DreamWorks animator and Animation Mentor alum Nicholas De Lotto explains how to take a shot from floaty blocking to something entertaining and appealing, by pushing timing and posing beyond what reference alone gives you. Using a simple jump over a car as his example, he walks through his process for scaling keys, adjusting spacing, and knowing how far is too far.
Watch the full video above.
About Nicholas De Lotto
Nicholas De Lotto is an Animator at DreamWorks Animation. He started his animation journey in 2018 by attending Animation Mentor’s Character Animation Program and then started as an intern at Pixar where worked on Lightyear, Elemental, Inside Out 2, Elio and Toy Story 5. He has also worked on a few game titles, including Fortnite.
What “Pushing” Really Means
At its core, pushing your animation means changing timing and posing. When you first block a shot from video reference, it tends to look floaty and unfinished, and that is normal. Reference gets the information into your shot, but it is your job afterward to shape that information into something with style and energy, whatever style the shot calls for.
Picking a Target Style
Before pushing a shot, De Lotto recommends deciding what kind of animation you are pushing toward. He breaks it into three rough categories: fully cartoony work like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or Hotel Transylvania, with held poses and fast transitions; pushed realism, closer to a Pixar approach, where body mechanics stay grounded but certain moments snap and pop; and fully realistic animation like How to Train Your Dragon, where poses are rarely held and movement stays continuous. Even realistic animation still needs to be pushed, just more subtly. Watching films in your target style before you start, frame by frame if needed, gives you a reference point for how far to push spacing and timing.
Letting Go of the Fear
One of the biggest hurdles De Lotto points to is fear of moving keys too far. As a student, he says he would nudge one or two keys and call it good, rather than really committing to a change. His advice is to push further than feels comfortable, since you can always scale back or undo. He calls the unexpected discoveries that come from this “happy accidents,” moments where changing the timing on one part of a shot suggests a new idea somewhere else, like adding overlap on an arm after speeding up a pose change.
Knowing When You’ve Gone Too Far
A common note from mentors is to keep pushing a pose or timing choice further. De Lotto suggests it is easier to push past the point where something feels broken and then scale it back, rather than nudging a value up in small increments and getting the same note repeatedly. Once a shot starts to feel wrong, that is the signal to dial it back rather than keep pushing.
Why Feedback Matters
Watching the same shot repeatedly makes it easy to go blind to its problems. De Lotto recommends getting feedback regularly, not just from other animators but from anyone watching, since a fresh set of eyes can catch issues you have stopped noticing.
A Lesson From a Real Game Test
De Lotto shares a game test he did shortly after Animation Mentor, meant to be cartoony. Looking back, he says the animation came out closer to realistic than what the studio wanted. He attributes this to three things: not researching the target style closely enough beforehand, not getting feedback before submitting, and being too afraid to push the animation far enough, inching poses forward instead of committing to bigger changes.
Demo: Pushing a Jump Over a Car
To demonstrate, De Lotto works through a simple jump shot where a character named Jules needs to clear a car. He starts with a blocked version that technically clears the obstacle but reads as flat and even, without any sense of life. From there he adjusts timing by scaling groups of keys, particularly around the takeoff and landing, to sharpen the spacing and add hang time at the peak of the jump. He also uses a selection and offset tool to adjust the character’s pose more broadly, pushing the body into a more dynamic, athletic shape rather than a neutral one. Throughout the process, he leans on AnimBot for tweening between keys, calling it a tool worth getting familiar with if you don’t already use it. He works through this in stages, alternating between breaking down the smooth curves he already has and rebuilding them with sharper, more deliberate choices, rather than trying to preserve everything from the first pass.
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