Fraidy Cats

Tending to cats, recently.

Murray the Cat is hanging in, although he was diagnosis terminal a few months back.

This is a little film we did several years back for a pilot that never went into series.

Animation is by Doug Compton.

Half A Walk

Michael Sporn has a typically interesting post illuminating a problem of poor craftsmanship being inculcated in today's animation students.

It reminded me of a half-walk we did for The Stepford Wives.

Six drawings B13 through B18.

B 13

Sure this was a big Hollywood movie, but here's the rub: they needed rewrites after a test screening and were hoping to help "fix" it in our sequence because the lab needed the new cut in just over a week.

B 14

Given the timeframe another 6 drawings (times two for clean up, times two for paint) wasn't insignificant.

B 15

Above is the passing point, it's the "trick" drawing where the legs switch.

B 16

Fortunately, this shortcut is stylistically acceptable in the context of the whole piece.  It also makes for funny animation.

B 17

Doug Compton is the animator here, and it wouldn't work without his considerable skill.  It's only a "short cut" if 20 plus years of honing one's skills as an animator is a "cheap" way to do something.

B 18

In the context of what he's criticizing, Michael's point is right on target.

I do like George Griffin's thoughts to put the problem in the larger world of motion study:

Plympton made fewer drawings work and it was not a decision based on narrative or character; it was experimental animation; it did break the rules; it let the scratchy lines move slower and not distract. A cycle is anything that’s repeated. The running Nazi gained some interesting qualities with fewer drawings: his head is obsessively facing forward to emphasize his menace, not twisting to the side on the stride; and the crazy legs give him a loping kind of nutty asymmetry.

Advice to students: Forget about “good” or “bad.” Just think about your objective, your time base, your momentary design and how it will flow or jerk in time.

Here's the animation cycled on twos.

Dog Show

In honor of this weeks big dog show, here's a cel level that was cut from a recent commercial we've finished.

This is part of a very complicated crowd scene animated by Doug Compton.

We did a layout test for the client and started animating.

A few weeks later we sent the first half of the pencil test cut into the layout test.  At this time they thought it over and decided against having the dog in the scene.  (we like the dog in the scene, of course, but there are many things not worth arguing for and this kind of thing is a big one)

In any event Doug had already done this level by that point.  Fortunately, he's a discrete part so there was no trouble pulling it.

This isn't inbetweened.  They're just 16 extreme drawings out of 35 total for the character.

The extremes are held for the subsequent undrawn inbetweens.

It's "limited animation" in a sense.  That's how you can make a crowd interesting.

The shot is almost 19 seconds and the 35 drawings play out of the course of that time.

Within the next week or so, we'll post the key drawings and how the AfterEffects project was set up.  It's a good system for testing without inbetweens that is precise and saves work in the long run.

How To InBetween

Things they don't teach you in animation school.

If you have good extreme drawings and thought out charts, inbetweening is easy.  If you consider that inbetween drawings can outnumber extreme drawings by 3 to 1, the whole process of animation becomes less daunting.

Of course that means you need to have a good animator (the guy/gal who does the extremes and usually the keys), a good layout artists, a good storyboard and a good design, but if you can only have one -it's a tough choice, but a good animator does so many things that's the most important position to fill.

Doug Compton is one of the best.  Here's a simple series of drawings to be inbetweened.

Drawing A05

Drawing A05 works into drawing A10.

A10

That means there are 4 inbetweens.  It's typical to be given 3 inbetweens, but 4 is not unheard of.

The chart or ladder which shows how these 4 drawings are to be made is written on A10.

chart on A10

From this we see that A08 is a direct inbetween of A05 and A10.  So that's the next drawing we do.

Doug, being a great animator, has already started it for us.

A08

He's done the broad, important "acting" part of the action and left the rest to be filled in.  This drawing is marked "C. D." (complete drawing).

chart 08 "C. D."

Now back to the chart.

Once A08 is drawn, move backwards to A07.  This is the direct inbetween of A05 and A08.  Then A06 which is again half the distance between A05 and A06.

Next, move forward to A09 which is between A08 and A10.

A11

Note how A11 "pops" from A10.  It's not microscopically inbetweened.  Because of this, the animator draws it as an extreme -right after A10 which is also an extreme.

There's no formula to when or where extremes fall.  There  could be 5 in a row, there could be 2 in 24 frames.  It all depends on the action.

A15

A11 works into A15.  This is a common spacing -three drawings (I'll generally refer to the number of drawings as "space" whereas the number of frames is "time" -although "space" is really the distance between between drawings) -here there's not broken up evenly.

chart 15

In chart 15 you see that A14 is the direct inbetween of A15 and A11.  This spacing builds a natural ease into the animation.  A "regular" inbetween would have A13 directly between A15 and A11.  Though this may be "regular" and eased inbetween is very common.

So you drawing A14 between A11 and A15, followed by A13 between A11 and your newly created A14, finally A12 between A13 and A11.

Note the X between 14 and 15.  Note the height of 14, then 13, then 12.  Note the arcs on the bottom.  This is how animators communicate with assistants. 

Top Secret

Can't go too much into this yet, but these are too good not to share.

Doug Compton's layout drawings for a film we're working on.

There will be a few of these short bits throughout the picture.

This particular shot will be about 7 seconds.

She's sitting by a vanity (mirror screen west).

These eight drawings are the starting point for the animation.  He'll probably do another 20 or so drawings and time and chart the remaining 60 odd drawings for inbetweeners.

Note that the detailed pattern is drawn in on all of these.  That will likely drop off from the extreme drawings and be left for assistants.

One thing he'll do (maybe we'll show when they're done), is a lot of partial drawing on the inbetweens -a blue line body with the head finished so the inbetweener doesn't have to make the face act, just follow the gesture of the body.

It's an efficient system which allows for a few important things: the most talented artist focusing on the most important parts,  less experienced animators working with a master to see how he does it, the division of labor helps hide the animator's hand allowing the illustration to retain it's original design (the several hands it passes through all refer back to the model)  and it makes production much more manageable by dividing labor into several stages instead of one "animation" chunk.

Leveling. Animation Leveling. With, Like, Cels and Junk. But Not Color Leveling -That's a Whole Different Story

This is an outtake from The Buddha.  The great Doug Compton did the animation.


It's a fairly straightforward shot that illustrates the concept or "cel levels" pretty well.

We've got four levels of animation plus the background. Each level is a cohesive series of drawings which run in sequence to make the illusion of movement.  The background is stationary for the length of the shot.

BACKGROUND:

This a stationary piece of art.

TB LEVEL:

"TB" for thought balloon.  This is a sequence of 14 drawings that animate up then cycle as a hold.

G LEVEL:

G for god.  After the balloon animates up, this figure morphs on.  This level has 16 drawings.

WL LEVEL:

WL?  wavy lines!  This is a sequence of 11 cycling drawings that make a glowing halo around the figure.

D LEVEL:

D for dancer.  This is a 10 drawing cycle.  Unlike the others, it's not in registration -you can't just layer over and VOILA! perfect scene.

The dancers are mention to be duplicated and repositioned so we have several surrounding the god.

In the olden days this would be done in inking and with the photocopier.  Today, it's a piece of cake in the animation composite in After Effects.

The composition looks like this:

You can see how the layering mimics an animation stand.

If you want your animation to resemble the movements of traditional cartoon animation, it's best to mimic the process as much as possible.

Again, this is a very simple scene with mostly effects animation and some generic dancing but the procedure is well illustrated.

Darwin Be Damned!

Monkeys evolved into cows.  At least that's what happens here.

This is one transformation in a sequence Doug Compton animated for The Buddha.  No inbetweens, all Doug's drawings.

You'll see two nice four legged walks and a simple morph between the two animals.

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Below is the test.  Drawings are held for exposure where there are no inbetweens.  Ultimately it's exposed on twos.

So I Can't Find The Video

of that TeleTV spot Maciek directed.

I know it's around here somewhere.

On top of that, I don't have the wherewithal to put much effort into a post.

Fortunately, the talented people who keep me from looking like a constant idiot have some good things to share.

First, Carlos Aponte (who designed our logo) has produced a graphic which sums up a lot of people's disappointment with the Obama Administration.

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Next, the lovely and talent Doug Compton has begun daily posts of his drawing.

His website already has terrific lessons for animators.  We've been fortunate to see a lot of his work up close, this is a great opportunity for everyone to see a animator's masterful drawings.



Here's a direct link to the page.