Animate beyond the set camera

It is the world of animation where every dream comes true. From Fantasy to real life experiences,

every where it has demonstrated its influence. A great potential lies with the animators, and so you have to take immense care while doing animation. Autodesk Maya is quite a common software among the animators. You may be acquainted with the four views that Maya provides. But when animation a shot you need to set a camera in order to stage the background and characters.

So while animating and what we tend to do is just animate those parts of the short that are visible through the set camera, and ignore the rest of it.

For Example - Suppose a character is saying a dialogue "what?" and the camera is fixed in a position that only characters face to chest is seen. So when you animate you leave the lower part of the body and only animate the pelvis to give a feel of movement to the upper part of the body.

Now considering a general pipeline that a production follows, you deliver your animation to the effects/ cloth and fur/lighting team. Now if you are lucky your animation will be accepted by other teams and will go for final render. But if there is any requirement of the camera to be slightly changed then perhaps some parts of your 'not animated' character might be seen. Thus your scene will come back to you like a boomerang for correction. And believe me; no one likes to do one shot twice.

This is not only the sole reason to animate beyond the camera. Animation beyond the realms of what is needed also adds life and believability to animation.

Did you know that Pixar has done far more than animation beyond the camera. While working on Ratatouille Pixar's animators travelled all the way to Michelin star french restaurants to study the location as a reference and to get the details perfect. Most of the audience would never notice, but the purpose was to create detail beyond what would be seen, but would instead be intuitively felt by the audience and extend the realism beyond what was directly presented.

Thus next time you are animating a scene try and animate the rest of the parts of the character that might be seen. But do not animate in details and waste your time on the unseen parts.

Happy animating!