This week, we're going to be covering

the importance of exaggeration, in animation,

when it comes to both the poses you use

and the performance your character gives.

Now, in animation, exaggeration can be utilized

on a few different levels.

In general, the exaggeration is,

or should be, used to accent

some sort of action, emotion,

or the idea that it's taking place on screen.

Now, this can come in the form of pushing

and exaggerating a pose,

or poses, during an animation,

to better communicate what is going on,

or altering your timing, in some way,

to place emphasis on a certain area of the animation

you want to have the viewer see,

or maybe just to exaggerate other principles,

such as squats and stretch, or follow through

to push the idea you're communicating

in the shot or the scene.

Now, what's important about this principle

is that it's only used as it's needed,

that it's not overdone, and that it's only applied

in a way that will accentuate

the action that is taking place,

because that helps to add a bit of a contrast

between some of the other emotions

that may be taking place, as well,

during that shot or that action.

For starters, let's go ahead and look

at some posing examples here,

and talk a bit about what I mean.

What you can see here is

we've got our character posed

and, from the base of it, we can tell

that he may be looking like he's getting ready

to, let's say, punch someone

and, for the sake of this example,

that's exactly what he would be doing.

Now, this pose, if you look at it how it reads,

it reads fairly well. You can see the clenched fist,

you can see he's got a stare,

which may be staring at a target that's, I'm assuming,

would be close to him, within punching range,

but the pose, it can definitely be pushed

and exaggerated to read just a bit better than this.

If we go ahead and scroll to the next frame here,

what we can see is we've got a much better pose,

a much better line of action on this character,

where there's much more wind-up here,

in a much more obvious sense

that he is about to swing

at whatever may be in front of him.

Now, one good way to test your poses,

inside Maya here, is if you hit the 7 key,

what this is going to do is this is going to basically

change it up so it's in lighting mode only,

so you're basically going to be able to see

the silhouette here of your character.

If we scrub back and forth,

we'll see that the character's line of action

is fairly boring here, in the first pose,

but, if I scrub to the second, it's quite apparent

that it's much more interesting and exaggerated

in this second pose here, so just keep this in mind

as you begin to block out your animation.

Let's go ahead and look at an example

of exaggeration in an actual performance.

If we go ahead and we play this animation,

what we're going to see is we've got this character

who's reacting to something that, maybe,

shows up off screen right here,

so I'm just going to go ahead and hit Play.

Let's play it through once or twice.

He looks, maybe, somewhat startled,

but the performance itself,

in the action that he's doing,

is pretty dull and it's not very exaggerated here.

He's reacting to it, but there's not really anything

particularly interesting or exaggerated

about the motion. It's just fairly plain.

If we go ahead and open this other example,

what we'll see is we're going to have a performance

that is much more exaggerated,

and a much more exaggerated response

than what we saw in the first animated example.

As you can see, the action itself is, like I said,

much more exaggerated,

and it's much more interesting than the basic

kind of step back, you know, what's going on here.

It's much more interesting to look at

than what we previously saw here.

When piecing together an animation,

just keep this principle in mind

when piecing together your poses

and both the performance

that you're creating with those poses.

A clever use, or a good use, of exaggeration

can really bring much more appeal and attention

to the animation you're actually creating.

That concludes this week's Tip and Tricks.

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