Staging is a principle of animation used widely in animation and it is a very good technique to understand because it allows the animator to essentially become a director and portray their animations in the best possible way, there are many ways to do this and I will be discussing them throughout this post.
There are various ways to stage your scenes, the most common way is through the manipulation of camera angles and getting a good sense of depth of field. By doing this you are using a lot of artistic judgements and sensibility's to produce something enchanting and captivating.
Thumb Nailing
This is a good technique it allows you to get a visual idea as to how you would like your scene to look, and allows you to experiment with different attributes of your drawings, it can also spark inspiration and innovative ideas by putting pencil to paper or setting up your view port correctly.
Animating the Camera
This is where you take all of your different ideas and thumbnails and you make a camera which you can animate on a curve, or by using key frames. This is excellent as it allows you to create fast dynamic movements, and it gives the illusion that the characters are moving but if your cleaver, it will be just the cameras doing the work.
In film they use real cameras with cranes, helicopters and all different kinds of mechanical systems, the beauty of using software is that you can create artificial cameras which do the exact same thing, in the blink of an eye.
Myself and my group were very cleaver with how we animated our scene, we decided that we would animate the props and environments around the characters, instead of the other way around. This was brilliant because it tricks the eye into believing that the characters are moving, and it makes life a lot simpler. These techniques combined with various camera angle can really create a nice punchy consistent cinematic.
Audiences Attention
Grabbing the audiences attention is important, so framing everything perfectly comes hand in hand with this particular principle. If a character is executing a gesture and the camera is panned to the side and not cantered or zoomed right out, the audience will not register what is happening.
In film they use shots called reaction shits, it is where a camera quickly zooms in and you get a close up of a persons reaction. This helps the viewer understand what is going on and depending on how the camera moves, and the sped of it, its also directing the audiences attention to a specific area in a scene. These methods are used a lot if many things are happening at once.
Creating the Camera
Doing this couldn't be easier, there's a few controls involved, but simply go to Create > Cameras > Camera. This will create you a standard camera which will do everything for you. You can animate them by keying them, then repositioning the camera and setting another key frame, the camera will then animate between the two key frames.
Tip: Its all about experimenting, another cool tip is to hit "T" on the keyboard, it allows you to choose where the cameras looking, so no matter how you move the camera, it will always have a target focal point.
So overall staging is basically the process of setting up your cameras and becoming the director of your scene, when you get to more advanced levels you can practice with different effects such as lens flares and lens shattering, along with motion blurring and much more.
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