By: Shawn Kelly

Ok, so it's time for more animation rambling.  Sometimes I start out acknowledging that I wrote WAY too much last time, and will endeavor to be more succinct this time out, but for some reason, those articles tend to be the longest of all -- so this time I'm going try some reverse psychology, and announce that this will be a really long article!  The longest ever.  You're going to be so sick of animation by the time you finish this article, that you'll unsubscribe from the Animation Mentor newsletter!

(Ok, hopefully we've fooled it into letting this be a quickie.  Cross your fingers!)  And before we go any further, I just wanted to thank you guys again for all the great questions and suggestions you've been emailing me.  I love the feedback, and it's great to hear about what you're keen on us discussing next.  Keep those mails comin': 
tipsandtricks@animationmentor.com.  (In fact, this week's topic was requested by Anas Mohammad from Dubai, who asks about the importance of
silhouette!)

So, last week we dove into the concepts of twinning, as it applies to timing as well as posing.  We talked about the robotic flavor inherent in all aspects of twinning, that twinning is the arch enemy of dynamic posing and believable performances, and we also discussed how to not only recognize, but hopefully FIX your twinned scenes.

This week, thanks to our friend Anas Mohammad, we're going to stick with the practical "nuts and bolts" stuff, and leap over to the concept of silhouette.

So, other than being a really difficult word to spell/type, what's this "silhouette" stuff?

Well, what's your most important goal as an animator?

Is it to make someone laugh?  Is it to tell a good story?  Is it to create a compelling acting performance that causes people to think?  Is it to create a great fight sequence, or show your characters’ deepest emotions?

Hopefully it's some or all of those things, and guess what?  Every one of those can be summed up into one overall goal that you need to have as an animator: to communicate clearly with your audience.

Your goal, in almost every scene you will ever touch, is clarity.

If your goal is to make someone laugh, the staging of the setup and punchline of your joke had better be clear, or no one is going to be laughing.

Try telling a good story without clearly showing the major plot points, or a strong acting performance where you can't see your character's eyes or have a good view of the posture.  Have a go at creating a dynamic fight scene where the punches are all staged away from camera so you can't see them thrown or whether they hit their target.  You are going to find that your work simply doesn't connect with the audience.  Your story will leave them baffled, the acting will fall flat, and the fight will never be the thrill ride you intended, instead your audience will be confused by what you are showing them.

As animators, our objective is to tell good stories and create these great scenes and performances.  But without carefully staging every aspect of our scenes with the audience's perspective in mind, our art loses any value or relevance it might have beyond anyone but yourself and your Mom.

The single most important ingredient to a communicative scene is clarity:
- clarity of ideas, and clarity of poses.  Anyone want to guess what the most important ingredient to clarity is?

That's right, it's silhouette.  Ok, here we go:

*Tip #18:  Black out your character.  Can't read the emotion or the action?  Then it's poorly staged.*

Ok, so what's a silhouette?

The "silhouette" of a body is the overall unified shape of the outline of the figure. Find a photo of yourself, grab a black sharpie marker, and color your body completely black.  All of it - head, limbs, face, everything.  That's a silhouette.

So, basically you throw out all the little details of the body - the eyes, the folds in the clothing, the color of the pants, etc, and what you have left is the single unified shape of the overall body.

This shape, this "overall" shape, is the very first thing we register when we see someone.  The very next instant, we flit to the character's face, seeking out the eyes, which immediately become our main focal point on the character - our "anchor," if you will, as we watch the character or person move around, act, react, etc.  But the instant before we find the face, we find the overall shape of the body.

Why?  Beats me!  Maybe because we're looking to recognize an overall body posture, which may be more communicative of attitudes and emotions at distances too great for faces to tell us much.  Maybe our brain is just looking at the overall shape to find the placement of the head, so it knows where to look for the eyes.  Or maybe that's just the way our brains work - like children learning to color, to find the outline of things before filling in all the details.

I don't know, but what I do know, is that it's true, even if it's most subconscious in our daily lives.  I know it's true because of the way it affects animation.  There's a reason that it's been one of the rock-solid principles of our art for so many decades!

(Right about now is when I'm starting to fear that our reverse psychology attempt is starting to fail-- I feel a case of the rambles coming on, so I'll try to be quick, I swear!)

Ok, so how does this affect animators?

Well, the most basic way you apply this principle is when attempting to show the emotional state of your character.  Selling the emotion through the overall body posture of your character is absolutely critical, since that's the very first thing the audience will see.  The audience has a restless eye, and you might only have a split second to tell them all the information they need to know.  Is your character shy?  Devastated?  Exuberant?  The posture of the body needs to tell this to the audience as fast as possible.

Before moving on, we need to clarify the importance of body language. 
Without getting too deep into it (because I think body language would probably benefit from an article unto itself), body language, as an animator uses it, can be employed to show the truth of an emotion or thought, regardless of what the actual line of dialogue happens to be. 
It can be used to show us the personality of your character (stiff businessman vs. laid-back surfer dude, for example).  Body language can tell us a lot about a character's state of mind, and it's absolutely essential that you connect the body language to the facial performance (particularly the eye animation).

 If your character is "exuberant," or "really really happy," you can create the happiest facial expression on the planet, but if you've left your character in the wrong body pose, it isn't going to work.  At best, it will just be confusing to the audience.  If your character is in a shy pose, but has a really happy face - that's just going to look bizarre.  The body and face work together to communicate emotion, right?  Never fall into the trap of thinking of them as separate entities-- they need to support each other in your acting performances.

In short, (and without flying off on a complete new tangent), the emotion of the character should always read first in the body language, and you should always think of the facial performance as the "icing" on your cake.

So, if it's so important that the body and face support each other, and you need the audience to be able to instantly "read" the emotion in the body, how do you employ silhouette to help you out?

Having a clear silhouette of this posture is essential to such rapid communication with your audience.

In that instant where the audience is looking solely at the "overall outline" of the body, they aren't going to see anything that's "lost"
inside the shape of that body, right?  Yes, they'll be seeing the face soon enough, and will start to fill in details from there, but in a medium where we break things down into 24 frame-per-second chunks, we often need to make sure that not a single frame is wasted.  You have an opportunity, in that instant, to make your scene that much clearer to the audience, and you should seize it!

The simplest example of this is staging the arms to be completely "lost" inside the outline of the body.  Let's say your character is going to be drinking a bottle of water.  Well, you *could* choose to stage the drink in a way that as he drinks from the bottle, it's facing right at camera, which would mean the arm-- and even more importantly, the bottle-- are "lost" within the silhouette.  Will the audience figure out that he's drinking a bottle of water?  Yeah, probably, but not as quickly as they would if you used the tool of silhouette when choosing your staging. 

Pull that bottle out to the side - make it a 3/4 shot to the camera, or even a profile view.  Build your acting performance around that pose instead, and everything will start to come together in a much more pleasing and communicative way.  Even pulling the bottle out just enough to see some negative space between the chest and the crook of your characters elbow can make all the difference in clarity.

Of course, there are always exceptions to these rules, and there would be some great ones with these examples.  For instance, the further you push a silhouette, the cartoonier and more "theatrical" the acting will get, so the style of the project is something that must be considered when choosing how much to exaggerate your silhouette.  Also, a great way to show an attitude in your character is sometimes to have his arms folded across his chest.  Well, that isn't much of a silhouette, but I bet that if you're clever and careful, you can at least make sure to stage his pose in a way that his silhouette makes it clear that his arms are folded!

This becomes a big deal in two specific instances:  dynamic action scenes, and plot-points.

In an action scene,(which I sure hope you generally want to be as dynamic and exciting as possible), things are going to be moving quickly, at least some of the time.  The audience will have even less time than normal when attempting to figure out what's going on.  A good fight scene must be carefully choreographed throughout in order to be clear, and there are probably no scenes with more "confusion potential" than a big fight scene.  It's so easy for the fight to degenerate into one big messy blur, and suddenly this big exciting thrill ride of a scene has become boring!

Throwing a punch is a great example - don't hide the anticipation of that punch in the outline of either combatant's body - try to at least get a nice silhouette on the antic whenever possible, and it's always nice and strong to see a good silhouette on the follow-through of the punch as well.  I personally don't think it's all that important that the connection point between fist and chin has any great silhouette (sometimes it's really hard to find a way to stage this) as long as the antic and the follow-through are nice and clear, it'll still read really well.

As for plot-points, let's say that a key story point is that everyone's been trying to find this certain wristwatch, because it's got a secret code scratched into the back of it that opens a safe or something.  And in your scene, it's the big moment where one character is going to pass the watch to another character.

Boy oh boy-- if that isn't a time for silhouette, I don't know what is. 
There would be many ways to stage this in a silhouetted way, ranging from subtle to completely over the top, but all of them would be far better suited to telling your story than "hiding" the watch hand-off within the outlines of the two bodies.  Try to show the watch in between them, and get a nice silhouette on their arms, or at least their hands. 

Different body languages will tell us if they are nervous about being caught, angry to have give the watch away, or reluctant to let it go-- but all of these can (and should) be staged in silhouette.

Oh, and before I go, here's one more quickie tip:

*TIP #18b:  In Maya, if you're using the basic default lighting setup and you hit the "7" key, Maya will show you the silhouette of the character for free!*

Okay, that's it!  Hope that was helpful to someone out there...Hope you're having fun with this animation stuff.  As always, feel free to hit me with some feedback or topic requests at: 
tipsandtricks@animationmentor.com

Have fun!!

-Shawn :)