Kelleytoons (4/2/2020)

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On that same subject (of going slowly) one thing to learn in animation is that if you don't know how to do something, fake it.

By that I mean there are a LOT of times it's far better to not do something even if at your heart you feel it's necessary.  Let's take a relatively simple example: you want to have your character drink out of a glass that perhaps has some poison in it.  It's a very dramatic necessity to show, and yet to show a character pick up such a glass, tilt it back and have the liquid move in the glass as he drinks is beyond a LOT of folks' pay grades (I know *I* wouldn't try it).

No problem -- you put the camera on a close up on the glass as the character's hand reaches it.  You *might* even show his hand wrapped around it and lifting it out of the shot.  You hear the sound of a drink and then the glass is replaced, empty, on the counter.  Lots of variations here -- you could cut to the character as they finish the drink (so we see the drink leaving the character's mouth with an empty glass).  You could show the reaction shot of the person who is poisoning them.  You could... I think you get  the idea.  Lots of ways to "fake" the essence without actually robbing your audience of anything (indeed, a good case could be made it's far better to do it in those ways than just a straightforward drinking scene).

Same could be done from the walking down the stairs -- no real reason to show the walk but even if you wanted to you could simply have a half person close-up so you see the upper body but no legs and watch the person go up and down as they go down the stairs.  An easy fake.

So many things in animation that are really faked are done that way in live action films, not so much because they can't show those things as they just don't need to show those things.  A closeup shot is far more effective most of the time anyway.

So -- yes, by all means learn all you can and learn all you can do but NEVER let it stop you from telling your story (which most of the time doesn't need all those techniques anyway).

videodv (4/2/2020)

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I did this some time ago and was my second try at hand animating walking down stairs, its not a final version but it gave me the route on how to do this.



Chris

Rampa (4/2/2020)

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... I could be wrong though.