I know that kind of title may suggest a blog about weight loss, but today we have a different, if parallel, argument about weightlessness in animation cinema.
I was born as a director, for needs I learned to do animation, compositing, rigging and many other disciplines to be able to complete and visualize my ideas. I grew up with classic animation Warner and Disney, between exaggeration and realism.
One of my myths is Ray HarryHousen animator StopMotion and SpecialVFX artist of the old school, where you did everything by yourself or almost, and in the moment of the visual effects you were practically going to direct the filming, to get the magic, the illusion of reality with characters big 20 cm.
Other animation myths include Phil Tippet, or Jim Danfort, or Dave Allen animators of the art of Stop Motion in visual effects, when the animation was made with "good the first" or every single frame was imprinted on film and at the end of the shot it occurred if it was correct, if it was not good you had to redo all from scratch.
This technique, combined with practical limitations of the time, developed a great ability for analysis and observation, to obtain pleasant and more realistic animations. And let's talk about the creators of animations for movies like Star Wars, Robocop, Star Trek and many other well-known titles.
Why am I talking about the past?
Because modern technology distorts the vision of reality.
I just saw the new Amazing Spiderman, and immediately I could tell you the age of who animated and in which shot… you know how? The weight… Missing…
When a body moves, the weight of the body, of the individual muscle masses, determines the speed with which each limb moves, with what speed starts and stops, the ratio of fat mass to lean creates a more or less wide inertia between movements.
Younger animators tend to look for references online, in the media closest to them such as video games, and less in nature, or in reality in general. And this is reflected in the reality filtered by these media.
Animated characters in games often have a very low weight, unreal, for many reasons, both for the convenience of engine and for the complexity of control, so they often jump, run and "float"…
This may be fine in a game, but in animation it always sounds strange, because if a 400 kg beast like Hulk or 200Kg like Lizard moves lightly, not placing effort on the hind legs, or when they jump 3 meters do not bend enough to absorb the impact, disappears the illusion created by translucent skin, dynamics of the tissues around the body, smoke, dust.
And yet it's not difficult, just do an experiment, take a Webcam,a camera , your cell phone, and try to do a simple experiment, climb 50cm of wall and jump down. Repeat the experiment with a friend much larger than you, with a 5- and 10-year-old, and observe the movements…
Each will have movements, accelerations, deceleration, bending of the knee joints, stiffness of the knees more or less accentuated depending on weight, age (which determines stiffness of ligaments and "unconsciousness" :-).
It may sound strange, but in most movies the technicians who even create muscle controls to animate secondary movements have not yet created a system for direct simulation of character weights. Or rather, there are software that does it, but they make mistakes because they reason for numbers, not sensations.
Any obvious sequences?
Blade II, the vampires who go to deal with Blade, when they do the stunts on the supports lights are literally weightless, they have no acceleration and deceleration, as if they were made of air…
VanHelsing, Mr Hyde when he fight with VanHelsing inside NotreDame is always weightless, yet he is an evidently large and heavy creature, as well as overweight, so he should be ungainly and unbalanced, while moving lightly like a dancer
The Amazing Spiderman, both Spiderman and Lizard when they fight together often do not have their real weight because they remain suspended in the air more than they should. +For Spiderman, it can be there, because it's very light, like spiders when they jump, but Lizard is akin to a Komodo Dragon, heavy, muscular, so it should has to have inertia.
The Lord of the Rings, Legolas is often weightless, climbing on that kind of mammouth, jumping from side to side.
How do you learn to give weight to objects?
Animating… Observing… Wrong and correcting.
The classic animation exercise of the bouncing ball, which all animation tutorials use (sometimes presenting it the wrong way…) helps an animator understand the principles of weight and speed.
If the same ball is made of different materials: rubber, stone, foam we will have different movements and different times of movement. In general, to learn how to animate, I always suggest a book: "The Animator Survival Kit" by Richard Williams. The practical bible of animators for any media.
Why am I so pointy?
Well if it were an animated film there is the concept of "Suspension of disbelief", but in a movie, a real creature, the replica of a character, can not be without weight, is not real and therefore breaks the fine line between fantasy and reality, distracting the viewer from the story.
