 Welcome back to the FNA and today I want to expand on the how to shoot reference playlist with two surefire tips that will improve your reference game. I don't think I was able to incorporate more buzzwords or keywords in that intro, but today I do want to talk about two things that have helped me tremendously when I shoot reference and it was because I wanted to animate a shot at home and I was just not getting it right. It did not work at all, so I tricked myself into a specific performance and that's what I want to talk about today. But before I do, hi my name is JD and I do animation lectures like these. I do animation analysis clips, I do acting analysis clips, I do rig reviews, product reviews, it is the pitch at the beginning. I do a bunch of stuff on this channel so check it out, look around if you like it, subscribe and if you don't that's also okay maybe I'll convince you later but that's that for the pitch let's get to the reference. So what happened? I had to animate the shot for myself where I was running into into the frame and I had to look for something and one of the common mistakes in terms of not just reference but in general when a student animates, not just a student I do this myself. So it's probably more like a general thing is that you need to give your character enough time to process things. By that I mean when your character is in the scene and it's going to be a pantomime, it's going to be ellipsic as well. You have to make sure the thought process is there. You can't rush the character through the scene, through the objective, through whatever they have to go through. So let's say the character is seeing something, which for example I want to show later, you have to give the character time to process that information, react to that and then make choices based on whatever is going on that what they're seeing and what they're reacting to. That goes back to characters actually listening. So I have when you have ellipsing so that if two characters, you can just have one character is wait, wait, wait, and then let's go and deliver. They should be listening to the other character and reacting to scoopy physically to scoopy again, whatever ways, but you want to make sure that your reactions and that you're acting in general should be truthful and as if it was for the first time. And that's the key thing. So as an animator, you will do things over and over. You will analyze things frame by frame and you're going to get very familiar either with the action, with the ellipsing, you're going to loop that audio over and over and over. So it's tricky to get a performance that is fresh, that is new, that is something where you are reacting to something for the first time. So I was trying to run into the scene and look for something and I caught myself going basically through the motion. It was just kind of looking in, looking around and I'm blending in that example. It was just kind of walking into the shot and just looking around and that was it. It just didn't work. It was just, it was bad, it was just bad all the time. So what I did was I, so silly, but it has really helped me, took a piece of paper and I wrote something down that I had to read. So when I got into the scene and looked at the piece of paper, I was reading this and then I moved on to something else. So basically I was looking for something and I have to look into different areas of the room that I was running into. But if you just kind of pretend you will kind of look and look and look and it's not that pause where you actually do look, process this side yes or no and then go somewhere else. So I was tricking myself by writing something down on the piece of paper. So something short, obviously your reaction and your reading will be short. Write something down longer and then you're going to read this for a longer period of time and then you're going to move over. So basically it's you're forcing yourself to read, process, react and go somewhere else. You're not rushing through the motion. Now if you don't want to do that, you can also just take an object that you're trying to find and tell someone to hide it somewhere in the room. Obviously if you have to come in and you have to act this way, they got to hide it somewhere here and up back there. But if you come in and you don't know where that object is, you're going to actually spend the time looking, reacting, seeing it and then moving on to your next acting point. But at least it's more honest because you are trying to see it, you're trying to find it and it's not this kind of rehearse or over rehearse where you kind of just kind of move around. It doesn't have that eye lock and darting and processing and moving over to something else. So whatever you're doing, if you're realizing that this is just kind of stale and I'm doing this over and over and over, find ways to trick yourself. For me it was writing something down on a piece of paper, putting it somewhere and so it forces me to take the time to read and then to move over or hiding something in the room where I don't know where it is. Now your shot might not be physical where you have to look around, it could be something else. But it's that idea of maybe I will ask someone to do something or I will do something that would trick myself into taking enough time for the character to reprocess or do whatever. Because again you don't want your character to rush through things because they don't look alive. They don't have that amount of time it takes to see information, process it and then react. And I think that plus the combination of other things that I talked about like you don't want to pretend, it's a big thing in reference where you don't want to pretend to lift something light, you don't want to pretend to shout but then you're not. It's like when you have lip-sync and someone's yelling or you're acting like this and you don't have that energy of yelling that reference is not going to work and that's why you're shooting reference because you want to study it to see how your body moves and so on. So I think if you have a list of those type of things plus tricking yourself I think it's really going to improve the way you shoot reference, the way you act in front of the camera and all the information you get from that and all that combined you can put that into your shot and make it so much better. Because ultimately you want your performance to be honest, you want it to be true, you don't want it to be rehearsed. So it's something fresh and born out of the moment if possible. Which is tricky if I animate this because we're not really the in-the-moment type people because we are frame by frame analyzing how long does it take to close the eye for a blink. So it's kind of this push and pull between you want to be spontaneous and do something quick and new and fresh and original while laboring over it frame by frame over and over and over. But that might just be me. I like to just shoot reference where it's something more in terms of something original in terms of a choice, a move or just a certain gesture or something that's character-based that works within the scene, the context and just who that character is. And I'm less about the posing and acting things out in front of the camera so that my silhouette is okay. I prefer to do all that later on. So when I shoot the reference, it's the basic construct of an original performance. That sounds super arrogant. I know it's not always, I'm not that good. But that's the goal, that's the hope that it will have that construct in terms of originality. And then later on I go and I push the poses, push the silhouette and all that stuff. Unless it's really cold forward and it's something very specific that I want to shoot. Obviously the way you shoot reference will vary depending on what you need and then and your style and so on and so on. I'm curious what you think. Let me know in the comments. Maybe you're doing the same thing or maybe you did that, post something else on top of that. But tricking myself is the way to go forward. Now I don't want to trick you into my workshop but if you feel like what I said is helpful, if you think that's cool, I want to try that and you want me to help you and make your shots even more awesome. I have workshop, it's the page at the end that you can sign up at anytime. Link in the description with all the information. And that is that for today's clip. Speaking of day to day time, thank you for watching this clip until the very end. I appreciate your patience as always that you do so and that's that. Thank you. And if that was helpful, maybe you want to subscribe and don't miss any of my uploads. And if not, that's also okay. Maybe we'll keep watching at a later time. But that's it from me. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in another FNA.