Dos and don'ts

- [Instructor] Some do's and don'ts, and these are kind of high level do's and don'ts, they're not like do squash and stretch and there's nothing like that. These are more high level overview kind of things to watch out for. This one sounds kind of contradictory, don't be too technical, but do plan. So let me explain. At one point in my career, I got so wound up by worry that I had a block and I was so self conscious about my drawing that I would freeze up. A coworker gave me this book by Shamus Culhane and he talked about his discovery. He had the same problem. He worked on "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves", the Disney movie and somebody gave him this Nicolaides, this book, "The Natural Way to Draw" and it's all like loosen up, draw fast, don't be bogged down by the nuts and bolts. You can tie things down later. And that saved him. That got him to flow and suddenly he was doing all the footage he had to do. So I thought, I'm nothing to lose, so I'll try it and I tried it and it worked. So having said that, you don't want to go maybe too far down the extreme of never planning. So in the method that he described, you would keep working in the gesture drawing mode for as much as you can. When you're planning your scene, when you're in thumbnail mode or when you're working your key poses you don't go in with a cleanup. You don't come up with tie-downs. You're trying to keep your drawings loose gesture drawings and do them fast and don't allow the mechanics to overwhelm you. So you're in a more fluid state of creation, let's say. So these are some examples of the kind of things. So, you know, you're not taking more than 30 seconds to a minute to do a drawing. That said you still need to plan. So what I try to do is to combine the best of both. So I do these elaborate thumbnails, if you've seen any of my courses, I always thumbnail everything. I think a lot of the books kind of underplay the importance of thumbnails so I tried to make up for that by going the other way. And in this case, I've tried to keep my thumbnails loose gesture drawings but planned. So you have that tension between the freedom of the gesture drawings and then the tight control planning off the thumbnail process. So another issue that's more technical really is about arcs. And when you work in puppet systems, and this is going to apply mostly to you, people who are using harmony or animate CC and it depends how you rig your puppets as well. Sometimes when you move a puppet rig, it'll look okay but maybe something doesn't quite feel right. And usually what that thing that's catching your eye or making you a bit off about it is the arcs. Let me show you how easy it is for these things to go wrong. So, and I've covered this in a previous movie, I'll just show very quickly again. Here, we have a simple puppet animation of the kind many people do. If you actually plot these arcs, they're all angular. They're not arcs at all. There's, some appear here but for the most part, they're just straight lines. And a lot of people don't notice because the thing moves so quick but the solution is, one solution is plot your arc, so you put a clean drawing over it and you put dots down or in this I've used these little symbols inside the hand to create these graphics that show me the different arc patterns, improve them. So in this case, I just made little guides for the body and the head to put everything on a proper arc path. So again, this is an emergent property that comes out of some puppet rigs. So solution, first identify the problem and make sure that you have the problem or you might not and pick a point of the character like the wrist and just plot that point throughout the entire range of animation and see what the arc path looks like. And applies the hand drawing. If you'd have a hand drawing, in this case I have a hand drawn walk cycle and this was done in harmony, but I put a clean layer over it, put a dot and then another dot and I plot in the wrist here of the right arm and the frame number and then I can see where the in-betweens are going to go. And I know the spacing and timing of the in-betweens. I can have the keys and in-betweens, and that is going to move beautifully. And you can pick the elbow, you can pick the wrist and you can see all of these different parts when you plot them and go, that's going to be a quality. No one's going to look at that and say the arcs feel weird. Another issue that the puppet people by which I mean, people who use harmony or animate CC will face is the problem of pushing puppets. I am as guilty of this as anybody. You take your flash puppets, your animated puppet your harmony puppet, and you just start moving it around. And before, you know it you have an animation done. The only problem with that is you're doing puppet animation, you're not really doing animation with a puppet, if that makes sense. So if you want to make a puppet do animation of the best quality that puppet can do you really want to draw. And again, you don't have to draw particularly well but the worst drawing will usually get you somewhere better than just puppet pushing. So in this case, I wanted to go from the standing pose into this crunch pose. So by creating this reference layer I was able to use that to guide my puppet into something that would look so much better. So again, that's the importance of, don't just blindly push the puppet do a quick sketch, at least for really good strong poses. Maybe you can't do it for every key pose in your scene, but you might find there's a couple of strong ones that would really help to emphasize the puppet animation. Huge problem today is camera moves that move too much. And this happens in live action CGI shows now, drives me nuts. So staging shots correctly is almost a lost art in some cases. So it's where should the camera go? What's the best camera angle to tell the character dynamics of a shot. And let me give you some examples. So the old hand drawn animation here, we obviously have pan scenes. Those were common enough, no harm there. We also had tracking shots where we would move into the characters, zoom in on them. And the kind of shot that I think is a little overdone now is these kind of orbit shots where we're moving around the character. They're not bad. I just think sometimes we move the camera to character relationship a little too much. This is a cheat one that I did to show how you might achieve an orbit in 2D. So I'm not saying don't do them, I'm saying use them only where they're going to really add something of value and not because they look cool. This is a good example of a correct camera placement because it shows the domineering boss, the brow beaten employee and moving the camera and the shot achieved nothing. It would actually distract from that. So there are other shots where the camera should move. This wouldn't be one of them. So try to avoid thinking on the screen or on the timeline and try to plan timing. And when I say plan timing, I mean on twos. So by thinking on the screen, I mean when you work in CGI or tune boomer, animate CC where you're trying to time the scene up by moving the key frame back and forth. Sometimes we do that but if that's what you're doing all the time then you're not really learning timing, you're just kind of guessing. And the beauty of planning your timing consciously by sitting down and thumb nailing a scene and working it out in advance, okay, it's an estimate, but it's an educated estimate. And every time you do that and then you apply it and see how accurate it is or isn't, you're learning something. Whereas I don't think you learn quite so much about timing when you're just moving key frames on the timeline. So when I say don't shoot for the moon and do have a realistic challenge the kind of thing I'm warning about is the kind of person who, and I've met them, who have very unrealistic ambitions and they're doomed to fail. And it's really sad because they end up just sabotaging themselves so please don't be this person. If you have an ambition to lift very heavy weight you start out with something that's a bit lighter that's still hard enough work. You graduate up to a challenge you can then meet. The goal I find is to have a task that's just slightly out of reach. You have to stretch for it and really work for it, but it's not impossible. It's an achievable goal. So you have these series of plateaus that you want to reach. So each one of these verticals, you can scale at some point. They're not impossible, but you could never for example, teleport from here to there. So you want to, again, set the challenges, set these goals that are definite plateaus above where you've been before. And this could be on the level of your work quality or even your work quantity. Final warning about burnout and about applying yourself properly. So one problem with burnout is, especially in animation you could, and this happened to me twice where you end up working ridiculous hours like 80 hours a week or more. And if you do it for long enough, at some point a part of your brain will go, I can't do this anymore. And your brain will simply stop giving you the energy that you need to do that work. So it's very easy to be in this trap when you're in your twenties. That's when it happened to me, twice. It's never going to happen to me again. I simply won't let it, I can't. So you want to preferably avoid ever having it happen to you at all, that would be the ideal. So try to feel when you're in that danger zone figure out some way to not be in that danger zone. That's all I can say, because you will end up worse off. It doesn't matter how much you want to work, your brain will simply not let you. That's a horrible feeling because part of you wants to work and the other part of you goes, I can't do it anymore. So that is probably the most important takeaway I would think from this movie. And one last detail, and here I'm going to disagree with Richard Williams who warns people against using headphones. There were times when you should use a headphone and times when you shouldn't. You shouldn't use a headphone if the stuff that you're working on is a very complex. If you're thumb nailing a complex action of a scene and it requires your complete attention, if there's some aspect of the work that has just too detailed, no, you shouldn't listen to music, you shouldn't listen to a podcast. But many aspects of our job are just ruthlessly repetitive and just numbing. I strongly recommend when you do those that you do listen to either your favorite podcast or music or radio or whatever, and then go back to take them off and stop if you have to concentrate again. That way you will go along with what's protecting your mind from that burnout scenario, that I described because it'll give your mind something else to deal with. Audio books are also a fantastic thing to do cause then you can listen to any number of books that way too. And you're getting something into your mind that's distracting you from the fact that you have to do maybe 120 in between drawings that are just not interesting. They're purely mechanical. They don't require you to be concentrating on them and get to a point with those where you can do them on autopilot. So the last thing you want to do is just to be doing that and nothing else. I think that would be very damaging. So in that respect, I would respectfully disagree with the advice which Williams gave in the "Animators Survival Kit".