 Welcome back to F&A and today I'm going to talk about what you should animate because as you start being an animator you don't know what to do. Like where should I start? Bouncing balls, body mechanics, like what's a good list of exercises and that's what the clip is about today. Kind of a bummer with that framing. I wanted to go back so I could show you the awesome Hilda. I should watch Hilda. That's great. Anyway, so today I want to give you a list of exercises that you can go through so that you can build on top of first easy quote unquote exercise and make it more and more complex and combine certain areas and will hopefully serve as a guide as you start in your animation career because you might be not at a school, you might not be able to take workshops and you get to work on your own but you just need a guide because when you just can do anything you don't know where to start it's almost like you have too many choices. But before I continue, hi my name is JD. If you're new to this channel I do animation lectures like these, I do animation analysis clips, acting analysis clips, I do review reviews, proc reviews, I do a bunch of stuff on the channel. This is the pitch at the beginning, like and subscribe, you know how this goes. It's YouTube but if you do like it it helps my channel grow if you subscribe and if not maybe you'll do it later I don't know but that is the pitch let's get to your exercise. So the classic exercise that everybody should be doing don't skip on this it's the bouncing ball. I know I know it might sound boring but I'm going to do a clip in the future where I can show you how the bouncing ball is everywhere it's you really cannot skip that exercise. Now to the bouncing ball there are a couple things you can do first you can do a bouncing ball that's pure physics then you can make it a bit more complicated than add a tail still all physics but you can learn about drag and overlap and it's going to be just one step above once you have that and you go for maybe a static up and down to a lift to right you can also add an obstacle course still all physics driven but it's going to bounce around hit certain objects and just make it more complicated in terms of interactions now once you have all of that you can add squash and stretch but still in terms of just somewhat physics it just falls and does things but you can add some squash and stretch once you have that now you can add character so your ball is alive and it's just not bouncing around it is deciding where to go reacting to things and so on and it's a great example that I always love that has everything combined and it goes through a heavy ball a little ball the ball with the tail and it has acting it just there's a bunch of stuff in there and it's just one of my favorite exercises that shows that you can take a bouncing ball and really do a lot with it and tell a little story and it goes through so many principles and you should be able to do something like that before you move on to characters as in like biped or creatures especially it doesn't just have to be a bouncing ball in terms of an object you can go with the cube uh some rigs out there that have like a juice carton with a little straw because you can also continue to other objects that are technically not alive it opens up the whole area of like anything that is just an object give this character and make it think and make it come alive but at one point you're going to transition to humans another classic example would be a pendulum for instance so there's just different things in terms of mechanics in terms of overlap and just things that you can add on top of the basic bouncing ball or just objects so you can learn familiar techniques and just have things break it has joints and stuff like that but at one point you're going to transition to humans now a classic thing is to go from bouncing balls and all those extra things to then a walk cycle but walk cycles despite being short technically in terms of the frame range they're hard to do walks are really hard so I personally I would recommend that you go from bouncing balls and objects and all that stuff to humans but body mechanics and keep it a bit simpler so since you've done a bouncing ball a classic thing to do is a jump so a jump with the human could be something now you can have a character jump in place jump from A to B jump over cliff jump onto something higher jump to something lower many things you can also do a fall back could start high and just fall down and you're getting into some more complex mechanics of course acting things that will also help so you can do a stumble go character fainting so anything where a character falls and it's still somewhat physics driven if you notice that little trend so it's not super character driven just yet but it's more mechanics of multiple objects falling on top of each other and overlapping and stuff like that then another one that I love that I give to my students all the time is the sit down assignment so sitting down onto a chair but also getting out of a chair so sitting down and getting out it's just a classic example because you have weight and you can also start adding character just because of how you sit down are you tired or happy exhausted but more about that later want to make it more complicated you can walk up the stairs or walk down the stairs or a ladder like anything where it's a different mechanics of stepping or holding onto things again you can just expand that into many many more complicated versions of this exercise it could also be climbing over something that could be maybe a kid climbing onto a couch or a you know a human and adult size getting onto a rock like climbing onto it over things so it's not the cubes it's not a normal flat object that you have to hold on to but it's a bit more organic and just unevenly shaped which will then change your posing and adds a asymmetry just more complexity to your posing and your mechanics make it more complicated you can have a character swing right from a to b over something into water like in his example so you can start adding objects where maybe you step onto a ladder into the ladder swings over from like you know one place to another place so again you can think in terms of it's a variation of a previous assignment or previous exercise and mechanic and I'll build on top of that with more complex motion and complex objects and combine all of that now a classic exercise of course is a weight lift so lifting something pushing pulling and there could be something light something kind of somewhat medium heavy and something really heavy a weight assignment is just a classic thing you should definitely not skip that it's just like a bouncing ball it's like one of these classic assignments because it's difficult to portray weight so do not skip that one now if you want to do something where you can actually look at reference and maybe it's not you but some reference you find online you can pick any athletic activity right could be someone running sprinting jumping pole vaulting it could be soccer tennis do you combine a bunch of sports and then you still have all the principles like a basketball right you will have something where you have a throw with the mechanics body like arm moving that with the shoulder and the body but also jumping look at sports as a big inspiration for body mechanics and then for something we're actually driven you can go into fights so you have a lot of reference out there you can check for inspiration and just to see kind of how they do this and it gets very very complicated and really creative in terms of how they fight so that's again another extra level that you can add another thing that has helped me a lot in terms of just exercises and finding inspiration is to look at sets I'm a big fan of looking around and finding either CG sets or just checking online in terms of structures and building that in CG in a very simple way well for instance you have like this image of the stairs I found this a long time ago and to me it's like that would be really cool to run up or run down and speak of which has a great test for Klaus it has everything in terms of mechanics and changes of timing and just complicated moves it's just really cool and inspiring to see this so I would look at sets for sure in terms of inspiration in terms of oh I can have a character jump over this walk over there and so on and so on now your movements don't always have to be big right so you have sports and fighting everything but you should also practice just gestures so it could be grabbing something could be a glass of water I have my ginormous jug of water here you can also start adding props and that would be a different thing about constraints I can do a different clip about that later but if it's a hat putting on a hat taking a hat off or being more intricate and you can put in a puzzle piece or taking certain smaller pieces apart that gets into more detailed finger animation or just opening and closing a door or being affected by a door again doesn't have to be full body could just be halfway but it's a different type of mechanic in different with handles or big things you have to grip so different types of doors again different types of shots or getting in and out of something doesn't have to be a chair so something more complicated like a car because you have to get out of that if hold on to things or it could be like a really tight airplane seat or you're in a bathtub it's something slippery so think about objects where maybe these surface properties are also adding a certain twister animation so it could be slippery sticky hot cold stuff like that now these are all technical things like body mechanics wise now you can take all of that and start adding emotional top of this so if you grab anything is it because you're in a hurry because you're excited because you're angry maybe you're tired so all of those exercises there you can add different kinds of emotional layers on top of that which goes into gear change right you can have a character to go from happy to sad from confused to you know not confused having an idea or being shocked so changes of an emotion or just a general change where you see thought process that is definitely important to practice and it's not just in the face this goes into pantomime so you don't use audio just yet but you're using full body body language for pantomime actions so anything that you just thought about in terms of mechanics jump grabbing something now put a little story on top of that with the character thinking and behaving and reacting and that's really just a silent body acting and the good thing is you could act that out so the bouncing ball you know yes you can find reference but all those object things are a bit trickier but now you're in the land of filming yourself or filming someone else as your as your acting buddy and start planning things out shooting reference and then now you have this whole world of pantomime and once you have all of that again this list is getting really long then you're getting into audio so now you start lip sync but I wouldn't go into like a 10 20 second long lip sync piece big short things couple seconds it could be just a yell even just a cough or someone laughing just short and then you get into a sentence or two and a bit longer then you got one character two characters a back and forth that could be yelling at each other could be something off-screen to react to so the lip sync world is huge I do have a clip about what to choose in terms of audio pieces because you don't want it to be offensive or something where you can't understand things or with heavy accents where you're where you just kind of confused and you're almost distracted from the animation so there's a couple guidelines in terms of what you want to choose if it's an exercise you know again that's what this is about it's a bit looser but once you go into the demo real department gotta be careful what you choose and then also think in terms of framing so your lip sync could be like this frame like that but also try something where it's a full body thing you won't see all the details but it's still important to be able to have a full body animation work with audio in that timing of it and once you have done all of these separate ones like I said before you can start combining things actions and emotions and pantomime and audio you can do something super complex so if you go back to sports let's say a tennis player loses the game screens in frustration so you have your audio in there and then breaks a racket so a lot of mechanics and weight and audio and after frustration falls on his knees and then starts walking on his knees towards the referee so it's not just a walk but it's walk on your knees different kind of mechanics you can have it knee fall and then crawl back on the knee then you can have him crawl to the referee and usually on like you know chairs and like higher up but they can hold on to things they can pull the referee down they can hold on to referee so you start having interactions either with props or with different character referee doesn't care so now you're just pantomime they don't say a word your player gets up frustrated walks away now you're getting into another walk and then as they walk away you can start adding camera animation so we pan with the frustrated player revealing the winner who's just standing in the background and the reporters are there fans are rushing towards you have no crowd animation and more contact and walks and you could add more sound to that where maybe the winner is saying something and you have fans shouting and on top of that you can start cutting it up into separate shots where it's a wide shot a close-up and so on and so on so as you can see you can take all these exercises make them so much more complex combine certain things so you will I mean again it goes into the whole thing of there are too many ideas but you can see how you can start small basic principles just the bouncing ball to something super complex now that is also just for humans that take all of that and go into the animal kingdom and now you want to animate creatures now again I have a series about creatures there so watch that as well but take all of this and think in terms of how does the creature move what is the creature's anatomy does it have wings or a tail is it small is it big how is it reacting to other creatures or creatures with humans the possibilities are endless but whatever you do do not skip the basics and keep the shots short I'm going through again different classes right now that I'm teaching and you can see despite the advice of keep it short some students stick with 10 15 20 seconds it's just too much it's too much to do you don't have enough time you might get into maybe a blocking plus pass and then after the next assignment you don't have enough time to polish things so really keep it short a couple seconds for just a gesture a move maybe three to five seconds because you want to go through the whole process and practice the whole aspect from beginning to final polish and if you want to see what the end result is of all this check out animation schools right animation mentor anim school anim squad they have their show reels of all their students have checked these out these are the top of the top students and that is your reference point of that's where you want to get to and then if you know where you want to work or you have your dream company look at that company's output so what is their portfolio what are they kind of movies or tv shows or whatever you have and all of that is serving as a guide again as your long-term goal but do not skip the exercises and in terms of ricks i have animation v face so check out that site you can go through i have all kinds of ricks from my beginner stuff to more advanced from creatures so anything that's out there there are paid ones they're free ones so that should also be a resource in terms of what kind of rig am i choosing and that's going to also inform the type of exercise because you got to make sure that you don't have a certain idea and then the rig doesn't work for that idea so this is kind of a back and forth in terms of testing the rig in terms of movement or your ideas and then getting to that exercise now as noted in the title this is part one why because exercises are different than a demoreal shop and i have a whole demoreal series again i've got a bunch of stuff but i still want to do a part two that's going to go specifically into demoreal exercise how you take that exercise and tweak it i talked about it before but it's worth mentioning other things on top of that so this goes into my demoreal playlist as well but it will be a part two to this clip and if you are starting out and you want a guide where i can help you go through exercises and critiquing you know what the pitch is my workshops if my workshops are exactly for that so if you need a guide you're starting out you need help you can sign up at any time i can suggest exercise i can see what you're doing already and i can critique that and exercises suggestions on top of that so link in the description all information you can sign up at any time you can start whenever you want my workshops are always open and speaking of time as always thanks for watching till the very end i hope you're still watching and if so thank you thank you for your patience and maybe i come in to you subscribe and if you do thank you hit that bell button so you won't miss any of my uploads and that is that i think for the whole clip so thank you again and hopefully i'll see you in my next upload