 Welcome back to the F&A and today I'm going to talk about reference and planning. Depending where you live, it's almost time to go back to school. You might already be in school, you might be in the middle of the semester and starting a new shot. Either way, before you start a shot, you have to really concentrate on planning and shooting reference or doing thumbnails, whatever your process is, but have a plan before you start a shot. So I shot a couple of silly reference clips and go over what to use and what not to do, kind of do's and don'ts about reference and planning. But before I do, hi, my name is JD. If you just came upon this channel, I do lectures like these, I do animation analysis clips, I do acting analysis clips, re-reviews, product reviews, news, all kinds of things. Feel free to browse around and hit subscribe and that L button. Well, let's get back to reference. So before you start a shot, you got to have a plan. You can't just open up your animation software and dive in and think it's going to be okay. I mean, it might be okay, but it's just going to be slower. My experience is just always going to take longer. And whenever I have a very clear plan, I can animate faster. It's like when you have a shot and then your software crashes and you lose your work and you got to do it again. Super annoying. But have you noticed, at least for me, I'm faster when I do it again. Why? Because I know exactly what I want to do when you just go through the step and the process to me at least is much faster. So if you take time to plan your shot through thumbnails or reference or acting things out, you're going to be fast as well because you know exactly what to do. You went through all the possibilities and motions and things you can use. It's just going to be blindly animating in your scene. So let me go over my silly reference clips that I shot. I'm going to show it off on the Wacom one. Disclaimer, it's a sponsored post. And if you're interested in it, I did a review about it. This unboxing kind of an overview of the features. It's actually very cool. Let's switch over to that. So here's a clip that I shot this morning and in my office. And you can see me walking in. Now I'm going to go through some of the dos and don'ts of what to do. What's already not good is this setup. Lots of busy stuff. You have things kind of hiding my feet. The framing here, you can see this. You can't see my feet. All that stuff is way too busy. It's dark over dark. This is not a good idea. So as you shoot reference, make sure that the camera is really framing everything correctly and everything is visible. So if you want to look at how do my feet fall, how's the foot contact, you got to see the feet. Now I did a clip about shooting reference. You can look at that. I'll put it in the description as well. That goes about adjusting your cameras, making sure that whatever you shoot replicates the scene that you want to animate. That way it's easy to look at your mechanics and your angles and your posing because it's the same as your actual shot. But let's give back to this. So let's pretend everything is clean. The background is clean. I can see everything. What would I do? So there are a couple things. Hey, you can look at elements in terms of posing. So as I turn, you can see this foot is turning around here and I do my turnaround before I actually sit down. So you can look at foot posing. You can look at how far are my arms swinging. When I turn around, what is the pose before I sit down? It might bend over like this with the fingers spread out and then your hands on your thighs to sit down. How far, I don't know why I did this. How far do I go down? Maybe you're really tired before you sit down. How far do I go in terms of balance? You can see I'm balanced here, the center of gravity is still here, until here where I can't let go. Bam! And then I go back onto the chair. So I will look at those elements. Posing when do I change the balance or proper direction. When I sit down, you can see how much the chair is moving. You can see the compression right there. That side is moving. Look at the armrest. When I go back, I touch this here. All that stuff is moving. Now when I go back up, you can see this again. I'm going back here, hand on the armrest, shoulders going up. And as I go up here, the pressure on the hand and on the armrest, look at this. A lot of pushing here. All that stuff is going down. So if you're animating a prop, if you're animating a chair, swiveling. If I turn this around, you have something like this here. So as this turns, how are the wheels turning? And again, you can't see this here. This is bad. So when I shoot reference, I look at this. I'm not exactly going, all right, let's go frame by frame. All right, well, the head is here, the head is here, the head is here, the head is here. This would be super boring. And also, it wouldn't look good. I mean, you would replicate real life and this might work for your photo reel clip where you have to do this. It depends on the style. But I'm talking about student work where you're going to practice in more cartoony aspects and stylization and just exaggeration. So when you shoot reference like this, I would look at extremes, golden poses, line of actions, what are the big elements that you want to keep when you animate your shot? So for me, it would be something where, okay, I'm going to look at this is how I walk. This is the pose. This is the turn. How long does it take? What are my feet doing here as I turn around where maybe, okay, I'll take a step here. But then I'm doing an adjustment here and I'm going to do one more adjustment there. And then I'm stable before I sit. Like I said, this is the moment where, okay, this is the balance pose and bam, now I go back here. Now as you go forward and you stand up, same thing. I'm not really looking at every single detail of the fingers, what they're doing. Maybe there's too much shuffling here in the feet, but I'm looking at that is the pose that I have here. As I get up here, I want points. Am I actually getting up? So when I get up, I'm looking at broader elements. So if I'm up like this, right, you can see this is how far back I am with the root. Technically, leg here, root here, that I'm still off balance. I would still fall back. So you can see that the arm is adding support. So if I would fall back, well, this arm is here to push down and keep the balance. So that is the pose I want to keep. I want to look at what is going on. Okay, I'm this far back, but this is really important. Again, if you're going for prop animation, as my hand is pushing down, you can see how far down the arm rest is going. So I would look at certain elements like this. This is the pose here. So that will be one, you can take notes. Okay, I'm going to look at that. Where do I look? How is my hand pose? How are the fingers? How are the feet? That's pose one. Now I want to go forward. Okay, maybe up until here when I get up. That's important. So that's the body here. These are my legs. But that is what the arm is doing. This is super important for balance. Okay, this is pose number two. Then at what point am I balance? Maybe at this point? This is important to me because as I'm pushing up, I am also now lifting my leg up here. So maybe that could be one pose. But before that, you look at this is the moment here before the foot goes up. This would be the stance, the in between breakdown before I turn to grab this. This could be important to me, right? Where this is the balance pose, but this foot is actually off the ground. And that's the balance pose here as I'm grabbing the backside of the chair. You can also look at moments like this when I grab this. I'm not really interested in the frame by frame aspect of what are the fingers doing? Again, I don't want to replicate real life. But I want to look at what is the general hand pose as I'm turning the chair around. You can see there's a finger here, here. It's not that much. This tells me how heavy the chair is. So when I shoot reference, that's what I'm looking out for. I'm looking at general posing, balance, maybe complicated mechanics. But as I'm turning a chair, that is an important clue of the weight of the chair. If it's really heavy, I would grip it with both hands and turn it like that versus now I'm just doing this and turning this around. That to me is a clue of weight and a prop interaction. So that's what I mean with planning. I want to look at what is my body doing? What are the body mechanics elements? How our pose is changing? How is the balance? But also sometimes details like proper interaction of how is my hand, how am I turning when I move the chair around? All that stuff is important before you start the shot. Now, but you don't have to shoot it just like this. So when I open another scene here, you can see that, okay, well, I have posters back here. I'm taking them down and you can see the posters are down here. So that to me is a better setup, because now I have a clean view. You have negative space here. You can clearly see what is going on in terms of the silhouette. What this is not good is legs, right? So as I'm going through here, you can see I'm shifting my weight here a little bit. I don't really see what my hips are doing. I definitely don't see what my legs are doing. So if you shoot something like this, this is purely for that. So again, make sure that whatever you film, the framing is focusing on what you need to study. So to go a step further, if I'm doing something like this, and I'm doing a scratch in my ear, my face is changing here. I do something like that where something's happening here doing this. This again might not be the right framing. You should probably frame it like this to really study the details. Unless of course, this is the framing of the camera that you're using in your animation scene. Then it's all appropriate. You're not going to focus on all the details anyway. So with reference, you have one way of I'm filming exactly the right angle of what I'm animating. This replicates my animation render camera. But you can also shoot reference where you just do close ups of eyes and fingers because you want to study the details of that doesn't mean that's the actual render camera, but you can still shoot reference like this. So you can do something like this. This might not be like I said the angle, but I want to look at, okay, well, if I do darts, what's happening here? If I look around, how much of the skin is moving here? If your rig has all the controls here, and you can all the deformations that you need for your shot, I want to study this. I want to know how much does this go in before I blink. Maybe my eyeball is moving while my eyes are closed. Well, there's the information then on the skin here, then I look over there. How much is the eyeball actually moving? How much of the skin is moving? What happens when I do this? Well, you have skin that pushes here. You have potentially relaxation in the mouth here. If you do a turn and I blink here and then stop, how much is relaxing? It feels like this is only moving. This is not moving. Nothing's moving here. So it's okay to shoot moments like this up close. Again, this might not be the angle. You might actually frame this even closer in your scene, maybe further out. It doesn't matter, but it's okay to shoot reference of separate elements just for you to know what is going on. And the same goes for fingers. So as I shot this, let me play through this interaction with the pen moving it. You can see how the hand is moving. Maybe I'm interested in this. What is the relationship of the finger here when I'm holding this pen? How much of the finger is going up? And then as I turn around, what is moving first? All right. Well, the thumb is moving first here. Now, if I put the pen down here, you can see this here, let's say I want to put it down, I'm going to grab it, right? So maybe that is something you want to know. All those little adjustments that I did, maybe here with this finger going up, grabbing it again, and letting go. And then as I let go, you can see how much of that pen is moving because you got the pressure between these two fingers and you let go and then that's it. Now, same thing when I grab it again, you look at more exaggerated finger poses for a nice cleaning silhouette, even though that is not exactly the best silhouette here, but you can see this finger here is moving the pen first. And you can see how much of this pen is moving. Well, that tells me how light the pen is. So the thumb is moving this in. This is now gripping it for a better hold. You can see as I do this, it's probably pushes the tip down this way, which means this is moving over this way. And then you grab it and you pick it up. And that is the change that you have here in the fingers to grab the pen like this. Again, you're framing in your shot might be actually you see the arm is a part of the shoulder, but you just want to know, okay, what am I really doing with the fingers? And also, when you shoot all of this, that doesn't mean you have to shoot this at the very beginning. You can shoot reference, you can plan things out, animate and realize I need more detail, then go back in and shoot new reference. You might be even this you did your overall reference sake of the camera replicating your animation camera, but now you need to go back in and shoot more detail because you are in the polish phase where you need to know about the eyes, fingers or anything that's really more important to you in terms of the details that might not be up close in your actual framing. But you want to put in that extra love in your polish animation. Now, if you're uncomfortable shooting reference like this, maybe you have a reference buddy, someone you can direct and you can tell what to do, make it slower, make it faster, more intense. And if you don't have a reference buddy, at least act it out. I mean, if you're not comfortable filming things, at least act things out so you know how it feels. It gives you just a better impression of Oh, yeah, when I lean over and I do this, this feels different here. Oh, maybe my shoulder goes up, at least do that kind of planning. Ideally, you would shoot reference, draw some thumbnails, maybe you pick a frame you really like, and then your thumbnail, you push that pose. Because in your reference that you acted out, it might just not be pushed enough, but it gives you a general idea what you're doing. So take that frame, take some notes, push that in your thumbnail and apply that to your scene. Whatever you do, you're just going to have a plan. It's going to be so much easier to once you actually start animating. And it's okay to take a day two or three planning and doing nothing, right? If someone sees you not animating, you're thinking about the mechanics, the shot, the acting choices. It's just important to really know what you're going to do. And it's not a cheat. It's a really huge misconception that using reference is cheating. It's not you want to know how things move. It doesn't mean you have to replicate the reference and copy it, but it gives you a better idea of how you are moving, especially between complicated motions, how an animal is moving. You can't just know every animal look emotion, how those animals move. You got to look at reference and study it to incorporate that and then you stylize it, caricature it to make it work for your style and your scene and your shot ideas. But if you're one of the animators who is now starting school in a week or two and you're starting a new shot, really think about that. Have a clear idea of what you want to do and then plan it out either through reference, just thumb nailing without reference, whatever your process is, but have a clear idea before you start your shot. Can't repeat this enough. Speaking of repetition, you know what I repeat at the end of every clip. If you feel like this was helpful and you want me to help you with your shots, I have workshops you can sign up at any time, link in the description with all the information. Speaking of information, if you feel like this is good info and you want to miss anything, click the subscribe and hit that bell button because I do upload every day except weekends. And if you subscribe, you don't miss anything. And that's it from me. If you're still watching this, thank you for your patience and I will see you in my next clip.