I was watching a baby at TGI Friday's the other night and he saw another small child through the window (down here in Florida you can eat outside comfortably at night in the winter =)....so he waved. And I started thinking about where that idea came from.
A) It's instinctive, and the First People got the attention of others by reasoning that they could attract the gazes of others by becoming mobile since themselves were caught by moving objects.
B) It's learned and cultural (disregard the specific motion here) and he has already learned that's how you say hello.
Has anyone ever been so cognizant while they were animating of what they were doing that they let the distinction between the internal motivations of motor skills affect the characterization of their acting abilities? For example, would you treat arms bunching around the head to protect the brain when you trip any differently -- even if it is something so minimal as a delay in limb timing -- than you would that same character going "OK, I want you to throw a ball at my head. Take three steps back, turn around, and then throw it" and then consciously preparing for the hit with the same arms-bunching-around-the-head deal?
On the same note, a bit of a rant... was watching the AnimationMentor teaser videos, and they show a kid getting his stuff reviewed, and they're doing arcs that week I suppose and up pops a head turn. He starts out looking left, then HUGE overt dip directly down and then swoop back up to the right. I'll bet the arc was beautiful, but it was so exaggerated in orientation and the timing was so even it looked mechanical and...well, where I'm going is, it's a school so he has an excuse, but it seems to me there is this class of people who do things in animation because they think "that's just what you do" instead of being judicious about how they act through the character.
Just because you read that the head arcs in a turn, doesn't mean you robo-copy every time. Being animators we're largely visual learners so I know from experience nosing into a book pales in comparison to observation. Use it for a springboard, I say, to know what to look for (in addition to whatever you're doing on your own), and then seek it out yourself.
In the example in that video it is such a stretch and takes the movement so far away from its natural context that it looks unnecessary. Pointless. Flat. I don't think a lot of people understand that the best animation comes from good judgment more than anything. You make the call when to use that information or not and you go with it. Hopefully you've been doing it long enough that it's second nature and you don't have to think about it.
But if I'm animating a teacher giving an evil gaze that slowly pans across the classroom she just barked at, do I have to do this giant bouncy arc where she seems like she wants to look under her kneecaps? Of course not.
