Animation

I just realized I'm posting my 'homework' results to these Brian Lemay lessons and I never gave them a proper intoduction. How rude of me. Well, here, I hope, is a proper intro for those curious.

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I originally went to school to become an animator. Unfortunately I made the wrong choice in the school to go to and later found out they had quite a poor animation course. However during that time I fell in love with 3d modeling and ran with that. Modeling has served me well. I have so far loved to do it professionally, and it has given me the chance to work with many great artists first at Glueworks, and now at Blue Sky Studios. However, I find myself with once again yearning to bring things to life through animation, specifically through traditional animation, drawing each frame of movement. So now, instead of going to an expensive school, I am going to home school myself. Luckily there are many resources available to me. There are my co-workers and animator friends who are open to giving advice, many resources out in internetland, as well as good books to learn from. One such resource are the books by Brian Lemay.

Brian has much experience in animation. From his website:

"He worked as an assistant animator on the feature film, Rock and Rule, character designer on the original Inspector Gadget series, and layout artist on Ewoks and Droids, Smurfs, Flintstone Kids, Laser Tag and Punky Brewster.

Brian Lemay was the Co-ordinator of the Classical Animation program at Sheridan College from 1996 – 2000. He was also an Instructor teaching Storyboarding, Layout, Character Design, Animation, Background Painting and Life Drawing from 1988 through 2000."

His book here teaches the fundamentals in a very methodical approach. Starting simply and adding one element per assignment. Each assignment reinforces the previous principles, so over time the early learned principles quickly become second knowledge and you don't even think about them. Once I complete the lessons I'll give my full personal review of the course. So far though I recommend it for any who wish to learn about, and create animation.

You can find out more about Brian Lemay, and purchase his learning material from his website: http://www.BrianLemay.com

Here is a simple assignment showing an important aspect of animation. The anticipation/reaction of a movement helps sell the action to the audience. The anticipation can help the viewer know that a big movement is coming up, just as the reaction can soften the end of a big movement. Or it can be a more subtle shifting of weight like when your character picks up one leg and the weight shifts to the other foot before the character takes a big side step (anticipation) only to subltely settle into balance after the big sidestep (reaction).

The first assignment that dared to enter into the third dimension. Giving drawings, and animations, the illusion that they exist in 3d space helps sell to the viewer that it actually exists. In drawing objects in perspective, an object in the background thats the same size as an object in the foreground will actually be smaller on the page. Things look smaller the farther away they are. In animating in perspective, the spacing from frame to frame follows the same principle.

A larger view of the clock
(click on the image abover to enlarge)

Another variation of overlapping action. This one almost combines the previous two assignments. This is another pendulum type swing, only this time the pendulum arm is a string and therefore can bend. This subtle change will effect the path of motion for the ball. At the two extremes of the swing, the ball is no longer pulling on the string to keep it taught, the ball is basically hanging in air for a beat. During this time the string gets a little slack, which itself is effected by gravity. So that slack starts to curve downward until the ball is once again moving downward and pulls on the string again making it taught again. Its amazing what you can convey with a circle, a line, and a little time isn't it?

Okay, so this is essentially the same concept as the last assignment. In the last assignment there was one object lagging behind the movement in another object, here however, one part of an object is lagging behind the movement of another part of an object. In this case its an piece of seaweed. The center of movement starts at its base, then the effect travels along the length of an object. This concept can be used in a multitude of other areas, like the wagging of a dogs tail, or the sway of a girls ponytail.

Rough

Here is the first step in the assignment. I first animated the spine of the seaweed to get the movtion and timing down before I jumped into animating the forms. From this simplified version though, you can see how this concept can be used in the wagging of a dogs tail.

Final

The movement is of course way too fast. I would have to go in and do quite a bit of inbetweens to slow it down to the speed what actual seaweed would move like.

Here the idea was that you have one large ball with a smaller ball hanging from it. The large ball travels across the screen and the smaller ball must then inherit that motion. In doing so, you have to take into account the ideas behind intertia. As the large ball begins to move, the smaller one wants to stay where it is, therefore it gets dragged behind a little bit. Once the large ball stops though, the smaller ball, now moving, wants to continue to move. It does so, while being limited by being tied to the large ball and by gravity. So the small ball is going to slowly come to a stop, more or less in a pendulum motion.

Here is a relatively simple exercise that utilizes the principles of key extremes, arc path of action, slo-in and slo-out, and repeating cycles. The ideas behind a pendulum swing can also apply to the movement of characters arms and legs, or anything that moves around a pivot. I had to do this exercise three times to find the right timing.

First Try

Here I purposely didn't follow the timing chart Brian provided in his book. He timed the action on twos, meaning he broke the motion down to take 12 frames to swing left to right, then doubled each frame to make 24 frames, or one full second. I thought if I did it on ones, a new drawing for each frame, I would have to figure out my own timing, which would force me to think things through more and understand things better. As you can see, the way I broke it down the pendulum tends to favor the two extremes for too long. It seem to hover, defying gravity, at the end of each swing. So that was no good.

Second Try

So here I went back and followed Brian's timing chart exactly, hoping to discover what I did wrong. While it did help me figure out where the timing was wrong, I wasn't exactly happy with his timing either. While the timing of the slo-in and slo-out feel right, the speed of the pendulum through the middle part of the motion feels too quick. Also note the more jerky aspect to the motion. Thats a result of animating on twos.

Third Times the Charm
(You are getting sleepy…very sleepy…)

Using the previous two tries, I found a way to breakdown the motion to have the right timing for the slo-in and outs and not speed through the rest of the swing. Instead of having the pendulum continuously pick up speed through the downward movement of the swing, I had it pick up speed, then maintain a certain speed through the majority of the swing. Then I just had the slo-in and slo-out at the very beginning and end of the motion.

Wow, this assignment was much tougher than I was expecting. The lesson I learned here is timing and spacing is EVERYTHING.

As you can see the ball is moving left to right in increasingly smaller arcs. The change in position of the ball along the arc frame by frame is what gives the illusion of weight and gravity. At the top of the arc the ball moves slower, they are closer together, because the energy pushing the ball up is losing to pull of gravity. As the ball begins to fall again, it picks up speed so the spacing becomes further and further apart. The bounce has a lot of energy which carries the ball upward quickly again, so spacing is still far apart, then it begins to slow once again due to gravity. At the same time, the motion left to right is also slowing over time until it rolls to a stop at the end.

The difficult part in this is finding that right about of distance the ball travels to give that constant and consistent motion. If you are off just a little bit, then the ball appears to hang or jump and its very noticeable. I had to redo this one a couple of times to get it right. It still isn't perfect, but the illusion is achieved and at some point you just have to move forward.