I have finished the book :D

I have devoured each page of scripture and its powers flow through my marrow. Im happy to start animating again but I will definitely be re-reading it in the future. I was right in thinking it was gonna change my way of animating, seeing as my new animations are already filled with a lot more life and character. The animation above is probably verging on over animated but I really wanna see how far I can push my poses while having them still feel believable in motion. You can scrub on the timeline above if you wanna see some of the frames in there- some look quite zombie-esque. Something ive been thinking about recently is how for an animation to feel realistic or believable, it doesn't have to follow the rules of the real world to achieve that. Most of the time breaking these rules can make something feel more real, or as they put it in the book, have more vitality.

A lil while ago I saw an animator responding to people who were calling their animation unrealistic and stiff. They had animated a slow-mo walk where the head of the character didn't move much. The animator was refuting the comments by explaining how when people walk in real life their head doesn't actually move much. This response really stuck with me as I think it perfectly outlines the job of an animator. An animators job is to make something FEEL realistic. Something being realistic and something feeling realistic are not the same thing. When I was animating the spy getting hit in the head with a baseball in the last video, lots of people who I showed it to told me the head wasn't moving enough in response to the impact. I argued it was realistic as the head wouldn't move that much in reality. I was forgetting my job as an animator isn't too recreate reality, its to create something that can be believed to be reality.

Rule 1 of animating that I just made up right now:
If an audience says something doesn't feel realistic, then its not realistic.

Arguing about over realism didn't change how the animation felt to the people I showed it to. It just made them listen to me explain how their subjective feelings were wrong, actually.

Things that are fake can feel real, things that are real can look fake. All that matters at the end of the day is making it feel real. An example of this is breaking joints in animation. Breaking joints can often make something feel more real despite that not being a thing the human body does normally- as I would hope. If I did a good enough job on the w.i.p. animation above you shouldn't have noticed that the heavies left leg breaks after the first turn. Its a pretty big break yet everyone I've shown it to so far hasn't noticed until pointed it out. It just felt natural so no one questioned it.

Something else I tried on this animation is an animation workflow described in the book. You start by animating everything pose-to-pose, working your way from keys, to extremes, to breakdowns. Then when you're done, you go and animate the whole scene again in straight-ahead. Starting with the primary action, then secondary actions, working your way down until you're done. This allows you to keep the spontaneity of straight-ahead with the planning and timing of pose-to-pose. I had done a similar thing in the past with the spy getting staggered by the baseball and it worked really well then. I had tried it again on this heavy but I just couldn't get it to feel right. I ended up restarting multiple times and eventually went back to animating it all pose-to-pose (what you see above). I'll be trying it again in the future for sure, for now though I wanna finish this bit up.

On a lil side tangent, that workflow is very similar to how I write these posts. I start with a rough draft hitting all the points I want to go over. Then I rewrite it all from scratch, using the original draft as a rough guide. This is actually my second time writing this. You'll never know what the first one was like mwuahahaha. I just think its kinda cool how the workflows lined up like that despite the difference in medium.

As for why I haven't posted in a lil while, I'm currently visiting friends and family and I don't have access to my computer. I'm animating this on a friends pc when I have the free time. I have a bunch more I wanna talk about, like about getting myself to work more like a gardener and less like an architect. I find myself analyzing my new ideas before giving them time to develop, inhibiting my creative flow by stopping after every new idea. I wont talk about that right now but remind me to next time cuz I have lots so say about that. Anyways its late, imma go walk around in the dark till the sun rises once more. Bibibibibi!