Tips & Tricks: Animated Action Scene

Dear Patreons,

I hope you're all well! Today I wanted to share some of my progress and thoughts about a recently finished action animation I made. Unfortunately I'm in a bus on my way to Copenhagen right now, and forgot to bring my WIP files. So rather than showing the process I thought I'd try out something new by talking more about the research that went on behind the scenes and share some of my findings. Next week I'll then follow up with some more of the visual material and storyboards. I'm curious as to if you're all interested in these sorts of text ramblings, so feel free to leave me your feedback in the comment section. Well, here goes!

Like many I'm a big fan of Sakuga work, and I've long been wanting to make something that was inspired by it. Apart from the occasional camera-turn my own projects haven't fully allowed me to go all out in that aspect, and so this was the first thing I wanted to do something about once I decided that this year would be dedicated to improving my craft. 

The first thing I did was to gather an inspiration reel with Sakuga animation that in one way or another went in a direction I'd like to explore. Secondly I looked around at different fighting styles. I already knew that I wanted the main character's movement to be inspired by that of cats and smaller monkeys, but in addition to that I also looked a lot at Capoeira fighting to get some ideas. With the anime fights at the other end of the spectrum I didn't want to let myself be bound too much by realism though, but find a place somewhere within that spectrum. For the opponent I took more inspiration from wrestling, and great grey owls + bulls. 

The struggle mainly lied in finding an animation style I was happy with. I think I started re-doing the first shot 5 times in different styles before finding something that I was okay happy with. I didn't want to completely copy-paste one particular style, and I preferred to keep all of the animation on 2's and 1's for the most part (I've done plenty of animation on 4's in my time). I did find in particular instances that a sudden change between 3's and 1's could give a nice dynamic effect though.

I looked at a lot of not-so-good action animation as well, trying to find out what it was about good action animation that put it above the rest, even if the animators themselves were of the same skill level. A couple of things that I found applied for the animation I wanted to come up with were these:

- A clear mapping of layout and use of the environment. We've all seen it so much in Jackie Chan action scenes, but it applies for animation as well. While a moving environment can be troublesome and in worst case super distracting (as in the first few minutes of Project K season 2, episode 1), the smaller things matter. It can be something as little as throwing a plate off a shelf or using a nearby fence as a jumping point - any interaction with the environment adds so much depth to the scene and helps making it unique and memorable. 

-  Leading the eye: It should be obvious, but it's something that I've only really recently come to appreciate. Be aware of where the viewer is looking, and unless you intentionally want something to look jarring, try and keep those lines of action (in the composition, not the characters) matching and flowing.

- Don't chop up your action sequence: Something I see as a point of critique being brought up more and more in live action is when an action scene is over-edited, constantly cutting to new shots and removing any proof of skill or choreography being put into the scene. And I mean, it does make sense. We're taught in media studies that action scenes usually have a faster cutting rhythm to ramp up the intensity, but it shouldn't be done at the expense of the flow of the scene. It's lazy, and it'll lul the viewer into a deep slumber in no time. What I see often done in newbie animation (I myself have been guilty of this) is filling up the scene with a lot of easy but unnecessary shots to pat out the time of the scene to allow for more fast-phased editing. These shots could for example be close-ups of feet, hands or eyes when the information isn't neccisary. Good action scenes tend to find a way to convey this information without needing whole stand-alone shots dedicated to it. In animation you even have full control of the characters' speed, so getting in a good rhythm without the use of these should be doable!

-   Interesting weaponry: This point doesn't always apply - some of the best Sakuga animation is made using traditional weaponry. But I think it's something to consider before we all default to samurai swords. The main problem when defaulting to these weapons is that we easily end up re-iterating animation that we've already seen so many other more skillful artists depicting before, without adding any original input. I think me defaulting to knives for the main character is one of the weaker points of my animation, since the depiction of these wasn't grounded in anything more than sub-consciousness. It's small, but this kind of defaulting can be felt. What I did try to do to add some flair to the fighting style was the implementation of the jacket straps. Going for the cat/monkey fighting style I wanted something to represent the tail of the animals. At first I wanted the straps to be controlled by telekinesis, but ended up grounding them more, simply because having them fly around on a whim on the screen seemed far too distracting to the eye. Anyhow, it's worth at least considering what you can give your characters to fight with and what that'll do for their fighting style.

Those are a few things that I think can help your action scene stand out based off of this round of analysis. There's a bunch more to it, but these were sort of the revelations that I came to this time around for this type of animation (as obvious as they may seem). If I forgot to add anything important I'll put it in next week's post. If any of you end up making an action scene of your own, or find a super cool sequence that you'd like to share, feel free to let me know!

Till next time!

- Sif