No. 41, Drawing Problem 1: The Eccentric Breakdown Drawing (Part 3)

My Own Solution

Back in April I challenged my readers to create their own eccentric breakdown drawing  to go between two of my extremes.  [Here is the link.] I had one entry, and it was a good one.  Now I want to show you what my own breakdown looks like, as I have finally finished animating that part of the scene.

Here is the pencil test:

To begin with, I have to admit I changed one of the extremes--but it was only the head.  Testing an eary version of the pencils, I felt that the woman came too quickly out of her long hold and into action.  There is always the risk that it will not look good when all of a characters' parts begin moving at one time.  Also, I decided it would be good if she smiled before she moved, so that the smile will be noticed; remember that rule?  One thing at a time, if you want each thing to be noticed.  This little movement also ends with a moving hold of the head only.

So, she lowers her head and smiles, then goes into her pose, then ducks out of the way as the man brings the fox past her head.  Finally, she moves in to examine the fox closely.

If you were following the Drawing Challenge mentioned above, you may be interested to see  my version of drawing 65, the breakdown drawing:

No. 40, Scanner Trouble, Part 2: My Solution

If you recall, I had complained here about the fact that my upgrade to Mac OS 10.8, known as Mountain Lion, had rendered my Mustek large format scanner useless: no drivers available!

My scanner was, in the words of another online complainant, no better than a doorstop--a dead weight.

My goal was to try to find a fix for this other than replacing the scanner itself.

First, of course, I tried software.  Nothing worked, including VueScan, where I actually talked to the owner, who said that scanner drivers are notoriously badly written.  Mustek's website said to go to Apple and get a driver from them, but there was nothing there.

Then I thought: what if I could get an old Mac that was still running on an earlier operating system, and dedicate it to the scanner?  And that is what I did.  The scanner is now paired with an iMac running Snow Leopard.  I did still have to download a driver for that, but it worked.

The Mountain Lion is tamed!

Now I am happily back in business!

A special thanks to David Nethery, who posted a comment just a few days ago suggesting both Vue Scan, which he didn't know I had tried, and the fact that Brother makes a couple of scanners that might have done the job for me, had I found it necessary to replace the Mustek.

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. 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