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Lesson: Exaggeration

Added 2023-08-01 06:00:45 +0000 UTC

To continue off of the cartoony workshop, I wanted to briefly cover the idea of exaggerating. Once you decide what the idea is in the moment (whether the character is reacting, trying to accomplish an objective, etc), you can determine how much you want to exaggerate the moment. As long as you and the audience understand the intent of the character, you can determine what level of “cartoony” you want to achieve. Obviously, it’s important to note that the style of animation should be consistent and determined from the start so it doesn’t feel out of place if you decide to “Hotel-T” out of nowhere.

But as you can see from the example I’ve done above, once I determined that my character is reacting to something he possibly might be afraid of, I asked myself how I can visually sell that idea. Once I thought of a pose, I knew I wanted to live in those golden poses as much as possible. If you were to frame through you’ll be able to see how much I try to live in the pose and push the lead/follow to further that idea.

Another way I like to think of exaggerated movement is how a character’s silhouette morphs from one pose to the next. This is where onion skin might be handy to visualize how you can graphically morph your character to cover frames with big spacing.

To conclude, it’s really hard to exaggerate like this if you rely on your reference too much where it becomes your crutch. Instead of thinking of copying the reference, observe and understand what you’re trying to do in the scene. This will come with practice but I hope this lesson and the cartoony workshop demo can help unlock something!

As always, let me know if you have any questions.