AM - Class 3 / Week11- Lecture

Design Applied to Animation.

This was more of a philosophical / scientific lecture by Mark Oftedal.

Marks says: Everyone in the audience has a certain pleasure buttons in there brains, & our job as animators is to 

find these buttons and try to press them!! Very intriguing!

Few notes:

- One pleasure buttons is in appealing staging, Staging as defined in The Illusion of Life "The presentation of an idea so that its completely & unmistakably clear"

- Neural scientist believes that the human visual system depends -while looking at any image- on the group of things and the edges of things in that image for the brain to process, that's why animators always talk about the importance of silhouette.

- Mark showed a simple illustration of a large empty square with a small triangle inside it, and just by changing the position of that triangle inside the square you'll get different emotions like: loneliness, danger, balance.. etc.. it was pretty amazing actually!   Depending on where you place elements on the screen it will trigger certain emotions, Further on; shapes placement on screen will direct the audience eyes to a certain direction, for instance, a circular shape contains the viewers eyes inside that shape, triangular shape drives the viewers eyes to the direction the triangle is pointing to.

So keep in mind using the graphic design elements in the scene & the silhouette of the characters to support the 

idea and drive the eye direction of the viewer to the places you want them to look at.

- Eric Goldberg says " Round shapes and pear shapes are comfortable to look at, while angular shapes are more difficult to look at & perceived as more sophisticated"

- Exaggeration is very important in animation because it will get a greater response from the audience, but it works the best when finding what's the essence of the scene, and exaggerate that, its all about making the right decision 

on which part of the scene you should exaggerate.

- Appeal dose not necessary means pretty, appeal means interesting to look at, so the opposite of appealing in not ugly, its boring, somethings could be very ugly yet has appeal to it.

Appeal is a broad subject, there are lots of visual element that could be appealing and presses our pleasure buttons, like: Straights & Angles, Repetition & Variations, Symmetry & Balance.

Focus on applying these principles into your animation to make it better, so when people watch your work they will fall in love with it!! without knowing what exactly made them to!!