​Unless you've been living under a rock, you would know that consumption of video on mobile devices is the new normal.  Latest stats show that *70% of YouTube audiences and **98% of Facebook users are on mobile devices. So if you're creating video or animated content for audiences on mobile devices, you should be designing your content for the medium. Here some of the main considerations:
 
1. Aspect Ratio
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A question that some clients are still not expecting is  "What aspect ratio do you want to make your video in".  Here's a few popular flavours:

​But a viewer can turn their screen sideways to view 16:9 right? Wrong - by default we hold mobile devices vertically with one hand - and a *recent study found that only 17.5% of users will actually turn their device sideways to view a landscape format video.
 
Clearly the full 9:16 vertical occupies the most screen real estate. But the full frame vertical format can be tricky to design for, and won't suit all content. If you're on the fence 1:1 square is a good compromise. If you have a dual requirement for mobile and traditional (16:9) audiences - then ask your supplier if they can provide your content in 2 formats - say square and 16:9 - they might say yes.
 
2. Sound
 
Videos that appear in the newsfeed of Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram are mute by default - unless the user switches the sound on. How do we design for this?
 
The safest assumption is that the entire video will be viewed mute - which means your film should be designed to be understood without sound (deja vu - the silent film era - have we gone full circle?).
 
If your message relies on dialog, add subtitles to the mobile version. Trouble with subtitles is they're not pretty, and may cover important parts of the image. So keep the lower third empty if you know sub's are being added later. Alternatively design it as a kinetic text piece - where the text becomes a part of the design, instead of an add-on.
 
*Recent studies have shown that text support in videos can increase view time up to 30%. Lets face it - text plastered over the screen is the new normal in mobile video - so design for it, rather than stick it on top as an afterthought.
 
To make your soundtrack pop out of a crappy mobile speaker system, don't use a track that relies on bass - cuz it may not be heard. Use a track that emphasises the mid-range so that the highs and lows are not lost if viewed in a noisy environment.
 
3. Duration

Optimum duration will depend on the social media platform your content is going out on. *Facebook states that to capture attention, branded content should be only 6 to 15 seconds duration! Facebook also cites the 3-second rule - that the first three seconds is how long it takes for people to decide to continue watching or not (it wasn't that long a go this was the 10-second rule - how quickly things change!). Facebook also recommends to present your brand in the first 1-2 seconds - if you are making branded content - which is totally contrary to TV commercial mentality where your couch potato audience is presented the logo at the end.
 
Instagram and Snapchat audiences have similar concentration spans! Linkedin audiences on the other hand have a little more patience and are more likely to persevere for longer durations of a minute or more. YouTube audiences are the champions when it comes to viewing staying power - with *average viewing times of around 14 minutes.
 
One thing is for sure across all social media channels - you gotta create a killer intro with a solid hook in the first few seconds to keep people around.
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4. Story
 
The challenge is to tell a story in short duration - which done well can be awesome. With this in mind - perhaps the new story paradigm for say a 15 second social media video might look like this:
 
ACT 1 - 1-3 seconds - the killer intro - the most compelling part of the story. Hook the audience here or it's likely you'll lose them. Better give them a whiff of the brand here too - in case they decide not to stick around.
 
ACT 2 - 4-11 seconds - the body of the story - more context - reveals, twists - live up to the expectations of the killer intro. 10 seconds is the big threshold - if you can get a viewer to commit to ten seconds - it's likely they'll stay 'till the end.
 
ACT 3 - 12 - 15 seconds - the climax - the film leads to it's exciting conclusion, Don't disappoint - pull the rug out from under your audience - surprise them, shock them, make them laugh, or cry.
 
5. Camera angles
 
Gone are the big beautiful wide establishing shots that languish on the screen for 6 or 7 lazy seconds. Instead it’s a quick full shot or medium shot to establish. Or maybe skip the establishing shot altogether and go straight to the action. Keep your scenes uncluttered cuz the more in the shot the longer the audience needs to take it in - and time is something it seems small screen audiences don't want to commit to any more.
 
Sources: *Scientiamobile **Statista

 Here's an older post that still gets a lot of views - thought it was time to polish it a bit and put it on top of the pile.

The agency likes what you do - that's why they've called you in to take a brief, but they need to be confident your vision for their TV commercial is aligned with what they want. They might ask you to write a Treatment. A Treatment is a pitch - a selling document to win across the agency and client to your vision for their ad. It's your opportunity to show that you totally understand the advertiser's requirement and that you are able to deliver it in the most compelling way.

1. Listen up
Ask a lot of questions so that the brief is crystal clear. Try to gauge how flexible the agency is about the story and visual style. This is important - the amount of creative freedom you have on a TVC can vary. Some briefs will be very specific, with little room for additional creative input. While at the other extreme the agency will have one of those "no idea" briefs that's gonna rely on your creative chops to flesh it out and make them look awesome. Understand who your audience is. Find out what the client likes - and doesn't. Find out if it's gonna roll out on social media as well - this may influence your storytelling.

2. Is the ad Story or Spectacle?
If it's story then it should have a beginning, middle and end, with at least one character. The objective of story is to engage the audience with a plot that resolves at the end with the advertiser's message embedded. If it's spectacle there is no story - the ad is eye candy that relies on attracting the audience's attention with appealing visuals and sounds. In a spectacle the audience is a spectator, unlike story where the audience is a participant. Story doesn't need visual extravagance to engage the audience - but if you're not telling a story then each shot has to be more interesting than the previous one to keep your audience on board.
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3. Get your story essentials in place
All stories must have a CHARACTER that the audience can identify with. The character should have a GOAL - he/she/it wants something. Finally there should be CONFLICT - an obstacle to the character getting what she wants, which must be overcome. STRUCTURE is equally important. The beginning is where the character is introduced and the setting is established. Then a problem or incident moves the story to the middle part, where obstacles are overcome. Finally the story resolves and the character is much happier now that (thanks to the product) the problem is solved. Cue the logo and park it for the last second. If your TV commercial has these basic story elements in place, you're in good shape.

Here’s a handy list I put together originally for the Malaysian artists on the Saladin TV series, then later expanded and updated for the animation teams on the Sherazade TV series - who were spread across India. With so many animators of different backgrounds and skill levels spread across the country - we had to get them on the same page when it came to facial animation.

STAGE  EXPRESSIONS  CLEARLY
1. Make strong poses (expressions) - animated character expressions are more exaggerated than human expressions.
2. Hold the pose - allow it to change in intensity if the dialog or situation calls for it, but don't change the pose until it is time to go to the next pose.
3. Don't overdo movement on the face - keep the expressions clear and simple. Once you have created an expression hold it while the mouth moves for the dialog.
4. Make sure the poses are different enough to notice the change of expression - the poses should contrast to show the character's thought process at work.
5. Make sure the audience notices the change of expression - don't change an expression during a fast body movement, change it just before or just after the movement.
6. Be careful not to hide expressions behind a big nose, moustache or unfavourable orientation to the camera.
7. Do not let the expression conflict with the dialog. The expression must reflect the emotion in the dialog.
8. Have you created the optimum expression - are all parts of the face working together to relate this one thought - the brows, eyes, eyelids and mouth?
9. Generally avoid symmetrical expressions. A character's personality will come across better with asymmetrical expression quirks such as a curled lip or a raised eyebrow.
10. Remember the face is only one part of the whole - the expression must be captured throughout the whole body.

HEAD  TILT
11. Tilting the head is powerful way to make a pose stronger. Tilting to one side will improve a questioning or curious expression. Tilting forward will improve a stern or serious expression. Tilting back will improve a surprised expression.
12. Tilting the head the wrong way will weaken a pose. For example avoid looking up for a frown. A slight tilt down will make a frown more powerful. A head that tilts down during a smile will change the meaning from a friendly smile to a sinister smile.

TIMING
13. The duration of an expression change is important - an excitable fast-talking character will change expressions quickly. A sinister devious character might change expressions slowly.
14. The duration of an eye blink is an indicator of emotion. An excited character will blink quickly, a tired or sinister character will blink slower.
15. The thought is slightly ahead of the dialog. So actions (manifestation of thought) will generally precede dialog by a few frames. For example a head-turn will precede accompanying dialog…
16. …and eyeballs move as fast as thoughts - so an eyeball turn will precede the accompanying head turn by a few frames. Eyeballs always lead any change in expression.
 
THE  EYES  ARE  THE  WINDOW  TO  THE  SOUL
17. Use eye blinks on the expression changes, eye direction changes and head turns.
18. Ensure eye direction is accurate. In 3D animation, constraining the eyeballs to the target with a locator may not necessarily give the best result. Use what looks right rather than what is geometrically correct.
19. Eye direction can indicate the thought process: Eyes looking up and to the left or right indicate remembering an event or trying to recall an image or incident.
20. Eyes looking to the left or right indicate recalling something that was said or trying to think of something to say.
21. Eyes looking down to the left or right indicate some internal dialog where an emotion is being held inside, such as embarrassment, sadness or shyness.
22. Eyeball scanning is another way to indicate thinking (life!). When eyeballs look in a direction they seldom stay still for long. Eyeballs will subconsciously scan their subject with a quick small movement to a new position, stop for a while then move again, and so on. Some animators call these 'eye darts'.
23. An exception to the scanning eyeball is for a character who is focussed, driven or in concentration. It is better to hold a stare for this character to create more intensity.
 
THE  MOUTH
24. The mouth, as well as performing dialog is also an indicator of emotion. Anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise can all be expressed with the mouth. Avoid symmetrical timing and poses - let one side of the mouth lead the other to resolve to an asymmetrical pose for a more natural look.
 
THE  BROWS
25. The position of the brows probably convey more information about an emotion than any other part of the face. Utilise them fully to extract the most emotion out of your character. Avoid symmetry in timing and posing.
 
EVERYONE  IS  AN  EXPRESSION  EXPERT

We humans naturally understand and communicate with expressions. Since we were children we learned to associate certain emotions with certain expressions. In our daily lives as adults we are engaged in a continual dialog of communications of which expressions form an integral part. We are all experts in interpreting expressions. For this reason, even the slightest discrepancy in your facial animation will be noticed by your intuitively expert audience, diminishing the performance. Your own face is the very best resource for experimenting with expressions before committing them into key poses in an animation. Use a mirror to rehearse and try different expressions when working with your dialog track.

By Steve Bristow

Image from Sherazade The Untold Stories, initially developed by Hahn Film.
©2017 Hahn Film | Chocolate Liberation Front | Toonz Entertainment

​Is there a missing 13th principle of animation? Why does this fundamental truth about animation fly so much under the radar? Let me explain…

Example 2

Maybe you already do this intuitively. So look for opportunities to show a change of expression when you are storyboarding or animating, and your characters will come alive.

By Steve Bristow

Images from Sherazade The Untold Stories, initially developed by Hahn Film.
©2017 Hahn Film | Chocolate Liberation Front | Toonz Entertainment

Lip sync can make or break your character animation - done well it can take your character's performance to another level - done badly it can turn your shot into a train wreck. This post is for the animator who submitted the offending shot, and the producer or director who can see that it's not working but aren't sure what's wrong with it.
 
1. The dialog seems too early or late
I've seen it happen more than once where the dialog has accidentally been nudged along the timeline a few frames - so my first take on this would be to slip the dialog track back and forth on the timeline and see if it falls back into sync.
Offsetting the lip sync can actually help - sometimes the mouth shapes may be accurately timed to the dialog sounds, but it still doesn't seem to be in sync when played back. Try offsetting the mouth key poses a frame or two earlier than the corresponding sound - this can improve the readability of lip sync. The exception is the closed mouth sounds B, M and P, which should fall right on the closed mouth pose.
 
2. The mouth shapes are too big
If the character's mouth moves through BIG shapes for open mouth sounds like A, E and O - this can look pretty grotesque. An animator tackling lip sync for the first time might have referenced a mouth shape chart like Preston Blair's famous 'DIALOGUE' page and created key mouth poses that are oversized. Lip sync mouth shape charts often show exaggerated poses - to make the point, rather than to be followed verbatim. Scale down the size of the extremes of the mouth shape and try it again.
BTW - that single page was the only published document on lip-sync pre-internet days, and a generation of animators owe a debt of gratitude to Preston Blair (RIP) for getting them out of trouble.
 
3. Too many mouth shapes
 If the mouth is moving through too many shapes in the dialog it will looks jittery and unnatural. It's a common mistake to try to hit every single phoneme with a key mouth pose. Identify the important shapes that define the word, and skip over the lesser ones.
Generally you should try to create lip sync with as few mouths shapes as you need to make it convincing - real speech is like that - the mouth doesn't move all that much. An extreme is anime - whose limited animation style typically achieves lip sync with two mouth shapes - open and shut (millions of anime fans never complained about this).
The best way to check what's really going on with speech is to rehearse it in a mirror - and all good animators have one on their desk - right?

Motion Capture (mocap) is the process where actor performances are captured as motion data, then applied to computer generated characters. An 'optical' mocap stage is a large room lined with infrared cameras, which track markers on actors wearing black body suits.

Choice of mocap for an animated TV series

During pre-production of Saladin: The Animated Series the big question was whether to use mocap or to keyframe the animation manually. After much deliberation - it was decided to use mocap. Reasons were - the character designs were humanoid, it was an action genre that would require a lot of complex performance animation. After a lot of consideration and research, we concluded that mocap would be a time and cost effective solution for the volume of animation needed to make 26 x 24 minute episodes.

Bye bye cartoon physics

The decision to use mocap meant we would have to forego those appealing cartoony qualities like squash, stretch, anticipation, exaggeration and snap. Instead the animated characters would move with realistic human motion. While it's true that mocap'd motion can be edited, in practice it's not that easy to manipulate mocap motion curves (think spaghetti), and in a busy TV series pipeline where artists are under the pump to meet daily quotas, not a practical option. It was a big decision stylistically, that set the tone for the look of the show.

Casting for actors
 
Not all actors are interested in playing mocap characters. While they will get a screen credit, their face will never be seen, and their voice never heard. Actors will be acting on an empty stage and will often be acting parts alone - unable to play off other actors.
 
Generally actors will need to be pretty athletic, with good physical performance skills, and if they have other abilities such as martial arts or dance then they may be able to double up and play other characters as well.
 
Actors are essential - they are trained in performance. And the same goes for stunt performers and dancers - so don't skimp on your mocap talent.
 
Directing mocap actors
 
Directing mocap actors is more about choreographing movements in time and space, than extracting authentic emotional performances. With the task of capturing thousands of shots for a TV series - it's a production line.
 
Before performing a sequence - play the animatic to the actors. Brief them on what's happening in the story at that moment, the emotion in the scene and your vision for the scene. Rehearse the shot. Let the actor interpret your instruction - allow them to have input. Help to locate their starting and ending positions on the stage. Rehearse the shot until you and the actor are ready to go for a take.
 
Timing of actions is critical - the animatic should have already been cut and timed to dialog recordings before starting any mocap - or at bare minimum the storyboard completed. Sequences are therefore in effect pre-edited - so if a storyboarded shot has the actor taking three steps, turning left and jumping - in three and a half seconds - then that's what has to be performed. There's little room for improvisation - the actors are essentially performing what's already been storyboarded and voiced by vocal actors.
 
When the mocap technician is ready, she will call 'standby' then 'recording'. Like a film director, the mocap director calls 'action' and 'cut'. This protocol might vary from one studio to the next.
 
The mocap technician will review each take first. If the take was technically good - without corrupt data caused by occlusion (explained later) or other system limitations, then it will be reviewed by the director and actor to assess whether it's a keeper or not. If not, subsequent takes will be made until a good performance with clean data is achieved. Sometimes a continuous sequence of several shots with different camera angles may be captured in one take, and later in the animation department, the shot cut up into the different camera angles.
 
Mocap stages will have some basic props and performance aids such as platforms and boxes to simulate stepping or climbing motions; mats for actors to fall or tumble on, and other props such as weapons (typically simple non-reflective wooden or plastic proxies).

Limitations

The active area of the stage is a performance limitation - actions in the storyboard that need more space than the stage can provide will need to have workarounds figured out - such as cycling a running action or capturing big actions in parts.
 
Occlusion (in optical mocap systems) is when a marker is obscured from the cameras. Markers need to be visible by at least two cameras to triangulate their location in 3D space. Whether it's self-occlusion or occlusion by other players or props, the result is bad data and retakes. Generally, the more cameras and the fewer players on the stage, the less chance of occlusion. Unless you're on a Hollywood budget, you may be working in a small mocap stage with 12 cameras or less, in which case you can probably put only one or two actors on the stage at a time.
 
Staging

On a mocap stage there is no physical camera to compose the shot, and the actor/s may have no awareness of camera placement or shot composition. So the director has to imagine the performance as it will finally appear on the screen.

However, a well equipped mocap stage will have a virtual camera - a small hand held screen that acts as a viewfinder for the director to frame the shot. The scene is rendered in the screen in real time - and may also include virtual props and set. The director can use the virtual camera to get real time feedback and make composition, staging and lensing decisions. The virtual camera also has markers so it's position and movement can be recorded.

Mocap directors must understand screen direction and continuity if they are capturing scenes for continuity cutting. When all the shots are conformed in the animation timeline later, they must be continuous, otherwise it's back to the mocap stage for a retake, which means time and money (and an anxious producer).
 
Clean up

Selected mocap takes are sent for 'clean up' before they can be added to the animation pipeline. Autodesk Motion Builder is the standard app for cleaning mocap data. If you're lucky your data will be pretty clean, if not there will be jerks and bumps caused by occlusion, reflections or other system glitches that need to be smoothed out.

Mocap vs keyframe - conclusion
 
So did mocap make it easier or faster to make 26 half hours of animation? Well... no. Mocap added a whole other layer of complexity where things could go wrong. The time taken to capture 8,000 shots and the cost of the mocap stage, technicians, stage hands, actors, clean up artists, mocap directors could arguably have been better spent on more animators, resulting in a more traditional animated motion and simpler pipeline. End of the day the realistic motion didn't look out of place on the stylised human characters and the co-production partners were pleased with the outcome.
 
I'd love to hear about your experience with or thoughts about mocap - leave a comment.

Steve Bristow is an animation producer/director based in Melbourne Australia.