Those wonderful Operative Words

I tutor people in animation part-time. I have a pupil at the moment and this Saturday we'll be delving into the deep, dark depths of dialogue animation.

I was thinking of how to present some of the ideas and I looked back through my plethora of Animation Mentor newsletters to see what I could find to spark my brain. Way back when, Shawn Kelly wrote a Tips And Tricks article on Operative Words and I was so happy to re-read it and see how simply I could present this tricky, yet simple, and all-important idea.

I decided to illustrate some of the points (for clarity for my pupil's sake) about how, by simply changing the Operative Word, you dramatically change the performance. The real key here is to choose one idea to drive a scene (if the scene is really long you might be able to get away with two ideas).

Here's the first idea (Emphasis on "I"):

The second idea(Emphasis on "Love"):

And finally the third idea(Emphasis on "You"):

When you see them side by side like this, it's obvious that a short line like "I love you" can only have one main idea driving it. Imagine how awkward this would feel if all three of those ideas were included in the same performance? The performance would be way over the top, and it wouldn't even work unless the line was delivered the same manic, slobbering, over-reaching sort of way. I can easily imagine that the girl's expression in the third panel would be a look of utter fear if the guy did all three of those gestures!

~Chris

10 Second Gestures And Commuter Sketches

A while ago I posted about a great, resourceful website called posemaniacs.com, and I've been using the site to do 10 second and 30 second gestures every day for the past week. Posted here are a couple pages of 10 second gestures. I like the 10 second gesture drawing because you have to strip away all the superficial details and just focus on the energy of the pose. I read a quote once that said "Don't draw the Nouns, draw the Verbs" and this is really what gesture drawing is all about. It's not important what the individual pieces of the body look like in a 10 second gesture. What matters is how it feels. And it's the same thing in animation. It's all about the feeling.

The third image in this post is a compilation of some of my favourite Commuter Sketches from the past couple weeks. I have tons of these so I'm hoping to post more in the future. I want to sketch in some different areas though. When you're commuting you're limited to only a very specific range of poses and it starts to get a bit monotonous.

~Chris