Acme Punched! A 2D Animation Blog

When the storyboard artist happens also to be the animator, some things may be included in the storyboard that would not otherwise be.

In my case, as an independent film maker, I am just about everything else in the production pipeline, too--but never mind about that.

When I am the Storyboard Person and I come to a scene where my thinking is engaged in the development of a scene, sometimes the Animator takes the pencil away from me and adds some "unnecessary" panels to the board.

Of course they are not entirely unnecessary--not at all. But they are perhaps not necessary to the storyboard as such; they are instead necessary as thumbnails for the animator. Thumbnailing your animation ideas is considered an essential step for the animator in visualizing all the action of a scene before more detailed work is begun.

I do consider not including these more subtle stages of movement, but when I do, the Animator jumps to his feet in great agitation, saying, "Wait! Having thought of these details, how can you not set them down? What if, by the time I, the Animator, at last get hold of the scene, I do not recall these inspirations that have occurred to us, and instead do something with the movement of this character that is less interesting than what we have thought of here? Then, having not recorded these fleetiing but wonderful notions, they will be lost."

And so I find that I, the Storyboard Person (Storyboardist? Why is there not a one-word term for this art? Even Inbetweener, awkward though it is, is but a single word) cannot argue with the Animator in this. If you think it, if you like it, write it down or draw it; make a note of it. Because, you see, if you think of it and do not record it, and then you forget the thought that you had, you may even forget that you had any idea at all. You will not even know that anything is missing. Why take that chance?

Following is a part of a scene that might have been depicted satisfactorily in just five panels, storyboard-wise. But for the sake of the Animator, I (the Storyboard Person) have included some extra stages of movement.

The first panel, the first pose.

He pushes open the lid; an essential panel.

Reaching into the lid; another essential panel.

In this panel and the next, the man unsuccessfully tries to pull something out
of the lid, This might be something that the animator and not the storyboard
person would be adding.

The Old Man now takes a two-handed grip.

This drawing clearly could be omitted from the storyboard, if not from the
notes of the animator.

This panel is another essential, showing the flow of the big overcoat as it
emerges from the lid of the trunk.

Another panel not essential to the storyboard. One can easily get the whole
idea of the action without these two sepia-colored panels.

The final essential panel.

Yes, we could easily have met the requirements of the storyboard with only seven of these nine images, and perhaps with only five. And yet, having visualized the action, why not note it down? In my opinion, storyboard artists should always err on the side of excess rather than omitting that which might prove to be useful and evocative.

On my storyboard, I find myself still in the men's room--in the toilet. And faced with the challenge of drawing a long neat row of urinals in perspective, I soon turned to the renowned animator and designer Richard Williams.

It was not the urinal itself that was the problem, but the convincing rendering of a series of evenly spaced modules diminishing in the distance. It is easy to know the size at any point along the row by the perspective lines radiating from the vanishing point, but it is not so easy to know where they should be placed along those lines.

In a lot of things, the experienced artist can fake perspective without going to the trouble of establishing an actual vanishing point and then drawing guidelines. Or perhaps a phrase more accurate than the word fake would be "make an educated guess." If the situation is simple enough, one can often get away with it.

But with things as regular as fenceposts or Doric columns, the viewer will be quick to notice if something is wrong in the spacing. After only a little drawing and a lot of erasing, I remembered that Richard Williams had addressed this issue in his book The Animator's Survival Kit. It was certainly worth looking up.

This is actually about spacing the drawings of something moving toward you in perspective,
but it also applies to a series of evenly spaced objects in perspective.

A most useful trick to know!

So here is how I applied it to my row of nine urinals.

You can see some of my blue pencil intersections.

What this doesn't give you is any cumulative change in angle as you go down the line. That part, I did fake.

And now here are the urinals again, this time with customers.

And all of this for a shot that will be on screen for less than two seconds. My thanks to Richard Williams, and to the great Warner's animator Ken Harris, who showed him this trick.

After my post about extra drawings in the storyboard (No. 111, When the Storyboard Artist Is Also the Animator) I found myself continuing to work in real time with those drawings, and I decided I wasn't entirely happy with them. Sometimes you have to tell yourself to let something go so you can get on to the end, but in storyboarding, if it isn't right, it must be fixed. If a pose or a gesture or a camera angle isn't right, you may not be telling the story in the clearest way; you may not be connecting with the viewer. To ignore the opportunity to improve things in storyboarding is foolish, because this is the last stage when changes can me made cheaply; as experienced animation film makers know, changes in the animation stage or after can be disastrously expensive.

During storyboarding, you actually have the luxury of what a live action director would just call a second or third take. You can say to your character, in effect, "Let me see you do that again, and this time get it more this way or that way." You thus direct the character: you draw it over and see if you can make it better.

Of course, this extends my metaphor that the independent animator is the director, and the animator, and the storyboard artist, and the inbetweener, and just about every other role in production. In this case, you are the director talking to the actor (you again) about the character (you yet again.)

The example I will show you here is at the climax of a whole sequence, when the Old Man reveals the overcoat that he has pulled out of his trunk. Here is the first "take" of that shot, in two storyboard panels.

Having failed to tug the garment out with just one hand, the Old Man gets a good
two-handed grip (image 1) and pulls hard (image 2).

I found these poses to be wimpy and not sufficiently dramatic. So I spoke quietly with the Old Man (in my head) and then I had him do a second "take."

Now as he gets his grip, the Old Man is a more interesting silhouette, and he is
coiled like a spring (image 1). This time when he pulls hard (image 2), his torso twists,
the violent motion throws him out of balance, and he will clearly have to take
a step or two backward if he is not to fall down.

Importantly for the animation, there is now more change between the first and second poses.

I want to note that it is interesting to work with a character like this who has some physical limitations and therefore cannot perform all the vigorous variety of moves of a younger character who is in good shape; his back must always be bent, and any violent movement may cause him to lose his balance or even hurt himself. Mostly, though still strong, he must move slowly and with caution.

I have gotten very fond of this old gentleman, and I look forward to doing him justice when I get into the animation.

A frame of sequence 7 in Storyboard Pro.

Having now created animatics of four of the sequences for my film Carry On, I am getting some idea of the length of the entire production. Right now, the screen time is something like 6.5 minutes.

For an independent production coming out of a one-man shop, this is an alarming amount of footage. It is not impossible, but with two more sequences still to be storyboarded, it could become overwhelming. So I am naturally looking for ways to trim unnecessary shots and otherwise tighten up the production.

Every scene is being scrutinized. What does it add to the telling of the story? What would be the effect of leaving it out? If important, could it be cleverly combined with something else so that the result would be shorter?

Sequence 7 is a case in point. At one minute and twenty-two seconds, it is actually paced rather nicely. But as I began work on the next sequence, number 8, I began to see a problem with them both. The two airline employee characters from 7 appear again in 8, and the interaction between them becomes complicated and time-consuming. At last I saw that if I rewrote their whole interaction, I could reduce their screen time considerably, while still putting across the same necessary points about their relationship that are essential to the plot. And somehow it seemed now to work better that the senior airline agent should be a man rather than a woman.

It looks as if sequence 7 will now end at about the same length as before, but sequence 8 will be shorter than it would have been, so that the story will become more concise as desired. In addition, the exposition is more clear, and the production benefits all around.

As for the character of the woman airline agent, she is out. She is, as film makers used to say, on the cutting room floor, like a length of 35mm footage containing her entire screen time, discarded by a film editor. But of course in animation, editing is virtually always done now, in storyboarding, and not after the film is shot.

Here is what she looks like, together with an image of her replacement:

A promising character design, I will keep her under contract until the right role comes along.

The new guy.

This week I decided to discard a whole sequence of my film. It is a sequence that I had meticulously storyboarded, and that I liked a lot. I have even featured it in some posts for this blog (Nos. 111, 112, 113), and I had looked forward with pleasant anticipation to animating it. But I have thrown it out now because I rewrote another sequence that came out longer than before, and I had to cut something. The total footage for the film is above six minutes, and if there is one thing I have finally learned, it is to keep the footage under control. If I don't, the whole film is in danger of never being finished at all. (Why have you never heard of me as an independent film maker before? Because I never finished anything, because all my projects became more ambitious than I could manage, and so they never got done.)

Thinking of all the sequences in Carry On, I saw that there was only one that could be let go. There was only one that, though it would be fun and entertaining, really added little to the development of the plotline. It's elimination would not ruin or make incomprehensible the rest of the story. It was the scene in the men's toilet where he opens his trunk to get out his huge overcoat. Though I am sorry to see it go, the move keeps me on track to finish the film.

While I try to recover from this painful but sensible event, here is a lighthearted post about something amusing that has followed me all of my life as an animator and cartoonist.

Selfies

Long before the word selfie came into the vocabulary, there have been self-portraits by artists. Rembrandt and Frida Kahlo are just two examples of painters who rendered their own image multiple times.

A Google web search produced this amazing array of Rembrandt self-portraits.

But perhaps no class of artist works with mirrors more than do animators. We are always mugging at our mirrors, making mouth shapes, contorting our features into simulations of horror, grief, or whatever emotion we are trying to get at in our drawings. But not just faces. Also body language involving head tilts, shoulders, and hands and arms are scrutinized in our mirrors.

MGM animator Irv Spence working on a facial expression for Tom.

I have been doing this for all of my life in animation, and even before. Included in this practice have been a good many images that were actual self-portraits or self-caricatures, of which I have saved quite a lot. Sometimes they were drawn for promotional purposes, as for example to illustrate posts in this blog (the latest of those can be found in post no. 110). Sometimes they were done for personal friends or party invitations. Others, just for the hell of it.

Following is a gallery of some of those hand-drawn selfies from over the years.

This is the oldest one I have. I was about twelve, and the cartooning
style I was emulating here was probably that of Don Martin of Mad Magazine.

Here is one from about 1973. At the time I was trying to be a novelist, and
as you can see, I was still a smoker.

This is a hand-painted animation cel from a self-promotional piece
that was never finished. Note the anatomically precise yet
four-fingered hand. Done circa 1980.

Preliminary sketch for another self-promotional illustration, obviously a precursor
of the painting on the masthead of this blog: the backlight shining
up through the drawing disc illuminates the face. Also about 1980.

On the occasion of getting my first computer games animation job, 1992. Now with contact lenses and moustache.

A few years later.

And later still, I give up contact lenses and go back to eyeglasses.

Detail of an invitation to a party from 2004.

Within the hundred-plus postings to this blog, there must be ten or twelve more examples that cover the period from 2011 until now. There will be more, I am sure.

All this is just a sort of side-effect of the animator's mirror that is always in my line of vision when I sit down to work. But it is fun to have a record going back decades of my own perceptions of what I look like.

And while we animators did not invent the selfie, we sometimes cannot resist to capture our own images, again and again through the years.

My Need for a Maquette

Sometimes as a 2D animator who imagines his characters in three dimensions, I have resorted to creating a maquette when confronted with difficult angles or points of view. Maquette is a French word to describe a small scale model or sculpture, usually employed as an aid to the creation of a larger work of art. It is a sketch in 3D.

The goldsmith and architect Brunelleschi created a model of his
Duomo that was 5 feet high (1.5 m).

Sculptors like Rodin created maquettes in clay of some of their concepts before carving them from stone on a much greater scale. The pioneering architect Brunelleschi made a model of his great duomo which became a guide for his workmen as they built the famous landmark church in Florence. (The maquette was also useful in making a sales pitch for an elaborate project to a pope or cardinal or to any rich patron.)

Rodin's maquette of a general as a model for a full-size bronze sculpture.

In animation, by the time of Snow White in the mid 1930's, the Disney studio was creating and distributing to animators scale models of their characters for reference, a practice that was continued until the advent of CGI modeling.

Legendary animator Bill Tytla confronts a maquette of the demon Chernabog
from Fantasia. Photo copyright Walt Disney.

The digital model for animation didn't only make the creation of physical maquettes obsolete for their all-CGI productions; it also eliminated their original purpose in animation, which was to go beyond the paper model sheet in offering to the animators a reference for drawing the characters at any imaginable angle. Henceforth, once the character model was finalized in three dimensions in the computer, no one ever had to worry about drawing the character again, or about staying "on model". The character had only to be manipulated like a flexible puppet, and there was no longer any danger of it looking "wrong".

Meanwhile, I, with other die-hards including some of you readers, remain out here in 2D world, wanting anachronistically to still do it with a pencil or a stylus. In our world, the maquette continues to be of real use.

One can get into trouble drawing rigid objects that must turn and twist in front of the camera without looking like they are changing their shape or their relationship to other features. An accurate maquette can make all the difference in creating convincing animation of spatially challenging structures like noses, hats and chins. The more complicated the shape, the harder it is to render effectively.

Just now I have a character design which is giving me some problems when I try to draw him from certain angles. Here is a selection of drawings of the character, Kevin.

Drawings of Kevin from storyboard panels.

Kevin is an obnoxious character. I want him to be amusing but not sympathetic, so I have deliberately made him weird looking, even a bit ugly. His large keel of a nose gives him a birdlike aspect, and his eyes, instead of being above the nose, are down along either side. This creates a design problem: certain angles of his face need to be avoided because his nose can completely hide the eye on the nose's far side.

You can see here that the Old Man has an equally large nose, but for two reasons it is not a problem.

With the eyes placed above the large part of the nose, you can still see them no matter which way his head is turned. Also, this character, an elderly gentleman, is far more restrained in his movement than Kevin, who turns and tosses his head about every which way as he speaks.

The difficulty of drawing Kevin will definitely be alleviated by a maquette of some kind. In the past I have made little maquettes from various materials, including paper.

A folded paper maquette of the Old Man's trunk for my film Carry On.

In the case of character maquettes, I use Sculpey, a modeling material that can be hardened at temperatures within the range of a home oven. However, if I am only wanting a temporary model to use while I draw, or to help me with drawing a model sheet, I sometimes do not bother to bake it. The Sculpey material remains pliable for years.

A simple Sculpey maquette of one of my characters, in this case
just showing the major masses of the face and head.

In preparation for doing my Sculpey maquette, I have made some careful drawings of Kevin's head--front, side and 3/4 views. (The 3/4 view actually favors the front view, since it reveals the offside eye better than a drawing that is precisely halfway between front and side.)

Side view

3/4 view

Front view

A CGI Challenge

At some point, it occurred to me that these drawings are exactly what I would create for a CGI modeler to use, and I thought: Maybe there is someone out there who would like to model Kevin in Maya or some other application!

Although I have some experience and understanding in Maya, I have never achieved any real facility in the program, and so this is not something I could easily do myself.

So, I am putting it out there as a challenge. If you model Kevin's head and give me the results, I cannot pay you. But if I can use the images, I will certainly give you a screen credit on my film Carry On, and I will give you publicity in this blog for your achievement. If you are interested, please contact me directly at bradrick@olypen.com, and I will provide you with additional tips and information. If I get more than one response, I will be happy to publish images from every modeler who takes this on.

Meanwhile I will start on my own physical maquette using Sculpey over a wire armature.

Let the fun begin!

No, it isn't what computer modelers call a wireframe, but it does employ the same idea of a grid of lines to define the contours of a shape.

In Chuck Jones case, it is just some detail found on a model sheet of Porky Pig. There were no personal computers, and this side of sculpting a maquette [see post no. 116], this was the best way in its time to make sure that he was understood. Jones, who had more formal art training than most of his contemporaries in animation at the time, wanted to make sure his animators grasped something subtle about Porky's jowls. He created what in an art school is called a contour drawing--imagining a series of parallel lines that follow a surface and thus define that surface in space.

Unlike a wireframe rendering, Chuck Jones' contour drawings have lines going in only one direction,
but the intent of precise understanding of a shape is the same.

In art schools, this was a common exercise to encourage precise observation in drawing students.

We were told to draw a leg or a torso or some inanimate object by this method, thus defining the subtleties of its surface without resorting to tonal (shaded) technique.

In the cel animation world of linear drawing, this was an ingenious yet simple way of conveying his instruction.

Off and on I have slowly been working on my Sculpey maquette, which I began soon after publishing post no. 116 in which I declared that I needed to do that for one of the characters.

First, let's review the front and side view drawings that I made.

Working directly from the drawings, I built a basic armature on a block of wood. An armature is an inner support like a skeleton that bears the weight of a clay or other plastic (i.e. malleable) sculpture and holds it in place. I neglected to photograph the naked armature, but here I got a shot before it was completely covered up. It consists of a length of heavy gauge steel wire stapled to the wooden block and then bent and shaped upward around a 3" (8 cm) screw that I had driven firmly into the block. The screw is the basic neck support. The upper end of the wire was then coiled around to support the skull space. The exact size front and side images were carefully studied to make certain that the wire would not extend outside the volume of the head. I then wrapped the wire and screw in aluminum foil; this saves on Sculpey material both in weight and volume, and a hollow layer of Sculpey will cure easier than a big solid lump.

Working still quite closely with the drawings, trying to get the linear dimensions and contours of the model to exactly match them, I began adding the modeling clay a little at a time. This is a painstaking process, and at first it doesn't look like much.

You have to work hard to keep the sculpture symmetrical, repeatedly examining it from every angle. Now it is beginning to come together.

And now with the eyes in place, it begins to look like what it is supposed to be.

Well, so far, so good. It is on the way to being a good match for both the front and side views, right? We just need the ears and hair and a few other details, right?

But wait. What of that 3/4 view that I also drew? If it was a well-done inbetween, it ought to be looking good also--right? Let's take a look.

Well, part of it looks accurate, but the head shape is wrong. Note how close to the eye I have shown the side hair to be. Why would that have happened?

The answer is that cartoonists and cartoon animators are used to working with character heads that are basically spheres. But Kevin's head is not a sphere. Here is a view of it from the top looking down.

The head is actually longer front to back than side to side, a shape
that hat makers call "long oval".

So, the maquette is proving useful already. Here is a new drawing of a 3/4 view based on observation of my unfinished maquette.

Check back here soon where I will do a post showing the finished Kevin maquette.

The Character Maquette Realized

Finally tore myself away from feverish storyboarding on Carry On to finish this maquette.

Somewhat imperfect in its fine details, it is completely usable now for its purpose--to show me any angle I desire of this character.

It has been baked (275°f for 1/2 hour) so now instead of having clay-like malleability, it is hard like a soft stone and can be sanded or carved. I may do some sanding just to smooth it out, but as it is only a drawing aid and not for public display, it is basically finished.

I could also paint it if I wanted to, preferably using flat acrylics, but I doubt that I will go that far.

I can now even see that one extreme angle that got me started, looking up at him from below his chin.

To see earlier stages of the sculpting, see post No. 118.

If there is one thing that artists in hand-drawn animation do not like to attempt, it is probably the crowd. Doing a convincing representation of thirty or more people moving about is a nightmare, even with the virtually unlimited number of layers that can now be used digitally.

But in setting my film Carry On in a busy international airport, I kept feeling a kind of pressure in my own mind to at least once show a great many people, since no one in a big airport can not be aware of the mass of humanity in motion all around.

I had storyboarded a scene where the camera slowly panned left to right over a file of passengers waiting to go through the security scanners. But the scene only showed seven people besides the Old Man character, and I thought it was the least effective looking scene in my whole storyboard. I decided to re-imagine it.

Online I began looking at images of people waiting in airports, and I finally got the inspiration I needed.

The scene opens on a medium closeup of the old man.

He idly turns his head to the right, so we see him in profile, and then his head swivels back as before.

The camera begins to zoom out.

Dissolve to a wider view, still zooming out, until the crowd below is revealed. Also the ambient airport sound will fade up as the camera pulls back.

Then a quick fade out/fade in to the scene where my protagonist is at the head of the security line.

So there is my crowd scene, all done with just a few drawings, but showing how my character had to get in line with everyone else. And the fact that the people in the crowd do not move is justified; they are merely standing still, waiting for their line to get moving again.

Next:What?!! My Storyboard is DONE??!

Thanks to Rafael Silva, who in a comment to Post No. 120 (Bring In the Crowds) directed me to the comments of Mark Kennedy on drawing crowd scenes in the blog Seven Camels. The link is repeated here: http://sevencamels.blogspot.pt/2016/09/drawing-crowds.html .

This stimulates me to say a little more about my own crowd drawing, and the three tricks I used to make it effective. At one time I worked for Dark Horse Comics, doing a funny animal series called Wacky Squirrel, among other things. Working in pen or brush and black ink, you learn a lot about how to depict things clearly.

1. All the characters in the first four rows are distinct enough that you can tell which way they are facing. This was important to show the direction of traffic flow through the maze of the security queue--back and forth, evoking an image of cattle in a slaughter house.

2. Height graduated in waves. This is not what you would normally see in a crowd, but it helps the eye to follow a file of people standing in line so that the progression is clearly seen as a line rather than just a mass.

3. Diagonal contrasted with horizontal. With the dominating directions of the lines of people and of course the tapes that separate them being diagonal, the Old Man's trunk being placed horizontally stands out from everything else. I would add that I composed this part instinctually, only realizing later how well it worked!

Maquette: When Not to Make It

Let's talk about when it may not be a good idea to create a maquette.

To review, for animators a maquette is a little model of a character for use as drawing reference. When sculptors made small models of proposed heroic sculptures to be done in stone or bronze, they used the word to mean "sculpted sketch."

The animator, required to draw her or his character from most any angle, relies on a maquette to find out how that foreshortened nose looks from the bottom, or how an ear turns in perspective with the head.

All well and good. But I think of two situations when it may not be such a good idea.

If The Character Design Is Truly Flat

Despite our claim on the two-dimensional, many 2D animation characters are designed as if they were actually 3 dimensional. In an effort to look "real" (whatever that means), the designs try to imagine the character in 3 dimensions, so that every detail of any drawing of the character is intended to make sense with every other drawing in terms of solid geometry. Bugs Bunny is like this, and so is Maui, the warrior from the recent Disney movie. Drawing a character in this geometrically convincing way can be a compelling part of the "illusion of life" approach to animation that is seductive to so many animators, myself included.

The ultimate outcome of the thrust in this direction is the technology of the digitally modeled and animated character; in this view, the virtual maquette, like the puppet Pinocchio, has come alive.

But some characters are conceived without regard for any kind of three-dimensionality. Designed on a flat surface, the designer allows their two-dimensionality to remain obvious and even uses flatness boldly in defiance of graphic realism. A model sheet of such a character may show various typical angles, but one angle may not logically rotate to another. We make it work in animation by seldom moving slowly from one angle to the next, and some angles are entirely avoided or at least not given more than one or two frames in passing.

Let's consider an example or two of this sort of truly two-dimensional character.

Here is a character whose turban is a graphic, angular spiral and whose facial
features are deliberately flat; this is not a good candidate for a maquette.

This guy looking to his right has both eyes on one side of his nose. If he turned to
look to the left, his eyes would be on that side. Maquette? I think not.

This cowboy has an appealing flat design that would not
do well if sculpted into a maquette.

This character with his floating eyes and flat, profile mouth and ear would look
better on an Egyptian frieze than as a maquette.

Also there is a hybrid approach to character design, which is what I subscribe to, choosing to accentuate either two-dimensionality or three-dimensionality as seems appropriate, and sometimes to combine both in the same character. This playful and open-minded attitude can even be seen in the drawings of the great Disney animators, who would often simplify a pose for graphic clarity, for example creating a single beautiful arc reaching from ankle to fingertips of a character stretching to one side

The Old Man character from my current film Carry On is of this hybrid type. His design contains some elements that I prefer for the sake of clarity to leave in the zone of two-dimensional graphics rather than to try to render them like solid objects. (See notations in the illustration below.) Also, I have found myself able to draw him from every desirable angle, and so a maquette of him is simply not needed.

This character is both round and flat. I never want to show his eyeglass lenses on edge (note profile view) and I take many
liberties with his ears and hat, among other things, that would be hard to depict in three dimensions.

If The Animator Is Too Literal

For beginning character animators especially, the hazard of using a maquette is in taking its rigid shape too literally. Despite the rigid parts of a head, for instance--the skull and the jaw--great liberties can be taken in animation that strict adherence to the proportions of a maquette can dampen out. The jaw can move from side to side as well as up and down, for example, and temporary distortions of elasticity even of the skull may sometimes be desirable. Someone too dependent on the maquette in her or his hand may miss opportunities where accents involving geometric exaggeration could enhance the animation.

For earlier discussion of the subject of the maquette, see posts nos. 116, 118 and 119.

When the wall was busy. This is before I settled on a more formal 7 x 7 pattern.

For months, my storyboard pinup wall has been covered with storyboard panels--not just one set of 40 or 50 drawings, but waves of them, one after the other. My wall holds about fifty drawings at a time, seven rows of seven panels each. Some sequences took more than two sets of fifty drawings to tell their stories. It has gone on and on, and at times it seemed like there might be no end to it.

The empty wall.

But now it has ended, and my wall looks like this, studded with pushpins that have nothing to support but themselves.

But though I am about at the end of making drawings for my storyboard, it isn't the end of the storyboard work. Now I have scanned all my drawings and imported them into Storyboard Pro to create an animatic for each sequence. This involves a lot of copying and pasting of layers, of making determinations for the duration of each panel in a scene, and of the addition of camera and layer movement--zooms and pans and rotations. Then there is a scratch track to be built, with dialog and sound effects and even some music to try to approximate what the finished film will feel and sound like.

Screen shot of a scene of my storyboard for Carry On.

And then? I will stitch the seven sequences together as a Quicktime movie and send it out to several friends for them to review. In the meantime, I will start on some actual animation of scenes without dialog.

Actual animation--I can barely believe it!

Confronted now with the prospect of animating all the many scenes I have storyboarded, the question of priority presents itself. How do I do this? Do I pick my favorite scenes and do them first? Do I start at the beginning with Sequence 1, Scene 1, and work relentlessly straight through from there?

First of all, I can eliminate for now any scenes with dialog except for those few in which final voices have been recorded. This is of course because the timing depends not only upon the timing that the actors will determine, but also upon any useful movement and expression that their characterizations may suggest.

The answer to the main question was defined for me by Nancy Beiman in her book Animated Performance (AVA Publishing SA, 2010). "Animators have the most time and energy at the beginning of a production," she writes. "If the most important and complicated scenes are done first, they will be done (and done well) when the animation is completed."

Beiman goes on to recommend ranking all scenes as A, B or C. "An 'A' scene is one that is vital to the storyline and usually contains the most complicated animation.

"A 'B' scene is still important to the storyline but may be a simple one-character shot rather than a two-shot with dialog. Since it will take less time to animate than an 'A', it will take second priority in production.

"A 'C' scene has lowest priority and may be eliminated if the limitations of time and budget intervene in the production, as they often do. 'C' scenes may still be necessary for the story but they can easily be modified or shortened if required."

In all my reading about studio production, I cannot remember ever before hearing about this very sensible system of prioritization.

* * *

For my first scene to animate, I have chosen one of the Old Man doing a little private victory dance. It isn't an actual dance, but his smile and his body language indicate that he has just scored a win and is feeling good about himself.

Here are the four panels that illustrate the scene in the storyboard.

Another character has tossed the Old Man's own business card into the air, and he has just caught it.

A man of thrift, he returns the card to his jacket pocket.

Now he turns away in a jaunty style that reveals his happy mood...

...and walks off screen as the scene fades to black.

Next:This scene in animation...

I have mentioned before how the animator as storyboard artist might often put more into the storyboard than an artist who does not animate would do. But when it gets into actual animation, that animator will then go deeper still.

Things occur to the animator as she or he contemplates and then works on a scene--things that will not have been thought of.

Take the first two storyboard drawings from the scene we have chosen. They show the Old Man having caught the card out of the air, then inserting the card into his breast pocket.

But let's look at everything that that will entail in my animation.

He catches the card.

He looks at his pocket.

He aims the card.

He inserts the card into the pocket.

The finger comes up to tap it in.

He taps it all the way in.

Could this have been done more directly? Might I not have just used the two basic poses from the storyboard and been done with it? Of course I could have done.

But that is basically the difference between full animation and TV animation. The proponent of full animation always is asking himself, "How can this be improved? How can it be made interesting?"

Naturally, as one working on my own personal animation project, I have the freedom to indulge myself. There is not much 2D animation being done today that permits such extravagant expenditure of drawings, time and money. Only in CGI animation will you find such lavish attention to this kind of nuance.

Special Note: You will see from the framing of this scene in the storyboard that the legs and feet will not be included in the shot. But I have drawn them in because the Old Man will turn and walk out of the frame, and so I need to know where his weight is and what his stance is. Even standing with his feet in one place as in these drawings, he is still balancing and shifting his weight about, so it is important to draw him right down to the ground if possible.

Next: The Pencil Test for the Whole Scene--wait for it!!

The Pencil Test

Last time (post No. 125) I showed you key drawings from my animation of a scene of the Old Man, along with the storyboard panels upon which they were based.

Now I have finished the pencil test, and you can see where that has taken me.

It is indescribably exciting to take a storyboard concept and breathe life into it, with all the timing and nuances that give it personality. For me, it is the height of creativity, the addictive moment of the animation process that makes all the rest of the work with its endless calculations and tedium worthwhile. It is what the animator lives for.

A New Movement?

Watching this pencil test, it occurred to me that I may have invented something new, or perhaps I am the first to put a name to it: I would call it a Double Anticipation.

This is something I observed in the tai chi classes that I attend. Our instructor teaches a sinuous and slow-moving tai chi called the Yang style. Properly performed, the movements actually give an illusion of a slow motion video.

In most animation, we are taught that when beginning any major movement, one begins with an anticipation--usually a movement in the opposite direction from the major movement--and then makes the main movement. This is based on observation of everyday actions of ordinary humans and animals and also serves to signal to the viewer what is about to happen. As animators, we all use this principle all the time, and it works quite well. It is a shifting of weight, a gathering of energy.

But suppose the tai chi performer intends to move to the left, for example. His first movement is not to the right but toward the left, the major intended direction. This is usually to shift the weight onto the forward foot and off the rear foot so that the rear foot can be turned to an angle that will best support the movement. Only then does the tai chi practitioner bring his or her weight back onto that foot, shifting balance to the right as in a classic anticipation.

Here in my pencil test I have given the Old Man a double anticipation before he walks off. I really don't know if my tai chi placed the idea into my subconscious, or if it just helped me to recognize and classify what I have animated.

A note on looping YouTube movies: Did you know that if you control-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) the lower righthand corner of a YouTube movie, you can select an option to loop the Movie? Very useful for viewing short animation pieces!

Quentin Blake's "Clown: Thrown Away"

There is a little 2D animated film that wants to be made which deserves support. Clown: Thrown Away, based upon a children's picture book by Sir Quentin Blake, is now up on Kickstarter with only 24 days remaining in which to make their quota. I have been asked to do what I can to publicize the project and encourage everyone to subscribe and make it happen.

On Kickstarter, unlike some other crowd-funding sites, it is all-or-nothing; either their stated goal gets pledged by the deadline, or else no funds are collected and they are back at zero.

This is an exciting and worthwhile production for a number of reasons. First, the charm of the style. The illustrator and author, Quentin Blake, well known for illustrating his own books as well as the stories of Raold Dahl, renders his cartoons in a loose watercolor and ink style that the producers intend to translate onto the screen. This is a difficult idea but will be exceedingly charming if they can bring it off, and there is every reason to think that they can.

This is line art from the film's storyboard; the animation has barely begun.

Second, the story is all in mime, which makes it universal, not dependent on language or translation no matter where it is shown.

And the story is also a universally appealing one, of courage and organization, sadness and joy, and of bravery and optimism.

Here is the link to the Kickstarter page: www.letsmakeclown.com

Support 2D animation by supporting this project, and please spread the word now!

Preview Audience

People's reactions to my animatic are diverse.

Some creative arts are commonly accomplished more-or-less alone. Painters, poets, novelists and composers, for example, often work by themselves, showing little or nothing to anyone until a work is finished. And even filmed animation, developed though it was as an assembly line process involving many hands and minds, can now be completed by oneself.

If one wishes for approval of the public, however, it may be a good idea at some point to get opinions other than one's own. In animation, an obvious opportunity for that comes at the completion of the animatic--the filmed, timed-out storyboard, preferably with sound. It still must be explained to some that: no, this is not the finished film; the characters will eventually not just slide along or pop from pose to pose, but will actually move. They will be, you know, animated. (Believe me, I have had to go through this explanation more than once.)

So with my animatic of Carry On at hand, I selected a small group of friends and invited them to a private site on You Tube to have a look at it. They were requested to give me any feedback that occurred to them. All of them knew the difference between a storyboard and actual animation, so I didn't have to explain that. All of them enjoy good animation.

Four of them have themselves done animation at one level or another. Two of the others are illustrators, and the last one has an artistic background and a keen critical mind. In addition to this "official" survey, I have had the opinions of my wife and a few other friends who have seen it.

The results are not all in yet, but they are interesting. Basically, they are all over the place; there is very little consensus on any one element as being wrong or confusing or overplayed or underplayed. Everyone liked parts of it, and most liked most of it. One person hated a certain character and another cited that character as particularly effective--that kind of thing. Several had their own suggestions about how they would do this or that differently, but so far, no two individuals came out against the same thing.

Well, except for once. It's that character I just mentioned. One reviewer found it extremely offensive culturally, and another said she just didn't like the character but could not quite say why; she just really, really disliked it. This set off a serious alarm in my brain, despite the fact that two other of the reviewers liked that same character a lot.

My following is small but it is world-wide, a statistical fact that brings me some satisfaction. I do not want to be culturally offensive. And so, that character will get a serious make-over. I have already worked out how to do that. It will cause me some trouble and work, but I won't consider not doing it.

I expect to have more to say about this review process in a later post.

In other news...

Beginning on March 18, this blog suddenly has experienced an amazing surge in daily page views, from an average of between 10 and 20 per day to between 150 and 250 page views per day. This increase continues unabated as of today, April 11.

Of course I love this, but...what is going on? Is something now being counted that wasn't included before? Is my blog required reading for some animation school? Or what?

I would like to know. If anyone reading this has any ideas, I would enjoy hearing them.

I have been busy since my last post as I start to do animation from my A list: the scenes that are the most challenging and or the most important in my film. (See post no. 124 for a description of the A-
B-C system of animation triage.)

Right out of the gate, I had a success. It is the scene described in post no. 126 of the old man catching and pocketing a business card, then strutting off. I planned it right, the drawing and timing went well, and it came out as good as I had imagined it should.

I felt righteous, as if I really knew my business. Everything from then on, I thought, was going to be easy, professional, attractive, and I would gain the admiration of everyone who knew anything about animation, as well as all those who didn't.

And yet...

Example of an erased, re-numbered, re-drawn, re-positioned and taped, and throughly battered drawing.

Nope. Hasn't turned out that way. The very next scene I chose to work on has been a challenge. It sounds simple; the Old Man is pulling on a pair of gloves. But of course the trick is not in just animating it but, as always, to do it in an entertaining and believable way.

But don't get me wrong! I am not defeated in this; I am just having to work harder than I anticipated. But I have always acknowledged that animation--good animation--is a challenge. Really, I wouldn't have it any other way. Anything worth doing ought to be hard, make you sweat, make you think.

So I have been: erasing, re-drawing, re-timing from my pencil tests, cutting and repositioning drawings with tape. This is all the unglamorous but necessary work of animating when you want (and have time) to keep after a thing until it is right.

Next: Staying On Model

"Staying on model" is a subject that comes nowadays under the heading of THINGS-A-2D- ANIMATOR-STILL-HAS-TO-WORRY-ABOUT-BUT-WHICH-A-3D-ANIMATOR-NEVER-EVEN- HAS-TO-THINK-ABOUT.

The cgi animator working in 3D has his or her model already done. It need only be manipulated, distorted, posed. It will always look like itself, no matter who is working the sliders.

The 2D computer animator using 2D puppets with replaceable parts likewise seldom has to actually draw anything original, once its whole set of parts has been created.

But for us die-hard animators whose images are hand-drawn and unique, it remains a big deal. At one time in the Hollywood-style studios, the problem was one of trying to get all the animators who might be working on the same character to draw alike. This was harder than you may imagine because the personalities and idiosyncracies of artists conspire to make them not draw all the same.
So detailed model sheets were devised and handed out to all concerned, and everyone was encouraged to follow the specifications closely. If you couldn't do it, you were put into the story or effects department--some place where character drawing precision was not quite so important--or you got out of the business of studio animation.

And to a great extent, this system did work. It got to be that the general public was unaware that one scene had been animated by Ben Washam, for example, and the next by Ken Harris, followed by another one by Washam. Today, experts or geeks like me can sometimes spot certain scenes as being by a particular animator, for the reason that the animator in question might have what poker players call "tells", being in this case something in their drawing, posing or timing that gives away their identity to the alert scholar.

The Warner's director Chuck Jones, in my opinion, had the on-model situation best in hand because he produced a profusion of pose drawings in his own style for his animators to work from. They were good poses, brilliantly drawn, and so all the scenes in the cartoons he directed tended to look like Chuck Jones cartoons, unmistakably.

An independent animator like me, answering only to myself, may worry about drawing consistency, or may decide that it does not matter.

To me, it does matter. And when I found that my drawings were drifting off model, I did something about it that I remember having done before. I scaled my model sheet to the exact scale of the character in the scene I was doing.

If the character on your model sheet stands 4 inches high on that paper, and the character in your scene would be 9 inches high at full length--your scene might be a medium closeup just showing the character from the waist up--and if you try to just scale the image up as you draw, you may get into trouble. You may get the head right but the shoulders too small. You may easily get the nose too long or the chin too big. A model sheet copied to the right scale can save you from unwanted distortion and inconsistency.

An array of model sheets scaled up in 10% increments at each step.

Even in a studio where the animator receives a layout with the character drawn in, having your model sheet sized to the proper scale will be helpful. Most copiers can take your image up or down in increments of 1%.

Try it!

No. 111, When the Storyboard Artist Is Also the Animator...

No. 112, Richard Williams Teaches Me How to Draw Urinals

No. 113, Take Two

No. 114, The Character on the Cutting Room Floor

No. 115, The Face in the Animator's Mirror

Selfies

No. 116, Maquettes, Physical and Digital

My Need for a Maquette

A CGI Challenge

No. 117, A Chuck Jones Wireframe from 1947--or is it?

No. 118, How I Got It Right--and How I Got It Wrong: Maquette, Part 2

No. 119, Maquette, Part 3

The Character Maquette Realized

No. 120, Bring In the Crowds

No. 121, More about Crowds

No. 122. Maquettes, Part 4: When Is It Not a Good Idea?

Maquette: When Not to Make It

If The Character Design Is Truly Flat

If The Animator Is Too Literal

No. 123, The Empty Wall: Approaching an End to the Storyboard Phase

No. 124, Storyboarding into Animation

No. 125, Storyboard into Animation, Part 2

No. 126, Storyboard into Animation, Part 3

The Pencil Test

A New Movement?

No. 127, A Worthy 2D Kickstarter Project

Quentin Blake's "Clown: Thrown Away"

No. 128, Animatic Private Viewiings

Preview Audience

In other news...

No. 129, Working Hard at Animation!

And yet...

No. 130, Staying on Model