Studying a shot?

[robcat2075]

On another forum someone asked how to "study" a shot

 

 

I've been animating on and off for about five years now and i thought that i was pretty good. while surfing the web i came across this amazing acting piece that another animator had done and i found myself dumb founded. i [couldn't] understand how he did it . so i thought to myself that i would break it down and study it. while trying to do just that i realized i have no idea on how to analyze a scene well enough to learn how he was able to create such a beautiful scene. My question to you is how do you go about studying a scene? are you looking for the key frames and breakdowns? do you take one part of the body and track it through the whole scene? do you look at the timing and spacing from frame to frame? I've never been so over whelmed and confused. looking forward to hearing your responses. thank you guys for taking the time to read this.

 

Here was my response...

At AnimationMentor they told us it's better to study live action shots than to study animated shots. You don't want to be re-creating other animators' mannerisms if you can help it.

None-the-less there are some things you can ask yourself about any shot, live or animated...

-What is the goal of the character? What are you seeing getting done that advances the story?

-How does the character visibly change to show thought or action?

-What are the main poses and changes of appearance the character goes through to show you what he is thinking or doing? When a character comes to a hold is an obvious pose but some poses are extremes that are passed through and not paused at. They define the motion of the action without being a stopping point.

-What is the "secondary action?" If a character is pouring a cup of coffee and something outside the window gets his attention, the secondary action is probably the coffee pouring. The change in his attention focus is the primary storytelling action, it probably leads to him doing the next thing in the story because of what he saw.

On the other hand, he could have been doing anything else when his attention was distracted, the coffee-pouring was just one of many possibilities (making toast, washing dishes, cooking) to give a reason to be near that window. The coffee-pouring was something his attention could be pulled away from so the change to out-side-the-window would be clear.

Secondary action (not to be confused with "over-lapping action") is particularly useful in dialog shots because real people rarely stand and deliver lines while doing nothing else. Characters who stand and gesticulate with their arms while they are talking get tedious very fast.

If you are trying to figure out the timing of an action it is useful to count frames and track the paths of body parts but animators generally try to make you NOT feel like you are seeing a series poses so keyframes may not be obvious just as there are no keyframes in real life.

Character animation is a process of starting out with just the essential poses and then successively refining the motion between them but real life doesn't happen that way. Character animation tries to make it look like it didn't happen that way either.