That one piece of criticism that finally stuck with me after years of ignoring it

An old timer at a con panel told me my fight scenes were just 'noise with extra steps' because I never thought about spacing or weight. Cut my choreography length in half and started focusing on impact frames instead. Anyone else get a random comment that changed how you animate?

2 comments

2 Comments

carter.hugo1mo ago

Did you actually cut your choreography or just the runtime on each action?

terryrobinson1mo ago

Wait, are you really telling me that trimming a couple seconds off each action makes more of a difference than actually stripping out whole sections of choreography? I think people get too caught up in runtime when the real issue is how the dance flows from one move to the next. Like if I take a 10 second aerial sequence and cut it down to 5 seconds, sure the whole thing is shorter, but the dancer still has to pack in the same amount of steps and transitions just faster, which can look rushed and sloppy. Cutting actual chunks of choreography, say removing a whole 8-count of floorwork or a series of turns, changes the whole rhythm and story of the piece - you lose that buildup and payoff. So yeah, I'd argue that shortening each action without cutting the moves themselves is actually harder to pull off cleanly than just removing whole sequences.