No. 14, Problem 3: The Fox On the Man's Head (Part 3)

[First, an apology to my readers for the long time between posts.  The fact that I was busy with other things does not mean anything when you feel that the blog you are reading has gone dead.  I intend to try to post at least twice a month, and more often if possible.]



Here I want to work on the beginning of the Fox's unwinding, slowing it down, making it more interesting, and making sure it works well with the little "take" or reaction  of the man to the tail movement.

Therefore I will only be showing the first part of the scene in this post.


Here is the first pass at improving the start of the unwind:

I feel this doesn't work as well as it might because, although I have added some drawings to the tail movement to slow it down from the original, the man's reaction still distracts from the more important movement that I want the viewer to observe (that is, the fox shaking himself out).

What else might be done here?  What else is in our animator's toolbox?   Well, it occurs to me that I could add an anticipation to the tail unwinding.  This would not only make the movement more dramatic and suspenseful, but it would also add the extra time to the movement that I am looking for.

So I erase those few drawings--they are simple ones and not hard to replace--and begin again with a snappy anticipation.

Here is how that looks:

Okay!  I am happy with this; it is exactly the effect I wanted to achieve:
-The man's reaction seems to come at a natural time, as soon as he feels something moving.
-The anticipation works well to draw your attention to the tail, and it lasts long enough that by the time the man has come to rest, the viewer is ready to focus on the main business of the fox unwinding, and he hasn't missed anything important

A note on the anticipation:

I want to draw your attention to something a bit unusual about the anticipation.  Here are the key drawings: 1, 13, 17 and 25, shown with 2 spacing guides.

Note that I use Disney-style numbering, where the drawing numbers are also frame numbers whenever possible.  Thus, if drawing numbers are all odd numbers, it means the drawings are being shot on 2's.  (This technique is best described  by Richard Williams in his book The Animator's Survival Kit.)

Drawings 1 thru 13 comprise the actual anticipation--the movement that telegraphs and often opposes the forward movement.  Nothing unusual here; as the spacing guide shows, we ease out and ease in.

But I have dwg 13 hold for 4 frames (at 24 frames per second), so that the next drawing and number is 17.  Again, there are no drawings between 13 and 17.   This gives the movement its snap.  Also, I am playing with the apparent variable volume you get with hair or fur, where it can appear to be a smaller mass when wet or otherwise compressed.  Therefore 17 shows the hair suddenly all spread out.

The remaining inbetweens that fill in between 17 and 25 are a conventional ease in as the tail fur collapses down again.

Next:  Shakin' It Out

No. 13, Problem 3: The Fox On the Man's Head (Part 2)

As stated, the first thing I want to do here is to change the "take" to something more subtle, and rather more amused than alarmed.  Here was my first try at the revision:

Better than before, but it still isn't quite right.  The arm movement overstates the reaction (not to mention that the framing will be a tighter closeup), and the eyes stay closed for too long.

Let's try again, letting the shoulders do the work and making the blink much shorter.  Here it is again:

Good; this is what I was looking for.  He just shows that he is aware that the fox is moving, without being too worried about it.

Next I will re-time the unwinding of the tail, slowing that down and also bringing it to a hold at the end after the body does, as it is seldom good to have everything stop all at once.

Next: The Fox Unwinds

No. 12, Problem 3: The Fox On the Man's Head (Part 1)

First, you will need to understand the story at this point.

The Story: 
The man has arrived home to present 3 things to his wife.  He has already given her the goose and a bag of grain.  But he has concealed his third purchase as a surprise: under his hat, perched atop his head is a live fox.

In problem 2 we saw how he pulled his hat off, using the stagger effect.  Now we see the fox, his ears down and his tail tightly furled around his body, so that the man's wife is not sure what she is seeing.

The Scene:
Closeup.  The fox uncoils his tail and shakes himself out.  The man reacts in a subdued "take" at the movement of the fox.

The First Version:
In my first pass, I had the man reacting with alarm as the fox uncurled.  Here is the pencil test of that:

Pencil Test 1

In fact, the first test had the man waiting until the fox was completely uncurled before he reacted.  This was poor planning, a too literal interpretation of the rule of thumb that the movement of a secondary character can draw the viewer's attention away from the main movement of the primary character.  Often that means to have only one character moving at a time. But I realized it doesn't work well for the man to wait all that time before reacting to the movement of the fox; he should logically react right away.  Therefore as you see above, I have moved his reaction up to the beginning of the movement of the fox.  This is better, but still, it does distract.

What would be a better solution?

In watching the movement of the fox (which I am basically happy with), I realized that it would be more effective to have the tail begin to unwind much more slowly, then time the man's reaction to happen with that.  Thus the man will be at rest (and not distracting us) by the time the fox goes into his more violent movement.

There are two other things I am going to change here.  First, the shot was to be a wide view as you see in Pencil Test 1.  Since planning that, I have had more experience in Toon Boom AnimatePro, and found how easy it is to use a Camera Module.  I decided I wanted a tighter closeup, excluding the wife from the frame, more like this:

The other change is to the man's reaction itself.  Instead of being alarmed by the fox's movement, he should react only a little here, with an expression more of delight than of uncertainty.  Notice that I have the man's head moving very little, because I want the fox to remain fairly stationary.  I will stay with that constraint, mostly moving his shoulders instead of his head, and giving him that more pleased expression.

Next: Problem 3: The Fox On the Man's Head (Part 2)  We fix the man's "take".

No. 11, When Good Enough Isn't Good Enough: Pursuing Excellence

The fox on the man's head.

If you have read my previous posts, you will see that I have shown some examples of improving my own work.  In the animation business, as in many others, one cannot always do that.  There are many good reasons for this.  Sometimes the budget is too tight, or the screen time allowed for some bit of action is too short, often dictated by the timing of a script that is already locked down.  Very often,  a short deadline does not permit the careful planning that might make for better animation and storytelling.

Perhaps these are excuses rather than reasons.  In any event, I have spent most of my career doing work that was good enough.  It was good enough for my clients and good enough to give me a career doing animation in TV commercials, video games, and now for the internet.  I have done work where there was no time for pencil tests or for doing anything over, and it has been good enough.  And--don't get me wrong!--much of it has turned out very well.

And yet, I have done some animation I cannot bear to watch anymore and which you will never see on my demo reel.  (I think most serious creative people have work that they personally do not like to look at, even though others may admire that work.)

Also, in television commercials and other short work that I have done, there has never been time to develop character or to have very much character interaction.  There was seldom more than one character on screen at a time.  Therefore I never professionally had a chance to develop my character animation skills to their highest level.

When I began work on my current personal film The Crossing, my attitude at first was as usual:  to make it "good enough."  So I have completed the pencil animation on a good portion of it at that level.  At some point, though, I asked myself why I was doing that.  Why was I only making it good enough, when I now had the time to make it as good as it could possibly be?  I decided I wanted it to be excellent, even if that meant doing some work over again.

Thus, we have the basis for this blog:  a series of examples of "good enough" animation being improved; being made as good as I can make it.  I hope you will stay with me and perhaps benefit from the process of re-thinking all of these little scenes along with me.

Next: Problem 3: The Fox On the Man's Head

No. 10, Problem 2: A Staggering Solution (Part 3)

Now let's take a look at the scene with the Stagger in place:

You can see how shooting those drawings out of order, in this very controlled way, produces the trembling effect that I wanted here.

Here is exactly how the drawings were staggered.  There were 9 drawings to the stagger, 437 thru 453 (using odd numbers only.)  For clarity, let's give them the letters A thru I instead.  For the smooth version, shown in Part 2, they were of course shot straight through: A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I, and exposed on 2's. 

But staggered as you see here, and exposed on 1's, it goes like this: A-B-A-C-B-D-C-E-D-F-E-G-F-H-G-I-H.  That's 17 frames as compared to 18 frames in the smooth progression, so the screen time is almost the same.  The basic idea to this stagger is: advance two letters, then go back one; advance two letters, then go back one.  Thus you progress steadily on to the end.

In my opinion the stagger adds an extra element of effort to the action, and was well worth doing.

No. 9, Problem 2: A Staggering Solution (Part 2)

I am now going to be doing my pencil tests in color and with as high a resolution as I can get.  I think once they are compressed for the web they will look much more clear than they have until now.

As promised, here is the test without the drawings staggered but just used in sequential order:

As you can see, the animation actually works quite well without even resorting to the stagger effect.  The strain of effort and the sudden release are all there already.  Note that for this version,  all the drawings that will be staggered I exposed on 2's, whereas when I show you the staggered version in the next post, they will be on 1's.  The screen time is almost exactly the same in each case.

Next: The Staggering Conclusion to Problem 2

No. 8, Problem 2: A Staggering Solution (Part 1)

The Stagger effect is one of those gimmicks developed in Hollywood and used at Disney, Warners, MGM, and probably other places as well. It's first real use is probably not known.   It is a way of getting a shuddering or vibrating sense  of extreme tension into an animation, or it is used to illustrate fright or some other emotion where a progressive vibration is called for.  The technique is definitely a gimmick and dependent on the use of a formula, though as in the cartoon Take, which involves an anticipation and then some extreme distortion to express surprise or fright, the possible variations are endless.

But how many animators have simply never been called upon to do a Stagger, or have never even had a scene where a Stagger was a possible solution?  Well I am in that category, and so in my film The Crossing, when I devised a scene where a character must remove his hat dramatically,  I was delighted to realize that a good Stagger was exactly the right solution to the problem.

You begin by animating one or sometimes two sets of drawings in a smooth moving hold, which is ordinarily a way of maintaining life by moving from an extreme pose to a similar but even more extreme pose.  Then--and here is the gimmicky part-- you shoot the drawings out of order, but in a calculated way, to get the stagger effect.

Let's now look at my example.

Drawing 409--first frame of the scene

The setup is that the man has concealed something under his hat which he wants to present as a surprise to his wife (a live fox).  He has already tried twice to get his hat off with a little tugging, without success.  Above, he takes hold of the hat brim for a final effort.

Drawing 421--he gets set

In 421, the anticipation, he sets himself with grim determination.

Drawing 437--first drawing of the stagger.

Drawing 437 shows him at the point where he has already expended considerable effort, but whereas in his previous attempts he stopped to regroup, now he means to continue to the end.  The Stagger begins with this drawing.  Note that although the drawing numbers 437 to 453 on the spacing chart indicate exposure on 2's (exposing 2 frames per drawing), the Stagger will actually be exposed on 1's; when I did the drawings I was experimenting to see if I could bring it off on 2's, but it wasn't effective.

Drawing 453--last drawing of the stagger.

By 453 he has stretched everything to the breaking point; something's got to give!  The hat brim will tear or his fingernails will be pulled out or he will collapse with apoplexy--I plan to add a gradual red flush to his face color as this goes on.  Note that if this were not to be exposed as a Stagger, then drawings 437 to 453 would simply be considered a moving hold.

Drawing 455--the next drawing.

Yes, drawing 455 is the very next drawing after the one above; sometimes, an extreme change like this can work very well, as Eric Goldberg demonstrates so well in his book ("Character Animation Crash Course").  As the man had hoped, it was the hat that came off.  Suddenly unrestrained, his arms shoot up, his head jerks down into his chest, his knees (unseen) bend and bring his hips down, leaving his belly to hang for an instant where it was, a follow-through item.

Drawing 475--recovery and hold.

By drawing 475, the man has recovered from the violent movement, and he holds here for 18 frames as he assesses the situation.  I will be adding a blink when I get to my digital processing in Animate Pro.

Drawing 503--last drawing of the scene.

And finally, here is the last drawing of the scene, where we cut in mid motion to a wider shot of both the man and his wife and he continues sweeping off his hat for her, revealing the tightly furled fox upon his head.


Next: For Comparison, Testing the Scene Without the Stagger Effect