Animation Exercises - week 2

These are this weeks Animation Exercises.   This weeks subject was a very simplified head structure.  I based this structure off of the structure used by Andrew Loomis in his book: Drawing the Head and Hands.  This week I received some excellent advice from Rainplace (I think Mike Nguyen is his name).  He recommended having an emotional motivation for the movement.  I tried to work that in starting on day 6.


Day 1 - a simple turn-around to familiarize myself with the structure and practice turning it in space.
Day 2 - Bouncing cycle with a little rotation.  Ended up looking kind of stiff
Day 3 - Jumping over distance,  this ended up being my favorite
Day 4 - Overlapping action cycle with a cube representing a torso going up and down
Day 5 -Bungee jumping,  I started this one without a clear idea of what I wanted it to look like but it still turned out okay.
Day 6 - So excited he launches out of control.  I was trying to do a stagger effect on the antic but it didn't quite work.
Day 7 - Moving so fast he loses control, but manages to stop himself before going over the edge.

Adding the emotional element to these makes it more difficult, but also a lot more fun.  As I try more complexity and emotion, I am more likely to fail to achieve the look I am going for.  I do go back and try to fix them up quickly if I can, but I have to keep in mind that these are intended to be quick exercises so I shouldn't refine them until they are perfect.  It is good to have this opportunity to try out things and not be afraid to fail.  I figure if I never fail, I am not being ambitious enough.  On the flip side, If I am failing too often then I am being to ambitious, since the purpose of these is to practice the fundamentals so they become second nature.

Animation Exercises

Last week, Jesse Winchester, from Schoolism, came to speak to our class. It was a very inspiring presentation. One of the things he encouraged us to do were daily exercises that isolate specific drawing skills. I know from experience how powerful that can be; so I took this idea, and applied it to animation. This week I did a quick animation exercise every night before going to bed. These took between 15-30 minutes. The specific skill I am trying to isolate is moving-three dimensional objects realistically in three-dimensional space.  I plan to use simple forms, so I can draw them quickly. The idea is to focus on the movement, not the individual drawings.  What I hope to achieve through these exercises, in addition to all the other animation I do, is to reach a level where moving objects in space is second nature, so I can focus more on the character and performance when I animate.
The theme for the first week is a cube. I figured a cube would be good to start with because, by definition, it is three-dimensional and must be drawn as so. The first day, I dropped the cube off a ledge. It bounced slightly, then after coming to rest, pulled itself back up. In the next exercise, the cube does a flip. The third and forth exercises featured the cube twisting one way, then twisting back in the opposite direction. I did this one twice because I was not happy with my first attempt. The problem was, I started animating without a clear idea of what I wanted it to do. As a result I ended up with an unclear action. On my second attempt, I knew what I wanted and was able to achieve it fairly easily. The next exercise was the cube jumping off into the distance. For my sixth exercise, I tried to give the cube a little personality and had it do a take then faint. My final exercise was the cube falling away from the viewer looking downward into a well.
It is early to say whether these exercises will give the desired result, but I am very optimistic they will. I plan to keep doing these exercises every day as long as I can find the time. Each week I will chose another simple shape and gradually get more complex while staying simple enough to remain focused on the movement.

Layouts

These were assignments for my layout class.  I enjoy layouts.  I like composing a scene.  Having the whole frame to work with, and with tones and colors allows me to create contrast.  Working with perspective appeals to my logical side.  Even though I often fudge the perspective, since I know the rules, I can logically figure out which way an object should sit and which planes should be visible.
Layout is important in animation, not just to give the characters a stage to act on, but also to set a mood.  The feeling of the environment can have a profound effect on the mood of a scene.  The look of the layouts and backgrounds is an important element and must match the look of the piece.

For these first layouts, the assignment was to create a composition with two characters, a briefcase, an animal, and a vehicle.

The next assignments are perspective assignments.  The first being in one-point.  I may have 'fudged' the perspective a bit much in this.  I moved the vanishing point away from the center to create a stronger composition.  This means technically it should be two-point perspective, however I still handled the lines as if it were one-point by keeping the horizontal lines parallel to the picture plane.  While technically this is wrong, I think it makes for a stronger composition, which is more important than getting the perspective correct.  For the color, we were aloud to use one or two hues.  The idea was that it would still be similar to greyscale.  Color adds to the feel of the piece.  One color also adds another dimension.  Greyscale can range in brightness.  One color can range in brightness and saturation.  Saturation being the strength of the color vs grey.  I took full advantage of that in this layout to contrast bright, saturated glowing lights, against a dark, desaturated backdrop.  The composition still works in greyscale but looses some of its punch.

The next assignment was two-point.  To create the circular shape of the room, I measure the room as a rectangle, then created a larger rectangle around it.  From this larger rectangle, I plotted out the circles in perspective.  I used a desaturated orange, to contrast the saturated blue of the sea.  I didn't push the contrast quite as much as the last one since I felt it would be distracting in this composition.

 This assignment was three-point perspective.  This was to be the exterior of the two-point perspective layout.  I was told to stop using so much color, since the class was supposed to focus on line and tone, so I kept all the color equally desaturated.

The final assignment to focus on perspective was to use measured perspective.  This means using perspective grids, and evenly spaced elements.  For this I went for a classical look.  I created a lot of contrast by using black against while to highlight the geometry.  To keep this contrast through out, I used only black, white, and 50% grey.

Special Effects Animation

In this post I will cover the two weeks we spent on special effects animation. Any animation that is not a character is considered effects animation. It usually refers to water, fire, smoke, and explosions. Special Effects animation is very different from character animation, yet follows the same principles. The first thing we covered was a flag waving in the wind. In this exercise we animated the wind, as seen by its effect on the flag. The flag follows a wave pattern. This is important because that pattern comes up again and again in special effects. The waves are created by eddies of air as it pushes the flag. To animate the wave, animate the eddies and draw the wave on top of it. Here is my flag waving cycle. The mistake I made here is having the eddies shrink in size further down the flag. This means the trough and peak of the wave are less pronounced further towards the down wind end. These should be the same size as they are on the upwind side, giving the end a snap to it.

 Next we animated a water splash. Special effects animation can be very detailed. It is important to start by animating very general shapes to get the motion down before adding the detail. For this splash, I studied a slow-motion video of a rock being thrown in a lake. Also, as in all my special effects studies, I referenced Joe Gilland's great books: Elemental Magic both Volumes one and two. A splash creates sheets of water, in a shape determined by the shape of the object causing the splash, and said object's angle and rotation. When the object first hits, the water is propelled with a lot of force. This force begins as a hydrological explosion and quickly forms the shape of the splash. As the force dissipates the splash slows at the top of it's arc. Next, the water shape breaks apart as the splash falls back to earth. A secondary splash occurs as the water displaced by the object rushes back into the air pocket created by the object breaking the surface. In many cases, including the splash I studied, this is actually larger than the primary splash. It follows the same pattern of movement as the primary splash, shooting up quickly, slowing at the top of it's arc, then breaking up as it falls. Animating water is difficult because in order to make it work, it must be abstracted yet still look like water. I feel that the biggest flaw in my splash animation is failing to make the splash really look like water.

Our final special effects project was left up to us.  The following clip is my project.  To animate the fire, I first animated the air currents.  Then I created a layer of fire shapes on top.  Next, I animated red and yellow soft layers above and below those fire shapes, based on where I thought the heat would be, to flesh out the flame.  The process lead to a very stylized fire.  I feel my skill were not up to creating a realistic one.  The motion of the explosion is similar to the splash.  The initial force is very strong and creates the smoke shape quickly.  The smoke shape slows down and then breaks up.  It dissipates and flows upwards instead of falling back down like the splash.  The smoke follows the exact same pattern as the flag wave.

I enjoyed special effects, but I am glad to be done with it and back to character animation.  If I were to really devote myself to effects animation I would study fire, smoke, water, and explosions, both in motion and still images.  It would take years to really learn to draw these forces, even longer to animate them.  I will not be doing this study because it will not make me any better at character animation, which is my goal.  However, I do feel like it is important to have at least an understanding of how special effects animation works.  In the future, if I am called upon to produce effects animation, I will have some idea of how to do it.  Also, there is something useful, as well as beautiful in studying the pure physics of these elements and the forces behind them.

Working with Dialogue, Music, and Sound

Working with sound adds a whole other element to animation.  Since the timing of animation can be controlled precisely within the fraction of a second it can be synced perfectly with both speech and music.
First, we covered lip sync.  Lip sync can be done simply by breaking down dialogue into the individual sounds that occur during each frame.  Then, the mouth shape is drawn to match the specific sounds.  Mouths shapes are covered in too many books in too many different ways for me to go into detail here.  It is slightly more complex in practice since multiple syllables can occur quickly in a single frame.  The important thing in making a mouth look convincing is to open quickly on the vowels and close slower into consonants.  Also, the longer a vowel is held, generally the more open the mouth.  Here is an exercise just for lip sync.

Animating dialogue is not simply making the character appear to be talking but to make the character act.  This is something a character animator works on an entire career.  Here is my first taste of it.  The first video is something I did on the side.  The voice is my friend Jarryd Meyer prank calling a blood bank.  This was practice for our dialogue assignment.

The assignment was to record one six second line of dialogue, then animate a character delivering the line.  The character must be shown in a wide shot (full body) and use his whole body to act.  I decided to go for some serious over acting.  The line is delivered by Nathan (sorry, don't know his last name) who is a very talented voice actor.  This was definitely the hardest assignment of the first semester.

Animation can be set to music as well as sound effects.  A beat can be placed at a regular number of frames (for example an accent every 12 frames), then music can be written to match or music with the same beat can be used.  Sound effects can be broken down frame by frame and noted on an exposure sheet.  Of coarse, syncing to music can be much more complex. Mark Mayerson and Amir Avni both wrote excellent posts on the subject.  This is one of my favorite aspects of animation.  Below is one of my favorite examples of music and animation synced.

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Our final assignment for the semester was to animate a character moving around to music.  The actual syncing with the music was not part of the grade.  It was more about showing all the principles we had covered during the semester.  Since the character had to jump around, I did not try to sync it to the music at all.  The jumps take too long to hit every beat. The assignments were linked up to form a class anajam.  At the beginning of each assignment we were to morph the previous character into our character..  This was to be synced with a sound effect we recorded.
The first video is my assignment.  The next is that of the whole class.

Walks and Runs

After an overview of The Principles of Animation, The next things we learned are walks and runs.  Animating walks and runs is simple to understand but infinitely complex in its variation.  Everybody has a distinct way of walking.  The way a character walks says a lot about a character and his/her mood.  For example a confident character will walk differently than a wimpy character.  That same confident character will walk differently when he's sad.  As you can see, there are as many way to do a walk as there are characters and emotions.
The nuts and bolts basics of how to make a two-legged character walk is fairly simple.  However he/she walks, he/she will go through some variation of four key drawings.  The first is the stride or contact, where the forward foot first contacts the ground, but before the weight has been shifted to it.  The second is the down or squash.  Here, the character has shifted his/her weight to the forward foot.  Usually, you would squash the character's leg down to take the weight.  In real life, this squash is very slight, usually imperceptible; however, in cartoon animation this squash gives the walk and up and down action which is much more lively and appealing.  The next key is the crossover or passing position.  Here, the rear leg has left the ground and is coming in front of the front leg.  Without this frame, the leg seems to pop from one side of the body to the other.  The last key is the step or up position.  Here, what was the rear leg has now passed the front leg and is outstretched, ready to make contact.  After the step, the other leg contacts and the cycle begins again.  With these four key, infinite variations are possible.
Walks can be animated from one part of the screen to another, or they can be done in a cycle.  In a cycle, the foot on the ground, that would be stationary in real life, must move at an equal rate throughout the cycle, as if it were on a treadmill.  Also, the first frame of the cycle should follow the last frame.  With a cycle a background could be panned behind it, and it would look like one continuous walk.  The first walk exercise we were given was a cycle of a character with extremely loose joints.  I took this to an extreme.

Walks can also be done in perspective.  The keys are the same.  The only difference is the added complexity of perspective drawing.  Start with a perspective grid on the ground plane.  The length of a grid square is the length of the character's stride.  First, using the grid, draw in the stride positions.  Then it is simply a matter of animating through the four keys between each stride.  The next exercise was to animate the same character from the cycle in a perspective walk.

After walking we covered runs and turning.  A run is basically the same as a walk except its faster and at one point both feet are off the ground.  With a run there are also four keys.  The first is the launch, were one leg is pushing off the ground, launching the body.  The next is the mid-air key, where both legs are of the ground.  Then the landing, where one leg, usually the one that did not launch, first makes contact with the ground.  Finally, in the squash position, the landing leg squashes to take the weight, while the other leg passes in front.  The squashed leg will be the one that launches in the next key.  In a simple 90 degree turn, after the squash, instead of passing the front leg, that leg turns.  Then the step is pretty much the same except now at a 90 degree angle, same with the contact.  Here is a quick exercise I did to practice turning.

For the major assignment on walks, we had to animate the pink panther walking in a way that expressed emotion.  First he had to walk across the screen, then turn an walk away from the camera in perspective.  After four strides he had to stop, turn 270 degrees, then run off the screen.  We were to follow the formula on all the walks, runs, and turns, except for the 270 turn we could be creative with.  The emotion I chose for him was upbeat.  I had him walking with a double bounce, where he goes down a second time during an extended crossover.  For the 270 turn, I had him pirouette.  To do this I studied youtube videos on how to pirouette.

Since the assignment I have continued to practice walks weekly.  There is so much of character animation in this motion.  I created another blog for my class to practice walks.  Check them out a The Weekly Walk.

Principles of Animation

The next subject covered in animation class, after basic timing, is the principles of animation. First laid out by the pioneers at Disney, these principles are necessary to make animation look convincing. They apply to any medium of character animation, whether hand-drawn on paper, 3d, or a whiteboard and camcorder.

Stretch and Squash -  Making the character compress and expand with the forces involved in the movement.  This could be literally stretching and squashing a rubbery cartoon character.  However, stretch and squash can be achieved without changing the characters shape by movement through the joints.

Anticipation - A minor, often opposite, movement that precedes an action.  Anticipation allows the character to generate the necessary force to carry it through the action.  It also prepares the audience for the action.  The classic example of anticipation is crouching down before jumping.  Without the crouch the character would seem to be being lifted off the ground instead of jumping under its own power.

Secondary Action - Parts of the character that attach to the moving body follow.  Hair and clothing do not move on their own unless the character moves or they are acted upon by some other force.  They follow the moving character instead of moving at the same time.


Overlapping Action - Related objects start and end their movements at different times.  If every part of the character moves at the same time and same pace it looks unnatural.  For example, when flicking one's wrist, the arm and hand move in opposite directions, the hand starts later and moves faster.

Follow-through - Things don't just come to a dead stop suddenly.  The motion will continue as it decelerates.  For example a batter doesn't stop swinging after he makes contact with the ball (or not) but continues through the swing,

Slow-in, Slow-out - Objects must accelerate before reaching full speed and must decelerate before stopping.  Objects generally move fastest in the middle of an action and slower at the beginning and end.

Arcs and Trajectories - Objects in motion follow a path and do not suddenly change direction without a cause.  Arcs and curves are beautiful to look at and see in motion.

Drag - Objects tend to remain where they are until moved by an a force.

Pacing - Characters do different actions at different speeds instead of every action taking the same amount of time.  Varying the pacing prevents the motion from being monotonous.

Exaggeration - Animated characters can do much more than real life characters.  Total realism is boring in animation.  It is the responsibility of the animator to take things further.

Appeal - Character and motion should both be aesthetically pleasing.  This is the hardest principle to define.

I have read these principles many times before.  However, you don't really know the principles until you use them.  As you can see, there is a lot of overlap in the principles.  That is because all of these principles should be applied simultaneously in all character animation.
To help clarify these principles we were given four short exercises to apply the principles.

The first exercise is for the principle of drag.  Here a spaceship is dragging a ribbon behind it.


The second exercise is secondary action.  Here nun-chucks swing from a pendulum.  The nun-chucks follow the primary action of the pendulum.  I realize it is unrealistic for the nun-chucks to go higher on the second swing than on the first, but this is just an exercise and I wanted to try both a smaller movement and a larger one.


The Third exercise is for overlapping action.  As the train hits the wall, when the front of the train is being pushed off the tracks the rear cars are still moving forward.


The forth exercise is for follow-through and secondary action.  Here a ball is wearing a skirt.  As it bounces it pulls the skirt with it.  When the ball changes direction, the skirt continues its path until the ball pulls it the other direction.  This was my favorite exercise.


Now these principles are applied to a character.  This is exciting, after using the flour sac, to move onto a character with arms and legs.  It is the next logical step since the character is basically a flour sac with arms and legs.  The character looks very similar to Stitch from the Disney feature Lilo and Stitch, but he isn't; so don't sue me.  Here, he jumps a couple times then falls on his face.  The principle should all be in this animation and every animation I do for the rest of my career.  A few example: Before he jumps, he crouches down, applying the principle of anticipation.  When jumping, he follows an arc and moves slowest at the top of the arc.  Here we see an arc, slow-in, slow-out and pacing.  When he lands on the first jump, his force causes him to use his hand to catch himself, demonstrating follow-through.  When he falls on his face, his hips land before his head and arms;  then his hips bounce off the ground before the head.  This demonstrates overlapping action.
 
This was practice for the principles assignment.  Again, the character is Stitch-like.  He starts on his back.  He stands up; then an object hits him on the top of the head, knocking him out.  He falls to the ground, unconscious, and bounces upon impact.  The above-mentioned principles should all be applied in the assignment.  How he stands up was left up to us to figure out.  Since we know the principles we should be able to figure it out.  I am very happy with the way this turned out. 


It is great to be working with characters already.  With these principles, I should be able to make any character move believably.  I feel like I am just starting to understand the principles.  It will probably take me years to truly master them.  My long term goal is to understand them so well I apply them automatically, without thinking about them so I can focus on acting.