 Welcome back, it is Friday and that means FNA Friday and we are on part 6 of blocking out your animation and today I'm going to take a look at acting out your animation. Alright, so we have concluded the prep part. We talked about planning your animation, testing your rig and creating a post library just in case you don't have any tools or scripts. And today we're getting into the quick check part of the series and it is about acting out your animation and the next week is about making sounds to check your timing to criminally underrated methods of checking your timing for your blocking. Today, hopefully I can explain to you the benefits of it and then you can adopt that workflow. And it is acting out your animation and it is not acting out in terms of shooting reference. It is basically if you use Maya and you animate and you make a movie, it's a play blast so it's act out your play blast. If you have a different software and that tool is called something else, then it's act out XYZ or whatever you have. But it is about you animate it, you look at your animation and then you act out what you just animated. That is the crucial component because you might be acting out something where you have a head turn and you do, you might do that. You have a little bit of anticipation on the arc, maybe an overshoot and a little bit of a settle with a nice arc in there. All fantastic, right? And then you do the play blast and then you look at it and the animation looks like this. Even timing, no arc, it's very robotic, very terminator-like. Bunny in your head, you acted it out, you shot reference, you animated it and think, well, this looks good. So then I take a look at it with fresh eyes and it's easy for me to complain and give you critiques, but I'm not animating it. And all I see is that very robotic move. So then I politely ask the students who will act out what you just did. And then usually the response is that they act out what they wanted it to be, but it's not what they actually animated. So then you got to tell them again, all right, I look at your animation, what did you do? And then they slowly moved in and realized, that feels weird, that is very forced. The timing is really slow. That's not really what I wanted to do. Now this gets really important once you get into body mechanics. So let's pretend that your character is lifting a leg. So let me push that chair out of the way. The mic is here, so hopefully you can still hear me. So you have your character and if I just lift my leg, I'm gonna fall over because if I lift my leg, I got to move my root over here, then I can lift it. And then the hips go up because all the weight is on this leg. And if I just lift the leg like this, it might look okay in animation, but technically if you do this, you're off balance and you're gonna fall down. So again, you might have acted this out. You might have shot reference and once you get into the animation, you go like, well, I'm just gonna lift my leg in and that's it. And you kind of forget what makes it correct. But if you act it out and you act out what you just animated, you try to replicate your animation, you realize, well, this is very stiff. The timing is very slow. But wait a minute, I can't actually do this. I'm gonna fall over. Why is that? Oh wait, I need to shift my weight over. Oh, now I get it. So I mean, hopefully, hopefully, when you do act out your animation that you will make that connection and it's gonna be helpful. But most of the time is when I have shots from students that they act out or I act out, which is probably more comfortable. I don't wanna force my students to do anything that's uncomfortable. Anything that, you know, embarrass them from the class. I'm not that, I mean, sometimes, but you know. So I prefer to act it out for them just to make a point. So hopefully when you do act it out or you see someone doing it and kind of pointing it out in the obvious way, there is a bigger connection of, oh yeah, this is wrong because of this. And you now need to fix this. And one of the very common thing is when a character takes a step back or has kind of a weight shift or a direction change and that's a very common mistake in student work. So let's show you. So imagine your character stands and takes a step back and usually it's this and then magically, I can't even do it, the leg goes forward first and then the root moves. But that doesn't work. So I usually have to act it out where someone has to hold me. When you move back, the only way to move forward unless someone pulls you that this leg has to stay here, point it this way so you can push yourself forward. You can't be off balance like this and then move forward. I mean, you would have massive amount of muscles. I don't know, this just doesn't work. So much work sold. So when you do have that where the leg goes first, right? Leaning back and then the back leg goes up and then the root moves forward. That's kind of a magical way of moving your root forward. The balance is not right. The mechanics are not right. The weight just doesn't work. You're off balance. You're gonna fall down. What I see, especially that part of our mechanics animated that way so often is to work and then when you act it out or you suggest that they should act it out, they definitely make that connection because they would fall on the floor and then it's just very obvious that when you're leaning back like this and you move your leg, this is not gonna work. But that doesn't mean that if you animate it and you look at your play blast and you act it out, again, that you're acting this out correctly. You're exactly replicating what you animated. So you might need someone to look at you and your animation to say, no, no, no, no, that's not what you animated. Move like this. So it doesn't mean that you're gonna get it right every time. It's as with everything, you have to practice. But it is for sure a way to quickly identify timings off. Something feels very wrong. If you have like a gesture and then your arm animation is this because you have no arcs in it and the timing is even. You feel this. Like you might see this and go, this kind of looks right. But the moment you do this, you realize, oh wait, this is kind of like a robot arm. Okay, I get it. This is kind of wrong. So I highly, highly, highly recommend that you act out your animation, act out your play blast. Again, don't act out in terms of reference. You wanna do this and replicate that. No, no, no, no, you just animated this and now you're gonna act out what you just animated. Now, of course, if you got creatures and there's all kinds of animation and you can't act out jumping around, I know that this is not applicable to everything. But for other shots and other mechanics, there are other ways of checking it. This is just one way of a quick check for moments that you can act out quickly. This is all about improving your workflow, getting faster at this. So if you need to check something out for a creature or flying around, obviously there are other things you need to do to check that and it can be more complicated and can be more time consuming. Again, I'm just talking basic body mechanics that a human does that you can replicate as you acted it out already. And it's just a fast way to check. Does this feel right? Does this look right? No, and because you're doing it yourself and because you are replicating what you just animated, you will feel that it's off. The balance is off. You will fall on the ground. You realize, oh wait, I can't actually do this. So that one, act out your play blast and making sounds which is next week. Those are two really, really fast ways to check your timing. Not enough people do that. I don't know why. So try it out. Let me know what you think. Maybe you already have or maybe try it out this weekend and then leave me a comment. Let me know. Hey, this kind of worked out. This didn't work out, but I added this to it. I twisted around your workflow and now if I do this on top of what you just said, now it works and now I understand. So whatever your method is, whatever you learn from this or whatever is not clear, let me know in the comments. And if this was helpful, as always, as I say, you can like this and you can subscribe to see all my uploads. Hit that bell button to get all notifications because I upload pretty much daily to the weekends. And that's it. That concludes it. And if you watched this whole thing till the very end, as always, I appreciate it that you take your valuable minutes to watch this and I hope I will see you next week.