Collecting Reference Footage

When collecting video reference, there are many specifications, do’s and don’t, that will make it better, and more suitable to use as reference for your animation. There is either recorded or secondarily found. Reference with multiple views are more usable, for example, front, side and perspective. Ensuring that the subject is in centre frame, despite movement. The control of the camera must be considered for this, beforehand, to be consistent in the reference. Appropriate shooting angles and equipment need considerations and preparations. These may include, the types of cameras, tripod, lighting or audio equipment. With combat, there are noticeable differences between real-life and pretend fights, such as physical forces, impact and consequences. During pretend combat with weapons, there needs to be ‘life-like’ impacts with weight and contact points. Trained experts (secondary sourced) would be better for more complex and skilled combat. Further essential considerations include eye line, focus, clothing and stand-in props, skill levels, actors, directing. Feeling the character, embodying the performance, emotionally and physically is key to making it realistic. “The sillier you feel the better the outcome will be” (AnimSchool, 2021). Depending on what medium you use to film the footage, you may need to change the frame rate or account for motion blur. Then when I have my footage, I should import it into After Effects, add a timecode, and export as PNG images. At the saving the file stage, I must ensure that I add a dot instead of the underscore in the file name.

These attempts at making my own reference footage were sufficient for their purpose. This is since I collected many varieties of experiments and scenarios. I compiled different types of shot to fit the purpose of the challenges, for example, for the lip syncing challenge, I filmed extreme close-up shots of the mouth movements, close-up shots for the head and shoulders movement and medium shots to fit the performance. In the future, I can still improve my reference footage by taking even further consideration for lighting, ensuring that is is high-key lighting to make smaller details clearer. Also, the figure was not always in centre frame, such as, in the more active references (see above).

References:

AnimSchool, 2021. How to Film Good Reference for Animation. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAUmgEzR1xA&t=326s [Accessed 9 November 2021].

Insider, 2019. How ‘Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse’ Was Animated. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEXUG_vN540 [Accessed 5 December 2021].

Neistadt, W., 2020. Take Your Animation to the Next Level & Capture GREAT Reference. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-CEQZ6jtE&t=334s [Accessed 7 November 2021].