To review the principles we've learned so far, we can recognize that they all have to do with physics except for straight ahead and pose to pose. And so that just goes to show how important understanding motion is to creating appealing animation. Now, the next four principles, we're gonna discuss that the nine old men of Disney coined are all having to do with creating clarity in your animation and your ideas, and how that clarity can help you strive towards appealing animation. Staging as a principle refers to the arrangement of the elements of your animation in the frame that you have. And so it could be akin to something like telling where your actors to stand on a stage, play at a theater. You wouldn't tell them to stand behind the curtain the entire play, or face the opposite direction of the audience.
In the same way in our animations, we wanna make sure that we're presenting our elements, whatever it is, motion, graphics or character as clearly as we can, and so that the audience knows what to focus on by the way that they're arranged in the frame that we have. The clearest example of this is the silhouette. That is one of our big advantages in animation and helps clearly communicate what is happening in the frame, especially for characters. So an easy way that I test this when I'm doing 3D animation in Maya is to hit seven on the keyboard, which is the shortcut to turn off all the lights. And so what you get is basically the outline in a black silhouette of the character. So let's try that experiment.
Now, if I wanted the audience to look at what I'm holding my hand, like this thing, should my silhouette look like this or should my silhouette look like that? I'm looking at it ever. All my attention is going towards it. I'm holding it away from my body. So the silhouette looks nice. I'm not doing this either.
Should I be doing this? Would that make it more clear what's happening that you should be looking here? So just because you can animate something like this hand over here doesn't mean you should. So clarity in staging what you're doing and silhouette and in motion can help direct the attention where you want it to be. Conversely to that example, you could have a ton of motion going on in the frame and your subject being totally still, it could be they're gonna look at what's not moving as well. So you have all these elements to use at your disposal, whether it's silhouette, lighting, color, you know, motion.
You can use all of these things to help stage your animation in the frame that you have so that audience focuses on what you want them to focus on. Exaggeration is the next principle, and it refers to kind of pushing the animation to an extent that's beyond the normal bounds of the motion. And so that can be just for a a, a few frames even. It doesn't mean distorting the entire animation, the model, the character, the design, um, for a long period of time. It means usually a very short amount, um, in the actual motion. Or you could also exaggerate the idea of a subject as well and caricaturing an idea very far.
Um, so it could be the micro of the action that's occurring. And just for a few frames, just like in squash and stretch, you might exaggerate how much squash and stretch there is in real life, just so that it's more readable to the viewer in frame. Now, one of the examples from my professional career for this would be when I animated on Ready Player One, it was a super fun movie to work on. And one example from that movie is the actual characters on that movie were actors that were captured in a motion capture performance, and they had a camera that followed their face around, attached to a helmet. And so we captured their facial performance and that data was then stuck onto the digital character and that we incorporated into the digital characters animation even we, we found when we used the facial performance of the actors, that we still needed to exaggerate that performance because when it was translated onto a digital character, some of the performance was lost. Even though it was a one-to-one match, it's exactly what they did.
There's some essence that is lost when you do that translation in, um, in a ethereal kind of, uh, intangible feeling, the data is one-to-One, it's super accurate, but the example that I had was in the eyebrows, the character's eyebrows felt like they weren't moving e enough. And so I would go back into those performances in my animations and push them just a little bit or exaggerate those areas so that it would actually look more real. So exaggeration doesn't necessarily mean always breaking reality. It could mean exaggerating something, so it looks even more real. And so that's where you have to understand, you know, and, and train your eye to see, uh, properly how the audience will see it and, and help guide your decisions on how and when and how much to exaggerate these types of animations. So oftentimes in my animation, I'll find that boundary of how much exaggeration is too much by going way big with my exaggeration.
And then I can just, in the graph editor that we've seen, I can just scale down the keys to their, uh, towards their default values. So it's a, it can be a lot faster and a lot quicker to go way beyond the breaking point of exaggeration. And then just scale it down until it looks right, then to constantly add a little bit, add a little bit more, add a little bit more, add a little bit more, add a little bit more to constantly be searching to where that that level is just blow way big past it. And then, and then you can kind of decide where to come back to so that, that might be more applicable to something in a digital medium, like 3D or 2D digital animation where you have a graph entered and you can scale keys down. And so that's just a workflow approach that I wanted to share on how I try to achieve exaggeration in my 3D animations. The next animation principle has more to do with drawing, but in spirit it can be applied to all animation mediums, and that's the principle of solid drawing.
And if we were to translate this principle into something like 3D animation where there isn't really drawing, you would maybe call it solid posing. And the general idea is we want to correctly convey the artistry of the model or the element that we're manipulating in the animation. And so for drawing, that might mean staying on model. And, and in 3D we also try to stay on model. It's just with different tools. So in 2D animation, you might have a model sheet which shows kind of the, the bounds of expressions or poses that the character can be put in.
And the same can be true in 3D animation as well. And so you can know how, what are the bounds that you can work within to create appealing poses that are true to that character. 'cause you also have to think if you're working on a TV show or a movie, there's gonna be other shots and other animators working on the show. And it's also a way to make sure that there's consistency in the drawing and the draftsmanship and the quality of the artwork or, and or in the posing of the character in 3D. Now, you might also hear animators sometimes say they're cheating something to camera. And so that might just mean that, that they might be breaking the model in other views.
This is maybe more in, you know, 3D animation. Um, and they'll say they're cheating something to camera, and that means they're playing to the frame. They're playing to the camera, where maybe if two characters are talking to each other, they might actually point their, point them this way a little bit just so that their eyes and their face are directed towards camera, even though the person they're talking to is maybe just off center of that. So that's just an example and goes to show that just by saying I'm cheating the camera doesn't mean you're breaking the solid drawing or solid posing rule. That actually means that you're working within the spirit of that principle so that you make sure that the appeal and the posing is correct for the frame and the camera. That is all that matters for that, uh, animation and the framing of that animation.
Finally, we end at the last of the 12 nine Old Men principles of animation. And that principle is appeal. It's basically what all of the other principles are aiming towards. And appeal is one of the most intangible qualities of all of the principles because it's a bit subjective. It's basically comes down to what do people like to see. Another way to think of it is adding a charming quality to your animation.
A misinterpretation of appeal might be something like assuming or, or thinking that the character design of your animation has to always be a handsome character, that a grotesque character can never have appeal. And that's just not the case. It's all about what people like or want to see or are, are kind of captured by and want to see more of. And so that can include grotesque, you know, scary monsters as much as it can include cute fluffy bunnies. Appeal isn't limited to those types of distinctions, so don't think of it in those terms of traditional, um, you know, qualities like that appeal can be charming in this sense in very simple sense. How often times have you seen a motion graphics animation on a social media platform of some kind where it's like a looping animation and it's just a very simple animation, but just that simplicity and the appealing motion.
Maybe it's something, you know, interesting happening, like something getting sliced in half over and over or who knows what it is. But there's plenty of examples online that people are enraptured by just because of that simple appealing quality. Now, you know, the color, the, all of the principles we've talked about up to this point play into that and help create that appeal. So something to keep in mind is, you know, something that has appeal cannot lack in clarity. It must be clear and to the audience for it to have an app appealing characteristic, right? Something can't be unclear and also be appealing, right?
That just doesn't make sense. So if we start down the path of trying at at least first to be clear, because that is a requirement, um, of, uh, of appealing animation, that clarity will help get us closer and closer to that appealing quality that we're striving for. And appeal isn't always about adding something to your animation. You know, when you look back at all, all of these principles, it's not like if you went through each one and checked off the box and you did each one of these principles that voila, you'd have an appealing animation. That's not really how it works. And so it could be about taking away stuff, so you know, reducing the amount of principles you put in, you know, adding that charm and quality could be adding something unexpected to the animation that we didn't cover here, or breaking one of the rules because there are those expectations.
So don't just think by adding more stuff or more animation that you'll get closer to appealing animation. It could be the fact that you might need to take elements away from your animation to make them more appealing and clear. So appeal in animation and as a principle all depend on the circumstance of your animation and what you're animating and those elements and how they're arranged, how they're moved, how they're designed. All of these things go in to creating an appealing animation. Now, one of the biggest aspects to evaluate whether it's appealing is to get feedback. And that's one of the most precious things, uh, about animating, is because we're trying to connect with an audience on some level.
We are making it to be seen by someone, and hopefully it's seen in the way that we intended it to be seen. So getting that feedback, especially at an early stage, to see if something is working can be very helpful and save you a ton of time. Maybe so you're not going down a road that someone thinks isn't working, it's too distracting, they aren't looking where you want them to look. Um, something happens too fast, it's too slow, they're bored, and you don't need to just ask other animators. Everyone you know, is a consumer of animation and has been watching things long enough to know what they like to see. So when you're thinking about appeal, also consider getting feedback from several different people to get eyes on it, because the closer you get and the more time you spend with your animation, the harder it is to take further and further steps back to see what it actually looks like sometimes.
And so that's a very valuable process in animation, is seeking out feedback. So let's review. In this lesson we discussed four of the last principles of animation. All four of these are about creating clarity in our animation, whereas everything before this, except for the pose to pose and straight ahead principle, were about physics. So in this we discussed staging, exaggeration, solid drawing, or solid posing and appeal, and how all four of those things can help us drive towards creating appealing motion in our animations. Now, and the assignment for this lesson is going to be creating the bouncing ball effect.
We've kind of been talking around it this entire time and we've used many examples of it, and it's a bit of a rite of passage to animate a bouncing ball and not just a rite of passage, but it's something you're gonna revisit quite often. One of the first movies I worked on, I, I worked on Transformers the last night, and in that movie there's a scene where knights are getting bombarded with catapults of these big fireballs. And you know, I'm super excited and proud to be working on my first, you know, big visual effects movie. And the first thing I get handed is basically the bouncing ball. I animate the mortar balls from the catapults flying in, hitting the ground. Some of them break, some of them roll over Digi digi doubles that I also animated in the scene.
Some of it in slow motion. So I really needed to know the principles and the fundamentals of the bouncing ball animation. So it's not something you're ever gonna escape. The bouncing ball really is involved in a lot of the animations I've done throughout my career in some form or another. The root motion of a character bouncing through a frame. All of these things, you know, can kind of go back to trying to get a mastery of the balancing ball.
So never be averse to trying, uh, the balancing ball animation, revisiting it, doing a different take on it, trying to be creative with it. It's one of the fundamental practices that, uh, you should be excited about and we're gonna do in the next, uh, demonstration and mini project together. So let's do that. And we're also gonna cover some claymation with that. So we are going to cover a new version of stop motion animation by using Clay. So thanks for watching and I'll see you there.