 Welcome back to the FNA and today I'm going to talk about the Curse of the Stepped Keys. Okay, okay, that sounds very dramatic. But the thing is, it comes up a lot with student work. So when a student starts off a shot and they do a blocking pass, some students do it in spline or lean or whatever, but a lot of students do it in step mode, because it's taught at school, companies do it, it's very common, it's really good for posing. But the tricky thing is, and this is a spoiler for the whole clip here, is that if you don't put enough breakdowns in your stepped pass, you don't have enough information to understand the story, the acting choices, the timing, and it's very misleading on many fronts, which I'll go through in this clip. Now, before I do, hi, my name is JD and I do animation lectures like these. I do animation analysis clips, I do acting analysis clips, I do a bunch of stuff. Which at the beginning is the channel to see all the thumbnails flashing through. That's what I do. So maybe you like it enough to subscribe so you don't miss a future upload or not. I don't know, maybe you watch this and you go, and whatever, or maybe you watch and you go do it later. I don't know. But that's the channel. That's what I do. I talk about a bunch of stuff in terms of animation. So let's get to this. And this all started a while back when I did an article for sync sketch. So the article was called keeping the original spark and timing your animation. It's kind of, it's a longer overview in terms of what you can do to keep your animation from not being, you know, spliny and crappy at the end. There's a bunch of stuff in there, but I'm going to concentrate, especially here on the curse of step keys. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you five different clips of a head turn, and it starts off with almost no information. And I'll talk through the process and kind of the ideas about all this and what still won't work at the very end. But at least when you compare one to five, you'll see the difference in how that approach will be better when you present something to your teacher, to your friend, classmates, clients, whatever it is, because you really can't skimp on enough information. If you keep it too simple, it's just not going to work. So if you take a look at a head turn and you just do this, and I'm being very generous with the shot length turn end. So it's very short. It tells us that the character is given the look interested in something on the left and then something that caught interest to the right. And but this could be anything. This could be the character looking to the, to his left or screen right. Is it because they heard something? Is it because something caught an attention and, you know, somewhere peripherally over there? And then he looks over. We don't really know a lot. And in the timing wise, it's basically just two poses. Now this seems super simple, but a lot of students have that they really just have the minimum amount of posing. But the problem is that yes, you want to be efficient and it's easy to edit and all that good stuff. But if I look at this, like this is more like a layout pass. This is the character staging and framing. And then the turn and that's it. But it doesn't really tell me anything about what's the character thinking, reacting to all the acting choices, all that good stuff you want to see in a, in a, at least a blocking pass. Now I have a long, not rent, but I have a long series about blocking and how you should approach blocking. So check out the series over there. I shouldn't know by now where to point, but link is giving all that good stuff. So let's go to version two. And actually, before I show you version two, this is version one splines, right? And you got those classic spline bumps. So if you have a key and a key, and you have nothing here, nothing here, and that's in your graph. So once your spline is, it's going to do this. That's what's going to happen. You're going to have that tangent that goes like that. And I got those spline bumps. And that's why you have that dissipation going left overshoot and come back. It just doesn't look good. And again, in terms of the overall animation, it doesn't tell you anything. So now if you go and add one more in between here, you had that moment of, Oh, something is happening. Again, this could be, I'm hearing something, I could realize something, but at least it's a reaction. It's something where it's, Oh, something caught me in whatever way. And I'm still going to look to my left or you know, screen right at this point. But if you spline this, it's still going to be very swimming. Now, like what is the transition between this to this and into that? So it's really this fine balance of adding breakdowns and making sure that all of this works once you spline it. So what do you want to do is really add enough breakdowns so we understand what is going on. As in interest to the left, something again, alert, audio, whatever it is, but not forgetting that there was an interest there. That's where the character started. Here's this. So they're still interested. And that's why they're still looking at this. And then they turn around. That to me already has more information. It's more interesting. The timing gets a bit better. Now, if you would spline this, it still would not look good. But it gives me just a bit more information, especially with this moment here. Now, again, if you spline this, it's still a spliny mess, especially once you go into this. So it's really important that when you do have step keys that you spline it, go back into step, spline it and go back. Always look at, do I have enough information when I go from step to spline? Because one of the big pitfalls is that when you have a step mode pass, the student goes, oh, that's going to be fine. Hit spline and then everything changes. The timing's off. As you can see, it's spline. It's super weird. And then they freak out. But that might be right before a deadline and they don't have time to go back and add more breakdowns and fix it and all that good stuff. So what are you going to do as a student? You can do step mode for sure, but spline it, look at what it looks like really when you spline it, and then go back, add more breakdowns, add more information and go back and forth. Always double check what it's going to be. So if you continue with those breakdowns, I want to add more information and a bit of a reaction at the end. Because the thing that's missing too is that the character, certain interests over there, something is, again, hearing, thinking, whatever it is. But I still want to check because this was really important to me. So now I'm going to check over there, but we want to know, okay, well, what is over there? Now, what's going on? Is that interesting or not? It's not. So again, this tells a broader story. You have more breakdowns. Now, if you spline this, it's still a spliney mess. I mean, you can still see the spline bumps. It feels all very even. You still need more information. But still, it still tells me more, I can still guess and kind of look past the splineiness and go like, okay, this is the thought process of the character over there, thinking over there. I know that this pose, this pose over there to expressions. Yes, there's a change, but how, why is the character looking? And when they see this and how to see that, what's their reaction? Really think about the character processing information and reacting to things. So if I do one more pass in step mode, you're going to have something a bit more like this. That tells me a bit more interest, huh? But I want to look over there. What's over there? What's that? That tells me more. Now, in step mode, I don't think that's too bad. I'm also thinking in terms of direction. So the character is leaning over there, looking over there. That's the interest. Then there's also certain heights right off the shoulders. So if I do this in a very rough way and I put on onion skinning, now when the character reacts, you can see that change here. We're higher. We're straighter. Obviously, the eyes are different, but there's more like thinking about something or listening to something. It's not the focus look over there. Then after this, after this height and this position, the character will go down shoulders, lower head tilt still slightly tilted towards where it's interested. The eyes are still looking where the original focus is, but not as alert. And this is why we're lower with the roof. Are we also moving to the right to this other point? Then we get to the moment of, oh, what is this? Thinking about it. You don't have to do too much here, which is to me, it's mostly about this. Then I will concentrate the keys on what the face is doing, thought process, you know, eye darts, processing things. And then the big reaction of, oh, not interested, really slumping the shoulders and leaning him over there. Now you could lean the character over there or over there. I have him to the right because that new interest is boring. It's also not a threat. It's nothing dangerous. You can lean towards something that is safe. Now, it's also totally fine to have him lean the other way because this is not interesting. So he backs away, disengages from this. So you can totally have the character lean this way. Now, if this was a dangerous thing, right? If you look at this and realize, oh, that's not a good idea. And you have a reaction at the end, not this. I would have the character take a step back over here with maybe, you know, a bigger shock reaction or something. That being said, even though I like this more, there's more information, timing is better. It tells a full story in terms of what the character is thinking and processing and all that good stuff that I look to see when you spline this. It's still not great. It's better. It gives me a better idea, but you can still see that little move back here. That's your spline bump again. Then over there, you hit that pose, but because I have key and then the same key, it's going to have a bump again. So you're going to overshoot over here and then come back to the same spot over there. Same thing here. You can feel that if I track the nose, you can see how everything's kind of bumpy, overshoot and comes back. These are all the typical spline bumps. And especially since I have no extra breakdowns for the shoulders, they're already going fairly early up and down into that. At the same time, I don't mind too much because if I see this, again, I can see past the spline bumps. I can see past all those hurdles, but it gives me a bigger picture or the full picture of what the character is going through and why they're going from this to this. The other thing too is if you compare all of these, besides seeing the difference, you can see how the shot has gotten longer. At the very end, the last version is 115 frames, whereas if you go with the first version, it was 63 frames. But even then I was super generous. This would probably be maybe 40 frames, 50 frames. So not only do you want to have more information, but the thing is it will also tell you how long the shot really needs to be, because that's the other pitfall for stepped animation. If you don't have enough breakdowns and information there, it's going to be a character sitting, standing, standing, sitting, or looking to the left or right, whatever you have. That's such a massive change in terms of posing, especially if someone is sitting and standing or standing and sitting, whatever, like a bigger mechanics move, that they think, oh, that's going to be okay. Maybe a couple breakdowns by then I'm done. They realize I don't have time to put in all those breakdowns. The shot is too short. Now, if you continue and you have, you know, week one, two, three, I'd say in the school environment and you're in like week two and a half, you're still struggling at the end, you realize this is not working. I need to make the shot longer and add more breakdowns or in between and flesh this out. You only have a couple of days left to finish the assignment. This is not going to work. So from the very beginning, besides planning and sketching things, shooting reference, you really know how long this is going to take, especially with shooting reference. You have to make sure that all the information is there when you step out of shop and it has to have ease in and outs in between reactions, all that stuff. It might seem like more work at the beginning because you want to say, Hey, it's a blocking pass. It's going to be simple. Here's the idea. Sure, that pass will be fast, but at the end, you're going to spend more time fixing. You're going to be more trouble at the end. So it might seem like you're spending more time at the beginning, but it's going to pay off towards the end. I guarantee you. So absolutely continue with step mode is it's a great way to really concentrate on the golden poses, the extreme poses, you know, just face expression, all that stuff that tells a very clear story in the smallest amount of possible terms of information. I mean, that's your goal, right? You want to tell the clearest blocking pass and story, whatever you have with the least amount of keys on the fewest amounts of controllers in English so that you can make quick changes, quick edits, show different versions of the teacher or to a client. That's the idea. But again, like I said in my blocking pass series, sometimes if you want to tell a really clear story, you're going to have to set more keys where it almost turns into blocking plus technically, but that's what you need to tell the story. Again, hope that makes sense. The blocking series goes into that in more detail. But the main takeaway is, as a student, if you're watching this, do not skimp on breakdowns and in-betweens. You can't just have two poses and think that's going to tell the story. It's just not enough. And if you're going to break that down, you're losing way too much information in such a simplified pass. For more information, again, check out the Sting Sketch article. There's more about that in terms of just timing, the approach of, again, like I said, not losing the spark and initial, you know, like the energy of what you've thought about first. Now, if you don't want to be cursed by those step keys, I can lift the curse by you signing up for my workshop. This is silly. But I do have workshops and I can talk about this. I can help you with the shots and make your shots even more awesome. I'm here to help you. So let me know if you want to sign up, link in the description with all the information. Let's email. Let's talk. You can sign up at any time you can start whenever you want. And that's that speaking of time. Thank you for watching till the very end. As always, I appreciate that you watched the whole thing. If you did watch till the very end, if you didn't, then you wouldn't know this anyway. That's it for me from the clip. I hope it was helpful and I hope that I see you in my next upload.