From the course: Essential Technical Aspects of Animation

Cheating orbits

From the course: Essential Technical Aspects of Animation

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Cheating orbits

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- [Instructor] This is a very simple cheat but it's a fun one. And don't overdo it but it's handy to know how to do it. It's a camera orbit and it's taking a flat character and then doing a little spin around. And it looks fancier than it really is. Let's take a look at some of the nuts and bolts. So as the name suggests, we are orbiting the camera around the figure and that creates this nice arcing movement. And that's often used for dramatic shots, reaction things and stuff like that. So, how do we create this illusion with flat characters? Because if you're working in CGI, it's simple, you just move the camera. If you're working in a puppet system though, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. So the right way being the biggest mistake you can make, is the direction of motion of the background. So in this case, to get the illusion of moving the camera from left to right, we start on the right side of the background and move left. So it inverts the direction of movement of the camera. So as long as you get that down, it shouldn't look too weird. So that's the background by itself And then when combined with the figure. And again, notice with the figure, it looks like he's doing something fancy. He's really not, I've just separated the head off onto a different layer and the arms and just slightly tweened them in After Effects. You can do the same thing in any puppet-based system. You could even draw this by hand. I just didn't have the time to do all these in-betweens. So as you can see, that they both match. The feet are not doing anything, they're as flat as you could like. You could always crop them off if they were bothering you, or you could do some other puppet system on them to try to put motion on them. But the brain seems to accept a certain range of motion with these kinds of cheats, with 2D puppet systems. And I think it's about 20, 30 degrees before we begin to see the cheating happening. So again, if this is our background, we would frame about here and then move to there. So that would be sufficient to give that range of motion. This isn't a very long background, so I had a limit to how far and how fast I could move it. But even that was enough to buy us, what I think, is a pretty nice illusion of motion.

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