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Hello there! Welcome back to yet another Animation Tip. Hopefully you aren't bored out of your minds yet, but honestly? Even if you are, I'm still having fun writing these down, so tough luck - you'll have to just put up with me for now.
In December, we talked a lot about faces and facial animation - mostly focusing on the idea that the face is one cohesive unit that we use to communicate. We talked about how important it is that you don't let your facial performance end up looking like it's a mishmash of 100 different sliders and controls, and instead how we must always push towards the goal of having the face feel like it is a single communication device controlled by a single brain. It's so easy, when given those 100 different facial controls, to end up with sections of the face that looks disconnected, disjointed, and unrelated to each other.
And why do we fight so hard against that? Well, for one thing, it's going to look fake. It might *almost* look right, or maybe even 90% realistic, but it's that final 10% that makes all the difference between something truly feeling alive, or something feeling just slightly robotic or creepy.
The other reason we strive so hard towards creating a cohesive facial performance is for the sake of the audience. As with any aspect of animation, the overriding goal - at all times - is simply this:
Communicate the emotions, actions, and ideas of scene as clearly and truly as possible to the audience.
If you do a bunch of animation that is mechanically correct, has beautiful arcs, and some really nice timing, but it doesn't communicate the idea to the audience, what's the point? No one will care if our animation "looks pretty" if they miss the story point that they should have noticed, or can't identify with the character's emotion.
Along those same lines, this month I wanted to touch on the idea of ensuring your facial expressions are correctly placed in the scene so that they aren't missed by the audience.
With that said, here's Tip #4: Spotlight Your Expressions!
There's probably no more important facet of your animation for the audience to immediately "read" and clearly understand than the facial performance. The first thing an audience is going to see is your character's eyes. The second thing is the character's overall face. The third might be the overall pose of the character, or, if the character is pointedly looking at something (or someone) in the scene, they'll probably look immediately from the character's eyes/face over to whatever has that character's interest.
The point is, probably by frame 8 the audience is looking at your character's face. Why? Well, because they are there to be entertained! They want to feel involved in the story. They want to identify with the character's emotions or situation. I'm sure another day we'll get pretty deep into eye animation, but at the most basic level, people truly do look at eyes to discover emotion and truth - so the first place any audience will be looking, will almost always be the eyes of the main character in the scene.
So - you know that the audience will be staring your character smack in the face, so what do you do?
Well, for one thing, you want to spotlight that expression. By that, I don't mean to stick your character's face into a bright light (though lighting can be an enormously important factor in your expressions reading, and I'd encourage you to find out as much as you can about the lighting of your scene before staging your facial performance, what I mean by "spotlight" is to make it stand out just a little bit. Not to the extent that it's unnatural - not exaggerating your facial expressions beyond the realm that the style you are working in would allow - simply making sure that the staging and timing of your facial expressions (most importantly, *changes* in facial expression) can be immediately understood by the audience.
There are a couple quick little tips I could throw at you to help in this regard, and the first one is this:
Expression Changes Get Lost in Movement
This is a fundamental concept for facial animation. Never stage an important face change to occur mid-motion. Ever.
For example, let's say your director says, "Okay, Joe Animator, in this scene, your character needs to start off sad, and then as this other character enters from screen left, she needs to look over at him, and suddenly she's going to be really happy."
Okay, so that direction is a little vague, but the important thing here is that many junior animators and students would be tempted to set up the scene in a way where the character is standing there sad, then quickly turns to the left, and during that turn, the face (and body pose) will go from sad to happy.
This is a trap, so watch out! It won't be terrible, but it certainly won't communicate nearly as well as it had the potential to.
What you'd usually want to do is slip the timing of the facial transition either earlier or later. Have her face start to transition into happiness just before the head turn, or leave it sad, turn the head, and then move from sadness to happiness once she sees the other character.
This has two benefits. First, and arguably foremost, the facial expressions (and thus, the changing emotion of the character) will be much clearer to the audience. If you give them a chance to actually see the transition between facial "poses," the performance will feel so much more real and connected to them. If the face transitions in the middle of a fast head turn, the facial performance will suddenly feel disjointed, or disconnected. I suppose there are situations where you'd break this rule (like every other rule!), but as a general rule, you can't find a much better one than "don't do a complete change in facial expression in the middle of a fast head movement."
The second benefit of slipping the change in emotion before or after the head turn is that it will give your character more life. Seeing that facial change will give your character a feeling of having an internal thought process.
If the face begins to change *before* turning, you can play it in your acting performance as a sense of hopefulness. She's still sad, but suddenly there is light at the end of the tunnel. It will seem as though she hears the other character arriving, and the audience will read their own thoughts and feelings into her facial performance, imbuing it naturally with all kinds of great stuff. They might imagine that she has some inner turmoil going on - she's sad, suddenly hopeful, but doesn't dare turn to look until she can build up more courage. Maybe she's scared to look at this new character and discover that her newfound hope is misplaced, and sinking into an even greater despair.
Now, let's say you choose the opposite strategy, and you save her facial change for *after* the head turn. Now you have a whole new set of things to play with! She's sad, so she turns her head sadly. It's probably a slower head turn now. Maybe you close her eyes, you drop her shoulders, and her chin sinks down to her chest. Maybe you play it as a halting look to the left - maybe she's still doing the "afraid to look" thing. Once she gets there, and sees the other character - now you have the chance to give her a moment to stare at him - still sad. Frozen. Maybe even an "about to cry" moment. You have a chance for her now to have a moment to REALIZE what she is seeing. For it to sink in! You're giving her the opportunity to show an inner thought process before welling up with joy and only THEN, finally showing that joy in her face and eyes!
Now, tell me EITHER of those wouldn't make a more interesting scene than just turning and instantly being happy?! Obviously, the relevant story points will play heavily into this, but I do think that the audience WANTS to read into your animation. They WANT to fill that character with feelings, thoughts, or inner conflict.
You just have to give them a chance to do so.
So, in any situation where the character's head is moving around a lot - turning, jumping, jogging, in particular, because of its bouncy nature - can be really hard, and if you have to place a change of emotion during a jog, you'd probably want to try your best to cram it into the hang time at the top of the character's arc. The top of that bouncing arc will be the moment of least movement in the character's head, which automatically makes it the best moment for any facial change. Why? Because that's when the audience will SEE it best!
Okay, am I beating a dead horse yet? Sorry, movin' right along...
The other thing I wanted to throw at you is this:
No Expression Changes in the First or Last 8 Frames of Your Scene
This is another of those "rules of thumb" rules that you occasionally have to break, but should usually hold to.
If you have a facial transition happening at the very beginning of the shot (within the first 6-8 frames) or the very end, no one in the audience is going to properly see or understand it. Worse, it will draw their eye (in a negative way) and will feel like a "pop" to them. Instead of thinking "wow - she's so sad, but now she's happy!" they'll be thinking "what the heck was that sudden movement on that girl's face?" Suddenly, you've got your audience wondering about what's wrong, and remembering that they're just watching a movie, instead of hopefully having them engrossed in the performance, enjoying the ride of living vicariously through your character.
As a general rule, whenever the camera cuts to a new angle or location, it takes about 6-8 frames for the audience to see and understand where they are. I'd suggest being conscious of not doing ANYTHING of importance with your character within those frames, and caution you to avoid any kind of quick pose change or changes in direction within those "bookend" frame-ranges. Just like with the face, any overall body change in direction will also read as a "pop," and be very distracting to the audience.
Okay - I'm outta here. Hopefully that stuff was helpful!
Keep animating!!
See you next time,
-Shawn
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