From the course: Essential Technical Aspects of Animation

When to start a pan

From the course: Essential Technical Aspects of Animation

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When to start a pan

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- [Instructor] Let's take a look at the right way and the wrong way to start a pan animation. Now this scene is panning all the time, so what I'm going to show you now is kind of irrelevant to this example, but what if we wanted to start with a static position and then begin the panning of the scene? There is a right way and a wrong way, and I'll show you both. So let's just look at the man. Then imagine we have a scene where we're going to start him on the left and then track him across to the right. So we can do something like this. Now, the problem with this, and maybe you can see it or maybe not. The pan is happening before he reaches the halfway point of the screen. In other words, he's still on the left side of the screen before the camera starts to pan. And the problem with that is the pan anticipates the action. That's not good. Here is another version where this time, we wait a little bit until he's on the halfway point of the screen or just a little beyond and then the camera person realizes, "okay, wait a minute. He's moving out of shot." So you do not want the pan to anticipate the action. The camera is always responding to the action. The camera should not be psychic. It should not know what's going to happen before it happens. There could be exceptions to this, but this is a pretty good general rule. Here's the monster, same thing here too. We start from a standing position and the camera pan anticipates the action, not good. Instead we wait and that's much nicer. So this kind of thing is at the subtle end of camera moves, but if you ever have the issue with moving from a standing position into an action scene, try to have the camera follow the action and not lead the action.

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