No. 104, Crazy for Storyboarding

For about three weeks I have been neglecting this blog, but not because of disinterest or laziness; it is for the best of reasons: because I have been energetically forging ahead in drawing the storyboards for another long sequence in my work-in-progress short film, Carry On.

Unlike the previous one, this sequence will not be published as an animatic on You Tube for all to see. It contains too many plot spoilers, and you'll forgive me if I want to keep everyone in suspense.

However, I will now show you a few of the images, with comments.

Making It Happen Offscreen

Animators love to animate, but because it is such a lot of work, we look for ways oftentimes not to animate--that is, not to show the obvious.  Here we want to show that our main character, the Old Man, is slowly moving forward in a line of airline passengers at a security checkpoint. Having shown other passengers in a long pan that moves gradually toward the head of the line, we finally come to a framing where we can see the Old Man's steamer trunk in front of an ill-tempered man. The trunk then slides out of the frame, and we cut to a wider shot of the angry man moving forward to close up the space. Only then do we pan to the right again and show the Old Man himself now at the head of the line.

The Old Man moves forward--but it happens off screen.

The angry man and some of the other passengers we have seen will now be used for reaction shots to what follows, and we have avoided some tedious animation of the old man towing his trunk. That action has been shown in the previous sequences and will be easy for the viewer to imagine.

Gloves

The old man is seen in two shots putting on a tight-fitting pair of leather gloves. The first shot will mainly show the wiggling fingers of the right hand as he forces the glove on. The second shot does the same for the left hand, with a variation on the pose. A passenger reaction shot (the Angry Man) will separate the two glove shots, emphasizing the impatience of the other passengers to the slow and deliberate ways of the Old Man.

The Angry Man shows impatience with the Old Man's deliberate ways.

The Big Rope

The Old Man has already been seen towing his heavy trunk through the airport bare-handed. Now he has chosen to put on the gloves in order to handle another rope. It is a rope as thin as the one he has already used, and I want to make a joke about that, so first we see him with the gloves on, ready to go to work, and we pan to the right, revealing what looks like a thick and heavy rope hanging down. When the Old Man reaches for it, however, we see that in fact the rope is close to the camera and only appears to be big.

The big rope that turns out to be small.

An Homage to Bogie

Here I wanted to show the Old Man making some gesture of self assurance as he waits for something to happen, and I got the idea of having him hitch up his trousers as Humphrey Bogart's characters used to do in his old movies.

The Old Man does Bogie.

This one drawing assures me that the gesture will be effective.

In conclusion...

These are the sorts of useful things that occur to the thoughtful storyboard artist as she or he draws the panels, redraws the panels, or stands back looking at the panels in sequence on a board. Often a simple rearrangement of drawings provides an improved sequence, or the insertion of a reaction shot in a different place. Creating a storyboard should be thought of as a constantly evolving process, until the most effective possible combination of shots, angles and movement within shots has been achieved.

Of course, after the storyboard has been organized into an animatic, with timing and sound, still more needed changes will likely become obvious. But that is another story...

No. 103, Life Drawing as Animation

Not long ago I read of an animator--could have been Richard Williams--who put a model in life drawing through a sequence of related poses of some action, such as pitching a ball. At each successive pose the animator did a gesture drawing on one page of a pad of translucent paper, starting near the back of the pad and working forward, so that for each new pose he could see through the paper to the previous pose and could relate them one to the others.  At the end he had a series of key drawings of the action, scaled and in register, that could actually be made into an animated scene.

At the drawing sessions which I attend, we often have "long poses", where the model holds a pose for fifteen minutes, takes a short break, and then assumes the same pose again, for as long as one and a half hours. Accustomed as I am to quick drawing, I sometimes become frustrated with these long poses. Instead of working on just one drawing, as most of the other members do, I may do several different versions of the pose. Occasionally, I get up and move to another viewpoint in the room.

Recently I tried something new. Getting to my feet, and with a small pad held across one arm, I did a quick drawing of the model from a viewpoint at the far left of the room. Then I sidestepped a few paces and drew him again from the new viewpoint, superimposing the new drawing over the first and keeping the proportions much the same, as I could see the previous image faintly through the paper.

I continued on, moving to my right after each drawing, sometimes crowding in between the easels of two of my fellow artists, until I was at the far right of the room with seven different angles of the model on my pad.

Seven related drawings of a single pose.

Now I have scanned the drawings and made a little animated movie of them. The result is of course the illusion that the model is rotating on his stand.

This is a wonderful way to learn to understand proportions, to get a grasp of the idea of foreshortening, and to learn the all-important art of visualizing your flat drawings as representations of spatial geometry.  I plan on doing it again soon.  Try it!

No. 102, The Benefit of Life Drawing

I don't believe there is any animator or storyboard artist or concept artist who could not benefit from life drawing.

Even if you don't get a chance to do much character animation, the experience of life drawing could lead you to a pose that adds in body language some of what might be missing in the animation.

Here are two examples of 3 minute drawings from a recent life drawing class that I attend on a weekly basis.

Each figure was drawn in under three minutes. Practice in quick drawing and observation
is invaluable for the animation artist.

Notice the woman on the right; she is in a strange pose that one might never imagine without reference to real life, with all her weight on that left leg that is angled far to the right, so that her right leg can cross over and come to rest on the opposite side. Because of the flexibility of the ankles, it is actually quite a stable pose. This person, with clothes on, might be standing and waiting for her child's school bus to arrive.

In the pose at left, the woman again has all her weight on her left leg. Animators always need to know how the weight of a character is supported, and it is seldom an equal distribution of weight to each leg.

Here is a 15 minute drawing of a model seated.

A good study in the foreshortening of limbs.

I enjoy poses like this where the long limbs of the legs or arms are coming almost straight at me, or straight away, and I must convincingly depict that illusion of depth.  In this case the model's right upper leg and her left lower leg are severely foreshortened.  The arms, on the other hand, are both in a plane that is perpendicular to my line of sight, so no foreshortening was required there.

Here is a 3 minute drawing that shows what can be defined with a minimum of line and no shading, which is the essence of drawing for traditional animation.

Line drawing--the heart and soul of traditional hand-drawn animation.

Line art as the primary means of expression for traditional animation came about through a combination of influences:  because of the process of tracing through a stack of paper sheets held in register; because the early animation producers were working with a high-contrast black and white film that could not record subtle shades of grey; because hand-shaded drawings were jittery and took too much time to render; because of the strong influence of the styles and media of newspaper comic strips; and, with the advent of the use of cels, because the smoothest way to shade was to fill the areas defined by the lines in flat greys or colors on the backs of the cels. Animators learned to delineate volume with carefully crafted outline, until that became an art.

Now in the present digital age it has become possible to render animation directly as volumes rather than as outlines representing volumes. But for me and many others, animation through line art remains the more alluring medium.

Beyond outline, to attempt to draw the subtle contours within a form is excellent exercise in observation and eye-hand control.

A 15 minute drawing of a male model with
well-defined musculature.

If you cannot attend life-drawing sessions with nude models, you can still benefit from life drawing of family and friends. You will find that it is very different from drawing from photographs. If you are not already doing this, I strongly encourage you to draw from life, analyzing shape and weight and balance from the viewpoint of an animator. You may discover your animation skills to be greatly enhanced!

*  *  *  *
Next: Life Drawing as Animation

No. 101, Animated Cartoons for the Beginner, Part 2

As promised, I have now converted the other two flipbooks from the margins of Volney White's Animated Cartoons for the Beginner into watchable movies.

Like the walk cycle shown in post No. 100, these two short sequences have no registration crosses or other aids in re-aligning the badly registered drawings, so I have just made educated guesses as to the proper relative positions.

Run Cycle

Aligning the run cycle was aided by continuity of feet in contact with the ground, and I think I am quite close to the mark.

This cycle may have been intended to run on 1s (one frame per drawing, at 24 fps) but I found it very hard to watch at that speed, so I am showing it here on 2s (2 frames per drawing).

Character Turning His Head

Working with the second scene, a character turning his head and winking, I became aware that the inbetweening of the hands/arms was very poor; precise inbetweening would have been a great help in getting these drawings into proper alignment, but it just wasn't there. Sloppy and careless work.  Still, I think I am fairly close to the original.

But that original leaves a lot to be desired, as it violates a rule that I learned only gradually over the years: if you want your animation to read, only do one thing at a time. Here, Volney White has wasted a wink of his character's eye by just tacking it onto the end of the head movement; the wink is noticeable only if you are looking for it.

These two little animated movements do nothing toward redeeming them from my verdict for Animated Cartoons for the Beginner as Worst Ever Animation Instruction Book.


Next: The Pleasures and Benefits of Life Drawing

No. 100, Book Review: Animated Cartoons for the Beginner

Worst Animation Book Ever?

Published privately by Foster Art Service of Tustin, California, a private publisher of large format how-to art books that were distributed across the United States beginning sometime in the 1940's, Animated Cartoons for the Beginner is one of the first animation books that ever came into my hands. Priced at one dollar, it was part of a line of instruction books that included titles about drawing, painting in many media, sculpture, and various art crafts; eventually the list numbered over 200 different publications.

Many of the books were credited to known artists, but number 25, Animated Cartoons for the Beginner was anonymous and remained so for decades. Recently I learned on the internet that the author and artist was an animator named Volney White, who lived from 1907 to 1966. He worked for Romer Grey studios, for Schlesinger under the directors Norm McCabe and Frank Tashlin doing early Porky Pig Looney Tunes, and then for Paul Terry.

The Foster books also failed to carry any publication dates, and I have not been able to find out when it first appeared in print. But the drawing and animation are very much in the Warner Brothers style of the late 1930's, with character designs largely dependent on circles. The characters had large eyes with huge pupils, exaggerated highlights, and eyelids that came down like polished shutters, apparently designed to look like they were heavy with eye shadow.

A character much like Porky Pig of the late 30s. Volney White was
animator on a number of Porky's cartoons at Schlesinger.

The style is consistent with the known work that Volney White did at Schlesinger's around 1937, on such Looney Tune cartoons as Porky at the Crocadero or A-Lad-In-Bagdad. (These cartoons are available for viewing on You Tube and other video sites.) There is also a clear influence of "Cartoon Charlie" Thorson, a Schlesinger studio character designer at the time and the man who drew the famous original "Bug's Bunny" model sheet for Harum Scarum.

Ain't they cute? A page of typical character designs by Volney White.

As to content, the first half of the book's thirty-two pages are devoted to character design, something that author White clearly enjoyed. Most of the character drawings are paired with so-called "rough" drawings of the same thing, yet instead of real rough drawings, these are the usual circle and stick figure de-constructions that persist like some undying urban legend about how cartoonists draw.

Showing the mythical method of drawing that cartoonists supposedly use. Note also the
winking eyelid of the character at lower right.

He might have done better to have got right into the subject of inbetweening, the beginning animator's traditional training regimen which is so valuable because it makes a newbie animator actually useful in a short time while exposing him or her at ground level to the practices and standards of the studio for which he will work, and because there is no better way to understand the process than to handle and work with the drawings of a more experienced animator. The best example of practical inbetweener training that I have seen is in the book Animation in Twelve Hard Lessons, by Bob Heath. (See my post No. 18 for a review of that book.)

A page showing the building of an animation desk.

When finally the book gets to animation itself, there are a couple of useful pages about the animation desk and how to build one. Then we are off into walk and run cycles and a lot of pose drawings. There is nothing at all about timing, about breakdowns, about spacing, about the basic rules of smooth animation, nor even about drawing registration. Sometimes I think veteran animators forget: walk cycles are hard to do. They are not really beginner material at all, in my opinion. When I see a book like this, I wonder if the author actually imagined that anyone could learn much from it.

One of the pages featuring a run cycle. Note the eye unaccountably winking at lower right;
in a cycle, the eye would wink at every other step!

And the one intriguing feature of the book, a column of cycles presented as flipbooks in the margin of the right-hand pages, was completely ruined by the printers and by a careless editor, who let the book go into print, not just once but in who-knows-how-many reprintings over the years, with pages out of order.  Thus the flipbooks are out of order and make no sense, only creating confusion for anyone trying to understand them. This is why I suggest that the book, disappointing in so many ways, is a good candidate for the Worst Animation Instruction Book Ever.

The book's concluding three pages, under the heading "HERE ARE THE PROBLEMS GIVEN BY THE LEADING STUDIOS", is at last in the right informational spirit, yet the problems are more along the lines of a test that might be given to a story man rather than a candidate for animator.

A page of problems. The aspiring animator was to show his solutions when applying for a job.

A final note: I took the trouble to scan all the pages and re-order them correctly. Below is Volney White's flipbook walk cycle, which, as far as I know, has not been seen as it was intended since White delivered his manuscript pages to Walter Foster some sixty years ago.

In addition to the images being in the wrong order, the drawings here were carelessly registered, so that the character jerked about both vertically and horizontally. I re-aligned them vertically by keeping the feet on a constant plane when in contact with the ground. Horizontally, I decided on keeping the mass of the character's abdomen and rear end in about the same place, which seems to work.

In a future post I will include videos of the other two cycles featured in this book.

_________________________

Footnote, March 30, 2017

While on a recent visit to Portland, Oregon, where I lived for ten years, I made a visit to the famous independent bookstore Powell's Books. Among the animation books on their shelves, I found a copy of this book in an earlier format, wider than it was tall, and, sure enough, this earliest edition had the flipbook images printed in the correct order. So they had got it right--before they then got it wrong!

No. 99, A Most Unusual Walk Cycle, Part 2

One of the drawings in the cycle, cleaned up and ready for inking.

In post number 95, we looked at five stages in the development of this walk cycle of an Old Man dragging his trunk through an airport.

Since then I have finished and cleaned up the animation, adding and refining things, and I want to show you the result.

First, here are versions 1 and 5 from the earlier post, so you can see how far it has come.

Version 1

Link to version 1
Nothing is right here but the legs, which will remain virtually unchanged right to the end. But it is a good place to start, and the uneven leg rhythm suggests complementary movements of the torso, left arm and head. I can see clearly what needs to be done.

Version 5

Link to version 5
By this time I have gotten the arm figured out to my satisfaction, but there are many other things I still want to add. That left arm now has acquired a hypnotic over-importance only because, unlike everything else here, it is detailed and finished looking, like a sharply focused element in a picture that is otherwise blurred. That is just what rough drawings are: unfocused images.

Version 6

Link to version 6
Now, everything is in focus, and the left arm is no longer the only thing one wants to look at.  I have added in such things as the thrust and turn of the head, the sleeve of his right arm sliding up and down the wrist, the movement of the tail of the jacket and the swinging motion of the necktie. Still, the original movement of the legs that is apparent in version one remains unchanged.

The Old Man in Color

How my character of the Old Man may look in the film Carry On.

I spent a day working in Animate Pro, inking this drawing and testing color palettes and learning how to do textures, until I came up with this image, which is close to how I want to see the Old Man in the final film.  Having a color concept like this will help me as I continue to storyboard the rest of the film.


Next: A Review of the Second Oldest--and possibly Worst--Animation Instruction Book ever published.

No. 98, A Poster for "Carry On": Its Development

From Thumbnail to Final

Stage 1, The Thumbnail

The first image, done on a 3" x 3" sticky note.

Visualizing my personal film Carry On in terms of a movie poster was useful in focusing my thinking; the exercise of distilling the concept into a single image was an interesting challenge, and I was surprised when it came so easily.  Here it all is, showing the Old Man, his oversized suitcase at the airport, and his own challenge as represented by the open frame "sizer" or test container that some airlines have used to control what their passengers may bring aboard.

Incidentally, this is another good example of working small, with no chance to put in too much fussy detail, before you work big.

Stage 2, Full-Size Drawing, 1st Draft

The first full-scale drawing. 

Attempting a full scale drawing, it became clear that perspective was not just necessary but that I would have to do my perspective drawing in a precise and formal way instead of faking or guessing at the approximate perspective, as it is sometimes possible to do.

Stage 3, Full-Size Drawing, 2nd Draft

The final pencil drawing.

This is the final pencil drawing as it was when I brought it into Photoshop for painting. At the edges I had taped on extra paper so that my vanishing points could be extended way outside the range of the image frame. The airplane was originally drawn in at the top, as shown here, so that I could have it on its own layer and then easily adjust its position as seen through the window.

Stage 4, The Digital Drawing

This shows the digital outline layer as I traced it from the pencil scan.

Tracing the pencil layer digitally is the cleanest way to get a good line image with a completely transparent background. The line image here is shown over another layer of medium grey.

Stage 5, Tonal Rendering

The tonal, monochromatic rendering.

This method of working, where you completely work out your value scale before adding any color at all, is one I have long been curious to try.  Sometimes, thinking about color at the same time as you are setting the values (shades of light and dark) can be dauntingly complex. I found that I liked doing it in this way.

Stage 6, Full Color

The tonal image, now with color added on a new layer.

Unfortunately, adding color the way I did it reduces the contrast considerably. The technique I used called for creating a second copy of the tonal image, setting the mode of the top layer to Multiply, reducing its opacity to about seventy percent, then creating a new layer in between the tonal layers where the color is layed in.  It does work, but, as I say, a lot of the contrast was lost.  I have heard of a somewhat different technique which I plan to try next time I do a painting like this.

Stage 7, The Final

The final illustration.

Here I have added a few brighter highlights on a new layer, cropped the image to printing size, and of course added the text. I am fairly well satisfied with the result.

Next: One more look at that Most Unusual Walk Cycle, with all drawings cleaned up and detailed.