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If you are an animator working on your first and one of many projects, it would do you good to go over these key points.
Making a great animation is all about knowing how the audience perceives a motion picture. Most of the time, they aren’t looking for anything overly dramatic, but something that sticks out without looking too cartoonish or unrealistic to the point of being silly.
Some of the greatest animators have said that the trick to making animation is to tell the audience what your characters are trying to say without even the need for making them talk. They should be able to understand the story through motion alone. The wisdoms of some of the best animators have been diluted to four tips that we have made in this article for all you animators out there.
- Avoid Motion Capture
Motion capture is tempting to use in animation. It’s fast, efficient and the results are great. But it is also cheating. If your characters need motion, especially human like characters, try doing it by hand and not simply capture it by mo-cap techniques.
Motion capture is frowned upon in the animation industry and isn’t even considered a proper animating technique. Creators can clearly tell when something is motion captured. There is a particular feel to the hand-made animation that motion capture simply cannot exude.
- Imitate Life
When animating, a very common practice is to use references. Many artists use videos of real life things in action. For example, when making an animation that involves a human like character, artists take videos of people walking, running or doing various activities, and try to have their animated character copy their actions.
When looking at references, try to see the key poses and subtle gestures which you would normally not see. Use them in your key frames and polish the motion in-between.
Using references is a great way to study real life motions that could be handy later on.
- Make the motions flow
Using jerky motions in life characters is one of the biggest mistakes made by amateur animators. When animating, one must be careful to not break the illusion that what the audience is watching really has a life of its own.
When animating, keeping all motions fluid and transition them together properly without breaking up. After making every few seconds of animation, check to see if it is seamless and iron out all the jagged, robot-like motions. The final animation should look like its moving effortlessly and without any hitches.
- Always Get Feedback
It never hurts to show your animation to someone else and get their feedback. Consider it proofreading for a writing task. It gives you a sense of what others think from a common point of view. After all, they are going to be the ones who see your animation. Why not get their early opinion?
Before you release your animation, let others see it and give their critical thoughts. Are the characters convincing looking? Is there any bad section that sticks out? Can anything be improved?
In conclusion, the composition of a superb animation goes down to your own sense of how much you know about your audience. Your animation is a caricature of real life and you must use all your creative senses to make it as such. A good animation takes time and trial and error while understanding your own abilities and taking the time to grasp how the motions in our world can be put into a digital form.
