Fuzzy Timing

There are shelves of books concerning Animation theory and technique available, and reading them allows an individual to benefit from the experience of others, standing on the shoulders of giants to increase our own grasp of the craft. Ultimately, however, the actual craft of Animation is something that can only be appreciated through application and labour. Every piece of work is unique and there are always personal discoveries to be made. While somewhat laborious to recount, (please forgive the long-winded post), I made an interesting observation recently that got me all Animation-dorky/excited. Let's call it fuzzy timing - it will make it sound very important, but really I just made that up. (Copyright Shorey!)

A little while back I was working on a shot with Astrid as the main focus. It was a great chance for me to observe, analyse and attempt to incorporate small gender-specific details in to the performance. I didn't want it to be over the top or obvious, (it's really easy to do), instead favouring a natural female feel to reinforce the main acting beats. I decided to have the character unconsciously flicking her head to clear her hair from her face in between the lines of dialogue. I've seen this little gesture from lots of people with long hair and bangs. As an aside, it is my observation that people with finer hair will head-flick if they can, but those with coarser, heavier hair have to use their fingers to accomplish the same thing - heavier hair needs help to get it of the way. Most of the time people don't even know that they are doing this. Interesting thing #1.

(password: education)

As I said, I wanted the flick to be its own thing, and not a gesture tied to the dialogue, for which I had already made other choices. The line is, "He flew away the second he was unleashed!". Acting it out, the most natural place would be before or after the delivery but as you can see I didn't have that option, with a tight edit at head and tail.

I blocked in the hair flick along with the rest of the acting and showed it to friends. They liked it, but thought that the move was an accent to the dialogue, rather than its own little thing. Ack! I played around with the flick timing for a good while, finally admitting that I would be unable to truly separate the ideas given the constraints of the edit. The gesture stands, as you can see, and it still works, but it means something slightly different to my original intent. Balls.

So why the different interpretation? I had a long conversation with my pal Mark, and we came up with a couple of conclusions - interesting thing #2: the types of sounds within the dialogue were making it harder for me rather than just the fact that it was dialogue. 

Check out this audio breakdown:

"THE-SEH" and "EESH" are examples of long, soft sounds with fuzzy™ ins and outs - I would have to give them more frames around their occurrence to separate the hair flick gesture than I would with harder, more staccato sounds. The fact that this dialogue happens to contain lots of the fuzzy stuff made their influence across the dialogue all the more pervasive.

Another observation that Mark made is that the acting performance required for the shot has a level of energy and tension that makes it harder for the head flick to stand out with its own intent. For example, if this were a less energetic shot then a head flick would maybe stand out regardless of where it sat in regards to the dialogue. There we could use contrast in energy to our advantage.

Due to my being a huge dork I found this stuff fascinating. I am not sure if anyone else will appreciate the technicalities of such a minor discovery, but it certainly made me more jazzed to discover this, and the reasons behind it. Even if I didn't succeed 100% in my intent, at least the shot looked OK in the end.

Thanks for bearing with me. If you finished this super dorky post I award you 1 gold star.