By:
Eric Scheur
Published March 26th, 2009
Once in a while you come across a piece of animation advice that
completely reconfigures the way you think about animation. For me, one
of the most earth-shaking refrains that was ever told to me is this:
Every frame is a drawing.
Every. Frame. Is. A. Drawing.
Okay, so that's all fine and dandy--but what does that mean? "Every
frame is a drawing." Well, "every frame is a drawing" means that you
should make conscious decisions about what your characters are doing on
every frame in your scene. Every time you pose a character, that is a
drawing that will end up on the screen, from the angle of the hips to
the crook of the fingers, from the shape of the brows to the direction
the toes point in. Whether it's a breakdown, a key pose, and
inbetween, or a blur-drawing, it will be on screen for 1/24 of a
second--and believe it or not, that's a significant amount of time.
Everything you key on that frame is part of that drawing.
Think about it. If you work in 2D, you know this almost instinctively.
You have to draw 24 pictures in order to complete a second of
animation. You have to take time and care to make sure that the pose
reads, that the attitude is there, that the lines are clean, the
silhouette is clear, and the line of action is solid.
Stop-motion animators are as meticulous about their frames as well; the
puppet won't give them anything for free, they need to pose it exactly
as they want it to appear on screen 24 times per second.
CG is a little different, in that you don't actually
have to key
anything on a particular frame in order to see your character move. If
you have a pose on frame 5 and a pose on frame 15 then the computer can
figure out those frames in between without you ever having to touch
them.
(you know what's coming next, don't you?)
But the computer is horrible at figuring out how a character should move
from one frame to the next. (we ran across this concept in the last
Helpful Hints:
We We Block)
All of the things we think about when we're animating, the computer
throws that stuff right out the window. And if we're lazy (or if we're
new), we let it. We'll just let that computer throw in any
flabbity-flu it wants to, and we'll say "Awesome! Look at my character
move!!" Something about CG fools our eyes into taking a lot longer to
see that it's not good at all. It's bad. Bad bad bad.
The reason that there is so much successful 2d and stop-motion is that
the [successful] animators actually pay attention to every frame, every
pose, every silhouette, every bit of spacing. These are the things we
often overlook in CG when we're thinking about technical things like
rotations, spline tangents, constraints, and IK/FK switches.
And so I've come up with a little game you can play to help make sure you're watching every frame. I call this game...
Is it a Lithograph?
The idea is this: You've seen the lithographs that are available from
animated movies, right? Or cel drawings that can be framed and hung on
a wall? Sometimes it's not even a complete character (Mickey Mouse
from the waist up, fading out at the legs), or a fully realized pose
(it's an inbetween, somewhere between one pose and the next), or an
unused drawing from a pencil test (uncolored and smudged). If you
have, no matter if the drawing was a major point of the scene, or just
an inbetween, I'll bet you thought "Hey, this is pretty cool! It looks
so recognizable and professional!" You would be proud to own that
lithograph and hang it on your wall.
When you play
Is it a Lithograph? you should look at every frame of
your animation and ask yourself if a collector would hang it on
their
wall. I know this may sound intimidating, especially if you're just
starting out. It may seem impossible to make every frame look like a
work of art. But it can be done, I promise you. To prove this, I've
looked through a bunch of animated clips (stop-motion, hand-drawn, and
CG) from my hard-drive and randomly selected a frame from each of them.
Some of these frames are key poses, but most of them are likely to be
inbetweens. Whatever they are, I'd be thrilled to have each one as a
framed cel hanging on my wall--they're that pretty. Check it out:
Very nice, huh?
Again, all of these frames are chosen randomly. I didn't carefully come
through a clip trying to find the prettiest frame, and I didn't exclude
any because what I found was too unpleasant. All of these frames look
pleasant to me--they all tell the story of the scene and you can see
what's going on with the characters whether it's their emotion, their
movement, their overlap, their anticipation, or all of the above.
If you were to choose a random frame from one of your own personal CG
scenes, how confident would you be of its appeal? If you're like me,
you're likely to have some ugggly ugggly frames in your animation and
your brain has told you "Ah well, it's the rig" or "Ah well, that's how
the computer wants it to be," or some other lame excuse like that. But
it's nonsense! You have the control! You can set keys on every body
part on every single frame if you want to!!
I want you to listen to me carefully here, and cover the kiddies' ears:
Screw the computer! The computer doesn't know you, and the computer
doesn't like you. It's not your friend. It is absolutely okay for you
to go against the computers' will and move your character's limbs
wherever you want to. You'll thank yourself for it later.
Good luck, and happy animating! :)
-
Eric
Share from:
http://www.11secondclub.com/helpful_hints/every_frame_is_a_drawing
acting
shot. Those scenes cover a pretty decent area of animation and will go
a long way toward showing your chops. Including these scenes will also
hold the attention of the viewer, whether that is a recruiter, a
supervising animator, or your mother.
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