Quick Tips on Hand Animation

1) The hand is one cohesive unit

Think of the hand as a whole, rather than a collection of joints and fingers. The movement of each finger and joint often affects the others in some way.

2) The hand can communicate!

The hands can be your single best way of communicating emotion. Whether its a gesture, flexed fingers showing rage, or freezing a hand pose as a way to show the character getting lost in thought - hand animation can really help tell your story.

3) Hands are squishy!!

Obviously, some rigs are better than others, but as much as you can, try to recreate the "squishiness" of your hand in your animation. I'm not even really talking about all the wrinkles and fleshy folds and stuff, but more how the fingers interact with each other and shove each other around. Make a fist, and make it tight, and look at what your fingers do. They don't all just rotate in one axis independently of each other, there is some wonderful complexity going on in there for you to study and recreate in your work!

4) Default hands = bad bad bad bad bad BAD!

Even if your character is saluting or karate-chopping someone, hands are almost never in "default" pose in the real world, with the fingers all straight out. As far as scientists have been able to discover, default hand poses only seem to exist on beginner student demo reels. So if you want studios to take your work seriously, avoid this at all costs!!

5) You don't always have to move the hands

For a lot of us, one of the most difficult things when we were learning animation was trying to figure out what the heck to do with our character's hands. I used to struggle with this as well until Wayne Gilbert set me right and really explained the importance of going through a strong planning process.

The truth is that if you really plan out your work, and film yourself giving a TRUE performance, then whatever your hands do in the reference will feel REAL and NATURAL, and will, at the very least, give you some great ideas of what to have your character do.

That said, there are plenty of times where minimal hand animation *is* what feels most natural, and that's OK! Be careful, though, as your scene can easily lose some entertainment value if you keep the hands static for minutes on end, but at the same time, don't feel like you always have to have the hands moving around and constantly gesturing.

Gestures would be a completely separate post, but one thing I will quickly mention is that you should use them very carefully and, unless going for a specific "talks with his hands" effect, are usually best used in moderation.

Shawn :)