With the current art style, animations have different names than for the older art styles. Whether you were familiar with directing on Episode before now or are just getting started, it’ll likely be a bit of learning curve before you’re able to recall the names of the animations quickly. There are also a few new features to help make animating characters a more efficient process.

Keeping Characters Active                                            _

While the artists are working on returning animations to an “idle” state after the character has performed the animation, some of the animations currently end with a character bent over, leaning forward, talking for too long, or otherwise frozen in an awkward position.Just a few of the animations that do this are...

talk_happy_agree

talk_gossip

talk_awkward

disappointed

You’ll get a sense of which do this as you start to get more practice with directing. With these animations and the others that you notice freezing the character in an awkward position, it’s good to get into the habit of putting, after their line of dialogue and before the next character’s line of dialogue: @CHARACTER starts idle (or idle_happy, idle_arms_crossed, idle_sad, etc.).

Let’s look at a few examples...

In the app, open the story “Advanced Directing Guide” and click button “6.2 Keeping Characters Active”

*To follow along in the script, open:

http://episodeinteractive.com/write/story/Advanced_Directing_Examples/1

Then jump to “label sixtwo”

Example A: Placing the characters in idle after finicky animations keeps the characters active and the conversation looking natural.

Example B: Without placing the characters in idle after finicky animations, the characters will look awkward or “broken.”