 Welcome back to an active analysis and tips for animators. And today I'm going to take a look at episode one of season one of foundation currently in Apple Plus, and I'm going to cover things like outside influences on a character, performance, anticipation, surface influences on a character and awesome awareness for the character. So let's go now before I go into all these clips. Hi, my name is JD. And I do active analysis tips like these. I do animation analysis tips. I do animation lectures. I do animation news. I do reviews, product reviews. I do a bunch of stuff. This is the pitch at the beginning. Check out my channel browser on if you like it, subscribe. If you don't, maybe I'll convince you later, but that's it for the pitch. Let's get into the sequences. First up, we have this one. And I want to talk about something that is not super used in student work and sometimes not even in movies or TV shows. It's the surface properties, right? So you got rocky terrain. It's not going to be super smooth to walk on. You can see he has to kind of look at sometimes very determined, not super looking at where to go. But the steps are not going to be very, very even. You can see that they're going to step on things, going to roll off differently. And sometimes, depending on how the surface goes, where we see here, there is snow, so it could be potentially slippery. So as we move forward, you can see what the character does here. Takes a step and slips. Now, he's in a hurry. He's very determined. He's not, you know, maybe a bit nervous. So you have to factor in what is the state of mind of the character. What is their objective? Do they need to go? Do they look for something? But with all of that to me, it's always interesting. What are they walking on? And what are they wearing? And the combination of those two is going to change your walk. It's going to change just the way the mechanics work. Instead of always having something where a character is on a flat surface, think about, or is it something on a slope? Are they on something that is slippery or sticky or whatever it is? To me, this is something that's underused and shot, especially by students. So I highly recommend you think about the surface properties and how that influences your character, especially the body mechanics. This was a cool moment. It's something that I bring up a lot in some of those acting analysis clips is that if you have lip sync and you have two characters, the other character doesn't have to be clearly visible. Now, this character at one point, we switch over and focus is on her, but it's very blurry. So you have a lot of freedom in terms of lip sync for animation. And it's all about her listening and reacting. And there's a lot in there as she gets ready. You can see this character already spoke to her offscreen. She comes into the scene and I love this. This is one of the main things why I'm bringing this up here. As she's about to start, she has that look over. As you patient with the head turn and the mouth opening, but then she goes back and then she starts talking. It's a little things like that that I love in performances where it's not just an action and then you got your lip sync and then you have your animation that just matches the lip sync. So to me, it's always to think about before your character starts talking, what could you do before that? Is it acknowledging the character, the environment? Is there some other thought process that goes on and actually continues on? And she says all that stuff. You see the reply, you see, you hear and kind of see the replies. And what I love is her reactions in that. You can see that there's something that's very emotional. She has to kind of, she kind of breaks contact from she's really invested in and looking at this year kind of long memories there. But you can see that reaction and then she kind of collects herself and she has the dissipation of no, so tiny little headaches in there again. Just a little bit, a little bit as this character is talking, half sign in the shadow again, less to animate. And then she goes, no, she has a bigger move of or bigger, not an outburst, but no. And then, you know, she explains her position there. But again, to me, it's a really cool setup of we constantly are focused on this character. And even though you have lip sync with two characters, you don't really have to worry from an animation point of view how much you have to animate. But again, this is very freeing in terms of only half is visible and blurry. So it's all about this character talking, but also reacting. And that's what I love about this is that you can see the thought process and the emotional reaction to what she's listening to. So think about that when you have a two character dialogue, you don't always have to have two characters visible with the lip sync on both. It's sometimes also interesting to just show one character listening and reacting and then doing the actual lip sync like it is happening right there. This one is more about something that is frequently not really, I wouldn't say not done correctly, because it really depends on the setup. But it's something about outside influences. And it's, for instance, this massive, massive ship coming down is probably fairly loud, but you also have all of this here, right? You got the wind. You can see here the engines and it sprays the waterway. When we cut to this, nothing is moving here. Cloth is not moving. Nothing is moving here. And that's the tricky thing was this is all CG and they are on a green screen. I would assume I haven't seen it behind the scenes, but there might be outdoors with the green screen or not. But the thing is it doesn't look like they have massive wind machines blowing this way to simulate what is going on there. And that's just it's a common thing in live action. So it is a lot, but that goes back to me in terms of outside influences. Same thing as this. When you go back to this, to me, the surface and what the character is walking on and how this is going to influence the character is to me just as important as anything that's going out there in terms of is there a ship that is really loud or something that's really hot? Is there just wind in general? Could there be, you know, like icy winds or rain going sideways? To me, that type of stuff. When you see this in the background, it influences the characters here. To me, it really feels like the character lives in this world. Everything that goes around this character, you know, again, in terms of physical things or wind or whatever is influencing this character, to me, it's just it just makes it more believable. And there are many examples where it's really well done. My my favorite example that I always show to my students is Lord of the Rings. When you can see the wind sing on the face, you can see the hair, how the arrows are influencing the hair. That to me is just a really nice influence on the character and really believe that that character is in there in that world as opposed to something like this. So this is not exactly I was, you know, acting in terms of performance like this. But to me, it's just if you are already doing something in CG and these are your characters, right, these are your rigs and you have full control of the scene, then you might as well do something where imagine something lands on the side and maybe it sprays water and they can wince a little bit, maybe turn the heads away a little bit or something gets really loud. Again, they would influence here in the winds on this side or something opens up again. I'm it's very visible when it's on one side. But imagine something lands here and it opens up the door and something is really warm, which actually brings me to another point. If you take a look at doing, for instance, right, when you have this opening, I know there's winds that's already done and they're slightly squinty because it's very bright. But imagine the heat of that planet and you can see him. He doesn't really have any reaction. It's more about the elements, right? You got the spice, you got the sand and everything. Imagine if you have the crazy heat of this planet and this opens up. That's the wave, the heat wave that comes in. Not to say that there's a lot of air conditioning there. Who knows, right? But there's still a massive difference between being in there and this huge heat wave. So I would have loved to see just a bit more in there in terms of, whoa, this is really hot. Again, they got to be regal and they can't be out of control, but a little bit of something, at least in Paul, who's really not used to this. So a reaction like this. And I know this is not the first shop when it opens, but something like that really doesn't tell me anything. And I saw a clip where they were talking about the sweat. Like this is really hot and he doesn't really sweat. This, you know, any type of sweat forming here is only when he's in agony and is in pain. Sure, why not? But still, I mean, it's really hot there. He's now used to this. A little bit of sweat in there would be great. Anyway, definitely going off on a tangent there, but it's just something that I'm so picky about and it just bugs me to know it just because it's not that difficult to do to just think about the environment where the character is in and then set this up in terms of either when machines or heat, I say this is it's not hard to do. I'm sure it's costly and time consuming. And there's also a directorial choice, all that stuff. But I want to bring this back to your scene. So whatever you are animating, wherever you place your character, think about where they are. Are they there for the first time? Yes or no? That's always my big, big question. That's going to influence your movements, your acting choices, your thought process, but also the environment. Is that character exposed to that environment for the first time? Yes or no? And how is that going to inform the performance, the acting and you have control over all of this? And just to me, it's not just dimensions to be picky, but to me, this opens up a whole new world and layers of performance choices and influences that make your shot more interesting and more original than just your standard character that's in a room or an empty room where nothing is influencing the character at all. And the character knows everything about the whole scene. That's a whole different brand. Maybe that should be an FNA about this. Let's go back to the last clip. And this clip is kind of also part of that. I guess that's the whole theme about this. He tells her, OK, come on, sit down. And there's someone next to her. This is the setup where she's here, but there's also someone here. And what I like about this, again, is something that's somewhat underused in movies, TV shows, especially for student work, is that he says, come on, sit down and she can't believe that, oh, that's so cool. And she looks over to the other guy for approval or in terms of, oh, is this really true? Can I really sit down there? She's so excited and she wants to almost share the excitement. But to me, that look over and, you know, before we start the sequence, we know that he is here. But that look over opens up the shot. There's a lot of times when students do their shots, do you have a character here? And that's all they think about is what is going on within this frame. Nothing else that's outside of this frame is either important or is is influencing the character or is something that would drive the character to performances where they would acknowledge anything that's outside the frame. And I love this. I love that she goes, oh, that's so great. Oh, I'm going to sit down. That's awesome. I can't believe this. And acknowledges that this guy is offscreen. And this, I guess this is the theme, is just the outside influence or acknowledgement that there's something going on outside of the character, be it through sound, something in terms of wind, another, as we saw, the ship that might influence elements that might in turn influence the character, but also characters that are there offscreen. You might have an establishing shot where characters there with other people. And then your actual shot is all kind of framed like this YouTube clip here. But you can still have moments where the character says something and has a quick look for either approval or they heard something. There's maybe an outside line and you don't have to cut and show that a character talking, but you can have the character acknowledges with the look and listening and then deliver the next line and so on. To me, this is just the big factor that's that's underused. Just making sure that your character is aware of the environment, the outside environment and being aware of what's going on outside of the frame. And I think, again, as a student, if you do this, it just adds that extra layer to performance, to attention to detail and just kind of takes it out of that student realm and more into a cinematic performance where the character is alive within the world you created. Now, speaking of creating worlds, if you feel like, yeah, that's kind of cool. And I want to create worlds and characters and you want me to help you to make your shots even more awesome. You know what this is about is about my workshops. I have workshops you can sign up at any time, link in the description with all information you can start whenever you want. Again, this is all that all the detail stuff is in there, but you know, I have to pitch my workshop and speaking of pitching, I'm going to pitch my channel again. So since we're at the end of the clip, maybe by now you like this. You don't want to miss any future uploads. Feel free to hit subscribe and hit the bell button so you don't miss any of those uploads. And that is that from me. Thank you for watching till the very end. And that's it. I will see you in my next upload.