Aug 5, 2009

Quick Trick: Think In Reverse


This one is kind of abstract, maybe makes no sense, but might work for some of you.

If I try and block a shot using "story poses", I usually find myself getting stuck. I find it easier to set my first pose, then work through the shot trying to set the minimum amount of poses as possible along the way, but still using rough breakdowns to figure out where the character is going ( imagine it like straight ahead, but with very few drawings ). If I just step through and put my "story" poses, they can sometimes be so far apart either in time or in screen space that how I actually get to them ( e.g, what my breakdowns look like ) can start to confuse me a lot.

So sometimes, when I do try and do just story poses, I occasionally think backwards from a pose that is causing me problems when I come to figure out the breakdowns. So say my keys and breakdowns are working nicely from frames 1 - 30, but then I have a pose on frame 50 that I can't easily figure out how to get to... I find it can help to think backwards from frame 50 to 30 and do the kind of straight ahead blocking towards the previous key.

I think this can sometimes make it easier because your transitions into frame 30 are figured out, so you understand where the motion is coming from, but everything after frame 5o is still blank space so understanding where its is going is harder.


3 comments:

DAVID WILSON said...

Great post. It's a lot like figuring out "if/then" statements. Making sure the motion in the suggested poses can believably carry you from A to B and back again.

Let me know if I'm way off base. Thanks for the wisdom.

2d and 3d animations said...

Good post. Thanks a lot for sharing.

Anonymous said...

Last night I tried this method and it worked!