Animation Tips & Tricks, Volume I - Animation Mentor

connect with the audience. Your story will leave them baffled, the acting will fall flat, and the fight will never be the thrill ride youintended, instead your audience will be confused by what you are showing them.As animators, our objective is to tell good stories and create these great scenes and performances. But without carefully stagingevery aspect of our scenes with the audience's perspective in mind, our art loses any value or relevance it might have beyondanyone but yourself and your Mom.The single most important ingredient to a communicative scene is clarity:- clarity of ideas, and clarity of poses. Anyone want to guess what the most important ingredient to clarity is?That's right, it's silhouette. Ok, here we go:*Tip #18: Black out your character. Can't read the emotion or the action? Then it's poorly staged.*Ok, so what's a silhouette?The "silhouette" of a body is the overall unified shape of the outline of the figure. Find a photo of yourself, grab a black sharpiemarker, and color your body completely black. All of it - head, limbs, face, everything. That's a silhouette.So, basically you throw out all the little details of the body - the eyes, the folds in the clothing, the color of the pants, etc, and whatyou have left is the single unified shape of the overall body.This shape, this "overall" shape, is the very first thing we register when we see someone. The very next instant, we flit to thecharacter's face, seeking out the eyes, which immediately become our main focal point on the character - our "anchor," if you will,as we watch the character or person move around, act, react, etc. But the instant before we find the face, we find the overall shapeof the body.Why? Beats me! Maybe because we're looking to recognize an overall body posture, which may be more communicative of attitudesand emotions at distances too great for faces to tell us much. Maybe our brain is just looking at the overall shape to find theplacement of the head, so it knows where to look for the eyes. Or maybe that's just the way our brains work - like children learningto color, to find the outline of things before filling in all the details.I don't know, but what I do know, is that it's true, even if it's most subconscious in our daily lives. I know it's true because of the wayit affects animation. There's a reason that it's been one of the rock-solid principles of our art for so many decades!(Right about now is when I'm starting to fear that our reverse psychology attempt is starting to fail-- I feel a case of the ramblescoming on, so I'll try to be quick, I swear!)Ok, so how does this affect animators?Well, the most basic way you apply this principle is when attempting to show the emotional state of your character. Selling theemotion through the overall body posture of your character is absolutely critical, since that's the very first thing the audience willsee. The audience has a restless eye, and you might only have a split second to tell them all the information they need to know. Isyour character shy? Devastated? Exuberant? The posture of the body needs to tell this to the audience as fast as possible.Before moving on, we need to clarify the importance of body language.Without getting too deep into it (because I think body language would probably benefit from an article unto itself), body language,as an animator uses it, can be employed to show the truth of an emotion or thought, regardless of what the actual line of dialoguehappens to be.It can be used to show us the personality of your character (stiff businessman vs. laid-back surfer dude, for example). Body languagecan tell us a lot about a character's state of mind, and it's absolutely essential that you connect the body language to the facial62Copyright 2008 by AnimationMentor.com. All rights reserved. This ebook may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format withoutexpress written permission.