No. 32, Problem Five: Bringing the Fox Down (Part 4)

The Answer

If you haven't figured it out, the problem to which the Director was referring  was the spacing of the drawings.  Specifically, the fox images in drawings 87 and 89 did not overlap each other at all; nor did they overlap the adjacent drawings 85 and 91.  Generally speaking, overlap of shapes in animation creates smoothness in movement, while lack of overlap makes for the jittery look called strobing.

In live-action and, now, in computer generated animation, this is compensated by blur: by a softening of the edges that happens naturally in live action photography and is simulated in the computer.

With our old fashioned 2D animation, however, we can make use of one of four traditional solutions for this problem:

1. We can simulate blur with streaks or speed lines that trail along behind the moving character and accent the arc of movement.

2.  We can add multiple images to a single drawing.

3.  We can use the smear technique as made famous by Chuck Jones in "The Dover Boys."

4. Or lastly, we can simply go on one's--one drawing per frame--and add a couple of drawings that will provide the needed overlap.

There is an additional technique now available to me in Toon Boom Animate Pro, which is the ability to add a blur effect to any drawing.  I have not yet experimented with this however.

In a future post, I will demonstrate all of these different solutions, but in this particular instance I decided to use number 4.

Before Adding New Drawings

Here are all the original drawings of the movement slowed down, with each drawing exposed 12 times rather than 2 times, so that the spacing can be clearly seen:

Note the great distance that the middle drawings, particularly 87 and 89, have to travel.  There is almost no overlap of the fox's head with the adjacent drawings.

After Adding New Drawings

Here is the same sequence with two new drawings (86 and 88).  Now 85 through 88 will be on ones, so in this slow-motion demo, each of those is represented by 6 exposures instead of 12, while all the others are on 12's as before.

Now you should be able to see that the spacing has a lot of overlap of shapes, thus smoothing out the movement and minimizing strobing.

The New Sequence At Full Speed

Here now is what it looks like at full speed, using 2's and 1's as planned:

As always, if anything about the above is unclear, please send me a comment and I will try to improve upon the explanation.

One more thing I want to mention is that when I examined the arc of movement of the original drawings, I determined that one of them--number 87--was seriously out of line with the arc.  Before shooting the above tests, I corrected that drawing.  The correction is illustrated below:

The red outline shows the original positioning.

Next: Adding More To the Scene

No. 31, Problem Five: Bringing the Fox Down (Part 3)

Adding the Fox Himself

Last time we saw the fox, he was nothing more than a rough stand-in looking like a bad drawing of a stuffed toy.  Let's see that again:

Scene 13_3

Thinking about what the fox might do as I looked at this test, I immediately had some wild ideas.  Although I had basically kept the man's head upright and steady, there was some movement and even a little tilt.  This is something I could have some fun with, I thought, and I did a few thumbnails.  Here is one idea:

But then I, as Animator, knew what I, as Director, would say.  (It was as if he and I were the same person!)  He'd say, "There isn't really time for this much action, and furthermore, you don't want the fox upstaging the movement of the man.  You have to tone it down, and keep it simple!"  And he would have been right, of course.  Also, I realized that this kind of thing was out of character for the fox, whom I had begun to see as Mr. Cool.  Like Bugs Bunny, this fox is usually in complete control.

I went to work then animating the fox.  There were a few tests and adjustments, because it can be more difficult to animate with restraint than with wild abandon.  But finally I felt I had what I wanted.  Here is the test I next presented to the Director:

Scene 13_5

So, the fox reacts to the movement, but he remains seated and basically unruffled until the man picks him up.  I thought it was a good solution, and the Director agreed.

"Yes, I think you've got it here!" he said with enthusiam.  

And yet I was still worried, because he kept running the test over and over, staring intently at the screen.  Then he started looking at the ending frame-by-frame, until finally he turned to me and said, "There is something you might do..."

"What's that?" I asked, finding it hard to keep the annoyance out of my voice.

"Oh, it's just a little thing, but I think it will be worth doing.  Look, I'll give you a hint.  It's something between drawings 83 and 91 that you could improve. Take a look and see if you can find it."

We sorted out the five drawings he mentioned and spread them on the desk.  They showed the middle of the arcing movement where the man brings the fox down from his head to waist level.  Here they are:

Drawing 83

Drawing 85

Drawing 87

Drawing 89

Drawing 91

I use the Disney-based system where drawings exposed on Two's are given odd numbers.  Thus, if you saw an even-numbered drawing, like 2 or 4, you would know it was a "One."

"Can you see what I am talking about?" says the Director.

"Uh, I'm not sure," I say.

"Let's look at them another way then," he says, and proceeds to stack all five drawings and peg them to an animation board, turning on the light so that we can see all five images at once.  That looks something like this:

I have added partial outlines in color to make the spacing clear.

"Do you see what I'm talking about now?" the Director says.  "Do you know what you ought to do?"

I smiled, nodding my head, and I went back to my drawing board to do what was needed.

 Do you know what the Director was talking about?


Next: The Answer

No. 30, Problem Five: Bringing the Fox Down (Part 2)

Approving the Timing

Soon I was back with most of the drawings roughed in, and the Director and I looked at this second pencil test.

Scene 13_2

"Oh, this is coming along!" the Director says.  "The timing is looking pretty good."

I felt good about it now.  The timing did look good, I thought.  Still, I yearned to see the smoothness that I knew it would have with all the inbetweens there.  I went back and added them in, then shot another test.

Scene 13_3

At this, the Director only shrugged.  "No surprises here," he said.  "Yeah, it looks nice and smooth, but I knew that it would."



[I want to add a note here to explain how a pencil test for timing can be shot without all planned drawings present.  Suppose you have a section showing the first 9 drawings, with 1 and 9 being the extremes, as in the spacing chart below. 

Spacing chart for drawings 1 through 9

 In the pose-to-pose mode, you would have done those first, of course.   Then the breakdown, number 4.  Then the major inbetweens, 3 and 5.  That leaves drawings 2, 6, 7 and 8 undone.  To shoot a test without these, you have to compensate for the frames of the missing drawings.  So if all these movement drawings, 2 through 8, are meant to be exposed for 2 frames each, then you would expose drawing 3 for four frames, addiing in the frames that will belong later to drawing 2.  On the other end, you expose drawing 5 to include the frames for 6, 7 and 8 as well, or 8 frames.  Thus, whether or not you shoot just 5 drawings or all 9, the total will add up to 18 frames or exposures, and so the overall timing effect will not differ.

Note: Frames for drawing 2 were added to drawing 3, the succeeding drawing, while frames for drawings 6, 7 and 8 were added to drawing 5, the previous drawing.  This is because we don't want to add either amount of frames to the extremes, 1 and 9.  The reason for that is that you want to be able to clearly judge the impact of the extreme pose as planned, and the inadvertent addition of 2 to 6 frames could affect that judgment.]


Now back to our conversation between me, the Animator, and me, the Director...

I thought about it a minute and then I knew what he meant: adding a few missing inbetweens did not change the essential timing, which has to do with how long a pose or action is stressed, or how slow or fast something happens.  All that information had been available in the first test (Sc 13_2).  Adding all the inbetweens was only finessing what already had been stated.

Now the Director said, "You know what I want to see next, don't you?"

"The fox, I guess."

"That's right.  So far, the fox looks like a stuffed toy.  And that's fine, because the man's action here is the important thing, and you had to get that right.  But now I want to see you turn your attention to the fox and make him as alive as the man."


Next: Animating the Fox

No.29, Problem Five: Bringing the Fox Down (Part 1)

This new animation problem is a fascinating one for me; I hope that you will find it interesting as well.

Once again, my director (me) has called me, the animator, into his office to discuss a scene I have turned in.  Together we review the pencil test. It is the scene right after Problem Four, where the fox, atop the man's head, has shaken himself out.  Now the man lifts the fox down from his head.

"What do you think of it?" the director asks.

"Umm, well, it certainly has to be changed because of the man's attitude at the beginning.  He was apprehensive about the fox's moving, but now he is just amused.  We have to match the two scenes."

"Yes, there is that," the director says, "but there's more.  Jim, I want you to do it again, start from scratch.  Don't even look at the old drawings.  When you get your extremes and maybe a few key breakdowns done, test it again and we'll look at it together."

A day later, I am back with the new test.

"Well, this is a lot different, isn't it?" says the director.  "You've really got a lot more acting into it."

I had, in fact, thought it through much more thoroughly.  Now I had the man playing to his wife, rather than worrying about getting the fox down, and the key drawings were more dynamic.  I had worked in the Z-axis, too, moving the fox close to the camera as he comes down.

"Okay, now go ahead and rough in more of the drawings, so we can look at your timing."


 Next:  Two Versions More