28 Principles of Animation
This article was given to me by Mark Kennedy (storyboard artist on Hercules and Tarzan). Thank you Mark for all those handouts!!
Often times animators and storyboarders in the industry are able to get handouts from some of the artists who are great teachers. This is an example of such kind of handout that gets circulated among the artists gradually. It took me quite a while to retype and scan the images from this handout. Please don't reproduce this on the internet without permission. (if you'd like to print it out and give it to another animation student, however, PLEASE do!) The entire article from here on out is by Walt Stanchfield (sp?) I included the images in approximately the same spot as they were on the original hand-written article.
This is a wonderful article for not only beginners but also for practiced animators. Please read it.
There are some principles of animation that can be consciously used in any scene. We should familiarize ourselves with them for both animation and animation-cleanup.
To illustrate these principles, I have chosen a supposedly simple scene. When the scene is analyzed, it is apparent how far one may go in using these principles.
The action in this scene is quite broad, making the principles easy to find, but they should be applied to subtle scenes also. Rarely in a picture is a character doing nothing- absolutely nothing. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty spend a short time in complete inactivity, but even then certain of these principles were used.
The use of held drawings and moving holds can be very effective, but only if they contain the vitality of an action drawing. Again, the use of these principles makes that possible.
28 Principles of Animation
The purpose of studying and analyzing a scene like this is to acquaint oneself with the possibilites in the use of the principles of animation. I have listed 28 principles, though there well may be more. At first these will have to be used consciously, then hopefully in time will become second nature. These are the tools of animation and should be incorporated whenever possible. Some of them are accidentally stumbled upon while animating in an emotional spurt, but when the emotions are lax, knowing these principles will enable the artist to animate his scene intellectually, logically and artistically as well as emotionally.
28 Principles of Animation
Here is a list of things (principles) that appear in these drawings, most of which should appear in all scenes, for they comprise the basis for full animation
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28 Principles of Animation
An example of the observations that might be made by flipping and studying just these two drawings. By shifting your eyes from one drawing to the other you can see these things happening. Watch the negative shapes also.
28 Principles of Animation-page 5
... To continue along this line of investigation...
This drawing would be called the "push off". Note that every line and shape on the drawing helps the upward thrust. Even the tail, which is still following the path set up for it by its primary force, the rump, helps by way of contrast and followthrough. Pick any shape on the figure and compare it to drawing #6 on the preceding page. Note how each shape changes to enhance the overall shape and action: the neck, the chest, the legs, the back, etc.
Even though this is just one drawing, there is no doubt about the action that is taking place in this part of the scene. This should be true of any drawing in any scene.
Consider Anatomy Alone:
Aside from its purpose in the scene each drawing can be analyzed for different aspects of drawing. The whole body is a caracature of an animal, but all the parts of a real animal are present i.e., head, neck, back, hips, tail, etc. And each of them work and move in a plausible way.
Anatomy Continued
Anatomy, of course is essential to any drawing whether it has a direct reference to nature or is completely imaginary. Though a character and/or its action may be greatly exaggerated or caracatured, anatomy in a sense remains fairly constant. An elbow is an elbow and only bends in a certain way, and has its limitation. Liberties may be taken but the "reality" of even a cartoon must be kept or it will lose plausibility or credulity. It is not an easy thing to convert one's knowledge of structural anatomy to the cartoon medium.
It has been said that the location of a joint is more important than the joint itself. For instane if an arm shape has been established, it cannot have an elbow bend in an improbable place, no matter how well the elbow is drawn. Compare tiger's arm to that of a real tiger.
Consider Weight
The pull of gravity is one of the most important principles to deal with in animation. Everything has a certain amount of weight and will act and react accordingly. One easy way to lose the attention of an audience is to have feathers falling like bricks or bricks falling like feathers.
A certain humor can be gotten by bending the rules but should only be used where humor or special effect is called for. In shorts cartoons defying the laws of gravity, weight, speed, squash and stretch, etc., is a the rule of thumb. In Disney feature cartoons such flamboyant abandonment must be handled more discriminately.
Acting and Animation
By Doron A. Meir
"An animator is an actor with a pencil", goes the oldest and truest animation cliché. Not "a draftsman that acts", but first and foremost - an actor. If you're trying to tell a story through a character, inevitably you're an actor. The only question is whether you are a good actor or a bad one.
My feeling is that in the past few years, while there's been great progress technology-wise, the art of acting in animation has been abandoned. Compared with the acting quality of characters such as Shere-Khan (The Jungle Book), Captain Hook (Peter Pan) and others, today's characters are pale, dull, and lack personality. In better cases, an exceptionally interesting voice-talent saves the day (Robin Williams as the genie in Aladdin); but usually the script alone is responsible for providing the characters with some sort of personality.
In the various internet forums one can find threads concerning software, design, textures - some even talk about movement - but it's rare to read something about acting. I haven't yet seen a comment saying something like "the animation is good, but the character has no personality". It seems that the level of expectations is so low, that it's enough for an animator not to make technical errors. Would you consider praising a writer simply because he made no spelling mistakes?
In the following article I have put on paper my thoughts considering acting in animation, which apply to any form of character animation - including 3D. The article is not meant to provide a "good acting in animation" formula - simply because such a formula does not exist. Every animator has his personal attitude, every film has needs of its own, and undoubtedly there are other ways of getting good acting. The goal is to propose a "toolbox" for the actor/animator, and maybe raise - even a little - the animators' awareness of acting in animation.
What is good acting?
When I ask my students what they think good acting is, the first answer is usually "believable acting". But credibility is only one side of the story. Good acting is believable and interesting. In my opinion, these two attributes wholly define good acting. With this idea as an axiom, we will try to separately analyze what makes acting believable, and what makes it interesting.
I. Believable acting
In the life of an animator there are short and rare moments of true magic. Those moments are the reason I became an animator, and they are the reason I still am one. I'm talking about a moment in which you look at the animation you've just created, and suddenly you believe your own character. Suddenly it's alive, it's there in its own right. Those are the moments of believable acting.
Believable acting holds a great power over the viewers, because the character they're watching gets a sort of meaning. Every man has meaning to us - even if we don't always think about it: If a total stranger sitting next to you on the bus suddenly collapses, you will not be indifferent - because the very fact that he is a flash and blood human earns him that meaning. This is why we feel sorry when Bambi's mother dies: we believe her and we believe Bambi, and both of them mean something to us. On the other hand, the characters in South Park are anything but believable, which is why there's no problem killing Kenny in each chapter.
(This might be the right place to reemphasize that the animator is of course not solely responsible for contributing meaning to the characters - script has an important part in it too. This article, however, is dealing with animation).
Believable acting means that the audience feels that the character's actions are the result of its own inner motives, and not the animator's inner motives; that the character feels, thinks and reacts consistently according to its personality and mood. I emphasized the last sentence since it encapsulates many of the ingredients of convincing acting:
Feel.
The aim here is not just to portray clear and defined feelings (happy, sad, etc.) but to look for a kind of inner feeling that we have in us all the time - maybe it can be called "consciousness". Try to "feel" your character when you create animation, not just move it around according to the principles of animation.
Think.
Your character shouldn't always act on immediate instincts. Look for opportunities to show thinking process, which leads to decision and action. It will enrich your animation with depth, complexity and believability.
React.
Acting is actually more or less a series of reactions - the character reacts to its environment, to other characters, to stimulus. Every action must have a reason. Make sure you know what your character is reacting to, and that the reaction is reasonable (in other words: it's reasonable that this particular character will react in this particular way).
Consistency.
Retain a consistent attitude to your character's reactions. A shy character (small, timid movements) that unexpectedly acts in an extroverted way with no clear reason, will suffer great damage to its credibility.
Personality.
The character's personality dictates its reactions - i.e., its acting. Again, we are not necessarily talking about a definite personality such as "arrogant", "grumpy", etc. Try to get to know your character the way you know a family member or someone you work with. What makes him tick? What is he afraid of? What are his problems?
Mood.
Mood resembles personality - it, too, dictates the character's reactions - but unlike personality, its effect is temporary. For example: a guy who's hurrying to work acts and reacts in a very different way than the very same guy as he calmly walks his dog in the evening.
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Reading the above notions, one might think - "hey, all those things belong to the script and storyboard! Reactions, personality, mood - I can't control that! I'm just the animator here, my job is merely to move the character around and make sure there's a lot of anticipation!". My answer is in the following example:
The storyboard shows a character entering the frame, and looking angrily at another character. You're assigned to the scene, and the questions that should arise are: does the character enter slowly? Quickly? Determinedly? Hesitantly? Does he stop suddenly or gradually? Did he know the other character would be there, or does he spot it in the scene? Is he furious, or merely dissatisfied? What sort of anger is it - helpless (like a child's anger towards his parents), or superior (like a parent's towards his child)? And so on and so forth.
The actor/animator's task is to carefully read the script, study the storyboard, and try to "get into" the character. In other words: to find the character's inner feeling and to "wear" it for a while as if it was his own - so that he can get to know and understand the character. A good actor doesn't invent his acting - he discovers it. And still the animator faces the tough challenge of putting the experience into his animation, keeping the principles of motion. It isn't easy, but the reward - that magical moment of believable animation - is worth the effort.
SO YOU WANNA BE AN ANIMATOR?
by Shanna Smith
The term "persistence of vision" describes the optical phenomenon that makes animation possible. The human eye retains an image for a split second after the source of the image disappears, so when 24 frames per second of an animated film zip through a projector, the flow of motion on the screen looks seamless.
The same phrase could also be applied to the mind-set of a young (or not quite so young!) person who has his or her heart set on becoming a Disney animator. For generations, the debut of each Disney animated feature film has ignited in the minds of thousands of individuals the desire to be a part of the marvel they see on the screen.
What does it take to be a Disney animator? What spectrums of talent and elements of training are needed to produce these wonder-working "actors with pencils" called animators? We recently put these questions to Frank Gladstone, Manager of Animation Training for Disney, who works out of the Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World.
Gladstone begins by explaining that natural talent will come out at a young age. Every parent knows that a child with an artistic bent considers the family home a vast and inviting canvas. Such children "draw all the time... everywhere, on everything. They see Mommy and they try to draw Mommy. They see the dog and they try to draw the dog," Gladstone says.
Children go through different phases as they explore their skills. Three that Gladstone cites are: 1) The very young child who tries to render his or her own creative fantasies. Mom or Dad may not be able to recognize it as such, but according to the child, that blue scribble is a dinosaur eating an ice-cream cone! (And who is to say it isn't?) 2) The older child who is fascinated by visuals, who sees cartoons or illustrations and attempts to copy them as accurately as possible. (This "draftsman" stage may be difficult and frustrating - more on this later.) 3) The high school student who goes back to the beginning and gives free rein to the imagination, rather than adhering to straight copying.
"This is the bridge," Gladstone says. "This is when someone may be a serious artist. If they draw things they see - the real world - that is a big jump. The intent to interpret what they see in the three-dimensional world is, for me, the tell-all that somebody's interested in art in a serious way."
Getting to that "bridge," that third phase, though, requires passing through phase two - easier said than done.
Gladstone explains, "Most young people who start drawing are trying to make things as accurate as possible. They work very hard to get the eye right, and that's where a lot of people get discouraged.
"There's a certain strength in being an artist, he says "in that at some point every artist I know is trying to draw Mom or Dad and somebody will come up behind them and say `that doesn't look like that.' This is when many people's art career ends."
He continues, "The only time they'll draw again is if they can copy something exactly, which is why many people are good at drawing from a picture, but they can't do the other [draw from life]. The person who is strong enough to say `So what? It's my version of this'- that's another step."
Practice is paramount to maturing as an artist. "Go to the zoo and sketch: draw your friends," Gladstone suggests. "Drawing people and their animals, trying to capture something that's moving - this kind of thing comes with time. It's not something that many children do early on. It comes with experience."
Milton Gray, in his book Cartoon Animation: Introduction to a Career, recommends studying animated films frame by frame, using a VCR or laser videodiscs.
Gladstone agrees. "I had the opportunity to put an old-time print of "Pinocchio" on a Moviola and spent an entire night going through the scenes I like frame by frame and finding out how they created that movie.
"It won't teach you everything," he warns, but, "we still do that. We still study how [certain segments] were done - how did Frank Thomas approach this problem. It's a very good way to do things, but it's only one of the ways."
Hand-in-hand with practice is formal art training. A young person, brimming with talent though she or he may be, needs structured schooling to make animation a career.
"They're not going to get a job here when they're fifteen years old," Gladstone says. "We recommend not only high school, but additional schooling as well - hopefully a college degree."
This schooling would, of course, have art as its primary focus - not merely drawing, but other disciplines as well, such as painting and sculpting. Milton Gray recommends studying actors and books on acting, learning something of staging, choreography, and principles of music.
Beyond the fine arts, some background in history, geography, the life sciences, et al., makes for a more knowledgeable, flexible animator.
"You have to bring things to the table," Gladstone explains. "Half of doing Disney-style feature animation is the ability to draw, paint, run a computer, or whatever, but the other half is communication skill. We find that people who have some post-secondary education are more well-rounded, more adapted to the needs of our studio.
"We realize," he adds "that not everybody can go to college, but we seem to see more seasoned players if they have." Can you be an animator without being able to draw? Gladstone replies, "If a kid wants to do animation and he or she can't draw, there are ways to do that. There always have been ways to do that - stop-action, pixilation (which is stop-action using people instead of objects), things like that. Now there's another one, the computer. You don't have to learn to draw to learn how to animate on a computer."
He cautions, however, "Computer animators just have a very fancy electronic pencil. If they can draw traditionally, they're that much ahead of the game. In all the computer work that I've seen in my life, [work] that has really pushed the animation limits - not just the movement limits, there's a difference - the animators have either come from traditional areas or had good traditional skills."
These skills, be they traditional or high-tech, can be utilized in a variety of ways. An animated feature film employs the talents of a wide variety of artists. Animators make up a fairly small population of the people that create an animated film. There are also assistant animators; in-betweeners; breakdown, background and layout artists; effects animators; storyboard artists; visual development or inspirational artists; computer animators; and graphic designers - to name a few!
All these individuals work as a team (hence the importance of communication) during the long, arduous process of producing an animated film. Gladstone gives an example of how the artist (in this case the layout artist), director, and art director work together. These individuals interpret the storyboard into the various sets, backgrounds and foregrounds for each shot of an animated film.
"The layout artist has a lot to do with the lighting of the film, the scope, the way the camera moves through the sets," he explains. "The layout artist is in a very great way the cinematographer of an animated film, deciding what the camera is going to see and where the characters will be blocked in a scene."
The in-betweener has traditionally been looked upon as the first rung on the ladder of a animation career. Although there are exceptions, Gladstone says, "Most people come up through the ranks, starting as an in-betweener and working their way up to an animator. I think that's a good way to do it. Eventually, if they become an animator, they will have had the experience of the people that follow them up. They were there before."
So, the path is charted - now, where to go for the all-important formal instruction? There are many schools that offer good fundamental art programs and consistently produce graduates with the skills necessary to become Disney animators. These schools are by no means the only choices available to the future animator.
Gladstone speaks from experience, "If you need to go to a state school - great! Find a state school that has an art program and take the best advantage of it you can. Learn how to draw well. Draw better than everybody there. If you can only go to trade school, great! Go to trade school and do it that way."
The various roads to an animation career all demand hard work, discipline, and patience. We asked Frank Gladstone what crucial advice he would give animators. He responded, "Keep trying. Don't get too frustrated. Realize your potential, be honest with yourself, and apply yourself to whatever that particular goal is you want to reach."
It takes, in a word, persistence!
For information on the Disney Animator Training Program, please write to:
Walt Disney World Casting,
P.O. Box 10,000,
Lake Buena Vista, FL 32830-1000.
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