STAGING
A pose or action should clearly communicate to the audience the attitude, mood, reaction or idea of the character as it relates to the story and continuity of the story line. The effective use of long, medium, or close up shots, as well as camera angles also helps in telling the story. There is a limited amount of time in a film, so each sequence, scene and frame of film must relate to the overall story. Do not confuse the audience with too many actions at once. Use one action clearly stated to get the idea across, unless you are animating a scene that is to depict clutter and confusion. Staging directs the audiences attention to the story or idea being told. Care must be taken in background design so it isn't obscuring the animation or competing with it due to excess detail behind the animation. Background and animation should work together as a pictorial unit in a scene.

Staging is a combination of layout and posing. The posing part is the most important if your scene deals with character animation. As was mentioned earlier, the posing or action should clearly communicate to the audience the attitude, mood, reaction or idea of the character as it relates to the story and continuity of the story line. Since animation is such a work/time intensive process, you don’t have the opportunity to fool around with different optional actions for the character.

While it’s true that the action within the scene is predetermined in the storyboarding stage and clearly defined in the layout package, the animator does have a certain amount of flexibility in the final action of the scene. You want to be sure that the character is not doing something that will distract the audience from the intended focus. In some cases, (not every), less is best.

You also must have enough space to allow the character to do what they need to do within the scene. This has to do with the fielding of the scene and the size and placement of the character on the screen. This is largely the responsibility of the layout artist

The composition of the scene is also the responsibility of the layout artist. Making sure that the background works with the animation to effectively communicate the focal point of the scene. The layout artist must also avoid cluttering the scene with distracting elements. Sometimes this can’t be avoided due to the nature of the location design.

Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose

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