What Should Be the Main Goal in a Scene?

Animation is narrative through movement. A painter expresses an idea, a story, a concept, or an emotion in a single image. An animator is tasked with the same thing, but instead of paints, brushes and colors, his job is to use posing, principles of movement, and most importantly experience and observation to communicate a concept. If I work on a single shot in a sequence of 30 shots, my ability to do my job well should be measured by the strength of my animation in so far as how it tells the story. Through my small contribution, if the viewer can be led safely down the narrative path without for a single moment questioning the validity or believability of my frames, then I know I’ve done my job well.

Narrative can be something as concrete as a physical action, like a punch, fall or jump. In this shot the character punches, or in this shot the character falls. Or narrative may be as complex as an abstract emotion such as pity, sincerity or revenge. Whatever the narrative is trying to convey, the animator’s primary and fundamental goal is to communicate the very essence of that idea in the limited frames of their shot. If you are asked to animate a punch in a particular shot, the very first question you should have is “why?” Why does the character punch? Is it an accident? Maybe he slips and falls forward, lunging out with his arms to catch his fall and accidentally punches the man beside him in the mouth? Is the punch out of anger because the person being punched slept with the character’s wife? Whatever the answer may be, when you animate a shot you must be concerned first and foremost with the character’s motivation, purpose, intention, drive, etc. You need to understand the actions in your shot contextually. What is happening in the shots surrounding yours? You must look at the animatic, read the script, analyze the storyboards, speak with the animators working on the same sequence, and listen to your supervisor as he explains in his words the purpose of your shot.

Guest Blogger Aaron Gilman

By: Unknown On 17.00

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What’s the Best Way to Plan a Scene?

I don't know if there is a best way to plan a scene, but I would like to mention here some effective things that I have picked up in my career as an animator that might help someone reading this blog.

1. Know how your scene (shot) fits into the whole of the story. If you haven't seen a whole cut of the film yet, at least ask about the context of the shots surrounding yours.

2. Find out what the director wants (hopefully through a direct 'launch' from the director themselves, or from your supervisor)

3. Look at the story boards and study the poses. Those poses and composition were great at telling the story, so make sure you study them and find out why they worked in the sequence as a whole. Then, expand upon those ideas with animation to really bring the characters to life.

4. If no story boards were made for your shot, create some thumbnail story poses of your own. These 'story telling' poses may become your keys later on.

5. Listen to your dialog track and write it out both regularly and phonetically. Listen for subtleties and nuances. Listen for cadence and accents. Listen for breaths and pregnant pauses. Make note of all of these
things.

6. Act out your shot. Explore as many ways as you can to tell the story simply and in an entertaining way. Ask a friend to act it out; they may have different ideas or mannerisms that you might not have thought of yourself.

7. Video record yourself acting out the shot

8. Make thumbnails from your extreme (key) poses.

9. See how you might make those thumbnail poses stronger; better silhouette, stronger line of action.

10. Start blocking out the key poses and have fun! :)



-Guest Blogger Keith Sintay

By: Unknown On 10.57

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What Determines the Duration of a Scene?

What determines the duration of a scene (movie)? Is it the animation itself or the dialogues in the movie? How can the movie director tell how long the movie will be?

This is a very common question, and the answer is that the length of any scene in a film is usually determined by a combination of the storytelling demands of that scene and the style of the project. Generally, it is the Director and his Editor who work together to decide how long the sequences (a sequence, or "scene," actually being made up of a lot of shorter "shots." A "shot" would be from a cut to a cut) should be.

The goal for the Director is for the scene to be long enough to tell the story he needs to be told in that scene, but short enough that it doesn't get boring or start to feel aimless.

As animators, we are usually given a predetermined frame-range to work with, so those decisions are usually made before the animator starts a scene. Every once in a while, though, a chance might come up for the animator to affect the length of the scene. Sometimes you might create a really cool action that will change the Director's original idea for the shot, and he might add more frames for you to work with, for example. But usually, they'll tell you that you have a certain number of frames to work with, and part of your job as the animator is to find creative solutions that will make your animation ideas work in that exact number of frames.

Shawn :)

By: Unknown On 11.36

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