EMMA - Field Research 09

A while ago I sent a mail to someone with some advice about animation. They wondered if they should use realistic (rotoscoping) animation, and even though this can be quite a handy technique, I immediately found myself thinking about exaggeration.
I truly love to search for the animation's leading 'motion-arcs', and exaggerate these. In our Fist of Fame Project, I even got to exaggerate them as far as I could: over-the-top being the selling point of the game. I loved this and truly enjoyed animating these moves 200% more extreme than I normally would've done...

So, when they want to use rotoscoping techniques, their exaggeration is limited to zero. Rigid bodies don't squash, stretch or over-stretch, even though their movements sometimes appear to do so.
Within high-end games, this realism is no problem: we see enough complex details to comprehend i.e. mo-cap animations. When you create smaller, often 2D games, moves tend to become undefined or unclear, and need exaggeration to clarify themselves.





Above, Call of Duty and Swords and Soldiers. Where the realistic CoD would need no exaggeration to express their meaning in atmosphere or actions, Swords and Soldiers needs colour and exaggerated actions to express their meaning.