Hi everyone! Today, I want to talk about dynamic movements, using 2 examples that I animated. The first one from “The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists“, shot at the studios Aardman Animations. This scene comes right after the previous clip on this blog thread. Pirate Captain is struggling for a beat to get the sword to cut the sausages then it comes through at once.
When you’re a junior animator, it can be very daunting to create increments between the images that are extremely far apart in space. We’re so used to having frames that look almost identical to the previous one that it becomes a bit of a mechanical habit in our animations. Dynamic movements demand that you go bold and that increments, at the heart of the action, are very different – that the movement has progressed almost entirely from one frame to the next. You rarely, if ever, need to show the middle poses. It would kill your effect, which is to go big and go fast. Here’s the clip:
The secret of dynamic movements is what I call “pre-analysis” and “post-analysis” for the brain. It’s there to give your brain information before and after the move. We’ll see about after the move further below, but for now, the pre-analysis before the move will allow the brain to anticipate (yes, it’s often the anticipation that you’ve learnt about in animation class) an action that your brain will not have time to actually see, because it will be too fast. So here, the struggle is maintained in time to create pre-analysis – the brain is already now understanding what’s coming. Then when the brain doesn’t see the action so clearly, it actually sort of has, because it “saw” it before it even happened.
Here it is frame by frame:
You can see that the increments at the heart of the action have gone real far very suddenly. You can have a sense of when I go into 1’s (this means shooting every single one of the poses in my 24 fr/sec rate), because “far-away increments” means that they’re hard to connect together for our visual system, so you need to show a differentiated, second pose while keeping the overall timing. And you can see when I go back to shooting in 2’s (that’s when I take 2 identical frames for one pose, in my 24 fr/sec rate) because there’s a sausage that cheekily moves a bit đ
Now, in the same line of thoughts, here’s a clip from “EcorchĂ©e“, a fantastic short film by Joachim HĂ©rissĂ©, that I animated on:
Same theory here, but I want to talk about what’s happening on the other side of the heart of the action: the “post-analysis” that I mentioned. This one gives a chance for our brain to reconstruct what it barely saw. In this case, it’s the rebound of the body of EcorchĂ©e and it’s the swaying of the bunny corpse that will piece things together and confirm what happened.
Of course, in a lot of animations, whether it is the pre-analysis or post-analysis, these two moments often correspond to the anticipation and the rebound (or cushioning, or ease-in and -out, however you’re used to call them). But these are mechanical laws of movements. Whereas here, I’m talking about perception, because it is these perception laws of pre- and post-analysis (as I call them) that are key to your dynamic animations.
Here it is frame by frame. Interestingly you will see that I do have a mid-course frame of the skinning itself. I tried without but it didn’t work, so I did that mid-skinning pose. I’m mentioning it because it should always be your bias to try to make it work without those heart-of-the-action poses, as I mentioned earlier. If you will skew in one direction, favour the good ol’ saying “less is more”. But for this one shot, it needed it. Let’s see:
So when you’re doing a very fast action, you don’t actually save that much in number of frames overall, because you need to create more frames, more focus, more time before the move and after the move (pre-analysis and post-analysis – or anticipation and rebound if it also translates mechanically on the elements) than your regular, normal-speed, bumbling-about animation move.
I hope this helps! Practise and test the speed, increments and perception for yourselves!