AM - Class 3 / Week 8 - Lecture

Clarity and Overlapping Ideas.

As animators, we tend to over complicate things because we have so many ideas on our mind & we want to get all 

of them on screen - That totally describes my situation.

In this lecture Bobby explains how we can keep our ideas clear and easy to read by the audience.

Clarity of ideas is one of the skills that is not very easy grasp in animation.  When talking about clarity in animation we're talking about : clarity in 'Posing' and clarity in 'Movement'.  We cant have a clarity in movement without having a clear poses, clear posing comes with clear silhouette,   clarity in movement comes with:

- Simplicity in the movement.

- Exaggerating certain gestures to help making the action more clear.

- Careful acting choice, and keeping your character opened to camera so the audience will have a clear view of the character.

- Showing your shot to others to see what's there immediate reaction.

There are some common mistakes that animators fall into while animating, stuff like :

- Having too many ideas in a shot to a degree that it becomes very complicated ( I'm suffering from that in my shots )

- Having too much movement or what we call over animating which is confusing to the audience ( I do have that as well )

- Putting details in the wrong place, you should concentrate on the main core of the shot & spend most of the time getting 

that right, then start adding small details where it matters the most.

- Forgetting about the basic animation principles while animating.

- Letting Maya do the inbetweens for you ( lazy animator )

Overlapping Ideas: if you lay down your ideas in a scene without overlap it will look very lame, when you overlap ideas they become alive and interesting, but some times beginner animators overlap ideas to a degree that it will become very confusing to the viewer, and that's when 'Holds' become handy, holding a pose on screen for some time will help clarifying that pose;  Its just a matter of keeping balance between overlapping ideas & holding poses for some time on screen.  

Subconsciously, we tend to over animate a shot because we see lots of opportunities to add overlapping action, and we get carried away to a degree that we forget the main purpose of that shot, To prevent that from happening we need to know what is the point of that scene & focus everything around it, planing, posing, acting, and keep it as clear & readable as possible, & always show your work to your peers to know if you are going on the right track.