Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512296
Kudelka and AJ Harpold, who mapped out the film's dance sequences. Using the choreography reference, Bradford introduced the principles of dance to the animators, such as the direction dancers are moving, their location, and how high and low they are in relation to each other. Other considerations included identifying where the center of gravity is, which part of the body is leading, and the different pathways dancers are taking to move a certain part of the body or to get from one location to another. All of these elements are important to create dance sequences that feel realistic despite the cartoonish shape of the characters. For example, Bradford looked at the posing of hands and feet and how they impact the overall silhouette. Clear silhouettes are especially important for the style in a Trolls film. What can be challenging, she says, is that the proportions of the troll characters don't allow a lot of room for big movement; they have stubby limbs and fingers, and giant heads. "So what you can take from the choreography and translate onto a troll's body is very limited," she explains. In addition to the principles, Bradford reviewed the dynamic qualities of movement—suspended, sustained, percussive, etc.—and how they can be exaggerated by the animator to add texture and clarify the performance, which can be pushed in the Trolls animation style. "There's a lot of … hidden scaling of limbs … just to try to get the poses to read clearly for the audience," Bradford says. If the choreography requires a low knee-bend pose, for example, the animators exaggerated and lengthened the legs so that viewers can read that knee bend and silhouette. Having previously worked on Trolls World Tour, the choreographers knew that the trolls can't put their arms overhead, and they would try to avoid that. There was a lot of taking the essence of a pose and reconfiguring it to work with the trolls' proportions. Willis points out that animating dance can be intimidating, which is why he wanted to get into the specifics of speaking the language of dance to prepare the animators. As part of this learning process, he tasked animators with coming up with components that would only be possible in the Trolls' universe. "So it wasn't just taking the dance reference and interpreting it," he says. "It was also like, can you 'troll-ify' it? Or can you do something where the Troll defies gravity, or uses their hair some way, to dance." Willis says that while they had the freedom to interpret, overall they stayed true to what the choreographers came up with, and that, along with the deep dive into music and dance, paid off, resulting in sequences that feel genuine as well as entertaining and fun. her animation work. "When I started on Trolls, it was like, 'Oh, this is what it was all for. This is why I got into this,'" she says. She advises colleagues to pursue their passions "because it really feeds the work that we do as animators." For the music theory lessons, Bradford included song structure, rhythm, and syncopation, and how to count beats and find the pulse of the music. She showed animators how to break that down and translate it into frames per second on a timeline. She wanted to provide the animators with a blueprint to work with, so if they didn't have the choreography for a particular moment, they would be able to use their new understanding about the music and experiment to come up with their own moves. Bradford's own method is to first get familiar with the music and count out the beats. Then she'll figure out the overall song structure, taking note of chorus, verse, and changes in dynamics or volume. All this, she says, plays into what you do with the dance. She'll spend time visualizing before studying the choreography created by Justin Timberlake's choreographers, Marty WINTER 2023 39