Animation Mentor AN02 - “Body Mechanics” - Assignment 01 - The Sidestep

The entire point of the “Body Mechanics” class is to understand how the human body moves at a fundamental level. A bipedal (human shaped) character is a collection of joints and muscles that are subject to the laws of physics. True, you can ignore them completely and make a cartoon, but the best cartoons honor the laws of physics by breaking them in creative ways.

So, before you can break the laws, you need to understand them, and that’s where Body Mechanics comes in.

What do the shoulders do when you take a step? How does the spine move when you lift something heavy? The answers depend on the character doing the action. Are they young or old? Male or Female? Angry or sad? Without defining these characteristics, you end up with something called “vanilla”… there’s nothing wrong with “vanilla”. It’s basic and that’s the point.

When used correctly, it becomes the basis for a lot of other really interesting things.

Assignment 01 - The Sidestep

At first glance it seems simple, but simple is NOT the same as easy. There are a lot of subtle interactions between parts of the body in a simple sidestep and that’s the true point of the assignment… capturing the subtleties. A step to the side is all about shifting weight. From one foot to another from one side of the thing you’re stepping over to another. It’s all about shifting.

I try to start every project with a written description of what I’m going to do…

Project Narrative - The Sidestep
Stewart will try to step over a large sleeping creature without waking it up. They’ll get halfway through the move and pause as the creature stirs, then finish the move without waking the beast.

Reference Video is key…

A lot of the time when you record reference video, you aren’t physically able to do the “exact” thing you need. In this case, the pause over the top of the creature was too hard on my knees LOL, so I used After Effects to do two things… Pull out the key poses and retime the movement. That gave me this version…

Sketching always helps…

There are 7 key poses to communicate the basic movement. To help study the poses, it’s best to start sketching… There’s something about drawing that focuses the mind and helps you see details that you would overlook. Even when you have a pretty precise video reference, it helps to sketch out the poses so you can think about them without the noise of 3D software.

NOW it’s time to go into 3D…

With all of that preliminary work done, I can finally open Maya to begin blocking out the key poses. The sketching and reference video has helped me see how the weight shifts throughout the move. and I can quickly block in the poses to get this…

The space between the poses…

With a stepped version of the scene blocked out, I can now add in what happens in between those poses. Maya can do this “automatically” but the result is quite stiff and not natural at all…

The animtation is smooth from pose to pose, but it has zero “life” or energy. It feels very “computer generated. The remedy to that is where the “magic” happens. It’s where All of the subtleties that make a character feel “alive” happen. It’s where animation becomes amazing animation and it is an incredibly manual process. Making tweaks to a curve and then playing it back to see how the feel of the movement changes. Over and over until you can’t really see straight LOL.

Responding to critique…

The whole point of “Animation Mentor” is getting feedback from an experienced animator and learning from their input. The beauty of all of the prep work though is that IF you get it right, then the Instructor input is not “this sucks… you need to start over” and more “make these subtle changes and it’s going to get soooo much better”.

And the feedback I got from the Instructor, Dana Boadway Masson, was incredible. She helped me see subtleties in the rotations of the shoulders and pelvis and timing of the head movements that took something that was OK to something that feels… believable.

What did I learn?

I feel like I’m “learning to see” for the first time. I’m noticing little details that I never paid attention to before and I’ve grown dramatically… I’m Excited for the next assignment… The full body walk!