I’m surprised I haven’t come across one like this before, so I’m glad Rick did. He points out as an extra gem that that’s the Alamo Drafthouse in the background. Thanks, Rick!
To see all of the posts in this collection, just click on the link for the Stop Me category
If you see any stop signs like these in your travels, feel free to take a picture and send them to eric@sabudesign.com. I’ll happily include them in a post here. If possible, make the pictures as large as possible (I’ll take responsibility for setting the right size and framing), and let me know the city and street crossing you took the picture at.
There have been occasions when I’ve seen “Stop” messages that I’ve already photographed. I pass these by, deciding that I would rather find new and unique messages rather than find all examples of every old variety.
But this sign caught my attention. Even though I’ve already posted about Stop It and Stop, Collaborate and Listen, this sign tells a bit more of a complicated story.
Clearly, someone had already come along to spray paint the giant “I” and giant “T” underneath the “Stop.”
Then, someone else came along with their Glarkware packet and said “Whoa, now. ‘Stop It’ is pretty clever. I’ll give you that. But I’ve got a sticker here that will Blow. Your. Mind.”
I like the idea of someone seeing some graffiti and deciding “I can do better.”
I’m even more giddy at the irony of that same person covering up a handmade effort with a bit of manufactured wit you can buy online.
Ah well. Here it is:
To see all of the posts in this collection, just click on the link for the Stop Me category
If you see any stop signs like these in your travels, feel free to take a picture and send them to eric@sabudesign.com. I’ll happily include them in a post here. If possible, make the pictures as large as possible (I’ll take responsibility for setting the right size and framing), and let me know the city and street crossing you took the picture at.
I haven’t been taking any pictures of stop signs that have been “tagged” by gang members. Although I’m fascinated by that entire culture, about which I know absolutely nothing, it’s a different spirit that I’m trying to capture with this chronicle.
But last week I came across one that was not only a gang tag, but also incorporated the “Stop” into their message. So, here’s to OWL. May they never be stopped.
To see all of the posts in this collection, just click on the link for the Stop Me category
If you see any stop signs like these in your travels, feel free to take a picture and send them to eric@sabudesign.com. I’ll happily include them in a post here. If possible, make the pictures as large as possible (I’ll take responsibility for setting the right size and framing), and let me know the city and street crossing you took the picture at.
I came across this one the other day at one of my favorite design blogs, Swissmiss.
To see all of the posts in this collection, just click on the link for the Stop Me category
If you see any stop signs like these in your travels, feel free to take a picture and send them to eric@sabudesign.com. I’ll happily include them in a post here. If possible, make the pictures as large as possible (I’ll take responsibility for setting the right size and framing), and let me know the city and street crossing you took the picture at.
Friends, I had such a big rant built up for this post. It was going to go something like this:
One of my biggest frustrations when posing a character is the lack of clothes to interact with. In particular, pockets. Any time I try to do some video reference for a scene, I usually end up putting at least one hand in a pocket, or hooking my thumbs into my pocket, or something like that. Then I review what I’ve recorded and I think “Dammit, I can’t do that! We don’t have the simple CG technology to put hands in pockets! This is a fundamental flaw in the characters we animate, especially given how often I put my hands in my pockets! It’s as if I’m being asked to animate a character with no clothes on!”
To demonstrate my angry point, I planned to post a ton of pictures showing examples of actors with their hands on their hips, or in their pockets; the types of things that we are unable to do as CG animators. Something like this:
But I was in for a surprise. You see, despite having a bunch of really great video clips from movies on my hard drive, those two pictures were just about the only poses I could find to prove my point.
Most of the pictures I grabbed demonstrated that there are many many natural poses that don’t require your hands to be interacting with anything at all. Have a look:
This is a very strong and defiant pose from All About Eve. Arms stiff and proud at the side, hands balled into fists, one of them clasping a purse.
This, of course, is from an episode of Seinfeld. The most obvious hand in this shot is George bipping Elaine’s nose. But notices George’s other hand, resting casually at his side. Not in his pocket, on his hip, or folded across his chest–it’s just hanging there.
The Dude, from The Big Lebowski, checks to make sure the path is clear before snooping around Jackie Treehorn’s house. Once again, hands pretty much relaxed at the sides, closely following the line of action of the rest of the body. In this case, I think that they add a sense of comedy to the pose.
Two poses to look at in this shot from Beverly Hills Cop. The white-shirted manager has his hands dangling limply at his side (with apparently a pretty severe case of bowler’s arm), while the security guard’s arms hang in front of him in a way that almost feels unnatural–if nothing else, the add to his lummox quality.
All of these examples show arms that hand at an actor’s sides, demonstrating that you can very well treat your character as if they were naked–you don’t need to slip your hand into a pocket in order to stand at rest.
Of course, they don’t need to just hang at your sides, either.
I recently finished reading Steve Martin’s new memoir, Born Standing Up. It was a pleasant read, especially if you are interested in a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to make it as a stand-up comedian (and there are parallels you could draw to the career path of a professional animator). And I only mention it in this post because the hardcover book is bound in front and in back with a two-page spread of contact sheets from a Steve Martin arena performance in the 1970’s. It’s a great reminder of how varied and exaggerated you can go with your poses, and still not rely on having your character’s hands on their hips on in their pockets.
I hear that there’s a common refrain among beginning actors when they first get onto a stage or in front of a camera. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my hands!” They agonize over it, and I can definitely understand. For some reason, when you start thinking about performing you become hyper-aware of your hands. They feel heavy and gangly and in the way. You don’t want to over-gesture everything, but you also don’t want to lumber around with your hands shoved into your pockets all of the time.
Perhaps it just takes time before you start feeling more natural with your hands being out there in the open. I would love to hear from anyone who has gotten past the “I don’t know what to do with my hands” stage of things, and how you overcame it.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to be more observant about the different ways people use their hands when they’re not interacting with their clothing. I’m certain that it’s a major element in getting your characters to feel more natural and open.
Unlike the person who urges us to Stop Sexism, this sign has a much more drastic solution to our problems.
To see all of the posts in this collection, just click on the link for the Stop Me category
If you see any stop signs like these in your travels, feel free to take a picture and send them to eric@sabudesign.com. I’ll happily include them in a post here. If possible, make the pictures as large as possible (I’ll take responsibility for setting the right size and framing), and let me know the city and street crossing you took the picture at.
[Smurfette] was magically created from clay by the Smurfs’ enemy, Gargamel, so that she would use her charms to cause jealousy and competition among the Smurfs in order to cause their fall.
Until this point in Smurf history there had been no female smurfs; it had been an community composed entirely of men. And so that leads me to wonder this very large and looming question:
What made Gargamel think that a woman would stir up any kind of sexual feelings in a village of men who have clearly been getting along fine among themselves? I mean, I’m not saying that the smurfs were all homosmurfuals but… well, yes I guess that’s what I’m saying. At the very least, their sexual desires and needs were presumably being met among all of the other men around. So I ask again, how exactly was a female smurf supposed to cause dissention?
I don’t know if the upcoming Smurf Movie intends to address this issue, but I sure hope there’s some kind of explanation.
Incidentally, that same Wikipedia page discusses how Smurfette was less attractive and more annoying until Papa Smurf agreed to perform “plastic smurfery” to turn her into a bubbly, high-voiced, blonde-haired (dare I say it?) bimbo. This made her more desirable and decidedly happier among the smurf village.
I’m not going to get my soapbox out–but make of that what you will.
This month’s tip can be applied in any number of ways in any number of situations.
I’m going to start off with a demonstration using the graph editor. But first, there’s a small test I want you to take. Below this paragraph you will find a white square with a blue dot in it. All you have to do is click on that dot. Nothing will happen when you click on it, this is just to check your eyesight and dexterity. Ready? Go!
How did you do? My guess is that you either were a pixel or two off of the dot, or you spent quite a bit of time steadying your mouse hand, squinting your eyes, leaning towards your monitor with your neck held stiff, and making sure that nothing shook out of place when you clicked your mouse. In other words, it wasn’t very easy or very quick.
Now, here’s the second part of the test. Do the same thing with the square below this paragraph–this square is shown at 10 times the size of the previous one. And….. go
I’ll bet you did a lot better this time, quicker with less straining, right? That’s because, and I know this will be a shocker, it is easier to see and touch something that you’re closer to.
A friend of mine gave a great example once, using the difference between grabbing a doorknob that you’re standing a foot away from, and grabbing the same doorknob from across the room using one of those extendo-arm things they sell to change lightbulbs in high-ceilinged buildings. As you can imagine, it would be a lot more difficult to be accurate with the extendo-arm from across the room.
Now, I’ll tell you what this has to do with your graph editor.
Let’s say you’re animating a hand doing a simple move up and down, and you are keeping your eye on your graph. It looks pretty good–like a good, smooth curve should look. Something like this:
You say to yourself “Excellent. Looks fine to me, and so I’ll move on.”
But hold on, Buster Brown! The truth is that if you were to zoom in on that curve, you would see that it might not be so perfect after all. Check out this quicktime where we push in to see the curve up close:
Now we can clearly see that there’s a hitch in that curve, and it’s a lot easier for us to tweak the tangents and make that curve as pretty and as smooth as we thought it was when we were way far away from it.
(For Maya users, you can zoom the graph editor horizontally by holding down the Control and Alt keys while click-dragging with your Middle Mouse Button. Likewise, you can zoom vertically by holding down the Control and Alt keys while click-dragging the Right Mouse Button)
When I get down to that stage where I’m really ready to start polishing up my animation, I’ll go in and look at each individual animation curve throughout the chunk of animation I’m working on. I’ll run through it like it was a roller coaster, starting at the beginning and going straight through to the end, making sure that there are no crazy hitches. The process looks something like this:
(see if you can tell where the curve looks fine from far away but has obvious trouble when you see it in close up detail)
I’ve found my work with the graph editor improved vastly once I started zooming in and getting up close with it.
But, hey! We’ve hardly even started yet! There’s another place that getting up close makes things easier. Let’s take the example of a character delicately holding a flower in front of himself. Like this:
Now, I want the hand holding that flower to look clear and natural and to have an appealing pose, right? I’ll need to select each of those finger joints individually to rotate them. From this far away, however, it’s almost a guarantee that I won’t click on the right finger joint with my first try. It’s also unlikely that I’ll be able to see the results of my teeny-tiny rotations in any meaningful way. Remember our boxes with the blue dots? Remember our doorknob across the room? Same principle.
What’s the solution, then? Zoom in! Get up close with those fingers!
In fact, here’s a little tip: Make a duplicate camera and make that camera orthographic. An orthographic camera has no depth–which means that no matter how tightly you zoom in on your character, you will still see the same shapes you see at your regular camera distance. This is super helpful for maintaining and adjusting your silhouettes!
UPDATE: I have been informed by Matt Gaward that this orthographic trick won’t actually give you a silhouette that’s true to your original one. He suggests this:
1) Select your perspective camera that you want to zoom, and open the Attributes window.
2) In the Film Back section, there are three values you can change:
Pre Scale; setting this to any value above 1 will zoom by that factor.
Film Translate X and Y; these values will then allow you to move your scaled view around the scene as if it were orthogonalI’d suggest doing this on a copy of your shot cam. That way you can zoom in temporarily, move around the scene as necessary working on fine details, and you don’t lose the perspective-ness. Great for to-camera face work on a distant character.
Thanks, Matt!
In addition to that, Jean-Denis Haas recommends the “Zoomerator” tool, available at HighEnd3d.com. Thanks, JD!
To continue:
Up close, the hand looks like this:
Much much much easier to select the proper fingers and rotate them the proper amounts.
See how much fun this is? But wait, I’ve got one more for ya.
Let’s talk a bit about staging your shot.Now, I’m not going to pretend I’m some brilliant cinematographer or a genius storyboard artist. But I can tell you that I’ve seen a fair amount of animation reels and animation tests, and one of the most common things I see among many new (and some not-so-new) animators is that they love to have their characters very small in the frame. I suppose that the notion is “I want you to see everything, including the character’s feet, and their weight, and everything all around them.” The irony is that with characters so tiny in the frame, you can hardly see anything at all.
I’ll take two examples based on some shots I’ve seen. First up:
You almost have to squint to actually see what’s going on, don’t you? Without changing the angle at all, we can push the camera in and get the much more visually pleasing:
See? Now I can clearly see every move this character makes, and the zoomed in camera has the added bonus of making the scene much more congruous with the intense anger this character is expressing.
Here’s another example:
If I were to see this character acting, I would feel virtually no connection with him at all. Even if you want to show that you can control the entire character, from head to foot, wouldn’t you feel more connection with this composition:
Or, if this is an intimate dialogue shot, why not reflect that intimacy in the composition by coming in even closer:
Doesn’t that last picture feel so much more present and alive than the first version?
Finally, there’s one other way that the idea of Zooming In can really affect your animation workflow. But instead of trying to articulate it myself, I’ll point you over to Jason Schleifer’s wonderful post from 2005, “The Fear Of Moving Past Blocking.” He clearly addresses the importance of zooming in on your keyframe range so that you’re only animating 20 or 30 frames at a time instead of trying to tackle 250 in one go. Brilliant stuff.
This one comes from Aja, during her time in New York.
I don’t know what Branded Driving is, so I don’t know how to stop it.
To see all of the posts in this collection, just click on the link for the Stop Me category
If you see any stop signs like these in your travels, feel free to take a picture and send them to eric@sabudesign.com. I’ll happily include them in a post here. If possible, make the pictures as large as possible (I’ll take responsibility for setting the right size and framing), and let me know the city and street crossing you took the picture at.
Another global message and an important one, too. I’ve seen the same message in the same handwriting several places around town.
To see all of the posts in this collection, just click on the link for the Stop Me category
If you see any stop signs like these in your travels, feel free to take a picture and send them to eric@sabudesign.com. I’ll happily include them in a post here. If possible, make the pictures as large as possible (I’ll take responsibility for setting the right size and framing), and let me know the city and street crossing you took the picture at.
