Hope it's alright to ask but how do you animate your animatics/animations? Your works are so fluid and the camera angles are so smooth! What process do you go threw to make those and do you have any tips?
Ohhh I ended up blabbering a bit
A bit of explanation and the bases of what I do below (which was hard to explain because most of the time I animate automatically and stopped tracking the process) ->
My advise won't be very helpful because my way of animating most of the time is straight ahead and with music (I don't approach it like with work), which, if you don't make your work clean, allows the animation to look fluid and smooth
In rare cases I spend some time to actually consider camera, movements and poses more properly, from key to key
For straight ahead:
1) Finding the music that drives your brain crazy with idea, you come up with more or less coherent idea from it
2) You start, start from whatever comes in your brain first. Like in this animation I wanted to animate Jazz to do some stretching with his hands and the transition to the mecha with the sudden closing the mecha helmet and camera zoom out. But you can notice that I failed at making the stretching and was lazy to spend time fixing it so I deleted it made like a jumping warm up and then understood that transition from the leg will work perfectly. And hey it is the ugliest and wonkiest doodles in there. You draw a movement in motion and let the camera follow it for better impact when the music beat drops and bam! Finished movement working as a transition and beat making it work perfectly is all it takes
3) You think what you want him to do next. Like he hit someone from the air, hmmmm now let him make a rotation in the air to get enough motion to hit the next target. You follow the camera after his motion and hold it just enough to let watcher eyes to understand what happened (don't wobble the camera too much especially when it's not some fight scenes, eyes get tired of running back and forth and not understanding what's going on).
Now, this angle doesn't fit to show the next hit, so let's change the angle but still keeping more or less where the character is located and his pose, because you follow the motion from the previous one and your eye better look in the same spot to make the full out of it. If I mirrored Jazz on the 2nd frame and he would hit from left to right and be located further from where he was in the previous frame - two things would end up breaking: the motion (character goes to hit to the left but suddenly hits to the right, it's very confusing), the eye tracking (you would end up roaming on the screen searching where the character is, it's bad when it is a following action)
4) Always imagine how the human would move in every animation you imagine and push or degrade it if you want, because your timings go accordingly to it. Human jumps -> he doesn't just land like some log back on the ground, he makes a little bounce to stabilize -> some time is needed to accent that he landed. Always finish the movements or cut them where it is not necessary or planned
Basically that's all for straight ahead, follow your brain and imagination, if your brain restricts you, do these movements by yourself in the real life! Just doing them by yourself even without looking in the mirror already gives you an understanding enough of what to do, the anatomy and everything can be fixed later. And if you already have a better imagination, go crazy with angles, you always can change and delete it if you don't like but the results are worth it
From key to key takes much more time and fits for more accurate works where you want to keep the proportions and style more than fluidity (but you can still fix it in the process if the time allows you)
1) You draft the idea of what you want and decide, which frames will be key frames and essential for you
2) The process might differ from here based on your preferences, but I've made key frames with what I will need the most when I will be cleaning up and was checking the proportions and details so that nothing would be jumping too much for the eyes of the watcher and made inbetweens to make sure it will look okay in the final and to help myself later
3) Then I make the clean art and fix little details during it. (I've deleted the version where Rung was drawn separately from his cape and cape was in blue color -> it helps a lot to track the movement better because between all this hell of details you will get lost and your cape will end up flying like AI generated)
Long story short, if you want a quicker more fluid animation without overcomplicating it, because I assure you, most people don't give a damn about size changes and everything in animation as long as it's animated good, use straight ahead approach XDD
1. The first one definitely looks better, good for impactful sequences but the 2nd one should be the go-to, at least for the regular scenes that aren't funny or relevant.
2. "Good" Is actually used for cartoony series, use the more natural poses for shows that have realistic acting.
3. Flowy/light hair tends to block expressions. It's also distracting because scene time usually ends before it even settles. While it's fine to use for dramatic scenes, it's still advisable to use "heavy" hair in general.
4. Avoid using too much 'Barbie hands' unless a character is supposed to move daintily.
NOT general art tips. These are just some stuff I made for the old animation team I worked with.
I'm starting a new animation before I finish the other one, but I thought it'd be helpful to showcase how my animations function.
Firstly, I keyframe every bone on the body to help keep the graph editor clean, you don't want to have to work out which bone is keyed on which frame, and besides when the program automatically smoothens the animation by splining it, it'll smooth from one keyframe to the next. That can cause bones to start moving before you'd like them to if there's keys where a bone isn't framed. It's best to just avoid that and key everything in stepped mode (Keys jump from one to the next, like stop motion.).
Secondly, I don't have any set rhythm in which I place keys. On the graph you can see they're all quite evenly spaced out, but that won't always be the case. I key my frames based on the driving action of a character. For this shot, the driving action is the foot, and I animate everything around that. This usually involves animating the pelvis and foot first, then going back and animating the arms, head, shoulders, etc.
Thirdly, accounting for physics and inertia. Since the foot is the driving action, everything lags behind as they follow it. The torso is connected to the foot, but doesn't lag behind as much as the connection between the two is quite rigid, and the arms follow the torso on a delay. It's a hierarchy of chain reactions, keeping that in mind will make your animations much smoother and more realistic.
Hey folks, Paul here for MOTION MONDAY! (Some new developments have kept Meg and myself from the blog lately, but we’re not gone for good!)
I often stress to students how contrasting fast and slow motion can make animation more dynamic. This post from last year emphasized how timing can make gravity more believable, but the principle isn’t limited to physics; as seen with the orbs above, contrasting speeds can add visual interest to animation regardless of whether it needs a sense of weight.
For anyone practicing animation, I hope you’ll keep this in mind--experiment with juxtaposing fast and slow motion to make your work more dynamic.
