WIP Update #5: Using video reference (Patreon)

Welcome to the first of these updates that's more of a tutorial, or at least a bit of a write up on my process! Today I'm covering video reference, since it's a big part of the fluttershy animation that won the last poll - don't worry, shape key dynamics are coming soon! It just makes sense to do these when I have a good example to go over.

I mainly want to cover video reference since I think a lot of people see it as "cheating" and avoid it. In reality quite the opposite is true - most professional studios you're not allowed to animate anything without reference. The most common note you'll get on a shot in any hollywood film is "stick to the reference". If you're not using reference, doing it properly could improve your work tenfold!

Do I use reference all the time then? No. Good reference can be hard to find, and depending on what quality of animation you're shooting for it isn't always neccessary. A big VFX studio will insist you use reference for even very simple movements only because everything has to be perfect in a blockbuster movie - I'm not making a marvel-size movie here, as much as I'd like to.

As you can see in the gif the stage I'm showing here is less developed than usual - there's some clipping here and there, no facial animation and none of that classic melvelvin skin interaction. Don't worry, that's coming ;) It's also feeling quite fast at the moment, I'm considering slowing it down a bit. The focus here is on the body mechanics, how it matches up with the reference, and where it differs, which you can see in the playblasts linked at the end. Note how I've played with the rhythm but kept a lot of the main beats, and most of the little details are there in my version but usually tweaked in some way. You can also see that the proportion of the actors in the reference and the characters don't match: big mac is insanely hung, so I had to adjust the pose a lot to make things fit, and of course they have hooves which makes some of the leg movements completely different.

There are three things you need to get right when using reference - you need to recognize good reference, you need to know how closely you should be following it, and you need to know how to follow it accurately.

So, what's good reference? First, it needs to be as ideal as possible an example of the motion you're trying to animate: that rules out most "adult entertainment" for our purposes. Let's face it, most adult performers are just robotically going through the motions of the same five positions. Garbage in, garbage out. There are only a handful of adult performers who really know how to move their bodies well, so make sure to find something really good. Then, the action needs to be clear. A lot of adult films are shot too close, or cut around in awkward ways right when you need to see how she's actually moving her hips. No good. You want a clear continuous shot that's got most of the actors bodies clearly visible. Third, you need to be on the look out for really unique moments and actions that can elevate your animation - using a peice of reference with real soul can make a good animation great. Ghibli movies are really good examples of that.

How closely should you copy your reference? Well, usually not exactly. The term for copying reference exactly is "roto-animation" and it's a very different craft, only appropriate in some very specific circumstances (and often soul-destroyingly boring, ask me how I know). However, it can be very useful to know how to rotoanimate so you can always be sure that you're only deviating from the reference intentionally.  At the other end of the spectrum is animating from imagination or trying to recreate a gif you saw on discord one time, didn't save and can't find now. Generally you want to be somewhere in the middle, extracting all the interesting and naturalistic body mechanics or facial performance, but fudging things here and there to realize your vision and make sure things work with your characters. Most of the artistry here is knowing when to deviate from the reference and how.

The key skill in using reference is the fundamentals of body mechanics. You need to be able to analyse the weight and shape of the subject, understand where they actually are in 3D space and what's going on in their joints. If the camera is moving, you have to compensate for that: I usually do a rough matchmove job on a separate camera, just four or five keys to let me sanity check my posing by directly superimposing it on the footage. When copying the pose you generally want to focus on the core first, then dial in the limbs - bear in mind it's a process, and having to go back and forth is natural.  It's crucial that you understand when a particular motion actually hits its extremes and where to place your key poses, otherwise you're going to be making life much harder for yourself. Remember, you're not copying, you're reconstructing, using the reference as a guide: you don't get anything for free!

Apologies for the lack of visual accompaniment to this one, it's quite conceptual and I don't want to risk falling foul of patreon's policies by actually showing the reference in the post itself. you can find the playblast with the burnin and everything here. Whew. That was a lot of  words, hope it was helpful, or at least interesting!