Uploads September 22 - October 3, 2019

Happy Leif Erikson Day

As an Animator, I especially enjoyed the Fantasy vs Real swordfighting. I'm sure you'll be spoken to about this again, so I'd like to share some "ammunition" with you. The big word we all know and love is CONTEXT! (thunder and lighting effects) It makes sense for a cartoony character with whacky proportions to be swinging a weapon around however they want, but when you're animating something that is supposed to feel realistic, then it makes sense for the animated motion to be founded in reality. An Animator does not answer to the concept of "right" and "wrong", an Animator must ask, "how does this feel?" and "does this convey what I need to convey?" the same way a writer must choose their words to convey their thoughts. One of the 12 Principles of Animation is "Exaggeration", and I think it's important to point out that it's called "Exaggeration" and not "Make Shit Up". The fact is, if your animation is not grounded in reality, it will feel "off". Again, context, this can be useful, like if it's a monster character or a comedy cartoon, but you need to make sure it doesn't look off when it isn't supposed to look off. There are also other ways to exaggerate than by messing with the motion itself. You can make it go slow-mo for a moment, use a zoom in or dutch angle, play a fancy sound effect, make "POW!" flash across the screen, etc. Also, it's interesting, when you're showing the two cuts at 8:33 and say "this looks more powerful, but this way IS more powerful", actually, the real one looks more powerful to me. I can't quite put my finger on why, but I guess it looks to me like the longer swing is just waving your arms around while the proper swing it looks like you're putting more body weight behind the cut. And I think the message there is that doing it right should look right, I think if animators learn more about what the proper techniques they can make their animations look better and more realistic at once. In the same vein, I think part of the reason why katanas have their cool reputation is because japanese martial arts are more mainstream than HEMA, so animators have more available reference for it. People see samurai characters using fairly real moves, but knights are just swinging their swords around like baseball bats and you can just tell that the realer fighting style is better looking. And that makes people believe in all these bad stereotypes about medieval combat, and people are naturally attracted to the style that's more anchored in reality. You can also compare this with Chinese weapon-based martial arts, where most of the surviving traditions are designed to be showy rather than completely efficient.

Erik Eldritch