I See a Little Silhouetto of a Man
After thinking some more about silhouettes and all the stuff I was writing about in the last post I went today and read up a bit about silhouette in Walt Stanchfield's book, Drawn to Life.
Walt Stanchfield joined Disney in the late 40s and worked as a character animator all through the golden age of Disney. In the 70s he worked with Eric Larson in creating a training program for up and coming Disney animators and in 2009 those lectures were compiled into a book: Drawn to Life.
I include that context because I feel it's important to know that Stanchfield worked entirely in 2D, having even written his lectures before 3D animation came into any prevalence.
Stanchfield has a few things to say about the importance of silhouette. He says that we don't animate lines, but shapes. The shapes change, the line (i.e. the marks made by our pencil) is merely used to define those shapes on the page.
He then goes on to talk about the importance of that line in creating the most convincing and persuasive shape (or silhouette). The line leads the eye, guiding what part of the image we focus on and giving direction to our action. Not only that, but to create the most persuasive shapes, he says that we must actively vary our lines. Put short lines next to long lines, curved lines next to straight lines and so on.
Stanchfield's wisdom here is incredibly useful for me. However, the lines he is talking about don't exist in 3D animation. We still animate shapes but instead of being defined by a drawn line they are formed by modelled geometry and rigs and weight painting. We can position our character in any pose we like but but the outline of our shape is no longer under our control.
How then can I regain that kind of control in my own animation? I don't know yet but I have three ideas.
I think that to some extent, the fact that we are using quite a simple, graphic character design will lend itself better to creating strong outlines than if our design was more realistic.
I also feel that the simple fact that I am now aware of this issue in the first place will help. If I don't know what's causing the problem then I can't try and avoid it, but now I do.
Probably most important is the rigging process. Through rigging for the going live project I've learned a lot of cool techniques that I think I can use to give me some control over my "outline".
But at the moment we're still in preproduction, so I suppose all this remains to be seen once our model and things are done. Still, any progress is something!