FMX 2014: Bring Rhythm into Animation

FMX Friday 25th April 2014
Bring Rhythm into Animation by Chip Lotierzo (Blue Sky)
The next talk that we went to was another Rio 2 talk, this one taken by Chip Lotierzo who was there to talk about the rhythm in the film and during the musical scenes. He likes to visualise the movement of the character in something called an energy line. An energy line represents their movement and how they feel during the scene, some characters may be energetic and some could be sloth-like and have no energy at all. Even secondary characters need to have something on their energy line even if its just a heartbeat. This creates a contrast between characters depending on how they act as a character. Using a line gives so much movements which shows when they are resting and when they are active.

This can be translated with lines like movement, but also emotions as well. You would listen to the audio that is provided from the actors and in this you can hear the pitch of the voice and how it goes up and down, and you can play it whenever your need to during production. What was nice about what they did next is that its a very interactive way to get involved with a project; as they wanted to get the movement of the character into their head they filmed themselves acting it out as if they were a bird. He could then use this to work out where the high and low points would be and create an energy line so that they match up with the delivery of the actor as well as the line.

They would then start to take this into animation and create a blocky performance from which to test the limitations of the birds body when acting out what they practiced and to also start looking at the movement to bring it to the performance.

Line of Action and Overall Shape
Where we see the postures of the characters changes, this can be done in animation by changing where they are bending and it makes it clear in this film with all of the movement of Blue's head and where he is looking. They ask themselves what does the line look like from head to toe? Is the overall shape of the character changing enough? Are they taking up enough of the scene when they stretch their arms out, or are they using up too much? It's important to ask yourself the relevant questions throughout and look at the position of the character throughout a number of different scenes to ensure that they are changing enough times.

Music in Rio 2
They obviously took a lot of influence from Rio 1 when it cam to the dance scenes and they wanted to enphisise this, and ensure that they focused on movement and how they would fly and dance at the same time but still matching up to the beat of the music with how they move and their wings flapping with the beat. They used a kaleidoscope kind of idea with the music so that the eye is drawn to the centre of the circle of the group of parrots. This was tricky and Chip went from having to animate around 13 birds in Rio 1 to 160 in Rio 2 all at the same time, which was a massive jump.

He started by creating the initial movement in a very simple animation to be able to create the design and different circular patterns that the birds would follow and spin around. They needed to create the perfect mix between order and chaos for this to work, so that is where they got the idea to mix in the random movement that then formed into perfect circles, so it created the organised chaos you see in the final scene, which was a really interesting technique to look at.