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better and easier to do. There are lots of formulas, principles, clichés and devices here to help, but the main thing I want to pass on is a way of thinking about animation in order to free the mind to do the best work possible. I learned it from the best in the business and I've boiled it all down into a systematic working order. It transformed my work - I hope it will be useful to you.
1 11 23 35 41 46 47 48 57 61 68 70 75 76 78 80 WHY THIS BOOK? DRAWING IN TIME TIME TO DRAW IT'S ALL IN THE TIMING AND THE SPACING LESSON 1 ADVANCING BACKWARDS TO 1940 History of the Chart and Inbetween Extremes and Breakdowns Keys Three Ways to Animate Testing, Testing, Testing The X-Sheet Came the Dawn ... The Best Numbering System The Great Ones and Twos Battle The Top and Bottom Pegs Battle
84 88 90 92 96 99 99 101 101 102 106 109 111 115 118 120 128 135 136 136 142 146 147 148 156 163 167 173 176 189 192 195 200 201
MORE ON SPACING Classic Inbetween Mistakes Watch Your Arcs Getting More Movement Within the Mass The Elongated Inbetween The Major Beginner's Mistake The 'Ruff' Approach How Much Do We Leave To The Assistant? Take The Long Short Cut WALKS Getting the Weight Set the Tempo The Passing Position or Breakdown Two Ways to Plan a Walk The Double Bounce Loosening it Up Digging Deeper into Walks There's Nothing Like Trying It The Heel Foot Action Normal Walk Spacing Weight Shift The Belt Line Arm Movements Counteraction The Recipe Sneaks The Tip Toe Sneak RUNS, JUMPS AND SKIPS The 4 Drawing Formula Run The 3 Drawing Run The 2 Drawing Run The Recipe Run, Jump, Skip and Leap
209 Skips 212 Jumps 213 viii Weight on a Jump
217 218 223 226 230 231 246 249 251 256 262 264 269 272 273 282 283 285 295 295 297 297 299 301 301 304 305 310 311 314 314 315 320 321 323
FLEXIBILITY The Breakdown Simple Overlap Overlapping Action Simple Counteraction Breaking-Joints to Give Flexibility Flexibility in the Face Overlapping Action in the Face I nstant Read - Profiles for Readability WEIGHT Pressure and Weight How Much Effort Do We Have To Expend? Dancing Rules of Thumb On Synchronising Action ANTICIPATION Surprise Anticipations Invisible Anticipations TAKES AND ACCENTS A Hard Accent Bounces Back A Soft Accent continues TIMING, STAGGERS, WAVE AND WHIP Stagger Timings The Side to Side Vibration Formula Whip Action Wave Action DIALOGUE Phrasing Picture and Sound Sync Accents Attitude The Secret ACTING Change of Expression Look for the Contrast An Acting Point
324 324 325 325 327 328 330 333 334 334 334 335 335 335 335 335 335 335 335 335 338 338 339 342
Body Language Symmetry or 'Twinning' Steal It! Eyes ANIMAL ACTION Live Action Reference Basic Animal Walk Pattern DIRECTING The Brief The Leica Reel Separate the Characters Best Foot Forward Casting Animators Making Changes ' Say! Say!' Voice Recording Hook Ups Research Editing Believe in Your Material REVIEW The Procedure The Ingredients Acknowledgements
When I was ten years old I bought a paperback book, How to Make Animated Cartoons, by Nat Falk, published in 1940. I t's now long out of print, but I used it as a handy reference guide for 1940s Hollywood cartoon styles when I designed the characters and directed the animation for
Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
More importantly for me, however, the book was clear and straightforward; the basic information of how animated films are made registered on my tiny ten-year-old brain and, when I took the medium up seriously at twenty-two, the basic information was still lurking there. I was living and painting in Spain when the incredible possibilities of what animation could do engulfed my mind. I planned my first film and took the money I had left from portrait painting to London. I starved for a bit, finally found work animating television commercials and managed to self-finance The Little Island - a half-hour philosophical argument without words which won several international awards.
The Little Island, 1958
Three years later, when I'd finished the film, the unpleasant realisation slowly crept up on me that I really didn't know very much about animation articulation, that is, how to move the stuff. To train myself I traced off the animation that Ken Harris had done of a witch in a Bugs Bunny cartoon (Broomstick Bunny - 1955, directed by Chuck Jones). Doing this only confirmed how little I understood about movement. While I was making The Little Island I had seen a re-release of Bambi, but since I'd considered myself a revolutionary in the field of animation, I'd rejected the film as conventional. But when I finished my film, I saw Bambi again, and almost crawled out of the theatre on my hands and knees. 'How did they ever do that?' I'd learned just enough to realise that I really didn't know anything!
So, how and where to get the expert knowledge? I was working in England as an independent and didn't want to go into the Hollywood cartoon mill . I wanted it both ways . I wanted my artistic freedom but I also wanted the knowledge. Preston Blair's How to Animate Film Cartoons was available, but because I was put off by the squashy-stretchy 1940s cartoon style, it was harder for me to grasp the underlying principles I was after - although it's a solid book and Preston was a very good animator from the Golden Age. It's ironic that forty years later I would become best known for my work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit - drawing in precisely the same style that had put me off learning from Preston . Much later, I was able to work with Ken Harris, the first'real' master animator 1 met, and whose witch in Broomstick Bunny I had traced off. It's generally agreed that Ken Harris was the master animator at Warner Bros . Certainly he was director Chuck Jones's lead man. In 1967, I was able to bring Ken to . England and my real education in animation articulation and performance started by working with him. I was pushing forty at the time and, with a large successful studio in London, I had been animating for eighteen years, winning over one hundred international awards. After seven or eight years of working closely with Ken, he said to me, 'Hey Dick, you're start, ing to draw those things in the right place.'
'Yeah, I'm really learning it from you now, aren't I?' I said. 'Yes,' he said thoughtfully, 'you know . . . you could be an animator .' After the initial shock I realised he was right. Ken was the real McCoy whereas' I was just doing a lot of fancy drawings in various styles which were functional but didn't have the invisible 'magic' ingredients to make them really live and perform convincingly. So I redoubled my efforts (mostly in mastering head and hand 'accents') and the next year Ken pronounced, 'OK, you're an animator.' A couple of years after that, one day he said, 'Hey, Dick, you could be a good animator.' When he was eighty-two, I would go out to Ken's trailer home in Ohai, California and lay out scenes with him that he would later animate. He'd often take a half-hour nap and I'd keep working. One day he conked out for three hours and by the time he woke up, I had pretty much animated the scene. 'Sorry, Dick,' he said, 'you know . . . I'm just so god-damned old.' (long pause) 'Oh . . . I see you've animated the scene . . .' 'Yeah,' I said, 'I didn't know what else to do' . 'Nice drawings . . .' he said, then pointed . 'Hey, that's wrong! You've made a mistake.' And of course he was right. 'Dammit Ken,' I said . 'I've worked with you for thirteen years and I still can't get your "thing" . I'm afraid it's going to die with you.' 'Ye-e-aaahhhhh . . .' he snickered, then said, 'Well, don't worry, you've your own pretty good thing going.' Then he snickered again. Ken was a very fast worker and I was always squeezing him for more and more footage and getting him to animate even when the taxi was ticking outside waiting for him to catch a plane home to the States . When he died in 1982 at eighty-three, my real regret was that when I was a pallbearer I didn't have the guts to tuck a blackwing pencil into his hand in his open coffin . He would have loved that . When I first started working with Ken, we had just completed the animation sequences which occur throughout Tony Richardson's epic film The Charge of the Light Brigade and I thought .l was getting pretty proficient . When Ken saw it in the theatre he said, 'God, Dick, how did you guys ever do all that work?' (pause) "Course it doesn't move too good . . .' But I'm still not ashamed of our work on that film . After that we went to see The Beatles' feature cartoon The Yellow Submarine . Though I liked the designer Heinz Edelman's styling, the 'start-stop, stop-start' jerky quality of most of the animation meant that after a half hour much of the audience went to the lobby. No matter how stylish or inventive - jerky or bumpy animation seems only to be able to hold the audience for about twenty-five minutes. While The Yellow Submarine had an enthusiastic cult following from the advertising agencies and university crowd, the general public avoided the film. It killed the non-Disney feature market for years.
A top United Artists executive who distributed The Yellow Submarine told me, 'This is the Beatles at the height of their popularity and still people stay away from non-Disney animation .' Film executives at that time always said of animation, 'if it doesn't have the Disney name on it, no one will go see it.' But the real point is, it wasn't just the Disney name - it was the Disney expertise that captivatedthe audience and held them for eighty minutes. Almost the same week Disney's The Jungle Book came out and was an instant hit. I went along to see it reluctantly, thinking (as I still considered myself an innovator) that though there might be something interesting, it was probably predictable stuff. That's how it started - with standard-issue wolves adopting the 'good housekeeping seal of approval' cutesy baby. I remember the boy Mowgli riding a black panther moving and acting in a clichéd way - until he got off. And suddenly everything changed . The drawing changed. The proportions changed . The actions and acting changed. The panther helped the boy up a tree and everything moved to a superb level of entertainment. The action, the drawing, the performance, even the colours were exquisite. Then the snake appeared and tried to hypnotise the boy and the audience was entranced. I was astonished . The film continued at this high level, and when the tiger entered weighing eight hundred pounds and was both a tiger and the actor who did the voice (George Sanders), I realised I didn't even know how it was done - let alone ever be able to do it myself . I went back to my studio in shock and, through the night, I wrote a long fan letter. In those scenes 1 thought I had recognised the hand of the great Disney genius Milt Kahl, who Ken Harris had raved about. The first name on the directing animator's credits was Milt Kahl, so I assumed the work that stunned me had been Milt's . And it turned out that it was - except for one shot that was by Ollie Johnston . Johnston and Frank Thomas had done lots of other marvellous work in the picture. So I wrote to Milt saying that I thought The Jungle Book was the absolute high point of pure animation performance and that I didn't think it would ever be possible for anyone outside the Disney experience to reach that pinnacle . It turned out Milt said it was the best letter they ever had - and even better, that he knew my work a bit and wanted to meet me. Irrepressible ambition made me change my opinion that they alone could attain such heights; I figured, I think correctly, that given talent, experience, persistence - plus the knowledge of the experts - why should everything not be possible? I couldn't stand it any more. I had to know everything about the medium and master all aspects of it. Cap in hand, I'made yearly visits to Milt and Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Ken Anderson at Disney. One of the most important things Milt said was: 'Our animation differs from anyone else's because it is believable . Things have weight and the characters have muscles and we're giving the illusion of reality.'
A powerhouse of animation knowledge. From the left- Ken Harris, Grim Natwick and Art Babbitt, with students Richard Purdum and me outside my Soho Square studio in London, 1973 .
But how to make it believable? I didn't go there to drink Milt's bathwater or to find out what Frank Thomas had for breakfast. I would fire my carefully prepared list of questions at them and later write down everything they said . These wonderful virtuosos became my friends and were incredibly generous with their help . As Milt said, 'if you ask questions you find out what you want to know . if you're lucky enough to ask someone who knows.' I was also fortunate enough to enlist the marvellous legendary animator Art Babbitt as a collaborator and teacher. Babbitt had developed Goofy and animated the Mushroom Dance in Fantasia. He'dumped his kit' of knowledge by giving several month-long in-house seminars as well as working with me in my London and Hollywood studios for several years. In 1973, I hired the eighty-three-year-old - but still brilliant- Grim Natwick as a 'live-in' tutor in my London studio . Grim had made his name designing Betty Boop and animating most of Snow White herself in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . I also worked closely with Emery Hawkins who Ken Harris regarded as the most imaginative animator. Emery was wildly creative and rotated in and out of every studio . I was also able to work for a short time with Abe Levitow, Gerry Chiniquy and Cliff Nordberg . Dick Huemer, one of the first New York pioneer animators, and later a key Disney story director (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo, Fantasia and all the early Disney features) also gave me a very clear picture of the early days of animation . Most of them are gone now but this book is full of their accumulated knowledge and craft.
In the three-day masterclasses I've been giving lately, some experienced professionals initially feel that we're running over material that they're quite familiar with . Then about half way through the seminar things deepen and on the last day it all suddenly knits together. Some even describe it as an epiphany. Well, it.sure was for me when I finally'got it' . So please read the whole thing. Animation is just doing a lot of simple things - one at a time! A lot of really simple things strung together doing one part at a time in a sensible order. The movie actor, Scott Wilson sat through my three-day San Francisco masterclass. To my surprise he came up at the end and said, 'Of course you realise, Dick, that this whole thing has been about acting .' I said, 'What?' and Scott said, 'These are the exact equivalent methods, exercises and analyses we actors do in our acting workshops.' So acting is intrinsically part of the whole . And if you can't draw or articulate movement how are you ever going to do the acting? Someone once asked Milt Kahl : 'How did you plan out the counteraction you used on that character?' Milt blew up: 'That's the wrong way to look at it! Don't think of it like that! I just concentrate on giving the performance - that's what's important! The play's the thing. You'll get all tangled up if you think of it in a technical way!' Of course he's right. If a musician knows his scales, he can concentrate on giving the performance and bringing out the ideas inherent in the music. But if he constantly has to think of the mechanics of what he's doing - then he can hardly play. Therefore, if we know qnd understand all the basics - then we've got the tools to create . Only then we can give the performance! This book is an anatomy course in animation. Just like an anatomy course in life drawing, it shows you how things are put together and how they work . This knowledge frees you to do your own expressipn . It takes time . I didn't encounter Ken Harris until I was nearly forty and he was sixty-nine . I had to hire most of my teachers in order to learn from them. I hired Ken in order to get below him and be his assistant, so I was both his director and his assistant. I don't know if this is original, but I finally figured out that to learn or to 'understand' I had to 'stand under' the one who knows in order to catch the drippings of his experience . There's a tale about a decrepit old Zen master wrestler. A very fit and brilliant young wrestler begs the old master to take him on and show him the master's ninety-nine tricks . The old-man says, 'Look at me, I'm old and decrepit and I'm not interested .' The young man keeps pestering the old man who says, 'Look, son, I'm fragile now and when I show you the ninety-nine tricks, you'll challenge me, they always do - and look at me, you'll make mincemeat of me.'
The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1968
'Please, oh please, master,' pleads the powerful young man . 'I promise I will never challenge you! Oh please teach me the ninety-nine tricks .' So reluctantly the old man teaches him until the young man has mastered the ninety-nine tricks . The young man becomes a famous wrestler and one day takes his master into a room, locks the door and challenges him . The old man says, 'I knew you'd do this - that's why I didn't want to teach you in the first place.' 'Come on, old man, there's just me and you in here,' says the young one, 'Let's see what you're made of.' They start and right away the old man throws the young fellow out of the window. The crumpled-up young man moans up from the street below, 'You didn't show me that one!' 'That was number one hundred,' says the old man. This book is the ninety-nine tricks . The hundredth trick is called talent. I became a repository for various strands of animation lore and I've taken all this stuff and given it my own twist. The goal here is to master the mechanics in order to do new things . Get the mechanics into your bloodstream so they just become second nature and you don't have to think about them and can concentrate on giving the performance. I remember once saying to Emery Hawkins (a wonderful, unsung animator), 'I'm afraid my brains are in my hand .' Emery said, 'Where else would they be? It's a language of drawing. It's not a language of tongue.' So everything I know about animation that I can put into words, scribbles and drawings is here in this book .
Why animate? Everyone knows it's a lot of hard work doing all those drawings and positions. So what's the hook? Why do it? Answer: Our work is taking place in time . We've taken our 'stills' and leapt into another dimension. Drawings that walk: seeing a series of images we've made spring to life and start walking around is already fascinating. Drawings that walk and talk : seeing a series of our drawings talking is a very startling experience . Drawings that walk and talk and think: seeing a series of images we've done actually go through a thinking process - and appear to be thinking - is the real aphrodisiac. Plus creating something that is unique, which has never been done before is endlessly fascinating. We've always been trying to make the pictures move, the idea of animation is aeons older than the movies or television . Here's a quick history:
Over 35,000 years ago, we were painting animals on cave walls, sometimes drawing four pairs of legs to show motion.
In 1600 BC the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II built a temple to the goddess Isis which had 110 columns. Ingeniously, each column had a painted figure of the goddess in a progressively changed position . To horsemen or charioteers riding past - Isis appeared to move!
The Ancient Greeks sometimes decorated pots with figures in successive stages of action . Spinning the pot would create a sense of motion .
As far as we know, the first attempt to project drawings onto a wall was made in 1640 by Athonasius Kircherwith his 'Magic Lantern' .
Kircher drew each figure on separate pieces of glass which he placed in his apparatus and projected on a wall . Then he moved the glass with strings, from above . One of these showed a sleeping man's head and a mouse. The man opened and closed his mouth and when his mouth was open the mouse ran in. Although photography was discovered as early as the 1830s, most new devices for creating an illusion of movement were made using drawings, not photos . the vital principle, 'the persistence of vision'. This principle rests on the fact that our eyes temporarily retain the image of anything they've just seen. If this wasn't so, we would never get the illusion of an unbroken connection in a series of images, and neither movies nor animation would be possible . Many people don't realise that movies don't actually move, and that they are still images that appear to move when they are projected in a series . Roget's principle quickly gave birth to various optical contraptions :
In 1824 Peter Mark Roget discovered (or rediscovered, since it was known in classical times)
The Thaumatrope: A cardboard disc mounted on a top - or held between two pieces of string. A birdcage drawing is on one side and a bird on the other. When the top is spun or the strings are pulled the disc twirls, the images merge and the bird seems to be in the cage.
The Phenakistoscope: Two discs mounted on a shaft - the front disc has slits around the edge and the rear disc has a sequence of drawings . Align the drawings with the slits, look through the openings and as the discs revolve we have the illusion of motion .
The 'Wheel of Life' (or the Zoetrope): Appeared in the USA in 1867 and was sold as a toy. Long strips of paper with a sequence of drawings on them were inserted into a cylinder with slits in it. Spin the cylinder, look through the slits and the creature appears to move .
The Praxinoscope : Devised by the Frenchman Emile Reynaud in 1877 . He was the first to create short sequences of dramatic action by drawing on a 30 foot strip of transparent substance called 'Crystaloid' . This opened the way for the tremendous advances to come .
The Flipper book: In 1868 a novelty called 'the flipper book' appeared worldwide and it remained the simplest and most popular device . It's just a pad of drawings bound like a book along one edge. Hold the book in one hand along thebound edge and with the other hand flip the pages and 'see 'em move' . The result is animation - the illusion of continuous action . Drawings in time .
This is the same as school kids making drawings in the corners of their math books and flipping the pages.
Today the 'classical' animator still flips his drawings the same way as a flipper book before testing it on the video or film camera. He places the drawings in sequence, with the low numbers on the bottom, then flips through the action from the bottom up. Eventually he should get good enough at it to approximate actual screen time and spot any errors or drawings that need altering. Now that we have the video camera with its instant playback of the drawings at film speed, not everyone learns to flip.
In 1896 a New York newspaper cartoonist James Stuart Blackton interviewed the inventor Thomas Edison who was experimenting with moving pictures . Blackton did some sketches of Edison, who was impressed by Blackton's speed and drawing facility and asked him to do some drawings in a series . Later, Edison photographed these - the first combination of drawings and photography. In 1906 they publicly released Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. A man puffed a cigar and blew smoke rings at his girl friend, she rolled her eyes, a dog jumped through a hoop and a juggler performed. Blackton used about 3000 'flickering drawings' to make this first animated picture - the forefather of the animated cartoon . The novelty brought explosions of laughter and was an instant hit.
A year later Emile Cohl made and showed his first animated film at the Follies Bergères in Paris. The figures were childlike - white lines on black - but the story was relatively sophisticated: a tale of a girl, a jealous lover and a policeman. He also gave lampposts and houses intelligence and movement, with emotions and moods of their own . Cohl's work prefigures the later animation dictum, 'Don't do what a camera can do - do what a camera can't do!' Winsor McCay, brilliant creator of the popular comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, was the first man to try to develop animation as an art form. Inspired by his young son bringing home some flipper books, he made 4000 drawings of 'Little Nemo' move . These were a big hit when flashed on the screen at Hammerstein's theatre in New York in 1911 . As another experiment he drew a bizarre short film, How a Mosquito Operates, which was also enthusiastically received .
Then in 1914 McCay drew Gertie the Dinosaur and McCay himself performed 'live' in front of the projected animation, holding an apple in front of Gertie and inviting her to eat. Gertie lowered her long neck and swallowed the fruit - astounding the audience . This was the first 'personality' animation - the beginnings of cartoon individuality. It was so lifelike that the audience could identify with Gertie . It was a sensation.
In McCay's words: 'I went into the business and spent thousands of dollars developing this new art. It required considerable time, patience and careful thought - timing and drawing the pictures [my italics] . This is the most fascinating work I have ever done - this business of making animated cartoons live on the screen .'
McCay also made the first serious dramatic cartoon, The Sinking of the Lusitania, in 1918. A war propaganda film expressing outrage at the catastrophe, it was a huge step forward in realism and drama - the longest animated film so far. It took two years of work and needed 25,000 drawings . Later, as an older man being celebrated by the younger funny-cartoon animators in the business, McCay lashed out at them saying that he had developed and given them a great new art form which they had cheapened and turned into a crude money-making business done by hack artists. This well defines the endlessly uncomfortable relationship between the pioneering artist/ide-' alist and the animation industry - working to comfortable and predictable formulas . Still doth the battle rage . . . In the twenties Felix the cat became as popular as Charlie Chaplin . These short Felix cartoons were visually inventive, doing what a camera can't do. But more importantly a real personality emerged from this flurry of silent, black and white drawings and Felix'himself' connected with audiences worldwide. The Felix cartoons led straight to the arrival of Walt Disney, and in 1928, Mickey Mouse took off with his appearance in Steamboat Willie - the first cartoon with synchronised sound.
The brilliant Ward Kimball, who animated Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio and the crows in Dumbo, once told me, 'You can have no idea of the impact that having these drawings suddenly speak and make noises had on audiences at that time. People went crazy over it.'
Disney followed Steamboat Willie with The Skeleton Dance . For the first time, action was coordinated with a proper musical score. This was the first Silly Symphony . Ub Iwerks was chief animator on both films and a lot of the sophisticated action of The Skeleton Dance still holds up today.
Disney leapt forward again in 1932 with Flowers and Trees - the first full colour cartoon .
Then he followed it one year later with Three Little Pigs. This had a major impact because of its fully developed 'personality' animation - clearly defined and believable separate personalities acting so convincingly that the audience could identify with and root for them . Another first.
Astonishingly, only four years after that, Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world's first fully-animated feature-length film, raising cartoon drawings to the level of art and holding the audience spellbound for eighty-three minutes . A truly staggering feat accomplished in an incredibly short space of time . (It's said that many of the artists booked themselves in advance into hospital to recover from the effort of completing the film.) The tremendous financial and critical success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became the foundation of Disney's output and gave birth to the 'Golden Age' of animation: Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi and Fantasia, as well as the Silly Symphonies and Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse shorts . 19
Surrounding the potent Disney centre were the satellite studios : Max Fleischer with two features - Gulliver's Travels and Mr Bug Goes to Town - and Popeye shorts ; Warner Bros' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig; MGM with Tom and Jerry, Droopy and the great anarchic Tex Avery shorts, and Walter Lantz with Woody Woodpecker. Fed as they were by the knowledge and expertise emanating from the Disney training centre, their much wilder humour was often in reaction to or in rebellion against Disney 'realism' and 'believability' . But after the Second World War the situation changed . The arrival of television and its voracious appetite for rapidly produced product demanded simpler and cruder work . 1950s stylisation gave birth to UPA studios in Hollywood who created Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing. UPA's approach was regarded as more graphically sophisticated than Disney and used more 'limited' and much less realistic animation . At the same time there was a worldwide flourishing of personal, experimental and 'art house' animated films made in new ways with many different techniques and with very different content to the Hollywood product. Animators were reinventing the wheel stylistically but were ignorant of the structural knowledge developed in Hollywood's Golden Age. This knowledge, though residing in the hands of the originators, was generally ignored as being 'old hat' or was forgotten in the following thirty years. However, in the last few years, the renaissance of animation as a form of mass entertainment is giving rebirth to the old knowledge . The startlingly successful innovations of computer animation are helping to transform animation in all it's multi-faceted forms into a major part of the entertainment mainstream . Alongside this, there is also the explosion in the computer games industry. If drawn 'classical' animation is an extension of drawing, then computer animation can be seen as an extension of puppetry - high tech marionettes . Both share the same problems of how to give a performance with movement, weight, timing and empathy. The old knowledge applies to any style or approach to the medium no matter what the advances in technology. Most of the work methods and devices in this book were developed and refined in the Hollywood animation studios between 1930-1940. I've co-ordinated what I've learnt from various approaches and I'm presenting it here in a form based on my own experience in this medium - with its limitless possibilities of imagination . Emery Hawkins said to me, 'The only limitation in animation is the person doing it. Otherwise there is no limit to what you can do. And why shouldn't you do it?'
This section is really for classical animators. However, I haven't been surprised to find that most of the leading computer animators draw rather well, so it may be interesting to them too. It certainly helps .enormously to be able to put down your ideas - even in stick figures. For the classical animator it is crucial. Drawing should become second nature, so that the animator can concentrate on the actual actions and the timing of them and give the performance life . When you're doing cartoons all the time, it's very easy to slide into formula drawing. During the making of Who Framed Roger Rabbit I found this pinned up on our notice board :
Life drawing is the antidote to this . When you're doing life drawing, you're all alone. One of the main reasons animators - once they become animators - don't like to spend their evenings and spare time life drawing is because it's not a collaborative operation. Animation is. usually a group effort, and one has the stimulus of constant interaction, both competitive and co-operative, with the cut and thrust, highs and lows, political factions of complaint and inspiration, all the tensions and anxieties, rewards and excitement of group production . 23
With life drawing there's no one to admire your efforts - rather the reverse. It's always shocking to find you're not as advanced or skilled as you thought you were, and since it's about the hardest thing to do with no rewards other than the thing itself - it's no wonder few do it or stick at it. Most animators are exhausted at the end of a day's work and have families to go to . Also, one has to do a lot of life drawing to get anywhere - not just a bit at a time here and there. But the fact remains that there is no replacement for the hard work of solid life drawing. There is one payoff and it is substantial - the gradual and fundamental improvement of all one's work . Winsor McCay once said : 'If I were starting over again, the first thing I'd do would be to make a thorough study of draftsmanship. I would learn perspective, then the human figure, both nude and clothed, and surround it with proper setting.' And Milt Kahl said : 'I don't think it's possible to be a top notch animator without being an excellent draftsman . You have to try for the whole thing, you know, got to know the figure . Know the figure well enough so that you can concentrate on the particular person - on the difference - why this person is different from somebody else . The ability to draw and be able to turn things and the ability, the knowledge that enables you to caricature and to exaggerate in the right direction and emphasise the difference between things is what you're doing all the time . Any time you're doing a strong drawing of anything well, your drawing is strong because you're depicting why this is different from something else . You need that figure-drawing background in order to sharpen . Every animator should have this background and unfortunately they don't! You just can't know too much . If you're going to lampoon something, or do a satire - you have to understand the straight way. It gives you a jumping-off point. It gives you a contrast . You just do it and do it . . . and do it!'
Art Babbitt is blunter: 'If you can't draw - forget it. You're an actor without arms and legs .' But we can learn to draw. There's the myth that you are either a born draftsman or not. Wrong! Obviously, natural talent is a great help and the desire is essential, but drawing can be taught and drawing can be learnt . Its best to have done a ton of it at art school to get the foundation in early. But it can be done at any time . Just do it. Here are three pieces of drawing advice that were given to me - and which stuck . When I was fifteen years old and really keen on being an animator, I took a five day-and-night bus trip from Toronto to Los Angeles, and walked up and down outside the Disney Studio fence for days hoping to get inside . Finally an advertising friend of my mother's saw my drawings and rang up the Disney PR department, and they took me into the Studio for two days ; they were very kind to me and even did a press story on me. It was there that I received my first piece of great advice . Richard Kelsey (Disney story artist and designer/illustrator) said, 'First of all, kid, learn to draw. You can always do the animation stuff later.' I desperately wanted to become an animator and I produced my sketches of Disney characters, which were kind of at the Roger Rabbit level since I was a precocious little bastard . Dick Kelsey looked at them and said, 'Yes, but I mean really learn to draw.' '
Weeks later when I was getting on the bus to go home to Toronto, I rang Dick up and asked again, 'What do you think I should do?'-'Learn to draw!' he said. One great regret I have in my life is that forty years later, when I was animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I saw Dick in the Disney canteen out of the corner of my eye, but I was so caught up in the production politics I didn't break away to go over and thank him . I never had another chance . After my trip I went straight to art school and received the second piece of advice, from a great teacher and superb draftsman, Eric Freifield, then teaching at the Ontario College of Art. He looked at my life drawings and said, 'Well, here's a clever little fellow who's never seen anything.' I said, 'What should I do?' He said, 'Go to the library and look at Albrecht Darer for two years.' I did. And not surprisingly my interest in animation vanished for years. I paid my way through art school by knocking off Disneyesque dog food ads like the one above - at the same time doing 'realismo social' like this lithograph of a revival meeting 'Where the healing waters flow'. After that I lived in Spain for a couple of years doing paintings like these until a totally unexpected affliction by the animation bug got me. Forty years later a top executive on Who Framed Roger Rabbit kept referring to me as 'artsy craftsy' or 'artsy fartsy' . How did he ever know? He must have smelt it as there was no sign of it in my animation.
The third piece of drawing advice came many years later - I was fifty - when I was pretty accomplished, and it came from a much younger man. My talent is primarily 'linear', which makes cartooning easy. However, since animators have to enclose their shapes, there is a tendency to end up just drawing outlines - like colouring-book figures. In other words, animators don't usually draw from the inside-out, like a sculptor does. Sculpture had been my weakest subject - although I'd done a lot of life drawing and had a grounding in basic anatomy. John Watkiss - then a twenty-three-year-old, self-taught, brilliant draftsman and anatomist held his own life drawing classes in London. (Recently he was one of the principle designers of Disney's Tarzan .) 1 used to hire John periodically to do presentation artwork and we were friendly. I went to John's evening life classes for a while and one day John, who is ruthlessly honest, pointed to my drawing and said, 'Hey! You missed a stage!' I felt like a butterfly pinned to the wall. He was right. I knew exactly what he meant. I was weak from a sculptural point of view. I was too linear. Years later, when I had dropped out of the 'industry' part of animation, I re-studied my anatomy and worked on drawing from the inside-out . I advanced backwards and filled in the missing stage.
I showed my ex-illustrator mother several of these life drawings when she was bed-bound just before she died . 'I've been working at reconstituting myself, Mom, doing all these drawings .' She looked at them carefully for some time, then said, 'Very nice, very nice . . . Nothing new.' Advice from the inside - from one's family - somehow doesn't have the same impact as from the outside. However my mother had once said, 'When you go to art school, you'll find everybody sitting around practising how to do their signature,' and sure enough, there they were, some of them doing,just that . She also gave me this great advice : 'Don't try to develop a style. Ignore style. Just concentrate on the drawing and style will just occur.' Of course there's an opposing view to all of this 'you've got to learn to draw' stuff. The great Tex Avery, master of animation's ability to do the impossible and make the unreal spring to life - and the first director of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd - said : 'I was never too great an artist. I realised there at Lantz's that most of those fellows could draw rings around me . . . I thought, Brother! Why fight it? I'll never make it! Go the other route. And I'm glad I did . My goodness, I've enjoyed that a lot more than I would have enjoyed just animating scenes all my life .' 29
Tex stopped animating and became a great, original and innovative director. The biographer John Canemaker said: 'While Disney in the 1930s was trying to convince the audience of the "reality" of his characters in his film world, by creating his "illusion of life", Tex went in the opposite direction, celebrating the cartoon as cartoon, exploring the medium's potential for surrealism.' He never let audiences forget they were watching an animated film . Tex had a twenty-year run with his wildly funny approach to the medium, but he found it impossible to sustain . 'I'm burned out,' he said . His colleague, animator Mike Lah said, 'He didn't have any more space. He used it up .' I love Tex Avery's cartoons - his drawings and character designs. His Droopy is my favourite cartoon character. One of the nice things about doing Who Framed Roger Rabbit was to emulate Tex Avery's humour -'But not so brutal!' were my instructions . Though, as Milt said, 'You have to try to have the whole thing.' I am convinced that if an animator's drawing foundation is strong, he will have the versatility to go in all the different directions possible at his fingertips . He'll be able to draw anything from the most difficult, realistic characters, to the most wild and wacky. And it's not likely he'll exhaust his resources and suffer burn-out . Because of his strong drawing ability, Milt Kahl was usually saddled with animating'the Prince' or Disney's 'straighter' characters - which of course are the hardest ones to do. Whenever anyone criticised his work, he'd say, 'OK, you can do the Prince.' And they'd soon vanish . Word spread among the more 'cartoony' artists that, 'Milt draws beautifully but he can only do the straight stuff and he can't handle zany stuff at all .' Then, between features, Milt animated most of Tiger Trouble, a 'Goofy' short. Everybody shut up, and stayed shut up . His work is a classic of broad and crazy animation . 'If you can draw funny that's enough' is an animation myth that's been around a long time, and still seems to persist. This is because a few of the early animators lacked sophisticated drawing skills - but nevertheless were very inventive and excellent at getting the essence of the drama and performance. The myth was that all they needed was to have a good draftsman as an assistant to do the final drawings and everything would be fine . But in the mid thirties, when the new wave of young animators with better drawing skills came on the scene and learned from the old guys, the ground was soon littered with out-of work animators who could only handle the cruder cartoons. The new breed of better draftsmen took their jobs away from them. If the present boom in this medium ever contracts it's certain that the more skilled artists will be the survivors. Bill Tytla - famous for his animation of Stromboli in Pinocchio, the Devil in 'Night on Bald Mountain' from Fantasia, and Dumbo with his mother - once said : 'At times you will have to animate stuff where you can't just be cute and coy. Those are the times when you'll have to know something about drawing . Whether it's called form or force or vitality, you must get it into your work, for that will be what you feel, and drawing is your means of expressing it.'
Obviously all this doesn't apply so much to computer animators since the 'maquette' of the character is already planted inside the machine, ready to be manipulated. But since most of the leading computer animators draw rather well, many work out their positions in small sketches, and, of course, the planning, layout and story artists and designers draw exactly the same as their classical equivalents . I had an unnerving experience in Canada when a friend asked me to give a one-hour address to a large high school gathering of computer animation students . They had a very impressive set-up of expensive computers but, from what I could see of their work, none of them seemed to have any idea of drawing at all. During my talk I stressed the importance of drawing and the great shortage of good draftsmen. A laid-back greybeard professor interrupted to inform me, 'What do you mean? All of us here draw very well .' Words failed me. At the end of the talk, I showed them how to do a basic walk, and as a result got mobbed at the exit, the kids pleading desperately for me to teach them more. I escaped, but I'm afraid that's what the situation is out there - a lack of any formal training and no one to pass on the 'knowledge'. You don't know what you don't know. One of the problems rampant today is that, in the late 1960s, realistic drawing generally became considered unfashionable by the art world, and no one bothered to learn how to do it any more . The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen . A distinguished British painter who taught at the Slade asked me, 'How did you learn how to do animation?' I answered that I was lucky enough to have done a lot of life drawing at art school, so without realizing it I got the feeling for weight which is so vital to animation. Then I said, 'What am I telling you for? You're teaching at the Slade and it's famous for its life drawing and excellent draftsmen .' 'If the students want to do that,' he said, 'then they've got to club together and hire themselves a model and do it in their own home.' At first I thought he was joking - but no! Life drawing as a subject went out years ago. It wasn't even on the curriculum! I had a boyhood friend who became a bigwig in art education circles. He ran international conferences of the arts . About sixteen years ago he invited me to Amsterdam to a conference of the deans of the leading American art colleges . He knew me well enough to know I was bound to say controversial things, so I was invited as his wild card . In my talk I found myself lamenting the lack of trained, talented artists and that I was hampered in my own studio's work because I couldn't find trained disciplined artists to hire . The applicants' portfolios were full of textures, abstract collages, scribbles, often nude photos of themselves and friends. No real drawing. I didn't realise how strongly I felt about this and as I talked I found myself nearly in tears.
I harangued the deans of the art schools for failing in their duty to provide proper skills to their students . Surprisingly, when I finished, the deans called an emergency meeting to which I was invited. 'Look Mr. Williams,' they said, 'you're right, but we have two problems. Number one: since classical drawing was rejected years ago, we have no trained teachers who can draw or teach conventional drawing as they never learned it themselves . And number two: our mostly rich students - on whom we count for our funding - don't want to learn to draw. They would rather decorate themselves as living works of art - and that's exactly what they do.' So I said, 'Look, all I know is that I can't find people to hire or train ; but otherwise I don't know what you can do .' They said, 'Neither do we.' Lately things have improved somewhat. So-called classical drawing seems to be coming back, but with a hyper-realistic photographic approach because skilled artists are thin on the ground. Shading isn't drawing, and it isn't realism. Good drawing is not copying the surface . It has to do with understanding and expression . We don't want to learn to draw just to end up being imprisoned in showing off our knowledge of joints and muscles . We want to get the kind of reality that a camera can't get. We want to accentuate and suppress aspects of the model's character to make it more vivid . And we want to develop the co-ordination to be able to get our brains down into the end of our pencil . Many cartoonists and animators say that the very reason they do cartoons is to get away from realism and the realistic world into the free realms of the imagination. They'll correctly point out that most cartoon animals don't look like animals - they're designs, mental constructs. Mickey ain't no mouse, Sylvester ain't no cat. They look more like circus clowns than animals. Frank Thomas always says : 'If you saw Lady and the Tramp walking down the road, there's no way that you are going to buy that they're real dogs.' But to make these designs work, the movements have to be believable - which leads back to realism and real actions, which leads back to studying the human or animal figure to understand its structure and movement. What we want to achieve isn't realism, it's believability . While Tex Avery released the animator from the more literal approach in order to do the impossible, he was only able to do it so successfully because his animation was mostly done by Disney drop-outs who already had 'the Disney knowledge' of articulation, weight, etc. So, ironically, his rebellion, his 'going the other route', had its basis in an underlying knowledge of realism. But don't confuse a drawing with a map! We're animating masses, not lines So we have to understand how mass works in reality. In order to depart from reality, our work has to be based on reality.
The bouncing ball says it all . The old bouncing-ball example is often used because it shows so many different aspects of animation.
and where it hits - the 'boinks' - that's the timing. The impacts - where the ball is hitting the ground-that's the timing of the action, the rhythm of where things happen, where the'accents' or 'beats' or 'hits' happen .
The ball overlaps itself when it's at the slow part of its arc, but when it drops fast, it's spaced further apart. That's the spacing. The spacing is how close or far apart those clusters are. That's it. It's simple, but it's important . The spacing is the tricky part. Good animation spacing is a rare commodity.
So we have:
The two basic elements of animation. To experience this, take a coin and film it in stages under a video camera.
First plot out the timing- where you want the ball to hit the ground. Then push the coin around - taking a picture at each frame - and see what looks right or wrong. Try it with different timings and spacing. You're already animating. You're already dealing with the important fundamentals and you haven't even made a single drawing. You're doing pure animation without any drawings .
Hidden in this simple test is the weight of the ball - how it feels, light or heavy ; what it's made of. Is it large or small, moving fast or slow? This will all emerge if you do several tests - which only take a few minutes to do. The importance of the timing and the spacing will become obvious. Because you did it, a certain amount of personality will creep into the action - whether the ball is deliberate, slow, jaunty, erratic, cautious, even optimistic or pessimistic. And all this, before you've made a single drawing. This reveals how important and dominant the timing and the spacing is. Even if the ball positions were drawn in detail by Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, the timing and the spacing of the drawings will still dominate . Another interesting way to experience the difference between timing and spacing right away is this : Let's put a coin under the video camera and move it across the page (or screen) in one second - 24 frames of screen time . That's our timing . We'll space it out evenly - and that's our spacing.
Now we'll keep the same timing - again taking one second for the coin to move across the page . But we'll change the spacing by slowly easing out of position number 1 and easing gradually into position number 25 .
It still takes one second for the coin to get over there . It has the same timing - but there is very different movement because of the different spacing. Both start together - and both hit the middle together - but the spacing is quite different . And so the action is very different. 38
You could say that animation is the art of timing . But you could say that about all motion pictures. The most brilliant masters of timing were the silent comedians: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy. Certainly for a film director, timing is the most important thing. For an animator, it's only half the battle . We need the spacing as well. We can have a natural feel for timing, but we have to learn the spacing of things . One other thing: The bouncing ball example is often used to show animation 'squash and stretch' - that is, the ball elongates as it falls, flattens on impact with the ground and then returns to its normal shape in the slower part of its arc. It might squash and stretch this way if it was a very soft ball with not much air in it, but what
I've found is that you can get a good enough effect with a rigid coin - provided the spacing of it was right - so this added technique is not always necessary. Certainly a hard golf ball isn't going to bend all over the place. In other words, if you do this squishy squashy thing too much, everything comes out a bit 'sploopy', like it's made of rubber. Life ain't like that. At least most of it ain't. More about this later.
Golf ball bounce, 1951
Having established all this, let's go to lesson one: 39
Unplug! Take off your head phones! Turn off the radio! Switch off the CD! Turn off the tape! Close the door. Like many artists, I had the habit of listening to classical music or jazz while working. On one of my first visits to Milt Kahl I innocently asked:
Since it came from a genius, this made quite an impression on me . After this I learnt to face the silence and think before swirling my pencil around. My animation improved right away. This has been the case with many artists. when I've passed this wisdom along. Recently, two previously sound-addicted computer animators were shocked to find that their . plugged-in colleagues instantly made them objects of ridicule for not having wires coming out of their ears. They were even more surprised at the startling improvement in their work. . . . end of lesson one.
Let's advance backwards to approach where animators were during the'Golden Age'. And then go forward from there - so we can do new things . The thing you are going to build on must be basic. Everyone wants to decorate their house with interesting pieces before putting in the cornerstones and supports. Everyone wants to jump ahead to the sophisticated bit - glossing over the dull, old support work. But it's the thorough understanding of the basics that produces real sophistication . As Art Babbitt said : 'The knowledge that went into making little drawings come to life is in the early Disneys. Nobody taught us how to articulate these fanciful characters . We had to discover the mechanics ourselves and pass them around amongst each other. There are many styles but the mechanics of the old Disney animation remain .' They had it all worked out by 1940, around the time that Pinocchio was released . It was a wonderful system - precise and simple . First we'll take it bit by bit - and then we'll put it all together. 46
A very interesting thing happened when we worked with Grim Natwick. He was so old that each day he tended to snap back into a different professional period of his life : one day he would come in and do circular 'rubber hose' animation from the 1920s, then the next day he would be in a 1936 'Snow White' phase, making tons of smoothly moving drawings, the next day would be sharp, physical actions with plenty of static holds from his 1950 UPA'Mr Magoo' period, then he'd be doing as few drawings as possible, as if he were animating a 1960s TV ad, and then the next day back into fulsome Fantasia mode. One day I found him drawing in an old style - something like this:
He wasn't just showing the arc of the action - he was indicating all the different spacings on his drawing. I suddenly realised that this was probably the origin of the charts that animators put on the edge of their drawings
I asked, 'Hey, Grim -. did these charts just gradually move across the page away from the drawings? A far-away look came into his eyes -'. . . Yes . . .' 47
In the 1920s, animators did most of the work themselves . Dick Huemer was the top New York animator and was working for Max and Dave Fleischer on their Mutt and Jeff series . Dick told me they said to him, 'Your work is great, Dick, but we can't get enough of it.' So Dick said to them, 'Give me someone to put in the in-between drawings and I'll do two to three times as much work.' And that was the invention of the 'inbetweener'. Dick later said in an interview that it had been the Fleischers' idea and that he just went along with it. But Dick actually told me that he had invented the inbetween and the inbetweener, the helper or assistant. The main drawings or extreme positions came to be called extremes and the drawings in between the extremes were called the inbetweens .
Number 3 is smack in the middle between 1 and 5. Then we put number 2 right in the middle between 1 and 3 - and number 4 in the middle between 3 and 5 . We've got the inbetweens spaced evenly.
Take the example of a swinging pendulum : The extremes are where there is a change in direction - the ends of the action where the direction changes.
Because the pendulum's arm maintains its length as it swings, the middle position creates an arc in the action . We can see how important that middle position between the two extremes is going to be to us.
It's obvious how important this middle position is. In the 1930s they called this the 'breakdown' drawing or'passing position' between two extremes . We'll add two inbetweens .
Some animators underline the breakdown or passing position because it's so important to the action . I have the habit of doing this because it's a position which is crucial to helping us invent . We're going to make tremendous use of this middle position later . . . 49
If we want to make our pendulum ease in and out of the extreme positions, we'll need a couple more inbetweens :
So our chart will look like this .
What we're doing is easing in or easing out of the extreme positions . 'Slowing in' or 'slowing out' is the classical terminology for it, but I prefer today's computer animators' term of 'easing Wand 'easing out' . To make the action even slower at the ends, let's add a couple more inbetweens .
Now our chart will look like this.
Ken Harris always called it'cushioning' - which is a nice way to think of it. Master animator Eric Larson - who became the instructor of the younger Disney animators says that what animation has to have is a change of shape. So, let's change from a closed hand to a pointing finger.
if we 'ease out' of number 1 in order to point - number 5 - the chart will be :
Alternatively, if we 'snap out' or 'speed out' of the closed hand and 'ease in' or'cushion in' to the pointing finger the chart will be :
For a more relaxed, slower action we could add more inbetweens and ease out of the closed hand, and speed through the middle, and then ease in to the pointing finger.
The animator can get away with just drawing the two extreme positions and making a chart for the assistant to put in all the inbetween positions . I was spoilt by being taught by marvellous, hardworking, top Hollywood animators and I had a few shocks when I worked with some of the lesser mortals. Here's how a Hollywood hack animator might duck the work : A character enters screen left . . . and goes out screen right.
To walk across the screen it's going to take 4 seconds - 96 frames . So the animator does drawing number 1 and drawing number 96 and gives this chart to the assistant and goes off to play tennis . He wanders back in next day and blames the assistant for the terrible result. This may seem far-fetched, but it does happen . Moving on - we know the extremes and the breakdowns are crucial to the result, but the inbetweens are also very important. The genie in the computer creates perfect inbetweens, but for 'drawing' people - getting good inbetweens can be a real problem . Grim Natwick constantly intoned, 'Bad inbetweens will kill the finest animation .' In 1934, when the novice Milt Kahl - having just started work at Disney - first met the great Bill Tytla, he told Tytla that he was working in the inbetweening department . Tytla barked, 'Oh yeah? And how many scenes have you screwed up lately?' 52
Like most people starting out, I did all my own inbetweens . Then I got my first 'official' job animating for UPA in London. They gave me an inexperienced assistant who drew well, but this is what happened : We had a simple character of the period, a little girl called Aurora who was advertising Kia Ora orange drink. 'Where's the Kia Ora, Aurora?' She looked like this . I drew drawings 1 and 3 and 5, my assistant put in inbetweens 2 and 4.
He had ambitions as a designer and he didn't like egg-shaped eyes like this: He liked circular eyes like this : So the inbetweens all went in like this:
The result on the screen, of course, is this: Wobble, wobble, wobble.
As is common in production when racing to meet the deadline, we end up hiring anybody off the street who can hold a pencil . And this is what happens: Say a live actor is holding an animated coffee cup -
The inbetweener from the streets doesn't understand simple perspective - so the curved top of the cup gets put in straight on the inbetweens .
Result: 'Frying tonight.' Wobble, wobble, wobble . And if it's this wobbly with a simple thing, just imagine what it's going to be like when we are dealing with complex drawings . All the shapes will be doing St Vitus's dance. So the assistants' or inbetweener's job is really volume control . A lot of assistants worry about the quality of their line - matching the animator's line quality. I always say never mind the line quality - just get the volumes right. Keeping the shapes and volumes consistent = volume control! When the thing is coloured in, it's the shapes that we see - it's the shapes that dominate. 54
Whenever we were under the gun and short of skilled helpers, we found if we outnumbered the dodgy inbetweens by three good drawings to two bad ones - we just scraped through with an acceptable result .
When we only had two good ones with three bad ones in between them - the bad ones outnumbered the good ones and the result was lousy.
If the breakdown or passing position is wrong, all the inbetweens will be wrong too.
When we're not accurate, here's what happens: The animator supplies a chart and wants equal inbetweens . This is putting them in the right place.
But let's say the assistant puts the breakdown or passing position slightly in the wrong place -
So: Number 4 is wrong. 3 compounds it. 2 compounds it more. And instead of ending up with fluid actions like this -
- we'll get this all-over-the-place kind of thing.
One thing an animator should never do is to leave his assistant to make 'thirds' . If we need to divide the chart into thirds - the animator should make one of the inbetween positions himself -
- in order to leave the assistant to put in the remaining position in the middle . 56
Leaving thirds to the assistant is cruel and is asking for trouble - but it's fair to make a chart like this, calling for an inbetween very close to an extreme:
And now we come to the Great Circling Disease. For some reason, animators just love circles. We love to circle the numbers on our drawings . Maybe it's because, as old Grim Natwick said, 'Curves are beautiful to watch.' Or maybe it's just a creatively playful thing. I once worked with a Polish animator who circled every single drawing he made!
'Is animation, man! Circle! Circle! Circle!' You'll notice that so far I haven't circled any extreme positions. In this clear working system and method developed by the 1940s, the extremes are not circled, but the key drawing is. The drawings which are circled are the 'keys' . Question: What is a key? Answer: The storytelling drawing. The drawing or drawings that show what's happening in the shot .
If a sad man sees or hears something that makes him happy, we'd need just two positions to tell the story.
These are the keys and we circle them . These are the drawings we make first. How we go interestingly from one to the other is what the rest of this book is about. Take a more complex example: Let's say a man walks over to a board, picks up a piece of chalk from the floor and writes something on the board .
If it was a comic strip or if we wanted to show what's happening on a storyboard, we'd need only three positions. We'll keep it simple and use stick figures so we don't get lost in detail . These three positions become our keys and we circle them . The keys tell the story. All the other drawings or positions we'll have to make next to bring the thing to life will be the extremes (not circled) : the foot 'contacts', the passing positions or breakdowns and inbetweens . 58
If we time this action out with a stopwatch, we might find that our first key position at the start will be drawing 1 . Say it takes him 4 seconds to walk over and contact the chalk on the floor we'd circle the second key drawing as 96. And when he's stood up, stepped over and written his stuff, it might take another 4 seconds - so our third key could be the last drawing in the shot -192. The whole shot would then take 8 seconds. Of course, we don't need to time it all out first, but before we dive into animatorland with all that stuff, we have to clearly set out with our keys what it is we're going to do - and we can test our three drawings on film, video or computer. We haven't dealt with how he or she moves - whether the character is old or young, fat or thin, tall or short, worried or happy, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor, cautious or confident, scholarly or uneducated, quick or slow, repressed or uninhibited, limping or fit, calm or desperate, lazy or energetic, decrepit or shaking with the palsy, drunk or frightened, or whether it's a cold-hearted villain or a sympathetic person - in other words all the 'acting' stuff, plus all the trimmings clothes, facial expressions etc. But what we have done is made it very plain what happens in the shot before we start. If we were to make a diagrammatic chart of the whole scene, it would end up looking something like this:
Important animators are called key animators, and word got round that they just draw the keys - anything that they draw is a key - and slaves fill in the rest according to the little charts provided by the key animators. Wrong. A key animator is simply like a key executive -an important one. Many good animators call all their extremes 'keys'- I sure used to . But it makes life so much clearer and easier if you separate the keys from the extremes . Actually, I never heard Ken Harris ever call a drawing a key, but he would say, 'Draw that one first. That's an important drawing.' And it was a key, really. I've worked every system, good, bad or half-baked, and experience has convinced me that it's best - even crucial - to separate the storytelling keys from the extremes and all the other stuff. (Of course, as in our example above, the three keys will also function as extremes .) Separating them out stops us getting tangled up and missing the point of the shot, as we vanish into a myriad of drawings and positions. There may be many keys in a scene - or maybe just one or two - it depends on what it is and the length of the scene. Its whatever it takes to put it over, to read what's to occur. You can spend time on these keys . I remember once visiting Frank Thomas and he was drawing a cat. 'Dammit,' he said. 'I've been working all day on this damn drawing - trying to get this expression right.'
I was shocked . All day! Wow! That was the first time I ever saw anyone working so hard on a single drawing. How was he ever going to get the scene done? Finally, the penny dropped. 'Of course, stupid, its his key!' It's the most important thing in the scene! He's got to get that right! And it was encouraging to see anyone that great struggling to get it right! 60
1 . The natural way, called
We just start drawing and see what happens - like a kid drawing in the page corners of a schoolbook - stick the numbers on afterwards . Disney director-animator Woolie Reitherman said, 'When I didn't know what I was doing in an action, I always went straight ahead. I'd just start on ones. Half the time I didn't know what I was doing . To me, it's fun. You find out something you wouldn't have found out otherwise.'
2. The planned way, called First we decide what are the most important drawings - the storytelling drawings, the keys and put them in. Then we decide what are the next most important positions that have to be in the scene . These are the extremes and we put them in - and any other important poses. Then we work out how to go from one pose to another - finding the nicest transition between two poses. These are the breakdown or passing positions. Then we can clinically make clear charts to cushion and ease in and out of the positions and add any finishing touches or indications for the assistant. To illustrate how effective the pose to pose method is, the brilliant Disney art director-designer Ken Anderson told me that when he was making layout drawings of characters for animators working on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he drew lots and lots of key poses of Grumpy for each shot. Ken's drawings were then given to one of the Grumpy animators. Ken found out later that the guy just put charts on the drawings, handed them to his assistants and went off to lunch, and took the credit, for what in effect, was Ken's fine animation.
So it's pretty obvious the best way to work is going to be : 3. First we plan out what we're going to do in small thumbnail sketches . (It's also a good idea to have done this with the other two methods.) Then we make the big drawings - the storytelling drawings, the keys . Then we put in any other important drawings that have to be there, like anticipations or where hands or feet contact things - the extremes. Now we have the structure, just as we had with the pose-to-pose system . But now we use these keys and important extremes as guides for things and places we want to aim at. After you get your overall thing - go again . Do one thing at a time. We'll work straight ahead on top of these guideposts, improvising freely as we go along. We'll do several straight ahead runs on different parts - taking the most important thing first. We may have to change and revise parts of the keys and extremes as we go along, rubbing bits off and re-drawing or replacing them. So: we make a straight ahead run on the primary thing. Then take a secondary thing and do a straight ahead run on that. Then take the third thing and work straight ahead on that. Then the fourth thing, etc. Then add the hair or tail or drapery or flapping bits at the end .
Let's take our man going over to the blackboard again . What do I do first? Answer: The keys - the storytelling drawings or positions that have to be there to show what's happening. Put it where you can see it . . . so it reads.
What do we do next? Answer : Any other drawings that have to be in the shot . Obviously, he has to take steps to get over to the chalk - so we make the 'contact' positions on the steps where the feet are just touching the ground . There's no weight on them yet- the heel is just contacting the ground. As with the fingers just contacting the chalk - they haven't closed on the chalk yet. If we act all this out, we might find he takes five steps to get to the chalk and bend down . I notice .that when I act it out, I automatically pull up my left pant leg as I bend down, then I put my hand on my knee before my other hand contacts the chalk. I would make an extreme where the hand just contacts the pant leg - before it pulls up the pants. These will be our extremes . We're working rough, sketching things in lightly - although we probably have made rather good drawings of the keys . (I haven't here, because I'm trying to keep it simple, for clarity) . 64
We could act it out, timing the steps and putting numbers on the extremes or we could leave the numbering till later. 1 would probably put numbers on it now and test it on the video to see how the timing feels as his steps get shorter - and make any adjustments . What next? We'll break it down, lightly sketching in our passing positions or'breakdowns' . We won't get fancy about it now - the fancy stuff comes later in the book . For now, we'll just make the head and body raise up slightly on the passing positions of the steps - like it does on a normal walk.
We'd probably have numbers on the drawings by now, and when we test it, we've got three or four positions for every second - so it's easy to see what our timing is. And to make any adjustments. And if the director wants to see how we're doing - it looks almost animated . Now we'll make straight ahead runs on the different parts - using our extremes and breakdown positions as a guide - and altering them, or parts of them, if we need to as we go along. Take one thing at a time and animate it straight ahead.
Maybe he's mumbling to himself, or maybe he's talking - maybe his head just wobbles around with self love . Whatever it is, we'll treat it as a separate straight-ahead run, working on top of what we already have. We'll make another straight-ahead run on the arms and hands. Maybe they'll swing freely in a figure eight or a pendulum movement; or maybe they hardly move before he reaches for the chalk. Maybe he pulls up his pants as he moves along - or scratches or snaps his fingers nervously, or cracks his knuckles. When we arrive at our key, we might rub out the arm and alter it to suit our arm action . Or delay his head. Or raise it early to look at the board. We can do lots of interesting things with the legs and feet, but for now we just want them to function smoothly. (I'm avoiding the problem of weight at this stage because the up and down on the head and body that we have at the moment will be adequate for now, and the figure won't just float along.) When he writes on the board, we'll treat that as a separate run . If he has long hair or a pony tail, we'll do that as a separate straight-ahead run. His clothes could be a separate run, baggy pant legs following along. If he'd grown a tail, that would be the last thing we'd put on . 66
I've shown these things in different colours to be as clear as possible . In my own work I sometimes use different coloured pencils for the separate runs - then pull it all together in black at the end. I was delighted to find that the great Bill Tytla often used colours for the separate bits, then pulled them all together afterwards . To recap: Having made the keys, put in the extremes, then put in the breakdowns or passing positions. Now that we've got our main thing - we go again, taking one thing at a time. First, the most important thing. Then, the secondary thing. Then, the third thing. Then, the fourth thing etc. Then, add any flapping bits, drapery, hair, fat, breasts, tails etc. The general principle is: After you've got your first overall thing - go again. Do one thing at a time (testing as you go along) . Then pull it all together and polish it up. Make clear charts for the assistant to follow up or do it all yourself . It's like this:
Of course, you can work any way you want . There are no rules - only methods . You might feel like ignoring all of this and just work straight ahead or work from pose-to-pose, or start one way and switch to the other - why not? What's to stop us re-inventing the wheel? Lots of people are busy doing it. But on the other hand, why bother? This method of going at it was developed through concentrated trial and error by geniuses and it's a wonderful basis on which to operate . Having used just about every approach going including no system - I've found this is the best working method by far. Get it in your bloodstream and it frees you to express yourself . Use this technique to get past the technique! Milt Kahl worked this way. Near the end of his life I told him, 'Now that I've been working the same way, I really do think that - apart from your talent, brain and skill - fifty per cent of the excellence in your work comes from your working method: the way you think about it, and the way you go about it.' 'Well . . .' he said thoughtfully, 'you're right. Hey, you've gotten smart!' Milt often told me that by the time he'd plotted everything out this way, he'd pretty much animated the scene - even including the lip sync. Then he'd finish putting numbers on the drawings, add bits and make little clinical charts for the assistant - easing things in and out. He complained he never really got to animate because when he'd finished plotting out all the important stuff - it was animated. He'd already done it. 1 rest my case .
I always use the video to test my stuff at each stage - even the first scribbles - time them and test them . In the 1970s and 80s, Art Babbitt used to get mad at me for it -'Goddamit, you're using that video as a crutch!' 'Yes,' I'd say, 'but is it not true that Disney first instituted pencil tests and that's what changed and developed animation? And don't you always say that pencil tests are our rehearsals?' Assenting grunt . 'And what's the difference between rushing a test in to the cameraman at the end of the day when he's trying to get home, and if he does stay to shoot it, hang around the next day till the lab delivers the print and mid-morning interrupt the editor, who's busy cutting in the main shots, and then finally see your test - when we can use today's video and get a test in ten minutes?' Art would turn away, 'I am not a Luddite.' (Machine wreckers protesting the Industrial Revolution .) 68
Whenever Ken Harris had to animate a walk, he would sketch out a quick walk cycle test and we'd shoot it, pop the negative in a bucket of developer, pull out the wet negative (black film with white lines on it), make a loop and run it on the moviola. 'I've done hundreds of walks,' Ken would say, 'all kinds of walks, but I still want to get a test of my basic thing before I start to build on it.' Bill Tytla said, 'If you do a piece of animation and run over it enough times, you must see what's wrong with it.' I actually think the video and computer have saved animation! Certainly the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit contributed substantially to the renaissance of animation, and having the video to test everything as we went along was crucial to us . We had a lot of talented but inexperienced young people, and with a handful of lead animators we were able to say, 'Take that drawing out, change that one, and put more drawings in here' etc. This enabled us to keep improving everything as we raced along, so we were able to collectively hit the target. Milt always said he would never bother to look at his tests. 'Hell, I know what it looks like - I did it!' He would wait to see several of his shots cut together in a sequence but only to see'how it's getting over . But that was his way. I have never reached that stage and probably never will. I test everything as I go along and it really helps. We're building these performances, so why not test our foundations and structure and decorations as we proceed? And since it reveals our mistakes mistakes are very important since we do learn from our mistakes - we make our corrections and improvements as we build . Of course, at this stage I wouldn't have a problem routining my way through a job without testing - but why? The video or computer is there, so let's use it. An interesting thing I've noticed is that when animators get older their perception of time slows up. They move slower and animate things slower. The young guys zip stuff around. So, thè video is a useful corrective to us old bastards . And young ones when it's too fast.
Before we dive into walks and all the articulation stuff, there are some other important camera techniques we should know about.
On the next page is a 'classic' exposure sheet called the X-sheet or dope sheet - the first sight of which is guaranteed to put any beginner or artist off the whole business. When I was a kid and first saw one of these I thought, 'Oh no, I don't want to be an animator anymore. I'll just make the designs for other people to move around.' Actually, it's awfully simple when you make friends with it. It's just a simple and efficient form where animators write down the action and dialogue (or music beats) for a scene or shot - plus the information for shooting. Each horizontal line represents a frame of film .
The five available 'cel' levels on this X-sheet are there so we can treat each character or element separately. Why have different levels - why not draw everything on one level? Answer: You can, but what do you do if you want to change the timing on one or two parts of the action and leave the other bits as they are? However, it's a good idea to try to keep to just one or two levels for simplicity. If we wish to use all five levels, start with the main action on level 1 . Say a man walks in from one side of the screen and a cat walks in from the other. We animate our main action man on level 1, and the cat on level 2, adding a 'C' after the cat numbers: 1-C, 2-C, 3-C etc., so as not to confuse it with the man drawing. The man drawings, or main action, don't need an identifying letter. If a woman passes in front of them, we'd put her on level 3, adding a'W' behind her numbers. If a truck was to stop in front of them, we'd use level 4 for the truck and add a 'T' to the truck drawings . If it's raining, we'd put the rain drawings on level 5, adding an 'R' after the numbers . The X-sheet would look something like this:
This system obviously enables the cameraman to stack his levels correctly - working from the bottom up - and take a frame of film with all the numbers across matching the dial number on his camera. But there is one very important thing here :
Keep It Simple, Stupid! Use simple numerical sequences! Animation is complicated enough without making it any worse . 73
My years in England taught me that the English just love complexity. A very brilliant friend, who is a top Oxford mathematician, called me up and said, 'We're about to penetrate your principality.' I said, 'You mean you're coming to visit?' 'Indeed .' 'Wow,' I said . 'You just used nine syllables to say what a North American would say in two! Vi-sit!' We sure used to pen-e-trate-our-prin-ci-pal-it-y with our exposure sheets until Ken Harris joined the team . They looked something like this:
Can you imagine trying to make any changes or improvements when you're weighed down with numbers like this? It would be like re-numbering the Encyclopaedia Britannica . Not only were our numbers complicated, but our action went from two frames to three frames then to four frames, bumping along then back to two frames etc., giving a jerky stop-start result to the movements . When we had just one level of action - say it's a tiger - everyone would call the drawings T11 and T1-2 and T1-3 etc. One day I asked, 'Why are we doing this?'The answer from the head of the department came, 'So we know it's a tiger.' 'But we can see it's a tiger! Why not number it simply 1 and 2 and 3?' Answer: 'That will just confuse the painting department .' And it's not just the English who can overcomplicate! I once saw the working sheets of an established American animator who's written two books on the subject, and his numbers looked like this: All smudged and rubbed out and re-entered . . .
And then the first real live master animator arrived to work with us . On his first day Ken Harris lightly pencilled in simple numbers going down the page on 'twos', that is, two exposures per drawing. That was the first time I ever saw anyone go down the page on twos! Ken usually planned his action on twos : twelve drawings per second, shooting each drawing for two exposures, instead of working on 'ones', one exposure for each drawing, which is twenty-four drawings per second - twice the amount of work. Ken was from Warner Bros - used to tight budgets; the animators had to produce an average of 30 feet (20 seconds) a week or be fired . Since most normal actions work well on twos, Warner animators tried to avoid putting actions on ones. When he needed to go onto ones for fast actions (runs etc.), he'd just number it in on ones. i.e.
Then he'd go back on to twos 'Ok, Ken, but what do you do when you've worked it out on twos, but you find you want to add in ones to smooth it out more?' Answer: Add 'A' drawings Great, so now all this TXL-1 and PP-2 3/4 stuff goes out the window. We're not weighed down with meaningless technology. It becomes simpler to work and easy to make changes and improyments and we start getting better. But there is an even - better and simpler system!
Milt Kahl called it his system, but I suspect that the good guys at Disney all discovered it around the same time - it's so logical . Just,use the camera dial numbers for the drawings . Go down the page on twos but use odd numbers . Then if we do need to smooth something out or we need very fast action, we just add in the ones. Milt told me, 'Whenever I see my drawings with odd numbers on them, I know I'm on twos and when I see even numbers, I know I'm on ones.' I asked, 'What do you do when you want to get into a hold - just indicate you're holding that drawing with a line? And when you come back in do you start again on the dial number?' Answer: 'Yes . Come back in on the dial number.' Not only does this make it easy for shooting, but it's easier when you do need several levels of action . We've now got the same dial numbers horizontally across the frame of film .
So, just go down the page with odd numbers - on twos and drop in ones when you need them. It's simpler and frees you to concentrate on the work. Boy, did my output and quality improve! There are a couple of other things to mention before we start in on the great argument of ones versus twos. 76
There's a very important thing I learned from Ken Harris . I know it sounds crazy - but if you have a series of B drawings - don't put the B in front of the number. i .e . Put the B after the number. i.e.
We want to think as simply as we can. Ken said, 'Look, you don't call me Mister Ken . Put the letter behind so all you think of is the numbers.' Put any formality or whatever behind . It may seem mad but it helps you do more work . Try it. All we're really doing is thinking of series of numbers from 1 to 10. Anything to keep it simple . Nobody could figure out how this sick old man could produce so much work-and of such high quality. He just kept everything as simple as could be.
Two more things : The only time you should circle a drawing on the X-sheet is when a cycle of action re-starts - when we're repeating the same set of drawings . We circle drawing (1) to alert the cameraman that it's out of sequence with the normal dial numbers. Then we circle the drawing in the correct dial number when we come back to a normal sequence.
My rule is: The only time you ever put a letter in front of a number is when you have an overlay cel (of something in front of the characters). Then you put O-1 (for the overlay cel) or for a held cel (somebody's stationary feet, for example) and call it H-1 .
Some people always complicate the numbering by calling ones and twos, 'singles' and 'doubles' . In fact 'singles' is from a 1940s term for inbetweening when the animator did drawings 1 and 3 and 5, made an evenly-spaced chart and said to the assistant, 'I've left you singles.'
i.e. single in betweens But when to use ones and when to use twos? The rule of thumb is - use twos for normal actions and ones for very fast actions. For instance, runs always have to be on ones - normal 'acting' on twos . Walks can function nicely on twos, but they're going to look better on ones. Obviously, life is on ones (or whatever speed we film it on), but twos work well for most actions and, of course, it's half as much work as doing it on ones. And half as expensive! Working on ones is twice as much work and expense all the way down the production line . Apparently, in the early 1930s as Disney's animators got better and better, costs were skyrocketing, and since twos work for most things, they tried to stay on twos whenever they could. A lot of great animators even say that twos are really better than ones, that ones lead to a mushy result, that broad, fast actions on twos 'sparkle' and adding ones diminishes that vitality. Well, yes, this is true if the ones are just dumb, mechanical inbetweens . My experience is different. I've found that if you plan for ones, the result is usually superior to twos . I feel that twos are an economic answer to an artistic question . With twos being half the work, everybody gets to go home on time, and why would 1 make a case for ones? Hell, I was a studio owner. When I was re-learning all this stuff, I would wait till my animation on ones was traced and painted, then I'd shoot it on ones as planned and then I'd take out every other cel and shoot the rest on twos to see if it 'sparkled' and was better. In all but one case, ones worked better. The time the twos worked better was when I had an old lady pulling out a doctor's stethoscope from her pocket. The ones produced a very smooth movement .
It worked just fine, but then I removed every other painted inbetween and shot it on twos . It was better on twos! I cannot figure out why - it just was better. So they're partly right, I guess. But I became addicted to using ones whenever I could - ones seem to make for compulsive viewing and that's what we're after. Art Babbitt used to nag at me for using ones. 'That's too realistic - one of the things about animation is that it's not like life!' But I would often add ones to Art's work when he wasn't looking and it came out better- and he liked it better. Computer animators have everything on ones - with perfect inbetweens - and it hasn't diminished the appeal of their work - rather the reverse. And twos tire the eye after a few minutes. I feel that ones are twice as much work, but the result is three times as good. Compulsive viewing, easy to watch . I think my co-animator Neil Boyle said it best 'Twos work - ones fly.' And Ken Harris, who spent most of his life working on twos, would say to me when I'd be putting ones into his stuff, 'Oh, it's always better on ones.' There's one thing that always makes me crazy. When you have a character animated on twos and the camera is panning with it on ones you get stroboscopic jitter. Either pan with it on twos (not great) or add in single inbetweens so it doesn't strobe! Some of the really good guys do this. It's a mystery to me. Why don't they add single inbetweens so it doesn't strobe? Maybe its because a lot of things don't show up on the pencil test. It's when it's coloured in that we see the bumps .
It's a combination of twos and ones. Not only but also. Normal actions on twos - which is the bulk of our work anyway. Fast or very smooth actions on ones. Normal spacing on twos . Far apart spacing on ones. 79
An endless debate has gone on among classical animators about whether to register the drawings on top pegs or bottom pegs . At present, bottom pegs seem to have won out; most people seem to be animating using the bottom pegs to hold their drawings .
Frank Thomas has said, 'Getting off the top pegs and working on bottom pegs has actually advanced the art of animation because you can roll the drawings as you work and see what's happening - whether the creature is doing what you want.' And that's had a tremendous influence. (Disney animators all work on bottom pegs.) Alternatively, Ken Harris spent his life on top pegs and would flip his drawings and see what's happening - whether the creature is doing what he wants . (Warner animators all worked top pegs).
Ken would sometimes go red in the face and explode, 'You know who started that whole bottom pegs business? A goddam lazy cameraman who didn't want to be bothered reaching all the way under the glass pressure plate to place the cels at the top! He's the bum who started bottom pegs!' 80
And what's going to make it easiest to draw?
Add to this the fact that most of the discs that animators use are made of heavy metal with inset panning bars with screws to tighten and release them for sliding pans. It's pretty awkward with all these points sticking up and we unconsciously have to dodge the pegs as we draw .
The engineer who made most of the equipment for my English bars differently every time . I had to fire a guy once, and his close ed - quit with him. To get even with me they ordered a special three panning bars for different field sizes, top and bottom - six in the screws it looked like this :
studio arranged the panning friend - who was very talentdisc (on the firm) made with in all! By the time you added
But how often do you really use the panning bars? Not too often, in my experience . One day about fifteen years ago I found layout artist and designer, Roy Naisbitt, working on a big piece of white plastic Perspex (Plexiglass) with a peg bar just taped on to it.
What a solution! You tape the pegs on wherever you want, top or bottom . Also, I keep a heavy metal disc with panning bars beside the desk for when I very occasionally need it for a mechanical pan.
This also allows you to tape on taller pegs to carry more drawings if you're on top pegs. The shorter peg bars are OK for bottom pegs, but the drawings keep falling all over the floor. Again, an elastic band helps. I'm delighted to see that Roy's solution has spread through the industry, as I've seen several animators walking around in Hollywood with Perspex discs and a taped-on peg bar tucked under their arms. It works just fine . I animated the first close-up on Who Framed Roger Rabbit in a Welsh hotel room with a Perspex disc on my knee - and top pegs! I work both ways. Again, it's not only but also. Top pegs is great for drawing and bottom pegs is great for rolling. Take your pick. Obviously, computer animators are free from all this tactile nonsense - but I'm sure you have equivalent stt,tff to cope with . Having started out as a drawing animator, Jim Richardson, now a computer animator, told me that when he first switched over to the computer, he found it was like'animating with a microwave' . 83
Somebody once said an animator is something between an artist and a garage mechanic . Here's more nuts and bolts from the garage - but very interesting ones, and it really helps to know them. Ken Harris showed me this one :
Say we've got a telephone pole moving up quickly in perspective . Where do we put our middle position?
You'd put it in about here, right? 84
Wrong. Even after fifteen years' experience I got it wrong. And nearly every professional I've asked since has gotten it wrong.
Here's where the middle position is:'
Rule in the lines like this and the cross point tells us it's here. At least technically. And just keep doing it:
This works well for fast moves . However, for more normal moves it's best to cheat it - split the difference - and come back about half way to where our first guess was. Do that throughout and you'll get a better result .
Ken Harris showed me how to exaggerate a hit. Say a creature shoots through the air to hit a cliff:
We'd need about five drawings - even spacing on the head - to get him over to the cliff. The figures overlap slightly to help carry the eye - on ones, of course, because it's a fast action . No inbetween between 5 and 6. To get more impact, more power to the hit, add in another drawing where he just touches the cliff, just contacting it before he's flattened on the following frame. This will give more 'change'- action within action .
Now to give it yet more impact, we take out drawing number 5, throw it away, and stretch out the drawing that's touching the cliff. It becomes our new number 5.
Now our action kind of leaps a one frame gap. We won't see it, but we'll feel it and it will give a much stronger impact to the hit. There's an interesting thing here which takes us right back again to the bouncing ball . In 1970 I showed Ken an early edition of Preston Blair's animation book when I was questioning whether we need that amount of squashing and stretching of things . (You can gather by now that I'm not too keen on 'rubber duck' stretching around - although twenty-five years later that was what was required on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a cartoon of a cartoon .) I noticed that Ken, though famous as a broad action animator, used squash and stretch rather sparingly.
I had the page open on the bouncing ball . It was like this - which certainly works OK.
Ken said, 'Yeah, sure, but wait a minute - never mind that. We can make this much better. We need to have a contact in here before the squash .'
'Put in a contact where the ball just touches the ground and then it squashes . That'll give it more life .' (Move the preceding drawing back a bit to accommodate it.)
'And do we do the same when it takes off again?' Answer: 'Not in this case -just when it contacts . You get the "change", then it's off again .' The animation grapevine flows like lightning: 'Did you know Ken Harris in London has corrected Preston Blair's bouncing ball?' Preston's next edition came out like this :
Perfect. 94
This is not done to show disrespect for a skilled animator like Preston, who was the first classical animator to make real animation knowledge accessible, or to put him down in any way. Ken was just showing an important device to get more action within the movement. Ken continued, showing the same idea with a frog .
'Have him contact the ground before he squashes down . Then keep his feet contacting the ground as he takes off. That'll give more change to the action .' Next, a jumping figure .
'Have at least one foot contacting the ground before the squash down, then leave at least one leg still contacting the ground as he takes off again .' This is great because we're getting more 'change' - more contrast - straight lines playing against curves . We're doing it with bones as well as round masses. We can use straight lines and still get a limber result . More on this later. We don't have to be stuck with rubbery shapes to get smooth movement . This will also free us from having to draw in a prescribed cartoony style because it 'suits animation' and is 'animatable' . I'm using crude drawings here because I want everything to be crystal clear. I just want to show the structure and not get lost in an overlay of attractive detail . 95
In the late 1930s when tracing and painting the drawings on to cels was all done by hand, many painters became very adept at 'dry brushing' the desired transparent live action blur effect . Animators indicated the blur on their pencil drawings and the 'dry brushers' would cleverly blend the colours together to simulaté the transparency in the blur.
After the 1941 animators' strike and World War II, budgets shrank and so did the use of skilled backup painters. But a lot of animators just kept on indicating blurs and it became a cartoon convention to just trace this in heavy black lines - ignoring the fact that the dry brush artists were long gone .
Now it's become a cartoon cliché . A cartoon of a cartoon :
With characters just vanishing from the screen, Ken told me: 'We'd have this witch up in the air laughing and then she's gone. Instead of making a blur we just used to leave hairpins where she was.'
'We learned that from the Disney guys in a fish picture. They'd have these little fish swimming around and something would scare them and they were gone - that's all - with just a few bubbles for the path they took .'
in the early days, speed lines were a hangover from old newspaper strips :
Then they were used in animation to help carry your eye . But they're still around now when we don't really need them . You don't even need to show the arrow entering . We have nothing and then it's just there - maybe with the tail vibrating.
However, I find the elongated or 'long-headed' inbetween is very useful - not just for a zippy cartoon effect, but also for use in realistic fast actions:
Again, we're returning to the original purpose - emulating the transparency of broad, live action blur movements. It's especially suitable with 'soft edge' loose drawings - where the outlines aren't sharp and enclosed like colouring book drawings .
Doing too much action in too short a space of time, i .e. too great arm and leg swings in a run. The remedy: go twice as slow. Add in drawings to slow it down - take out drawings to speed it up. Ken Harris told me that when Ben Washam was starting out at Warner's, he became famous in the industry for'Benny's Twelve Frame Yawn'. Ben drew well and made twelve elaborate drawings of someone going through the broad positions of a yawn - an action something like this:
Then he shot it on ones. Zip! It flashed through in half a second! So then he shot it on twos . ZZZip! It went through in one second! So then he inbetweened it (twenty-four drawings now) and shot it on twos. ZZZZZZ! It went through in two seconds - almost right. Then Ken showed him how to add some cushioning drawings at the beginning and end - and bingo, Ben's on his way to being a fine animator.
Some animators want to save themselves a lot of the work so they draw very rough . ('Ruff' they don't even want to spend the time spelling 'rough'. Too many letters in it to waste our valuable time . . . ) And they leave lots and lots of work for the assistants . I've never understood why some people in animation are so desperate to save work. If you want to save work, what on earth are you doing in animation? It's nothing but work! 99
in the early days at The Disney Studio, when animation was being transformed from its crude beginnings into a sophisticated art form, they used to say, take at least a day to think about what you're going to do - then do it. One old animator, writing about the subject forty years later, advises that we should spend days thinking about it. He's read up on Freud and Jung and the unconscious mind and he writes seductively about how you should ruminate until the last minute and then explode into a frenzy of flowing creativity. He told me that in a week's work he'd spend Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday thinking about it and planning it in his mind . Then on Friday he'd do it. The only problem is that it then takes three weeks for somebody else to make sense of it. I knew this guy pretty well - and he made it sound so creatively attractive that, though I felt it was artistic b.s ., I thought I better try it out. I managed to ruminate, stewing and marinating my juices for about a day and a half and then couldn't stand it any more . I exploded into creative frenzy for a day, drawing into the night like a maniac. The result was pretty interesting, but it really did take three weeks to straighten it all out afterwards . And I don't think it was any better than if I had worked normally - maybe just a bit different.I think Milt Kahl has the correct approach : 'I do it a lot. I think about it a lot, and I do it a lot.' Ken Harris worked intensely from 7.30 am till noon, relaxed at lunch, hung around doing bits for a while, went home to watch TV (or play tennis when he was younger) and thought about what he was going to do the next day - then came in early, avoided social contact and did it. He worked carefully and thought very hard about his stuff. He said he was surprised when he saw some of Ward Kimball's working drawings because they were exactly the same as his very neat - very carefully done - usually something on every drawing in the shot . When I first saw Milt's work on his desk I was startled by how much work he did . His drawings were finished, really. There was no 'clean up' - just 'touch up', and completing details and simple inbetweens or parts of them . Ditto Frank Thomas, ditto Ollie Johnston, ditto Art Babbitt. The two exceptions to this were Cliff Nordberg, a marvellous 'action' animator who worked with me for a while, and Grim Natwick. Cliff did work very roughly - so he was awfully dependent on having a good assistant and it always caused him a lot of concern. And Grim was a law unto himself. There's an animation myth about the assistant always being able to draw better than the animator. (I never met one who did.) The myth is that the animator creates the 'acting' and the fine draftsperson improves the look of everything and nails it all down. Well, there aren't that many fine draftspeople around and if they're good enough to nail all the details down and draw well, they really should be animating-and probably are. (An exception to this is the assistant'stylist' on commercials where the 'look' of, the thing is it's raison d'étre . There are a few excellent ones around .) Rough drawings have lots of seductive vitality, blurs, pressure of line, etc. But when they're polished and tidied up you usually find there wasn't that much there to begin with . 100
As we go along through this book it'll be apparent how much work we have to do to get a really interesting result . No matter how talented - the best guys are always the ones that work the hardest. But hang the work, it's the unique result that we're after. Every time we do a scene, we're doing something unique - something nobody else has ever done . It's a proper craft.
Milt Kahl's answer: 'I do enough to have iron clad control over the scene.' Ken Harris's answer: 'I draw anything which is not a simple inbetween.' Milt again: 'I don't leave assistants very much . How much can I get away with leaving and still control the scene? If it's fast action, I do every drawing.' The purpose of the assistant is to free the animator to get through more work by handling the less important bits - but as we have seen, he/she can't be just a brainless drawing machine. The computer produces perfect inbetweens, but obviously has to be programmed to put in the eccentric bits that give it the life . Here's my tip on saving work - my rule of thumb:
The long way turns out to be shorter. Because: something usually goes wrong with some clever rabbit's idea for a short cut and it turns out to take even longer trying to fix everything when it goes wrong. I've found it's quicker to just do the work, and certainly more enjoyable because we're on solid ground and not depending on some smart guy's probably half-baked scheme. And again, if you don't want to do lots of work, what are you doing in animation? One of the things I love about animation is that you have to be specific . If a drawing is out of place it's just wrong - clearly wrong - as opposed to 'Art' or 'Fine Art' where everything these . days is amorphous and subjective . For us, it's obvious whether our animation works or not, whether things have weight, or just jerk about or float around wobbling amorphously. We can't hide in all that 'unconscious mind' stuff. Of course, we can dress up and act like temperamental prima donnas - but we can't kid anybody with the work . It's obvious whether it's good or bad . And there's nothing more satisfying than getting it right!
Advice from Ken Harris : 'A walk is the first thing to learn. Learn walks of all kinds, 'cause walks are about the toughest thing to do right.'
Walking is a process of falling over and catching yourself just in time. We try to keep from falling over as we move forward. If we don't put our foot down, we'll fall flat on our face. We're going through a series of controlled falls. We lean forward with our upper bodies and throw out a leg just in time to catch ourselves . Step, catch. Step, catch. Step catch. 102
Why is it that we recognize our Uncle Charlie even though we haven't seen him for ten years walking - back view - out of focus - far away? Because everyone's walk is as individual and distinctive as their face. And one tiny detail will alter everything . There is a massive amount of information in a walk and we read it instantly. . Art Babbitt taught us to look at someone walking in the street from the back view. Follow them along and ask yourself:
Then run around to see the front and check. So what do we look for? The big eye-opener for me happened like this. (Unfortunately it's a little politically incorrect, but it's a great example, so here goes.)
I was in my parked car turning on the ignition, when out of my peripheral vision I semiconsciously noticed a man's head walking behind a wall.
It passed through my mind that he was gay. A gay walk. Now I'm quite short-sighted - my eyes were focused on the ignition key, and it was a busy street with lots of cars and people - and he was about fifty yards away! Wow! How did I know that? This is crazy. All I'd seen was his outof-focus head moving along behind a wall for a split second! I started to drive away, then stopped. Wait a minute - I'm supposed to be good at this. I'm supposed to know these things . I have to know why! I remembered Art's advice, re-parked, jumped out and ran a block and a half to catch up with the fellow. I walked along behind him, copying him. Sure enough, it was an effeminate walk. Then I got it. He was walking as if on a tightrope and gliding along.
Now how could I have registered this with out-of-focus peripheral vision at fifty yards without even seeing his body? Simple, really. There was no up and down action on the head. Try walking on an imaginary tightrope and your head stays level . No ups and downs.
From then on the first thing I always look for is how much up and down action there is on the head . The amount of up and down is the key!
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The best way to time a walk (or anything else) is to act it out and time yourself with a stopwatch. Also, acting it out with a metronome is a great help . I naturally think in seconds -'one Mississippi' or 'one little monkey' or 'a thousand and one, a thousand and two' etc. Ken Harris thought in feet, probably because he was so footage conscious - having to produce thirty feet of animation a week. He'd tap his upside-down pencil exactly every two thirds of a second as we'd act things out. Milt Kahl told me that on his first week at Disney's he bought a stopwatch and went downtown in the lunch break and timed people walking - normal walks, people just going somewhere. He said they were invariably on twelve exposures - right on the nose. March time . As a result, he used to beat off twelve exposures as his reference point. Anything he timed was just so much more or so much less than that twelve exposures . He said he used to say 'Well, it's about 8s.' He said it made it easy for him - or easier anyway. Chuck Jones said the Roadrunner films had a musical tempo built into them. He'd time the whole film out, hitting things on a set beat so they had a musical, rhythmic integrity already built in . Then the musician could hit the beat, ignore it or run the music against it. Chuck told me that they used to have exposure sheets with a coloured line printed right across the page for every sixteen frames and another one marking every twelve frames . He called them '16 sheets' or '12 sheets' I guess '8 sheets' would be the normal sheets . I mentioned once to Art Babbitt that I liked the timing on the Tom and Jerrys . 'Oh yeah,' he said dismissively, 'All on 8s .' That kind of tightly synchronized musical timing is rare today. They call it 'Mickey Mousing' where you accent everything- it's a derogatory term nowadays and considered corny. But it can be extremely effective.
To my knowledge, I think Art Babbitt may have been the first one to depart from the normal walk or the cliché cartoon walks . Certainly he was a great exponent of the 'invented' walk. He became famous for the eccentric walks he gave Goofy - which made Goofy into a star. He even put the feet on backwards! He made it look perfectly acceptable and people didn't realize they were backwards! Art's whole credo was : 'Invent! Every rule in animation is there to be broken - if you have the inventiveness and curiosity to look beyond what exists .' In other words, 'Learn the rules and then learn how to break them .' This opened up a whole Pandora's box of invention. Art always said, 'The animation medium is very unusual. We can accomplish actions no human could possibly do. And make it look convincing!' This eccentric passing position idea is a terrifically useful device . We can put it anywhere and where we put it has a huge effect on the action . And who says we can't put it anywhere we want? There's nothing to stop us .
I've found that this contact method is the one that gets you through -takes you home . It's especially suitable for natural actions - which is what we mostly have to do. I've found it to be the best way to do most things . Milt Kahl worked this way. 'In a walk, or anything, I make the contact positions first - where the feet contact the ground with no weight on them yet. It's kind of a middle position for the head and body parts - neither an up or down . I know where the highs and lows are and then I break it down . Another reason I do it is because it makes a scene easy to plan .' 'I always start off with that contact because it's a dynamic, moving thing. And it's much better than starting with the weight already on the foot, which would be a very static pose!'*
The cleverness of this approach is that we've already taken care of the up and down in the first three drawings . Of course, we can put the passing position up, down or sideways - anywhere we want . But having the downs already set helps us invent ; it gives us a simple grid on which to get complicated, if we want. We know it'll already have weight and so we're free to mess around and invent eccentric actions, or actions that couldn't happen in the real world. Again, we're not stuck with one method or the other. Why not have both? Not only but also . . . I highly recommend the contact approach for general use, but starting with the down position is very useful for unconventional invention. From now on we'll use both approaches .
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