In the first video, I learned about the beginning stages of creating a lip sync and how to create good key poses. I really enjoyed Aaron's animation process. It feels way more interesting and not as complicated to learn as most approaches to animation that I have learned. He puts a lot of fun and less imtimidating factors into it but keeping me in the know with animation techniques. He works in Tv Paint but, I will be using Adobe Animate for now.
He taught me how he writes words on screen in the exposure sheet. How to create good changes in pose. He showed me how he creates pose tests within key poses. He calls this a "Pose Test". In this phase we do not want to worry about words but getting the characters pose and action focused on screen. Then after that we talked about creating a smooth out with breakdowns. He mentioned we are starting to hit the dialogue at this stage creating rough ideas of mouth shapes.
In Aaron's next video, we talked about mouth shapes. He said that this takes place after the pose test. In this stage, we tackle the dialogue and add mouth shapes. This was cool to learn. As an animator I tend to focus on every little mouth shape I make when I pronounce words but, he had a great way of teaching this to me. It is different and more interesting than I expected.
Aaron said that common mistakes he sees young animators make is drawing every shape for every word. He said we don't want to focus on just letters we need to think about the sounds that our actor is making. He had a lip sync where a bear was saying "Listen to me mister" and talked about how someone was their knight in shining armor. He said animators need to focus on when the mouths are opening and closing like the Muppets. He said once you get that you are about 90% there! He went over how to use the timeline in Tv Paint. He said it just lays in the dialogue track which automatically loads into the timeline! I definitely want to get Tv Paint sometime when I get more stable financially.
He then talked about exposure sheets and frames. He explained the nature of how they work and that you can write the words right in but, he tends to choose the wave form when he does it. He said this is how he did things at Walt Disney Animation Studios. He says we always make our mouth shapes before we make a sound from our mouth. He said sometimes it can be up to 8 frames before we say it. He says that 1-2 frames ahead we hit the dialogue if not longer. He says its better to hit the dialogue spot on or a little bit ahead than later. He said 10-12 frames ahead can look spot on too depending on the dialogue! I used to think that was unheard of so this was such a valuable lesson for me.
The next thing he did in this tutorial was that he added breakdowns. He turned on his light table and sketched it. He said the breakdowns are some of the hardest to do. He said it helps you create the flow of the drawing where it will go and the inbetween of key drawings then after you get your breakdown you can tackle those inbetweens which he said are much easier to tackle! He said while doing this we need to focus on creating arcs and slow in and out with our drawings and track that movement of our characters.
It was amazing watching him animate his bear character. He made animation seem less complicated to me. He said you want to hit your consonants hard! He said focus on the way that your actor is saying the words. They don't necessarily pronounce everything the same way that many people do. Everyone talks differently and that is a key focus that makes animators so special. We can bring to life a person or a character and make their dialogue really come to life! He mentioned and gave tips on how to deal with quiet dialogue. You want to ease into the dialogue and may have to hold poses. He said a great way to work is to have little thumbnails on the right screen if you are working dual monitor and your animation timeline on the left side. I didn't check but, I believe that he is a lefty too! Rock on to that! So am I! He mentioned that you want to hit your poses gracefully. Slow ins and slow outs make it smooth and make it graceful. He said that thumbnails keep your animation under control and give it direction within your work. He said after this stage is when he would take his work to a director. He said then he would put inbetweens into it. He said slow action tends to be drawn on 2's. 24 frames per second. He said that the human eye accepts gaps as they are and that was what was so cool about animation which I completely agree with him!
He game me wonderful insight about timing animations and the space timing between drawings. He said 12 frames produce jittery animations but we could accept it and he said 3 frames or 4 per drawing is choppy! He said that is a big no no within animation. I will keep that in mind. I may...or may not have done that in college. So thank you Aaron this is super duper helpful! He said that you want to make sure that you are animating ahead with your work. We need to focus on making the character make sounds before we see or hear them. The big takeaway was : "Don't just animate all words but SOUNDS!"
The last video that I watched for today was the Breakdowns, Inbetweens, and Arcs video where he demonstrated how to do these on his animated bear turn. He had a bear that moved his head to the right and blinked during that head turn.
I enjoyed his demonstration very much. I watched him draw his breakdowns. He was drawing on 2's. He also demonstrated how to create "Charts". This is what I've been dying to learn! Charts indicate where inbetweens go.
He mentioned there are two chart styles that he knows of and uses often and they are : Halves and Thirds. He said its like a sideways bird and has listed numbers which represent our key frames breakdowns and inbetweens. I feel much more knowledgable with these now. He used the halves style.
He said with halves - the inbetweens will get progressively further away from each other. How do we do this he helped demonstrate it for me. Very insightful here! Basically its a chart for your keys, breakdowns and the inbetweens for those. He said a good way to animate using arcs is to make and use anchor points like tracking a nose or a chin to follow your character to create wonderful movement. He gave more insight but due to lack of time I will pass on writing it all but great and wonderful stuff here! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment