The 5 Stages of Movement [Movement Grammar]

[@RonSmoorenburg-LIfeisaction]

This information is gold, as when you understand these 5 stages and you adapt them accordingly you can create your own fighting style and character.

[@Cine_Coverop]

You're the only person I found that speaks from experience... most KZbinrs are extremely vague about mocap tips/stuff. This is inspiring!

[@benjaminpotts2097]

I think that's one of the best explanations & theories of movement that I have seen in the past 20+ years - getting shared instantly !

[@sounghungi]

Amazing analysis of a simple but in depth idea. I love the break down of the movement and how small variations can change how the movement is read.

[@RealTDragon]

Gold information thank you for sharing!! 🙏🏻

[@jasontassell]

This is such great info. I've been an animator on quite a few games and communicating with performers is a really difficult part of the process. Having a way to break down the performances into a language like this is so smart.

[@augustuslodholz5453]

Wow! That was absolutely incredible. You have one of the most impressive minds in this industry and it is incredible how you can create philosophies out of action and movement.

[@jabroniepictures]

Thank you for the opportunities, Eric. And thank you for teaching me this movement language and method. I will use video as reference for my training.

[@bazooie]

Thanks for sharing your hard-earned experience and method, Eric! Every aspiring action game developer should see this. Your insights into cultural style are right on point too.

[@RogueOriginFilms]

Awesome video as usual Eric! Super informative!

[@rrobjchilds]

Fantastic professional development. I hope you continue to build on your experience. Thank you for sharing!

[@ArtSchoolDropouts]

Great knowledge check here. The way you verbalize your thoughts into meaningful, dissected lessons open up even more ideas of variation.

[@bakaluie]

This is amazing. I'm writing a screenplay that has a martial arts finale and I was intimidated by how to convey the type of action I'd want to someone who may not be familiar with regular marts movie nerd shorthand.

[@PatrickNanEdits]

Super informative! Its great to hear what actually goes on during a capture session but also how you feel doing stunt work vs p-cap/game-cap

[@tonybabic4081]

Fascinating video Eric. Thank you!

[@Moveset-Mastery]

Very Solid, with this method you can basically break down and even imitate Martial Art/Movement styles. I wonder how we can apply this system outside of the motion capture business

[@Mercymorn99]

I missed your essays! This is super cool.

[@rodroeq7956]

This shares a lot similarities with the key poses that I look for when I'm doing keyframe animation for gameplay. Also, man you always drop some golden nugget that I'm like, tell me more tell me more. This time was head rage and leaf torso, the leaf torso I assume related to the concept on animation that everything is a bouncing ball or a blade of grass, but head rage, what the hell is head rage, I'm dying here 😂

[@bossianimator]

On point, clearly explained and always enjoyable to follow. Lovely!

[@jadedbreadncircus9159]

Amusing to me, it sounds like you're talking about a combination of fighting game start up frames, active frames, & recovery frames, while also talking about key frames in web design animation.

[@SolidCloudDR]

Brilliant break down brother 👏🏼

[@damvid21]

Thanks for this Eric, superb content!

[@kobywalsh307]

Eric is the best. Fantastic video!

[@lancergt1000]

9:10 huh i never thought of calling different kinds of startup/recovery animation styles with different adjectives before, thats very intresting 🤔

[@amy2590]

This is wonderful! So much good information

[@lancergt1000]

3:00 i wonder if there's ways to just give the attack extra range in post-production (for example giving the startup frames forward momentum), instead of forcing the mocap artist to unnaturally lunge forward before the attack

[@EricJacobusOfficial]

Yeah sometimes I'll add in a tiny slide to add a half meter or so, because leaning the body forward on some attacks is pretty awkward

[@Jocken75]

Great stuff for us animators doing our own Mocap

[@spacelord3000]

amazing video!

[@Druid_Ignacy]

Thank you, that was helpful! Do you get any trouble with melee weapon props while using xsens? I was using it and the prop was a pool noodle, after more dynamic swings / hits to the ground / parries with simulating impact with second person and their noodle - the prop kept receiving weird rotation offsets in the recording software. Did you experience something like that? Do you mitigate it in any way?

[@greentokyo]

Brilliant!

[@AMGaweda]

Do you think the Movement Grammar expands when you consider grappling styles? The grammar would need to address a two body system, an attacker and a receiver. Would the five stages still work for a receiver taking a throw or submission hold, or is it a different set of stages, or additional stages, or even to simply the receiver of strikes? I'd at least nominate the stage name to be called "Sell" as a reference to what pro wrestlers call "making the move believable".

[@EricJacobusOfficial]

Once you introduce a second performer, if it's empty handed with no chance of using objects (technically impossible) then you get an Optimized-Merge field where the signals that are shared and agreed upon are surface deep and carry weak hierarchies. As soon as objects become variables then it becomes an Unoptimized-Merge field where signals carry far deeper hierarchies and complex signs emerge which take full advantage of the entire "switchboard" of human grammar. Future video!

[@AMGaweda]

@@EricJacobusOfficial Right on, and I look forward to that future video :D I can definitely see the switchboard effect in play. Similar to the miniature grammar used for Natural Language Processing where an English sentence can be constructed in varying ways, the transitions between movement stages could serve as your moments of interrupts. Do you have something I could read up more on Merge fields?

[@EricJacobusOfficial]

@@AMGaweda The merge fields are my theories, the closest out there for humans is either Chomsky (who coined the phrase "merge" which indicates an internal hierarchy associated with a given word, except I believe he's looking in the wrong place for it) or maybe Terrence Deacon (about to get into his book Symbolic Species). I recommend Eric Gans' Origins of Language (revised edition with intro by Adam Katz). For animals, Song of the Ape is the best I've seen. The channel www.youtube.com/@nativlang has been putting some interesting animal language videos out there. In terms of how merge fields actually work, research is scanty at best. We're just starting to investigate how language causes self-domestication. Richard Wrangham sort of opens the idea up in Goodness Paradox, but nobody has given a good origin of language theory. Mine is the ROBA hypothesis - unoptimized, recursive object based aggression causes an infinitely deep shared moment of anticipation between antagonists. Each signal validated by this "unoptimized-merge" field carries the infinitely deep structure and when put together can reveal what the grammatical switchboard underlying it. Chomsky's Minimalist Program is unreadable, I recommend Pinker's Language Instinct and also Bickerton's work for understanding that stuff, because it is nerrrrdy

[@risingdragon1581]

Hidden gems 💎

[@strikeaposefilms]

This is genious.

[@alexmaniotis2352]

GOLDEN

[@mmartinez9802]

Wow... last thing I would think about. No one explores this stuff and maybe it's not made for all but very intellectual........I think ur like mega man. That absorption of many styles... I know time is lacking but it would be so cool from you. To see u do a fight scene.. but the same fight but in all those country styles... to make it a 1 min fight scene.. and see how hk would do 100 moves as opposed to US 5 moves... and try to portray the same character im the fight with the same outcome.

[@venomtang]

I mean I could animate that before lunch. And blend it to idle before the end of the day. Not making a very good argument for the use here

[@EricJacobusOfficial]

Cool man, would love to see your work.

[@TigraSpartan]

King!!!