ChooChoo ^^
Rainplace
Hand-drawn animation from an inner perspectiveThe Organic Speed-
The technical perfection of timing a scene including slow in & slow out doesn’t guarantee that the animation is now has sprung to life. While mechanically perfect, the texture of the animated movement might still appear clockwork and mechanical. For life to be invoked, the speed of movement has to feel organic and natural.
This organic texture is very personal and an essential quality that defines an animator. There is no technique that can address this organic speed because it lies beyond the mechanical aspect of movement. It is a ‘feel’ that the eye senses a movement.
However, there are ways to coax the organic speed into the movement by consciously ‘feel’ a designated force prior to animating, then allowing it to subconsciously come across through the animating process by constantly referring to this ‘feel’ as a anchor.
(Here, study sketches for the scene above in ‘My Little WORLD’)
On Slow-in & Slow-out-
In a way, slow-in & slow-out is part of the larger ‘timing’ principle, placing attention to the exhilaration and deceleration of movement. While simple in nature, it is often overlooked especially at the earlier stages of learning to animate. Same to the early days of animation, the spacing of drawings tend to be in equal increment, resulting in unnatural one-speed movement from start to stop.
In movement dynamics, a mass takes time to pick up speed and same to slowing down. It is an interaction of cause and effect between force and form.
From a physical outlook, slow-in & slow-out yield information to the strength of force and gravity. And from a deeper sense, it is an important component to performance. It brings grace to movement, carrying emotional info through the control of exhilarating and decelerating duration. Imagine a single musical note is strike on a piano. The way a note lingers and fades away is rooted in the force that strikes it.
It is good to keep in mind to vary and contrast the starting in relation to the stopping speed. For example, if the action is slow to exhilarate then good to have a quicker decelerate (instead of same ratios to starting and stopping).
Most critically, slow-in & slow-out has to stay true to reflect the interplay of physical forces or its expressiveness would be hollowed.
ChooChoo ^^
On Timing-
Much of the vitality in an animated movement is rested in ways that it is timed. With all the 11 principles of animation in place, it is lastly ‘timing’ that make or break a movement.
Timing addresses both mechanic and performance.
From the mechanic aspect, timing should reflect a flow of interacting physical forces between the internal and the external, from one body of mass toward another through the varying speeds.
And since movement is information and a critical element of storytelling, the way a scene is timed greatly affects the interest of a performance, bringing about the underlying emotion that is encased within the physical action.
Cue to timing is rooted in ‘feel’, an essence that is critical to the animator. Feel out the action of a performance and committing to a pattern of flow (like a phrase of music) prior to animating is the anchor to timing a scene.
(Above, a clip from an unfinished short film that I started a very long time ago and am intending to finish some day. And here, a rhino study for the short film)
My feline companion ChooChoo ^^ :D
Interpreting the Animation Principles-
Hand-drawn animation requires all 3 conditions- solid draftsmanship, fluid mechanics and compelling performance to enable a character to life.
And in the pursuit of these conditions, some distinctive patterns emerged. They were noted by the master animators from the Disney Studios back in the earlier time and written into the 12 principles of animation.
When studying animation, the 12 principles become a technical guideline and often taken at given surface values. For example, ‘squash-and-stretch’ is necessary to keep the movement pliable, organic and not stiff-looking. A body part must squash and stretch from a technical point-of-view. But it really is much more than that and has much to do with how an animator senses a feel of mass in relation to force.
I feel it is very resourceful to question the principles, to fully understand how certain principle came to be from a more personal perspective. Through this in-depth understanding, an animator can truly apply them effectively, and in turn, adding new personal revelations.
(Above, my very first scene for the industry from Disney’s ‘Rescuers- Down Under’. I was animating more on instinct for most of my earlier time and not as consciously aware to the underlying nature of movements, causing me to be much slower at arriving to a result…)
Production Approach to Clean-up Animation 02-
A hand-drawn character has to stay consistent in movement textures while looking on-model, flowing seamlessly from scene to scene as if just one animator created it.
And in feature production, maintaining a character’s look to be on-model is very achievable. However, to maintain a consistency to the movement texture of such surface details like clothing articles are more challenging within a group effort, because each animator will likely sense the flow of such particular fabric differently.
There are 2 ways to overcome this difficulty. One is to enable a single animator to handling a block of successive scenes. Another is to have just one designated assisting animator to tie-down a block of scenes and addressing the overall follow-through while following the established character performance in the rough pass from the various animators.
When viewing a classic Disney film such as Snow White, each character looked, moved and feels very consistently as if just one animator animated the entire character. From my observation, the clean-up process was quite different back in those days. The role of the animator was to arrive at the essence of a performance, opting to leave out many surface movement details undefined. The rough animation is then followed up by the assistant animator, putting character into final model and completing the remaining surface animation such as clothing articles.
The assistant animator in this production approach is very well capable at animating and only missing the ability to generate a compelling performance.
In the above clip from July Films ‘My Little WORLD’, the scenes were animated by 3 different animators (my friends Steve Wong, Casey Alexander and Michael Koizumi); each kept rough with right characters proportion but not needing to be exact on model. I tie-down the 3 scenes and the final clean-up lines by my other friends.
My cat ChooChoo ^^
Production Approaches to Clean-up Animation 01-
The sensibilities required of the clean-up artist is differs pending on production preferences. In our presence time, the animator is required to keep the animation drawings very well defined, fairly clean and on-model.
The clean-up artist follows the animator’s line very closely and narrowed it down to a final line with precision to steadiness, thickness and density. The clean-up work is tuned to the technical side of drawing mechanic, adding finer model details, refining volume consistency and perspective in motion, not on surface movement texture as this task was entrusted solely to the animator.
In this approach, if one animator is handling a block of scenes then a consistency is maintained. But due to production schedule, often animators get assigned disjointed scene within a sequence of film. The result is that while the character is looking on-model, it is often appearing inconsistent on film due to the differences of interpretation to surface follow-through from scene to scene by the many animators working on same sequence.
It is quite different when greater responsibility was entrusted to the assistant animator in the clean-up task, where the ability to animate also a requirement to help maintaining consistency to surface look of movement throughout a sequence.
(This was my very first scene for Brad bird’s ‘The Iron Giant’, assisted by my late friend June Nam who was my Lead Key for this project :D )
