Favoring passing positions

[OwenWelsh]

I noticed that in a lot of animation, especially walk cycles and head turns that a lot of times the animator will favor the passing position to an extreme. I believe this is done to have a stronger silhouette so that you don't have arms or legs that are completely hidden within the silhouette of the character. Does this help make the animation more readable / interesting?

I remember Don talking once about a 180-degree head turn accomplished in NIMH in only 4 drawings (shot on 2s). This would be Ms. Brisby's head below. The passing position is implied and the rest of the head turn relies on overlapping action of the body and cape that is slightly delayed.

http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p143/robertow/headturn.jpg

Sorry, Don answered this question here: http://www.donbluthanimation.com/forum/showthread.php?t=284

[Don Bluth]

I noticed that in a lot of animation, especially walk cycles and head turns that a lot of times the animator will favor the passing position to an extreme. I believe this is done to have a stronger silhouette so that you don't have arms or legs that are completely hidden within the silhouette of the character. Does this help make the animation more readable / interesting?

I remember Don talking once about a 180-degree head turn accomplished in NIMH in only 4 drawings (shot on 2s). This would be Ms. Brisby's head below. The passing position is implied and the rest of the head turn relies on overlapping action of the body and cape that is slightly delayed.

http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p143/robertow/headturn.jpg

Sorry, Don answered this question here: http://www.donbluthanimation.com/forum/showthread.php?t=284

Silhouette is such an important principle. The profile of a character is certainly a better silhouette than a 3/4 front. However, the 3/4 front is generally best for expressions. I think one of the reasons we should move quickly from pose to pose is to keep the animation from looking sluggish. By using slow-ins and slow-outs instead of even in-betweens, we accomplish a crisp snappy look. TV animation jumps from pose to pose, in my opinion, because they don't want to deal with the anatomy problems involved in turning a head convincingly.

In the final analysis, the head turn depends on the emotion of the scene. If the character is being cautious, he/she may scan the objects in the room slowly looking for clues. If they are frightened by a sudden noise coming from behind them, the turn would be very quick. The best rule of thumb I can think of is this: caricature the action based on an analysis of the real world.

[OwenWelsh]

Thanks Don for your response. This is going to help us greatly. I've been studying NIMH recently and I noticed that the "slow in, slow out" method is used abundantly on the characters to create that fresh snappy look. This style of animation is so much more appealing to me than animation that has even in-betweens -- as you said, it looks "sluggish." I also like the rule of thumb, "caricature reality." A lot of times when I hear the word "caricature" I think of the visual design of characters, not that you can also caricature the animation.