No. 39, Problem Six: Fox Bites Nose (Part 5)

For the next couple of weeks I will be working on my website, bradrick.com, to update it, make it easier for me to change by using Wordpress.org, and increasing its search engine optimization.  Meanwhile, here is a pencil test that came out right the first time!

Take One

Here I had to make the woman react as the fox bit and held onto her nose.  This called for a violent "take" of some kind, as she is struck by the shock (and some pain!) of being bitten by the cute little fox.  Takes are not something I have been much called upon to do in my career, so I looked in Richard Williams' book The Animator's Survival Guide at some classic formulae for takes which he had learned from animators of the Disney and Warners studios.


 The anticipation is on two's, then the upward "take" has two inbetweens on one's, followed by a "settle" on two's.  I cut to blank frames at the end because I want to cut away to a closeup at that point, without first going into a hold, and this shows me that the poses read well.

No. 38, Problem Six: Fox Bites Nose (Part 4)

A Reminder:

As this blog is focused on detail and the small decisions that accumulate to make a larger picture, in these posts we will often examine short sections of a scene instead of the whole scene.  This helps keep the presentation concise and clear.  However, I want to remind you (and myself) that normally it is best to look at an entire shot or scene all at once, to judge its rhythm and pacing. I hope that in your own animation work, you will not lose sight of this important idea.

Bad, Not-So-Bad, Better, Best

This time we will look at a part of the action of the woman.  The man holds the fox in his hands, having just lowered it down from his head, and the woman has moved in close.  At the beginning she is looking at the man.  She then turns to the fox and reaches out her hand to tickle him under his chin.

I have four pencil tests to show you.  The first one I call...

The Bad

If there is one bad habit I am most often guilty of, it is that of making my rough drawings too detailed before testing the action even once.  When it works, it works, but when it doesn't, then I have unnecessarily wasted a lot of time and effort.  This is an example of that.  The poses looked good to me, I didn't see how it could go wrong, and so I spent a lot of time drawing detailed hands, for instance, because I thought the animation was a sure thing.

It wasn't.  The head and body work fine, but in this first test I could see that the arms and hands are not saying what I want to say.  The left hand passes too close to her nose on its way to reach out to the fox, and the right hand makes a fluttery gesture that only distracts viewer attention from the main action.

The Not-So-Bad

Right hand fixed.  Left hand has been changed so that there is much more drag; the wrist leads the hand.  At first I thought this might be too theatrical a gesture for this character, but she is about to admire the cute little fox, so she is in a playful mood.

But now, as often happens when you change one thing, something else becomes apparent that needs to change.  The action in this test begins and ends with holds.  Everything begins moving all at once, and everything also stops all at once at the end.   It goes against the good advice that, going into a hold, everything should not arrive all at once.  This is something that people will notice, or at least it is something that will ring false even if they don't know why.  Rather than appearing to be alive, the character looks robotic and mechanical. (I did think that  the tickling movement of the finger that will begin as soon as her left hand comes to rest might be the overlapping movement I needed, but now I see a need for more overlap.)

The Better

Now the unfurling of her left hand has been delayed and finishes after her body and right hand have come to rest.   You can still see the  ghost images of the hand where they have been erased from other drawings.

To fill out the delayed movement of the left hand, I tried a moving hold of her fist, but it isn't working right.

The Best

I changed the left arm so that it moves in close to the body in an anticipation of the main movement.  This works pretty well now and I am happy with the result.



Pencil testing sometimes goes like this, through four or more versions before the scene looks and feels just right.  Other times, the animator hits it right the first time through.  In this case, the main thing I did wrong was to draw in too much detail before the rough movement was proven in pencil test.

"LET THAT BE A LESSON TO YOU!" the director (I) shouted at the animator ( me.)

Let it be a lesson to you, too.

No. 35, Problem Six: Fox Bites Nose (Part 3)

For the pencil test of the drawings shown in Part 2, I have created two versions.  Version one is the entire scene comprised of all existing layers and drawings, so that the first part includes the fully animated layer of the man lowering the fox down.

But as this is rather dark and hard to view, due to the fact that there are four layers present, I also include a version with all layers turned off except the new one featuring the woman and the characters combined onto that layer.  The timing here is exactly the same.

In my opinion, this would work well enough when all the drawings have been added.  The action is clear, funny, logical in its cartoony way.  Yet I believe I have found a way to enhance it even more.  Now, using Toon Boom Storyboard, which I have just added to my animator's toolbox,  let me show you what I mean.

Here is the same scene with a closeup added at the peak of the take, where the woman has drawn far back with the fox gripping her nose.  

Adding this closeup necessitates some timing changes.  Now she pulls back just a little slower and will ease in to the hold just before we cut to the closeup.  Now there WILL be inbetweens as she pulls back, and the closeup will include some rapid eye blinks as she takes in the situation.

Now that I am satisfied with the timing of the animatic, the next step is to chart the spacing of the remaining drawings, then add the breakdown drawings and, finally, the inbetweens.

Next: The Scene With All the Drawings Present

No. 34, Problem Six: Fox Bites Nose (Part 2)

The Most Creative Step

Animation is a strange artform.  The process of production is so complicated, and the road to the final result so long, that it seems that the ember of inspiration might darken and grow cold before the animator ever gets to the end.  It is miraculous that an animator can hold and keep alive in her or his imagination that glowing spark through all the tedious stages it must endure: the timing calculations, the planning of layers, the process of construction and refinement of drawings, the endless adjustments and revisions.

And yet, we do.  It is the thrill of making it work, of making it seem to be alive, despite all the technical encumbrance, that keeps us going on to the end.

This post describes as best I can one of the high points of the journey.  This is the magic moment in the process when the animator sits at his drawing board and makes the key drawings upon which all else depends.

As we discussed in Part 1, my first attempt for this scene was wrongheaded in just about every way, and it was largely because I tried to handle the three characters separately from one another.  This was okay for the first part of the scene, described in Problem Five, where the woman is watching as the man lowers the fox down from atop his head.  After that it was a failure because the three characters were acting in concert and they needed to be regarded as one combined entity, rather than as separate elements.

At this time I have made sixteen new drawings spanning the entire scene.  The first eight depict the woman's behavior during the action covered in Problem Five, as the man reaches up and lifts down the fox.

The last eight drawings show all three characters together, as the fox bites and holds onto the woman's nose and she and the man react to that.

Let's look at the drawings.

Dwg 1.  She has been watching the thing on her husband's head turn into a fox.



(Drawing 2, formerly in this position, has been removed, to be replaced by Breakdown Drawing 65.)

Dwg 3.  The peak drawing of the take.

Dwg 4.  Hold drawing at end of take.

Dwg 5.  As the fox is lowered down, she pulls back out of the way.

Dwg 6.  Now she leans in for a closer look.

Dwg 7.  She turns to look at her husband.  Her head is on a separate layer here.

Dwg 8.  She turns back to the fox and tickles him under his chin, and then...

Dwg 9.  He snaps his jaws closed on her long nose.  She winces in pain.

Dwg 10.  Reflexively, she starts to jerk away.

Dwg 11.  But the fox hangs on.

Dwg 12.  The peak extreme of her action.

Dwg 13.  Realizing she must not resist, she yields to the fox.

Dwg 14.  Coming down, she looks to her bewildered husband...

Dwg 15.  ...who turns his attention to the fox.

Dwg 16.  Now they are at stalemate.

Note that these drawings are by no means evenly spaced throughout the scene.  They are the storytelling drawings.  Where there is more going on, there is need for more drawings.  Here, drawings 9 through 15 cover just 64 frames of time--a little more than 2 1/2 seconds, because that is where the violent action is.  In fact, drawings 9, 10, 11 and 12 are consecutive; there will be no inbetweens added there.  It may be unusual to consider them all as key drawings, but they were key to my understanding of the movement, and as I felt their structure so strongly, I thought it necessary to do them all at this time.  It was a tricky section that had to  be proved out, and I deemed them essential.

In Part 3, we will look at the pencil test/animatic of all this movement together.

Next: Pinning Down the Timing

No. 33, Problem Six: Fox Bites Nose (Part 1)

Well, it has happened again.  My Director (me) has just come by and dropped onto my desk all the drawings from the end of this scene with the fox.  All he said was, "You can do better than this."

At first I was angry.  All that work for nothing!  But the animator (me again) calmed down and took a look at the pencil test.  This is part of the whole sequence where the man pulls off his hat, revealing the fox underneath, then lifts the fox down for his wife to see.  All that has been the subject of the Problems 2, 3 and 5.

Now the wife leans in to see the fox.  As she tickles his chin, he suddenly seizes her by the nose.  Instinctively she jerks away, but not too hard, for she doesn't want to lose her nose.  Holding the fox, the man also reacts, yet he cannot just pull the fox away.

I had animated everything described above, and it was clear what was going on.  Yet as Animator, I had to admit: it just did not work.

Here is the pencil test:

I have to say, I am embarrassed now to even display this video on my blog, it is so bad.  Yet as I have stated, part of the idea of the blog is to show you my mistakes and how I am correcting them.  This is one of those times when I am taking a chance, because as I write this, I have not yet fixed the problem, so I cannot be sure what I will create to replace the mess I have made.  (But yes, I have already roughed in a new set of key drawings, so I do have some idea of what direction I will go.)

First, let's try to analyze what I did, and why it is so wrong.

Here is what happens in the scene:

1-The wife moves in.  She tickles the fox.

2-The fox bites her nose.

3-She jumps.

4-The man does a "take", reacting in surprise.

5-The woman moves into a pleading attitude, hoping that the fox will let her go.

 And so it goes, 1-2-3-4-5.  The result?  It is boring.

The Failure To Visualize

My first mistake was the biggest mistake you can make as an animator: failing to envision what the scene should look like, or what it should feel like.  In any animation, but particularly in a pantomime like this, it is all important to have a good idea where you are going before you try to go there.  Even with something quite complex, a good animator should be able to close his or her eyes and "see" the action, at least to the extent of its timing and power.  I had not really done this.  I had analyzed the scene intellectually, and I had broken it down into five separate components and then had animated each one, separately.  In cases where the characters are not closely engaged, this can work.  But in the present instance, the three characters are not only closely engaged, they are actually physically connected!

Once the fox takes hold of the woman's nose, the three characters have become one moving mass.  In the language of computer graphics, they have become grouped.  It therefore no longer makes sense to try to animate them separately; they must now be animated as a group.

Also, I had a mistaken notion that the fox's head should not move after he takes hold of the nose.  I thought it would be funnier if the others moved all around the fox, and he didn't.  Well, I tried that, and it obviously did not work.

The New Vision

This kind of group movement is well known to veteran animators, and once you get the idea, it provides an avenue to good results in scenes where two or more characters are locked together in combat, for example, or where a group of characters all react to something, where the reaction moves through them like a wave or surge.  Many of the dwarfs' scenes in Disney's Snow White make use of this approach to great effect.

Group movement is also discussed in some detail on pages 364 and 365 of Illusion of Life, the Disney animation bible by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

Next: My New Approach