No. 137, Taking Steps Without Legs

I think I have touched upon this before, but it is an amazing thing that really does work: you can in some cases animate a character moving from one place to another, without drawing the legs or feet at all until the very end. And yes, I mean in a full figure scene that shows the legs and feet.

I just did it again in a scene I am animating, and even though I have done it before, it always requires a leap of faith to try it--to keep myself from blocking in the lower limbs.  Because, after all, doesn't that leave the head and upper body just hanging there in space? How can that ever come out right? I ask myself.

Well, it certainly does take some planning.

In my experience, you will want to know the precise perspective of the layout involved. You will want to be sure you understand your character's relation to that perspective. And you will want a solid key drawing--with legs and feet--both before the movement and at the end.

The fact is, when we step over from one position to another on the floor, we do not always bounce noticeably up and down with each step. Walk cycles are usually full of the up and down movement of the body mass, sometimes with a lot of squash and stretch to add weight to the character.  But like good dancers, we sometimes shift our position in a way that is more smooth and gliding, and the usual bobbing up and down is then unnecessary and even distracting.

Let's look at the scene to which I am referring. My Old Man character has just opened up his steamer trunk. Aware that he is being watched by security guards off the right side of the screen, he reaches into the trunk and pulls out a cylindrical object which he then holds out for the guards' inspection.

I did not start this scene with the intention of using the "no legs" technique; it just became appropriate in my mind when I saw that as the Old Man lifts out the cylinder, he must take two (or three or four) steps as he turns almost 180 degrees  and holds the object out. This move was to be done slowly with a moving hold at the end, involving 30 drawings on 2's and over 2 seconds.

As I began roughing in the extremes of this move, there were other complexities to think of, as for example that I wanted his hand with the cylinder to arrive first while his head and torso catch up a bit later. So I began leaving his legs and feet completely off the extreme drawings between no. 161 and the last drawing, no. 233.

Here are the extreme drawings nos. 161 at the beginning
and 233 at the end.

Even as I filled in the breakdown drawings and all the inbetweens, I did not think about the legs and feet.  His torso simply turned in midair, drifted across a little way, and came to rest at drawing 233, where he had his legs and feet once again.

Here are drawings 203, 213 and 225, as they looked when I first worked with them. At the time, I did not
know that they were to become extremes for the leg movements. (For purposes of this blog post,
I had to erase the legs in Photoshop to illustrate this stage of development.)

When at last I was ready to consider his steps as he moved across, a close look at the exposure sheet suggested that three steps might be just right. As an old man not always sure of his balance, it was appropriate for him to take short, uncertain steps, and I saw that the contact drawings--the drawings where his moving foot touched down--ought logically to come on frames 203, 213 and 225, giving 4 to five drawings between each pair of extremes.

The X-sheet, showing where I decided to place the contact drawings. Scenes like this
should not be attempted without charting your timing on an X-sheet first.

And note this: none of those three contact drawings was an extreme pose as regards the upper torso. This is fine, but to me the significance of that is that had I tried to do the legs and feet at the same time as the turning torso, I would no doubt have tried to force the contact drawings onto some of the existing extremes.  That might have worked out anyway, but it might also have resulted in something more stilted, less fluid, and less interesting to watch. Using this technique, I was completely free to place the contact drawings wherever seemed best, rather than just on one or another of the available extremes, since by this method all the drawings already existed.

Now these lowly inbetweens have become extreme contact
drawings for the leg movement

Here is the link to the video. This is not the whole scene but just the end of it.

This post serves as a reminder that it is often wise to make several passes over a scene, doing things one at a time, rather than struggle with the complexity of trying to get everything in all at once.

By the way, I am certainly not the first to think of doing this.  It is mentioned somewhere in Thomas and Johnston's Illusion of Life; when I locate the reference, I will amend this post with the details.

No. 136, Animatic Reviews

Back in Post No. 128, Animatic Private Viewings, I described my animatic review process. To a select group of associates, I had sent a link to the full animatic of my film Carry On, asking for reactions to the film as a whole. The animatic, a filmed and timed version of a complete storyboard, augmented with an audio scratch track that includes dialog, sound effects and some music,  can be a most valuable tool for the film maker, helping  him or her to see the strengths and weaknesses in the story structure, in character development, and in other areas--things that are not so apparent when one is focussed on just one detail or moment at a time.

But to reach this stage in production also provides an opportunity for gathering opinions from outside one's own consciousness. In the case of the independent film maker, without even a production staff off whom to bounce ideas and from whom to gather opinions, the value of some more objective opinion is even more important.

I got back written reviews from just four people. That is fewer than I had hoped for but it was a good
sampling.

No one hated it and they all liked at least parts of it.

Three of the four liked it a lot but had widely differing suggestions for changes, and no two people wanted to change the same exact things.

No one came up with a genius idea that allowed me to cut whole minutes while still telling the whole story.

There were several thoughtful explorations along the lines of "what if a certain character were more like this or that."

They all brought up issues that I had already struggled with and had set aside as either irrelevant or as requiring adding more or completely different scenes to the film. There were also a few instances where the character or scene existed for a logical tactical reason which my reviewer had not perceived.  For example, there is a scene with two characters whose only raison d'etre is to conceal the Old Man and his trunk from the view of the gate attendant until the last possible moment.

I am grateful for all the suggestions even if  I don't use many of them. But there was one objection which troubled me a lot and has made me decide to re-write two of the sequences, replacing a major character, even though that involves quite a lot of work.

I had written in a character who could be perceived as a cultural slur. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will recognize him from some posts about character design that I did a while back. He is the one for which I created a head-and-shoulders maquette out of Sculpey.

Two drawn angles of Kevin, and his unfinished maquette.

I was bothered not only because one reviewer strongly disliked the character but because my wife had expressed a similar dislike.  (Some other reviewers did like Kevin for his strong comedy value.) And in my heart I didn't feel strongly attached to this character as I did to all the others in the film. In fact, I recognized that the character was artificial, conceived to advance the story as a person who had to provide a certain amount of resistance to letting the Old Man get past him, but who would then capitulate. He was a comic character, but comedy based too much on cultural stereotypes is unnecessary and unwise; I realized that a characterization that could be perceived as demeaning in this way would be shameful to have in my film.

And so, after much thought, I created another character who could fulfill the same purpose as Kevin had, but with different motives. He is actually better developed than the first one; he has a believable back story and a better relationship with the supervisor character with whom he interacts. It was a struggle to back myself up and re-think the two sequences that are involved, but I am now comfortable with the result.

Examples of the facial expressions inspired my my new character, Howard.

The lesson here is that nothing in your work should be considered immune from change if the reason for change is a strong one. Walt Disney knew this when he cut two already-animated sequences from Snow White. We should all remain open to the possibility of change even when it is painful.