 Welcome back to FNA and today I want to talk about why you need to have creatures on your demoreal. And this lecture is going to be broken up into multiple parts when talking about idea, selection, what to think about when you use creatures, which creatures and animals to select and why, what kind of reference material you could use, what kind of inspiration, just a whole thought process about animating creatures for your demoreal. Now this is a lecture that was based on a lecture that I gave at CTN in 2019 and I thought why not, let's dig this out, let's update a little bit and then present it here so you guys can watch it on the channel. And before I do anything, you just watch this for the first time, like who is this guy? My name is JD and I do animation lectures like these. I do animation analysis clips, I do acting analysis clips, review reviews, product reviews, all kinds of stuff. If you've been watching my channel, you know this is the beginning pitch. Browse around, check it out. If you like it, subscribe. If you don't like it, don't subscribe. What are you going to do? Well, that is that, that is the pitch. It helps my channel grow to subscribe. Let's get to the slides and let me explain to you what I mean with why you need creatures on your real. You need them because creatures are everywhere and this was from 2019. I'm going to update this, but just for now, my example was that these were the movies from 2019 and see this is what we have and you have many, many more movies. And if you look at them at the top, you can see there are creatures everywhere. It's not going to be just humans. Now we can switch over. Let's say if I do a search for animated movies 2020, that's what you get here. You can see here 2020 popular animated movies and you can see you got creatures, there's a creature in here that's 2D. You got a cat in this one. You got wolf. You got scoop. I mean, you can continue on. You can scroll down. There's always going to be a creature somewhere. It's not going to be fully human. And even if we do a future search into 2021, let's see what we have creature here, creature here, and so on. You can continue. You're not going to have that many movies where it's going to be 100% humans. Compared to before, you have more movies with more humans, but there's always going to be a creature somewhere. Sometimes movies are just only creatures. If you go back to the 2019 example here, you got Secret Life of Pets, Ton of Creatures, How to 20 Dragon, Clearly, Clearly Creatures, Angry Birds Creatures, Lightning Creatures, Abominable Frozen has a little of you here and there, Arctic Dogs, All Creatures, and Spies in the Skies, a creature. And even if there's not that many, Soul, which I just took a look at, there's a cat that is a creature prominently in the movie. So there's a good chance there's going to be a creature somewhere. Even if it's tiny, it's look at spider-verse. You still got pigeons, you still got a spider. Someone has to animate those. And let's pretend you got this on your reel. This could be your junior position, an intern position, whatever an apprenticeship or whatever role you have. If you have creatures on your reel, you go, listen, we got to make this shots happen. You got this on your reel. You are a scientist. It might not be the hero shot that you wanted. You might just not do miles in this shot. You're just going to do only the pigeons, but it's still, it's something that maybe many other people don't have on the reel. It's one way to get into potentially a company because they're looking at a very varied skill set on your demo reel. Now, when it comes to animating creatures, there's going to be a different approach. In this example, I have Secret Life of Pets 2, Ratatouille in Lion King. I should also add Zootopia to that. Why? Just because you have, on one end, fully realistic creatures where you look at reference, you study them, and it's a fairly close replication of real life, which would be the Lion King and their other examples out there. Now, you have to stick to the real example just because the renders are very, very real. And if you do make it too cartoony, the face is too cartoony, it's a weird disc, it's not going to quite work. That being said, having worked on some more realistic movies is creatively not always the most satisfying thing because you are replicating something that's already there. It's still a cool challenge in terms of the animation technique, but that's that kind of movie. Now, when you go to the Secret Life of Pets, you have creatures that move like creatures, but they are cartoony, but they still have a lot of the creature behavior, the locomotion. Just the way they behave and move is still fairly close to creatures versus Zootopia, is where all the creatures are on their back legs, and they move and behave more like humans, and they might switch back to a potential animal state in the back and forth, but that is that kind of movie. What I like that's kind of the hybrid is Ratatouille, which I love just generally, it's a great movie. But the creature aspect is so good, just because you go through actual creature behavior where the rats, they move on four legs and they move, and you can see that person, the animator has studied rat behavior, locomotion, everything. But then when it comes to the acting part, they can go back on their back legs and then they behave like humans. And for you as you study this and as you do, you know, shoot reference, at least you can shoot yourself, you can film yourself, and you can act something out, and it works for your acting shot. So you don't have to be on all fours and kind of pretend, but that doesn't quite always work. So it's a nice mixture of I can study real footage and behavior and the locomotion, all that good stuff, but then also go back and forth between actual acting that I can shoot and film, and visually it's also really interesting because you go back and forth between those two states. So there's a wide range of how a creature can be portrayed in the movie, super cartoony, super stylized, super real, something in between in terms of behavior and how they move and how they act. And if you as an animator use a lot of choices you can pick from, again, that makes it very exciting to animate creatures. Now, how do you approach animating creatures? So for that, I want to talk about ideas, inspiration and reference as it says here. Because a lot of times in class, when you bring up, you shoot anime creatures, people think of, let's do a cycle of a horse, like a gallop, or just a walk, and it's going to be based on footage, on a rotoscope, and it's going to be super boring to do, which it can be, but that's not what I'm talking about. I would still approach creature as in a character with the personality, the certain behavior, it can be stylized. There's just a different way to think about how you would animate creatures. So it's not the general cycle aspect of there's no personality behind it. And it's also as an animator, maybe not super interesting to animate and to learn into practice. For that, I give you this example here. I love this just because there are many things happening in this. You can see here, you have immediately the contrast of a big creature and a small creature. That's visually already interesting. Then you have the very, very long anticipation of the small creatures. You don't quite know what's going to happen. Is it going to be an attack or what is going on here? Then you have the technical aspect that's very complicated of a backwards walk to a stop to a reverse direction to a somewhat run to a stop and contact. All of that is very complicated. And on top of that, at the very end, you have the connection with the heads. So in a way, you got the static cow part where it's not much to animate. And it's there for the sheep to kind of, you know, interact with to a certain degree. The sheep itself, again, it's just, you look at local motion. You might have studied how they walk. You found something where they walk backwards. But now you combine all of this. It's not just I'm animating a sheep walking or walking backwards or running. Now it's, I'm going to use this for entertainment value where you set up a scene and it's a patient is huge as an audience, you know what's going to happen. You got the sheep walking backwards stop and you think this is going to be a fight. But then look at how long the heads connect runs forward and then and it's cute because you just hold this for just longer than a contact or a hit. It's just and what does that mean? Is the cow tired of fighting? Are they friends? And they just this is like a way of loving each other. It's like, what is going on? And to me, that already, even though it's purely local motion, the way mechanics, you can combine it and you can put elements together into a more entertaining shot. That's not just a cycle that has something where you are looking and you're interested that you want what is going to happen. Same with this, you can look at it's a bit of a longer shot, but you can see the cat. There's movement. Then you have this coming in. Okay, that's interesting. And then you have this. What? So let's look at this. So let's pretend this is what you've chosen. You are looking at a cat. So all right, you have movement of the ear. There's a head turn. It's a little bit of a shift. It's really not that much, but I think this is cool just because it's a small introduction of how a cat would move. It doesn't have to have complex steps or even sitting down. It's just enough to study what the pose is. How do they sit down? What are some of the moves? Again, your little ear ticks here. And then you got a faster move. You can show how fast this creature can actually move. And then after this, what do you see? It's a bouncing ball. Well, this is a classic Simon. All of you should be able to animate a bouncing ball by the time you're attacking a creature. So now you're combining one thing that's potentially simple, then introducing a moment or just a focus point for the creature to look at. And I love that the creature or the cat in this case does not follow the ball. It stays put here. Then you have this. And what is going on here? It's an owl that runs. I love it. If you tell someone, animate a cat sitting, that just turns the head, right? Just do this and some ear flicks. It's like, oh, I can see this. It's kind of boring, kind of simple, whatever. You tell someone who's been doing this for a while, that's now starting with creatures, animate a bouncing ball. Really? Do I have to go back to that? That's a bouncing ball. Then you tell someone, do a run like an owl running. All right, that's already interesting and funny, but it might just be a run cycle and not that interesting potentially. And now take all of these together, combine them. You got the cat looking, there's a bouncing ball coming by, and then the owl running by. It's like, what is this? What's going on here? It's a funny ending, and it's not overwhelming in terms of amount of work, but the entertainment value, at least to me, I find the shot funny. And if this is on a reel, this to me would be more interesting than just a sight. I could be wrong. This is, again, also subjective. But think in terms of there are potentially simple elements that seem simple, but when you combine them, that creates something new and interesting. And again, the entertainment value, the humor, or sinus, whatever you have, could be more interesting and more personality-driven and character-driven. Then next up, you have this, which is definitely a longer clip. Now I'm going to play this in full. You can see the dog. This is much more complicated because you got the full locomotion of a dog walking in, turning, lots of little steps. Of course, you can simplify this, but it brings in a pillow. It's okay. Why is the dog doing this? Grab the little dog. So now you got the weight assignment. Again, this gets more complicated. Obviously, for a shot, you kind of work on silhouette and clarity, but that is already huge. Okay. And putting this little guy on the pillow. And what is this? Stepping on that little guy? What is going on? Oh, no, I want to be with the human on this. And if you look at the last frame, it's incredibly uncomfortable for the bigger dog. The human in there is just there for context. Basically, you might have to animate some interaction. If a paw pushes on the arm, how that moves, but the human is not moving. There's no lip sync. There's no pantomime. It's just there for context. It's kind of the goal for the bigger dog. I want to get on there. So now you're combining locomotion walk and a turn. It's a combination of a weight assignment. It's a light dog, but it's cute where it's elevation from lifting to the ground. You got two different creatures, a younger and older one, a smaller and a bigger one. There's so many different elements in terms of contrast on top of again, the potentially in, I find this funny, the entertainment value of the dog getting onto what is this? Like a foldable bed or couch to get to the human. Then you have this one, which is one of my favorite ones. You have that happening. You want it, what's going on. That comes out. And then there you go. Now there are many, many elements in this that I want to talk about just because it's just way too awesome. If you have a creature with four legs and a tail, sometimes you got four legs and a tail and wings, like the moment you're animating a creature, it's going to be much more complicated than a human. There's more things to keep track of. You got four legs now, there's a tail, how do they work? What's the gate? What's the locomotion? What's the rhythm? So much to do. Creatures are complicated. Now, if you are new to creatures and if you're like, yeah, I don't want to deal with all of this, then why not have the creature in murky water? Now you don't have to animate the legs. You don't have to animate the tail. It's purely this. Okay. What's a water environment and you can add something like that. Again, you don't have to animate the feet. It's not that much work, but you have this kind of setup. So now you have contrast. You got a big creature and a small creature. You got a potential attack. And then you got the surprise of whoa, it's gone. And now look at the head turns of the tiger looks, looks around. This could be you. This could be you acting this out. So you can kind of add this. You don't have to really worry about the legs and the tail. It's easier to just animate this. And in terms of entertainment value, you got the weight and see patient what is going on. And the nice look over there that gives us room for this guy to come out and then go away. That to me again, like I said, has contrasting creatures. So you can show big movement, you know, slower movement and more weight, even though it's in water and a smaller creature. That's a completely different creatures got wings and it's paddling and completely flying and swimming. It's just that already that combination, the contrast of that is interesting. And now you have the conflict or the problem or whatever situation you're choosing, where the tiger wants to eat the duck, the duck disappears. And as an audience, look what's going to happen. And you use the murky water as a point to hide and then bring out the duck somewhere else where the tiger is not looking. So think in terms of what creatures could I use and where can I put them? Maybe because I don't want to animate everything. So if it's a murky water, you don't see the legs, but okay, well, it's water. What else could I choose? That's part of water. And then combine all those elements, like I shown here into a funny shot to me, at least, where it's not your typical creature animation that you would expect. When I go creatures and students go, oh, gotta do cycles. Now that to me, it would be a different approach and a funny approach. Then you have something like this, which always cracks me up. So with this, it's kind of the same idea. So you're going to choose to animate a dolphin. You don't see too much in here. Maybe I should probably change the color given this here. So you don't really see them. You can see the general emotion and then this guy coming out. So again, you combine elements where you have not just one, but you copy paste an existing cycle that you have. You put that in the environment. Now you don't have to do crazy simple water. You can just kind of simplify this. Now you're adding a human, not too much in terms of locomotion and body mechanics. It's not super complicated to animate, but now you're adding this element, the creature that we usually associate with cute and nice and funny or just sweet. It's not so sweet. Look at the fins when this guy comes out. It's just happy. Like, that's get off, get out, get off. I love this. And then you got contact, you got mechanics, you got the nice bam, you got a nice line of action there. To me, this becomes a funny shot. And also it's the twist of it's a creature you would usually associate with something nice is now the villain or not. Maybe the human is a villain invading the dolphins, you know, home and they're just defending themselves. Whatever you want to read into this, but that you can imagine, I got to do a dolphin cycle. All right, we'll do it. Then copy paste, copy paste, offset a couple of times. So now you have a group of dolphins. And then for contrast, one does something else in all the others. And then you give that one dolphin an action. This may be a problem, a conflict. And now it has that one specific humorous moment. It's still a creature shot, but there's more of a story to it. Got more elements like contact and weight, a little bit of human animation. And I think all that combination again, is something more interesting than just a dolphin cycle. Now, as you grab any type of creature, they've like, that'd be fun to animate. Don't just stick to the scale of the creature. So what do I mean by that? So let's say you grab a spider. Well, what if the spider is huge? You got here the cat for reference, you got a human for reference. So maybe the creature that you want to animate could be really big, could be really small. In this case, you can look at the never ending story. That's a cool shot, cool composition. Now it's kind of like your wise turtle. Maybe by now this has been overused. Who knows. But again, you take a turtle, which is usually not that big unless, you know, there's some other ones that are huge, but it definitely not as big as this image there. So as you select your creature, thinking those terms as well, what if I change the scale? Is that going to make the shot more interesting? What is the story I want to tell with a creature you know to be small? Now it's really big or something really big that's really, really small. It's not just let me just grab the creature studied and animate, like with the dolphin, maybe go against type where they're not the thing, the nice thing you would expect to see. Or when it comes to scale, change the scale. Again, that could change the whole approach and idea of the shot. Same thing goes for reference. So when you grab reference, your animation doesn't have to stick closely to the reference. So by that, I mean, if you look at this example, right, you got small creature, big creature, this interaction, locomotion and that's it. That's cool. But maybe you don't want to grab this and just animate the same thing. It could be kind of boring. Well, you could choose something like this. So now you have an interesting entrance with a creature movement that you wouldn't expect. And again, your creature doesn't have to be a monkey or whatever. It could be something that's potentially similar or just the action is similar. So in this case, you got small and big. You got small getting onto a big creature and then walking away. That is still happening in this case. You have an entrance, which I always like, but that could be also against type. You animate an entrance of a creature. The more you wouldn't really expect the creature to roll, even if it's a creature that we know doesn't have to be a fantasy creature like this one. Then you can do any kind of interaction between the two, if you have two characters there, right? I mean, imagine you have two because you want one to get onto the other. And then this is the element that we saw in the reference. But now you're changing it where the creature grabs the human. It's not two creatures anymore. And then you have this. It's a sort of a weight assignment. You got interaction. And you kind of show also potentially the personality between the two and how the bigger creature grabs the small one. Is it, you know, is it a delicate move? Is it just a kind of guy, get out of here. It doesn't really care. And at the end, you can go into locomotion where it could be something that you study. So if your creature is not something fantasy based, and it's a real creature, then you can still change elements. And at the very end, you show off as the creature walks away that I have studied this, I have studied this creature. I know how it walks. Let me show you how I do this. But within that overall shot, you still took elements and changed them. And it's still based on the actual reference that I showed you, but with enough tweaks to give whoever's in there more personality, there's something potentially funny, sad, angry, whatever you have in terms of how they behave, but it's different than just this is the reference. Let me copy it, kind of boring. And then that's it. With this example, even if you do a cycle, you can still have some of a change where something happens, the creature notices something. And you can see here how the back, you can see the fur goes up, the eyes open. And it turns around, slows down and looks back. And that's it. Even that's like tweak is a bit more interesting than just a cycle. Even the beginning, if you look at this here, eyes are closed, noses up. So even if you do a cycle, imagine grabbing whatever move you have, a walk or maybe not run, but yeah, something a bit slower and then give your cycle just heads up, eyes closed, snobbish creature, snobbish human, or just the general tilt throughout. Even if you take just whatever you did and you add an overriding element to it, an attitude, or I guess like eyes closed in the head up for the kind of like type of walk. Even with that, and you add a slight change to the end, it breaks up the cycle, gives it personality, gives it a focus or a reaction like in this case. And again, it doesn't have to be just the replication of a reference that you found. I always think in terms of I want to give this personality, certain behavior to it, just something that has character. And it's totally normal for you to look at all this like this is still way too overwhelming. Creatures are complicated too many legs and tails and wings or whatever. I don't want to do all this. You could still simplify everything and just have the creature there and just animate something small. But the main focus is the human. So if you look at this shot here in total, you can see it's a great way to assignment with the human. And the creature is just there. Not that much to do. It's there for interaction. It's kind of there as a comedic element for the human to play off of. You have another way to assignment, basically right there. And then as you throw it, now you can add some creature behavior, waking up, you got the stretch, which again, just serves to scare the human. And then you got that funny ending. So it doesn't have to be all completely focused on the creature where you feel like this is too much as overwhelming. You can still have the main shot be about a human, which by now you're used to animating, and you just add a little creature element to it, maybe a contrast element for weight or some sort of interaction. So thinking those terms as well, you can ease yourself into animating creatures because they are complex and they are complicated to animate. So just pick a smaller element just like with the cat and the bouncing ball and the owl. Maybe it's just a cat bouncing ball and then a human. So it doesn't have to be, I'm gonna animate a creature flying around 10 dragons fighting 50,000 orcs. It doesn't have to be complicated. You can start small and find your way in. And maybe your idea is based on life action reference where it's humans. You're like, well, I couldn't find a reference that is actually the creature that does what I wanted to do. And I don't know how to approach this because all I can do is fill myself or what I like is based on life action with humans. That's okay. You can also do this. So an example from The Dark Knight, you get a foreground element, there's a dialogue, guy masks. This happens and reveals the other character in the background. Now I like this idea and go a bit further. So what if the background character is actually hidden? So what if it's something like this? I don't look super weird for that, for my example for the lecture. Imagine you got some weird creature, the scoopy fantasy creature or something else, but it's on a tree branch and you can see little creatures here. So you got contrast between a big creature and a small creature. Then you got a reaction, big eyes and as an audience you wonder, what happened? What's going on? Then creature falls over, there's an arrow in the back revealing the human that shot the blow dart. So you can take human elements like this kind of re-jig the whole thing and make it something where I take the essence of a foreground element that falls over to reveal a background element. And you can change this around where the foreground element is a human. The human is look at the branch, maybe you're like, you know, big magnifying glass, look at smaller creatures and you got your facial animation that you used to do all human and then a reaction and this could be human falling over and a ginormous ant in the back that attacked the human. Or it could be the human going, maybe joke, the human going up and then it has a like a snake coiled around the neck and passes out revealing a snake behind it. So the point being that you can still look at human reference, film yourself, just whatever you can find in movies and TV shows and then just look at what is the idea behind this? Maybe it's the staging, maybe it's the reveal and then incorporate human behavior, creature behavior, combine all of that. And again, it can be in a small scale. It doesn't have to be a crazy complicated animation involving creature locomotion. You can start small, but think, as I showed in other examples, think of separate elements that can combine and that combination, even though separately might seem simple, a combination together makes it interesting, funny, scary, surprising, or just generally entertaining. Now, there's a lot more that I want to talk about, but it's getting long. I see this is a longer clip. So this is part one, it's going to be a part two, where I want to talk about more what the characters should be in terms of behavior, how you can go against type, how you can use environments, how the environments are going to affect the creatures, their situational awareness, are the creatures in a familiar or non familiar environment, stress reveals all kinds of things. There's so much more to talk about this will be part two and potentially part three, all of them, hopefully cementing the idea that creatures are not scary to animate. I mean, they can be complex, but you can start small, can be interesting, and it can be a really nice addition to your reels to round up your skillsets, just humans and creatures, different size, different scale, different age. I think all of that will make you more versatile animator and also more attractive to potential employers. And if you want to be more attractive, and you want me to help you to make you real more attractive with a weird segment, I have workshops you know my page, right? You can sign up at any time, link in the description or information I can help you, help your shots, schedule is always flexible, you can sign up whenever you want, you can start whenever you want, and that is that. Speaking of start time, it's a long clip, so if you're still watching this, thank you so much, I appreciate your time. And like I said before, if you like what you saw, you don't miss any of my uploads, feel free to subscribe and hit that bell button, that is the YouTube pitch. And that's that helps my channel grow, and you won't miss any of my almost daily uploads. And I'll say thank you, and I'll see you until then.