Anyway, head of it has done a ton of interviews with people. (calling them webinars.) Was watching this one with Andrew Tan that had some good tips. Blocked in his dynamic camera with a bouncing ball, then grease pencil on top. Thinking about spacing and texture to rhythm.
Definitely going to wander through the rest of the webinars.
if your character is enraptured in something, the audience will become interested as well. But it's really an editing choice, choose the 1.5 seconds where they are enraptured and discared the 10 minutes where they aren't
I watched TinTin yesterday (which I had been reluctant too, because it just threw out Herge's awesome graphic style, and then TinTin's voice bleh) and there is no denying that Spielberg can craft a really fun movie. It had me thinking about how Lucas and Spielberg just recreated the old serial movies they watched. So I went poking around and found this fan site that says that they went and watched all 15 episodes of Don Winslow of the Navy for inspiration before hashing out the story. The site says that after their week of day long story meetings Lucas had divided the story up into 60 scenes, each two pages long, and had outlined 6 cliffhangers. So a peril turns up every 20 pages and every 10 minutes the hero is in mortal danger, the danger had to be as real as possible and required the hero's cleverness to escape. Had me trying to pin why Indiana Jones is so fun, but Avatar left me 'meh' and answer I've come up with so far is that Avatar characters feel generic, Indiana Jones the characters are cool and fun to hang out with and feel more developed.
Talking about the Last Crusade it's mentioned that Spielberg storyboards everything, and figures it out on miniatures, which saves a lot of money having it worked out ahead of time and makes it easier for all the different departments to do their jobs.
When Sean Connery came on he really looked to put in as much humor as possible, and as much conflict between Jones Sr. and Jones Jr.
The tank chase was mentioned as being different from most action set pieces because it had more story in it, characters evolved during the chase, we saw Sr. strong for the first time and we see Indy at his weakest.
(makes me think of Lost's approach of couching everything in terms of character.)
I missed the webcast with Gabor last year. Went trawling through the animschool blog, decent stuff in there.
here's their youtube page. And their earlier page when they were 3DAppeal, which is interesting to watch and see how he adds appeal to models.
don't jump right to ref, double check your set so you know what you're dealing with "is there space to move like I'm planning? How much movement will I have to do (how many steps)?"
then appeal test - test what poses work and what poses don't for appeal for your characters (Sid the Sloth doesn't look good from a lot of views)
familiarize self with controls and rig what's possible, what can you break. For a lot of animations does quick appeal tests for the expected golden poses of the shot (a walking talking shot, figure out what poses are gonna look good for walking, and gesturing) 2 hours about (all these poses are gonna get tossed so don't spend too much time) essentially it's thumbnailing with computer so you know what is possible (as opposed to cheating with a pencil) training and teaching yourself
at bluesky very conscious of their sub frames which will affect motion blur
I have a link that I haven't gotten to yet, so I'll put it here to clean up my bookmarks.
Jim Hull's Story Fanatic page, lots of great articles on story structure, analyzing and breaking down stories and why he thinks they work, lots to learn.
he has a really interesting trick (goes into it pretty quick on ep 5) where he's basically kit bashing his image value/color together. So he takes a bunch of random photos that have the feel he wants and just slaps them down onto a single layer, and I guess just color picks and colors in his line drawing. really interesting.
Holy Crap, Feng Zhu (who has always been awesome) has thrown down a billion tutorials (I think he has a school). He makes the brilliant point that watching a lot of tutorials is like watching a professional basketball player, it's cool to see, but you're not going to be able to go out and do it because you have to put in your practice time on the fundamentals which most tutorials don't even go over. Seems like maybe his earlier tut's (like this one) do go over the basics some.
he has a really interesting trick (he goes over it in ep 5) where he kit bashes random unrelated photos into 1 layer because it has the value and colors he wants. Then he color picks off that abstract image and fills in his line drawing. He does it again ep 14 part 2 @ 7:40 but this time he's laying down some techy photos as overlay, so they pick up the value of his painting but make his sketchy thing look totally teched out. (I think he takes all his own ref photos so that he doesn't have to worry about copywrite)
another thing he talks about is zooming out til your image is postage stamp size, the image will work if your values are well organized even this small, so don't get detaily until it works this way. Make sure the eye travels well around the image, and points to your emphasis.
he always throws down a horizon line, this tells him wether he's looking up or down onto parts (because our eyes are always on the horizon line) which helps with light and form.
know what the selling point of your image is and emphasize it
don't be afraid to use "entertainment lighting" meaning everything is awesomely lit with rim lights and stuff, because we're trying to make awesome images so do it
he always thinks in terms of forground mid and bg, usually pushes things back with fog layers to make them softer and less contrasty, repetition of objects helps us know distance by how small the further back one is, likes to include human sized elements so we can judge size,
he has a trick where he'll copy out a piece of the image, take it to a new file and uprez it to get details in (easier with a regular brush, instead of a 1 pixel brush) then drop it back in to the original and fit it in
for a painting he does a very loose line sketch, then fills it in with silhouette (or gradient w/ light at top) and starts working on defining form, as soon as he can turn off the lines and the forms and volumes still read he's done with the lines.
flipping through Michelle's blog I saw a link to Arte y Animacion who I don't know, awesome collecting blog with stuff I haven't seen before. Have to make note so I remember to look at it when I have more time. Thanks Michelle.
Animator @ S2Games -----------------------note to self----------------
it's never going to be easier, only harder. Life will never say "hey, why don't you take a break from all the stuff you have to do so you can CREATE something". So stop making excuses and start making sacrifices to get that thing you want to do, done (or at least begun).
