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.

No. 97, An Iconic Image On a Good Day

A Good Day

As mentioned in my last post, No. 96, I went to the Drawtastic event last Saturday in West Seattle with the intention of promoting this blog and, as always, to crusade for drawing and for hand-drawn animation.  I paid a fee for a vendor's table, though I had nothing to sell for money, and I sat there all day just talking with the crowd, handing out my flyers, and doing some drawing at my portable animation desk.  It was time well spent.

At my vendor's table during Drawtastic. Photo by Tony White.

I talked with a teacher about her program of guiding high school students through the making of personal animated films.  With a very limited classroom schedule, what do you emphasize for them to accomplish? A certain length? A certain style?  No; to try to tell a story.

I talked with the caricaturist Nolan Harris about those cases where you just can't get a good likeness. It does happen!

I met a man whose son, also present, loves the old Jay Ward Rocky and Bullwinkle shows.  The boy is about ten years old. This gave me a little thrill, because I believe that a lot of kids today have no interest in any animation now considered as classic, which mostly is comprised of 2D animation. Jungle Book?  Awesome! (But they mean the CGI Jungle Book.)  Lion King? Oh, yeah, that's a Broadway musical, isn't it? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Ancient history. But meeting this boy gives me hope that perhaps I am being too cynical.

Among the guests, I met the animator Mike A. Smith, from Portland, Oregon, winner not only of Drawtastic's Golden Pencil Award for Best 2D Animated Film, but also, by audience vote, Best of the Fest. I had seen Mike's entry Cooped on Vimeo, and loved it, but I didn't get it that this guy was that animator until near the end of the day.  Mike works "paperless", drawing directly into his computer. That's something I have not been able to do, but Mike's work is proof that the results can be worthy indeed. Google "Cooped" and see for yourself.

A frame from Cooped, by Mike A. Smith

The Perfect Moment

The most magical moment of the day, however, was captured by a fellow vendor who got this candid shot of me with a young animation enthusiast.

Passing the lore to a new generation, perhaps. Photo by Morgan Krepky.

It's such a wonderful image, it just leaves me speechless.

Next:  Developing the movie poster for Carry On.

No. 96, A Poster for "Carry On"

Drawtastic

Today I spent my time promoting this blog and my feelings about 2D animation at an event in Seattle called Drawtastic. This is the brainchild of my friend and fellow 2D animation enthusiast Tony White, whose first book, The Animator's Workbook, has been a valued volume in my animation library for 30 years. Originally from England, Tony for the past several years has lived and taught and written about animation in the Seattle, Washington, area near where I reside.  It was a great pleasure to finally meet him face to face a couple of years ago, especially as we share that passion for preserving and nurturing the art of hand drawn animation.

The event was the first of what we hope to be many annual editions.  It was designed to encompass not just animation drawing but all drawing, and so it included the professional caricaturist Nolan Harris and several other comics artists and graphic novelists among the presenters and vendors. Organized along the lines of a comicon, the vendors like me occupied tables in a hall where visitors could talk to us freely as they moved about, and some of us made drawings during this time. I set up a portable animation board and worked on cleaning up the rough drawings of the Old Man's walk cycle. (The roughs are what I presented in my last post before this one, No. 95.)

The Poster

Also, stimulated by thought about what would make a good visual presentation at my table at the Drawtastic event and despite the fact that I had only about three weeks to get it ready, I decided to create a poster for my film Carry On.And because of the intense work I have been doing on my storyboards for the film, I knew at once exactly what imagery I wanted to show.

My movie poster for Carry On.

In my next post I will talk more about Drawtastic and some of the people I met there, and I will tell about the stages of development the poster went through.

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.