Ambitions - Part 1 - The Teaser to Insight!

After a few months of internal debate, a journey to Estonia and extensive field testing, I finally feel ready to share my thoughts on ambitions.

Ambitions play a core part of the work I do and my thoughts circle around the subject a lot. About a month ago I started to boil down my thoughts on how I work with ambitions to its essence. The outcome is the equation depicted below:

I will leave this open for you to think about. Don't despair though, part 2 is already in its making!

Running Indian: Thumbnails

Some time ago I did a drawing of an indian man. I, along with my mother, thought that this was a very successful drawing and I really wanted to take the character further and use him for some animation. The drawing can be seen further down the page.
At first the idea was to do a close up scene with him using the drawing as a keyframe to get started. However, the God of Doodles had another plan! While doing a playblast of a scene for Cartoon Saloon I started to sketch him in a full-out run. The sketch had a good raw energy to it (first one was the one down in the right corner) and I kept on going almost keying out the poses for the run.
I did the sheet in about half an hour, threw down a few notes, scanned them in and started working them over in TV-Paint adjusting them for animation.
I love the feeling of being on a roll putting every line down in just the right manner. (Not every line maybe...look to the lower left corner) Feeling the flow of what the drawings would be like in motion.
when I sketched these out I tried to have in mind all the time how to take it further than a simple generic run. How to add an interest to every sketch, while still having it compliment the previous ones. When every sketch is strong enough on its own to show what's going on, then the foundation for an appealing animation is laid out.
Going into the first pass on the animation the drawings will have to be adjusted to unfold an overall pleasing flow playing out the motion intended. This can be a very hard compromise, I think. Maintaining the uniqueness and strength of the sketch while toning it down to be a part of the continuity is a delicate process. In the end it should only make the scene better, so the compromise should be to strengthen the animation without taking too much away from the single frames.
Next post I'll show how I am trying to get through this process safely with strong drawings together making a strong animation.
As always I am very interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter, so please don't hesitate to leave a comment, thanks.

Drawing for animation

For the past three years I have tried to in cooperate drawing successfully into my workflow when approaching a scene. It is not up until recently that I have started to feel in control of both the animation and the drawing aspect of the scene and make them go hand in hand as I believe they should for a scene to breathe organically.
Either the drawings turn stiff in the attempt to maintain the character model, the animation gets compromised, because it is adjusted to fit the drawings or it simply takes too long to draw the frames to keep a healthy continuity going for the animation. These have been the problems I have run into during my self-study and now feel I am starting to shake off. What have helped me in this process is what I would like to share in this post.

What I first off had to realize was that the animation and overall feel of the scene and character has to be priority number one. Everything else should be in the scene to support this. To be able to support an overall feel of a scene I have to know what that feeling is and break it down as simple as possible.
For example the scene I did called 'the old couple' had one keyword to the entire scene; joy. Every drawing in this animation should depict this feeling. This approach brought something into my animation that I had not been able to bring earlier. I can best describe it as my intention and emotion for the scene getting integrated in the 'masses' (the characters) I animate. The reason I say masses is because without the transfer of emotion and intend they are exactly that, masses. They only become characters in my eyes when they appear to have a will of their own. I think I brought some will to the characters in this scene by not trying to control it entirely, but letting it play out with the the clear emotion of joy in mind while creating it. Too much control over a scene will in my experience hinder the characters in it becoming actual characters. Let them surprise you and take the scene to another level, where you bring them life and they in return turn to life as unique creations rather than an empty shell, a thought of what they should be.
I used a different approach on how to implement the drawing aspect for this scene which I think worked really well for me. I told myself repeatedly that no drawing was tied down before the part of the animation it supports is working as I intended it. Even a storytelling drawing is only two frames in your scene! I benefited a lot from this way of thinking about it.

Distortion is necessary to make a scene work. It took a lot of personal struggle to begin to grasp this and how to implement it naturally into my work. I find that it has to be controlled through drawing. I tended to get scared of 'ruining' the design of a given character in my animation and it turned out as a string of illustrations lacking believability and move too mechanically. A thing that helped me start to push this issue aside was to think of where to implement changes of shape into my scenes. To see a breakdown or extreme as a chance to bring in a unique shape for the mass animated works well for me. Do not think of the breakdown or extreme as a the middle shape between the keys you might be animating to. These are great opportunities to push your characters model around and be imaginative about it. I try to have fun instead of feeling restrained basically, which is harder than it sounds. With this approach I find that a lot of the drawings in the animation get to be unique while they still serve their role as frames in a scene. I find that animation and drawing go well together this way since the drawings now bring interest to the animation and compliment the it better. There will be more interesting movement through the change of shape and less straight-forward in-betweening which in the end will bring a more interesting look to your scenes.

It is important not to let a single drawing stall you and ruin the continuity in your work. I find that if I am having trouble with drawing a frame in my animation it is because I am unsure what is happening in the animation. I then either re-evaluate what I planned for the animation, get really rough with it and try to hit something that animates with the surrounding frames or simply leave it to come back to. For me it is really important not to get stuck since I forget my priorities and get lost in the drawing aspect of the scene, which will in the end ruin the scene.

Drawing in animation for me is about adding finesse and characteristics to the scene and I want to add it from the beginning. This is hard, but I am truly pleased that I do not settle for anything less.

Here's a link to the scene I mention with the old couple : http://frederik-villumsen.blogspot.com/2009/03/one-week-of-1st-pass-animation.html
and a link to the thumbnailed golden poses for the scene: http://frederikvillumsen.blogspot.com/2009/04/animation-sketches.html

Not all scenes are about great emotions and life and death though, and I think it is important to be able to take these grand thoughts down to a level where they can function in smaller and less grand scenes.
I recently did a short cycle scene for Cartoon Saloon, where I think the drawing is a good example on how I like it to be for animation. The character is riding on the back of a wild goat. There is not a clear emotional state of the character or at least it is not in focus, but every drawing is drawn with the action in mind and as first priority giving me a clear idea of where to push each drawing instead if letting it be its own.

(All pictures and animations in this post is copyright property of Cartoon Saloon)




Mike Nguyen has written a post I found very interesting. It is about distortion in animation and here is the link:
- http://rainplace.net/?p=270

Thank you for reading, I hope it has been of interest! You are very welcome to share your thoughts on the matter or simply comment on the post. I am always interested in input and hearing from like-minded people with a passion for animation.

Stop Motion Planning, workflow and experience

Beside the fact that I'm not thumbnailing or sketching for a scene, stop motion has a very familiar work flow. I get the scene handed from the director, I look at the animatic, look at the notes the director has given me, I write my own notes and questions, I have a talk with the director and hopefully I get my questions answered and NOW I'm ready to stand on my own for a while and create the foundation for a strong scene.
I take a deep breath, I clear my mind, without forgetting everything the director told me! I imagine the scene as I see it finished. I run it in my mind over and over and take note of all things happening that I like. Big storytelling beats as well as small gestures that I like for the characters. Usually the animatic, and thereby the director, will have a fairly set timing on all scenes. On 'Forest' this is very much the case and the creative freedom does not lie in overall timing and story beats. It lies in all the character animation between and around the beats. The poses might already have been settled on as well so this isn't where I can experiment either. I find that especially the transitions and the timing of these as well as secondary actions are the areas in which I can make the scene into something more than what is to be seen from the 'blueprint' of it.
When I have a strong idea of how I would like the scene to be, I arrange for another exchange of words with the director. In this meeting it is very important to me that nothing is left unaswered. If some of my ideas for the acting or speed of the actions don't fit the directors plan, we need to come up with something he likes together, which usually works for us, or I have to rething parts of the scene. I already once tried starting animating a scene, while still having unanswered questions in my mind and it really doesn't work for me. It distracts me in the sense that the scene feels open to input and new ideas and this makes my mind wander off. When I animate, I want to focus on getting my planned motions down best as possible.
So I get all my questions sorted with the director, before I start animating. If I am still a bit unclear about what the director wants with a scene after our first couple of talks about it, I blog it out roughly and we take it from there.
The timing of transitions and of the scene in general is what is most unique about stop motion, I think. In Maya I can slide my keys around as I please and in hand-drawn scenes I can change the frame number and add, replace or take out frames in the process. In stop motion I don't have this possibility. This forces me to fully understand the velocity and motions involved in the scene, before even starting to animate the puppets. Thumbnails, small sketches or notes are all ways to remind me of my thoughts about the scene. I've done a few scenes now and I tend to mostly do notes as planning with the occasional sketch or two. (see planning sheet above for as an example)
Every frame is unique and importan in the sense that I wont have the opportunity to go back and adjust it. This demands all animation senses to be on high alert for every frame, which is what I am learning the most from these days. It is also exhausting and at times it is very tempting to capture a frame even though it isn't spot on and I only kind of know how my arc for the right ear is going to be like! This is where professionalism, stubborness and self-discipline plays in and I find that it can be a real challenge to work on a scene for two to four hours without loosing concentration. Luckily our time schedule allows breaks when we need them. They are very needed to get a high quality result, I think. And this is what we want!

Stop motion animation stands to as an amazing challenge that will leave its marks on the way I animate. It's hands on and trial and error with immediate failure or success! And during it all you find some great friends in the puppets.

Headshake Overview

I did this overview of the headshake from the scene. Match it up with the planning sheet I posted if you are interested in the process of going from timechart to actual drawing. I am quite pleased with the flow of the mouth shapes in this part of the scene so that was just another reason to post this overview. Enjoy.

Headshake Planning

From fr91 to fr111 I want a headshake. *I just like to think she, she...* is the dialogue for this bit and I think that a headshake would support his subtext very well. (see post about subtext further down on the page)
I will animate it from profile to 3/4 and it will be on 4s. A headshake on 4s means that he will shake his head 3 times in 1second, 25fr. I find it helpful to think this way when planning a headshake.
As you can see from the time charts I did, I am going to ease out from every key. Next week I will do a test to see the diference in doing the same headshake, but with ease ins instead. For this assignment I find that this is the best choice since it will help the lip-sync better along.
Check out the key drawings and timing of this in the video a few posts below to see how it works.

Eye Pass

The eyes will be an important part of the scene so I wanted to give them the time a day they deserve. After I got my acting beats down, while acting it out myself, I started to think about the flow of the eyes. Where should there be blinks? Where should they be open and closed? All this planning is saving me the pain of erasing faces, eyes and nicely drawn but wrong mouthshapes from my keys. It is pretty simple and doesn't take a lot of time or effort to do. I am very pleased with the results I am getting with this aproach and can only recommend you try it.

Acting Pass

This is my pass on the acting and action. I wrote down the dialogue first and then started to act out the scene with the soundclip rolling in the background. I was looking at my very first pass on this, the brainstorm sheet, to make sure I follow up on the original ideas I had. I am trying to keep this planning simple and precise and note only the really important things. Fx are the eyes an important part of this scene, but I felt it would take a lot of extra energy to think about that at the same time. I will go through the eyes in the post above.

On the sheet shown here, I have all I need to key out the scene with help from my thumbnails. Fx I can see that my acting had me put down the vase as he says 'you'. I then look at my x-sheet and simply number it so the keydrawing is ready to be part of the string of drawings. I find that this way of doing it gives me the peace I need to get all the things in the scene I want, and that on the right time as well. In previous scenes I have done, I've always found myself changing a lot of the timing around throughout the process and it is far from optimal. Breaking things up in passes feels right for me and it seems to work as well. I can only recommend that you aproach your scenes as simple as you need it as you can. It can remove a lot of stress.

Beat 3

Third beat should maintain his stiffness and that he is thinking about something not so pleasent. The diference between beat2 and beat3 is that in this beat, he isn't 'offended' anymore. He knows how the situation was and he finds comfort in the fact that he knows better. Actionwise he gets back to business and starts to coam the hair of the customer.
For this beat I have planned a headshake for him to shake the stiffness off. I will post the specifics on this later on. Also the coaming has been planned fairly accurate and I'll post about that as well.

Beat 2

For the second beat I want his mood to stiffen and he should loose some of the warm feeling from the beginning of the scene. If you take a look at the subtext you will see why. His action, which is putting down the vase, will support this nicely if timed right, so that's a thing to keep in mind when getting into further planning. When I am to work more with this pose, I am going to try and support his now 'colder' mood more than in this sketch. For axample by having negative space between him and the customer, which will have his silhouet seems like he doesnt want to touch the customer, not a warm feeling to it.
I put in the sketch from beat 1 to have the continuation in mind and maintain my idea of how it should animate. If I can't fairly clearly imagine the arcs between the poses I've thumbed, then I know I need to try and do another one inbetween or change one of the them.

Beat 1

This is the first pose in the scene. Or the thumbnail for it that is. I have divided my scene into 4 beats and I have given each beat a golden pose to work around. This is the sketch fitting the example I gave in my post below. It pictures the hairdresser pouring water in the hair of the customer. I wanted to put emphasis his nostalgic mood as he is thinking of his late wife. Having him gaze into the falling water gives me that effect.
On each beat page I've done, I have wrote his dialogue line, his subtext, which is his thoughts that describes his feelings and not the words he is actually saying, and last the action. I have tried to keep this as simple as I could not to have the scene feel complicated before all the real complicated things should be added! So this was beat1.

I always enjoy to see how other people aproach their work, but it is usually not easy to come by the first rough idea sheets. Maybe because they look messy and got ugly drawings on them or perhaps they get lost in the big piles of paper! i don't know. Nonetheless I would like to share my aproach to the dialogue assignment I am doing.

I did this last night and I use it as sort of a brainstorm phase, where I close in on what I want. First I simply write the words of the dialogue. I divide them into phrases to have room for notes as well as to keep an overview. I kept on listening to the dialogue, while I started to act out the scene as I imagine it in my head. Just through acting it out a few times in what would seem the same way, I pick up on some small subtle gestures or maybe poses that make sense to me.
For example : In my scene, the main character, the hairdresser, is talking to his customer about his late wife. I want him to act as a hairdresser throughout the scene, while his mood and thoughts drift away in another direction. So his secondary actions wont put emphasis on what he is saying, but on what he is thinking. "She was very protective..." is his first phrase. In this phrase, the beginning of the scene, I want him to nostalgicly think back on his wife. So I had my idea for the mood of the character. Now I need to figure out how I can put emphasis on this through his secondary actions. I once made a drawing of this guy pouring water in the hair of his customer and I tried in my acting to put this in, but it either got in too early or too late the first five or ten times I acted it out. Then I tried to start pouring the water in the customers hair before the dialogue starts. I really liked what this did for the scene. It sets just the mood I want and he is now starring into the water as it is falling from the vase as he is saying the phrase.

Long example! This is how I am building up the acting of my scene. I love doing dialogue scenes, because I have something very solid to work from, before even starting to draw. I continued to work through the phrases like this and I kept adding small notes about mood, actions and whatnot.
I will go through the other phrases as well as I did in the example above, but it will be in my next post accompanied by the sketches I did for the phrase.