How to Make Animated Films 120 I’ve drawn this in a very mechanical way to illustrate the point, but in your own action you might want to add side-to-side action on the head or even a slight swaying from side to side to give it more  uidity. Again, trial and error is the best way of knowing what works and what doesn’t. First, the Neck Action For this exercise, therefore, take just the  rst “ down ” front leg drawing and place it on your pegs (this is drawing 1, in my example). Now, with a new and separate sheet of paper on the pegs above this (and numbered N-1, with N standing for neck), draw the neck and jaw position, slightly up in relation to the body (see the following  gure). This is a very mechanical approach to get the point across. For more  uidity, you might try a slight twist in the neck as it moves up and down, or maybe a little more  exibility in its shape in general. Quadruped Walks 121 This is the most economic and safe way of working here. However, if you are trying to save on the number of levels you need to use, like the body, you can draw this action onto the actual front legs drawing that your are referencing, as I have done. However, if you need to make changes, you will  nd that the original drawing can get really messy if you repeatedly correct things. Now take the front legs “ up ” position (5) and add the neck to a new sheet overlay (N-5) and draw the neck slightly down. Other factors to reckon with for this kind of action are the placement of the legs and the angle of the shoulders beneath the neck. In this drawing, the legs are straight and vertical, but in your animation you will probably  nd all kinds of variations to their positioning. Consequently, you will have to balance the neck action in accordance to how the underlying body is supporting it. Finally, in-between the neck for the other front legs positions and pencil test the result. You should see the neck slightly delaying its movement to the up and down of the front body action. If you are using separate levels, your exposure sheet should look like the following  gure. Remember that with all these dope sheet examples I am indicating animation on two’s (i.e., one drawing for every two frames). However, if the action is fast and/or very  uid, you should animate it on one’s (one drawing per frame). How to Make Animated Films 122 Adding the Head With the neck successfully animated, in combination with the body, it is time to work on the head part of this unit. If the neck/body action does not work, however, continue with the corrections until it does. Remember, the best animation is always a process of trial and error, correction, trial and error, correction, and so on until everything is right. To animate the head on the neck we do not need to work with the legs animation level anymore (if you have them as a separate level). So, with just the individual neck drawings on the pegs, take drawing N-1 and draw in the head. Remember, the neck in N-1 is slightly up in relation to the body, so based on the principles of overlapping action, the head in this case should be somewhat down. Yet another mechanical-looking illustration to demonstrate the principle. For  ner animation you should use side-to-side and rotation movement on the head and neck to give it a more natural and  uid appearance. (Note here too that I’ve even indicated a separate overlapping on the ears… meaning that when the head turns down the ears will drag back and vice versa.) Similarly, the head in drawing N-5 should be slightly up in relation to the neck, which was down in relation to the body, of course. As indicated in the neck section, a lot of the head-plus-neck action will depend on the way the legs and shoulders support this action. Consequently, you will probably  nd that the animation with the legs and shoulders in a position to this drawing will require that you position the head and neck slightly di erent, although the core principles of its movement will remain the same. Quadruped Walks 123 Now in-between the other drawings of the neck to represent the changes the head is making in relation to it. (Don’t forget the principles of favoring one side to the other when the secondary animation is changing direction, as we did with the hands on the arms for the generic walk!) When all the in-betweens are complete, pencil test the front legs and the neck and head together to see how it all works. If you have not gone too over the top with the overlapping action, you should now see a gentle,  exible movement of the head and neck in relation to the up and down of the body. The next  gure shows what the dope sheet would look like with everything on separate layers. Remember, again, that I have numbered everything similarly here to make things clearer. In reality, you may  nd that you need to number each layer slightly di erent, depending on the less-than-generic action you eventually end up with. Now is the time for you to approach the  nal piece in the puzzle — the tail. Adding the Tail Compared to all the other more  xed and simple-jointed elements of the horse that we are dealing with, the tail must be approached as being more signi cantly  exible and  uid. It is still subject to the overlapping action principle, but this time we don’t have to treat it with the rigid, jointed e ect we have used so far. In fact, the tail can be treated as a  uid and extreme version of the head, but much more  oppy — that is, the tail moves as a more curved version of the neck and so its tip is a more extreme and  oppy version of the head moving in opposition. If it helps, imagine the inside of the tail being a whole series of closely packed joints, that each delay and overlap with each other as the tail moves. How to Make Animated Films 124 This is a generic approach to tail design. You will probably want to create your own ideas for what it will look like, but I strongly advise that you look at real tails and base your cartoon version on them. I mostly advise that for this tutorial you create a tail that has some bulk to it and some  exibility. So, when the back legs of the horse’s body move up, the main body of the tail will tend to curve down. However, in overlapping with the downward curve of the tail’s body, the tip will tend to curve up at the same time. The opposite is true of the tail when the back legs of the horse move down. When I refer to the tail moving up, I am referring to the root of the tail where it is attached to the butt of the horse. As you can see from this drawing though, the tip of the tail is still curving from where it came from, not from where the root of the tail is going to. Note that the root of the tail is moving downward, whereas the tip of the tail continues to swing in the upward direction that the rest of the tail was originally going. Quadruped Walks 125 The in-between of the tail is also a little more  uid and  exible than the head and neck movement. To get a greater  icking action at the end of the tail, you will signi cantly need to favor one side or the other when the tail traverses the center line of the body. (i.e. Never use a straight line inbetween linking a convex shape or a concave one… always favor one side or the other of the straight line!) Note that the tip of the tail doesn’t reverse inward until drawing T-9. Prior to that, it maintains the outward curve it started with. By not in-betweening the positions between T-7 and T-9, it gives the action a certain  ip that makes it more convincing. Even if this action were to be in-betweened on one’s, I would still recommend that there be no in-between from the last frame curving outward (in this case, T-8) and the  rst frame curving outward (T-9). Now try to animate the tail yourself. On separate levels of drawings (or on the back legs drawing if you wish to save on levels) create the tail action using the same process you used for the head and neck. Number the tails T-1, T-3, T-5, etc., and when it is all done, pencil test the action. When you are satis ed with the tail animation, reshoot everything together for a  nal pencil test (i.e., the legs, body, head, neck, and tail). Hopefully it is all working well together. If not, make the necessary corrections to the o ending layer (or layers) and repencil test until everything works as you would like it to. To shoot it all together you’ll need some kind of comprehensive image-capture software, such as DigiCel’s Flipbook. Alternatively, you can scan every individual level of the drawings and composite and render them together on programs such as Adobe’s Photoshop/Premiere or Photoshop/After E ects, or work in a vector environment using ToonBoom Technology’s ToonBoom Studio. How to Make Animated Films 126 The six layers that make up the complete cartoon quadruped action. The following  gure is what the exposure sheet should look like when everything is  nished. Perhaps here you can see the need for clarity, thus each layer is described at the head of each layer column. Moving Background Until now we have not even considered a background with any of our walk assignments. However, here is where all that changes. Remember that when we created the generic walk cycle it was pointed out that every foot-slide distance had to be identical? Here is why. To get the e ect of a character’s feet moving along a background surface we have to make sure that the objects depicted in the background move identically in distance to the foot slide. Using the background concept in the following  gure as our reference example, you will learn how to make the Quadruped Walks 127 background move and the foot slides synchronize. (Although you’re free to design and use your own background artwork if you so choose, of course.) Because the animation we are using moves on a cycle with the foot sliding a consisting distance from one drawing to the other, the background has to move this identical distance as well. Consequently, all the elements in this simple background structure have been designed as a repeat pattern of movement from left to right, so one section can be in-betweened to the other… creating a repeating action as it moves through the screen. This is a very simple background with basic coloring to clearly illustrate the principles involved. In this background the light area to the left is identical to the dark-shaded area to the right, meaning that these are e ectively key positions that can easily be in-betweened so that a repeat cycle action can be utilized. Note that usually the background behind a walk cycle is an extremely long piece of artwork that pans past at precisely the same distance per frame as the character’s foot slides. However, for our pencil test examples here, I want you to draw the moves to avoid any unnecessary technical requirements, as well as to help you learn the process of synchronized movement by the more comprehensive hand-drawn process. Note that the items on the background move exactly the same distance as the foot slide, frame by frame. If the scene is long, the same cycle animation drawings can be used over and over again throughout. However, the single piece of background art will have to be long enough to pan through for the entire scene without the edges of the artwork appearing in the shot. How to Make Animated Films 128 The trick here is to design and position the elements in the background (at least those in closest proximity to the feet) in such a way that as you in-between them on their own background cycle animation, the distance they move across the screen is identical to the distance the foot slides. This way the feet will give the clear impression that they are really  xed to a speci c point on the ground as the character walks. However, should the background move at a di erent speed in the area of the foot slide, the feet will appear to slip or skid in relation to it! Note how the sliding action on the animated-cycle background animation is identically matched to the sliding foot of the character. This  gure is a unique example of that same matching background slide principle. I created this scene based on a walking bull glass design found in an ancient Egyptian tomb. I wanted to animate the bull on cycle animation. However, to make it convincing, I also had to animate the background pattern beneath the bull. Consequently, although both the bull and the animated background were on separate levels, I had to make sure that they both had the same amount of panning slide movement, linking the background design and the bull’s animated foot slide. Quadruped Walks 129 Multilayered Backgrounds The background can be broken up into separate layers if you like, with artwork for the distance, walking area, and foreground on separate layers. Working with the principle that something farther away from us tends to move slower, the panning speeds for the various layers in our background will have to move similarly. Therefore, the distant background layer will move slower than the midground layer, and the foreground background elements will move the fastest. For this scene the various layers would be (1) the far hills and sky (slowest panning speed), (2) the pathway (medium speed), (3) the character (his foot slide matching the pathway speed), and (4) the foreground sign (fastest speed, probably coming in and out of the scene during the entire sequence). Some testing will be required to achieve the most compatible mutual speeds. The various layers. [...]... character moving the location of two boxes 149 How to Make Animated Films Here the character is closer to the center of the picture However, for your animation assignment, don’t forget to have as much free space to the right of the screen as possible to enable your character to move across the screen and place the boxes down From this illustration, create the keys to have the character pick up the first... need to bend to cushion the impact of any weight placed on them 145 How to Make Animated Films I repeat this image to emphasize the point that the legs must bend when a character is holding something of weight 2 Where there is an absence of weight, however, or even the opposite of weight—for example, a character with a helium balloon strapped to his or her back—the poses can imply the opposite See how. .. characters who have weight in their physical makeup, will always suggest a downward sag to their pose, especially in the flesh of their body 147 How to Make Animated Films 7 In seeking to lift a heavy weight, a character has a much stronger base to work from if he or she spaces out his or her feet and applies the lift over a greater area for the pulling-up action I tried to straddle the feet as far apart on... into our animation However, before we discuss the quality of weight in animation in further detail, I want you to try these three simple examples We are returning to the bouncing ball principle to do this, but on this occasion I want you to approach it in a much simpler way, using three different kinds of balls: a standard rubber ball, a ping-pong ball, and a bowling ball 137 How to Make Animated Films. .. another pose that also implies that a character is really dealing with weight 143 How to Make Animated Films This time the character’s whole body mass is beneath the weight, implying that it is heavy and needs maximum support to carry it Again, the knees are bent to take the weight better The objective of any animator is to maximize the effect of what is required through dynamic poses, long before the... Technology, I was able to break down the shape of the cat into definable, primitive shapes See the following figures The full film sequence shows the puma pacing backward and forward, providing more than enough information to make an educated guess at an acceptable and realistic animated example of how the big cat moves The only difficulty was that with the long grass it was hard for me to see how the cat placed... drawing, sized to the dimensions I needed for animation Then I blocked out (in blue pencil) the foot-slide paths of action, on which I also marked the front and back foot positions By breaking the body parts of our realistic-looking character to simple primitive shapes, it makes the animating of these body parts so much easier 133 How to Make Animated Films From these images, I was much more able to animate... ”Quadruped Walk—Cartoon” and “Quadruped—Natural” Assignment 6 Taking a three-quarter view of our pantomime horse, create a cycle of it walking eccentrically That is, none of the walk action should be generic—both the front and rear legs should contain a different kind of walk movement You can photocopy the version here or download it from www desktopacademy.com 135 How to Make Animated Films My original... that made up the previously illustrated scene 131 How to Make Animated Films Realistic Quadrupeds Of course, animators’ work will not always be focused on producing the kind of simple, cartoon-style characters that we have dealt with here This is especially true in the world of games or movie special effects, where animators are more and more required to replicate lifelike quadruped action through creatures,... have to establish on your paper for the scene The character does not need to walk far from the left to the right side of the screen, perhaps just a few short steps Once you have completed this, animate the character returning to pick up a much heavier box, carry it over to the first, and carefully place it down on top of it, finally stepping back to appreciate the effort A few things to work toward: . them together on programs such as Adobe’s Photoshop/Premiere or Photoshop/After E ects, or work in a vector environment using ToonBoom Technology’s ToonBoom Studio. How to Make Animated Films 126 . realistic-looking character to simple primitive shapes, it makes the animating of these body parts so much easier. How to Make Animated Films 1 34 From these images, I was much more able to animate each. How to Make Animated Films 120 I’ve drawn this in a very mechanical way to illustrate the point, but in your own action you might want to add side -to- side action on the