All language subtitles for 15 The Basic Principle Of Animation - Editing

If you want to turn off the subtitles,
click [setting]-[tooltips]-[‘on’ for PC, ‘close’ for mobile]

Hello, everyone.

Havtza here.

And this is the last lesson in the animation section.

Now that we know how to animate,

how to move the camera

and how to match character and camera movement,

it's time to think about how everything connects

into creating a single scene or sequence.

A typical animation has more than one shot in it.

Having an entire story told in the same location

from the same perspective will usually be visually boring.

No matter how nice the movement and animation itself looks.

By using different shots with different angles and movements,

you will give your animation a much more engaging and interesting look,

which will keep your viewers attention.

That being said though

the way that you choose your cuts and camera movements

can make or break the overall scene or sequence.

If you use bad transitions you will risk

confusing and disorienting your viewers,

which might even weigh on the atmosphere and intent behind it.

In this lesson, I'll be teaching you about some rules

and guidelines to help you choose

how to connect your shots.

And how to use animation to support your shot choice.

No matter if your animation tells a story,

cuts between disconnected scenes

or just made out of abstract concept and movements.

You need to have a flow to your shots

which connects to all of them together.

To do this, the way you change the composition

between each shot and cut is important.

If you create too little variation between your composition,

you will have a boring looking scene.

If you create too many variations,

you will have a messy flow.

When choosing your shots,

you need to aim for a good balance between these options.

There are several rules that we can keep conscious of that help us

make these choices.

First, and most importantly,

you have to make sure

that the way that you cut your shots

keeps the continuity of the entire scene or sequence.

Each action has to connect

to the one before it in chronological order.

And your characters have to stay in the respective position in the environment.

Otherwise, it'll seem like there are time skips in the middle of the scene.

That can create continuity mistakes

that distract your viewers and break their engagement with the scene,

or even make it, so they completely misunderstand or can't understand it.

There are a couple of important rules that help us keep track of our shots

and make sure that even when cutting to different angles,

we keep continuity.

This is the 180 degrees rule.

This refers to the placement of the camera in the environment.

In essence, when there are two objects in the scene,

they can be connected with a straight line.

The 180 degrees rule says that your camera

must stay at the same side of the line

for the entire scene.

Visually, this means that your objects stay

on the respective side of the screen in every shot,

regardless of the angle and focus of the camera.

This is especially true in cases where you switch shots

in the middle of a character action.

Since you will have to switch backgrounds

in camera movement direction as well.

If you are not keeping the 180 degrees rules,

which creates a messy and hard to follow feeling when used too much

and will usually make it so that the audience can't follow

what is happening in the scene.

This can result in either the audience misunderstanding the narrative

or it can completely make them disengage

with the entire animation,

which kind of defeats the point of working hard

on every single shot.

Because even if each one of them looks great separately,

if you use bad positions,

you would not be able to understand the individual movements.

This is something that you see quite a lot

in the real life action movies,

where there are too many cuts

during an action sequence

and you can't really understand

what is going on anymore.

Here we have two versions of possible cuts

that we can make in the sequence.

In the first one, the 180 degrees rule is being kept.

This helps us keep track of the movement

and interactions of the character.

It's easy to follow which characters perform, which actions

and where they are in the environment.

Also, pay attention to how I keep track of the characters sizes

and the relative positions of the details in the backgrounds

in relation to the characters.

Even when reusing the same background,

we want to make sure that the perspective and the distance

matches and gives us a good composition.

However, in the second version,

the 180 degrees rule is broken,

which makes it hard to keep track

of the flow of the movement in the scene

and where the characters are in relation to each other.

You can see that this also makes the entire scene look more boring

because there are no variations in the focus points position on the screen.

So the composition looks really stale.

Using this technique when switching shots

in the middle of a character action is especially bad

because you completely change

the direction of your camera movements, your backgrounds

and the flow of the shot is completely broken.

By breaking the 180 degrees rule,

we also have to create new backgrounds

for the new scenes and cuts

because we need to

show the other side of the environment.

Making the overall workload for the background artist bigger.

There are several exceptions where we can still break the 180 degrees rule.

The first one is the case of the camera moving in 3D space.

We kind of looked at it before

when trying the four different camera movements,

but if your character themselves move in the scene,

this might force the camera to change its position

similarly to the perspective part.

Because we are having some changes in perspective and positions,

some objects might change their location on the screen,

depending on their position in relation to the focus of the scene,

which is the characters switching positions.

This can also happen if you have a single object in your scene

or multiple objects,

but you're consciously making the camera itself

move around in the environment.

By either using a spin or a partial spin,

or just take little perspective shifts

to show different angles and add additional depth to the scene.

But this also creates the problem of switching

positions of objects on the scene,

depending on the color position.

In either of these cases,

you will have to use the camera movement itself

and actually show the switch on screen.

You need to make sure that you are not hiding

any part of the information

and that the switch in position is clearly visible.

So that it doesn't look jerring

when you going to keep the new 180 degrees rule

in the connecting and next shots.

Your switch in positions needs to make sense and show

the continuity with clear details.

You don't want to just suddenly jump between different scenes

on the other side of the line

because it will create the problem that we've talked about for.

But once you have shown the switch on screen,

your audience would not feel quite as disoriented.

Of course, if you have shown a switch on screen,

don't cut back to the original position of the camera.

Because then we're creating the problem of the 180 degrees rule

all over again.

Another exception to the 180 degree rule is when the camera itself

is placed on the line between the characters.

This is usually done in scenes where you have a small space

when you want to have an exchange between the characters

with each one of them being alone in the shot.

This is usually very common when creating back and forth sequences.

By placing the camera on the actual line,

connecting between the characters

we're basically forcing it to completely rotate

to the other direction for every following shot.

It's especially obvious when the characters

or background is also moving in the scene,

such as when walking or driving,

as the entire background

will move in the opposite directions

for each switch of the camera.

To keep continuity in these cases,

we will add additional shots, which gives us context

to the character placement in the environment at the beginning of the scene

and through out it.

This also helps us break the flow of moving back and forth

between the characters,

which help us have more variations and

interesting visuals to the entire sequence.

Even though each character is going to be alone in their respective shots,

we will still try and keep each character to the outside of the screen

as much as possible to help and create a clear distinctions

for their placement in the environment.

This also has the additional benefit of giving us more interesting

composition to the individual shots,

because keeping each shot as a

center shot is both going to make the composition

of each scene less interesting

and is going to have an overall

going flow to the entire sequence

because the focus point

does not change position on the screen.

The character actions and interactions themselves

will also give us clues

to keep context of the situations

when the situations itself is established.

Another exception to the 180 degree rule

is when you intentionally move the camera

to the other side of the line.

This is usually done to show different parts of the environment

which will previously hidden.

You see this quite a lot when trying to create suspense,

show important details, or play around with character reactions.

This type of switch is pretty common,

and since they usually have pretty simple and straightforward

composition and purposes

we don't need to have a lot of complicated techniques

to keep continuity in these cases.

But it's still important to keep the sizes of the objects

in your scene consistent with the relation to each other,

as well as keep the overall atmosphere

and lighting in the shot consistent.

When creating this type of scene though,

I do recommend switching the distance of your objects

from the camera.

Even though the shot itself is straightforward,

you still want to create variation in focus point

to keep the entire sequence more engaging.

So you can play around with both the sizes

of your objects in the scene,

as well as the composition guidelines

like we've done in the first background design video.

I have been using these terminologies

flow the entirety of the lesson up until now,

but the flow of the scene and the points of focus between shots

are very important to create engaging animation.

And now that we know that we need to change the composition

between shots and when and how to use

the 180 degrees rule to keep continuity,

we want to know how to combine them

together to create this flow in focus and continuity.

But first, what is flow?

So we kind of use this concept in our first background lesson,

but the composition of your scene will naturally

create points of interest and focus in certain areas on the screen.

Add to this the eyes natural instinct

to follow movement and the natural human trait of focusing on faces.

And you will create points on the screen,

which I will naturally focus on.

Ideally, and if we did the previous steps as well

these areas of interest will all converge into the same place on the screen.

So usually your character face will have a lot of movement in it,

in the composition which really supports and points to it.

And hopefully this point of focus help us really concentrate

on the important details on the scene

and tell us the intent and narrative behind it.

On the other hand, this effect or focus point

essentially makes it so that the wider image

is not fully registered by the viewer,

especially when we use quick cuts

or shots with many details in them,

which makes it so that the audience really

can't focus on all the details in the shot.

The way that these points of interest

and focus are located on the screen

and how they change position

when switching between cuts

creates the overall flow of the sequence.

There are several ways

to create different types of flow within your sequence,

which depends on the composition

and angles that you choose for each shots.

The actual actions of the character within the animation

and your overall timing, it camera movements.

By combining these things, you’ll create the flow,

which will affect both the energy and narrative of your scene.

So in order to make the scene understandable,

you need to create a smooth

and connected flow between your shots.

Disconnected shots can create the same type

of disorientation as bad continuity,

which breaks your audience engagement with the scene.

There are two ways to create a smooth flow.

One, by using your actual background composition

to create different points of interest between your shots

and making sure that each point of interest

is at a slightly different location on the screen.

This method works the best

if your actual points of interest

have a coherent curve or light to them,

similarly to how we space objects

in animation between different frames.

Then you rely on your actual

character actions within the scene

to shift the point of focus between

one point of interest to the other.

Since the eye will usually focus on the character in the scene

anyway, this will make it

so that you will both have the best composition

within your background,

which points to the character.

As well as keep the entire flow of the sequence

move and easy to understand.

Since we're going to treat the flow itself like an animation.

This also helps you to make connected shots

with different compositions.

Since you will have an easy connector

between different points of focus on the screen

by using the character.

Second option is to make all of the focus points

in the background in the same area,

to make it easy to follow,

even without using clear flow with the character.

But be careful not to make too many shots

with the same focus point position together,

because it will make your scene boring again.

Even if you're using different compositions and different angles.

You want to make the eye move a little bit

to different parts of the screen,

to give the audience a little bit more to focus on

and keep them actively trying to engage and follow the scene.

But still, the most important thing to keep in mind

is that your shots need to be connected and easy to follow.

Movements that are very big and go all over the screen

will create big changes in the focus point position.

And depending on where they end

by the end of each shot,

they might not allow continuing to flow in one single directions.

So you want to plan your trajectory

to be more complicated.

Similarly to how we do it in actual animation spacing.

In these cases, there are two approaches that we can take to

still create a readable flow.

First, by given each individual action

a smaller space to move

and starting each new action

from the end position of the one before it,

you can give the overall scene one flow direction.

This approach works well when you want to create

a sequence of actions where the most important thing in

the scene is the narrative ability,

because the eye will be able

to move slowly in one direction across the scene.

Your viewers will have more time

to observe the details within each individual shot in the sequence.

The second options is by using repeating flow trajectories.

This is basically just matching

the trajectory of the focus

point to the trajectory of the animation.

And repeating the animation movement and timing

to let the viewers get accustomed

to the flow of the scene,

and make it so that they can read it more easily.

By having the same movement repeated on screen,

the eye can already anticipate the trajectory.

And thus will have an easier time following it.

This works well in shots where the movement goes

along with the entire screen,

or when we want to give the scene more energy.

But be careful with given too many scenes in a row the same movement

because it can tire the eye and will get kind of boring.

When deciding and planning your flow

you need to think about the movement and camera direction

of each individual shot.

You want your camera movement and character position

to support the character action.

You can't place your character or move your camera in a way

that covers the actual motion in the animation itself.

Basically, you want to make sure

that each individual shot looks the best that it can

with both character animation and the supporting camera movement.

Each character action and camera movement direction will support

or break the flow of the entire sequence.

By given a character action and associated flow in the sequence,

you can also support the sequence narrative.

When the flow goes in one character direction,

they have the momentum in parallel in the narrative

while alternating and changing the flow will show shifts

in character dynamics.

Each decisions such as this will give inherent flow direction

to your shot, and by combining them you will get

the overall flow of your scene.

This means that you might not be able to use connecting shots

to create a single flow to your sequence.

But this is actually a good thing

because if you only following a single trajectory

you will create a pretty boring sequence,

even if it is really easy to understand.

Same as with how using varied focus points in your shots

create more interesting sequence

using varied combination of flow direction and patterns

will make your scene more interesting as well.

When planning your future animations,

try and pace your shots by changing the shot length

connecting and repeating flow patterns, or adding breaks

by keeping your focus point stationary on the screen.

By combining your different shots and patterns together

in a readable and interesting flow

which supports the movement of each individual shots,

and creates a good narrative,

you will present your animation in the best way possible.

Let's try and analyze a complete animation

to see how I use different type of flow patterns and flow breaks

to create an interesting narrative.

First, we hav ean extreme close up shot of the character's face.

This shot establishes both the character look and the emotions.

And the focus point is obviously her face,

but we can have additional actions with the eyes themselves

because we humans tend to focus on the eyes when trying

to analyze character emotions.

By using shifts in the eye position,

and we, as the viewer, will follow the directions

and we as the fuel will follow the directions

to which the character is looking.

Because the eyes of the character are looking to the right,

by the end of the shots.

When they cut to the following shot,

I can get away with placing the character to the right side

of the screen initially.

Even though the position of the face in the last shot is in the center.

Next, I switch the focus of the scene

by shifting the character position on screen,

and making the focus go back to the center again.

With the next shot, I actually create a break in the flow.

Because the character does not change position on the screen,

but the overall flow is still being kept

because we haven't switched position from the last scene.

The next couple of shots have movement,

which zooms across the scene.

Creating a complete shift in the focus points,

and have a much more energetic flow.

With these shots, I actually used the first pattern

where the ending point of the first action is the starting point

of the second action.

I then immediately switch to the second pattern

where I use a repeating trajectory between following shots

while still keeping them very energetic.

The reason I use the first pattern in the first instance

and second pattern in the second instance is because of the complexity

of the trajectory of the action itself.

In the first instance, we have a straight line.

So it's easy to follow even when the action is going

all over the screen.

But in the second instance, we have a somewhat curving trajectory.

So it's better to use a repeating pattern

to make it easier for the audience to perceive each individual shot.

Especially since we don't really have the space to continue the first trajectory

between the connecting shots in the repeating pattern instance.

The focus of the last action shots stays at the middle

of the screen by its end.

So the last cut is another break in the flow,

since we had a whole bunch of energetic shots before it,

and for it I just placed the composition

with the focus point at the center to make it easier for the eye to rest.

You can also see that the timing of each individual shot is different.

They don't all have the same length.

Usually breaks in the flow will be slightly longer

to allow for the audience to have a rest,

while action shots will be very quick

and very energetic to keep the overall flow and energy between each cut.

Establishing shots all shots with focus on the character emotions or acting

are somewhere in the middle

because you want to give the audience

enough time to perceive the acting or the details in the environment.

But you also don't want them

to get bored with the length of the shot,

since it is not a rest.

In this type of shots you can actually create many flows

with the character actions and emoting itself.

You just need to make sure that they don't disrupt

the overall flow of your sequence.

So make sure to start

and end them in logical positions.

In a way that supports the overall flow.

Basically, you can see that by creating a very understandable

and nice looking flow with good pacing and good timing.

You can switch between the distances of your camera from your character,

the type of shots that you're making, the angles and even the subjects

in each shots which help you create an interesting narrative

without compromising on the overall readability of your scene.

By mastering these concepts, you will create the best directed

shots and sequences that you can have.

And the rest is up to your individual ability

as an animator and background designer.

To make sure that each individual shots in the sequence is looking

the best that it can be.

The exercise for this lesson is divided into two parts.

First, create your own versions of the examples

that have shown throughout this video,

but choose different subjects to what I've made.

Again, you can choose the same animations and character designs

that we've made before if they fit the exercise

but if not, try and actually adjust and change

the animations that you've made before

to fit and create a new flow together.

Use different angles and cuts if necessary

to create rhythm within your animation.

And for extra difficulty, you can actually change the timing

of your character action as well.

Again, because some exercises might require a complete re-draw

of all your animations, you can choose to add

all the move details as necessary.

To recap, today we learned how to make your entire sequence

more interesting,

using different techniques and camera movements

to make it easier for your audience to keep track of your scene,

as well as keep

the scenes connected and energized using variations in flow.

We learned about the 180 degree rule,

and we learned about repeating patterns and pacing the animation.

This is the last step to making sure that the actual animation

looks as good as it can get.

In the next lesson, we will be beginning

the last section of this course.

And look at the actual production steps

starting with the storyboard.

Thank you for watching and see you next time.

Bye.