I have a super basic animation to share this week, and it helps illustrate a crucial animation concept: Contrast!

As you can see, this character reaction animation really just consists of two key poses. A hunched over pose and an upright pose. This two pose set-up is very similar to the head turn and head take animations I’ve done before. But unlike those animations, this reaction shot is of the character’s whole body. And because of this, the character’s pose and silhouette matters all the more!

This is where contrast comes into play. I’ve talked in past blog posts about the importance of clarity and readability in animation. It’s a form of communication and so you need to make sure the message is clear! In this motion I wanted to communicate a character’s emotional change. He starts nervous and anxious and then ends up being excited and confident. In order to make this as clear as possible to the viewer, I created two very different and contrasting key poses to represent each emotion.

The first pose has the character looking small, compressed, and rounded.

This contrasts nicely with the next pose, which has the character looking large, expanded, and a bit angular.

The nice thing about animation is that you can really exaggerate poses to make things clearer to the viewer. Feel free to leave subtly to the wind and really push your poses to the extreme. While I wouldn’t say I pushed these poses too far, I would say that this reaction is way more cartoony than what you’d typically see in real life. For the most part at least…

Regardless, this emphasis on contrast and clarity is something I always try to keep in mind when creating my key poses. And whether you’re creating cartoony or realistic animation, these concepts are always important! 

If you’d like to take a look a previous iterations of this animation, check out this SyncSketch link. Thanks for reading!

Carl Rig by CharacterRigs

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