In this tutorial, Animation Mentor alumnus Nathaniel Seymour walks through staging a shot with two characters. The focus is on deciding which character the audience should be watching at each moment, and how to block key poses so the viewer’s eye moves between them naturally.
Meet Nathaniel Seymour
Nathaniel is a 2009 graduate of the Animation Mentor Character Animation Program, with credits spanning visualization and character animation for film, TV, VR, and music videos. His work includes Dune: Part 1, Godzilla vs. Kong, Pokémon Detective Pikachu, and Clifford the Big Red Dog.
The Shot and the Characters
The shot features two imps from the same rig, one scaled up into a big, bulky character named Rock and the other kept small as a quick little character named Twig. Nathaniel always pictured Rock as the bigger guy with longer arms, so he used the rig’s adjustability to scale him up, lengthen his arms and widen his hands and fingers.
The gag is simple. Rock thanks Twig for helping him find a great-smelling flower with a casual pat on the head, but his size and strength drive Twig into the ground like a railroad spike. While Twig is knocked out, Rock sniffs the flower, his allergies kick in, and his huge sneeze blows him back on top of Twig. Nothing is meant to be mean; Rock just doesn’t know any better.
Setting Up Stepped Keys for Blocking
Before posing, Nathaniel checks his animation preferences in Maya. He personally prefers weighted tangents and leaves the default in tangent on auto. For blocking key poses, he sets keys to stepped.
Stepped keys make the work pose by pose, which helps a lot when figuring out timing. Once the key poses are set, the finer breakdowns and secondary poses get added later. Stepped mode also gives more leniency while roughing things out; for example, there’s no need to set extra holding keys to stop the mouth from drifting into a new shape too early.
Deciding Who to Watch and When
Normally the big character grabs attention first. But while Rock sniffs the flower, his movement is very subtle, mostly just standing and sniffing while the flower scales. In rough blocking, Nathaniel even keeps Rock perfectly still during this stretch. That quiet moment is what frees up the audience to look at Twig.
Twig has to work harder to earn attention. He sits up, pauses, looks over at Rock and blows his head tail away from his face. Nathaniel treats that look-over as a warning sign to the viewer: even if they only catch it out of the corner of their eye, it signals that Twig’s important action is coming, which is pulling himself out of the hole.
Once Twig is out, he just sits up and brushes himself off, which is intentionally not very interesting. That makes it easy to hand focus back to Rock as he winds up for the sneeze, since his size naturally pulls the eye.
Posing the Smaller Character
For Twig’s wake-up, Nathaniel zeroes out a good portion of the facial controls, closes the lips and keeps a frown, since nobody wakes up happy after being hammered into the ground. To sell the blow, he repositions the lip segments and brings in the corners of the mouth, then lifts the head slightly. He checks that the tail reads with a clear silhouette so it’s obvious what’s being blown away.
For the climb out, one pose going down builds momentum, with the head down and a slight lean forward, and a few frames later he pushes up. He also adjusts the pose so it reads more clearly from the camera angle, not just from the working view.
A rule Nathaniel picked up in the business applies here: don’t break the slinky. Keep the spine controls flowing in a clean arc. A pose might look fine with controls hidden, but turning them back on can reveal a squiggly line you don’t want, unless you’re animating a worm.
Animating Props Separately
The flower and tree have simple joint-based rigs that Nathaniel built himself, so he keeps their controls in a separate view from the character controls. Having both visible at once makes it easy to accidentally select something you don’t mean to animate.
He usually animates the flower first, scaling it down as Rock sniffs and moving it as needed, using video reference of himself sniffing. Once the flower motion looks good on its own, he leaves it alone. Since the character rig is much more detailed and adjustable, it’s easier to fit the character to the flower than the other way around.
Arcs, Set Interaction and Secondary Motion
With the key poses in, Nathaniel looks at how the characters interact with the set. The tree, for example, shouldn’t stay in a flat, uninteresting angle; a small adjustment gives it a better flow of motion. When Rock starts sneezing, the tree gets blown back further using more than one control so it reads more dynamically. He also scrubs through to make sure arcs stay intact the whole way.
From there, sub-poses get layered in. A good example is Rock’s wind-up before the sneeze: adding small down-and-up movements to the mouth and lips before the big mouth opening. Since Rock is basically a big mouth with arms and legs, the mouth is the easiest place to add this kind of secondary motion.
Switching Between Stepped and Spline
At this stage, it’s common to go back and forth between stepped and spline. Timing that looks right in stepped mode can feel quicker or slower once the curves are splined out.
Nathaniel’s advice is that once you commit to spline mode, try to mostly stay there. Switching back and forth too often can get confusing.
The Finished Shot and Key Takeaways
The final version adds a couple of rocks that fly up as Twig pulls himself free, plus interactive vegetation that falls from the tree when Rock sneezes. The finished render was brought into After Effects for the background, motion blur and smoke effects.
This shot made staging relatively easy because one character is naturally easier to watch than the other. With two characters of the same size both doing something active, it gets more challenging: one character has to tone it down so the audience loses interest in him and shifts to the one who’s moving more. How you handle it depends on the shot and the characters.
The characters were originally used in a short Nathaniel made called Opposites, which fits a big, slow character and a small, quick one sharing the screen.
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