...minimize blocking?

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human
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...minimize blocking?

Post by human »

After hacking away towards animation for a year, I suddenly wonder whether I've been making more work for myself than necessary, by spending too much time preparing to do (but not really doing) “blocking.”

Wikipedia: “Blocking is a theatre term which refers to the precise movement and positioning of actors on a stage in order to facilitate the performance of a play, ballet, film or opera.”

Now I wonder whether I've been too influenced by my rotoscope sources from long-form cinema. A truly vast amount of blocking happens during a feature film. Actors cross a room, approach doors and open them, settle into seats or rise from them, and so on.

In live-action, and particularly in feature-length productions, blocking makes sense. All this ambient character motion doesn't entail much additional workload for anyone; it establishes a compelling sense of continuity; and it enlivens the picture with human action, even though it doesn't advance the plot very far.

On the other hand, I need to tell my story in a matter of 3-7 minutes, and character movement entails a very, very high cost in animation. Therefore, I'm suddenly asking, maybe I should stop thinking like a feature-length movie director, and learn how to economize?

Before you dismiss this as obvious, give me the benefit of a doubt. This is not as simple as it sounds, and it may have implications that I would prefer not to deal with-- above all, continuity problems. For example: if I want to avoid following a character getting out of bed and walking all the way over to the window, the only alternative to put him in both places is to jump-cut.

Jump-cut here, jump-cut there, jump-cut there, and pretty soon, you have a pretty choppy production. I guess this calls for a more sophisticated approach to editing, in which you cross-cut to another camera angle or to a parallel storyline, particularly, in my case, to some image which stands for what the character is thinking.

I'm struggling to get clear about this. Help!
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slowtiger
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Post by slowtiger »

I never spent much thought on "blocking", in fact I learnt that term just recently. I am used to storyboards instead. And before that, I used to decide where to place my life-action actors right on the set, depending on space and light mostly. (That was no-bugdet filmmaking, mind you ...)

When I worked in a bigger studio I spent quite some time correcting other people's storyboards, for economical reasons. In the original version it would have needed a new background painted every two shots, which was impossible. I had to combine shots in a way to save backgrounds and to take other shortcuts as well.

From a certain level on, animation is more the art of cutting costs that the art of drawn movement. If you look at lots of animation series you'll notice that most of the time movement is avoided as much as possible - because it's expensive. This of course is the exact opposite of the "anything is possible in animation" dictum.

Life action has it easier in this regard: to let an actor walk across the room costs just the same as to have him sit in a corner. And then there's that dictum of "realism" or "naturalism" in film: people normally don't stand still like in a Robert Anthony Wilson play. People walk around, have to carry the ashtray to the bin, whatever.

In animation we rely on strong composition for dramatic effect, and we compose them in 2D. So the "dramatic language" of animation is much more "decided" than in life action, it's more like poetry than prose, leaving out all fillers and continuity - and not only because it's to expensive to have people walk from one pose to antother, it's just not necessary. Animation should (as some say) be the essence of real movements, so it sounds reasonalbe to concentrate on the bare necessities of the story as well.

I found some great examples of good blocking in anime. What skilled anime directors can do just with clever angles, perspective, and editing, is amazing. Lots of variety, and it's even cheaper than our average dialogue scene in western style animation.

I don't know which style of animation or story you're going to do, but you may need only some basc blocking knowledge for dialogue scenes. Everything else should be done in 2D with a graphic mind.
human
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Post by human »

slowtiger wrote:From a certain level on, animation is more the art of cutting costs that the art of drawn movement. If you look at lots of animation series you'll notice that most of the time movement is avoided as much as possible - because it's expensive...

...In animation we rely on strong composition for dramatic effect, and we compose them in 2D. So the "dramatic language" of animation is much more "decided" than in life action, it's more like poetry than prose, leaving out all fillers and continuity - and not only because it's to expensive to have people walk from one pose to antother, it's just not necessary. Animation should (as some say) be the essence of real movements, so it sounds reasonalbe to concentrate on the bare necessities of the story as well.
Beautiful. Thanks.
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slowtiger
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Post by slowtiger »

Uups. Too much honour, I wrote this before coffee ...
ali980
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Post by ali980 »

slowtiger wrote:I found some great examples of good blocking in anime. What skilled anime directors can do just with clever angles, perspective, and editing, is amazing. Lots of variety, and it's even cheaper than our average dialogue scene in western style animation.
Can you show us or give us links to the examples?
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slowtiger
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Post by slowtiger »

Can you show us or give us links to the examples?
Sorry, no. There was one film where I very much liked the first 20 minutes, which were great material to learn from, but I don't remember the title. But I assume that the overall storytelling quality of anime can be found in nearly every feature-length release. NOT in series episodes, mind you: nearly all examples I know consist solely of shortcuts, which is nothing good to learn from.
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slowtiger
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Post by slowtiger »

Just today I stumbled over http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/hitchcock/ ... _Hitchcock. As the name implies, it is a breakdown of 52 feature length films of Hitchcock down to 1000 frames. It makes a very interesting study object in terms of blocking, camera angle, and continuity.
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mkelley
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Post by mkelley »

After this older thread was revived it kept sticking in my mind, and today it jumped out at me.

If anyone here is familiar with Gerry Anderson's puppet work (Thunderbirds, Stingray, Supercar, Fireball XL5) or perhaps the take off on it (for you younger kids), Team America, it serves as an excellent study in how to minimize actual walking movements.

Because the marionettes could not really walk (their puppeteers were gifted at moving arms and head, but the walk movement was never convincing enough) there are almost no shots of feet. Instead the puppets are always filmed from at least the waist up (with the characteristic "bobbing" motion of a walk, which is much much easier to do in animation).

Anyone looking to avoid walk cycles would do well to rent some of this stuff (it's nearly all available on Netflix) and study how they constructed scenes to get around their characters inability to actually walk.

The other thing present (we used to deal with this a lot in 3D animation until the tools got better) is that you don't have to use "jump" cuts per se in order to avoid showing the character walking. Here's an example.

Let's say we have a character waking up, getting dressed, running for his bus, and finally settling into a seat. This might entail a lot of walking/running but we can make it at a minimum and still not make the editing so jumpy it looks like an MTV video.

You show the character in bed, and then a shot of the alarm clock, with his hand turning it off. You cut to the dresser and hold on it for a second or two while he comes into the frame in a medium waist shot. Then he moves out of the frame, we hear footsteps and the door opening and closing.

We see him running down the street after the bus -- this is the "money" shot and the only time we need to actually have a run, but because it's the gag we can make the run funny (and fun to do). From the interior of the bus (also mid waist) we can see him come in huffing and puffing, and paying the bus driver, and then we cut to the bus seat for a second or two, as he settles in.

We've done an entire animation and had only one shot that involved a run cycle. But the audience will be sure they've seen the character walking about.

The trick is not to abruptly cut to him IN the seat (or AT the dresser, etc) but to always start off the scene with the empty frame that he fills. This gives the illusion (both real and imagined) of time passing and thus of him walking and getting there. Just try it and you'll see what I mean -- you can even hold the empty seat so long the audience starts anticipating his arrival and wonder why he's walking so slowly (taking so long).

But study Gerry's stuff -- it's really wonderful in terms of an action story how much they can accomplish with characters who can't really move (or even interact much). Part of it is the vehicles carry the day, but there are many many techniques that can be used in character animation to avoid having to constantly make your characters walk/run.
human
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Post by human »

mkelley wrote:The trick is not to abruptly cut to him IN the seat (or AT the dresser, etc) but to always start off the scene with the empty frame that he fills. This gives the illusion (both real and imagined) of time passing and thus of him walking and getting there. Just try it and you'll see what I mean -- you can even hold the empty seat so long the audience starts anticipating his arrival and wonder why he's walking so slowly (taking so long).
People like to say there's no magic solution that solves all problems, but this strikes me as coming pretty close... that is, if you hadn't already learned it from watching the work of others--and I had not.

I find this enormously helpful. Thanks!

Just curious--has anyone ever seen this spelled out clearly in books about animation?

There are also more good ideas in the posts by mkelley and slowtiger, too.
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mkelley
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Post by mkelley »

I'm an old man (so sometimes I forget a lot of what I knew :>) but where this really jogged my memory was that my wife and I were in the post office yesterday and they were playing one of the Rankin Bass puppetoon films, the Rudolf one.

I pointed out to her that they rarely showed a two legged character walking -- because this is a real PITA when you are trying to do the kind of stop motion work they were doing to have only one support (to move the reindeer they could have two legs on the ground at any point in time, so there are more shots of them walking).

In any case, it is another example of how you can cheat with mid shots of the characters and showing the empty scene first and afterwards, etc. etc. So there is still yet another place to look (but this reminded me of Gerry's work, so that was the post I made here).

I don't know if there are any books about this kind of stuff -- it's sort of learned on-the-job and in many cases could be considered cutting corners (and there are few books out there that describe how to cut corners in ANY occupation). But perhaps someday you can write one (you never know, that's how people end up writing books, they study things until they themselves become the experts). For me when I see this stuff it's kind of an "aha" moment when I think "so that's how I can do it" and file it away for future reference.
human
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Post by human »

OK, now we can do a lot more blocking, thanks to

http://www.moviestorm.co.uk/MSDB/HomePageServlet. *

For instance:

Image

MovieStorm and its base human models are freeware [!].

MovieStorm's functionality is very, very analogous to iClone.

MovieStorm, however, has a unique higher-level design that makes authoring an animation much more like being a movie director than a cel animator.

(Anybody want me to do a comparative review?)

However, as you can see from this animation, what I have here is only one step above an animatic.

I used aggressive tooning on the video to simplify these keyframes, and a lot of work is still required to make a finished animation with my own character.

Therefore, I still consider mkelly's insight into how to minimize blocking (see post above) as the best answer, even when you can generate plenty of reference footage.

One remarkable thing about this sequence is that it doesn't exhibit the shimmering usually seen in rotoscoping.

What do you think?

* PS! Their website has orange, lots and lots of pretty orange ! :lol:
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fiziwig
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Post by fiziwig »

I have recently been wondering about blocking and camera angles in animation, specifically "limited animation" in the style of Jay Ward and Hannah-Barbera.

I took apart a 5 minute "Fractured Fairy Tales" episode and broke it down into a storyboard using a screen shot from every cut or cross fade. There were a total of 122 camera setups in that 5 minutes.

Most significantly, (and this really only applies to limited animation, and especially not to live action film) character movements were almost always just implied by the next camera shot. For example, in one shot Cinderella is swinging a feather duster at a table lamp. Cut to the next shot and the table lamp lies broken on the floor. We never see it fall, and we never see it break. And yet when watching the animation at regular playback speed this omission isn't even noticed.

Another example is where two characters stand across the room from each other, followed by a cut to a shot with them standing together. We never actually see either character walk the distance between them, yet in our mind, we saw it happen.

Another trick is to cover up complex action with a dust cloud, a puff of smoke, or the backs of a crowd scene. For example, on the opening of Rocky and Bullwinkle's "Aesops's Fables" young Aesop junior carves his name into the rock with a jack hammer. All we actually see is junior lunging toward the rock wall with jackhammer in hand, followed by a cloud of dust that obscures the entire frame, followed by the dust clearing and we see the name carved in the rock. Yet we are left with the impression that we saw junior carving his name in the rock, without ever having to animate such a complex bit of motion.

When Rapunzel gets a haircut, all we see is the backs of a crowd of barbers, and bits of hair flying around. The real action is hidden from sight, and therefore, not animated.

There's a real art to cutting from one virtually still shot to another yet leaving the audience with the impression that they have seen the action take place.

Really interesting stuff.

--gary
human
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Post by human »

Thanks very much, fizzy!

This is valuable stuff, isn't it????

As the forum's laziest member, I must say that every discovery of ways to avoid work is the greatest triumph of them ALL.

:wink:
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