 Welcome back to another F&A about the most common animation mistakes and this time it's part 4. I'm gonna talk about spacing All right, last week I talked about arcs and arcs and spacing kind of go hand in hand It's all about the technical aspect and keeping your animation clean But most of all taking the time to do so so it's not a specific thing of here's a trick to make the spacing better It's just a lot of attention to detail and painstaking work of going Tracking frame by frame of course again You can use all kind of tools that you want to use motion trail this dry race marker Whatever you want to use but the main thing is that you want to make sure that you don't have any random pops in your scene So this doesn't have to be about arcs It's just any type of movement that you have so if you have a person standing and kind of leaning in Have a moving hold an arc head turn whatever you have one of the most common things that I see Hence the title of the series is that students have the animation where it's pretend There's an arm movement is going to a scene. I'll show you later There's an arm movement and suddenly it just there's some moments where it the pops up and goes down or suddenly you have a move And there's a big gap and then it continues moving That's the stuff that I'm talking about and that's what you want to avoid so again It's just like with arcs you got to go in there frame by frame and you got to take the time to do so So let's take a look at one of my older scenes that I did a long time ago ten years ago So if I play this scene you can see that you have one character Moving you're gonna have the next character moving There's no sound I turn the sound off here and you can see this is not just about a beautiful art There's a bit of a tricky moment where you have a lot of movement and also camera movements Well, let's just pick out a scene for instance with a head turn, right? So right here the character looks around this scene is 10 years old I'm sure I'm gonna find all kinds of mistakes and I'm gonna know what I did here All right, so I got a couple keys here. So let's go crazy and you can already see here what I'm doing here That is what is that? Let's see. Let's play this again All right, so I try to be all Fast and it's turned and you can see here if you would check the the tip of the nose How it goes over to a right right right always only to the left so to me I will probably want to Change that a bit and smooth that out again. This is just going to be just to quickly Show you what I mean here. So it has a little bit Of a softer Turn here now specifically when it comes to spacing This is more a bit of a spacing in an arc moment Of course, sometimes you do want to have a one frame change and again The one frame direction change is going to be part of another FNA But let's say you have this turn what I see you want to ease out of that What I sometimes sees that students will have something like this and maybe this frame and then maybe that's actually It's go right here. You want to ease out of that and then this would be Way over here and then this and maybe that and maybe this one way over here and then we're back here So if you play this now You see that about Very hiccuppy Right there very very broken move. Let's take a look at what do we have here? Do we have anything with an arm swing without the camera move? Well, let's take This hand here right looks like an IK So whatever I did here. It moves back. So let's pretend I'm gonna go over here over here my key this here and let's say on this There's a move all the way up to here. I'm not gonna change the wrist and go down here to this then maybe here over here and Actually stays put that would be a good example. So now if you play this back in real time You can see that hiccuppy Factor here right there now I'm exaggerating but I do see every now and then scenes where is where there's exactly that where if you would track this here With your marker, whatever you want to do here You can see how arm goes up and the hand pops over the massively spacing pop here and then down and Then what I have here another pop here and then actually goes back the other way So that's sometimes what I see in students Shots here when I track this when I when I'm in class and I check this frame by frame and this can be Smaller things for a let's say here. So let's continue with his hand This hand is a bit of a moving hold and let's say right here. I'm gonna do this Continue on so when you play this Right there. I see this Right there. So that's that's the stuff. I'm talking about where suddenly You have those moments where you come up and then just the hand kind of pops And that's something else and if you go into the graph editor here Let's see here There you go. Look at that crazy town. What is going on? So if I open a students scene That's what I would see. I would see a crazy change And you can see the plateau and then you got your crazy spline bump And then you got that one frame pop thing goes over there. So that's usually when I look at students Curves, that's what I see So whatever you have anything where it's subtle movement like on this character on the left side We're just kind of looks around you have bigger movements on the one on screen, right or just bigger actions like right now Especially going on an arm swing if you look at this character's arm swing here That's where I would do a lot of cleanup here again This is tall excuse here 10 years old But there's a lot of work I would do on the shot especially here. I do kind of like that That lift and that settle there, but there's still if you see all Chots of yours. Oh, I can see this the mistake that I've done or the mistakes that I have done But yes, so even like it's pretend this arm here Going up here I would probably play more a bit more with that elbow and that hand because of spacing issues But I mean this would be an example where you go over here And then you pop maybe this way then he goes back down even if something like a subtle like this The arm goes up Right when I actually delay this a little bit more and you see this here now You track that right if you go up up up and it suddenly pops over and you can see how it's the same height So you have that sun pop and then staying put to the left That's what I'm talking about you want to make sure that these type of things are not in your scene And again, this can be different for different scenes Sometimes you have movements like in this one where you have a pigeon head that kind of pops around Then the pop is their own purpose You still kind of have to look at the ease ins and outs But generally spacing goes hand-in-hand with ease ins and outs generally speaking You want to make sure that you have consistent spacing within a movement So by consistent I mean spacing that gives the impression of proper speed and action based on the character and acting and the movement and the intention Everything right so what you don't want to do is just like what I showed here where an arm supposed to have an ease in And out or like in the shot where you got wing flaps and movement So when you have like pigeon head moves like this. Yes, you can have poppy moves But still kind of look at that the the momentum and the way it's not broken even in something light That pops around can't just go crazy with one frame direction changes Otherwise looks like that character whatever it is just hits a wall all the time But once the pigeon is in the air and flies around Because of the style and the physics and with the flapping of the wings Then you got to really look at the curves and the spacing so that when the characters Propelling itself in the air and has hangtime and falls you can't just have an up movement and suddenly pops down and flies over So you really have to look at the intent of the movement intent of your acting choice because again There are always exceptions where you can really pop into a move or pop out of a move But then it's just more about breakdowns and again kind of a storytelling thing But again, I'm talking generally about cleanup of spacing in terms of how does your arm move into that arc? How does your head turn around so it has that nice arc? It has that ease in it has that hold so you don't have moments where things just kind of pop around hope that makes sense And it is totally boring just like tracking your arcs checking the spacing It's totally boring you gotta go in there and loop things around you either check it in your scene Or have a movie open and loop and loop and loop and check your arc of your wrist You check the finger movements you check stuff on the head or on the chest You just kind of constantly have to double check double check double check and go frame by frame And because this is something that takes time and effort and it's tedious and it's potentially super boring It's also probably a reason why some people skip it or don't want to take that much time in order to make that work They want to get in there getting that a performance and work on on cool ideas But you still have to go in there and clean up and polish your scene And it's important that you get a grasp on of those principles because otherwise If you have moments where characters only pops around especially if it's a bigger character Then the sense of weight is gone and the overall believability of the movement of the character again the scale So for me, you just can't skip that because if you don't have those fundamentals down Then why even attempt a performance and acting piece of lip sync because all of your movements are going to be Distracting and and poppy and you don't have to even worry about going down the line for lip sync and facial performance because your base weight and that just the main mechanics and the main believability of The weight of a character the movement will be destroyed by not paying attention to your arcs or to your spacing Like that I showed here and what this topic is for this clip at the same time It's not always easy just kind of pay attention to all those little details There's so much you got to pay attention when you work on the shot So if you need help and you want me to I still laugh because I'm always pitching this at the end But but if you feel like this is helpful and you won't help and you want me to help you with your shots And make your shots even more awesome as always I have workshops workshops are open You can sign up at any time that is my pitch link in the description with all the information And of course if you like this you can hit a like if you want you can also subscribe if you want They do upload a lot So if you want to subscribe hit that bell button you won't miss any of my uploads other than that that is it If you're still watching thank you for your patience and watching till the very end other than that I will see you in my next upload