Update with a side of animation

Long time no post! Well Horton is looking amazing. Besides the animation looking fantastic, the lighting is really kicking it up a notch. Working at Bluesky has been a blast. The people really make it an awesome place to work. Every time you see a new shot, it just blows my mind. I've been fortunate enough to get some fun shots and I've been learning a ton about animation. The most important thing that I've learned is the importance of performance. Without a good performance you have nothing. I wanted to share something that really helps kick a scene up a notch. Most young animators tend to fall into the trap of just making a scene flat. You always want to spice up your scene with information for the audience. For example: You have a guy open a door, walk to a window and look out. What does this tell the audience about the character? Not much. Just having him walk in and do these actions doesn't give us too much information. Say you have him run in really fast, slam the door, put his back to the door and run to window. What does this tell us now? Well, we can assume he is running or hiding from someone or something. He's probably scared and worried that he is being followed. So you see the difference is that we are telling the audience a little something about his character. When you get a shot in production, you are given information about your scene and the scene goals. It's up to you to do your research and figure out how the character is feeling at that moment. How he has been acting through out that sequence and his already defined personality. With that information you can get ideas on how to act out the shot and how to show it in that shot. Here is another example that I got from my father. (Who is definitely not an animator) My father works for the city and has dealt with working on subway tracks before. He was telling me a story on how you can tell the new workers from the old timers. When working on the tracks, sometimes you need to step over the third rail to get around. (The third rail is the one with the electric juice that runs the train and can kill you.) He told me that the old timers would comfortably step on top of the rail or walk right over it with no problem. He then told me that the new guys would very slowly and carefully spread there legs wide and step over making sure not to even get close to the rail. Now he can tell who is new and who has been doing it for a while. In animation, these distinct ways of handeling that situation gives the audience the same type of information that it gave my father. It lets us know a little bit more about the character that we didn't know before. With that being said, if you have a shot that calls for a certain goal to happen, spice it up with information. The scene will be boring and/or fall flat. On the flip side, you don't want to give everything about the character in one scene. It's a balance of giving the right amount of information for that specific scene about the character. Remember that when you act it out, think to yourself: Is it the most entertaining way to show the character? Is it telling the audience anything? Do I need to spice up his performance so that the audience can better understand what has or is about to happen? Hopefully this little bit of info will help you with your shots. So now go kick those scenes up a couple notches!!