In the Animator's Survival Kit, Richard Williams advised that to create & develop characters, make them believable, not realistic nor accurate. Is this applied to webcomics, as well? Please elaborate.
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elaborate on what he meant.
Sure, it applies to webcomics too. I think it applies to all fiction.
Now if we could just get our politicians to be believable....
Eddie
Yeah, what Eddie said. There has to be something to hold onto that lets you suspend disbelief of the fiction. And that goes for characters, plot, everything.
I guess it's the old joke, "once you can fake sincerety, you've got it made".
"Believable politician" is an oxymoron isn't it? :D
To some extent, though, on the artistic front, realism and accuracy are part of believability. A thing needs to at least adhere to its own sense of reality to be believable.
In the context of animation, though, he's likely talking specifically about motion. The reason motion crapture never works as well as animation is that our sense of motion is very different from the actual things we observe. To some extent that information is symbolic and the viewer interprets it. When animating a person walking, for instance, you'd be better off studying the way an amphibian moves than a real person. Taken away from the visual cue of a real live person, the motion loses context and looks as awkward as it really is.
Bouncing a ball doesn't really deform it as much as an animator must deform it to show the motion. Shadows aren't as prominent as they should be to describe interaction with the background. But the exagerrated motion is more believable, the exagerrated shadowplay ties the figure to its surroundings. Water doesn't really show its movements as nicely as in a good animation, and wind doesn't move things in nicely composed swirl patterns, but the fiction is more believable and communicates itself more clearly.
When designing a character, facial features and physical construction should, then, lend itself to this believable method of animation, rather than trying hard to replicate the realities. Features that are more easily manipulated and proportions that allow expressiveness within a more limited frame make for better animated designs (and to some extent comics as well though we have more freedom when it comes to the space). Believably constructed characters are much more important than realistically constructed ones that articulate in the same awkward ways real people do.
That's more the realism vs. believability argument in animation. Trying to mimic the real world often only serves to highlight the ways the real world fails our imagined concept of it. Interpretation is better than representation when it comes to animated art, and to some degree, static art as well.
Thanks for that post. I was wondering if it meant storytelling, but the line didn't make sense in that context. I remember roommate(an animation major) mentioning this to me though, or something along similar lines, where he said it was necessary to exxagerate instead of show things in a realistic sense.I thought exxageration was a bit extreme, but believability over realism makes a little more sense.
I guess it's reflected in traditional art in the old backlash against academic painting, with the models portrayed very realistically, but the posing and tight rendering gave a sort of artificial look to the scenes. Because we don't view the world in stills, so you can't have a genuine reflection of reality with a still shot. So people adopted looser styles they felt better represented reality on a canvas...amongst many other things. I guess a good example of thi is how in art we lock onto "best faces" when drawing expressions. What I mean is, take a video, and freeze it while someone is talking. Generally the face takes on a pretty awkward shape. But when we draw someone talking, we ignore these in betweens and generally give them an expression that represents their overall mood while speaking. So in that respect it applies to art. In cases like faces it's learned pretty intuitively. But in directing some kinds of scenes, people have an awkwardness about how they handle things. They may not get how to direct action scenes, and so they'll use a reference for a punch, with the end result looking like someone sorta played their hand on someone's face, and that person bent over a little... and they just stood like that for a while. It may look realistic, but it's not believable. It gives precedent to a moment over the whole activity it is conveying - the swinging of the arm, the impact, etc.
Comics are like pornography. I don't want them to be too realistic. I want the skin airbrushed, and gravity defied. I don't want to read something that chronicles just how boring life can be. There might be two juxtaposing disciplines in art - ability to take someone away from reality successfully, and the ability to render that reality.
Style is the result of your compromise between the two.
In my own web comic, the more I've loosened up and exaggerated things, the more people seem to respond to it.
[quote="Fabricari"] I don't want to read something that chronicles just how boring life can be.[/quote]
hahaha, I'm writing something close to that story right now. Seriously. Pencilled 30 pages and everything. Taste is a funny thing.
Aw nut's, I did it again. Open mouth. Insert foot.
No worries. I'm the only guy I know that gets interested when someone mentions that they didn't like a story because "nothing happened". I took a creative writing course once that came with a textbook that basically said "DON'T DO THIS" when referring to the things I like to do. I got an A, but it was mostly by using other things to makeup for what people expected. Humor, interesting conversations, etc... whatever let the reader enjoy the story without noticing that nothing was really happening. And hopefully when they catch on to the lack of... a plot... they liked it enough to not care so much. I mostly agree with your post though. Stylization is more appealing in general to people than realism, color over black&white people do like conflict and a degree of escapism in stories. I don't think the lesson is that stories should always avoid subject matter or approaches that don't appeal to most people, but that creators working on that sort of thing should be mindful of it. Hearing about the uncanny value shouldn't stop people from going for high levels of realism... it should just make them aware of the increased scrutiny that comes with it.
Re:
[quote=rezo]
No worries. I'm the only guy I know that gets interested when someone mentions that they didn't like a story because "nothing happened".
[/quote]
So you're a fan of literary fiction, then? I once loosely defined literary fiction as "fiction which has nothing to say, but which says it beautifully."
:-D
I'm teasing, of course. That definition only applies to the hack stuff. All too often when someone says, "nothing happened," in literary fiction (the good stuff, anyway--My above definition still applies to the hacks), it is because "nothin' got blowed up."
D. Robert Hamm
Blue Crash Kit
BookMuncher
D. Robert Hamm
Blue Crash Kit
BookMuncher
Can't they be both?
I'd say make your characters believable first, give your readers a few hooks so they can get a grasp on "what" your character is, and as you develop them you can introduce more and more realistic elements so your readers can get a fuller picture of "who" they are.
...Erm... That's rather vague. By hooks I don't mean to encourage the use of stereotypes or simple archetypes, but I think if your readers can start out with a 2-dimensional picture of a character (i.e. "she's the smart one who reads lots of books") it's easier to then introduce the more random and illogical elements that all of us have in our personalities that make us genuinely interesting and 3-dimensional (i.e. "she also has an inexplicable weakness for cute animals").
Jonathon Dalton
A Mad Tea-Party
I'd agree, in the sense that
I'd agree, in the sense that your character can obey all the laws or realism, but they may just be empty. If your character is believeable then they create their own realism. In some ways I can't get my head around that statement for the pure reason that I don't have a very singular view on reality... in a non-pretentious way... I'll be quiet
~Firedaemon
tangentine.com
tangentine.com
Believability comes from
Believability comes from coherence. You can have a character that shoots cowebs from his wrists or lasers from his eyes, and still make him a believable character because his actions and thoughts are coherent and consistant.
Maritza
CRFH.net
There's a big gray fuzzy
There's a big gray fuzzy line here.
I have often said that there are writers I admire because they are so adept at writing the way people really talk (Linklater), and those I admire because they write the way people SHOULD talk (Bradbury).
I think it is possible to write realistic characters who are also interesting, but when given a choice, go for the interesting yet believable over the true-to-life. Indeed, leave out the "er... uh....," unless you've a point to make by including it.
Exaggerate or understate wherever needed to get across those aspects of the character that should be important to the reader. (Note that I say to the reader--It is easy to get caught up in details that the writer falls in love with but that do not serve the story, and so must be excised. This is called, "Killing your darlings.")
D. Robert Hamm
Blue Crash Kit
BookMuncher
D. Robert Hamm
Blue Crash Kit
BookMuncher
I look at things in the
I look at things in the opposite way. Character elements should be shown because they're a part of the character without any specific importance to it And the best reason to use "er...uh..." is if it's in a situation where the person would say "er...uh..." and the only point being made is that, well, the fellow talks like that. I think people can be fine not worrying about whether something serves their story.Just showing things as they are without an especially focused narrative is a good thing and perhaps lends itself to more naturally developing characters and situations if you're mindful.
Kiwis by beat!
To umm and err is human
Absolutly. It's worth looking at a transcript of, uh, a speech or something someday. Um... You be surprised, well, how badly people - most people speak. They, er, pause and, well, they backtrack over their own speech and, well do all sorts of things that, uh, look bad if you actually write them.
And they're usually worse than the above paragraph. That's an example at a very basic level but it applies the many, many facets of characters and writing. There are about fifteen seperate "wise" sayings which all say pretty much that same thing. The only one I have to hand is one from Terry Pratchett, which although it pretty much the same thing, isn't about characters.
"Facts don't have to make sense. Only well-crafted fiction has to obey such rigid rules." - The Science of Discworld 3
- Joel Fagin
"The difference between
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense."
I forget who said that. I may be wording it slightly different. But it's a very good one to live by.