No. 95, A Most Unusual Walk Cycle

Note: This post is currently under edit in an attempt to improve the quality of the videos. Some links may not function from time to time.

Back to Animation

Well I certainly had some fun this past week. Having gotten the animatic for Sequence 3 of my film in pretty good shape, I decided it was time to do some actual animation.

And the choice for that animation was obvious: the all-important action of the Old Man dragging his ponderous suitcase through the airport, which was destined to be seen from several angles throughout the film. It would be onscreen repeatedly, and if it did not work well, it could spoil the entire production.

Based on a drawing I worked out some time ago, the cycle would need to show 1) the weight of the object being dragged and 2) the continuous effort required to keep the weight moving along.

The character pose that was the inspiration for this walk cycle.

To help me to understand the forces involved, I took the largest suitcase I have, which is perhaps but a quarter of the size of the Old Man's bag, and I loaded it with two 12-pound hand weights and two 15-pound weights, for a total of 54 pounds [24.5 kg]. (I had at first added 20 more pounds, but 74 pounds [33.5 kg] turned out to be too heavy to drag effectively.) I then had someone take movies of me dragging this thing along a concrete walkway, a surface that provided a lot of friction that contributed to the resistance of the movement.

Dragging my 54 pound suitcase for live-action reference.

Taking caution from Nancy Beiman's advice in her invaluable book Animated Performance, I no longer am tempted to any literal interpretation of live-action reference footage, and so the filming was perhaps more interesting in what it felt like to drag that suitcase than in what it looked like on the screen.

I also had live action taken front a frontal viewpoint and from a 3/4 rear viewpoint, which should be useful when I adapt the cycle for these other angles.

At last I sat down at my animation desk and knocked out this rough animation of the walk in profile.

Pencil Test 1

Link here.

A frame from Pencil Test 1

First, I failed to check the settings on Toki Line Test, the pencil test application that I use.  It was set on 30fps, the standard video setting, whereas I am timing this film at the standard film frame rate of 24fps. So, this test plays slightly faster than it should.

The upper body is a mess of uncoordinated and lurching movement--not a success.  But if you mask off the upper part and just watch the legs and feet, you can see that this part works quite well.

Back to the drawing board!

Pencil Test 2

Link here.

A frame from Pencil Test 2

Now we have the proper speed of 24fps, and you can clearly see by its jerkiness that the test was shot on 4's.  With a stopwatch I had determined that the whole stride (two complete steps) ought to take a little under 2 seconds, so I settled on 40 frames.  Shot on 2's, that would be 20 drawings, but in this rough version I am working with just 10 drawings which, because the movement is slow, will be enough for me to be able to evaluate the action. Later, the 10 missing inbetweens will have to be added.

The action now looks a lot better, with the straining of the upper body evident as he throws out his left leg. I have omitted the left arm for now so that I can focus on the torso. Note how the right arm straightens out completely at the most extreme point of the effort.

Pencil Test 3

Link here.

A frame from Pencil Test 3

Walking up and down a hallway in imitation of the Old Man's walk, I began to get an idea of the proper left arm movement. Because the right arm is constantly restrained behind him by the burden of the suitcase, the customary counterpoint--right arm moving with left leg, left arm moving with right leg--is disrupted.  The left arm now moves in direct support of the left leg, adding its own weight and momentum to the effort on that side.

But while the arm looks correct at the forward part of the movement, the backswing and turnaround are unconvincing. I go back to my drawing board--and my eraser!--once more.

Pencil Test 4

Link here.

A frame from Pencil Test 4

Here we have a much better movement. The arm comes back far enough and the drag and follow-through on the arm and hand work pretty well.  It is time to put in those remaining 10 drawings.

Pencil Test 5

Link here.

A frame from Pencil Test 5

Of course we have a much smoother movement overall now that all 20 of the drawings are present and it is playing on 2's.  Also I was able to do a lot with ease-in and ease-out spacing while adding the last 10 drawings, as you can see by the flurry of spacing charts around the character's head. Further, I darkened some lines, drew in the hat on all drawings and made some adjustments to the scale of the left hand which made it more convincing as it approached or retreated from the camera.

The next step will be the addition of detail and cleanup, but at this stage I feel I have validated the walk cycle and that all the principal questions have been answered.

No. 94, Using Storyboard Pro with Scanned Images, Part 3: Timing an Arbitrary Scene

How Long Is the Scene?

The screen duration of many scenes is easy to determine. If your character is doing a certain bit of business before the camera, then the time it takes to perform the action may give you your answer.  If it is based on dialog, then you have another easy guidepost to determine the length of your scene or shot.

But what about a scene with no clear beginning or ending? What then determines how long it should last? Such a problem is confronting me in Scene 7 of the sequence of my film Carry On. This is where Miss Hopegood first crosses paths with the Old Man and his Suitcase.  The camera is facing across a long corridor in which the Old Man drags his case to the right, while Miss Hopegood passes in the opposite direction, moving to the left.  In the next scene, she realizes what she has just seen, and she goes back to try to help him (whether or not he wants her help.)

I originally boarded this scene in three panels, with the camera traveling along with Miss Hopegood, keeping her centered in the frame, while behind her we see that she is moving past the Old Man. The background of the corridor, of course, is also slipping along toward the right.

Here are the 3 panels:

I timed this out to last three seconds or so.  In SBP I originally gave it 3 seconds, 20 frames, or 92 frames and just under 4 seconds for the three panels.

It seemed to play well enough in this form, but I realized that I could get a better idea of it by making the three panels into one and animating both the Old Man layer and the Background layer in motion to the right.

This involved separating the character elements from each other and from the background, each on a separate layer. With all the negative space being white, it was impossible to clearly see what was opaque and what was transparent, so I added an extra layer at the bottom of the stack which was colored a solid blue.

The Layers window showing the opaque layer included at the bottom.

With this blue layer, I was able to clearly see what opaque parts needed to be removed from each layer.

Next I created a new background layer on which to create a moving vector background.

The New Background layer added.

Showing the simple background I created with the line and fill tools.

All layers showing as translucent with Auto Light Table turned on.

The final composite as it looks in the movie.

I did all this but then found that it worked better if the scene lasted about 6 seconds.  Here is the result, with a few scenes included before and after to show the context.

Revised Animatic

I have made many other changes to my animatic of Sequence 3, adding refinements and effects to better approximate the final vision, which in turn allow me to make more assured judgments in the timing of all the shots. Changes include:

--Simple animation of layers from left to right (or in the X axis), such as a character moving across the screen or a background.

--Layer animation of characters/vehicles, including scaling, to show these things moving in perspective

--Transitions such as cross dissolves

--Camera moves that clarify the action

There are many other refinements that could be added, but I am trying to limit the embellishments to only those things that would help put across the story more clearly; if a single still panel is effective, then to animate their elements in the animatic is not worth my time and trouble.

Here is a link to the revised animatic.

No. 93, Using Storyboard Pro with Scanned Images, Part 2: Animating Layers

Animating Layers

This post continues my investigation of using Storyboard Pro for scanned images, as described in post 92.  To follow along, you may need to refer to the video link there.

Yesterday I decided to enhance one of my scenes by using the Animate Layers feature of SBP. This feature adds extra versatility to the program by making it possible to show, for example, a character entering or leaving the frame. Only the character layer would be animated, with all the elements appearing on separate layers being unaffected by the movement. Not only lateral movement, but also changes in scale and rotation can be implemented, or a combination of those changes.

I thought it all sounded quite useful, and I had in mind a particular scene that I wanted to try it out on. After my character, the Old Man, enters the airline terminal building and makes a turn, dragging his ponderous suitcase, we cut to a CU of his face lasting for about 3 seconds. In animation we will see him in motion, slowly bobbing up and down as the hallway background recedes behind him.

I decided it would not be difficult, using layer animation, to simulate this in the animatic.

Moving the Background

The hallway background I envisioned had not even been sketched in on the storyboard panel. I therefore created a new layer called Hallway for that to occupy. The character layer I labeled as Old Man.

The Old Man on his own layer.

Before doing anything else, I needed to deal with the fact that scanned images are opaque from corner to corner. If working with multiple layers, you need transparency everywhere on a layer except where solid objects are represented, in order to be able to see through to the layers underneath. (This is the same concept as cel layers from the days of filmed animation.) Thus, on the Old Man layer, I used the Cutter tool and cut away and deleted all the space around the Old Man's image. Small areas can also be made transparent with the Eraser tool.

Hallway layer.

My idea for the hallway background simply showed a long corridor diminishing in one point perspective, with shapes representing doorways or display windows along the walls, and with rectangles suggesting fluorescent lighting fixtures in the ceiling. I drew the Hallway background using only the line tool, erasing unwanted portions of lines using the eraser.  I located the perspective vanishing point conveniently behind the Old Man's body.  It is not necessary to make any part of the Hallway layer transparent, since it is the bottom layer and nothing needs to be seen behind it.

The Old Man and Hallway layers combine.

To animate a layer, in the Stage View I selected the Hallway layer, then clicked on the First Frame Transform icon in the toolbar. Next, and very important in a zoom in one-point perspective, I located the pivot point at the perspective vanishing point.

First frame selected. Note the selection's pivot point is placed on top of
the perspective vanishing point.

Showing the First Frame icon in the grey box (selected). The Last Frame icon is just below it.

Next I clicked on the Last Frame Transform icon, again making sure that my pivot point was centered on the perspective vanishing point, and adjusted the scaling.

Last frame selected.

To get the right appearance of speed and distance traveled down the hallway, it was necessary to make a couple of tries.  In this case, the old man is supposed to be moving slowly, so my object was to make it appear that he did not travel very far during this scene. Finally I had the desired effect, as you can see in the clip here.

Moving the Character

Now that I had the background moving as I wanted, it was time to animate the Old Man on his own layer, slowly bobbing up and down to suggest his trudging walk. It would be a cycle of about 20 frames, I calculated, to be repeated three plus times over the 72 frames of the scene.

All I had to do was set about 7 keyframes, and--but wait a minute!  It finally came to me: I CANNOT DO THIS!

Because, you see, SBP allows keyframes only at the beginning and end of each panel.  Any movement or transformation must begin at the first frame of the panel and end on the last frame. Although "ease-in" and "ease-out" enhancements are allowed, no further changes within a movement are possible.  Without additional keyframes within a panel, an up and down movement such as I wanted to add is not possible.

Not the End of the World

After my initial moment of disappointment, I posed the question: Is this a serious limitation in Toon Boom Story Board Pro?

Actually, it is not. It is a limitation but a reasonable limitation. A storyboard program is not an animation program, after all.  It is a production tool for making a limited representation of the final end product and should not be expected to have all the bells and whistles of Animate Pro, for example.

Further, SBP allows export to Animate, Animate Pro or Harmony, which means that you actually could then add any extra movements desired by using the animation software.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Next we will look at some of the other SBP features that I have encountered and used.

No. 92, Using Storyboard Pro with Scanned Images

Screenshot of the You Tube screen.  For the video, see link below.

Storyboard True Believer

I am now a true believer in making full use of the storyboard stage of production. To fail to do this is simply foolish, as so many important questions can be resolved at this stage, avoiding mistakes and wasted work at the animation stage.

There are excellent tutorials by Mark Simon and others showing how Toon Boom Storyboard Pro (SBP) works when the artist does all his or her drawing within the application, but less has been said about the artist like me who prefers scanning drawings done on paper. Here is some information from that viewpoint.

Here is a link to the sequence I have been working on; if you are following this blog, you may recognize characters discussed in some of my recent posts.

As discussed in my blog post No. 87, I like to draw on half-sheets of used animation paper.  (See the post here for a review of that.) I put them up on my pinup wall and study them for continuity of action, clarity and strong characterization before committing them to the scanner and SBP.

In the case of the sequence just scanned, I was able to add voices for three of the characters: the busybody woman whom I call Miss Hopegood, the Old Man, and the little girl crying. The third of those was found in a sound effects library, while the first two are original recordings made with my Zoom H1 digital mini recorder, an amazing and economical device the size of a small TV remote.

The ZOOM H1 Recorder, with an American 25-cent piece for scale.

I processed the resulting WAV files in Adobe Sound Booth, deleting unwanted portions and modifying the sound quality as desired. As I am not a trained sound engineer, some of the technical settings for the sound files are a bit beyond my understanding, so I generally settled for the default settings. But those turned out to be good enough, especially as this is actually a "scratch" track, or a sound track which may be later replaced with a more sophisticated version.

Additionally, I was able to find recordings of airport terminal background noise, which adds greatly to the ambience of the whole sequence.

Still to be added are such specific sound effects as walking and the beeping of an electric trolley.

Is a Digital Storyboard an Animatic?

And, while this digital storyboard can now be called an animatic in that the scenes are timed to simulate the timing of the proposed final cut, there are many more effects of transition and movement of the camera and layers that can be added to increase the approximation of the animatic to the final film experience. An animatic is often also a working, malleable document which, with the gradual replacement of storyboard frames with actual rough animation and then finished animation, will eventually metamorphose over time into the final production.

No. 91, Woody Woodpecker Model Revealed

The twenty-year-old 3D walk cycle of Woody Woodpecker that I showed you in my last post, number 90, was not only done with early 3D software; it was also done without the benefit of many tools and tricks that the 3D animators of the present day take for granted.

A frame capture from my Woody walk cycle in 3D.

First of all, there wasn't much that was flexible. The hands, the feet, the topknot of feathers, remain rigid all through the cycle. Most obvious, if you look for it, is that the feet do not bend or flex at all. As stiff as a pair of wooden shoes, when Woody rolls forward on them, they just stand up on their toes until he lifts them and brings them forward. Then they slap suddenly down as the forward foot takes the weight.

Neither do the hips move. The torso is just a cartoon pear-shape with the legs stuck inside.  In fact, there are no bones or attempt at any skeletal structure at all.  The arms and legs do bend, but the hands only look good because I made use of secondary and follow through action simply by rotating them appropriately at the wrists. To make him look jaunty I also nodded the head a bit from side to side as he walked.

In short, I made up for limitations in the model's structure by using a few items from my bag of animator's tools. With good posing and timing, together with the follow-through and secondary action of the hands, I was able to get a fairly attractive walk, despite its admitted shortcomings.

No. 90, "Easy Way to Walk"

Last time, in post No. 89 ("Easy Way to Draw"),  I talked about some early inspiration in my life as an animator, which has left me with a lifelong fondness for Walter Lantz and his star character, Woody Woodpecker.

From that period I have preserved the original drawings of one of the first walk cycles I ever created. It was done when I was 12 or 13 years old.

There is a lot wrong with this cycle, but at least I had the idea of a repeating cycle.

Then in the mid 1990s I was experimenting with an early 3D application (I don't remember what it was called, but it was neither Maya nor 3D Studio Max), and as my test project I created another Woody Woodpecker walk cycle.

Shows some improvement over the first one, don't you think?  This time I used an earlier character design of Woody by Art Heinemann or perhaps Fred Moore which I have always thought was more elegant than the later Woody of the 1950s.

Anyway, it proves I can handle 3D animation if I want to.

No. 89, "Easy Way to Draw"

My first real interest in 2D cartoon animation was inspired by a 1950's TV show, Woody Woodpecker. Each half-hour show was comprised of four theatrical cartoon shorts produced by the Walter Lantz studio over the past two decades, plus a live-action segment in which studio head Walter Lantz would do a mini documentary about some aspect of animation production.

Here is a link to one such segment now showing on You Tube.  Seen today, the live action footage includes scenes that were clearly staged for the filming, such as story conferences and animator interactions. But at the time I felt I was being let in on animation production secrets. Indeed, there was little information available to the general public on this subject, so anything at all was better than nothing.

At the time I could not discriminate between Walter Lantz studio quality and that of the Walt Disney organization, nor between Lantz and Warners or MGM. But I did recognize the sophisticated animation in the Woody Woodpecker cartoons of the late 40's and very early 50's, and I didn't know then that they were more the work of directors Shamus Culhane and Dick Lundy and their animators than of Lantz himself. It was Walter Lantz who seemed to have reached out to me, and so I wrote him a letter.

When the personal answer arrived, I was thrilled to be treated with respect and to have been acknowledged by this important animation producer. The book he mentions is Walter Lantz "Easy Way to Draw".  I don't remember now if I got the book because he mentioned it, or if I had it already.  It was an attractive book published by Whitman Publishing, who published hundreds of titles for children including many, many coloring books. This book was more-or-less in the style of a coloring book, and the illustrations were quite appealing.

As promised, there were many pages of step-by-step illustrations of the drawing of the Walter Lantz characters, and I tried and tried to copy and then extrapolate from these examples.

The bogus "basic shapes" process of drawing that has been enshrined in
so many learn-to-draw books over the years.

The only problem was, though there may be an easy way to draw, there is no easy way to learn to draw.  Aside from the examples of a very few natural artists, the rest of us have to work very hard to draw well. The professional artists who illustrated these pages had worked for years to be able to do this kind of work.  And let's face it, no one draws like this. How-to-draw-it lessons like these are really deconstructed; the artist starts with a finished drawing and works backward to arrive at the basic shapes.  I know, because I did it myself one time in a book called You Can Draw Animals Right Down to the Skin.

My own lesson in how-to-draw--or how-NOT-to-draw!

I can think of a dozen examples illustrating this same bogus process, including a wonderful parody by Farside creator Gary Larson.

Nevertheless, I was inspired. I yearned to be able to draw like this, well enough to be paid to do it. I kept after that dream, and eventually I have, I believe, learned to do it pretty well. But don't let anyone tell you that there is an easy way to draw, or an easy way to play classical piano, or an easy way to do just about anything worthwhile. There are only hard ways to learn an art, after which you may say you have "a way to make drawing look easy."

More exciting to me than the book itself was this picture on the back cover, my first glimpse of a real
animator's workspace: the desk, the shelving, the coiled pencil holder and the metal drawing disc with
Acme pegs. (actually, these pegs look like they might be Oxberry, a slight variation on Acme that was

common at one time in east coast studios.)

Next:
A Woody Woodpecker walk cycle I did at 12 years old.  Plus, proof that I could do 3D if I wanted to!