 Welcome back! This is another FNA for new animators and this is part 9 of Animation Blocking and today I'm gonna talk about how you should not loop your shots. Alright, so looking at the list that I showed you last time, I said that I'm gonna skip a couple, now I'm gonna add one more, I'm gonna skip and that is silhouette. I just finished all my last critiques, looking at all the shots from all the classes, the grades and everything and then once again there's something about silhouette especially about joints, how they're bent for knees and elbows. It comes up all the time. I'm actually gonna take that and also put that as one more point in the most common animation mistakes by students and go straight into don't loop shots and yes, I'm also gonna skip mirror your shots because that's kind of what it kind of says it all. I mean you just take your shot and you mirror it, you can go into quick time and there's an option in there to flip horizontally so you can look at it in a different way. I'm using Keyframe Pro and in there you also have an option to take your image and flip it horizontally so in whatever package you wanna use you probably have an option to do that, you can go old school and take a mirror and then look at your shot. In the mirror it's a bit cumbersome but you could technically and I remember someone asking me in the comments if you could actually flip your image horizontally in Maya. I don't know, I did a quick google search, nothing came out quickly. I'm sure that is possible somehow, I don't know, I'm just guessing maybe it's not possible but the reason why I'm not quite entertaining that idea is because when I look at my shot I want it to be in real time. So I wanna look at my playblast and then look at exactly the right timing and if that's flipped, that's your fresh eye take there. If I look at this in Maya, it's probably not gonna be real time. It depends on your rigs, I'm used to rigs that are pretty heavy and it's not gonna be real time so I wanna make a playblast and then flip the image. So skipping this, mirroring your shot again is very simple. I don't think I need a whole F&A just about that. So I'm gonna straight into looping shots. Okay, so looping a shot just for technical fixes and looking at things, totally fine. What I actually mean is that if you have your shot and you bring it up, you wanna take this shot and sandwich it between two other shots. The danger is that if you bring up your shot and you rest on that first frame because you don't hit play right away, you get used to the frame. You see everything and you think it's clear. Same thing when you get to the end of the shot, you rest on that last frame and you think well everything is okay, staging is okay and there's enough time to see what's going on but if you actually cut out of that shot, it might not be as clear as you think. Now, so then you would say well then you should loop because then you don't have that lingering first and last frame. Kind of technically yes, but the thing is you're still looping within the same shot so you still get used to the beginning and the end and you lose sight of how does it really look like and feel like when you cut into the shot and cut out of the shot. So yes, looping kinda helps. My main point is that you wanna be 100% clear with your shot and again, you wanna just eliminate anything that will influence the way you see it and you wanna stage it for yourself in a way so that you see the shot the way an audience is gonna see your shot. Now to illustrate my point, I'm gonna take some examples from the 100 frame animation contest that I'm holding right now. So there are a couple of submissions I wanna take and then use that as an example. So I'm taking a look at these three shots here. I took the audio out but you can see that we have this shot cutting into this awesome shot with an awesome action and then cutting into this one which is also awesome. So you could argue that this is all fine, which it is. So we don't have a frame where we don't see enough of it. There's enough time to see what's going on here and just enough time to read what's going on here. So this is the way the shots are but I would still look at it in this way. So you have a shot before and then as we scrub, we have a shot after. So because these shots are well done, again, there's enough time here and there's enough time here, there's not exactly a problem in terms of readability. So to exaggerate my point, I cut some frames out of the middle shot. So now when this ends, we get into this and then we cut out into that. And that's a bit more jarring. So now it's pretend that you open your shot and you rest on this for a couple seconds or 10 seconds. You take your pencil or whatever and we're resting. And we see, okay, well, here's my character and it's fine. I don't know, I can read everything. There's the city, there's the sky. Okay, let's play. All right, falls. All right, that's cool. And let's pretend it doesn't cut out and rest here. And go, okay, well, I got my shape here. Everything is fine. It's a nice little wet there. I don't know, everything is fine. Well, let me look at the middle part and kind of start tweaking things and look at the pose and everything. But again, if you look at this with other shots, whoa, we missed this. Like what, what was this? What did I just see? Hmm. This is actually clear. So you're missing that beginning point. Same with the ends. Bam. Wait, what? What was that? Did something just, oh, okay. So open the wings and then, whoa, we cut into the next shot. So this is the danger. If you loop the shot, you will miss exactly these points. It's too short. Now you can exaggerate this even more where I cut more out of the end of the second shot and the beginning of the third shot. And then this happens. Now this might be intentional. You might argue, well, this could be kind of cool. But now you have the opening of the wings and the opening of his arms. So let's pretend that's not what you intended. And this is also very cool here. If you have this playing like this, it feels like, wait a minute. That's a weird, interesting transition where this goes into that, wait a minute. And then the audience might be confused. So for you, you have to take your shot, sandwich it between two other shots to make sure that A is the shot clear by itself and B is the shot clear with other shots before and after. Because again, this might happen where you think they're connected and the audience is confused. So take other shots that you've done. If you don't have any other shot, then just create something, couple of cubes or something and do a play blast and just add something before and after and make it last a couple seconds with some kind of a strobie thing. And then your actual shot comes in. You want something that's, you know, a couple seconds length and then your actual shot and then something else. That's again, five to seven seconds or 10 seconds. If you want to make sure that the end is long enough that you forget the middle shot and it loops into the first shot again, long enough that you forget the middle shot and then cut in and cut out of your actual shot. There you go. Another tip. Hopefully it's helpful as always. If it's not helpful, got any questions or anything? Let me know in the comments. If you like this, a like would be awesome. If you have not subscribed just yet, I would recommend that you do. And if you watch the whole thing till the very end, as always, thank you so much. I will come back next week with other uploads. Until then, thanks for watching.