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 Three

These are the third and final set of notes from my Nelvana seminar. Please remember that I was asked to explain my personal method of animating (and the Frank and Ollie tomb "Illusion of Life" had not yet been published). We were all youngsters, experimenting on our own and trying to learn from each other.

The third seminar session consisted of answering questions that were handed in by animators a week after the first two sessions. I believe that the material covered in this series is as relevant today as it was 30+ years ago.
 

The following is how I rough out my full-size poses after working out my thumbnails.

Above is my first rough pass at a Quadhole key pose.

Above is my second rough pass at a Quadhole key pose...I mold the character's form over the forces I laid out on the first pass, making subtle changes as I feel the body reacts to those forces. This pose would be cleaned up on a third sheet of paper.

The next three sheets show how I filled out the basic posing and interpreted the timing of the previous examples shown in sessions one and two. Please refer to the exposure sheets in session one to see how I described the action with particularity. I find that writing it out in this manner forces me to analyze the movement in terms of "anticipation, action, and reaction".

If you have a mind to, you can cut out the poses (registering them by their leg placement and shifting of weight), then film them in sequence as a rough pose test, using the exposure sheet for timing.

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."

1st Pass Roughs, Semi-Roughs, & Clean-ups: Hank the Spider Monkey & Batman

Every animator has his/her own way of creating their animation poses.

I normally make three passes at my animation drawings: Rough 1st pass (focusing on the essence of the pose), followed by a semi-clean up on a second sheet (tying down all the elements of the design). Finally, I clean that pose up on a third sheet, making a careful drawing. I cleanup my own drawings as I haven't had a clean-up assistant in the past ten years.

1st Rough Pass

Semi-Clean-up

Final Clean-up, Scanned with Blue Line Dropped Out

For fast actions, I rework the rough 1st pass drawing on a second sheet with blue pencil, making adjustments to the tilt of the head, thrust of shoulders, etc. Then, I buff down that semi-clean up and apply my final black line on that drawing.

The following are examples of how much I will adjust the thrust of the different parts of my character's body from 1st pass to that final phase on the second sheet. Note, I'm showing the final version of each pose as scanned in color for this posting. Normally, I would scan the final drawing to Photoshop in grey scale, setting my scanner to drop out the blue lines and just scan the black line. Then, I would adjust the Contrast and Brightness settings of the Photoshop file.

I made adjustments to the head tilt, hat drag, the hands, shoulders, mid-section. In this pose, the head is cocking back as a quick antic into the next pose, which is leading into the lift-off.

Major adjustment was twisting the upper torso, leading into the lift-off.

Twisting the upper torso (shoulders, etc.) to corkscrew up off the ground.

Hank's head and left shoulder are now leading the corkscrew motion up off the ground.

Now for those who prefer a more "realistic" style of character, the following are some of my semi-roughs I did for the series of Batman & Robin commercials about which I've previously posted. I'm planning on posting all the semi-rough drawings I did for this particular scene to give all those interested a chance to practice cleaning up an animator's drawings and finishing all the inbetweens. It is more difficult than it appears, as an assistant needs to be able to think like an animator and not lose the vitality of the drawings. This was the old school path to becoming an animator. Post a comment if this interests you.

This pose is an antic into the following pose #37

Tools of the Art: Pencil & Paper versus Computer & Cintiq

In a comment by David Nethery regarding my previous post ("Animation Drawings: Seen and Felt"), David expressed an interest in seeing my rough pass pencil test of Hank sliding in, etc. Unfortunately, I don't have that anymore. However, I do have some of the initial rough pass drawings, which I will show in a future posting on cleaning up rough drawings. I also have the X-sheets which will also be the subject of a separate posting.

However, as a decorative element for today, here are the three stages I take my Key drawings through.

This is my first rough pass at a pose

My semi-rough of the same pose

My final clean-up

To the tune of Irving Berlin's "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off":
"I draw with Pencil,
 You like the Cintiq..."

As an artist, the tools I use are incredibly important to my ability to work comfortably and with precision. I have a very light touch, and at times draw tight movements, so my pencils and paper have to be responsive to the pressure of my fingers.

I draw with pencil on Ingram Bond paper, using Col-erase Blue and Red for construction lines, etc, and California Cedar's line of Palomino Pencils to lay down my black line. I roll my drawings back and forth between the fingers of my left hand, laying down my pencil line with my right. I do this for all the phases of my drawings, whether they be Keys, Breakdowns, or Inbetweens. This enables me to feel the drawing in motion as the line starts at my finger tips and passes through my pencil and on to the page...after all, the poses are always coming from somewhere and going somewhere else.

Over the years, this has become an automatic back and forth motion: draw line... roll pages... draw line... roll pages... line... roll... line, line...roll...etc.

Very much like a pianist's fingers striding across the keys. (No pun intended.)

Now, I understand the Animation Industry's reliance upon the Computer and Cintiq as money-saving manufacturing tools to link together artists and studios from different parts of the world.

But if you had your druthers artistically, which would you use? Pencil & Paper? or Cintiq & Computer?

Discussion time!

What are the pros and cons of both sets of tools?