Good Posing For Both Animation And Comic Book Art

I use the same principles of drawing for both my animation and comic book art. I follow the same stages of development in both types of projects. (Check out the completed comic page at: www.bloodwingangel.com

The sketch stages are: 1) Thumbnail; 2) Rough Pencil; 3) Blue Pencil Refinement; 4) Final Black Line. See the following samples below.

1) Thumbnail sketch and its enlarged version.

2) Rough Pencil Layout. Note the dialog balloon and spotlight placements for composition.

3) Blue Pencil Refinement of the character poses. The dialog balloons and spotlights will be on separate levels. 

4) Final Cleanup/Tie-down Black Line. Did this using a Blackwing 602 and a Mitsu-Bishi 9850, then scanning it at 300 dpi and adjusting the contrast. As I said earlier,
check out the final completed comic page at: www.bloodwingangel.com

Cleaning Up Drawings & Spacing Charts

This is a cleaned up animation key pose using buffed down blue pencil for underdrawing, tied down with a combination of Blackwing 602 and Mitsubishi 9850 HB for the black line...Blackwing 602 for thicker lines and Mitsubishi 9850 HB for more delicate line work!

It's second nature for me to describe on my spacing charts what I plan to do on particular drawings.

2D Animation Work In Progress

I've been working on this two and a half minute short web cartoon on and off for the past year. It's my way of keeping my hand in traditional 2D animation, using pencil drawings scanned into ToonBoom Studio software. This file shows the various stages I go through to produce my final color...there are completed color scenes, cleaned up animation, rough inbetweened animation, and basic key poses.

For those viewers who can't see the below embedded file, please go to Vimeo at:
https://vimeo.com/152711633

A frustrating aspect of Blogger is how it messes with the quality of the uploaded HD video clips. But this gives you an idea of how my characters' relationships are developing.

Nelvana Seminar Notes (circa 1981): Part One

It's been a very long time since I last posted. I always promised myself that I wouldn't write just anything just for the sake of posting something on my blog. Now I have a topic that I believe will be of interest to those visiting here.

Recently in a communication with Ken Duncan (Owner/Executive Producer of Duncan Studio), Ken said "John, when I was in Paris in the 80's I thought I saw some 'how to' notes that you'd done during Rock 'n Rule.....
1- Am I delusional?
2- If not, are they available to see?"

Well, Ken is not delusional...and after searching through my files I found the original typed notes that were xeroxed and handed out at Nelvana during the production of Rock & Rule. Basically, it was an explanation of my approach and work-flow method, going from initial thumbnails through to tie-down drawings.

Originally, there were 20+ pages in my handout for the three session seminar, which took place over three afternoons, using poses of my character Quadhole the Policeman to illustrate my approach. Because of the amount of material covered, I've decided to post them all here as a series. I have also supplemented the examples with Cindy Schlepper development material I created months after this seminar was given.

(Note: At that time, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's bible "The Illusion of Life" had not yet been published. Young animators such as ourselves were basically learning from our own experiments...studying the silent results on the studio's Lyon Lamb Video Animation System...not seeing if it worked with the dialog until it was shot on 35mm film and synced up on the flatbed.)

The following are my original typed notes from the first session. I'm including the exposure sheets and samples of my thumbnail analysis of a couple of Cindy Schlepper scenes.

 

These above poses were my very first exploratory sketches of Cindy Schlepper.

 

 

 

Above are my thumbnail analysis of the first time we see Cindy.

Cindy has arrived at Club 666 and is excited. "Oh, Boy! Mutants in the foyer!"

The following exposure sheets are for a Quadhole scene---the poses of which were originally handed out as a packet including the typed notes. I'll be posting those drawings in the next installment...and you can then cross-reference them with these sheets.

For those who are not familiar with the process, there's a lot to digest on these pages.
Hope you find it informative and useful.

The Animator's Team

Historically, the best way of producing animation in terms of both creativity and hitting production quotas was to set up animation units, whereby the various members of a unit could concentrate on certain aspects of bringing a scene to life. This was how the Disney studio set up its animation teams. At its most successful, it made for a great sense of pride and security amongst the team members that they could count on one another to get the job done.

It was also a great way of having an apprenticeship program by which everyone had the opportunity of being trained to go up to the next level; or it became apparent that a person could not handle the next stage and he/she'd gone as far as ability would let them. (The fact there was studio politics that stood in the way of deserving talent does not diminish the validity of this team concept.)

Before there were animation schools, on-the-job training was the only way to learn more than just the basics (which you can teach yourself). Even today, an apprenticeship program would be the best way of developing animation talent. But that would mean a commitment by the studio to keeping its artists employed from production to production.


The following is a basic Old School Unit the way I remember it on the feature Raggedy Ann & Andy:
1) Animator
2) Rough Inbetweener
3) Assistant Animator
4) Breakdown Assistant
5) Clean Inbetweener

Work flow:
The Animator draws the rough keys and eccentric partials. These are shot for a pose test. When the pose test is okayed by the director, the scene goes to the Rough Inbetweener who rough inbetweens the entire scene for the first action pencil test.

Once the director okays the rough pencil test, the Animator may go back in and add the important lip sync (if he hasn't already included it in his rough pass). The Assistant Animator then cleans up the keys, making adjustments so that the character is on model, and checks the exposure sheets to make sure that any leveling of the figures, overlays, etc. are correct.


The Breakdown Assistant then cleans up and completes any eccentric partials and crucial inbetweens, leaving the Clean Inbetweener to finish off the rest of the drawings.

But let's not come away with the mistaken idea that working this way was a bed of roses. The pressure on the artist to produce has always been enormous. The following is a 1976 cartoon by Eric Goldberg showing a bit of foxhole humor during my last few days on Raggedy Ann and Andy. I was leaving to start my first gig as an animator at Nelvana...and there was the assumption that I would be introducing Hollywood animation production methods to that studio in the Great White North.

How Long Does It Take To Finish A Clean Up? #2

I ended my previous post on this subject with the statement: "As long as animation is treated purely as a manufactured product, the art of animation will never develop past what it has been in the past."

The critical word in that statement is "purely". Of course animated films in essence are manufactured in that thousands of images have to be created and linked together to form the final piece, product, or however you want to describe it. To me, what kills the art is treating each drawing as "piece work".

I know that a certain amount of work needs to be done each week in order to make a deadline. What I object to is the attitude of "Let's set the budget of this project as cheaply as we can and beat the drawings out of everyone."

An example of a manufacturing attitude: Stories are boarded as though everything can be animated fully, and then toss the burden onto the contracting studios to "make it work." 

I learned very early on: Don't treat each scene as though it was equal to another...there are "money" scenes and there are scenes that can be done cheaply. Put the effort (money) where necessary and balance it out with easy scenes. I learned this from animators like Johnny Gentilella and Marty Taras (who were veteran Fleischer/Paramount/Terrytoons animators).


When I first started in the animation industry, I quickly became an assistant animator doing clean-up on "Tubby the Tuba". There I was assigned a mix of hard and easy scenes so that I could hit my weekly footage quotas. Even though I was on a salary, we still needed to keep one eye on completing a minimum amount of work each week. I have used that basic formula in everything I've done in my animation career (which hasn't ended).

How Long Does It Take To Finish A Clean Up? #1

An anonymous comment was posted to my blog entry: "1st Pass Roughs, Semi-Roughs & Clean-ups: Hank the Spider Monkey & Batman." The person asked the question: "How long does it take to finish the clean up? For example that Batman. How long did the clean up artist (take) to finish the inking, painting and shading for every 1 frame?"

The answer to that question is not a simple one. It's not just a combination of how talented and fast the clean up artist is, how much pencil mileage (complication) there is to the design, and how much work the animator left for the clean up artist to correct/adjust. This question also suggests that the clean up, inking, painting and shading, etc of that drawing is going to be handled by the same person. Given what computer animation programs can do today, I know that painting a cleaned up drawing is very fast, but I am not on the production line and don't know how long a complicated color scheme (several different colored lines, multiple colors for costume, hair, etc.) takes to paint. The fastest I can paint one of our studio's Avenging Apes characters (using a bucket dump tool) in about five minutes. But I wouldn't want to be painting at that rate all day long.

Regarding cleaning up a rough drawing, again it depends on how much work the animator left for the clean up artist to correct/adjust. I spend 30 minutes to draw a semi-clean pose like the Batman drawings in question. It would take me another 30 minutes to clean it up on a new sheet of paper. This includes some rest time for my hand as these drawings need very tight pencil control. At other times, like drawing a fast action, I don't have to be as precise and can finish a clean-up in ten minutes.

Then comes the shading, which I consider to be a special effect, which needs to be done by an artist who understands how to handle that. It may be done by the same animator who animated the action, but that stage needs time to think out and accomplish.

This brings up (what is to me) an injustice. I consider the dumping of several stages of production onto the shoulders of one artist, but not scheduling the time to do it properly, to be unfair. Animation programs that can combine layout, key posing, and even create animatics into the storyboard stage, may seem to be wonderful to The Suits and Bean Counters, but it's a prime cause of burnout for the artist.

It's not just about the physical time it takes to do a particular stage of production, it is also about the reasonable amount of thinking/analysis time these stages need before a line is drawn. Someone who has the talent to visualize a script onto a storyboard doesn't necessarily have the makings of a layout person, who can block out the on-model poses for the animators, create solid backgrounds, etc. Nor should that storyboard artist also be expected to time the scenes as they are to appear in the story reel.

What infuriates me about today's animation industry is the race to the bottom regarding cost of production. I, myself, am a Suit and I know it has always been "Faster! Faster! Cheaper! Cheaper!" But at what cost? If the final product (however economically produced) does not interest its potential audience, than The Suits are to blame...not the medium itself for the lack of viewership.

As I said in one of my first posts on this blog: "As long as animation is treated purely as a manufactured product, the art of animation will never develop past what it has been in the past."

Forced Perspective on Physical Action: Batman Swinging on Rope and Landing

Here is an example where the forced perspective of the scene setup will make your individual animation drawings look strange. The proportions of the elements of the character's body will look wrong frame by frame, but not in motion.

Background with extreme upshot perspective.

Batman's body in normal proportions.

Left leg swings forward.

Extreme perspective as Batman is coming down for landing.

Batman's foot touches down. Impetus of forward motion forces upper torso to bend forward at the waist. The body "squashes" as Batman hits the ground.

Lower torso has lost forward momentum due to foot touch-down. Upper portion of body moving ahead of lower portion. Body into "stretch".

Upper torso at its most forward. Combination of holding on to rope and second foot touch-down about to cause shift in impetus in opposite direction.

Batman lands on third foot touch-down and...

...brings trailing foot to stop position.

The rest of this short scene consists of Batman on multiple levels for cape overlapping action and mouth positions for dialogue. There is also a quick bit of animation of Batman tossing the rope aside to accent a word.

Batman Semi-clean Rough Poses & X-Sheet: Clean-up and Inbetweening Exercise

Here are the drawings and X-sheet for one of my Batman commercial scenes.
Before making any drawings, it is absolutely important that you (as an assistant animator) familiarize yourself with what is happening on the X-sheets!


Note how drawings are being exposed. There are some drawings later in the scene that work in and out of poses used earlier in the scene. Understand what the animator has planned before you start on your phase of the process to complete the scene. Many an inexperienced assistant has ignored this, only to have to toss out very-good-but-useless drawings because they thought they knew it all. Think twice, draw once!

At the end of this post is the completed Batman / Catwoman commercial that has this scene. Study the following drawings, then run the commercial to see how the scene works within it. Also, check out the lip sync of Batman's dialoque: "Paws off the customers, Catwoman!"


If you are so inclined, feel free to download these drawings, repegging them using the cross-hairs on each for registration. Then clean them up yourself and complete the inbetween drawings, as you would be required to if you were my assistant animator.

Note the extreme aspect of the right arm in this breakdown drawing

The extreme positioning of the right arm may look wrong, but it will feel right in motion.

 

 

Click here for the Catwoman Commercial that contains this scene.