No. 138, What's Inside!, 1: The Gadget, Part One

Where have I been?

Me at St. Michael's Mount, Cornwall.

I took a month off for a road and hiking tour of western England, plus Wales and Scotland. Had a wonderful time but now I am back with plenty of new ideas for blog posts to keep you animators thinking.  Let's get into it!

Now that I have reached the actual animation stage of my film production of Carry On, I find it appropriate to try to detail all the thinking and planning that go into many of the scenes I will be animating. I am now calling this type of post "What's inside!".

"What's inside" means all the things that the animation includes in terms of drawing, timing, spacing and any other aspects of the animation process that can be explained, and also the missteps and changes that take place before the scenes are finally approved.

I'll start with a scene I have referenced before, scene 6-15, where the Old Man opens his trunk and pulls out a cylindrical device which he then holds out for the guards to see. I am still working on this and have made some changes in the last few days.

First, here is the latest version:

A Puzzle

I have a lot to say about this scene, but first I have a fun puzzler for you. I challenge you to compare the latest version with this slightly older one and then say what change in animation has been made between them.

Don't be distracted by the more complete drawings in the new one--that isn't what I am talking about. If you can see what I mean, contact me and I will send an original drawing to the first two people who get it right.

Getting into What's Inside!

Okay, I have already showed you (in post No. 137) how I animated some of the legs in a second pass.

Now lets look at the movement where the Old Man, beginning with his hand inside the trunk, lifts the cylinder out and then turns and holds it out toward the guards. This movement required 29 drawings on two's, so it lasts 2 1/2 seconds up to the hold at the end.

Simple? Not quite. There are really only two key drawiings: the first and the last. (Remember, key drawings are the drawings that tell the story.)

The two Key or story-telling drawings, 163 and 235.

But clearly I needed more extremes than that, because, for one thing, how are you going to chart 27 inbetweens?  That might look like this!

Also, the change from one key to the other is enormous, so a little control is necessary, and you get that by defining the move with some more extremes plugged in.

I did this by animating more or less straight ahead between the keys and, working rough, produced three extremes.

The added Extremes/Breakdowns: 195, 207 and 223.

I have called these drawings extremes because they bear timing charts, but in fact they are more in the nature of breakdowns. Breakdowns, remember, are important drawings--possibly as important as the extremes themselves--since they define just how the action gets from one extreme to the other, and they can be eccentric. By eccentric I mean unpredictable and, in terms of inbetweening, illogical, because they can go where an inbetween cannot go.

A major example of this in scene 6-15 is what happens with the head relative to the hand holding the cylinder. I decided that I wanted the cylinder to arrive sooner than the head to its final position, because the whole point of this action here is to get the cylinder out and display it to the guards. If you play the scene, you will see that the head arrives late and catches up with the left hand. This was easily done by simply showing the cylinder almost to the end of its arc by breakdown drawing 223, a full seven drawings before the hold.

Drawings 223 and 235. His left hand in the first drawing is
 in the final ease-in, while the head still has far to go.

But does the hand-and-cylinder really arrive  before the head? No, it doesn't; look closely at the video and you will see that everything in the drawing comes to a halt at the same time.  The difference is in the spacing of the drawings for each part, which obscures the fact that it does all stop at once.

Here you see the same two drawings in register, making the situation more clear.

Of course the better known way of gracefully going into a hold is to have follow-through on something, hair or clothing or a tail, on an extra layer.  This spacing is just another way of doing that --and of making your animation more interesting to watch!


To be continued in post no. 139...