The Process of Animation - "Reference and Blocking"

The Process of Animation - Reference and Blocking 

Reference -

Shooting reference video is very important to get the look and feel of what you are trying to accomplish within your character. 

After listening to the source audio, and planning the action that will take place, I shoot reference video in order to get my ideas down of what I am thinking. I put the audio on repeat and do multiple versions of what I want it to look like. I then narrow it down to what I like most and what feels the best and will cut it to produce a video to reference my animation to. It is important not to copy the reference video to the "t" yet use it as a guide for your work. Notice that my blocking below, doesn't match my video reference exactly but it is generally the same idea and I used many key poses to get the timing down. While I would block I would find other poses that I found were stronger in the animation and went with those. 

Blocking-
Primary step when you first move into animating in 3d to establish poses and timing for your character. 

Blocking for me has always been a challenge for the fact that I never have thought that I do enough blocking before moving into the spline animation. I have always found myself doing double the work then I ended up needing to do in order to make up for my lack of a blocking pass. With this new piece of animation, I wanted to push myself to stay in the blocking pass for much longer than I typically would in hopes that I would be able to get stronger poses and stronger timing to make my animation more appealing.

Timing and weight have always been another issue of mine that I have been trying to grasp a better understanding of. Whenever I have my portfolio looked at either at a conference, expo or just whenever I can get someones eyes on it that knows that they are talking about...they generally all have the same point to make. That my animations are too "flowy" and it looks like my character is constantly moving. Now they quickly counter that I shouldn't make the character stiff, but I should be conscious of weight and timing in order to achieve the realism that we see in the daily life that we don't even notice is happening. So that is another reason that I tried to stay in blocking pose for much longer than I ever have...putting more key poses and in-betweens that I usually would, and getting the timing down to where I am comfortable and to a place where I felt like the animation was believable.

I hope that my patience and commitment to the blocking step will pay off in the end with timing and believably.

Happy Animating!

-Tom