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.

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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!

No. 88, Storyboarding Tips: Thumbnails

Think Small Before Thinking Big

I just re-learned something I have really known for a very long time: that working out your thinking in thumbnail-size images is a smart way to go, whether you are animating or planning out your storyboard.

Sometimes I start storyboarding in full-size panels, which can work, but which sometimes results in having to do over a number of panels because of poor planning. Then I just feel foolish, and that is when I remind myself of the value of thumbnailing.

Thumbnails are drawings so tiny in scale that it is impossible to get in any detail. That is the point! Working in thumbnail size, you can work fast and lay down an idea for a whole scene or sequence in perhaps a minute or two. Often you will reject some panels and replace them with others, but the effort in redoing thumbnails is nothing compared to replacing larger images in which you have invested a lot of time and work in detail and accurate drawing.

An important bonus also is that you can draw crude thumbnails as fast as you can think. This happened recently when I had been working at the staging of a difficult sequence for my film Carry On.  When the solution occurred to me, I sat down and thumbnailed the whole thing in a couple of minutes.

Here is the original page of thumbnail notes, telling me all I needed to know about what was in the frame, what character it was, which way they were looking, what the approximate camera framing was to be, and in what sequence the shots were to run.

The page of thumbnails, including three that were eliminated.

Later, I could confidently enlarge each image represented in the thumbnails to full size and with all the extra detail that those tiny drawings suggested.

The same basic images, enlarged and detailed.

So whenever you are working out your animation or storyboarding ideas, remember to think small before you think big!

No. 87, Storyboarding Tips: The Paper Storyboard

Storyboarding

If you are storyboarding your film or video before animating (and you should be!), how are you doing it?  There are some sensible things you might do to make the process go faster and easier.

The first thing is to learn to think cinematically. That is, to learn the language of cinema that has developed over the past hundred plus years, and to use those rules and techniques to help your presentation to be as clear and effective as it can be.

A film maker, whether in animation or live-action, is a storyteller, and there is little point in being able to animate expertly if that work is poorly organized and presented.  I, myself, am guilty of having neglected to give storyboarding it's due in some of my past work. But for much of my career I have worked in the extremely short format of television commercials, works of between 15 seconds and a minute, that were easy to comprehend and whose storyboards might comprise just ten or fifteen panels in their entirety.

Anything longer than one minute deserves all the care and effort at the storyboard stage that you can put into it. And when you are at the storyboard stage, it is okay to put in even sequences that you feel might be cut out later on, because even if you cut a scene at some later time, to get it down in storyboard panels may be helpful in giving you an understanding of your own story and characters. Such a sequence might contribute to what is called a "backstory" for your film, a behind-the-scenes narrative of your characters' lives that can be of help in stimulating the understanding and creativity of voice actors, character designers, animators and others involved in your production--even if all those roles are just you wearing various creative hats.

(For further reading on the subject of the language of cinema,  I recommend Film Directing Shot by Shot, by Seven D. Katz, (Michael Wiese Productions, 1991) and on storyboarding, Prepare to Board, by Nancy Beiman, (Focal Press, 2007.) Many other books on these subjects are also available.)

What Size Paper?

In a future post, I will discuss digital storyboarding; in fact, I use both paper and digital versions together. But today I want to talk about "old fashioned" paper storyboards.

In the days before wide-screen television, you could buy storyboard pads like this one.

There is no fixed size for a storyboard panel.  What should be considered is the screen ratio for your final output. Will it be widescreen or some other ratio of width to height? In my case, I have found that the right size for my finish storyboard panels is half a sheet of animation paper. Full size animation paper is usually 12.5 x 10.5 inches [31.7cm x 26.7cm], so half is 6.25 x 10.5 inches  [15.9cm x 26.7cm]. This is quite close to the basic widescreen ratio of 16:9, actually working out to 16:9.5. This is a nice size for me to work, with images that can be read from several feet away if they are boldly drawn, and it is economical because I just take used animation paper with images on one side that I do not care to preserve, and I tear them in half with a straight edge. (And because I prefer to animate on a premium paper called Ingram, which is heavy and expensive, I like the economy of using this paper twice.)

Full sheet of standard animation paper (used).

The sheet torn or cut in half.

The half-sheets pinned up.  Notice the Acme punch peg holes.

Displaying the Storyboard

Of course, among the advantages of digital storyboarding is its compactness; it does not require any more physical space than your computer screen. This may be a deciding factor for many in not working on paper, and it is a good reason.  If your workspace is confined to a small apartment, a bedroom, the kitchen table, then paper storyboarding is probably more trouble than it is worth.

But if you can--if you possibly can--find or create some place to pin up your drawings, I recommend it highly. I am now lucky in this way.  After years of pinning up storyboards on painfully small corkboards or on the walls of rooms that soon became pocked with the marks of pushpins, I moved into a new home where I reserved an entire wall to be covered with a synthetic material that is made to take pushpins and which closes over the holes when the pushpins are removed. The board is 5 feet high and 10 feet wide [1.5m x 3m].

My dedicated storyboard wall.

In a digital storyboard program such as Storyboard Pro by Toon Boom, you can view your storyboard in a number of formats, from a page of thumbnails to a single panel showing on your screen. But in my opinion, there is nothing like a big board you can stand back from to view the whole thing, or walk up to for a closer view of twenty or ten or even one panel at a time.

A closer view.

You can pace the room while you consider it, turn your head, walk up and re-pin some panels in a different order, make notations and corrections directly on the panels, and conveniently (and dramatically) walk another person through the action that is displayed there.

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Next I'll be discussing the Thumbnail (also on paper) Storyboard.