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. 37, Drawing Problem 1: The Eccentric Breakdown Drawing: A Drawing Challenge for You (Part 2)

There is a Part 2!

Well, one of my guesses was right: I had one person ask to do the drawing.  His name is João and he lives in the UK.

 Here is his drawing:

It has a lot going for it. The character is quite on model, considering that João had no model sheet and only two poses to work from.
Let's see how it looks in action, and then we will talk about it some more.

Here is the pencil test, repeated 6 times so you don't have to replay it each time:

Also I include an image that shows simplified drawings of the two extreme drawings in blue and red.  João's is the one with the yellowish outline.

The order of the images is blue, yellow, red.  We see that the artist definitely understood the concept of the eccentric breakdown; clearly this is not a halfway inbetween.  He chose to rotate the character's head while keeping its mass in place.  The right arm goes down and the left lifts up.  The body rotates almost all the way but its mass is positioned halfway.

This is generally a good solution and would work pretty well.  There are two things I want to point out, however, that I would  change.

The first is that it is not the best thing to rotate a head in place like a world globe turning on its spindle.  The features can appear to slide about, and also it is just not the most interesting way to turn a head.  I recommend displacing the head forward, something like this:

The suggested change to the head position.

Moving the head forward a bit also provides an anticipation before the final backward movement.

My only other change would be to make the smile bigger, but...

Here is something I learned only after years of making the same mistake:  when you change a facial expression during a big movement, the change is lost. No one will ever see it.  It may be appropriate to have the expression change anyway, but if you want it to be noticed, it needs to happen when the character is mostly at rest.


Thank you, João, for your participation.  I hope that in the near future, when I have another of these drawing challenges, some more of you will give it a try!

No. 36, Drawing Problem 1: The Eccentric Breakdown Drawing: A Drawing Challenge for You (Part 1)

The Eccentric Breakdown Drawing

Before I will be able to  post Part 4 of Problem Six, I must create lot of drawings, so it may be a long time before that post.  In the meantime,  I thought I would ask if my readers would like to engage in an animation drawing exercise.

This is not a contest.  It is a chance for you to try your hand at some creative thinking of the kind that keeps me excited by animation year after year.

What I am calling the Eccentric Breakdown drawing is beautifully described and illustrated by Eric Goldberg in his book Character Animation Crash Course (Chapter 10: Having a Breakdown!).  Dick Williams goes into it also beginning on page 218 of The Animator's Survival Kit.

First, do we all know what the breakdown is?  It is the main drawing between two extreme drawings.  I used to think that that was all it was: just the first and biggest inbetween.  As it turns out, in animation the breakdown is just as important as the extremes, because it tells us how we will get from one extreme to the other.  It can change the entire character of the animation.  And in a situation where your inbetweens are to be completed by another, less experienced artist, the breakdown helps the animator control those inbetweens to a great extent.

Here are the two extremes we will be dealing with in this little problem.  You have seen them before: the first is the held pose (with blinks) of the woman as she stares, mystified, at the thing on her husband's head.

The second is the beginning extreme pose of her delight as she recognizes that it is a little fox.

Here is the spacing guide I have worked out, showing the number of drawings that will get us from A to B, and how they are spaced.

 The drawing spaced in the middle (65) is the main breakdown we are concerned with.  The whole movement will take 16 frames (we are using film speed of 24fps), or two-thirds of a second.

Okay, let's get into it.

I am the Animator who has done all the extremes and spacing guides, and you are the Assistant Animator.  Often I will do my own breakdowns, but today I don't have time and I am asking you to do them for me.  I could not trust this to a beginning inbetweener, but you have some experience so I am asking you to try it.  We begin by discussing the two poses with which you will be working.

"Drawing 1 is a long hold; she hasn't moved her body for a while.  Suddenly she is going to pull out of that pose and start to move briskly, so you need to build an anticipation into the breakdown, drawing 65.  If she just pulled straight back to drawing 73 it would look unnatural, so you must think of a good way to do that.  By the end she must straighten her spine, and her head and body must make a quarter turn to the (her) right.  And, on drawing 65 I want you to show that she is already smiling; that she has by this time already realized everything and her body is just catching up."

You say, "Can I look at the other drawings to see the context?"

"Yes," I say.  "All the extremes can be found here, and there are various versions of the pencil test in recent posts for Problem Six. Now let me see you give it a try."

*     *     *

How to Participate

If you want to give this a try, send me an email to: bradrick@olypen.com, and I will then send you the two extreme drawings above as jpegs for you to print.  Take the printed drawings and tape them each to a sheet of animation paper, so that the registration crosses are in alignment.  Then make your version of drawing 65 on a third sheet of paper.  Remember to trace the registration crosses onto your new drawing.

Then scan the drawing and send it back to me.

Right now I don't know if I will get 1 entry or 10, or none.  When I get your drawing I will put it up on Acme Punched and write a comment about it.  Unless you tell me to use your whole name, I will just use your initial and country of origin.

Why not give it a try?

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

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