No. 192: The Walk Cycle Completed

The story so far...

Last time I showed you the first version pencil test where I had mainly focused on the legs and feet. Here is the promised version two, featuring the final hand and arm action.

Yet this was still only half the work, as the remaining 8 inbetweens had yet to be done.  And are these straight inbetweens, with every line or point on the inbetween  halfway between the two corresponding lines or points on the drawings it connects? The answer is, certainly not.  At the extremes, there are ease-in or ease-out spacings, and also certain of these "simpler" inbetween drawings may even have a useful eccentricity to them.

Here is a good example of that.

Example in which an inbetween [in red] is not a straight
inbetween but an eccentric one.

Watch for that little one-drawing, two-frame accent here in the final pencil test. Once for each step, of course.

Other things have been done here: Necktie animation, tightening of the drawing on all drawings, and also I raised the high point of the Up drawings before the inbetweening.

This is a reliable and methodical way to create a cycle, or any scene, by adding the various elements just one or two at a time, and not trying to get it all right on the first pass.

No. 191: The Old Man Walks

A New Walk Cycle

Every once in a while, I get down Richard Williams' book from my collection of something like 150 books on animation, and I go through it from beginning to end. This does not count the times I get it down to look up something specific, as for example recently when I wanted to review what he had to say about someone clapping their hands.

The Animator's Survival Kit by Williams and Illusion of Life by Thomas and Johnston are the two  most influential and informational guides to the process of traditional animation that I can imagine. Of the two, Survival Kit is actually the more useful.  For one thing, it is organized better; if you have ever tried to look something up in Illusion of Life, you will have little idea where in the book to look for that something.  You just have to turn pages until you find it. This is because, to a great extent, Illusion of Life is organized chronologically, more as a history than as a text book.

I like it so well, I have two copies of this book.

Survival Kit is actually everything that Richard Williams could think of about animation that could be written down.  It is a how-to book and a how-to-proceed book, and it also tells you why.  It is not a bible but more a book of lore, techniques that amount to a sorcerer's compendium of magic  gathered from years working with Disney animators and Warners animators and others, and setting out the spells and rites (and hard work) that can bring forth good and interesting animation that is alive. When I get it down for a thorough review, it is to look for things I had missed or glossed over before, and there is always something new for me.

Walks

On the subject of characters' walks, Williams does seventy-three pages, and that doesn't include runs and jumps and other such variations. So it may be no wonder that one tends to turn pages through this section, stopping to read just here and there. This time I gave it a closer scrutiny, because I was about to do a new walk cycle for my Old Man character (for my film Carry On) and I wanted to work more with the multi-pass approach to any complex animation, wherein you focus on one thing at a time, as for example, first the legs, then the arms, then the head, etc. By this method you can successfully carry out something that in the aggregate is more nuanced and rich than you could accomplish if you tried to think about everything at once.

This turns out to be a difficult thing to learn. I am always tempted to try to get everything down, and everything right, on the first pass. But my results that way are not always good, so I wanted to commit myself to the multi-pass system that is recommended not only by Williams but was practiced by Milt Kahl and others.

The Old Man

The brief, or requirements, for this animation were obvious to me.  The man is old, and he has a deformed spine, but he is not weak--he will be dragging that huge steamer trunk around, remember.
So his walk may be slow and deliberate, but not feeble or faltering. And, I don't want the walk to be too comic.

The obvious starting point is with the legs and feet. I did of course put in the torso, head and arms, but just as placeholders.  I am not thinking much about them yet: they are subject to change.

Each step will be sixteen frames, or 2/3 of a second at 24fps, rather than the 12 or 8 frames that we are used to seeing. I will animate on 2's rather than 1's, so each drawing gets two exposures. For the complete cycle of two steps, there will be sixteen drawings.

First Pass

I made eight drawings to begin with: for each step, a Contact position (1 and 9), a Down position (3 and 11), a Passing Position (5 and 13), and an Up position (7 and 15).  Here is that pencil test.

Well, it's working. He has an almost shuffling step, making contact on the ball of his foot rather than the heel, and I think the amount of up and down movement on the body is good too.

Before I add in the eight inbetweens, I will now make a second pass for the arms and hands, and I have an idea about this I want to try. We'll look at that next time.

No. 190: Square to 16:9

Getting the Whole Picture

When I began my film, Carry On, I had to decide on an aspect ratio; that is, the proportion of height to width of the film frame. I chose to use the 16:9 ratio, a very wide ratio similiar to those popularized in movie theaters in such formats as Cinemascope, Vista Vision and Cinerama, which they say were conceived to give the moviegoer an experience that could not be had on the medium that had become a threat to theatrical movies:  television.

Well, as we all know, television has found a way around that limitation. But in social media there are still examples of a fixed and restricted aspect ratio, mainly because of their use on cell phones.  Specifically, I refer to Instagram, which crops everything to a perfect square. So, try to post a wide or tall image on Instagram, and it will simply be cropped down to a square.

This shows what goes missing when a 16:9 image, shown in blue,
is cropped down to a square shape.

I recently posted to my Instagram account a pencil test in 16:9 and was annoyed to find that, because of the cropping, it didn't make any sense to the viewer.

Here, in square format, the cropping cut off some important action at screen right.

Looking for a workaround, I did a little searching online and discovered a service called Kapwing. For no charge, I could upload my movie and get it modified so that the whole frame was in view, somewhat smaller, of course, but perfectly clear.

Now we can see the rear of the taxi, where something happens near the end of the clip.

Kapwing.com merely requires the inclusion of their small watermark in the lower right corner of each movie. You can visit them for more information.