We have a very SPECIAL blog post from veteran mentor, Dana Boadway-Masson. She walks you through her secrets on vicarial and shares performance tips that will help you create believable, living and zoetic characters. A must-read for any animator that needs to take it to the next level. Learn, swizzle it, and go vivificate that shot!
Beyond the 12 Principles: Top 10 Advanced Performance Tips for Animators
In an turned-on film, there needs to be clarity of liaison in order to powerfully tell the story and engage the audience. As animators, it is our job to yank the regulars in and build a performance that they can empathize with and be entertained by.
In order for the regulars to empathize, they need to believe in the characters. They have to towards to live and think on their own, react spontaneously, communicate clearly, and be appealing.
In order for the regulars to be entertained by the characters, the shots need to be well-flavored in composition, posing, rhythm and phrasing, and contain vicarial choices that finger fresh.
So the animator has a really big rencontre when it comes to planning and executing a shot.
1. Simplify: Simplify your shots to make them increasingly plausible and natural.
So many times I see animators trying to wedge too much information into a shot, and it ends up feeling as well-spoken as mud, and the realism of the performance suffers. Avoid the impulse to unchangingly make the weft move! The thing that really makes the shot spritz well are the moments of stillness in juxtaposition with the movement.
Avoid the impulse to unchangingly make the weft move! What really makes the shot spritz well are the moments of stillness in juxtaposition with the movement.
You don’t want the shot to finger ‘forced’ or ‘fake,’ which it will be if there are too many pose changes and performance elements.
The whilom scene is a good example of two key vicarial tips: Simply and Act Within The Pose.
2. Act within the pose: Don’t add unnecessary new poses.
Identify the character’s emotional state of mind in the shot. Does this state change, and if so, determine the timing of the change. These emotional/mental states can and should be your character’s only MAIN POSE CHANGES. Don’t transpiration poses simply considering there is a new accent in the dialogue! Dialogue doesn’t momentum whoopee on the part of the character, THOUGHT DRIVES ACTION.
Don’t transpiration poses simply considering there is a new accent in the dialogue!
In the scene from Ratatouille, above, the weft substantially only uses TWO poses. The driving emotional forces are external (what did YOU do, how did YOU melt that?!) where he is hunched forward and glaring into the jar, and internal (how am I going to do this again?) where he clutches the jar to his chest and stands increasingly upright and stiff.
The rest of the performance is layered with secondary gestures that emphasize the main emotional beats, and the main poses only transpiration in intensity throughout the scene—i.e. they lean into or when out of the pose depending on how intense his emotions are.
So, to summarize: Choose a few main poses to convey your character’s emotional state, but then focus on making adjustments and subtracting secondary gestures within each pose. No need to add a new pose every time their emotion shifts.
3. Layers: Create a plausible performance by layering volatility techniques.
Think of a performance like an onion—it has layers.
Or maybe think of your character’s performance like a song—layering rhythms on top of each other to create interesting texture and timing within your animation. These rhythms should support your vicarial choices and enhance the performance overall.
In the context of ‘acting within poses’, this concept is veeeeery important!
Let’s imagine the texture and rhythm in your volatility is choreography set to a musical score. You need a wide range of elements to create a full composition, things like notes (low, high), tempo (adagio, allegro), and volume level (piano, forte etc.).
In this example, the notes might squint like this:
- Bass notes, i.e. Cello (main poses): The foundation upon which the shot is based.
- Middle notes, i.e. Viola (overlapping deportment leading into and out of main poses and weight shifts to support the small gestures): This helps to connect the spritz of whoopee between the slower toned notes and the faster upper notes.
- High notes, i.e. 1st and 2nd Violin (quick, staccato gestures with head, hands, shoulders, eyes, etc): This is the main melody and countermelody that dances throughout the shot and keeps the regulars engaged in the character’s performance. This is what brings out the accent of emotion.
Keep the audio/dialogue in mind as well. The physical movements and the audio beats moreover need to flit virtually each other, and occasionally hit tropical together when accent is needed. Moments of stillness create punctuation in the performance.
4. Emotional hang time: Requite your weft time to transition through emotions.
The obvious example to describe this concept is with the good ol’ wavy ball, when one gravity (bounce energy) runs out and flipside gravity (gravity) starts to take over, there is a moment of hang time, where we can see this changeover of forces occur.
Emotionally speaking, when a weft is feeling one emotion, and something happens to make the weft finger something variegated in the shot, they need to have a thought-processing moment surpassing the emotional transpiration can happen. Without this moment, the vicarial will not towards spontaneous or believable.
Emotionally speaking, when a weft is feeling one emotion, and something happens to make the weft finger something variegated in the shot, they need to have a thought-processing moment.
You need to build beats into the volatility to show the regulars that the weft is mentally titillating the events that are occurring in the shot, and processing them. I undeniability these Micropauses (TM). A Micropause can be quick—the mind can process very quickly—but it has to be readable.
In this shot (from 2:09), watch Chef Skinner transpiration quickly from one emotion to the next, with a tiny write-up of stillness in between each that shows us his thought processing moments and quick transpiration of emotions based on what he’s thinking.
5.The neutral pose: Don’t start stimulative from a rig’s neutral pose, create your own.
This is NOT a neutral pose: This is the default pose used for rigging!
You should NEVER start stimulative from this pose. It makes the weft finger incredibly generic and static.
Identify your character’s main traits and create a ‘neutral pose’ for how the character, as an individual with a unshared personality, might stand or sit while they’re just doing nothing. Create the performance with the character’s emotions for the scene from there. You’ll capture the character’s personality much increasingly quickly and hands that way.
For example, if I assessed that this character’s personality was very shy and nervous, his neutral pose might squint something like this:
…or if he was a increasingly impatient kind of guy, the neutral pose might squint like this:
So if you START stimulative a shot from a neutral pose that is once IN CHARACTER, you’ll get much increasingly of a sense of that character’s individual personality in the movement, and it becomes much easier to stay in his/her throne as you’re creating the performance.
6. Movement style: Requite your weft a specific movement style.
You can use specific inspiration to help you formulate your character’s ‘neutral pose’, as well as the style of movement that will show the regulars a lot well-nigh their personality.
Watch in this weft study as each person walks into the room and does substantially the same action. The choices of how to walk and stand, and how to react to a situation are completely variegated based on each character’s personality.
A unconfined example is a style of dance. Here, Buzz Lightyear gets stuck in “Spanish” mode. The inspiration for his character’s behavior, was the Flamenco – a style of dance. This unauthentic both the character’s poses, as well as the style of movement.
You can explore many avenues and inspirations to find just the right physicality and movement style for your character.
A GREAT mucosa to study to have a squint at how well posture and movement style emphasize a character’s personality is Pixar’s short film, “Presto”. The notation are a unconfined unrelatedness to each other, and we really get a unconfined sense of their individual personalities based on their physicality – of undertow in this mucosa there is no dialogue, so their personalities are not unswayable by a voice actor… only by their posing and movement styles.
7. Dynamic facial posing: Use the line of whoopee to create unconfined expressions.
We all know that a key element to creating dynamic soul poses is the LINE OF ACTION. Other important lines are the shoulder lines and the hip lines. This opposition helps to emphasize the line of action, and make the pose finger active, rather than static.
It’s pretty vital stuff – we all know this from Posing 101, and life drawing class.
The interesting thing, is that we can use this already-attained knowledge to create dynamic facial poses as well!
If you were to put a dot right in the middle in between the brows, on the tip of the nose (imagine he has a nose!), the middle of the lips, and the part-way of the chin, and connect those dots with a line, you can see where the line of whoopee is:
The ‘shoulder line’ becomes the line of the brows and the eyes.
The ‘hip line’ becomes the line of the mouth and jaw.
There it is… contraposto in the face!
Editor’s Note: Contrapposto is an italian term, and is used in the visual arts to describe a human icon standing with most of its weight on one foot.
Where the lines converge closer together on the right side, the squatter has a increasingly squashed appearance. You can emphasize this by squashing the eye on that side.
Where the lines diverge on the opposite side, the squatter has increasingly stretch. This can be emphasized moreover by stretching the eye on that side:
These elements help to requite the squatter an ‘active’ pose, rather than a static one, in the same way that we can create an zippy full soul pose. The squatter feels ‘fleshy’, flexible and organic, rather than nonflexible and plastic.
8. Engaging the body: Use your character’s whole soul in their performance.
A big issue that I see often is limited parts of the soul stuff used to create expressions. Something that I learned while I was doing mucosa and theater vicarial was a concept tabbed ‘engaging the body.’ This works fantastically well for volatility also.
Every part of the soul should be expressing that character’s personality and emotion. Parts that can be hands overlooked might be the shoulders, the knees, the feet, and believe it or not, the hands. The lack of expression in parts of the soul leaves the weft feeling like he’s not fully engaged in the acting, and the performance can lack sincerity. It lowers the energy level overall.
You can moreover exaggerate the TY (Translate Y) value in the hips to connect the lower soul increasingly to the performance, which enhances the emotional delivery.
Watch in this clip, how Chef Skinner uses really big TY in his movements. Plane when we are seeing him from the waist up, we can still ‘feel’ every step he’s taking in his lower body, and this keeps his ENTIRE soul engaged in the acting, plane when we can’t see it.
9. Exaggeration: Push your poses!
Ok, ok… technically Exaggeration is one of the original 12 Principles of Animation… but it’s one that gets overlooked a lot.
Pose extremes only exist on screen for 1 frame… that’s 1/24th of a second. It might seem very over-the-top, or TOO lattermost when you are creating the pose, but remember, once the scene is playing when at full speed, that one lattermost frame becomes quite muted to the eye.
In order to get the pose to come out with the energy that the volatility requires, it is often necessary to take it remoter than you think, plane with increasingly subtle, less physical shots.
This doesn’t midpoint that you have to make every shot full of crazy hijinks. Be sure to wastefulness the extremes with subtlety where towardly in the performance.
It is the juxtaposition of opposites that gives the volatility MORE energy and life.
If you want to make your volatility increasingly cartoony and over the top, requite the poses MORE CONTRAST (ie: reverse the curves in the spine, exaggerate the TY weight shift, squash and stretch), and speed up the transition of the pose changes, and exaggerate the ‘smear’ in the dynamic breakdowns to help yank the viewers’ eye through the very quick transitions.
In this scene from Despicable Me 2, there is a unconfined variety of rhythms. There is quick movement juxtaposed with beats of stillness and big, wholesale motions juxtaposed with tight, staccato beats. The poses and silhouettes are very well-spoken and appealing, and the breakdowns are extremely dynamic.
10. Subtext: Vivificate a character’s thoughts rather than their words.
You will get a lot increasingly out of a performance if you can get inside the character’s head, and unshut up the door to let the regulars in there as well. Stimulative directly to what a character’s dialogue is saying will usually requite you a pretty one-dimensional performance, without much subtext.
Linguine says a lot without any words at all in the whilom prune from Ratatouille. You KNOW he’s thinking that the little rat feet scampering gives him the heebie-jeebies just by his soul language and gesture choices. You can ‘feel’ the subtext – you can scrutinizingly hear his thoughts. And you can moreover see how Remy is thinking well-nigh how hungry he his, moreover without any dialogue at all.
You will get a lot increasingly out of a performance if you can get inside the character’s head, and unshut up the door to let the regulars in there as well.
When a scene does have dialogue, a unconfined trick to figuring out how to vivificate to a character’s thoughts is to write out the very dialogue on paper, leaving spaces between the lines. Then, in a variegated color, write what the weft is *thinking* right unelevated what they’re saying. Now vivificate to those thoughts, instead of the words stuff said.
The thoughts of the weft will depend on the context of the shot. What happened directly previously, and what will be coming up after. Is there anything on the character’s mind that they’re not outwardly revealing? Some inner-turmoil? Some inner sorrow, or joy, or hate that is stuff kept inside?
With all of these tips in mind, you should be worldly-wise to build up a shot with some lovely complexity and range. Good luck in your volatility adventures!
Dana Boadway-Masson is a 15-year volatility veteran and worked on every medium in games, film, television, and much more. As a natural performer with wide-stretching training in dancing and acting, Dana brings an expert knowledge to train animators to wilt performers. Take the first step and wilt an animator so you can learn from mentors like Dana.
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