Planning for Animation

my thumbnails for my animation

Disney 9 old men said before
use half of your time planning, half of your time animate


Planning is very important in Animation
some people just skip this stage, just open Maya or others 3D software start animate
in the end you will got a lot of PROBLEMSSSS

use half of your time planning, half of your time animate
what is this mean ?
if you got 1 week to finish your shot
use 3-4 days for planning

if you got 1 day to finish your shot
use 4-5 hour for planning


What is planning, planning can divide to 4 part
-thumnails

a lot of PIXAR or big studio animator like to use this way for planning, just some quick sketches for your golden story poses, no need be perfect drawing, but you can understanding all the communication poses

-Pencil test

Dreamwork Animator Jason Ryan workflow, he using flip book draw all story-telling keys and adjust timing, once your finalize your pose and timing, export it as jpg seq, import in Maya, this save you a lot of time, my favorite planning workflow

Video Reference

Shooting video reference is very important, some animator can't draw, so they just shoot video ref as a guideline , how to use video ref correctly ? normally my way is open your video in quick time, scroll timeline frame by frame, if the feet got contact with ground consider 1 story telling poses, find out all your key poses in video ref, sketches it and transfer all the poses in 3D


X-sheet

this is the sheet given my director or supervisor, normally they already plan all the timing in sheet, as a animator you just follow their timing in X-sheet, nowadays some studio still using x-sheet for planning