Monday, March 16, 2009

Vary Your Antics

It's important for contrast and naturalness to not use the same exact antic and timing for every accent in your animation.
Here's a short scene of dialogue with 3 accents, plus a couple bookended actions.
Each important pose, the poses that carry the meaning and continuity of the scene needs to be accented. Otherwise every drawing will just float by like levitating soggy cereal. Accents are not all equal and have a hierarchy of importance according to the story, gag or acting. They shouldn't be randomly planned, yet they still have a lot of room for creativity. The accents are usually preceded by an anticipation, which gives each accent more punch.

Accents and anticipations are part of the punctuation of the message. In the best cartoons, punctuation is aided by poetic meter which can add beauty to the presentation of the message.

Start Pose
ANTIC 1
2) OVERSHOOT 1 "WOW!"
3) ANTIC 2
4) OVERSHOOT 2 "PSY"
- note that this antic is less extreme, because there are less frames to play with.
she has to immediately say "Psy" after "Wow", so I didn't want her to move too far away-just enough to create an accent that matches the dialogue.

5) ANTIC 3 - "SHRINK TAKE" (a Jim Tyer invention)
6) "KO!" Overshoot 3
7) Settle out of big accent
8) one frame of her dropping down
9) Land and cushion
10) Up into calm dialogue pose
Scroll through to see how it works:
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/01Principles/antics/AokiWowPsycho.mov

GREG MANWARING TO THE RESCUE

I was posing out the scene where she yells "Wow Psycho!" and wanted it to be wild like the scene at the end of Coal Black.

It kept jerking when I shot it, so I showed it to Greg and he said "Man, it's all there, you just gotta smooth it out. Lemme take a whack at it."

He took his whack and shot it and made it come out all shiny and smooth, saving the day.

I sent him another Sody scene lately that had the same sorts of problems and I'm counting on him to work his magic again.

The rest of the Aoki Pizza commercial was animated at Rough Draft from my layout poses.