What Makes Arcane's Animation so Good?

this video is sponsored by squarespace hello my name is brad and usually i review tech for creative professionals but today i'm going to be talking about a tv show because i want to i want to take a look at arcane's animation and break down what i think makes it so special to do that i'm going to be talking a lot about animation principles and how they employed them here if you want to brush up on those animation principles i have a video but i'm not going to link you to it instead recently there was a video that came out by a channel called bam animation great channel i'm going to link to that one down in the description instead if you want to brush up on that stuff that is a fantastic place to start disclaimer number two this show is violent i'm not gonna be showing any of that violent stuff but also be forewarned it's for like people 14 years old and up so not for everybody number three i'm not going to be spoiling any story or anything like that however i am going to be showing a lot of clips from the first episode early in the series so if you want to go in totally blind know that so without further ado let's get to this alright so this is obviously an animated show but that animation is not motion captured the show's based off a video game and a lot of video game animations of of people those are motion captured that's the thing where they put a bunch of dots on a guy in a leotard and make him do weird stuff that is a real job not making this up emotion cap technology is amazing but the animation can fall into that uncanny valley where it looks realish but you can tell it's not real arcane instead goes for a more traditional animation approach which is less lifelike but more exaggerated i think that really serves the series well here it never looks stiff and it could really push the body language and expressiveness of the characters with real actors in motion capture everything looks kind of samey you don't get the same nuance there in here you definitely do and as the characters are moving around there's a lot of squashing and stretching that's the sort of thing you don't get with motion capture there's a ton of telegraph motion that's where before a character makes a big gesture they might move their arm one way before it shoots off the other way almost all the major action that you're gonna see throughout the series is doing that especially when you're looking at the way the characters themselves are acting number two how much detail they manage to squeeze into every single frame yet they do it with some restraint for a long time animation studios have employed concept artists to create these amazing dream worlds and they capture the mood and the feel of the places where the story takes place then they hand off the concept art and another team takes it and distills it into something simpler that can actually be made within the studio's budget and over the years we've seen that gap between concept art and the final look of the movie get closer and closer together because the tools and the technology they're using have gotten really good pixar movies obviously are the major example of this i think 2018's into the spider-verse was a fantastic example of concept art actually looking like the final movie and arcane definitely definitely fits in that tradition of really organic good-looking digital oil painting style they aren't trying to make human hair look real you can see the brush strokes in the hair you can see the brush strokes on people's faces the elements of the scene and the set when you get up close it looks like it was painted by a person it's so cool and detail is in every inch of arcane's world but i also mentioned restraint they aren't afraid to hide detail like this i think this is like really clear in like the opening sequence there's a lot of times when they want the mood to change or when they want to have an action scene will it break down that detail move away from it and go to like silhouettes or blurred background number three i think for me was body language and this one is kind of self-explanatory every character has a way of walking a way of standing a way of interacting with the other characters it's just all so well defined now some characters are more exaggerated than others and that also helps convey their personality number four even though there's a lot going on here and a lot of detail packed in the action still has a lot of clarity to it it's very easy to follow talked a lot about detail and exaggeration and those are great things but they can also get in the way and jumble up the scene make it harder to follow and arcane gives a master class on how to pull back a little bit for clarity obviously the backgrounds throughout the show are just ridiculously good but when the action starts to pick up these backgrounds get simplified tremendously and a lot of this is done through the camera and the focusing technique and where they choose to place the camera and even when they cut they don't switch between characters a lot they just show the character from different angles during that one particular action number five i think they do a fantastic job of using the art to set the location that you're in the show follows a lot of different characters in a lot of different locations so it's really easy to lose track of things but i never really did this happened to me while watching the latest season of the witcher where am i now a city somewhere i always felt grounded in arcane and it did this through the use of colors and tones like the over city it was bright and it was clean the undercity it was dirty and it was dark but it wasn't just that parts of the undercity were dark and warm color they used browns and reds to make them feel somewhat safe while other parts of the undercity were also dark but they used cooler colors to make them feel more menacing when you are introduced to a place it does these long establishing shots to show you where they are before it jumps to the characters to push the story forward another thing they did really well is they used bright highlight colors to code different elements so when you jump from one story back to another storyline or when a character from one storyline starts to interact with another character that was following a different story thread that sort of thing can kind of help you follow who's aligned with who oh this is blue they're using this kind of magic here oh this is purple they must be aligned with this group or this person that sort of thing helps with the clarity of the entire show now before i get to the next one i would like to thank today's sponsor squarespace having a website is great having your own domain makes that website even better but what really makes squarespace the all-in-one platform for your online presence are all the marketing tools and analytics baked in grown engage your audience with squarespace's email campaigns create powerful email content that matches your website with your existing products blog posts and logo so your message is consistent and effective quickly understand your audience with squarespace's website analytics including page views traffic sources time on site most read content audience geography and more get feedback on what's working and how you can improve squarespace takes all the guesswork out of search engine optimization for your website which means you'll get found in search by more people more often check out squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.combrag kobo to save 10 on your first purchase of a website or domain all right number six it's all in the eyes so much acting in the show happens through the characters eyes sometimes they're darting around sometimes they're holding an icy stare sometimes they're just directly looking into the soul of another character maybe those eyes are showing fear pixar does this well too but for me arcane kind of takes this to another level number seven is this show often tries to replicate real life cameras inside of their animation basically camera wiggle and i'm gonna sound like a broken record by the end of this but this is another one of those things where if they made that camera wiggle too obvious it becomes a distraction but i don't i don't feel like it ever does you want it to feel like a film crew is following around these actors and that this is not a static scene like some of the others that are filmed in a pub here they're climbing a building it's pretty shaky because they're in a precarious place but even when we switch to the establishing shot on the roof we can see v climbing up and over the camera is still moving you know just uh just a little bit just slightly this subtle camera swaying is everywhere throughout the series makes the animation feel more like it's moving and it makes the scenes feel more focused on a particular thing or character also shout out on the details this guy lands on the roof i forgot his name and he's eating something and you're like did he bring food with him and then when powder slides down the roof it shows the cupcakes you're like oh he must have snagged one on the way over i get it okay okay totally unnecessary detail happens all the time wonderful stuff number eight uh the themes are mature this is this is a very dark series but they're not gratuitously jark i don't like mature themes for the sake of mature themes you know what i mean like for a long time when i had a subscription to hbo you would just have these shows that had swearing and over-the-top violence just because they could just as a way to separate them from traditional network tv of its time to the point where in shows like game of thrones it was just distracting and i think arcane could have fallen into that because it's an animated show and most animated things are quote unquote family friendly they could have said hey let's make this super violent and super mature so that we scare off parents and kids and just because we can but but they didn't i felt like the violence really served the story and the setting it was always used to push the story further and tell us about the characters i guess what i'm saying is it wasn't gratuitous it wasn't there just to be there it it had a reason to exist so those are my thoughts on arcane you know what do you think this is a new kind of video for me do you like videos like this should i do more should i do less let me know down below in the comments thank you all for watching and i'll talk to you in a couple of days

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 79,783

Keywords: tech, technology, art, illustration, drawing, wacom, ipad, apple pencil, procreate, review

Id: Dy9tygAC4mY

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 17 2022