A couple months ago I stumbled across a fantastic tutorial by animator Chester Sampson about his approach to a pose to pose workflow. In the video, he outlines a super streamlined way to start the blocking phase of an animation; Create golden poses and then use progressive spacing to create the breakdown poses between them. While I’ve used similar pose-to-pose workflows before (like with my Juice Box Heist animation), I’ve always had a bit of trouble figuring out the breakdown poses.

My go to move would usually be to create a single breakdown pose that’s roughly the mid point between the two golden poses. While that’s a good starting point, Sampson recommends creating TWO breakdown poses to start, having each be biased towards one golden pose. After creating those, THEN you create that mid point pose. Here’s an example:

“Pose A” and “Pose B” are my golden poses and I wanted to create a transition between them. So I created breakdowns 1 and 2, which each favor the golden poses that they’re closest to. Sampson also recommends picking parts of the character that lead the action, and parts of the character that follow behind. Here, the sword leads the action while the head and tail follow behind. Then I created the midpoint pose to transition between the two breakdowns. The next step after that would be to create “ease” poses, which basically follow the same process, but between the breakdown poses and their respective golden poses.

This whole workflow really helped me better understand progressive spacing. And having this spacing already set up during your blocking pass really sets you up for success when you start your splining; there’s a lot less you have to clean up! After watching Chester Sampson’s video, I really wanted to try this for myself. So here’s a little shot progression of an animation I created:

Here’s the final animation:

Learning about this method was a huge game-changer for me workflow-wise. I think it really helps make a lot of the complexity of the blocking stage a lot less overwhelming. So a huge thank you to Chester Sampson for sharing this workflow, it really helped me a lot!

Speaking of help, I also want to thank Thomas Wolfe, DeVante Knight, and TalkingSkunk for providing me with great feedback throughout this process. If you want to see earlier versions of this animation and the feedback I received, check out this Syncsketch link.

Thanks so much for reading!

Kaju Rig by Stefan Iverson

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