Adding Personality

As many great animations have shown, any object can be given its own personality. No medium is really quite as effective as animation for enabling you to give life to the characters that would otherwise stay in your imagination. Even if you don't aspire to be a character animator in the strictest sense, any element that is animated within your Flash projects should have some recognizable personality. You don't have to add eyes and a mouth to an object in order for it to be expressive. In fact, the main expression of any animated element should be conveyed by the way it moves, even more strongly than by the exact composition of the graphic.

You can add personality to a line or a letter as easily as you can add personality to a cartoon character. A common exercise done in art schools to help students realize the expressive power of abstract lines and shapes is to give the students a list of atmospheres or emotions that they have to interpret and communicate with purely abstract lines and forms. The most surprising thing about this exercise is how similar most people's drawings turn out to be. Although the drawings do not include any concrete symbols or signs, students realize how concise their shared visual language really is (even if they aren't always conscious of it).

As an animator, you can draw on the common visual vocabulary to communicate a great deal to your audience without having to spell it out. Most people would probably recognize angry movement or joyous movement if they saw it. Certainly, some personal and cultural variations in interpretation exist, but the basic recognition is usually very consistent. As with some of the other topics we've described so far in this chapter, this is an aspect of motion design that may not seem relevant to every project at first. However, if you take the time to consider how you want to connect with your audience, you'll probably be able to pin down a fairly specific emotional tone or personality that you want your animation to have.

Cross-Reference 

Flash animator Felix Stumpf describes his process for planning and creating atmospheric Flash animation in his tutorial in Chapter 14, "Character Animation Techniques." One of his tools for testing concepts is to create a moodboard with rough animation and sample music that he can then use as a stylistic guide for the final project.

The next step is to observe and experiment to find the kinds of motion that best represent the personality or tone that you want the audience to recognize. Some of the factors that you can consider when designing expressive motion include the following:

• Speed: How fast or how slowly does an object move? Does it accelerate or decelerate?

• Timing and rhythm: How does the object's movement loop or change over time? Finding music to help with the timing and pace of an animation is often helpful.

• Consistency or irregularity: How much variety is there in an object's movement? Does it follow a repeated pattern, or a random path of motion?

• Anticipation or surprise: Does the object give some visual foreshadowing as it moves, or does it make sudden, unexpected movements?

• Freedom or constraint: How large or small are the movements that the object can make? Does it move all around your composition or stay in a very restricted area? How much of the object moves at any one time?

The "meaning" of these various kinds of movement can be debated as much as the "meaning" of various colors can. However, it is safe to assume that, overall, enough consistency among viewers exists on the meaning of certain kinds of motion for it to be an effective way of communicating the character of an object. If you're not sure how your audience will read a certain motion, just test it out on a few people — show them what you're working on, and then ask them what emotion or personality they think the object has. If enough people recognize the mood that you want your animation to have, you've succeeded! If most people are confused or have very different responses, you probably need to simplify your animation and clarify what you're trying to communicate. It's not likely that most people would be able to read that an object has slightly low self-esteem but is feeling optimistic. However, most people recognize movement consistent with extreme shyness or joy (or any other simple and exaggerated emotion).

Exaggeration is the foundation of the art of animation. Define the kind of movement that may communicate a particular emotion to your audience, and then see how far you can push it. In some cases, you may want very overt movements, and in other cases, you may want more conservative or subtle movements; but by pushing the boundaries, you can assess your options and find the right balance for a particular character or object.

Keeping Ideas Fresh

Some of the greatest modern works of art and music are based on the concept of permutation — the process of exploring all the possibilities within a specific, usually limited, group of elements. Permutation of a limited set of options can yield more surprising or unique results than unlimited options because it forces you to work within defined boundaries that enable the content of your work to influence the final result in ways that you may not have previously considered.

For example, if you allow yourself to choose any colors from a full palette, this may seem very liberating. But the truth is, you'll probably choose colors (or at least color combinations) that are familiar or comfortable for you, without even giving some new options a real chance. You can achieve much more inventive uses of color by forcing yourself to work with a truly random selection of colors (or to create an effective design with a more limited palette). You might be surprised by how well pink and brown go together, or by how much you can do with just a few colors. At the very least, experimenting with randomness or intentional limitation in a design can help open up new possibilities and keep your work from getting stale.