Techniques & Processes

Evaluation

2009-05-09T06:33:00.000-07:00

Techniques and Processes in my third year has really helped me develop my knowledge of the skills involved in the industry I am most interested in: the Animation Industry. I have always been interested in Animation, but in my final year I have taking my work, research and practise to a much higher standard. I have learned how an animated film is created from start to finish, from concept to editing and I have done so by actually producing my own cartoons. However, it would not be possible to have done this without learning the fundamental skills required to make things move on screen in a convincing manner and that is where techniques and processes has come in.

Run, walks, jumps, sneaks, jogs are all standard things in cartoon animation, but learning how to do them and perfecting takes time and practise. I have studied all of them and have practised many industry standard techniques all year, before applying them in my studio work. The most fundamental thing to learn in animation is the bouncing ball technique. This is simple to draw a ball that bounces up and down on the ground convincingly, with weight and conviction so that you ‘feel’ the bounce as it were real. Although this sounds relatively easy, it isn’t quite as simple a it sounds and many times I have had to go back to this necessary skill to re-learn the timing. Each ball looks like it is made out of something else. One ball with be made of rubber and squash up, the other will be made of wood and just hit the ground and stay rigid. After all if you were watching a cartoon and a bowling ball sprung around like a tennis ball, you wouldn’t believe it.

Learning to make a character walk is one of the most difficult things to do, but it is a necessary skill. As a child it can take you up to two years to learn to walk and after that it can take you a lifetime to perfect it. I have always tried to run before I could walk and it is the same with animation. I am still learning walks of all kinds, I am still practising runs and doing them well is very difficult due to the movement that the whole body takes when it lends itself to the activity of walking. Later in the year I read a document that has stuck with me since, “The Twelve Basic Principles of Animation.” Squash, Stretch, Secondary Action, Weight, Timing, Balance…all these new theories to apply to my work. I took each one in and practised them in my T&P so that when I applied them to my studio work, they were rehearsed.

But wasn’t just skills I learned about in T&P, I learned how the industry worked and how each department within the industry contributed to the final piece. I learned about storyboarding, layout artists, background design, special effects, directing, editing, sound recording, foley and I tried them all myself. By separating the jobs, I didn’t feel like I was doing it all by myself, I felt like I was working in all the different departments and facing all the different challenges that each department sees everyday. This gave me greater understand of how they worked together, with one another to produce a final product.

Techniques and Processes this year also provided me with the opportunity to research and discover certain resources that have become invaluable to me. Forums, websites, people, blogs, books, documents and articles have helped me further my understanding of what it takes to make a great piece of work. Without the opportunity to make mistakes in an open environment, I would never have learned from them and I would never have discovered all of these great resources from which to learn and take inspiration.

The Flour Sack

2009-04-30T08:09:00.000-07:00

There is a teaching technique used in the Disney studios that uses the a Flour sack to display how any object, no matter how inanimate can be brought to life through animation. I read about this in one of the books I have researched from whilst doing this project, The Illusion of Life.

The principle is simple...animate a sack of flour that conveys different kinds of emotion and realism. It's a simple idea, but a clever one because it forces you to think outside facial expressions and use body language combined with different animation techniques to put the emotion over to the viewer. I think this is going to be a valuable skill and one that I will be practising for the next little while.

This is a scan from the book...there are many drawings of the sack with a description underneath each of the emotion. They are so good though that you don't need to read the description, you know what the sack is feeling, which is the idea.

Here are a few sketches of the sack that I did myself.

Experimentation 2

2009-04-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

Here are some more experimental pieces that I have done to practise or make purposeful mistakes to learn from.

This run was intended to have more of cartoony feel to it that previous efforts. Almost like a 'dad run' its only a simple bounce step, but if I repeated it and finished onto the other foot with the same amount of feel I think it would amount to a good little run. I didn't plan it too well though and ran out of screen before he could hop to the other foot :P

I drew this funny little dog and decided to give him a quick walk. I had been watching some French test reels and had really liked the way that the images seemed to move...but you could see they were staying on the spot. It was a really stylised looked...but with a sliding perspective background this walk is quite fun, even though its pretty untidy.

This may look like a walk with no inbetweens and that is because it is. I wanted to try and experiment with how much action you could get between key frames without any inbetweens, so that I knew in future how much I could get away with. It turned out not much, as I expected. Still it was a valuable lesson to learn.

The 12 Principles of Animation

2009-03-09T03:38:00.000-07:00

THE 12 BASIC PRINCIPLES OF ANIMATION Paraphrased from the "Illusion Of Life" by Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston.(pp.47-69)

1. Squash and stretch

2. Anticipation

3. Staging

4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose

5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action

6. Slow In and Slow Out

7. Arcs

8. Secondary Action

9. Timing

10. Exaggeration

11. Solid Drawing

12. Appeal

1. SQUASH AND STRETCH

This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions. How extreme the use of squash and stretch is, depends on what is required in animating the scene. Usually it's broader in a short style of picture and subtler in a feature. It is used in all forms of character animation from a bouncing ball to the body weight of a person walking. This is the most important element you will be required to master and will be used often.

2. ANTICIPATION

This movement prepares the audience for a major action the character is about to perform, such as, starting to run, jump or change expression. A dancer does not just leap off the floor. A backwards motion occurs before the forward action is executed. The backward motion is the anticipation. A comic effect can be done by not using anticipation after a series of gags that used anticipation. Almost all real action has major or minor anticipation such as a pitcher's wind-up or a golfers' back swing. Feature animation is often less broad than short animation unless a scene requires it to develop a characters personality.

3. STAGING

A pose or action should clearly communicate to the audience the attitude, mood, reaction or idea of the character as it relates to the story and continuity of the story line. The effective use of long, medium, or close up shots, as well as camera angles also helps in telling the story. There is a limited amount of time in a film, so each sequence, scene and frame of film must relate to the overall story. Do not confuse the audience with too many actions at once. Use one action clearly stated to get the idea across, unless you are animating a scene that is to depict clutter and confusion. Staging directs the audience's attention to the story or idea being told. Care must be taken in background design so it isn't obscuring the animation or competing with it due to excess detail behind the animation. Background and animation should work together as a pictorial unit in a scene.

4. STRAIGHT AHEAD AND POSE TO POSE ANIMATION

Straight ahead animation starts at the first drawing and works drawing to drawing to the end of a scene. You can lose size, volume, and proportions with this method, but it does have spontaneity and freshness. Fast, wild action scenes are done this way. Pose to Pose is more planned out and charted with key drawings done at intervals throughout the scene. Size, volumes, and proportions are controlled better this way, as is the action. The lead animator will turn charting and keys over to his assistant. An assistant can be better used with this method so that the animator doesn't have to draw every drawing in a scene. An animator can do more scenes this way and concentrate on the planning of the animation. Many scenes use a bit of both methods of animation.

5. FOLLOW THROUGH AND OVERLAPPING ACTION

When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail (these follow the path of action). Nothing stops all at once. This is follow through. Overlapping action is when the character changes direction while his clothes or hair continues forward. The character is going in a new direction, to be followed, a number of frames later, by his clothes in the new direction. "DRAG," in animation, for example, would be when Goofy starts to run, but his head, ears, upper body, and clothes do not keep up with his legs. In features, this type of action is done more subtly. Example: When Snow White starts to dance, her dress does not begin to move with her immediately but catches up a few frames later. Long hair and animal tail will also be handled in the same manner. Timing becomes critical to the effectiveness of drag and the overlapping action.

6. SLOW-OUT AND SLOW-IN

As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like. For a gag action, we may omit some slow-out or slow-ins for shock appeal or the surprise element. This will give more snap to the scene.

7. ARCS

All actions, with few exceptions (such as the animation of a mechanical device), follow an arc or slightly circular path. This is especially true of the human figure and the action of animals. Arcs give animation a more natural action and better flow. Think of natural movements in the terms of a pendulum swinging. All arm movement, head turns and even eye movements are executed on an arcs.

8. SECONDARY ACTION

This action adds to and enriches the main action and adds more dimension to the character animation, supplementing and/or re-enforcing the main action. Example: A character is angrily walking toward another character. The walk is forceful, aggressive, and forward leaning. The leg action is just short of a stomping walk. The secondary action is a few strong gestures of the arms working with the walk. Also, the possibility of dialogue being delivered at the same time with tilts and turns of the head to accentuate the walk and dialogue, but not so much as to distract from the walk action. All of these actions should work together in support of one another. Think of the walk as the primary action and arm swings, head bounce and all other actions of the body as secondary or supporting action.

9. TIMING

Expertise in timing comes best with experience and personal experimentation, using the trial and error method in refining technique. The basics are: more drawings between poses slow and smooth the action. Fewer drawings make the action faster and crisper. A variety of slow and fast timing within a scene adds texture and interest to the movement. Most animation is done on twos (one drawing photographed on two frames of film) or on ones (one drawing photographed on each frame of film). Twos are used most of the time, and ones are used during camera moves such as trucks, pans and occasionally for subtle and quick dialogue animation. Also, there is timing in the acting of a character to establish mood, emotion, and reaction to another character or to a situation. Studying movement of actors and performers on stage and in films is useful when animating human or animal characters. This frame by frame examination of film footage will aid you in understanding timing for animation. This is a great way to learn from the others.

10. EXAGGERATION

Exaggeration is not extreme distortion of a drawing or extremely broad, violent action all the time. It¹s like a caricature of facial features, expressions, poses, attitudes and actions. Action traced from live action film can be accurate, but stiff and mechanical. In feature animation, a character must move more broadly to look natural. The same is true of facial expressions, but the action should not be as broad as in a short cartoon style. Exaggeration in a walk or an eye movement or even a head turn will give your film more appeal. Use good taste and common sense to keep from becoming too theatrical and excessively animated

11. SOLID DRAWING

The basic principles of drawing form, weight, volume solidity and the illusion of three dimension apply to animation as it does to academic drawing. The way you draw cartoons, you draw in the classical sense, using pencil sketches and drawings for reproduction of life. You transform these into color and movement giving the characters the illusion of three-and four-dimensional life. Three dimensional is movement in space. The fourth dimension is movement in time.

12. APPEAL

A live performer has charisma. An animated character has appeal. Appealing animation does not mean just being cute and cuddly. All characters have to have appeal whether they are heroic, villainous, comic or cute. Appeal, as you will use it, includes an easy to read design, clear drawing, and personality development that will capture and involve the audience¹s interest. Early cartoons were basically a series of gags strung together on a main theme. Over the years, the artists have learned that to produce a feature there was a need for story continuity, character development and a higher quality of artwork throughout the entire production. Like all forms of story telling, the feature has to appeal to the mind as well as to the eye.

Animators Survival Kit

2009-03-01T05:57:00.000-08:00

The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams has become my bible since I first picked it up a couple of years back. Where Illusion of Life teaches you to think like an animator and consider what you are doing, the Survival Kit just says, do it and learn from your mistakes. An approach that I genuinely like and that has both advantages and disadvantages.

What I really like about the survival kit is that it is right in your face. It says..."look this is how you do stuff, so just memorise it and get on it with it". That's what it would be like in the studio, you would be shown something, told to learn it and then repeat it. This is a great introductory book because it gets you away from static shapes and teaches you to work like an animator, considering mass, shape and balance in all of your drawings.

This book is full of techniques and little things to remember, tips and tricks that you would only learn from years of experience given to you right from the start. How lucky are we to be able to gain 40 years of experience in less than 500 pages. Richard Williams further emphasises certain other techniques and things to learn that you might not consider, such as life drawings. I have never been a fan of life drawing, but I know that if I am to become a better animator I need to follow his advice and study the way things move around me. I took that in from the very start and I often just sit and watch people walk by. My friend has the funniest walk I have ever seen and I have tried to draw it several times without avail. I think when I do get it right I will know that I moved up a step on the ladder.

The principles and techniques are all here from a man who has decades of experience and two Oscars to boot. The fact that he has put it all in a book for the rest of us is nothing short of the nicest thing in the entire world. Now if I can just master it :P

The Illustion of Life

2009-02-23T05:38:00.000-08:00

The Illusion of Life by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas is every animators dream. A book that teaches you the inside tips of the greatest animation studio in the world. But it does more than teach you tips, it helps you to understand what you are trying to achieve by creating animation, by making things move and the title of the book perfectly sums it up. When drawing cartoons you are creating the illusion of life, you are not creating drawing after drawing, or sequences or comedy you are trying to convince the viewer that what they are watching is real and did actually happen.

I have read this book from front to back and frequently refer to it for tips. Each section is well articulated and broken down, making things understandable and simple. Who would have thought animation could seem so easy, but I guess after working at the Disney studio it becomes second nature to talk about and communicate your ideas concisely and precisely.

The Twelve Principles of animation have become my 10 Commandments and once I saw all of the techniques listed and read each of the ideas, my animation improved on the spot. Suddenly, thing weren't static. They have blood, veins and arteries and I could see the sinew and muscles moving beneath their skin.

Along side all of the great writing there are hundreds of examples of different practises, skills and drawings from the animation studio, including hundreds of original sketches and drawings from Disney animated classics. Seeing these images that went on to become shots and drawings in full colour movies was incredibly inspiring and it sent me on a huge research craze across the Internet and through the library. I have collected over 500 hundred research images of original drawings from all of my favourite studios, including pictures of storyboards, layout shots and examples of lining.

This books has been a fantastic resource for me for over a year now and I pick it up everyday. With time constraints and deadlines I feel I haven't been able to spend as much time learning from it as I might like. Hopefully this will change when I finished College and can spend more time doing exercises.

Collection

2009-02-19T06:13:00.000-08:00

Last year I started collecting other animators original sketches and works as part of my ongoing learning curve. I didn't realise just how research I have done for this project because I haven't posted it. I have been researching in private and then doing some test and posting the results. This is bound to lose me marks because well, tutors like research. So I am going to post some of the images I have collected here and tell you how I have studied them, deconstructed them and learned from them.

My collection has surpassed 500 images and I collect more everyday. I have original sequences from Disney, Warner Bro's, Spumco, Fox Studios, Blue Sky and hundreds of other studios including storyboards and layout sheets. These have allowed me access to the world of animation in ways I never dreamed of.

Getting to see animators notes scribbles onto their drawings has provided a real insight for me in how to do things properly. These kind of images are in abundance, but I scanned these in from a Disney art book I sourced in the library.

Action, character and realism. Disneys character can be as tiny as a cricket but have as much character as you or I. I have a lot of Disney picture because well, 1. they are more available than any other studio and 2. they were on of the greatest studios to ever exist - why wouldn't you want to learn from them?

Preston Blair's Book teaches you a lot of great initial mechanics, but it is learning to use them in every shot that is the difficult part. Preston Blair animated Red Riding Hood in Tex Avery's 'Red Hot Riding Hood', often sighted in the animation world as the sexiest animated woman. His animation has effected every female animated character ever drawn since.

Classic Goofy skit from when the gang go on Holiday to Hawaii in one of their cartoons. The amount of detail in this scene is impossible to calculate. How can the animator possible have concentrated on so many things at once, it is just incomprehensible. This is one of the most inspiring sequences in animation for me.

You know exactly what this shot says. The pose, the way the hair is half covering one eye. The life in the drawing. I try every time I animate to get somewhere close to images like this. For each image to say all of the things I want it to say to the audience. It is absolutely incredible.

I have literally hundreds more images like this and I look through them for inspiration nearly everyday. I copy them and try and learn from them and I am getting better and better because of it.

Computer Animation

2009-02-11T04:52:00.000-08:00

Computer animation encompasses a lot of different thing, especially with the unstoppable force of 3D film. But I will be talking about computer animation in terms of creating limited 2D animation with the assistance of a computer. A lot of scenes can easily be brought to life or destroyed completely by computer animation. The trick is to use it sparingly or use it well...if you can do both then you are fantastic.

In Flash you can tween objects. This means you can set there start place, there finishing place and then let the computer do the rest. You can use masks, motion paths and good drawings skills to do this quite effectively and if you think about things carefully you can make things look exceptional. I have seen some truly fantastic work done with tweening, but I have also seen (And made myself) some really terrible stuff.

Because tweening is so quick and easy, there is a temptation to use it everywhere and you can do it so why not? Well, it is hard to make it look like it wasn't done with a computer. The trick is to and keep things as organic as possible by knowing what you can get away with. You can create a walk cycle within a symbol and tween it across a stage...there will generally be some slippage (Where the background moves on a different timing to the character or vice versa) but it is an effective and time saving technique. For things like rain, falling leaves, snow, wind or a shot with something flying through the air, you can't go wrong, but with character animation you are gunna have to have stylised content otherwise you'll end up with a robot.

Here are some effective uses of computer animation in some of my shots:

In this scene there is a lot of speed and action, it creates a lot of movement. But there is only one drawing. The computer moves the character about and the flashing lines are only on/off frames. The Japanese manga style background also helps to push the idea that things are moving so fast you can't see the background.

In this scene there is only one drawing again, but because in the previous scene we see the boy jump out from behind a log, we know the character is in the air. So when we see him enter above the tree line its OK and float on down towards the camera, we believe it because we know he's in the air. Add a bit perspective blur and have him crisp up as he comes into focus and add some sun shine flaring up the camera and you've got a great shot without having to make more than one drawing.

Computer animation does have its advantages. But you couldn't use it all the time. I have seen plenty of animations that just have a single drawing sliding in front of a detailed background...but it still looks like what it is and this style of animation earned the name 'radio with pictures' in the mid-sixties because budget cuts meant there was so little animation.

Planning Vs. Straight Ahead

2009-02-05T04:51:00.000-08:00

There are three main ways to animate. Planning a scene second by second, motion by motion and drawing it out to plan. Knowing your scene and just plunging in getting wild, funny, big exciting results. Or a combination of the two. I have tried both and I really do like the second way, but the best results are always gained from doing both together. With planned movements you know where your character needs to be for the shot to make sense, then you can fill in the gaps with some over the top actions straight from your imagination. This way the scene makes sense, but it doesn't lose the fun spontaneous element of plunging straight in.

Animators working to a tight deadline often have to just crack on and churn out as much as possible in as little time. These days that means less action, more talking, more still shots and less animation. But you can make cartoons quickly and cheaply with good thorough planning and a bit of effort and imagination.

Here are some examples of straight ahead animation, then some planned shots and then some using both. Let's see which look best.

This scene is animated completely straight forward. The way Uber enters the scene was done frame by frame with no planning and I think it looks hilarious. I really like this bit of animation, its genuinely funny and if applied appropriately this kind of animation really lends itself to overacting. To counter this over the top action...which is then followed by not very much animation I made Pervert Man's lips completely over the top as he spoke. They look like flags blowing in the wind. It all adds up to a very amusing sight...but not particularly professional.

This scene was completely planned. I drew the keyframes and then put the inbetweens and in and added it all together...with a elongated exit frame for panache.

This shot is also completely planned like the above one. It makes up for a fine looking shot because nothing more is required of it. This kind of animation is a necessity, rather than fun.

In this shot I used both methods. I planned the shot, but then I drew it straight forward to get a sense of spontaneity in it. I think with them both working together you get a great looking shot overall with a lot of action and some clever use of traditional animation effects in a limited animation environment.

The argument for the best way to animate was solved years ago...but certain ways are more fun that others. Lip syncing isn't a passion of mine...but it is integral to creating believable animation...whereas making my characters do silly things is something I really enjoy, but something you might not get to do in the industry with the strict stylised looks that dominate modern cartoons.

Experimentation

2009-01-26T07:55:00.000-08:00

Every so often I like to step away from a current project and just have a little fun. These experiments are generally testing something I have read about or want to test for an upcoming shot. Other times they are just playing about because I enjoy making things move. They are all mostly awful and only take a short while to make, but T&P is about experimenting and learning from your mistakes so I figure I might as well upload them. These are a month or so old now and are just some cycles of different actions I was testing, they are rubbish but I learned something from each one and then applied to anything I did for a final product, so they did come in handy.

This was a test walk cycle for a character I never used. I was trying to do some limited animation walks, only working with the legs and arms for speed. The results weren't great and I learned I would need to work with more body parts to make things work.

This is an unfinished walk cycle I was practising. Every so often I do one out just to remind myself of a few basic things. I didn't finish it because about halfway through I realised I knew this walk well and should be concentrating on learning a new walk.

This was my attempt at the Scooby Doo run. It didn't work because I didn't get the action right. The legs didn't come over the back in cartoony manner so it just looked like a real person doing something impossible. This meant it was unbelievable and scrapped. I learned a lot from doing this run. If you want to accommodate such big motions, you need to take the proper time to do so and make them believe able.

X-Sheets or Exposure Sheets

2009-01-19T04:49:00.001-08:00

Exposure Sheets or X-Sheets are used in animation to time shots. They generally run down the page and they provide a guide to the camera man for how to shoot the scene and a guide for the animator on the timing of the shot.

In traditional animation X-Sheets provided a way to make sense of a shot when you couldn't just output every time you adjusted your shot to see how it looked. The best you had was holding the sheets up and flicking the paper to see how the animation flowed...you had to develop a sense of timing. Modern animators don't have to do that because if something isn't working they can change it and test output in about a half second to see how it looks. I have been developing my sense of timing for a while now or trying to at least and it is a very difficult thing to do. By using FlipBook, which uses a tradition X-Sheet layout, my timing has significantly improved. I now understand how long certain movements need to last for a required look. To an extent at least anyway. I still output constantly, because I have the fortune and ability to do so, so why not.

The X-Sheet is essentially a timeline and as such I feel it is only fair to get fair cop out of the amount of work I put into making my animations, so I have taken some screen shots of some of my time lines from my animation to prove just how much effort goes into making any kind of animation, let alone traditional animation.

This is a traditional X-Sheet. On it you would write the numbers of the drawings next to the appropriate frames. A certain number of frames represents a foot of film and this is how animators would time things, by referencing to a distance they could visualise. Certain studios expected nearly 8ft of work from an animator every week. Insanity!

The timeline in Flash isn't that different. You have the number of frames along the top. Each black dot represents a Keyframe. Keyframes are the drawings that HAVE to be there for the shot to make sense.

The wonders of modern technology allow use to see all of the drawings in the timeline if we want to, so that we can see how they lay out. This can be handy for checking the timing on things and learning for the future. He we see the cannon extend and then do a flip before returning to its normal position. Above it was see the smoke that puffs out of the cannon and disappears over a few frames.

Click the image to make it bigger. Here we see all of the frames that make up a scene I am still very proud of. The jumping shot from Eligh's Dark Fable.

Here we see Captain Uber crouching down preparing to blast off and defeat his arch rival, Pervert Man! Literally thousands and thousands of minute changes or completely new drawings go into every shot and as I have got better at animating there are now significantly more complete drawings than ever before...which means more time and effort :)

So this is where the heart of animation lies. How things look depend on how you dangle them on the time line. With practise and patience you get better and better at it.

Slurs & Blurs

2009-01-15T04:49:00.000-08:00

Slurs and blurs are a common effect in animation and they stem from research done in the 1930's at many studios around America and continue through to Chuck Jones experimental work at the Warner Brothers Studios in some of his films.

When animators slowed down live action films to study the motion in them for practise, they saw an unusually high amount of blurred frames. This struck them as strange because at normal playback speed they were barely noticeable. Cameras back then weren't quite as good as they are today and couldn't capture motion quite as well, that said even today if the eye can still only see at 24 frames a second, so anything faster than that will blur and distort. Because of this, animators started to experiment with blurs and slurs in there films and they soon found them to be quite useful for conveying very fast motions or actions and adding a bit more life to their animations.

Slurring and Blurring are basically the same thing and are an extension of the stretch and squash techniques. By dragging a cartoon out to unrealistic proportions for just a millisecond, the action that follows it becomes immediately more vibrant. To do this you might draw just a whole blur of colours, or stretch the character from one place to another and the following frame have him snap back into place. In traditional animation they often used dry brushing rather than stretching entire drawings. This was the simple are of taking a dry brush with some ink on and trailing beyond a fast motion in the scene.

Chuck Jones experimented with endless kinds of effects to try and get more action and motion into his cartoons especially his faster cartoons like Roadrunner in which you will often just see a blue blur instead of a bird. So how can you apply slurs and blurs effectively in your work?

Here are a few examples from my own work:

In modern animation you don't see slurs and blurs quite as often as you used to because everything is stylised and rubbish. But if you use them effectively they can give a great classic cartoon feel to your work. These two shots above for instance follow on from some fairly straight forward animation without any unnecessary embellishments. But by just adding two frames at the end with the feet and legs zipping out of shot you show the character leaving the scene at inexplicable speed.

To clarify the difference the above shot is squash and stretch, two principle animation techniques. These are not slurs and blurs.

However these two are. Looking at them on their own they make no real sense, in fact you can barely see what they are. But whizzing past at 24/25 frames a second, you get a fluid and lovely motion that gives a lot of emphasis to your work.

Mastering slurs and blurs is difficult. You can over use them and end up with really messy looking scene and at the end of the day, nothing makes a scene look quite as good as just good solid drawing and good solid drawing.

Line of Action

2009-01-10T04:48:00.000-08:00

The 'line of action' is a fundamental animation principle. Its purpose it to show how the action is traveling within a character...the mass, weight, direction and pose are all based around the line of action. You might say that it is the characters centre of gravity. Everything starts from the line of action and is built on top of it...it helps a series of drawings to flow into one another and keeps things simple for the eye to see as the film rolls on.

The concept of the line of action was something I didn't grasp at first...I was confusing its purpose with other animation skills and principles. I found the following sheet and it cleared up a lot of things for me pretty instantly.

This was a revelation for me. This sheet clearly showed the difference between right and wrong. Suddenly, I understood how to use this technique to aid my drawings.

It can be put to use on characters, forms, objects and pretty much anything you want to convey action with. This example with the bouncing ball shows that its uses are limited strictly to characters. The direction of this ball, the height at which it enters and exits the shot and the effect that gravity plays on it are just some of the things line of action indicates in this simple shot.

I then started adapting it to my own drawings and suddenly I started to get the results I had been looking for all along.

Even the most insignificant poses can be brought to life by finding the line of action first. The line through the centre of this character tells me that the character is thrusting out his chest and arching his back. I further exaggerated this when I placed the shapes over the top of him and I was quite pleased with the final result.

In this shot I knew I wanted the character the be thrusting his crotch forward. The arm is incidental to the shot, though it does add balance to the rest of the pose. The line is a sharp bend backwards and this line of action really helped bring this drawing of Pervert Man to life.

This is a heavy action shot and I wouldn't have got the result I was looking for without the line of action. In this shot two characters are interacting so the rules change slightly. One line of action affects the other, so I needed to decide from the start which line was more important. I immediately identified the bigger force (The punch), was affecting the smaller force (The recipient of the punch) and used basic physics (Every action has an equal and opposite reaction).

The sharp line through the figure on the left makes the characters intent and action very easy to read. It gives the character purpose and gives his pose balance. Because there is such a sharp force moving to the right, the body must be braced to handle such an extreme movement, i.e. his stance must be wide enough to hand the movement. Because I knew where the force was I could easily place the other leg in a position that gave the impression that a lot of weight was been taken onto it. Without the line of action, this pose would probably have worked out very, very differently and become confusing to read and ugly to view.

The line of action is a significant and important tool for the animator. It helps give characters direction weight and purpose. No amount of research can teach you this skill...it is trial and error and making mistakes to get it right. I made a lot of mistakes and I am still learning some of its broader applications, but this is one tool I have already added to my arsenal.

The Layout Artist

2009-01-04T04:48:00.000-08:00

A layout artist branches across many different industries, but in each one there job is the same. To put things on a page or screen in an order that makes sense to the eyes and is easy to follow. This sounds simple enough when you just state it, but when you put things into practise it gets a lot more difficult.

In the field of animation the layout artist plays an integral role in the way the film is made. He might decide on lighting, character positioning, background positioning, camera angles and he works very closely with the storyboard artist and director to make sure that the story is put across understandably and efficiently.

Learning good layout is very difficult and is something I have struggled with for a while. I am not very good at it, as much as I try. I get too excited about the overall idea of the scene and forgot to stop and ask questions such as, what am I trying to say to the viewer? Why would these character be stood here? What does the viewer NEED to see? How can I place things in this scene to make the job easier for the other people I am working with? What is the mood of the scene?

These are the questions the layout artist must know the answer to before he puts pen to paper. He must be able to see the shot in his head and know how the dialogue, movement, camera angles and characters are going to fit in the shot. It's like juggling a toaster, frying pan and small mammal all at the same time and it takes a lot of practise.

This is a great article about what it takes to be layout artist.

So how do I fair? Here are some examples of my own layout plans for certain shots in my own animation, Eligh's Dark Fable...

This shot needed to create tension. The dark shadows on the boys face need to ease the audience into understanding the boy was been changed by the forest. By choosing an angle from below the character, the negative space around the character becomes eerie. The audience also focus' on the light coming through the trees instead of just character.

This was a complicated shot. After the boy runs off towards the wood the following shot has to not only show that time has passed since we last saw the boy, but also have one character enter the shot, before revealing the other character has already secretly been in shot the whole time. Putting this together wasn't easy. But, with the use of the cameras focus you can easy direct the viewers attention to the things you want them to see. For instance, the camera pans down, the butterfly enters shot. Then the camera moves further in and the focus switches to the log behind the butterfly. This shot look great in the final piece and I am still pleased with it now.

This shot was dropped because it didn't quite have the right spacing for the image. It was also far too dark, too early on in the animation. The boy discovers the forest after this shot and then the piece takes a dark twist. This idea was eventually used in the shot below but laid out a lot better.

Here there is space for the antic on the right, then the boy jumps onto the log and sits there and mopes. He then falls off of the back of the log and the shot changes. A simple shot, but without planning for the action that is taking place it wouldn't have looked quite as good.

Overall as a layout artist I need work, but when you are planning and then animating cartoons yourself, you don't need to communicate your ideas to everyone else so it is easy to work from your imagination and make changes on the fly. If I was laying out scenes that would cross multiple departments then I would need to be a lot more clearer.

Inking

2008-12-20T04:47:00.000-08:00

Inking is one of the final processes when it comes to animation and it is probably one of the most important. It gives your animation that 'polished' look that the rest of the preliminary work will be lacking. It is best to show you what I mean by example rather than by trying to explain.

Not only is this one of my favourite drawings of George Liquor, it is a really brilliant piece of inking. The silhouette of the character is clearly highlight in each drawing and the features fit into the face, like they are made of skin and bone and are real. This is what I strive for whenever I come to draw up my projects into neat.

Before inking come clean up. Clean up is generally taken care of by the animators assistant so that the animator can press on with the actions and get involved in the scene without distraction. A lot of people over the years have suggested that the animators assistants do most of their work for them...but these can't be animators otherwise they would understand that is not the case. It is easy to see why people think that way though when you look at the example below.

The top half is the rough drawing by the animator, the bottom is by the clean up artist. The top has no arms, they are only indicated by lines. The hooves aren't shown - so they have either been cut off by the scanner or the clean up artist has been given permission to do his own thing. But the animator has create this believable pose...along with the other hundred of sheets that this scene will have taken. He has create the actions and drawings, the clean up artist has literally just highlighted what the next department is supposed to see. A lot of people learn to be good animators by becoming assistants. By cleaning up and tracing professional animators lines you begin to really see how to get action and life into your drawings.

Inking has really changed over the last decade...for one it is generally no longer done with ink. Instead it mostly done digitally these days, often with vector based programmes so as to get that 'cartoony' look. Vectors tend to give smoother nicer edges because the computer handles the drawings mathematically, as apposed to pixels which are tiny parts of a complete image.

This is all wrong. I am proud of these drawings, but they aren't inked particularly well. The lines need to firmly join each other so there the gaps cannot be seen. There are 'clumps' of ink everywhere here: the right foot is very messy indeed. This is difficult to avoid and I am beginning to wonder if my pen tablet and/or flash is equally to blame. A good workmen always blames his tools eh?

In my opinion it is one of the hardest things to do well. I have seen very few examples of it done exactly how I like it and I can't get anywhere near to how I like it. It is something I spend ages beating myself up about on nearly every project. As an individual I can't just palm it off onto somebody else, it is my job to create the drawing from scratch and then ink it so that it looks nice and complete. Sadly, it is something I am still studying and it is something I struggle with.

This character has no silhouette and no definition. It is a fun pose and funny expression, so luckily the image carries...but if it was inked better it would a much more exciting and believable character.

From my research, I have learned that the best way to do it is to start from the outside and highlight where the characters silohette is. This gives the character definition from the rest of the image and helps the eye follow the character easily. Then you have to consider the characters pose and highlight the different parts of the image.

You constantly have to try to judge where the line needs more weight and emphasis to attract the eye to the right part of the image...otherwise you lose your audience. Computers have made this a lot simpler, but it is still as skill that requires a significant amount of mastery. It is a necessity though, because it adds life and dimension to your drawings. if they are all one shape and size they are boring and unappealing which is exactly what you want to avoid as an animator and cartoonist.

This blog post provides a great basic insight into how to get started when you are learning to ink. It teaches you how to build your own brush in illustrator and how to go about bringing your character to life from scratch.

Perspective.

2008-12-15T09:46:00.000-08:00

Perspective is something that takes a lot of time and effort to learn and I am no where near close to understanding it. Richard Williams book provides some insight into it, but it doesn't go into massive detail - combined with sat by my window watching cars coming from the distance and making smudges with my fingers when they arrived at certain points I was able to get a basic idea of what I wanted to happen in the opening shot of Eligh's Dark Fable. The boy should come over the hill, running through the grass with net in hand and his foot should stomp down and then leave shot for that added sense of perspective. There should be some kind of sun effect...i.e. blinding light and a silhouette and maybe some effect with the grass moving....but that will all be added afterwards, getting the animation right will be hard enough - or so I thought. My personal research and reading recently have really helped me get to grips with things like 'Solid drawing' and 'Appeal within character drawing'. They are both theories that I won't bother discussing now, but they have helped non-the-less. Here is a video of me making the opening shot:

1 1/2 Hours condensed to 30 Seconds.

I'll break down what I did to put the video into context. I started by ruling in the perspective...any reference on paper really helps put other things in their place because looking at a blank piece of paper is like trying to walk in a straight line the the desert. This gave my character direction. I then penciled in his end point, his halfway point and his beginning...along with a few other places for reference...this meant all I had to do was take the time to join the dots...an amount of time which isn't shown in this 30 second clip.

The main thing was making sure that the audience could read exactly what was going on and I think I achieved that, but to make sure of it the perspective had to be right. The character had to grow as he got closer to the camera, but he was also running past the camera or 'through' the camera, which meant you view him mainly from one side. To breath life into him he still has to appear to be a solid drawing...which he does or rather he will do when he is colored in.

He needed to look excited and focused. What this shot doesn't show you is the butterfly that flies past the camera before the boy comes running up the hill chasing it. It is quite a still scene in the beginning, with just the sound of the wind and heat. The special effects are whats going to make the shot. The camera wobbles when the foot comes down and the sun will blind the camera. The boy is also a silhouette as he comes over the hill, that is why he has no features until he gets closer.

Perspective running.

All of this is an attempt to really bring my piece to life right from the very start. Alright, this is only the opening 2 seconds of animation, but I have never done a perspective run before and combining two fundamental and difficult animation techniques successfully like I have is an achieve I am quite happy to say I am proud of.

In other words, for a first attempt I think I've done rather well.

Jumping, Swinging, Blurring, Slurring, Elongating....

2008-11-29T08:15:00.000-08:00

No this isn't a post about some of the spam you find in your inbox every single day, tis about animation instead.

I have a big long list ahead of me of things to go through in my T&P. Different techniques I have been trying a testing for a while and some new ones I have just come across and have never used. At some point, as part of my T&P, I will be dissecting one of my favourite cartoons (As well as quite a few other animators) of all time: 'The Foghorn Leghorn' directed by Bob McKimson for Warner Bro's back in the Golden Era. It is a tribute to everything animation should be and I love it - but that is for another post. The reason I mention it, is because it is packed full of different animation techniques with varying degree's of subtlety - from the promiscuous right through to the damn right blatant - I have learned a lot from that piece of animation and some of what I am going to talk about today has come straight out of that cartoon.

This is a test piece for Eligh's Dark Fable - so its rough, but I'm pleased with the amount of action I have got out of it. Firstly, I will show you the what I have done.

It doesn't look like much because its short - but there is nearly 40 drawings in there as its all done frame by frame.

Let me talk you through some of the techniques I have tried to apply just in these few seconds. Firstly, the character entering the screen. A sound piece of advice that I have found works well is from Richard Williams 'The Animators Survival Kit'. "Always make sure that if a character enters or exits shot, it is done of at least 5 frames". I have applied this piece of advice here and in many other places and it has always helped smooth the characters entrance or exit.

Secondly, something that intend to discuss in detail in a separate blog: The Elongated Inbetween. An inbetween in a drawing between the key frames - a filler. People often look at inbetweens a necessary evil - they take a crap load of time, but they make things look smoother. Well, for a while that is how I looked at them - but then I started to try and have fun with them. The Elongated Inbetween is great for adding cartoon impact to things. It was used profusely in 40's animation - sometimes way, way over the top for ridiculous effect. You see these inbetweens in everything, even in 'people films' - but unless they are pointed out to you, you won't notice them. If you have ever paused a DVD on an action scene and somebodies face has been blurred across the screen - then you've seen an elongated inbetween and that is where animators got the technique from.

When something is moving so fast that even a camera can't catch it on 1's, things blur and slur. But adding in the elongated inbetween you can help things move more believably - even though the drawing is quite literally a load of blobs. I have used this here to minimal but goo effect.

Here it is used to minimal effect, with the head just slightly tearing off. But it adds a sense of motion that brings the animation to life.

The above example is my final example. Animators watching old films in slow motion back when animation was being born were startled by the amount of blurs and multi frame shots that got caught on old cameras...not so much of a problem today - but out of it was born the above technique. Drawing in a single frame with multiple things happening. This is a great device for the shot before the impact. It tells the views eye exactly what is happening but in extra fast motion just for one still. The mind just blanks it over, but the eye takes it all in. The eye can see at a maximum of 24 frames a second before everything becomes blurry - so when you want the fastest possible action, this is one of your go to methods.

I will cover these techniques and some more in detail in another blog - but I thought this was a great example of how I am applying the things that I am learning from my T&P research.

Boy Run

2008-11-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

For my current Studio Project, I am animating a small boy doing many different things, including running, jumping, and walking and I thought it would be a good idea to tie it into my T&P. That way I get to practise everything once, before it goes into my final studio piece. It means I can get it wrong here - then get it right for my final product, which is a good thing.

To start with I thought I would begin by doing a run from a drawing I made of the little boy from my current project. This is the original concept drawing:

It is a cute little drawing and I want the run to match - even though, after planning my storyboard today I have had to write this scene out from the final piece due to time constraints.

I have made three mistakes with this particular run. 1) I have tried to make a cycle and they rarely ever work 2) I didn't plan it out, I just rushed in and 3) I started on the pass position frame....so my contact position was never worked out from the beginning.

This terminology pass position and contact position are taken from Richard Williams brand of planning a walk. I have always followed his work, I have read 'The Animators Survival Kit' back and forth and still haven't really made any progress. I can copy things out of it perfectly and get fantastic runs and walks....but I don't feel like I'm inventing anything. I have fully grasped the basics, I am just yet to put any of it into action. So I decided to change that - threw away the book and just went for it. It was a mistake not planning it, but I think learning the hard way is some times the best way for the kind of person I am. Let's just say, when I come to do my next piece of animation, it will be well planned in

Here is the basic run I drew. I wanted to get the legs going first.

Once I had got the leg cycle going I added in the arms which you can see below. This isn't quite right. It looks OK. Obviously its wobbly, because it hasn't been cleaned up and its also on 2's. But I have learned a lot just for this simple drawing. I won't be attempting a cycle again for a while - I'm just used to working with Flash and now that I'm working with a genuine animation program its taking me a little longer to get used to it.

The its not that bad, but it isn't quite what I was hoping for. At least I know what is wrong with it and how to make it better next time.

I was going to go over it, inbetween the entire thing and add the rest of the detail, but time has run away from me so that is for another day. Overall the result gets an OK from me, but it means I won't make the same mistakes in my final piece - which is all that's important.

Bigger Picture

2008-11-13T14:18:00.000-08:00

Tonight one of my older pieces of work, 'IGOR: The Unhappy Clown' was shown at the IMAX cinema in Bradford as the opening piece of a show reel before a 3D film about a journey into space. It was quite a revealing experience in many ways: 1) I didn't know that I would get nervous about it playing and be quite as shy as I was at hearing my own voice (Masquerading as a Eastern European) put through a cinema's PA and 2) Seeing your own work on the big screen is quite an unusual thing.

I have seen it on big televisions, small monitors, portable devices, MAC's, PC's and a whole range of stuff - I've even seen it projected before. But watching it up there on the big screen with over a hundred people watching was a surreal experience that I honestly did not expect to be happening for many, many moons to come. And even when it did happen (Because I'm confident it will) I expected to be frustrating the person sitting next to me by pointing out all of the inbetweens (That's where it will probably start) or the Key frames (Hopefully that is where it will lead) or scenes (*Closes eyes and prays*) that I have animated as they flick by at some predetermined number of FPS.

Anyway. It was awesome. Nuff said.

Bouncing Ball Refined....

2008-11-11T09:46:00.000-08:00

I said I would go back to the bouncing ball (And I will continue to do so throughout my career) because it is the most basic and also the most important technique an animator can know. It teaches weight, timing and material based physics. I wasn't happy with my previous attempts and at the moment I am forced to use make puppets out of my characters with Flash...so this took me about 5 minutes, but it was relief that I cannot explain. It felt good making every single frame. Planning the timing of the bounce, knowing where each frame needed to go to make a nice smooth bounce through the screen. T&P is my relief at the moment - Flipbook is definitely the tool for me.

The Run Cycle

2008-10-28T04:04:00.001-07:00

This is jumping ahead a little, but is something that I have been practicing and working on for quite some time. It was Ken Harris who said, "Learn walks, everything else will follow" and I believe him. Since I started practicing and learning how to do walk cycles and learning the ridiculousness involved in the process of walking (Fall, catch, fall, catch) my other animation seems to have begun to pick up a stronger sense of reality - or rather the opposite, but people are more willing to accept it because of the way I bend their perceptions.

Now my characters will run like this (No inbetween frames).

And walk like this (No inbetween frames).

Whereas before...then would have been bobbing up and down at the front of the screen so that I didn't have to draw legs and other complicated movements.

I remember at one point I was proud of this walk....

It all seems so innocent and kind of rubbish now and that wasn't animated that long ago at all. Progress is constantly been made, though it is an uphill battle. I feel like I am finally making some headway though, which is important and my characters are beginning to show weight and timing, even though there is still a long way to go yet and a lot more techniques to try.

Animation Magazine

2008-10-28T03:52:00.000-07:00

This Website...
...Is home to Animation Magazine a publication that has been running since 1986 and has covered every aspect of animation at every level without bias. It is one of the most accepting formats going, covering everything thing and anything to do with animation just for the love of the art.

They have great features on the website every week linking you to things going on in the world and on the Internet related to animation. Interviews with people in the industry and reviews of current technologies mean you are always are the front of what is currently happening.

This Book...
...Collects together all of the best parts from the last 20 years of the magazines publication and is a book that I have been eyeing up for some time. Sadly, it is very expensive.

Animation Magazine is great for research and has been a valued resource throughout my journey in becoming an animator. Sadly, I have only been able to garner scraps from it and around the Internet as it isn't published in this country and none of the resources i.e. library etc. stock it. One day I will make my way through the entire collection!

The Bouncing Ball

2008-10-28T03:24:00.000-07:00

The bouncing ball technique is among the very first things you learn as an animator. Richard Williams, author of 'The Animator's Survival Kit' opens his book by reviewing how well all animators this technique, because even though it is a reasonably simple technique at first sight it really does carry with it every thing you will ever need to remember as an animator.

Weight and timing make things come to life, everything in animation is based on this principle. As humans we have built in perceptions that need to be exploited for us to understand and relate with what we are seeing. If we saw a bowling ball, a heavy object that we associate with throwing, floating away like a balloon, we as humans would be confused and irritated because something that we recognise hasn't reacted in the expected way - other people find that kind of thing very inventive and creative and enjoy being surprised, but if a child was to see it they would be quite frustrated that the TV was telling them something different to what they thought they knew.

To understand weight and timing you don't need to do that much research....you just need to look at the things around you and the things you already know well. If you have grown up understanding that balloons float, then nothing changes because of animation - they still float and that is all you need to know. But have ever noticed that in animation the balloon doesn't just pull tense the string its attached to, instead it bobs up and down even if the person is stood still - this way we show that it is in fact floating around. If we were to show a static balloon, just hanging in the air we would use of previous perception of the behaviour of a balloon to question the animation. So the point I'm obviously trying to make is that weight is just as much about understanding as it is about emphasis. In cartoon land a bowling ball isn't heavy, it's HEAVY!!! The character can't lift it! He straaaaains his back and his arms elasticate and his face contorts to emphasize his struggle - unless he is a superhero, then he can just lift up a house. That is weight, timing something we will delve into next time.

This is one of my very first attempts at the bouncing ball technique from a few years ago.

This is one of my later attempts....

And this is my current level i.e one I just knocked up.

Here it is in half time so you can see exactly whats going on....this one seems quite jagged, but whe you run ti at full speed you don't see it....then again you don't really see the ball either. Still a lot of room for improvement, I will come back to it in a later blog to search for improvement.

As you can see, there is a significant difference. Not in drawing style - that isn't even to be considered as there are only rough sketches not full animations. All you need to do is watch the film and question yourself - 'Do I believe that is a ball bouncing up and down?' If you're answer is yes, then it has weight and timing.

New Proposal

2008-10-21T03:37:00.000-07:00

I have drafted a new proposal for my T&P after lack of enthusiasm with the other one and the realization that it was quite a pointless venture, when I could be working on something that would improve my output and animation skills. To put it in laments terms, I realized that the Techniques & Processes used in animation would make a much better Techniques & Processes project! Its taken me a little too long to figure that out - but I am sure I can more than make up time considering I was working on this all summer. I feel rather stupid at the moment.

Here is my new proposal:

For my T&P I will be investigating and experimenting with the Techniques & Processes that make up Animation. There are many skills and practices that make up animation and many advanced ways of observing and creating life like forms that move in a way we perceive as ‘real’. Behind these lie very basic principles and techniques – these are the things I will be looking into.

Ken Harris, famous Disney animator from the Golden Era of Animation put it best when he said, “The true gift of an animator is being able to take the unbelievable and make it believable”. You cannot turn a cat inside out or break limbs in silly directions in real life, but in cartoons you can do just about anything and get away if you are a good animator. But reaching that stage is something that not all animators manage and in the modern climate it is something that is very often not required. I on the other hand do want to reach that stage and then go even further, so this line of investigation and practise is not only important knowledge, it is essential.

Some of the things I will be investigating include:

• Line of Action
• Whips
• Breaking Joints
• The Process of creating an animation: working from the stick figures through to final coloured piece.
• Forms
• Character creation
• Realistic and unrealistic movement

I hope that by practicing the T&P behind animation I can become a stronger animator with a better understanding of not only how the process of creating an animation works, but also how to make my animation more believable. I think this is essential research and practice and I believe it will do nothing but benefit my studio work and indeed my future as an animator.

FlipBook and a change of heart....

2008-10-21T02:40:00.000-07:00

Having recently making the transition to FlipBook and wondering how I have ever managed to try and become an animator without it, I have made the executive decision to change my proposal and looks at something a bit simpler: The Techniques and Processes Behind Animation. This is going to center around 2D work, but as always with these things there is room for expansion. I will be animating the same piece of footage in several different mediums including 2D, hand drawn scans and 2D images - even going as far as to trace and hand paint some Cels. Primarily I want to look into the actual techniques behind animating, things like the 'line of action' and 'whip action' and many other techniques that are essential to becoming a good animator. I have been working on all of these things in my own time on top of all my other work and after some consideration it seemed ridiculous to not do this for my T&P when it is so important in becoming a solid animator.

Above is a time lapse of me creating the video you can see below.

28 minutes work to make just over 1 second of animation.

It is rough sketches, basic positioning with no timing and no in-betweens - in other words it isn't polished. I will be polishing up the lines, transforming the stick figure into a character of my own design, inbetweening and then coloring the character and adding a background to show the entire process of 2D digital animation - this is to illustrate the animation process, from beginning to end. After that I will begin working on Animation techniques and doing rough stick drawings practicing and investigating techniques.

Scanning and Converting Images to Vectors

2008-10-14T02:12:00.001-07:00

Scanning a document into a computer is easy, but converting it to vectors without losing too much detail is difficult.

When you scan an image, it is a file type that memorizes the image with pixels. The word 'Pixel' is a contraction of the words 'Picture' and 'Element', two words that perfectly summarize both what a pixel is and what they are used create. It is the smallest piece of information in an image and is typically a sample of the original image, so that when many are grouped together they create a clearer image of said image. It is a very clever system, but it is also quite a dated system. This is only a very concise description of what pixels are, but I am not writing this blog about pixels, but rather about Input and more specifically conversion of said Input.

Vectors differ from Pixels greatly. Vector is a word we might more often associate with coordinates and algebra rather than computers and interesting enough, that is exactly what they are - coordinates and math for the computer. Vectors use Geometric shapes, lines and points to equate graphics, rather than samples of the original image. By doing this, not only can the computer calculate them faster (Because computers are built around binary, they are made to calculate data and numbers - that is what they were originally built to do) but they actually look better - there is no resolution distortion or loss of image quality. 'Better' isn't a great term: digital might be better. The images look better on computer screens, they are brighter and more alive but they are also significantly less human.

OK, now that we are clear on what the difference between Pixels & Vectors are, we can begin working. I will be creating a very short animation and using many, many different mediums to transfer that image to the computer. I will then be comparing the results, for clarity and future usage. For instance, will an animation turn out better if I scan images in, convert them and then use them in an animation or will the results be better if I just draw straight into a computer. I will be looking at many different mediums including pencil, clay, photographs, scanning and so forth. I will use the same piece of animation in all of these different mediums so that the difference in the results is crystal clear.

As an example of the difference in results that I expect, I will do a starting test by scanning in two different drawings of the same image and converting it to vectors, before comparing the results.

The first image was a very rough drawing in pencil. The second image is a traced version of the drawing in a darker, clearer pencil - this would be the drawing animation studios would use to scan in, so I expect the results to favor the traced drawing.

Both images are below scanned at 300 dpi. Can you tell which one is traced and which one is rough?

Already we see the higher image quality in the lined drawing. The paper that I used for tracing the image is professional 40grm animation paper - obviously that has made the difference. I will now convert the images in vectors and we can compare the difference in results.

As you can see from above, neither drawing transferred to vectors very well. There are probably just too many lines in this complicated image for the program to deal with. I will look into different programs and see if I can better results for when I actually start scanning in the scenes. I think this is going to be quite a fun investigation in using different methods of animation and it is also going to be very helpful in the future for knowing the ins-and-outs and difficulties of each method of animation.

Although, this was the not the result I was expecting, with a bit of work with Flash, you could probably get tighter vectors and better results - but this was mainly just an example of the kind of thing I will be doing throughout my T&P project. I will animate the scene I will be shooting, then I will begin doing the same animation in a series of mediums recording the difficulties and advantages to all the methods and the time spent and everything else.

A list of things to look at....

2008-10-14T01:57:00.000-07:00

Scanning and converting to vectors in Flash
Scanning and converting to vectors in Illustrator
Drawing into the computer with a mouse
Drawing into the computer with a tablet
Different programs for drawing into the computer, Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flipbook
Tracing Images with a tablet
Tracing Images with a picture taped to the monitor
Drawing to pixels and the differences
Drawing to vectors and the differences
Converting bitmaps
Cintiq tablets
Wacom brand vs other brands
Tablet PC's + Laptops
Touchscreen Monitors

INPUT.

2008-10-07T03:11:00.000-07:00

The main reason I have chosen this topic to study for my T&P is because I believe a better understanding of this subject will help me create better animations at a faster rate and decide whether drawing directly into the computer or drawing onto paper and transferring things into the computer is the better way. I would like it to turn out that the later is best way, but that is just because I am a traditionalist.

I thought the best thing to to begin this blog would be to go through some of the input methods I have previously used and talk about their pro's and con's.

Tablet
I have worked with a tablet now for many years, going through many different brands and price ranges before I reached a tablet that I was happy with...which of course turned out to be a 'Wacom'. Wacom represent the great jump forward in interfacing with the computer. This is been taken to the next level with touch screen monitors and laptops that allow direct input - but this will most likely be discussed a little later on in the blog.

I have used several brands of drawing tablet now, including Touch, Face and several others and have found Wacom to be of the highest availiable quality. I found the A3 tabet to be quite frustrating for animation because it in ivolved a lot of movement and even though it gave me a bigger surface area to work with, it actually hindered my animation work. It was handy for tracing pre-drawn images and drawing over them on the tablet - but this wasn't as acurate as I hoped. The A4 tablet was the best, but I had to settle with the next one down due to money issues. That said, it is still of the same high quality - just a smaller surface area. I will be covering Tablets in more detail later in the blog.

Here is a short list of some of the things I will be covering in no particular order:

Scanning and converting to vectors in Flash
Scanning and converting to vectors in Illustrator
Drawing into the computer with a mouse
Drawing into the computer with a tablet
Different programs for drawing into the computer, Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flipbook
Tracing Images with a tablet
Tracing Images with a picture taped to the monitor
Drawing to pixels and the differences
Drawing to vectors and the differences
Converting bitmaps
Cintiq tablets
Wacom brand vs other brands
Tablet PC's + Laptops
Touchscreen Monitors

Testing, Testing...One, Two. One, Two...Alrighhhht....

2008-10-07T02:30:00.001-07:00

This is where my T&P research and progress will be documented. On the internet for all to see! For my T&P this year, I am going to experimenting with input devices for Animation. Looking at different devices and methods of inputting images into a computer to use in an animation. This is my brief:

T&P Proposal
Digital

What will I be investigating?
For my Digital Techniques and Processes project I am going to investigate different methods of converting drawings into digital data. A major issue that animation companies around the world have is the input of drawings into digital animation programs and the digitalisation of hand drawn images. Not only is it a very lengthy and time consuming process, it is also very expensive and extremely inaccurate. I have wanted to research and investigate new methods of importing sketches and drawings into a digital space for a long time but have been waiting for the correct time and opportunity to try and test several ideas that I have already had.

What are the main problems I am likely to come across during my investigation?
There are many, many problems with importing images and then converting them into different types of digital data so they can be used with animation programs, but the main issues I have found are:

It takes a ridiculous amount of time to scan many, many images if you are working at even if you work with a low frame rate or at the standard frame rate ‘on 3’s’ (A drawing every three frames).
There is a loss of image quality leading to wobbly lines.
Converting images to vectors of other ‘digital ink’ can take a long time for a computer to process.
Keep the continuity of the animation becomes increasingly difficult when you start cutting and pasting. It then takes a lot time once again to reposition each drawing correctly so that the drawings ‘line up’.
It costs an awful lot of money and creates an extra workload to employ somebody to scan in hundreds and hundreds of drawings. You are not replacing the camera-man of the traditional animation world, instead you are creating an entirely new job – scanner/scannist/image digitiser.
Drawing directly into the computer is a time consuming process and is extremely inaccurate unless you have a dedicated studio or a ridiculous equipment budget. A tablet PC or even screen tablet such as the Wacom Cintiq are expensive pieces of equipment and providing hundreds or even just tens of animators could end up been a quarter of a million pound job.

How do I intend to go about solving or overcoming these problems?
During this project I will be trying and testing several new methods looking mainly for a way to ‘cheapen’ the process of image conversion and looking at different ways animators on a cheap budget can get better results without having to spend thousands and thousands of pounds. At the same time I will trying and testing new methods of importing drawings, sketches and images and converting them into ‘digital ink’. These will include investigation into conversion to vector images, pixilation and the use of ‘true images’ in computer animation. Animation has always and will always be a time consuming process, but a large part of my investigation be looking into ways I can speed up the scanning, conversion and output processes. Realistically, these are the only areas that can be sped up – there will more than likely never be a quicker way to make thousands and thousands of consecutive images that together create the illusion of movement. Slave labour and dedication are the only way to animate.

Things I will be testing include:

Do different levels of DPI in scans affect the outcome of conversion of images into vectors?
Do different types of pencil and pen affect the outcome of conversion?
How accurate do the drawings need to be when scanning in?
How does the tolerance level affect conversion of images into vectors and what is the best tolerance when using say a 2B pencil?
Etc.