Animation Podcasts again

Was re-listening to Animation Podcasts, Clay Kaytis has done a tremendous service to our community with it. Anyway, new thoughts:

They're all saying the same thing. Andreas especially I think. You have to be your character. You have to think and feel and know what it's like to walk in their skin, how they individually would react and move to situations. Not just a cool action, but how specifically would this body and this mind do that action.

James Baxter:
*Talking of getting in skin, he talks about the Odd Couple with Jack Lemon, that they are both the same "rig" (male young caucasion) but they have such different ways of moving and reacting. Reminds me of that idea: level 1 can move without looking funny, level 2 character feels alive, level 3 a brain swap and you would be able to tell the minds are in the wrong body by the actions and movements and reactions to things. He also talked about their power centers (like Keith Lango does) that Jack's character is all in his head and twitchy while Walter's is in his pelvis and slouchy.
*early blocking, when you start timing it out, the pose you drew will be the last frame of the pose, so think of it that way, because you're gonna need the time to ease into that Extreme.
*There are no inbetweens, every drawing has equal time on the screen, but in 2D you have a natural advantage because every drawing must be hand made, so every single drawing can be drawn with appeal, which makes me want to pay more attention to what the computer is doing to the shapes of the figure on the frames I haven't directly intervened. Which he talked about a little, one of his frustrations in CG is that you have to fight the rig, and there are times when you just can't get an appealing 2D image from it, as rigs get better we can fight that, and we must remember to fight that and make sure the everything is nice.
*They were talking about Milt always has at most 2 charts on his Key drawings, which is just like Eric Goldberg talks about in his book. So it's simple and clear and your poses are complete and well thought out and appealing on their own. And then you use partial drawings (just the hand, or just the eyes and chin) as breakdown keys to describe how to flow from one pose to the next so it doesn't all happen at once and be stiff and boring but it becomes fluid instead. Basically it's pose to pose with layering afterwards. So you get a unified pose (which is hard to get if your running each limb straight ahead individually) but you also get fluidity and varied movement timing(which can be tricky if your doing pose to pose) Which translates straight to CG, block your key poses as full body poses so you can consider the whole and figure out your timing, and then after your major full body poses go ahead and straight ahead the individual limbs to break up the evenness

Nik Ranieri:
*make it alive. Think about how the world really works, don't just reach for the window blind and pull it, reach and miss and reach again, Glen Keane's Calarts video animating the woman with the shopping cart she reaches and misses once before actually catching it, same with Spirited Away the infamous tapping the shoe on as she runs out the door, it doesn't just slide on quick and easy.

Ken Duncan:
*talking about Meg from Hercules, how in the start of the film she's very standoffish, so she is usually facing away from people when she talks to them, but after she and Hercules start developing a relationship she turns and looks at him in the eye more often, stops jutting out her hip so much. So her personal changes are actually visually apparent in the evolution of her shape because how she's feeling affects the poses she strikes.
*He talks of the scene of Tarsan tickling Jane's feet, at first he was animating it technically: head down shoulders up etc, but the scene felt lifeless. Then he remembered tickling his wife's feet and how he and his wife interacted and put that into the piece, and he pulled it up so much that he felt ticklish
*he also talks of the odd couple with Jack Lemon, about how the character who isn't speaking often is just standing there as if he was not acting, but really he is being a good actor because they're allowing their characters to hear everything that's being said and processing it and then reacting to it. Which is what we should be doing also, letting the characters think and hear and react. It only takes 8 frames of an expression change to show the character has a new thought/reaction to what they've heard.
*The Fugitive has a lot of scenes where Tommy Lee Jones is just staring into space barely moving, but because of the context of where the scene is the audience is thinking "what's he gonna do, what's he thinking" and they're totally into it. It's hard to do that in animation, the temptation is to throw in a shoulder shrug or a sigh or something, but you don't hold the audience as much. Those still parts give texture to the whole piece, contrasted against more busily animated scenes. When very little is going on but there's context then the audience fills it in. There's a scene in Witness that the main character just finds out his friends been murdered, it's a back shot and we just see his shoulders drop, simple and plain. Or Toy Story when Buzz finds out he's just another toy, it's very still no extra dialogue, but it sinks in what he's feeling.

Glen Keane:
*Talked about how Ollie would milk a Golden Pose for like 3 pages of an xsheet (which I think is around 900 frames so I must be thinking wrong) basically a long time, because the audience "thinks in pictures" so you need to let them see the pictures to think them. Milk it as long as possible
*When a character is still, they are thinking