Friday, February 3, 2017

Nicolas Prothais Disney Animator Gesture Lecture CTN

Nicolas Prothais : Gesture Eloquence in Animation

animation is like driving a car, once you know the technical stuff you don't have to worry about it anymore.

Gesture Eloquence, the power to steer emotion
Since voice is provided, animator's provide the body language, which is stronger than the voice, because you can lie with the voice but not the body.
So really we only have posing and timing. And first posing, because can't time without poses. So Poses are the fundamental part of animation.
Body language driven by emotion, it can move very well but without emotion it's flat.
We cannot rely on instincts, very often we are outside of our comfort zone. (Trying to act like a little kid when you're not) And can not rely on luck. Have to plan.
So how do you start? Can try just jumping in with emotions and your first thoughts. Or try and narrow down possiblities. Approach left brain or right brain, and go back and forth carefully analytic and raw instinctual.
Big Hero 6. A character sits in a chair, no other direction. Different emotions and different personalities. A bazillion different people will come through, should come through if you're good.
He's big into Jungian Character archetypes
Figure out the spcecifi emotion you're going for, excstatic vs overjoyed, nail that pose
body language speaks more about what we believe: "Do you understand?" while shaking head yes means I expect that you do, shaking head no means I don't think you get it
Animators job is to add that extra layer of knowledge to the performance. It's often not in the voice (for example indicator emotions they aren't feeling just referencing)
Took a line, and built the golden pose of that shot.
1st Who you are animating, what kind of character what kind of archetype?
2nd What you want to say as an artist, how is he feeling about what he's saying?
Sculpting isn't what takes a long time, it takes a long time to be sure the emotion is the one you want.
Films reference with actual voice then resyncs it to actual audio. (warps it in maya, (black and white runs faster also) the timing.) Then goes through and step keys it to just have key poses. So that's the blocking, just have to put it onto character. So now have poses blocked and timed. Puts vid ref away and breaksdowns and smooths with animation principles from here. (Blocking is pretty broken down, on 4's maybe, really ready for spline, but he says don't do that it becomes rotoscoped)

Disney has strong posing background.

same line, different subtext

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