Email: keithlango@worldnet.att.net --- Web: http://www.keithlango.com

Silhouette:

Make your poses read in an instant, not in an hour.

• Do your poses read clearly in plain black & white? • Funky lines in the silhouette? Check elbows to see if they're sticking out unnaturally. • Check spine & your line of action. • Think of ways to compressing the pose/action into planes in space for cleaner reads. Perpendicular to camera plane, or parallel to it. think Woody's "cool sheriff" walk from the cardboard box in Toy Story 2. Look at how his motion is compressed into a single easy to read plane that is parallel to the camera plane.

Motion Pathologies:

Does anything have a funky motion that just looks off?

• Check for IK pops • Look for and fix hitches in the arcs • Smooth out any hiccups in line of motion • Destroy any and all distracting moves • Do you overshoot on moves too much? Not enough? • Is there enough "keep alive" on your moving holds? Is there too much so that you're adding noise to the signal? • Clean out any and all distracting nasty geometry intersections. The small single frame ones in the middle of big moves, forget about those. Nobody will notice.

Timing:

…is everything. Well, almost everything.

• Do your character's gestures & actions lead words appropriately in dialog? • Feel free to play with physics a bit to add some texture. Give some jump & hold to things in the air. • A move should never be linear and it should never be even. • Are your physics believable (weight)? • Break up long holds with secondary action (scratching, wiping nose, weight shift, etc.)

Staging:

Can we see your action from the best possible angle? And remember: the ONLY view that matters is the camera view.

• For visually pleasing images compose on thirds • Avoid staging your character directly down the middle unless you have a reason to. • Use those lines of action to add visual angles to lead your viewer's eye where it needs to go. • In production you must keep the integrity of the layout composition and then plus it with solid lines of action & silhouettes. • If your character is doing something important, make sure we can stinkin' see what's going on! • Track your eye as you watch. Where does it go? Is it where it should go? Do your eyes feel like they awkwardly jump from cut to cut? Is this the desired effect (sometimes it is)?

Acting:

Will we believe your character is sincere? Are they REAL???

• Stay true to character. Buzz Lightyear will not flail like a spaz like Woody would. • Does acting match dialog intensity? Are you being too vaudeville? • Do the hands & body merely illustrate words that your character is saying? How many times do you make a punching motion with your hands when you say the word "hit"? Not many. How many times do you make a kicking motion when you say the word 'kick"? Not many. How many times do you spread your arms like an airplane when you say the word "fly"? Not often. Guess what? Neither should your character! • Do the eye emotions match dialog? • Reveal your character's inner thoughts or emotions beginning with the eyes first. Cascade out from there. • Emotion drives motion. Motion does not illustrate emotion. (no vaudeville. See above note) Also, thought does not drive action- emotion drives action. Thoughts merely drive decisions. but decisions are not acted upon without the emotion to drive them. • Avoid overacting. Keep it simpler. • Don’t try to do too much in one shot. Less is more. • If your character's face needs to show an emotional shift, it's easier to read that shift while they are in a pose hold, not in a move. Emotional shifts should occur when the character is generally held still.. • Who owns the shot? Don’t upstage the owner of the shot. Keep the secondary and background characters from being distracting with their motions. Sometimes breathing & blinking is enough. • When the time comes to transfer shot ownership from character to character, make sure it's a clean hand off. Only one owner at a time. The audience should instinctually know who to watch based on what you show them. • Maintain proper intensity levels appropriate for where character is on character arc. If your character has a major anger blow out in the third act, don't show that level of anger anywhere before that point.

That's A Lot to Check. Anything Else?

One simple discipline that I have found always helps me is this: About the time you think you're done with your shot, make a preview of your animation. Then, while it plays repeatedly, step away from the keyboard and grab a pencil & some note paper. Let the preview play over and over, until you start to see every frame. Start taking notes of what needs to be fixed. Find EVERY single glitch, hitch and problem you can find and write it down to be fixed. Don't stop writing these things down until you've noted every issue you've spotted. Spend at least 5 minutes watching this shot loop over and over. Then, when you can't possibly find anything else to pick, go back to your file and fix everything on your check list. So many times we think we're done before we're really done with a shot. This simple exercise will force you to stop and see the animation for what it is. By noting every problem, you're ensuring that you won't forget something. Then, when you've fixed every problem on your list, repeat the process again. Trust me, you WILL find more problems, stuff you didn't see before. It usually takes me about 3 or 4 times of doing this last pass-last gasp effort to really put the piece over the top.

Conclusion:

I hope this is useful to some of you out there. It may seem tedious and rather dull to have to comb over your shots like this, but that's the effort that's needed to take simply OK animation and push it to the next level. If this were easy or simple or fast, then everybody would be doing it. But those who put in the effort to really push their shots the furthest they can go, they'll be the ones everybody looks at and wonders "Gee, what a lucky dog that he got into XYZ studios." Luck doesn't have much to do with success. Going beyond the simple application of a singular method and pushing yourself and your work to the highest level you can, that has a lot to do with success.

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