Preplanning Concept

Emotion is integral to any character animation endeavor. Without it, there is no connection with the audience and the story suffers. When I started the thesis process, I noticed that there weren’t many resources available for animators in the subject of emotion. There were some books on animating facial features, which I found to be too technical. The closest resource I had found was Ed Hook’s text, “Acting for Animators”. It touched on the deeper aspects of conveying emotion in characters and its connection with the audience. Other than these texts, one would experience this type of instruction inside the industry, where new animators, upon entering a company, will usually undergo a training session where emotion and the proprietary software are covered. Many animators working in the industry have become university instructors where they introduce many of these concepts to students. A good example of this is a website called Animationmentor.com, a private online animation school, where animation students from all over the world take 6 – 10 week classes and learn from professional instructors from Pixar and Dreamworks. The site is popular and many students after taking the course, are recruited to work in the industry. The instruction is only available to a select few, and although it is impossible to get first hand instruction from professional animators, I believe that engaging in these exercises, is a good first step.

For my project, I thought it would benefit everyone by researching the most important aspects of animating character emotion, the exercises to help enhance this and to turn into a curriculum that could be introduced to intermediate animation students. The idea, is that if students were introduced to these concepts while in school, when they graduate, they would have experienced methods, learned concepts and would have examples to demonstrate their understanding and which they could use as part of their professional demo reel. The end result is that these students would be more prepared to take on complicated animation tasks such as animating emotion.

As part of my research, I sent out a questionnaire to professional animators in order to get a better understanding of how emotion is seen and achieved in the industry. The questionnaire was comprised of twenty questions covering education history, mentors, animating workflow techniques, animating emotion and tips and tricks for students. Eleven animators responded and this week, I reviewed all of them to see if I could find a new direction or gap in animating emotion that I have not seen. I noticed something profound. It seems simple, but I think if I focus on it, that it could help students achieve greater results. What I found was that there is a great deal of preliminary cognitive work that has to be done before any animation is started. Simply put, it requires observation and questioning, the conscious implementation of both could make the act of animating emotion simpler.

In almost all of the interviews, when asked to provide a resource that had helped them animate emotion, “observation” came up in over half of the questionnaires. This seemed obvious at first, but it’s the basic task for all artists, all artists must be aware of the world in the way he understands in order to interpret that into a visual expression. In this case, its an animated performance. This includes careful observation of people and objects from life. It also means shooting video reference, and scrubbing through animation clips or movies. Another resource they found essential was the ability to act in front of a camera or mirror. This takes initiative from the student and it places the student in a situation where he has to “feel” the emotion in a character.

Other questions that helped to animate emotion include: What is the state of mind of the character? And what happened to this character in the previous scene? What happens to the character in the following scene? How does this scene play into the overall scheme of the animation? Almost all of the professional animators before working on a scene would ask the above. Once these questions were answered, the animator would have information to add to the scene and could then move to the next step. In this, to solve for emotion the animator proceeds to creating a series of poses in the character that help to convey the story. These poses must be clear enough that even in silhouette form, they would still be readable. These can be drawn then translated on to the CG character, or it can be applied to the CG character directly.

These questions provide clarity into the process. In reading about this, I wondered if there was a way to integrate some sort of exercise where the student would have to consider the state of mind or any previous histories of the character. These can be made up, but I wonder if the implementation of this will make the final performance more engaging and rich. I see this as being an addition to my animation exercises, where every exercise has a section called “Preplanning”. This gives additional value for the user.

In these interviews, we could conclude that “Preplanning” was key to creating great emotion in characters. Professional animators do this naturally as part of their practice. It saves them time, the approval process is smoother and they get a better performance. I see this “Preplanning” as a feature in the presentation of my curriculum. In it, we ask students before animating, to take the time to think of a couple of things before animating. This includes knowing the state of mind of the character, the scene before and after, shooting reference and formalizing clear poses. From experience, I know that some students take the time to preplan, but most do not, and if they do, I have not come across any resources that mention the most effective ways of doing this. Doing so would create better results for the student.