Thumbnailing & Staging

Thumbnailing

I highly recommend creating thumbnail drawings or a rough storyboard before you begin animating, particularly if you plan to make a multi-shot sequence. You can do this in your sketchbook, even if it involves very crude or rough sketches, or you can create the thumbnails digitally to form a timed out animatic. This will set you up to stage your scene effectively.

What is staging?

Staging is one of the 12 animation principles. It refers to how you go about setting up your scene, from the placement of the characters, the character's mood, and how the camera angle is set up. Staging is used to make the purpose of the animation unmistakably clear to the viewer.  

To answer that question, for a moment, let's look at this from a filmmaker's perspective rather than an animator's. Many filmmakers (including myself) divide the screen into either four or nine quadrants to help compose their shots. So in the future, if you hear me talking about screen left, screen right, or center screen; I am thinking about the frame from that perspective.

It is important to note, than when animating or storyboarding, you don't necessarily need to draw these lines on your frames all the time. It is more important to simply remember this concept.

Below is a picture of the viewfinder of my video camera. 

Left: Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). Right: Drive (2011)

Why do this? Thinking about the screen in quadrants helps with composition but more importantly it helps with both staging from one shot to the next. Here are two things to consider when staging multiple shots.

-Avoid jump cuts.  If for instance, you cut from your main character whose face is framed center screen, to a second character who is also framed center screen, that will often result in an awkward jump cut that will be jarring to the audience. In that instance, consider having your main character being slightly left of center frame, and your secondary character slightly right of center frame (or vice versa).

-Continued Action. If an object is moving from screen left, to screen right and then you cut to a second shot. Consider the screen placement of that object in your next shot. Both in terms of the direction of movement (is it going left to right, up or down?), but also what quadrant of the frame that object will appear in the second shot.