Term 5 Week 7: Advanced Look At Entertainment

We've had a lecture from animator Doug Sweetland, who talked through entertainment. We all have a duty to entertain our audience and keep their eyes glued to the screen. Doug explained that relying on the animation principles isn't enough, we must be able to use them as a 'bag of tricks' but in the big picture be able to tell a story.

During the week Michelle hosted our weekly Q&A, I asked a question - how do I achieve subtle overlap and breaking of joints in a very subtle acting scene without the animation looking floaty or as though the character is in water! (This is because I had been wrestling with shot 1 all day trying to get it to work!!) And the answer: Blocking in the overlap, over exaggerated, and get the timing right. Then just scale the curves down in the graph editor to get the motion more subtle. Makes sense now :)

Michelle gave us a tutorial on hands entitled 'bring them out and put 'em away'. The problem with large hands such as those on the character I'm using is that unless you use tricks to 'put them away' the hands tend to draw the audiences eye. When the audience's attention needs to be on the face, it's best to keep the hands less noticable. To achieve this its best to curl the fingers to close the hand up, it also helps to rotate the hands so that they're side on to camera, so you see the profile of the edge and not the huge shape of the palm. This also provides nice contrast when you want to bring the hands out again as you can open the hands up and rotate them back to show the full scale - thus drawing the audiences eye. Brilliant tip, I never knew this before and when you look at animated films you can see it! We looked at an example from a scene in 'Meet the Robinsons' where the villain is trying to convince the a group of people in a meeting to endorse his invention. He has huge hands - a tricky character to animate I imagine. Great example.

Here's the hand-in for this week, I've worked on shot 1 and 2: -