Transcript
OK. Hi, everybody. My name is Lamont Wayne, but you might know me better by my Internet handle, Chaostoon. This is another in a series of tutorials that I am going to be teaching, about helping you create better videos with GoAnimate. Just like before, I’m going to be opening up the Sword source file and we’ll be taking a look at the Sword source file and learning about how I did certain things. But this video is going to be about fighting scenes and tips to help you improve how you create your fighting scenes in your videos.
First tip, and I think it’s one of the best tips I can give you, is that if you want to improve your fighting scenes, you need to watch fights to get ideas and not just the fights on the GoAnimate videos but watch fights that are in films, watch fights that are in old, classic KungFu fighting films, watch fights that are on television. I know that with the GoAnimate characters there’s only a certain amount of fighting moves that the characters will be able to do. What I’m saying is watch the fights, so you can get an idea of maybe a fight that you can maybe recreate with the actions. And it’ll help you to get to be a little more unique with your fights on GoAnimate. With that being said, it’s very important for you to plan in advance your fight.
Now I’m not going to go into story-boarding very much in this video. I’m going to probably do a separate video for story-boarding. But what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to storyboard out your fight. Don’t worry if you can’t draw very good. If you can’t draw very good, draw stick figures. If you can’t draw stick figures, that’s fine, just make little notes. But what you want to is do is plan your fight out, exactly what’s going to be happening in the fight. The way that you do that, you plan it all out and then you revise. You look over it. You think about it. You rewrite it. Show it to your friends and as soon as you get that fight as good as it could possibly be, that’s when you go into the studio and you follow your plan and use the studio to create what you planned out on the paper.
Now when you’re planning your fight there’s somethings that you need to keep in mind: how much time do you have? A fight scene that someone with GoPlus would be able to do, will be a lot different than a fight scene than someone who doesn’t. If you don’t have GoPlus, you don’t have a lot of time so you need to plan how long is your fight going to be. How many shots do you need? Do you have to have all those shots or with the new tools in the studio, can you put that effect or what you’re after in one shot? How many characters are you going to need? Is it just two characters like in Swords? Or are you going to need a whole crowd scene of fighting? Who’s going to win the fight? Is it the good guy who’s going to win? Is it going to be the bad guy? Who’s going to win? And how will they win. Also, what are they going to be fighting with? Are they going to be using swords? Are they going to be using guns? Are they going to be fighting with fists? How are they going to be doing that? You need to plan all that out in advance, OK?
Now here’s the key that will really set your fighting scene off, in your animation. I know I just said you need to do all this planning, but what’s really going to set it off is if the fighting scene, it should look like it wasn’t planned at all. Have you ever seen a fight breakout? It’s very in the moment. The people who are fighting, their thought process, they’re swinging their fists or they ‘re using their weapons and they’re thinking in that moment, and they think from moment to moment. So as you’re planning your fight scene keep in mind that the characters are going from moment to moment, and make sure that it doesn’t look like it’s been planned out in advance. Because I know the more a fight scene looks planned to me, the more boring it ends up being. So plan, but try to make it look like they’re going from moment to moment.
And as you’re going from moment to moment, change up your camera shots. Don’t just have all of your shots be close-ups. Back the camera up. Show the whole field their fighting that they’re on. Zoom the camera in. Tilt the camera if you can. Show a pan, with the characters running across the field, if you can. Change it up because the more dynamic your camera shots, the more interesting your fight scenes are going to be.
Let me go ahead and open up because I’ve got a source file here and I’m just going to go over a few of the shots that people are always saying, “How did you do that?” I think the one that most people say how did I do that is this one. How did I get the swordsman here to run in slow motion? Well, I mean, it’s not a special effect. It’s not playing, there he is, running in slow motion. What I did was, and I encourage you to do this to make your animations a little bit more interesting, is to look outside of the fighting actions because this run slo-mo is actually in “Romantic guy” and I got the “Romantic guy” and it runs slo-mo in here. Well, actually, hold on, let me see. Yeah, “Romantic guy”, “Movement” and then “Run slo- mo”. Then if you move your camera in the background slowly and you have him running slowly, then it gives the illusion that it’s an actual slo-mo shot, with him running towards the flame general like he’s getting ready to attack. Another one I was asked about is this, where it looks like the camera is tilted, but you can see that there’s no camera effect and it’s not tilted but the characters are tilted. That’s really all I did is I tilted the characters and I tilted the background to give the illusion that the camera was tilted. Let’s see what else.
People don’t ask about this, but this is another trick that I did in the video. I’ve got the swordsman and it looks like in the previous shot where he knocks the flame swordsman back, I’ve got him where he looks like he just shoots up in the air and he knocks the flame swordsman back, and this flame swordsman gets knocked all the way back. Then when the camera cuts back to the swordsman it looks like he’s landing from really high. But you see with this action, there’s this whole bit of the animation where he’s actually leaning down and jumping up, and then he jumps down into the scene. Well, what I did was I masked him out. Can you see how he’s jumping in the back there, but you can’t really see him here? Well there’s a mask here, that’s green that matches the mountain here and then there’s another mask that covers up the ground. So it covers him up for the part of the animation where he leans forward and jumps up. Then I cut and then it looks like he lands. You can use masking to help you to create a look, that sort of looks like he’s jumping down, so he’s jumping and not doing jumping jacks. He’s actually landing from that big jump that he did earlier.
Then there’s things like where he actually leans back and he stops the sword from coming in. The flame general’s not holding the sword. This sword’s actually, I just take the prop and I just did prop animation, and animated the sword coming in while the swordsman is leaning back. It just took a little trial and error to get the timing just right. But it ends up looking like he leans back and stops the sword coming in from his back, which is kind of cool.
I used masking again,hold on, oh, I didn’t use masking here. I just kind of moved the character over here. But, yeah, with your fight scenes, just give them just a little bit of pre-planning. Get creative with the studio. Don’t just rely on the stock fighting. Look at some of the other actions, maybe like help a character do a certain motion better. Do masking, and I might do a video about masking later. I know that [inaudible 00:13:09]has a great video on masking. But that’s it. But let me take a look over at the chat if there’s any questions. Do you guys have any questions about what I’ve been doing or what I’ve been going over just through the video? No questions. OK. Well, thanks for tuning in and keep a look out for more videos from me about the GoAnimate tips. All right. Thanks.
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