Part 1: The Power of Reference – Learning from Live-Action Scenes
by Fjodor Mastikin, Cascadeur's Technical Writer

When it comes to the art of animation, its greatest strength would seem to lie in that animation can give us what other forms of cinema cannot: an ability to shape every motion and every scene to be as close to what we have in mind as it is humanly possible. This, in a way, is the purest form of filmmaking.

But of course, such power does have a price.

Creating animation is not easy - if you ever tried to animate something, you know this fully well. And this is especially true for action animation: complex motions, multiple characters and focus on interaction between said characters makes animating even a relatively simple action scene a serious undertaking.

There are, however, ways to cut corners. And the most versatile one would be using some kind of reference. After all, there is no shortage of impressive, well-choreographed stunts and action scenes in all forms of media that can provide us with inspiration - and also serve as a basis for our own creations.

'Cause when we animate something, what do we want?
First, for the whole process to take a reasonable amount of time.
Second, for the result to be close enough to what we have in mind.
And third, for the motion to look convincing and lifelike.

Of course, we definitely shouldn't make direct copies of our favorite movie scenes.
While this is not illegal, - there is no copyright for poses and motions - it is also not an ethical thing to do. And furthermore, sequences created in this way are all too easy to notice, and they give your work a certain low-effort vibe - regardless of how much effort it actually took to properly replicate all these poses and motions.

Taking only parts of a sequence, however, provides no such shortcoming. And if we restrict ourselves to only using these very things - poses and motions - while building shot-to-shot composition ourselves, this has to produce a much better result.
In fact, many animators renowned for their skill at animating action scenes use this exact approach. And way more often that you might realize.

An example of using a reference for animation. Animated by Norio Matsumoto:

But what kind of references should we use? Let's try to find out.
We should probably start with ruling out scenes from 3d animation and video games (where animation operates on mostly the same principles). It's fine to research this kind of animation and learn from it, but for reference, it would be better to use a medium different from the one we are working ourselves in.

Then what about scenes from live-action movies? Using them as a basis seems to address all three of the problems listed above.
First, using reference greatly decreases the time we'd need to figure out how the scene should look.
Second, because we specifically choose scenes close enough to our intention, it would be that much easier to do exactly what we want to.
And finally, these scenes are from live-action media. They are filmed in real places with real people - which means they have to be as lifelike as possible, right?

Well, right, but actually wrong.

Take this scene, for example:


Yes, it might give the impression of a single move filmed from a few different angles. But a closer look would reveal that it really is a set of several different moves put together to give an impression of a continuous motion.

And if you try to just copy it frame by frame, you'll end up with something that looks weird and not quite usable:



This is the magic of filmmaking. Even the most grounded, most 'realistic' films tend to imply many things rather than showing them outright. Sometimes, this is done out of necessity: some things are too complex, or dangerous, or simply impossible to film in live-action.
But other times, filmmakers do it deliberately to make their creations more captivating. It's far more entertaining to guess something for yourself rather than to be told outright. And movies do it all the time.

So what does all this mean for us? Basically two things.

The bad news is that using movie scenes as references is not as easy as it may sound.

But the good news is that even then there's still a lot of things we can learn, and a lot of things we can use.

For example, if we go back to the scene above, we'll see that every motion in it is actually fine by itself. The only thing it lacks is connection between these motions. And lucky enough, with tools that Cascadeur provides, we can create these connections with relative ease.

First of all, we'll need to recreate the motion in the scene using Cascadeur.
For this, we could use the Mocap feature: while it doesn't work too well with complex poses and unconventional angles, it nevertheless provides us with an animation we can use as a base.

After a lot of cleaning up and manual adjustment, we get something like this:


As you can see, there are three visibly separate segments. It is exceptionally evident if you take a look at the trajectory: it's easy to see where one part ends and another begins. Which is not something we'd want if we plan to make a continuous motion.

For this, we'll need to edit this animation so one segment follows another:


Here, we've also added short 'transitional' parts between the segments (marked with red lines); these parts do not contain any keyframes and exist to help interpolation smoothly transport the character from one pose to another.


The animation still does look rather rough and jittery. But if we enable the AutoPhysics tool to it, we'll see that it can take care of most of the problems:

This trajectory is a lot more smooth, the whole motion feels more natural - and it is actually way closer to what the filmmaker probably had in mind when they were filming the scene we used as a reference.

And if we apply AutoPhysics to our animation,we'll get something like this:



And this is how we can use movie scenes to aid our own creations. It doesn't take too much time or effort, and the result looks good enough to be put into some project of our own.
And yet... when you look at what we;ve got, don't you get the impression that something is missing - or maybe that at least some parts of this animation could've looked better?

In fact, these are all very valid concerns, and there are ways to address them. Almost any animation could be improved by making it more expressive and accentuated.
But how exactly it can be done is a story for another time. Do stay tuned for the follow-up article, 'cause there, we'll be taking our research a step further.

In Part 2, coming soon, we'll explore how to enhance motion, add emphasis, and bring more energy to action scenes. Stay tuned!