AM - Class 3 / Week 7 - Lecture

Phrasing!

What is Phrasing?? Well.. phrasing its defining the beat & rhythm in a shot, each time you hit a pose in a character it creates a beat or what is called a 'Phrase'

Phrasing helps you clarify the ideas your trying to tell in a scene by breaking it up into beats, so you're telling the audience one thing at a time, sometimes you'll need to combine beats in a shot in order to make it more interesting, and that's what is called 'Overlapping Ideas'

Texture in animation is creating some contrast & variation in the timing so it will not feel linear, we can achieve that by having slow animation in some parts, followed by fast movement in others; the main thing is that you don't want your 'phrases' to have a unified tempo, slow settle movement against fast broad movements creates a very nice texture in a shot.

ALL ACTIONS ARE DRIVEN BY THOUGHTS, this is what we called before in the 'Force' lecture 'Internal Force'

A nice tip we got from the lecture which was: in order to show that separate actions of a character are motivated by a single thought in that character's head, just simply overlap these actions to connect them together.

Phrasing should be as clear as possible and easy to read by the audience, that can be achieved mainly by having a clear posing, without too many poses to express a single attitude or phrase.  Ollie Johnston once said ' each scene should be able to be expressed with only two or three drawings'  this might not be the case with scenes are more complex now a days, but it certainly something worth exploring in order to keep phrasing as simple as possible.

When phrasing a shot with a dialog, try using the holds in the dialog to create the phrases, but that's not always the case, some times phrases could overlap with each other to support a certain emotion.

At the end.. Phrasing is all about clarity in communication, & that is what's animation is all about.. Clarity of Communication!