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jorvaidni-art · 11 years ago

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Over the course of this semester, my awareness of animation and the principles that govern it has been completely changed and I feel like I am constantly learning and improving my skills. Previously to starting this course I had 2 years of experience working with clay animation for my Moving Image Arts A-level. Looking back on all my previous work I realise how flat and lifeless my characters appeared when animated, how characters in illustrations could be vastly improved with more dynamic posing, and yet I know I still have so much more I want to learn and practise before I am anywhere near the standard I want to be at. Here is some of my learning.

One of the huge elements of animation that I needed to get the hang of was the idea that the animator’s job is to ‘give a performance’ that an audience can empathise with and, more importantly, believe. As I watched previous Disney films I loved as a child I began to pay more attention to the expressions on character’s faces, their body language, how animals can be made to look so human that an audience can connect to their thoughts.

I’ve gradually been working through my reading list, consisting of the key animator of ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, Richard Williams’, “The Animator’s Survival Kit”, Chris Solarski’s “Drawing Basics and Video Game Art”, Peter Lord and Brian Sibley from Aardman’s “Cracking Animation”, Frank Thomas and Oliie Johnston’s “The Illusion of Life”, and Michael D. Mattesi’s “Force: Life Drawing for Animators”. The principles across all animators appears to be the same, from how actions are timed and spaced, to the understanding of weight and the use of squash and stretch in exaggeration to add life to appearance and movement of characters or objects.

The persistence of vision is a principle that has been used across history to create the illusion of movement from stationary drawings, which then led to many inventions created in the 1800s that sparked a growing interest in the concept of moving pictures. In 1906, James Blackton and Thomas Edison created “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces”, consisting of over 3,000 ‘flickering drawings’ using chalk on a blackboard that was then photographed. One of the many artists who advanced animation included Windsor McCay who created the interactive show “Gertie the Dinosaur”. ‘Felix the Cat’ was an early example of personality animation, which then led to Walt Disney’s “Steamboat Willie” in 1928, the first cartoon with fully synchronized sound. Disney then began setting the standard for animation with each breakthrough – “The Flowers and Trees” in 1932 being the first full colour cartoon, and then in 1937 the first fully animated feature-length film “Snow White” gave birth to what is known as the ‘Golden Age’ of animation.

At the start of the year we were given the 12 fundamentals of animation, and these we would need to constantly think about when designing our projects, particularly in the later animatics we would create: 1. Squash and Stretch 2. Anticipation 3. Staging 4. Straight Ahead 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 and 12. Appeal. We began some Timing and Spacing exercises, learning the theory first then putting it to practice in Adobe Flash. Using Flash for what was for many of us the first time was quite challenging. The software looks daunting for anyone new to it with the idea of objects on separate layers being ‘tweened’ across a timeline feeling very alien. However the lectures were well paced and explained and so after some time we all began to understand the software, at least to some degree. The various exercises we underwent included animating a bouncing rubber ball, a bowling ball that rolls down a staircase, a ‘rabbit’-esque ball that bounced off the screen, and a floating a hot air balloon. These were all interesting as they forced you to think about how the object would realistically be affected by size, material and weight when it came to animating the movement.

Spacing is how close or spread out the overlapping clusters of the object in each frame. The ball OVERLAPS at the SLOW part of its arc. It is SPACED OUT when it drops FAST. Timing, on the other hand was when we wanted the ball to make impact with the ground.

Before making impact with the ground, the rubber ball changes shape due to the speed and force behind it. As it collides, its whole weight shifts and the result is a squashed appearance that then stores energy and then releases it again in a stretched out form.

Animators communicate through movement. Exaggerated movement adds interest to bland actions, appearing bigger and bolder than real life. However they are believable through smooth animation that flows from dramatic poses to held positions. From 'Cracking Animation': "Before you animate, use your own body to rehearse the movements and secure a smooth flow from one phase to the next. We call this 'acting through the puppet'". To make your animation a performance, your character's traits should be visually exaggerated and made dynamic. Personality affects their motion and posture. Many artists use previously shot footage as reference material or act out the animation evenets themselves to understand the timing and movement, whilst adding their own energetic characterisation. It is essential that the audience can empathise and understand the character's performance.

Individual spacing for each body part that would move at separate speeds from one another to look more lifelike. Characters tend to switch between 'pose' and 'hold' actions. Expressive sequences are sometimes used in scenes with continuous dynamic movement. However, when character is still they are never just stationary. They should always be expressive in their facial and body language, with different parts of the body moving at different speeds, as in real life.

In the animation industry there are 3 main ways in which you can approach animating a scene: Straight Ahead, Pose-to-Pose, or a combination of both. With what is known as Straight Ahead Action, the frames drawn flow naturally and are spontaneous, essentially letting the artist draw the scene as they go along, with more imagination and creativity. However, this often means the scenes are much harder to clean up to fit with the rest of the animation, and tends to miss the point of what is meant to actually happen in the scene. Ultimately it is time-consuming and costly. Pose-to-Pose Action however, decides the most important ‘key’ or ‘storytelling’ drawings to be drawn out first, followed by the next most important frames, the extremes, and then the transitioning ‘breakdown’ or ‘passing’ positions which are crucial to the arc of an action. Finally, the animators can make charts to ‘slow in’ or ‘slow out’ of these extremes with ‘inbetween’ frames, responsible for shape and volume control.

We also had the task of creating a storyboard for an animated sequence from Winnie the Pooh of Piglet sweeping leaves before getting carried away on one by the strength of the wind. With this excercise we had to consider the movement of the camera, the anticipation of wind blowing the leaf into Piglet, his struggle and the force pushing back against the leaf, the exaggeration and posing of his fight before being swept up and swirled around in the air.

For our Perception video we had the huge task of creating a 2 minute animation over 6 weeks, together with people I was just starting to get to know. A lot of time for this was spent planning out and agreeing on the genre and main story, character designs, storyboarding, and learning how to use Adobe Flash as that was our decided upon medium after a few arguments. Work division for this project stopped being an issue once we had our final storyboard drafted, and then we could all animate different scenes using the same character PNG files and background techniques, consulting each other in case any scenes needed clarification. For this animation we employed the principles learnt in the lectures of timing, squash and stretch, as well as cinematic techniques such as varying shots from wide to extreme close-ups, creating the effect of the camera following the old woman’s movement – though in a lot of scenes the camera is stationary. The downside of choosing animation over filming is that we did not explore as many of the camera techniques as other groups, such as camera tracking, panning and zooming. However, we did take care to add movement and pacing of the camera where necessary, and in our storyboarding and animating we took care to frame our shots using the knowledge of what we had learnt, such as the rule of 3ds, to place characters and objects in the frame in a way that reads and is visually interesting.

Learning how to professionally storyboard was a challenge for our 90 second animatic, ‘Runner’. Although I have created many storyboards for my own clay animations and for the Perception animation, I have always used them as a visual reference for how scenes might look and the order events will go in, however breaking each scene down into key frames and timing how long each action would last for was new to me as I was used to shooting a claymation scene and sort out the timing and editing afterwards.

It was important we figured this out in the early stages for the animatic though, as we were not allowed any time over or under those 90 seconds. We understood the importance of this; in an animation studio, after the final storyboard has been created there is no room for flexibility in the timing of the animated actions. Any dialogue, sound effects or musical scores would have already been timed and probably already recorded by this stage, so each frame would need to be drawn to match up with the sound. The storyboard in any animation is the skeleton from which everything can be built upon and without one, or with one that has a weak storyline or badly timed actions, the final product will have many problems to overcome in the process of creation. As a team, we began planning everything out, taking photographs for pose referencing and timed our actions with a stopwatch.

Our 3rd animatic was a result of a task to find a 30-45 second dialogue clip with 2-3 characters from a film of our choice which would then be transcribed and passed to another team. The idea was for none of the characters to name each other or be too obvious in dialogue as to what the film was so that the next group who got the dialogue would have absolutely no context of what was actually happening in the scene and would have to make up their own interpretation, storyboard it, record the dialogue, and then either film or turn into an animatic. This task focused on the quality of creating a good story and gave the teams freedom to act out more than they might have in previous projects.

With our group, we turned our script into a conversation of a prisoner/lunatic with his own inner voice. The animation and storyboard was limited, but our aim was for the scene to be slow paced and settled into the mood and mindset of the character, with the focus on the dialogue we recorded. Ryan played the role of both sides of the man in his conversation, putting on a slightly posh voice which we then played with in the post-production stages, pitch shifting it so it sounded deeper, added reverb for the echo of the room, and panning between the left and right speakers. Sound design was, again, a large element of this project as well, and we worked hard on layering different atmospheric sounds against each other - the dripping of water, scraping metal, a bell toll, the creepy howling and faint drum beat of the heart. Though they will not be the things the audience pay attention to, they add a huge amount of depth into the believability of this scene.

In conclusion, the work we have done so far has greatly reinforced our learning of the animation techniques that will be expected of us in this industry. Through careful planning and organization we have created pieces of work that we are proud of. Even if they are not all necessarily our greatest ideas, or there were problems in communication or execution, we have put the fundamentals and theory into practice and I feel that we have all developed the skills and awareness to each work together and create functional and perhaps even believable or lifelike animations. Rachel Johnson

#designdiscourse

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