The

Animator’s Eye
 The

Animator’s Eye
Adding Life to Animation with Timing,
Layout, Design, Color and Sound

FRANCIS GLEBAS
PHD IN FANTASY
First published 2013
by Focal Press
70 Blanchard Road, Suite 402, Burlington, MA 01803

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Focal Press
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Focal Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

The right of Francis Glebas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices
Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and
experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional
practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in
evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described
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Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Glebas, Francis.
The animator’s eye : adding life to animation with timing, layout, design, color and
sound / Francis Glebas. -- 1 [edition].
pages cm
1. Animated films. 2. Animation (Cinematography) I. Title. NC1765.G59 2012
777’.7--dc23
2012021762

ISBN: 978-0-240-81724-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-240-81725-5 (ebk)

Please visit the companion website at www.focalpress.com/cw/glebas

Typeset in Utopia Regular

by TNQ Books and Journals, Chennai, India
 Contents v

Contents

On
the DVD vii Pros and Cons of Construction 37
Meet Sackenstein 39
Preface ix Watch Your Angles 44
Acknowledgements xi Caricature and Proportions 44
Cloth 50
1 My Introduction 1 Rhythm Balance 52
Introduction 2 Sculpting to Learn Drawing 55
Introducing Iggy the Pig and Scared Bunny 5 Why Do Drawings Die in Cleanup? 60
It’s Now Time to Trace? 60
Sketchbooks and Drawing Tips 60
2 Mad Science or Magic? 9
Why Would Anyone Animate? 9
Animation Process Pipeline 9 5 The Laws of Animation 65
Creating Your Very Own Mad-Science Laboratory The 12 Principles of Disney’s Nine Old Men 65
of Animation 11 Animating: Step by Step, Frame by Frame 67
Learning Exercises for Animators 67
3 That Reminds Me of a Story… 15 How to Animate, the Basics: Thumbnails and
The Dramatic Structure of Stories 15 Key Frames 68
What Kinds of Stories can the Animator’s Eye Use and Abuse of Cycles 70
Dream Up? 16 Laws of Motion Principles for a
Why is Story so Hard to Get Right? 17 Believable World 70
How to Create Interesting Characters Using Animation Timing 83
Simple Rules 18 Timing for Rhythmic Interest 84
Animated Performance or How to Tell Clowns Toon Physics: The Laws of Fun! 85
from Zombies 19 The Use and Abuse of Rotoscoping 86
Roller Coaster Theory of Storytelling 20 Motion Analysis 88
Analysis of Story Structure 21 Loco Motion, or Getting Around in a Funny Way 93
How Do You Start to Write the Story? 21 Iggy Goes for a Walk 94
Fractal, Not Fractured, Storytelling 23 Four-Legged Walks 100
How to Ride the Roller Coaster to a Good Story 24
What do You Want to Say with Your Story? 25 6 It’s Alive! Animating Inner Life 103
Emotion Wheel 105
4 Secrets of Drawing 29 Show the Thinking Process 109
Seeing Shapes, Drawing Lines 29 Lip Sync 111
Drawing Basics 32 Lip-Sync Timing 113
vi Contents

7 Creating Worlds 117 9 Genesis of Idea 185

Creating a World on Your Desktop 117 The Evolution of The Animator’s Eye Flipbook 185
Creating Style Guides 119 Merge Flipbooks 190
Designing Style Guides 120 Continued Flipbook Refinements 215
Composing Pictures 121 Iggy’s Problematic Switch 215
Staging and Laying Out for the Viewer’s Eye 123
Going for a Walk with the Camera 126 10 The Production 229
Getting a Perspective of Your World 126
How to Choose Colors 127 Production—Now We’re Cooking! 229
Color Script 134 Art Directing by Color Script 232
Lab Exploration 135 Production Help 235
Castle Interior 136 Software Procedures 236
Design of the Mad Lab 137 Complete Color 237
Bokeh Backgrounds 141
Painting Technique 142 11 The Evolution of Iggy and Scared Bunny 255
Opening Pan from Layout to Background 147 How These Two Figments of My Imagination were Brought to Life 255
Pitching Ideas 258
8 Postproduction 157
Putting it Together in Post 157 12 The Animator’s Eye 261
Compositing Puts it All Together 157 Beginner’s Corner: How I Got My Animator’s Eye 261
Editing Makes Sure the Story is Told Clearly 170 My Beginner’s Corner 262
Basic Cutting Rules 174 Make Movies! 268
Sound and Music 178
Music Software 180 Appendix 279
Carl Stalling 180
Sonic Visionaries … Audioaries? 181 Bibliography 283
Marketing and Distribution: It’s Time to Show Your Creation Index 285
to the World! 181

On the DVD
DVD Contents
On the DVD you’ll find the complete three minutes and
30 seconds long animated film, The Animator’s Eye. It’s in
full color with score and special effects. You can also watch
a version that tracks the animatic along with the finished
animation.
In addition, you can see the early attempts at creating
the story. These are very rough drawings which were done to
explore the various ideas to see if they had merit.
Included are the following animatics: The Tragic and
Comic Sack, Duplicating Sacks, and Why Did the Chicken
Cross the Soccer Game?
Also included is a video showing how I draw Iggy
including drawing tips and tricks. It’s always helpful to
On the DVD vii
watch how others draw. And for animation reference, there’s
a video demonstrating various gesture movements. This also
includes lip sync reference.
I would like to thank the following people for their
help with the making of The Animator’s Eye. First and
foremost is Hans Karl who created the musical score that
added the final illusion of life to the film. You can reach
him at his website www.hanskarlmusic.com. J. D. Stewart
provided audio production services for Hans. Chris
Siemasko created the special effects of the eyes flying into
the heavens for the final shot. Chris can be reached at
Chrissiemasko.com. Bryan Cox provided the special effects
for the transformation scene from the alligator to the bunny
girl. Ryan Glebas edited all the animatics. Audio journey
music courtesy of Michael Hammer michaelhammer.com
You can reach me online at francisglebas.blogspot.com
You can also find inspirational audio journeys to help
you relax and get in touch with your inner creativity by Toni
Pace Carstensen.
Toni Pace Carstensen is a certified clinical hypnotherapist,
meditation teacher, and Reiki master.
Her healing practice combines guided visualization, age
regression techniques, and Reiki energetic healing to assist
clients in fulfilling their full potential.
She also has extensive experience in the entertainment
industry with multiple Emmy award nominations and
frequent work as a visual effects producer on feature films.
More information can be found on
www.creativityconnection.com

Preface
The Animator’s Eye is your unique opportunity to journey
inside a burning brain and watch the creative process at
work! The Animator’s Eye is the documented demonstration
of the creative process at work, as it applies to bringing an
idea to life using various animation tools and techniques.
There are many books available on the various aspects
of animated film production. I am not the best animator,
cleanup artist, layout artist, background artist, composer
or editor. I will refer you to sources to further train your
animator’s eye in these areas. What this book offers is to
see how the whole process of making an animated film fits
together.
It’s ironic that you can actually learn more from mistakes
than you can when something appears seamlessly perfect.
You’ll see behind the scenes, including the mistakes as well
as the successes. These mistakes can be embarrassing, but if
they serve to instruct then it’s worth it.
This book offers an overview for the novice as well as new
ways of looking at old truisms of animation, such as the 12
principles of animation. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson
did the animation world a great service when they presented
their 12 principles, but what if there were more hidden
principles? What if each phase of production had its own
Preface ix
principles of animated life? These principles of animated
life apply if you’re drawing, using cutouts, clay, computer-
generated graphics or zombie bodies, and they apply to each
stage from idea generation, animation, design, staging, color
and sound.
We’ll demonstrate the whole animation production
process, beginning with the creative process of capturing
of the original idea, through story development, animation
production, art direction, production design, compositing
and sound through to the completion of an animated film,
as well as thoughts on distribution. Nowadays, anyone
has the ability to have their own production facility right
on their desktop. We’ll look at various software packages
available for animation production. The Animator’s Eye film
is a combination of traditional, digital 2D and computer
graphics.
This book is not going to tell you what to do. Instead of
a “how-to book” it’s more like a “how-to and why-to book.”
You’ll learn “how-to” but more importantly “why-to.” We’re
going to train your animator’s eye to get you to see and think
in new ways about animation so you’ll know why you’re
making your particular creative choices.
Warning! This is not an ordinary book. It is actually a
movie and a book! The Animator’s Eye film is included in
this book as a flipbook as well as on the DVD. If timing is
everything, how can you learn about animation without the
element of time? Flipbooks allow you to study the animation
in motion. You can flip as fast or slow as you like and the
speed of the animation changes. You can even make it go
backward.
My goal for this book is to provide a unique learning
experience about bringing things to life through the medium
of animation. Hopefully it may help you, the reader, become
more alive as well. There’s nothing worse than being a
zombie.
 Acknowledgements xi

Acknowledgements
I've been bringing things to life with animation for a long introductions or comments and reviews on the web, I
time and have learned from so many people in so many learned that my book touched people in ways that I couldn't
ways that it's hard to decide, let alone remember, who to have imagined. So in advance, I'd like to thank you, the
thank. Instead of naming names, I'd like to share a story reader, whether you're a fresh beginner or lifelong expert of
about the film Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close. It's the wonderful world of animation.
the story of a boy who loses his father during the 9-11 And, in spite of the fact that I said I wouldn't name
tragedy. In order to process his grief, he goes on a journey, names, I wish to thank my wife for her love and support
meeting hundreds of people, sharing his story with them during the marathon of making this book. And my son,
and theirs with him. Without spoiling the movie, there's a Ryan, for the inspiration he's brought to my life.
simple close-up shot of a chain that symbolizes all of the
interconnected stories that hold our lives together. We're
supported by the interconnected stories of countless people,
some of whom we may not even appreciate how they have
helped us. How come he
I am grateful for the chain links connected to all of my
artist friends who generously shared their trade secrets with .didn't thank us?
me. I'd also like to thank the "links" of artists that I haven't
met but who have shared their inspiring work via the World
Wide Web.
I want to thank the wonderful folks at Focal Press, for
without their help this book wouldn't have existed.* This
includes the editors, readers, layout people, marketers and
distributors, all of whom provided interconnecting links to
bring this book to life from the original idea to the finished
book you hold in your hands.
I discovered something wonderful after completing my
first book, Directing the Story. Through emails, personal

*Dave Bevans, Gail Newton, Anais Wheeler, Chris Simpson, Joanne

Blank, and Lauren Mattos.

Chapter One
My Introduction
Come on the journey to the center of the eye. Well, actually
I’m inviting you to come on a journey to the center of my
brain. However, since you’ll be reading the account of the
journey into my brain, you’ll be doing it with your brain. As
with any journey, what you’ll gain is experience and brain
exercise.
The journey began for me with my first book. Well, it
really began when I first started working for Disney in their
My Introduction 1
story department, and I realized how much I didn’t know
about storyboarding and storytelling. Every morning I’d
get in early and type up notes about what I was learning.
I would have felt like SpongeBob absorbing so much
knowledge, but he hadn’t been invented yet. I learned
more in my first six months at Disney, being surrounded by
so many incredibly talented and driven artists, than I did
during my entire schooling. It was like every artist around
me became my teacher.
It was several years later, during the time that I was
directing Pomp and Circumstance for Fantasia 2000, that
Alex Topete, the head of the cleanup department, asked
me to speak to his crew during a lunch hour. I agreed and
immediately panicked: “What am I going to talk about?”
Well, I started talking to the crew and about two hours later
they were still asking questions. I guess I had something to
say after all.
Shortly after that talk, Jack Bossom, the head of Disney’s
artist development program, asked if I would speak to some
new artists at Disney about a film topic of my choosing.
I decided to talk about time in the editing process and as
an example I chose to analyze the finale sequence of Back
to the Future. It was amazing to study a small sequence in
frame-by-frame detail. That’s the only way a film will yield
its secrets. The first time you watch a film you are under
the spell of the story if, of course, the director’s done his or
her job. It’s only during the second and third viewing that
you can begin to see how it’s put together. That’s because
the director is directing your attention so that you don’t see
how it’s all put together; all of the effort is put into seamless
storytelling. This is also why a magician never reveals his
secrets by performing a magic trick twice—it would ruin the
illusion.
So I presented “Time and Editing in Back to the Future”
and this led to being asked by Tenny Chonin, the next head
of artist development, to present this material to the whole
studio. That’s how this shy artist now found himself in front
of 200 people presenting Disney lunch-box lectures on color
theory, narration versus the hero’s journey, and more.
Along the way I began to mentor story trainees at
Disney, eventually teaching story and storyboarding at Walt
Disney Imagineering UCLA and Gnomon School of Visual
Effects. I found I really liked teaching as much as I enjoyed
animation production. (Both of my parents being teachers
might have had something to do with my passion to teach.)
 2 My Introduction
As long as I had good filmic examples to show, talk about and analyze, I didn’t
need notes. The examples were triggers for my memory.
However, something unexpected happened when I taught: my students told
me that they had never heard of some of the stuff that I was teaching. I suppose
that is normal for a teacher to hear coming from students new to a subject, but
this wasn’t just coming from new, inexperienced students. One woman said
that she went through the whole [insert X famous film school here] and had
never heard of some of the material that I was teaching. Another woman had
been directing commercials for 15 years and this was new to her as well. One of
the student’s teacher evaluations said that they had a sneaking suspicion that I
was a “super genius.” Now don’t think I’m big-headed, because the only other
“super genius” that I know is “Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius.” Being a super
genius doesn’t seem to help him, as he’s always getting blown up! What all this
feedback did clue me into was that I had something to teach and my own way to
communicate it clearly, using examples that demonstrated the principles.
I completed my first book for Focal Press, Directing the Story: Professional
Storytelling and Storyboarding Techniques for Animation and Live Action.
The wonderful folks at Focal Press then asked me to start another book, The
Animator’s Eye, and my first thought was—Panic!—“I don’t have anything to say.”
So here we are and I’m inviting you to journey with me into the very beginning of
my second book, on the animator’s eye.
Introduction
Before we begin our journey into the world of animation, you need to know that
I’m not going to lie to you. Animation is hard work that requires a lot of learning
and practice. But if you picked up this book it means you probably already know
that and want to explore animation in spite of the obstacles. Animation is a labor
of love. The first time you see your drawings begin to move it’s like magic. It’s time
to learn some new magic tricks.
Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll learn in the upcoming chapters.
The Animator’s Eye
We begin by meeting our tour guides to the nutty world of animation. They’ll show
you how to find ideas and bring them to life.
The Mad Science of Animation Right in Your Own Lab!
You’ll learn the tools you need to create your very own mad-science-of-animation
laboratory. We’ll also learn the nuts and bolts of the animation pipeline that starts
with the most important idea of all—the story.
That Reminds Me of a Story…
Here Iggy and Scared Bunny will show you why stories are shaped the way they
are when they introduce their secret “Roller Coaster Theory of Storytelling,” a
novel way to come up with dramatic and fun stories.
Visionaries of Fantasy, Reality, and Surreality
Bonus: On the book’s website. We’ll also meet visionaries who’ll show us
surprising secrets of the animated universe, like the fact that our minds are trained
to see faces. And we’ll discover some of the tricks they’ve got up their sleeves.
Myths of Creation
Bonus: On the book’s website. Creativity is one of the most important ingredients
of the animation process. We’ll learn the stages of creativity and how we can apply
them to bringing animation to life. It’s easy and fun when you learn to ask the
right questions.
Secrets of Drawing
We learn that drawing teaches us how to see and drawing allows us to create the
illusion of life. First, we’ll learn the pros and cons of constructing drawings to
create solid drawings. We’ll explore force, gesture, and caricature with that old
animation classic, the flour sack. Finally, we create characters and delve into their
secrets for driving stories.
The Secret of the Animated Illusion
The secret of animated life is creating a believable illusion. It’s the illusion of a
real world filled with entertaining characters creating chaos. Here we’ll learn
the basic steps of animating a scene as well as exercises designed to train your
animator’s eye.
We’ll learn the animation principles of the masters as well as some new ones.
These animation principles fall into three categories—physical believability,
principles of inner life, and staging to show the audience where to look. Each of
the next three chapters will explore these principles.

The Laws of Animated Life
Here we dive into the world of physics to understand why
we have the principles of animation. If your character’s
movements are based upon physical laws, then they’ll be
more believable as if they’re real.
Cartoon Physics
It’s all well and good to create believable characters but
this is animation we’re talking about. We’re not shooting
live action, we want to have some fun! Let’s break some
rules with cartoon physics. It’s not E=MC Squared, but
E=motion{x fun!}
Adding the Brain for Inner Life—Look,
I’m Acting!
Once we can animate objects with believable mass
and volume we’re ready to learn the second set of
principles—animated acting and inner life. We’ll look
at Iggy on the emotion wheel and how lip sync is
ventriloquism in very slow motion.
Locomotion of Bodies without
Slipping and Sliding
The body also tells a story so we’ll explore body
language and how to get around on two feet or more. And
we’ll learn about that ever-present danger for animated
characters, the dreaded banana peel—sometimes they’re
invisible.
Watch Out for Zombies!
It’s checklist time. Finally we’ll learn how to spot zombies.
One secret is the eyes. With their empty eyes, they move but
don’t move us. Remember, just because something moves
doesn’t mean that it’s alive.
Creating a World
Now we put on the hats of the art director and production
designer to learn the third set of principles to create worlds
for our animation—staging for clarity. We’ll learn the
process of laying out animation, creating style guides, color
scripts and designing and painting background.
My Introduction 3
Rules for Clarity of World Building—Design
Style Guides
We’ll learn the rules of design and how to design everything
using a style guide.
Laying Out the Space
Layout is really a verb. It’s the process of arranging
imaginary things in three-dimensional space onto the
two-dimensional picture plane guiding the audience where
to look.
The Wonderful World of Emotional
Color and Color Scripting
Like music, color is a magical element that guides the
viewer/listener’s emotions. We’ll learn the value of color
scripts for continuity and tracking the emotional journey of
a story.
Painting Backgrounds
Here’s a demonstration of the basics of painting
backgrounds.
Putting it All Together in Post
Once we’ve completed our animation it’s time to assemble
all the pieces into a movie. The final secret ingredient that
creates the final spark of life is sound. Music tells us how to
feel. Remember, judicious editing is your friend and your
audience will thank you for it—in other words, keep the
story moving.
Special Effects
What would movies be without special effects? Animation
has its own brand of special effects with an additional spice
of life.
Compositing Layers and Editing
Once the animation, backgrounds and special effects are
finished, it’s time to put it all together and this process
is known as compositing. We’ll get to see how the layers
combine to create the final image using the secret
ingredient, blend modes.
 4 My Introduction

Finish with a Big Bang! The Flipbooks

Sound adds life and music adds emotion. We’re lifted out of the deadly silence On the edges of this book you’ll find flip books. A flipbook is animation in a book
into a world orchestrated with colorful timbres all to the beat. We’ll learn some form. You flip through the pages and the images appear to move.
basic recording, mixing and mastering techniques and a simplified way to think
about music. We’ll also explore software that generates complete music.

Evolution of The Animator’s Eye

Now we get to watch the whole process in action. Beginning with the initial
swirl of ideas evolving into a story, we’ll then watch the creation of storyboards,
characters and settings, through to production of the final finished production.

Documentation of Preproduction
The Animator’s Eye flipbook and film went through many incarnations. We’ll
explore how the creative process affected why certain decisions were made and It’s very simple to flip—hold the book binding in one hand and flip, letting the
how they evolved. We’ll see how the constraints that I had on the book affected edge of the page slide through under the thumb of your other hand.
the film as well.

Documentation of the Production and Postproduction

The biggest problem that affected the production was the fact that there wasn’t
enough time. Even during production, changes had to be made for clarity, comedy
and other creative improvements.

The Birth of Iggy and Scared Bunny, or Who

Let these Two in Here?
I’ve worked with Iggy and Scared Bunny before. Here we’ll learn where they came
from, how they evolved, their history and how they came to take over the project. But, where’s the sound? There is no sound—it’s a book. You can watch the
complete film with the wonderful music created by Hans Karl on the DVD.
How I Learned and Got My Animator’s Eye
I’ve been involved with animation since I was a four year old watching the first
animated series produced specifically for television, Crusader Rabbit. I started
making movies as a teenager and followed a path in art and film production. Here’s
some of my early art and I show what’s wrong with it so you won’t have to make
the same mistakes. It’s also for inspiration—we all start from humble beginnings.
The greats stay humble, always remembering there is plenty more to learn.
I also share how I got into the business, in spite of when in a job interview
I referred to “stretch and squash” as “squish and squash.”

It’s Time to Say Goodbye and Let You Fly

How do we keep the dream alive? Where do you go from here? That’s up to you, You can find additional material on the DVD or companion website when you
your imagination and your animator’s eye. see Iggy holding up the DVD.

Introducing Iggy the Pig
and Scared Bunny
Who better to teach animation than two animated
characters? They've even got references. You'll meet them
before their fame, when they were working for me in a
bunch of projects that never got off the ground. They say the
projects failed because of my fear of flying.
IGGY: I think we need a better name for this book. The
Animator's Eye7. What kind of title is that? What is it, a
medical book? I thought we were going to teach about
how to avoid creating zombies! How about, Iggy and
Scared Bunny, Zombie Hunters7.
BUNNY: But there's more to it than just avoiding zombies.
We'll learn about creativity.
IGGY: But the title doesn't even mention us? Why isn't it
Iggy's Fantastic Guide to the Animator's Eye7
My Introduction 5
BUNNY: Because it's not about you, I'm in it too! It's about
the 12 classic animation principles and how there are
actually more than 12!
IGGY: Then why don't we call it Iggy's 101 Principles of
Animated Life and How to Avoid Zombies in the Process
with a Little Help from Scared Bunny?
BUNNY: The Animator's Eye is a look at what it means to be
an animation artist, how they think and how they see
the world differently from most people. It's about how
to train your eye to be more imaginative and give it the
animation know-how to share that vision with the world.
IGGY: I give up. Welcome to The Animator's Eyel
So what is the animator's eye? The animator's eye is one that
sees life everywhere.
WHAT DOES
THIS HAVE
TO DO WITH
ANIMATION?
Occasionally, you might see Iggy making this protest.
I'm including many things in this book that I have found
inspirational to the training of my animator's eye. They've
 6 My Introduction
not all been directly related to animation. Besides, if I only gave you what
information you already knew from within the field of animation, how could you
learn anything new? Feel free to skip around, reading what you find interesting
and helpful. The animator’s eye and mind grow in mysterious ways.
Iggy and Bunny were actually an afterthought as part of this book. Actually,
Iggy and Scared Bunny had cameos in my first book, Directing the Story:
Professional Storytelling and Storyboarding Techniques for Live Action and
Animation. I’ve known Iggy and Bunny for a long time, but once they entered
into this book, they kind of took over. I’m including them for you to get ideas
about how to give your characters life. Just let your characters go and don’t censor
them—they’ll surprise you! My problem was they intruded so much it was hard to
focus on writing the book. Excuse me. I’ll meet you in the next section.
Author exits book.
AUTHOR (off screen): Iggy, put those fireworks down. Now!
My Introduction 7
 Mad Science or Magic? 9

Chapter Two an answer, but it's puzzling. Here's another quandary—why

do people expect you to give them a drawing? You wouldn't

Mad Science ask a brick layer to give you a brick.

Animation is a labor of love. It's overwhelming in the
amount of work, the cost, the time and creative energy

or Magic? needed. Why are so many people so passionate about

it? How can they best channel their energy so as not to
lose their spark during the work? These are some of the
questions we'll look at during our journey.

Animation Process Pipeline

We're not only going to learn each stage of the animation
process, but we'll see how all of the production stages of
animation fit together. You then can specialize in the area
that you're interested in or you'll have the knowledge to
make a complete film yourself.
Why Would Anyone Animate? What are the steps of creating animation?
Why would anyone in their right mind ever animate? But
animators are not in their "right" minds, they're in their left
and right minds, seeing things that mere mortals do not.
A
N
I
M
A
T
I
O
N

P
I
Animation runs at 24 frames per second (30 for video). P
One minute of animation thus requires 24 x 60 seconds, E
or 1440 frames per minute. An average animated feature L
runs 90 minutes, so that means 1440 x 90 = 115,200-plus I
backgrounds, rough animation, and storyboards. Why on N
earth would somebody do this to themselves? E
Why is it only with animation that we measure the work
in terms of counting the drawings? Do we ask bricklayers
how many bricks they used to build a house? Do we ask
carpenters how many nails they used? Do we ask race car
drivers how many miles they've driven? I actually don't have
 10 Mad Science or Magic?

The pipeline of animation falls into three main sections: preproduction,

production and postproduction, followed by marketing and distribution.
Preproduction is where it all begins, including story development, script
writing, production design, storyboards, and animatics. At this stage a film
might get a green light or go ahead to start production or head back for further
development. If it goes back to development or is canceled, not much is lost in
terms of costs (except for artist egos).
Production is where the real work and real money come in, to bring the
preproduction to life. This includes the creation of style guides, layouts, timing
Check Your Checklist!
sheets, workbooks, animation, cleanup, and inbetweening of characters and You wouldn't blast off to the moon without a checklist, would you? Of course not, you'd need
special effects. It also includes voice recording. to make sure you had maps, food, water, tools, air, and enough fuel to get there and back. Well,
Postproduction is where it's all put together. This includes compositing of the
creating an animated film is not as complicated as rocket science but it probably has more steps
images, editorial, sound design, and music scoring.
involved. You're going to be creating thousands of files. Organization is crucial if you have any hope
Finally, the film is ready for marketing and distribution.
of completing your project. Hierarchical folders for your computer files are necessary to be able to
Computers have varied this process, but more in terms of the technology
utilized for the steps rather than a change in the process itself. Some of the steps find the files you need.
of computer animation are related to live action being that they work in a virtual
3D space with lights.
Computer graphics has additional processes—previs, modeling, proxy models, Checking has always been an important part of the animation process.
rigging, texturing, blocking, camera, lighting, animating, procedural systems, Since there is so much work necessary, there is so much that can go wrong and
rendering, and other stages with exotic sounding names, like sub-surface scattering. somebody has to check that those errors don't survive the production process.
At Disney, they actually had workers whose job it was to just check that all of the
elements were created and that all of the colors were painted with the correct
color. They also had the job of removing dust from the eels. Static electricity made
C the plastic eels like dust magnets.
G Part of checking can be a simple checklist. In Atul Gawande's book
I Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, he describes the many benefits of
creating and utilizing checklists. Checklists are created to catch errors even for
P experienced people. When Murphy's law states that if something can go wrong, it
R will at the worst possible time, then checklists are a safeguard against Murphy and
O his intruding, maddening law. Atul describes how doctors and airline pilots use
D them and have documented their efficiency in catching potential fatal errors. If
it's good enough for them, then it's good enough for us animators, who only have
U
to create life and not worry about any of our characters dying. And if that's not
C
enough reason for you to start making checklists, remember, Santa's been using
T
them for years and checking them twice.
I
We can use checklists for story flow to track character arcs and motivation. We
O
need to insure that the story is driven by characters' decisions and their actions.
N
Checklists can be used for continuity and to make sure scenes have a clear
structure and point. Checklists are useful for animating to make sure the
principles of animation have been applied to really bring a scene to life.
Checklists are also a valuable tracking tool to monitor production progress and
that the film is hitting its deadline milestones. The checklist for making the film
for this book included four pages of spreadsheets to track 90 scenes of animation.
*CG\ - Computer Graphics Imagery. The book itself required multiple checklists just to keep track of what sections were
 Mad Science or Magic? 11

MAKE SURE TO CHECK

YOUR CHECKLIST!

And when you need to take a break to get refueled, bring your checklist to the supermarket.

written and which illustrations were still needed. Anytime
you're dealing with more items than you can keep in your
head, you need a checklist. For me, that's about seven items.
Creating Your Very Own Mad-
Science Laboratory of Animation
I don't know about you but I always wanted to have
my very own mad-science laboratory. What is it about
animation that makes me think about this? Maybe they're
both spaces to bring things to life. So you need a place
to create—your very own mad-science laboratory of
animation.
It's truly amazing that today it is possible to have your
own animation studio on your desktop complete with a
DVD with surround sound! This was unthinkable not too
long ago. Sure, you could make your own films with a 16mm
camera but could you mix a score for it too? Could you make
copies for worldwide distribution? Now you can. The game
has changed.

What do you need to design your own mad-scientist

animation laboratory? We'll look at a hybrid of traditional,
2D digital animation and 3D computer graphics used in the
making of this book. While its emphasis is on digital 2D, the
principles of animation design apply to 3D as well.
The traditional process of animation consists of hand
drawing on punched paper. The punch fits onto pegs which
register the paper so the animation doesn't jump around.
The paper drawings are inked onto acetate eels. These
 12 Mad Science or Magic?
cels are painted on the back. This gives the cel its smooth flat color look with
the line work hiding the edges. These cels then are combined with the painted
backgrounds and again placed onto pegs and put under an animation camera.
The frames are then exposed one after another.
The hybrid method consists of scanning the pencil animation paper with a
digital camera or scanner. Once the images are in the computer, the process is
now digital.
There are many software packages that can be used for creating animation.
They basically allow you to complete all the necessary steps of the traditional
process in the digital realm. For two-dimensional art, artists have used Adobe’s
Flash and After Effects, Toon Boom’s many animation packages, Pencil, and
Anime Studio.
In the three-dimensional world, there is also a wide range of software
options to explore, from the high-end Autodesk Maya to the lower-end Hash’s
Animation:Master. There’s also the very capable and free Blender 3D software
with tons of tutorials available on the web.
I personally chose TVPaint Animation for my project. It has a wide-ranging
toolset including complex compositing, camera moves and even a particle
system. It’s a raster-based drawing system like Adobe’s Photoshop. One reason
for my choice is that I want software that’s going to be very expressive in terms
of line quality. My favorites in this area are Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro and
Photoshop. TVPaint’s advantage is that the drawing tools are just as good and it
has a multilayered timeline. I don’t have to waste time saving and opening a new
drawing; I just click the arrow key and then I can start my next drawing. I can even
scrub through the drawings to see the animation move. This was my personal
choice—you may find other software fits your workflow better.
Here’s a photo of my own mad-scientist setup for bringing things to life.
My lab here is in a small basement. I surround myself with flat surface space.
In front of me I have my Wacom 21-inch Cintiq drawing tablet. I’m left-handed
so it’s on my left side. Next to the Cintiq is my Contour ShuttleXpress. This is a
wonderful little device with which I can program in keyboard shortcuts to each of
its five buttons, such as Undo and Save. In the center is a jog wheel that allows me
to scroll through my animation frames forwards and backwards. To the right is my
MacBook Pro laptop.
Behind the computer setup are several sheets of foamcore board. I taped my
color script and shot checklist to one to remind me of my progress. The other
foamcore is covered with sticky notes to remind me of things to include in the
book. Off to the side are my book shelves. I actually like the metal kitchen-type
shelving for getting organized. One last thing is to make sure you have adequate
good lighting. You want your eyes to last a lifetime.
Equally important as the equipment is your state of mind in your studio. It
should be a place where you can feel inspired and work without distractions. It
should also be a place where you can get right to work and find what you need
easily. Make it your dream. It doesn’t need to have Tiffany lamps and rosewood
desks, it just needs to be a space you can call yours.
Should you listen to music in your studio? In some stages of the process I find it
distracting, while in other stages, such as cleanup or rendering backgrounds, music
helps keep me on task. When I need to do a lot of thinking I usually turn it off.
If animation is what you really want to do, invest in good tools, and they’ll pay
for themselves. A small Cintiq and a 13-inch MacBook Pro including animation
software might cost between $2000 and $3000. Axiotron makes a Modbook, which
is a Mac laptop with a drawing tablet on the top. A tablet PC laptop with software
might cost a little less.
You don’t need to go this high end when you’re just starting. I didn’t get my
Cintiq until this year when I started animating for this book. I started animating
with cutouts under a Super 8mm camera and using a homemade light stand. In
fact, the desk in the photo is a homemade desk with under-light. You can start
with little pads and make flipbooks. When you’re employed in the industry you’ll
be able to afford fancier tools.
Good tools will make your life easier and make you look good.
Mad Science or Magic? 13
 That Reminds Me of a Story… 15

Chapter Three a sequential order to get an audience to feel a range of

emotions and thus have a satisfying experience. Bottom

That Reminds line, this is what entertainment is—providing the audience

with an emotionally satisfying experience.

Me of a Story…
The Dramatic Structure of Stories
Here’s Iggy’s and Scared Bunny’s New Definition of
Story: A story is a way of using pictures and/or words in
Lessons from a Melodrama
When I ask my students, “Why do we watch movies?”
someone always answers, “To be entertained.” What is this
mysterious quality of entertainment? If you could bottle it,
you’d make billions.
My hometown of Moorpark had a melodrama theater
that presented spoof melodramas. The characters were
all clichés including villains who twirled their mustaches.
We used to take my son and his friends and we were all
encouraged to participate by cheering the hero and heroine
and booing the villain. Everyone had a great time. Sometimes
I’d bring a small sketchbook because the costumes and
acting were way over the top, perfect for animation.
Suddenly, the concept of entertainment was crystal clear.
Those actors up there wanted audience reactions! And it
didn’t matter if it was positive or negative. (Of course, at the
end they wanted applause!) But during the show they wanted
it all, the cheers and boos alike. This meant the audience was
engaged and having a satisfying emotional experience.
There are many ways to achieve the goal of providing
a satisfying experience. What do you want from your
audience? Do you want to shock them? Give them insight?
Make them laugh? Cry? Overwhelm them? Transfix them?
Entrance them?
The animator’s eye is a very personal eye with access to
the realm of the imagination. Once you learn the tools you
can access your animator’s eye and offer your unique view
of the world perceptually and philosophically, all reflected
in your story. Narrative storytelling is the heart and soul of
Hollywood filmmaking. The audience joins your characters
on the story’s journey and is transported to another place.
That reminds me of a story…
Where do we begin to tell stories? We’ve all been telling
stories all of our lives. “There was the time my dog ate my
homework. Fido really ripped it to shreds and his drool made
the ink smear.” Sound familiar? It’s easy, right? Not so fast…
How do we come up with a story for our animation? Most
people dream up a story they want to tell and then create
characters. The characters did this and then they did that
and so on and so forth, until finally, the end.
 16 That Reminds Me of a Story..
Let's try a different approach. First, I want you to answer several questions.
Don't think up a story. Instead, think of what you want your audience to feel. Think
about what you have to say about life. What's really important to you? How do you
see the world? These questions lead you to your theme which underlines a story.
Next, imagine which powerful images you'd like to use. What would be
unforgettable? What would be strangely beautiful? Super cute? Now what would
be its horrifying opposite? These are just suggestions to get you to think about
what would make your images unique.
Think about conflicts that can drive a story and make it suspenseful and
exciting. What would drive your characters crazy enough to do wild outrageous
things? Learn to think backward. What could have happened to get them in this
predicament?
After you've explored these ideas, now think about the story you wish to tell.
I'm hoping you've noticed that this has put you in a totally different frame of
mind, an enlarged frame of mind. This will lead to a great story. You'll see later
that this is how the animated story for this book was conceived. In addition to the
questions I've proposed above, I needed to think about what animation concepts
I wanted the film to demonstrate for you. You have to structure your story for an
emotional response from your audience.
But animation's not real!
How can mere drawings or computer images affect us? Does it matter what's
real? Stories affect us and that effect that people feel is very real.
I've heard of a story of a man riding on horseback during a raging storm to
get to somewhere in a hurry. When he arrives his friends are surprised. He asks
why they're surprised and they inform him that he just galloped on horseback
over a frozen lake. The man immediately has a heart attack and dies. So what was
real in this story? Was galloping over the frozen lake real? Or did it only become
real when he learned that the lake was frozen? At this point he was already safely
on the ground! He had already made it across the lake, and nothing else should
have mattered. He died not when they told him the story that he rode over a
frozen lake, but rather when he told himself the story that it was impossible to
have ridden a horse over a frozen lake. It was the point where he made it real for
himself. Stories can be that powerful.
WHAT DOES
THIS HAVE
TO DO WITH
ANIMATION?
Have patience, Iggy you want to learn to make profoundly moving movies,
right?
At what point is something real? Is reality a matter of communication? Then is
the communication part of the reality? Thus, the observer really changes reality. In
this case I'm not talking about quantum physics but rather the fact that we make a
story our own. We supply our associations to all of the images we see.
This is a very powerful message for filmmakers with animator's eyes. Stories
don't have to be true to be effective and your audience doesn't even need to
believe a story to be affected by its structure. They don't need to believe, but you
the filmmaker need to know it works. So, yes, drawings can affect us as strongly as
live-action movies can. They're very real and maybe even tap into deeper, more
primal layers of our minds.
Of course animation's not real. But isn't that what's so wonderfully magical
about it?
What Kinds of Stories can the Animator's
Eye Dream Up?
It's easier to ask what kind of stories animators can't create. The range of stories
explored by animation cover every kind of human experience. Stories explore
the myths of life. The animator's eye allows us to swap characters with other
creatures. Where else could you have cats and dogs playing Shakespeare? The Lion
King was structured along the lines of Hamlet. Uncle Scar kills Simba's father and
takes over the throne. Of course there are big differences too. Hamlet didn't sing,
"I just can't wait to be king."
Richard Linklater's Waking Life philosophically explores what dreams
are. When the Wind Blows tragically explores an elderly couple's experience
of radiation poisoning post nuclear war. And on the flip side, the wonderful
Oktapodi explores the comic side of life in a powerful love story between two
octopuses. Fairytales have provided lucrative fodder for the Walt Disney Studios
for decades. It appears that they've run out of fairytales and now the rage is to
make fun of them. Dreamworks has hit home runs using this ironic approach to
fairytales with the Shrek franchise.
Part of animation's appeal is Peter Pan's world of Never Never Land where
you don't have to grow up. Most grownups have lost the ability to play. What's
worse is that they've lost the ability to even see any value in it. The worlds of
childhood portrayed by Alice, Peter Pan, fairy stories, and monsters are very
powerful.
What's behind these fantasies? Why is fantasy meaningful? What is their
enduring appeal? How do they relate to the real world? Fantasies can make
us make feel secure. This was one of the secrets that Disney knew; the world
of childhood was filled with terrors. He also knew that terror contrasted with
safety and belonging made for a powerful combination. Maurice Sendak's
work, such as Where the Wild Things Are, also had this dark edge to the
 That Reminds Me of a Story… 17

portrayals of childhood. I think the film version of Where Why is Story so Hard to Get Right?
the Wild Things Are misfired in this regard. Pinocchio
had a magical terror, and don’t even get me started on
the terrors of Snow White or Fantasia’s Night on Bald
Mountain. Disney, like Freud, knew the power of the dark
side and our wish to be protected from it.
There’s a charm and magic that accompanies hand-
drawn animation that harkens back to our flat drawings as
kids. During Piglet’s Big Movie, the Pooh gang lose Piglet’s
scrapbook while they’re out searching for him. In Pooh’s
mind, since it was Piglet’s book of memories, maybe it
would remember where Piglet was.
A storm prevents them from searching any longer, so
while they’re warming their toes they set about recreating
Piglet’s scrapbook with crayons. I thought it would be
wonderful to bring their drawings to life. Our animators in
the Japan studio did a wonderful job bringing storyboard
artist Robert Sledge’s designs to life. This song sequence
furthered the story by showing the characters that in each
incident, from the time they built a house for Eeyore to the
day Kanga moved in, Piglet had saved the day. They realized
that they took him for granted. This was a story about the
fact that, even if you’re small, you can make a big difference
and it was also about learning to appreciate your friends, all
set to wonderful songs by Carly Simon.
It’s fascinating that so much animation is really about
bringing things to life and the life of the animation. The
first Fantasia (1940) was all about sleep, dreams, death and
waking. The fairies wake up with the change of seasons. The
dinosaurs all die off. The hippos awaken to dance the ballet.
The demon Chernabog wakes the witches and demons on They don’t call it “development hell” for nothing.
Bald Mountain only to go back to sleep when the church Theme and story are the hardest part of making a movie.
bells ring. Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey goes to sleep and This is further exacerbated by inefficient corporate structures
dreams of conducting the heavens. that can easily derail a project. I’ve watched firsthand and
Fantasia 2000 was all about rebirth. The whales lose their secondhand and participated in many feature projects that
child and then are reunited as the flock flies up into the were derailed by an ineffective process. I’m not saying their
sky reborn into a heavenly ocean. The forest dies with the job is any easier but if all involved understood the dangers of
eruption of the volcano to be reborn with the touch of where stories can go off track, it might avert some disasters.
the nature sprite. In the sequence that I directed, Donald Time and money are often wasted trying to make the
is Noah’s assistant and he and Daisy both believe that first act of a story perfect. Studios will tweak it over and
the other has been lost to the storm. When the storm over, only then having to change Act One again once the
waters recede our lovers reunite under God’s symbol of theme and story are worked out and after discovering that
redemption,the rainbow. The whole earth has been reborn. the beginning doesn’t set up the ending properly. David
This might account for Fantasia’s timeless appeal—truly Ball’s book, Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual
classic music set to imagery about life and death. for Reading Plays, reveals the truth, that a story only makes
 18 That Reminds Me of a Story…

sense from one vantage point—the end. It is important to know where you’re
going and what it’s really about. Create your end goal first.
Tremendous money can be wasted by the needs of the studio’s production
pipeline. The pipeline determines the production flow, according to the budget
and time schedule, sometimes requiring that the movie start production before
the story is ready. This is a recipe for a disaster of which the Hawaiian “Pipeline”
is an apt metaphor—wipe out!
I’ve watched executives change their minds as to what kind of movie they’re
making and change the genre after a complete storyboard was assembled as
an animatic reel. (An animatic reel is a version of the movie which just uses
the storyboard panels with temporary dialogue and music.) This was a shame
because they had a really funny movie, but they decided they wanted to make a
dramatic action film. True story.
I’ve also seen problems arise because the writers were on projects not because
of their qualifications as a writer, but because he or she were friends with the
executives.
Let’s look at how one studio consistently gets story right and why.
artists, including acting out all the parts. He could see the whole thing in his mind
with his animator’s eye.
The Marx Brothers tested their comedy with a live audience and performed
it over and over until their jokes were polished. Only then did they commit the
performance to film.
Once you have the basic story, theme, story conflicts, and character arcs
worked out, the story almost magically begins to write itself. But this happens
only after a lot of research, exploration, development, and experimenting.
How to Create Interesting Characters
Using Simple Rules
BUNNY: One way to get characters that will provide you with dramatic story
situations and comedic material is to give them rules.
IGGY: We don’t need no stinkin’ rules.
BUNNY: Iggy, one of your rules is not to follow rules. You wouldn’t be Iggy if you
followed the rules.

How Does Pixar Do Story?

While I have never personally worked at Pixar, I’ve read and talked to colleagues
enough to understand their story process. It’s a model process that most story
artists at all studios intuitively want to execute but the typical studio pressures of
limited time, budget, and insatiable need to “feed the pipeline” do not allow.
Pixar has several very small teams of storyboard artists and writers working
on stories, getting them ready to fly. When they’re ready, they pitch the results. If
the pitch goes well then they develop it further. They’ll keep pitching, showing it
to progressively larger groups. Each time the character motivation gets refined
and the story gets tighter. Finally, after this looping process of development and
feedback they’re ready to put it into the pipeline.
There are two things to take note of in their process. First is to let everyone
contribute notes. This provides a group creativity and, as an added bonus, this
builds morale. Secondly, they don’t try to make it funny—yet. They focus on
making the story work. At this early stage, jokes can distract from whether the
story itself is working. Once they know the story works, they know they can make
it funny.
This process is very efficient because you’re just paying a small team to get a
film ready. Pixar understands there will be many problems to solve. So they don’t
commit the whole pipeline to the project until it’s ready. Having many of these In cartoons the rules for characters can be simplified. Find out what your
story pods going insures that they’ll have many projects ready as the pipeline is character wants. Give them simple rules based upon those wants. Iggy is
ready for the next project. impulsive, impatient and doesn’t follow rules. This gets him into trouble—instant
Pixar was not the first studio to use this development and feedback cycle. Walt story! Bunny’s name says it all—scared bunny. Bunny is cautious and thinks too
Disney and the Marx Brothers did it before them. Walt pitched Snow White to his much. He’s not as interesting on his own but he’s a great companion for Iggy. You

need characters to contrast each other. Bunny sets the rules,
shows the danger at stake and Iggy breaks the rule, letting all
hell break loose!
What do your characters want? Does your audience
believe they’re doing it because they’re real thinking beings?
Or do they look and act like zombies?
Their rules derive from what they want and their single-
minded purposefulness is what makes them so interesting.
Think of the Coyote’s desire to catch the Road Runner. Will
he do anything to catch the Road Runner? No, he won’t
simply chase him, he has to make it complicated using
elaborate plans with technological devices to catch him. The
comedy comes from his relentless drive in spite of the fact
that the plans never work.
Scrat from the Ice Age movies is like the Coyote—he’s a
perfect cartoon character. Let’s compare him to a zombie.
Zombies need to eat. Scrat wants nuts. Zombies
mindlessly roam around until they find somebody to bite.
They eat but don’t want anything.
When Scrat finds a nut, he never eats it, he just wants
to horde it. Then he tries to bury it and move on to finding
more nuts. The problem is that, true to Murphy’s law, when
he tries to bury the nut there are disastrous consequences
which threaten his life and sometimes the entire planet.
Rules are perfect for movies. The secret is that it’s not the
goal but the chase itself. The goal provides the meaning to
the story but the chase is the fun part. This is why they say
Act Two is so hard to write for movies. We’re all so interested
in getting where we’re headed, we forget to enjoy the ride.
Characters are memorable when they possess a unique
style and personality. The audience needs to identify with
your character so they can see themselves in the character.
When you really know your characters inside and out, it makes your
job easier because you know how they’ll act.
That Reminds Me of a Story… 19
Animated Performance or How to
Tell Clowns from Zombies
In the past, entertainers were jugglers, jesters, magicians,
clowns, fire breathers, dancers, and gymnasts who would
travel from town to town. Balloon animals came late in
the game. New media such as television and the internet
have allowed everyone to experience their merriment. In
addition it has allowed the evolution of their antics by a
continual process of topping each other. When one gets to
see what others can do, the art form grows in unexpected
ways.
Clowning is a great way to train your animator’s eye.
My storyboarding mentor, Ed Gombert, one of the most
respected storyboard artists in the world, actually went
to clown school. This clowning experience shows in
his work. There’s a spontaneous playful quality to his
storyboards.
Zombies are scary. Clowns are funny. (Except some
people have a fear of clowns.) Clowns play for fun while
zombies aren’t really there at all. They don’t do much and
they’re not good conversationalists.
Clowns often act very clumsy but, if you look closely,
you will find that they are really very agile and graceful with
very precise timing. They are giving a performance of being
clumsy. Slapstick is part of the clown’s arsenal. You have to
make sure that your character deserves to be slapsticked or
the audience will feel that you’re mean spirited. Slapstick
is comedy that comes from exaggerated violence. One key
 20 That Reminds Me of a Story…

to its success is that we know that the person isn’t really hurt, if not, it crosses the your character can perform an action. That’s going to make it fun to animate for
line and is no longer funny. you and fun to watch for your audience. Clowns are great to watch because their
We had to pay attention to this danger of being mean spirited with Donald actions read clearly all the way to the back of the big top.
Duck in Pomp and Circumstance of Fantasia 2000. It’s really funny to watch
Donald get smashed. But we realized that we needed to show the audience that he
deserved it. Viewers who know Donald would know he deserved it but we had to
remind our audience, including those new to seeing Donald, that he deserved his
pratfalls. Duck Amuck is a similar case. All this bad stuff happens to Daffy Duck
but we know by his behavior that he deserves it.
Zombies are clumsy but they don’t let that stop them. Unless you shoot them
in the head they keep going. But they don’t have any gracefulness about them,
and on top of that they drool. You want your animation to be clown-like and not
like a zombie. Learn the lessons of Earl Nightingale’s The Strangest Secret: “We become what we think about.”
Why are zombies so scary? Not because they might get us and we’ll become It’s a 20-minute audio recording available online. So if you think about it, you can become funnier.
one, but rather that we might already be one. So how does one turn into a
zombie? It usually takes a bite from another zombie; however, there are other
ways. If you succumb to self doubts and are frozen with fear, you can become
dead inside—thus one of the “living dead” or zombified. Don’t let this happen Roller Coaster Theory of Storytelling
to you. Here it is! The moment you’ve been waiting for—it’s Iggy’s Roller Coaster Theory
Clowns feel the fear and do it anyway. They take self doubt as an opportunity of Storytelling:
to learn and improve. Or is that mystics? I often get them confused. I think
clowns have more fun. As Jack Canfield, motivational speaker and author of
Chicken Soup for the Soul says, “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” I once listened to
one of his motivational speeches in which he concluded with the idea that
we might be totally surprised by the changes in our lives within the next six
months. Well, within six months of listening to his speech, I accepted a job
in the Disney story department, got married, and moved cross-country to
California.

Warning: Zombies and Mimes

What is it that makes something seem alive? It’s all about the illusion of life.
Mimes create the illusion that they’re acting with imaginary invisible objects A circle is not a good dramatic structure for stories. Circles, well, just go around
to entertain an audience. They create the illusion through their actions that in circles.
enable the audience to imagine the objects they’re interacting with. They
juggle imaginary objects, feel and walk into imaginary walls, or walk imaginary
tightropes. It’s very similar to animation the way they use principles of mass
and force to achieve their illusions. Animated mimes can actually interact
with imaginary objects as if they’re real. An animated mime could get into an
imaginary plane and actually take off and then parachute out. On a final note, be
careful when you hunt zombies that you don’t accidentally shoot a mime instead.
Zombies don’t wear striped shirts.
Jokes lose their impact once you’ve heard them. Physical comedy holds
interest because it’s about the unique style of the performer doing it. It’s all
about character. When you’re animating, take time to imagine the funniest way
 That Reminds Me of a Story..

If a story goes around in a circle, we get bored with it.

What does a story do? It takes you up, it takes you down and
Analysis of Story Structure
it changes directions and then at the end, plants your feet Here's where we talk about the importance of story
back on the ground- just like a roller coaster. structure. Without structure a story would come crashing
The roller coaster theory shows you where the story goes down. Without the scaffolding supporting the roller coaster,
up and down. So without further ado, here is Iggy's Roller it wouldn't stand and then no rides. There wouldn't be any
Coaster Theory of Storytelling presented for the first time in suspense or tension. In the story, you wouldn't be driven to
living color. find out what happens or even know who to root for.
Let's look at the emotional stages of the roller coaster
from a distance.
We start out with the first small dip (1-2 on chart). Things
11 are getting worse. We want something better and approach
5 that hill.
4 .6 10 We could look at the first hill (3-4) as approaching the
problem selfishly. So we quickly overcome its obstacles. At
1 the top (5) we think we got what we wanted but we realize
3 others around us aren't happy with what's been happening
2 to them and us.
7 9 Crashing down from the second hill (6-7) we see the
8 error of our selfish ways and the destruction of relationships
they've caused. So we bottom out big time and lose all
hope (8).
Let's look at what happens with a roller coaster. First, we Then things change and we begin our ascent to the
decide we're going to be brave and go on the roller coaster. second hill (9-10). This one's much harder and steeper.
Then we begin to feel anticipation. Anticipation is kind But when we reach this summit (11) we know that we've
of like excitement mixed together with fear. We climb in, followed the path of growth within a community. That's
waiting. Then the roller coaster starts to roll over small hills when we're truly lovable.
and then begins to climb. Our expectancy and anticipation What's interesting is that we can use the same roller
build to the peak of the hill, and then time freezes for a coaster for tragedies. lust flip the roller coaster upside down
second while we change directions and go zooming down and the comic journey becomes tragic.
with hearts beating. Tremendous relief is short lived as Now let's take another look at the roller coaster, but this
we realize we just tackled the foothills. We now climb up time from a closer vantage point and see how we can use the
to unimaginable heights and come crashing down in fear. roller coaster to help write our story. We'll see that each big
Finally, feeling the rush of adrenaline aliveness, we slow to a hill is made of a lot of little dips and bumps.
stop.
This sounds like entertainment, doesn't it—providing How Do You Start to Write
the audience with a satisfying experience. Well, it is
similar, but we're missing a wider range of emotions. The the Story?
anticipation, terror and incredible rush are entertaining Think verbs, not nouns. A verb describes an action. A noun
for the couple of minutes we're on the ride. But, could you describes a thing. Verbs are active. Nouns are not. Think of
imagine a two-hour roller coaster ride? desires rather than characters. What do they want? Some
To keep the audience's interest and attention we need to characters are driven by one key desire. The Coyote wants
provide more for a story than just pure excitement. We need the Road Runner and will stop at nothing to get him! There's
to fit a story about an emotional journey onto this structure nothing else he wants and nothing else in the story. It's
and, if all goes well, we could have a hit. perfectly clear and totally fun.
 22 That Reminds Me of a Story…

The story starts when they want something. They have a goal. The main So they ride the roller coaster down to their lowest moment, right past the
character or hero wants something so they make a plan. Decide what are the steps point where they can turn back. It’s here at rock bottom, just when it feels
they’ll need to take to accomplish their goal. What “actions” do they need to take, hopeless and they’re ready to give up, that the lessons come back and they learn
what do they need to “do”? Once you have their plan, now list what can go wrong what they did wrong.
with their plan. Until the hero learns that something, whatever it is they need, they can’t begin
Since something has prevented the hero from following their plan, either by to act differently. All it takes is one small incident to remind them of their true
accident or encountering an obstacle from a villain, they have to change their course. Hopefully this event is something that happened earlier in the story, or
plan. So now we root for the hero to continue on in spite of the obstacles. Invent was “planted” as we say, that affects the hero now that he or she is ready for it.
a physical and emotional obstacle course for your characters. The goal is to create However, once they do decide to really change who they are, then that decision
tension for them and your audience. takes the story in a new direction. This is the main turning point of the story. This
is where we root for them the most.
Like the Phoenix rising up out of the ashes, they come back to life and begin
their new struggle for a more selfless goal and achieve new heights.
Here are the key beats:
Problem
Denial
Go for it (first turn)
Go for it wrong path
Fake success
Found out, betrayed (middle turn)
Crashing down
No hope
New life from ashes (main turn)
Real struggle
PRINCIPLE: Murphy’s Law of Storytelling Overcome obstacles
Use Murphy’s law of storytelling—if something can go wrong, it will at the worst Real success
time.
Hero> wants> decide plan> take action <something goes wrong.
This is the pattern of the dips and bumps and it keeps repeating throughout
the story. Sometimes these dips and bumps are small and other times they’ll
make you lose your breath. Keep making your hero want something and put
stuff in their way.
Often in the dip of the first section, the hero will meet someone who can
help teach them about achieving their goal. But equally as often the hero thinks
they know it all and they’re off and running before they’ve learned the lessons.
Most heroes are impatient. Perfect heroes may be great but they’re terrible for
storytelling. They have to have flaws that get them in trouble. If something can go wrong, it will. If something doesn’t go wrong, you don’t have a story.
So the heroes struggle and they think they’ve achieved their goal. But then
everything falls apart because the goal was a false goal. Their friends turn away,
they might even be betrayed. They’re not ready to accept that it was themselves
that might have been selfish, betrayed a friend’s trust, taken a friend for granted Anticipation in Storytelling
or cheated to get the goal. Even though they’re not ready to really change, the Anticipation is one of the classic 12 principles of animation. However, it also
other side keeps attacking. pertains to the telling of the story itself.

Anticipation is good storytelling. Good storytelling is
about how you tease the audience through story delaying.
A narrative question is raised and we have to go through
the journey to wait for the answer. The journey makes it
resonant so we feel it stronger. You want them wanting to
see what happens next and provide them just enough to
keep them interested. If you tell them too much, they'll
guess what's going to happen and lose interest, or if you
don't give them enough information they might get lost and
lose interest.
Even at the action level anticipation is good storytelling.
It sets up an action and we expect it to happen. If the action
is accomplished with a great performance or done in a way
that surprises us, it becomes entertaining.
Fractal, Not Fractured, Storytelling
I really love Rocky and Bullwinkle's Fractured Fairy Tales,
but right now I want to talk about fractals. A fractal is a
mathematical construct whose shape can be fragmented
and each fragment is roughly the same shape as the whole.
It's known as self-similarity and it can be modeled with
computer programs.
WHAT DOES
THIS HAVE
TO DO WITH
ANIMATION?
Well, Iggy's creativity doesn't always take a straight route,
so why don't you relax and enjoy the detour?
A Kock snowflake starts with a triangle. The middle third
of each of the sides is replaced with two sides of a triangle.
So after the first replacement you get a star with six points.
Repeat the process and the shape resembles a star made
That Reminds Me of a Story.. 23
out of six stars. The next go around makes a six-sided star
of six-sided stars. This is a simple version of a fractal. But
if we keep going further, replacing using the same rule, the
edges begin to look like a landscape. Computer graphics
programmers noticed this too. And fractals became the
basis of modeling features of the natural world that couldn't
be modeled any other way.
Are you with me, Iggy? Your Roller Coaster theory is
actually fractaline. What I mean is that the overall shape of
a story is the roller coaster, but what is the shape of each
scene? Since it's a fractal, each scene is really a little roller
coaster where conflicts are played out. So we have big
conflicts the size of the whole movie and lots of similarly
shaped smaller conflicts in each scene. Roller coasters
can be flipped upside down to be comic or tragic. One
scene might end upbeat with the hero on top, "Yeah!", or
downbeat with the villain on top, "Boo!"
This is not the first time a mathematical metaphor has
helped further story theory. The roller coaster itself came
from a trigonometry mathematical concept, sine waves. The
actual math is not necessary to understand here; my point
is that something as abstract as mathematics can become a
metaphor for structuring stories.
I was struggling with how to write this chapter on story.
That was my problem. I'd already completed a lot of work on it,
including writing about the hero's journey and story structure
in my first book, Directing the Story. But I still felt most of the
concepts I had learned about were lacking something.
The specific problem was that if the hero's journey was
modeled on a circular structure, what do turning points
 24 That Reminds Me of a Story…
mean? Could you make a story structure that modeled the turning points? My
unconscious went into overdrive and searched memory banks that were over 20
years old. When I was one of the “guinea pig” artists testing graphics programs for
the scientists at New York Institute of Technology’s (NYIT’s) Computer Graphics
Lab, I began learning C programming.
Computer scientist and Toy Story producer Ralph Guggenheim began teaching
us the basics of computer graphics programming. After learning about functions
and how to build programs that counted and generated random numbers, he
taught us how a sine wave could be plotted on a graph based upon the mathematics
of a circle. I had taken trigonometry and studied functions in my high school math
class, but we never plotted the results out. It was never so clear as when I actually
got to “see” it plotted out. Suddenly, I understood functions, sines and cosines.
“Aha!” A circular structure can be remapped onto a sine wave. A sine wave
changes direction—in other words, it has “turning points.” It goes up and down
like a roller coaster! The only thing I had to do was distort the roller coaster to
grow bigger, just the way a story does, and I had a new structural model for stories.
A story is shaped like an expanding fractaline sine wave, or roller coaster.
Sometimes, you can’t get there from here—you have to go through mathland.
Sometimes you even have to go through the land of bad ideas to get there. This is
formally known as the Detour Theory of Creativity. (That’s because that’s what I
just called it.)
Remember fractal, not fractured. You want a unified story, not a broken one!
How to Ride the Roller Coaster to a Good Story
What Kinds of Things Could Be in a Movie?
Actually movies can be about virtually anything. With animation the field is
even wider, including the unimaginable until you imagine it. What movies
should have are things that make them interesting to an audience. When you
watch movies, pay attention to when your mind wanders. That’s what you don’t
want to do.
What audiences want to see are things that are exciting, suspenseful,
outrageous, heartfelt, funny, tragic, novel, and unique. Since film is a temporal
medium, it requires a temporal structure. That’s where the roller coaster can
guide us. The story has to start, go somewhere and come to a rest.
What gets the roller coaster started? Conflict is at the heart of it all. A roller
coaster is a machine but it still starts with conflict. If there’s no fuel it won’t run.
Let’s say it runs on a gas engine. Gas is mixed with air and goes into the engine
cylinders and is ignited. It explodes and makes the crankshaft move. Then another
explosion alternates, keeping the movement going. That’s conflict. But it’s
contained and predictable.
When you add conflicted emotions to the mix you can no longer contain it and
it’s certainly not predictable anymore. These are the ingredients to a good story.
Relatable Situations
Besides having conflict, stories need to be relatable. Story artist Ed Gombert
taught me a trick for coming up with ideas for animated films. He’d ask, “What
would my dog do in this situation?” It’s a great way to get personality, charm, or
comedy.
There’s an old expression in Hollywood about a simple story in three parts.
Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl. Let’s ask some questions about this
situation. That’s how we can develop the story. How do they meet? Does he
see her in class? Is it a dance? Do they meet at a funeral? How do you make it
interesting? Who talks to whom first? What happens when they meet? Do they
hate each other or is it love at first sight? Or does the girl get the boy? Does he
order her mail order? Does he create her, like Frankenstein or Weird Science? Does
he woo her with flowers or create poems for her? Does he create an animation
about her? This is what gets the story started.
Drama comes from conflicting desires. You want to orchestrate your characters
in opposition to each other, just like Iggy and Bunny. The middle of the story
explores how the boy loses the girl. Is he a logger and she an environmentalist?
Does he do something stupid? You could ask, what would I do? What makes the
love story work? It’s the obstacles to their love. It could be problems with them
or external obstacles keeping them apart. Continue asking and answering these
types of questions and your story will grow.
Boy sees girl. Girl teases boy. Boy chases girl. The advantage of these relatable
conflicts is that you have something you can animate. You can’t animate the
concept “love.” But you can animate a father chasing the boy with a shotgun. And
of course, in animation the girl and boy could be cats, dogs, mice, or flying moose.
So we have conflict and relatable situations—what else can we add?
Exaggeration can make the ordinary into something funny. Story artist and
creator of the Yeti vs. Gnome cartoons, Moroni Taylor once shared with me the
secret of comedy: it’s providing the audience with a surprise. In order to surprise

someone you have to first lead them to expect something and
then give them something different that sheds a new light
on the situation. Play an exaggeration-topping game—keep
making it bigger and more exaggerated. See what happens
when you keep topping it. You may find some fun surprises.
Where can we get ideas for stories? In the next chapter
we’ll learn more about getting ideas but here are some
places where ideas hang out. The world of childhood is
explored in many children’s books and fairytales, giving a
unique insight into the way kids view the world. They have
a surreal stream of consciousness. They have a mouse-eye
perspective of a world of giants. Their world is a world of
imaginary friends. It’s a world filled with monsters waiting
to pounce.
Make Sure You Give Your Characters
Something to Feel
Good stories have characters going through a journey but
the important part is that the audience identifies with the
emotions of that journey. A journey implies a change in
emotions. We need to see the reasons why the characters
progress from one emotion to another. Emotions also build
in response to events and running out of time.
That Reminds Me of a Story… 25
Make Sure You Have Something Fun
to Animate
Once you know how your character feels, then give them
something to do that allows you to show the audience how
they feel. If you don’t give your character something to do, you
won’t know what to animate! I know this sounds simplistic but
it could save you a lot of headaches. Think about the most fun
and interesting way to perform your action. How would your
character do it? How would they make the action uniquely
their own? That’s going to bring your animation to life—
otherwise you’ll be spending a lot of time animating zombies.
Something to do is often defined by the script. How they
do it and what extra gestures they bring to it is defined by
their character.
Any action can be made interesting by bringing a
character’s point of view to it. Richard Pryor spent three
minutes on a routine of a skinny kid in gym trying to lift
barbells that were too big for him. Even though he was only
lifting a lightweight microphone stand you could viscerally
feel the strain of this imagined immense weight causing his
whole body to shake. This skit rivaled Goofy’s classic sports
routines in its wonderful, over-the-top cartoonishness.
Your goal is to be interesting, not boring.
Even a simple action can be interesting if you make it a
game. For example, kids and Monty Python can make silly
fun of walking and make it interesting.
What Do You Want to Say with
Your Story?
 26 That Reminds Me of a Story..
It may be obvious that there are differences between words and pictures but
many people involved with filmmaking don't really appreciate how profound
those differences really are. Animators and writers both live in the same world. We
communicate in that world with words, body language, and images.
The images can be created with words or physical representations—in other
words, drawings, photographs, paintings, etc. However, even though they live in
the same world, I believe that writers and animators think very differently. I find
that animators tend to be more spatial in their thinking while writers are more
linear. It's like the difference between text and a map. Think about Google Maps
and how they offer a choice of either a sequence of verbal directions or a picture
of a map representing all the streets. They'll both get you where you want to go
but they're very different. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. The
directions are very clear and convenient. But what if you get lost? Then you have
no context to show where you went wrong. A map might be more difficult to use
to find your bearing, but you can find a new way if you get lost.
WHAT DOES
THIS HAVE
TO DO WITH
ANIMATION?
"Methinks Iggy doth protest too much."
This is important because animation requires both—images and words. We
start with a script that describes present tense actions. But in order to use these
images in the images of animation we need to translate. I believe this translation
is more radical than translating any language into another language.
In all my years of experience, I have found that this translation process is
where most stories have trouble. What works on the page dies on the screen. Most
often the script that has been approved is usually approved by executives—in
other words, more verbal people. A writer has words (nouns, verbs, adjectives)
to describe what he or she sees. When we read a script, we see in our mind's eye
what we imagine that they imagined. Our version is enriched and fleshed out by
our associations, experiences, memories, dreams, and expectations.
Once the script gets to the screen, the gaps and inconsistencies of character
motivation that had been filled in by the reader's mind now appear as flaws. In
live action these types of problems are often fixed by shooting coverage or the
more expensive option of reshoots. Then they fix the story in editing. In fact, it's
often said that a movie is made during editing. Likewise, the real work of making
animation is when the script meets the storyboards and later animation. The
animator must also be a writer who uses images.
In contrast to the writer, the animator can only make marks on paper (or its
digital equivalent). These marks represent characters, objects, scenes, etc. Instead
of verbal composition we animator's-eye types have spatial composition and the
elements and principles of design to structure our images. The principles include
harmony, contrast, balance, dominance, unity, and so forth. The effects of design
are the illusions of light, space and volume.
The marks we make are the design elements: line, shape, color, direction, etc.
In a very rough sense, these are equivalent to "adjectives." Here's a tall, blue tree.
When the marks are organized to represent things, we have our "nouns." When we
change the marks (their size, position, or shape) in a sequence of animation we
have "verbs."
Beyond simple descriptive sentences, writers can use figurative language like
metaphors and other rhetorical tropes. Writers might describe a character as "flew
like the wind." Animators can actually show the character flying and personify
the wind as a cloudlike shape with a face. We animators can literalize metaphors
concretely. For example, I remember watching old Terrytoons cartoons and when
it was raining "cats and dogs," they animated cats and dogs falling with the rain.
Metaphors are a spark between ideas, like a flash of lightning. It's just one
more way of bringing life to the inanimate.
So What Do You Want to "Say"? What is Your
Animation About?
When I was at school we watched a lot of symbolic films. The problem with
many symbolic films is that most of the time the symbols are too abstract. In other
words, the meaning of the symbol isn't clear, or worse, it's too cliche. It's like
watching a foreign film without subtitles. And so many of those films were boring
(at least to me). Practice telling a story dramatically and clearly. Then you won't
need words—the audience will feel the full impact of your images.
That Reminds Me of a Story… 27

Chapter Four
Secrets of
Drawing
Seeing Shapes, Drawing Lines
Secrets of Drawing
“I can’t even draw a straight line.” I’m sure you’ve heard
people say that when they’re telling you that they can’t
draw. Well, next time you hear that, simply ask if they’ve ever
heard of a ruler.
Why learn to draw if you’re using a computer to animate?
We could ask why learn about design if you’re just learning
to draw? Or why study sculpting if you’re just drawing? The
blunt answer is that if you don’t, it will show in your animation.
When you draw, you need to feel it in your bones, feel it in
your muscles. You’ll be drawing from the inside, capturing the
life rather than tracing the surface appearance. Whether you
use clay or computer models, drawing is about the carefully
designed arrangement of lines and shapes on a flat surface.
In this chapter, we’re going to look at specific techniques
to develop your ability to draw what you see in your
animator’s eye.
The First Secret: It May Look Easy But…
The first secret of drawing is that it’s an acquired skill that
takes a lot of practice to master. This is part of the most
reassuring secret of drawing: it can be learned. As a ten year
old, I discovered Mad Magazine and my world expanded. The
drawings and humor were a totally new world to explore.
I really wanted to be able to draw cartoons like those masters
of the art. Since the only reference that I had to go by was the
Secrets of Drawing 29
magazine itself, I mistakenly thought that the Mad artists drew
the panels exactly that size and drew in pen exactly what the
panel looked like. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered
that they actually worked much bigger than the final
publication size—usually 1.5 or even 2 times larger. And the
bigger surprise was that the final image was often drawn many
times. Various compositions were tried. Character designs
were explored. And when they were ready to do the final art,
they drew it in blue first, then cleaned it up in pencil and then
drew the final clean ink line. I discovered more secrets when,
years later, I got to see some of the original art. The artists, in
addition to erasing, covered their mistakes with opaque white
ink and sometimes even patched in other pieces of paper.
The “b” part of this secret is that it does get easier.
Second Secret: Drawing is Thinking
First of all, you need to understand that drawing is about
thinking as much as it is about moving a pencil around the
page. Drawing is a way of learning to see. Moving your hand
around the page also involves thinking. It’s called eye–hand
coordination and the brain is responsible for it. Consider
it like riding a bike. When you first start it’s so difficult you
might think it’s impossible. Once you learn how, you no
longer need to even think about it. Even after years of not
riding you can hop on and go. (Of course, you’ll probably be
a bit rusty at first.)
As an animation artist, you need to know what to look
for and then learn how to get your animator’s eye and your
animator’s hands to work together to put that vision on
paper or a computer screen.
Drawing requires feedback. We look at what we’ve
drawn and think about it. How does it feel? Does it feel
unbalanced? Does it feel fragmented? Is it telling a clear
story? Does it flow? We look and provide our minds with
feedback, and then we can take the next step.
Take a few steps back to get a better overview of your
progress. Try looking at it in a mirror. Let’s say I’m drawing
a castle. I’ve looked at reference to get ideas and then I start
drawing a castle from my imagination. The castle takes shape
as I draw it. When I see the pieces, I can start rearranging
them, changing the proportions, creating repetitions of
shapes and start putting it together. Drawing is a continual
thinking/drawing/feedback process. If it’s not working,
don’t be afraid to start over.
 30 Secrets of Drawing

Third Secret: Even Great Artists Scribble
When you’re ready to start your day of drawing it helps to loosen up your arm and
wrist. Use your whole arm when you draw rather than just using your wrist and
fingers. This helps getting a fluid quality in your drawings. Just start scribbling to
loosen up and learn to be aware of the expressive qualities that emerge from your
scribbles. Try to represent different emotions just with drawing scribbles.
Artists get ideas by doodling and finding images that suggest other ideas.
Sixth Secret: Think Shapes, Not Lines
Most artists think with lines. It’s easy to get lost in lines. If you’re in a rut with your
drawing, try thinking in shapes. Try what Matisse did. When faced with arthritis,
which prevented him from holding a paintbrush, he created masterpieces using
cutout colored paper. It’s a great way to learn to be sensitive to shapes and get
clear silhouettes.

Fourth Secret: Use the Force

No, not that “force.” Let your eyes follow how the forces run through the body. The
“line of action” principle was proposed by Preston Blair in his book Animation:
Learn How to Draw Animated Cartoons. This is an imaginary line running through
a pose that represents the dominant flow of force moving through a body. There’s
a directional intention behind many movement that shows where the character is
headed. At any time there are multiple forces running through the body. The “line
of action” is the dominant force that helps the figure feel unified.

In these poses you can see the clear lines of action (indicated in red) with all parts
subordinated to this line. The character doesn’t flail around in different directions.
I’d also like to recommend Michael D. Mattesi’s excellent book on the subject,
Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators.

Fifth Secret: Learn to See Rather than Merely Looking

SEEING is not the same as LOOKING. When we look we perceive things. When
you really see, sometimes you forget about the “thingness” and perceive the
shimmering field of color that the impressionists saw or the sculptural shapes that
the Renaissance artists saw.
Beginning artists need to learn what to look for. Often they will draw what they
think they see rather than what’s there in front of them. Seeing involves seeing
shapes, values, masses, lines, not things. Sometimes it’s as simple as seeing subtle
things like the alignment and position of feet on the floor. What good are lines
then? Lines certainly have their place, lines define edges, directions, forces, and
shape boundaries.
 Secrets of Drawing 31

Does knowing how to draw limit your creativity? How

Try drawing the shapes instead of rendering with line.
Try using a big brush or even cutout paper. Look for shapes
as volumes in space. This will help set your shapes in a
dimensional space.
Seventh Secret: When Drawing Small,
Focus on Silhouette
This isn't really a secret, but who ever heard of six secrets?
When you have to draw small, focus on the shape of the
silhouette instead of the details. If you get the shape right, the
details will fall right into place.That will help maintain the
quality of your drawings.
could it? Suppose you draw in one way all the time—could
this create a rut? By all means find your own style, but be
open to new ideas and let your style evolve to become richer
as you grow as an artist.
Go for expressive drawing instead of zombies. Make your
drawings dynamic, funny, cute, cool, sexy, or appealingly
ugly—just anything but dead. Most of all have fun; it will
show in your work.
Caricatured
Realism

Flat graphic
Drawing for animation falls broadly into three styles.
The first is a realistic style that aims to capture the look of
"reality." This is difficult for it requires strong draftsmanship
skills and is very labor intensive. People's ideas of what is
realistic can also vary.
The best way to train your animator's eye is to draw all the time.

Finding Your Own Style

Many artists worry about finding their own style. Don't
worry about it. Practice and your style will come out of
experience. Be careful, because if you have a unique style
and that's all you can do, you might lose out on jobs. On
the other hand, if you have a unique style that people love,
they'll be coming to you with offers.
 32 Secrets of Drawing
At the other pole is the flat style like United Productions of America (UPA)
cartoons or many television animated series. The Flintstones, Jetsons and Rocky
and Bullwinkle were early adopters of the UPA style. Foster’s Home for Imaginary
Friends and The Powerpuff Girls are more recent variations.
The third pole is a caricatured style while maintaining volume. Disney
animation uses this approach in a restrained manner. Warner Brothers cartoons
also use this style but use wild exaggerations.
Here’s a pitch I created with Design by Greg Goler.
If you draw them too realistically they will complain about every little flaw. You
can animate realistically if you learn how to simplify. Look at legendary animator
Glen Keane’s work on Tarzan. He uses a simplified figure anatomy, yet it’s all there.
When you don’t think about line, you don’t have to worry as much about your
line quality. Go for expressive drawing over clean line work. Of course it matters
what kind of film you’re working on. The children’s TV show Ed, Edd n Eddy
broke new ground by creating a jiggly line on the characters that worked well for
the show.
Drawing Basics
Here are some basic exercises to start drawing. Try drawing a series of circles and
boxes to warm up.
The next step is to take two of these and connect them.
 Secrets of Drawing 33

Now start twisting them.

This seemingly simple skill will come in handy when
you start drawing the figure. This is exactly how the parts
fit together. Round parts flow with this type of stretchy
connective tissue into boxy ones.

What Do I Draw?
This was a question that always came to me when I would
start drawing—it still does. You can draw anything that comes
to mind. Draw the things around you. Doodling is a great way
to come up with ideas. Go to a park and you’ll find people
involved in all kinds of activities that might be fun to draw
and animate. You might find a drawing idea that leads you to
a story idea.
34 Secrets of Drawing

If you’re really stuck for ideas you could just draw from other artists’ work that
you admire. This can be very educational.

Before and After Gestures

Gesture is the key to giving life to your animation drawings. If your drawing
doesn’t have gestural life it can easily become a zombie. A zombie drawing is one
without life. Zombies don’t have gestures, they just kind of hang out as if they are
hung from a coat hanger.
Let’s compare zombie drawings with some spontaneous drawings. Here is an
old art comic book page that I did as a teenager.
 Secrets of Drawing 35

In the thumbnails here, I’ve recomposed the action,

giving it some force.

This is supposed to be an action scene, but it’s totally

lifeless! Why? What specifically is wrong? If you look at the
lines of the characters, they’re all still running parallel to the
edge of the frame. This flattens out the space and deadens
the effect. They feel wooden.
The values are also muddy. In the next lower thumbnail,
you can see how much just changing the values can add It’s much more alive now.
more life. What brings a drawing to life? Don’t draw things, draw
their spirits—how it feels. This is what was missing from
the first version. Knowledge and practice can help you to
express yourself through your drawings.
Let’s now look at more recent Adam and Eve cartoons.
I thought it would be fun to do a comic strip about
Adam and Eve and how they couldn’t get along. It would
be about all the normal problems that relationships
have. This provided fun stuff to draw and animate. Here
they are:
 36 Secrets of Drawing

As usual in relationships, the man has to apologize.

Finally, Adam finds out Eve’s ulterior motives.

It’s different when Eve wants something. She uses her magic on him.

When I drew these they just flowed out onto the page, effortlessly. I find this
to be a rare occurrence that I wish would happen more often. The reason was
that I knew exactly the feeling that I wanted to capture. You get immediately how
they feel. The other difference between these drawings and the Good versus Evil
drawing is that I had a few decades to practice drawing.

I thought about setting the Adam and Eve story as a
television sitcom. But look how I stiffened it up again.
I’m also showing you this so you don’t get discouraged.
Everyone has to start somewhere. No one draws the Mona
Lisa on their first sketchpad or iPad.
Pros and Cons of Construction
Gesture is the life force running through your character but
now it’s time to give your spirit some bones to make it real.
Constructing is the process of drawing the underlying
simple shapes and building up the character from this
foundation. The benefits of drawing in this way include
the creation of a solid-looking character, a deeper sense
of perspective and space in the drawing, and the ability
to maintain shape and size among a series of animated
drawings.
Secrets of Drawing 37
The drawing process of construction is to find what
simple shapes underlie your character and begin drawing
those. It is important to make sure you have strong lines of
action that hold your character together. When you draw
these simple circles, ellipses, or pear shapes, the next step
is to draw perspective lines running down their center and
around their circumference. These lines provide guidance
as to where to draw the features. In this book I’ve left some
of the construction lines on the drawings so you can see the
thinking and searching process to find the final drawing. In
this one where Bunny is freaking out because he can see his
construction lines, you can see that originally his ears were
forward. I pushed them back to allow for a clearer read. You
can also see my construction lines to indicate the floor plane.
Let’s look at an example of construction using Iggy. In
the first drawing we have a simple circle on a cone-shaped
body. The arms are simple tubes. The perspective lines have
been drawn in on the circle defining the center of the face.
You can see my search for the shape in the multiplicity of
the rough lines.
In the second stage, I’ve begun lightly drawing Iggy’s
features and refining the details in red. I’ve done a lot of
erasing and kept the lines light.
In the third drawing I’ve drawn a clean black line over the
red. At this stage, I’m not tracing. Each time I’m redrawing
Iggy looking for ways to make the line express the volume of
Iggy’s shapes, his emotion and any forces shaping the pose.
 38 Secrets of Drawing

When working digitally you can work in layers. In traditional animation the Your linear elements are straight, curved bulges and curved dents. Think like
drawing would have blue lines with a clean graphite line cleanup. Then an inker you’re pushing clay with your pencil to capture the feeling of forces acting upon
would draw the animation onto a clear acetate animation cel. In this case I’ve drawn your characters.
each color on a separate layer. Many animation software packages such as TVPaint,
Digicel’s Flipbook or ToonBoom offer automatic color filling of areas bounded by line.
In this fourth stage, I’ve turned off the rough blue and red layers.
In the fifth stage, I’ve added the color to a layer under the line work. This layer
still has the red construction showing.
The final pose has the finished drawing of Iggy in color. Compare it to the
version with the rough construction and you can see how the construction lines
help give the drawing more depth. The problem is that these lines would flicker
during animation and it doesn’t look natural for a character to have lines drawn
down and around their face.
By comparing you can see what articulations you might want to change or add
to further enrich your final drawing. I can see that the rough has a line connecting
his snout to the wrinkle lines above the snout that give the rough version a more
solid construction. It would be simple to add this line to the final and strengthen PRINCIPLE: Contrast Straights Against Curves
the drawing.
and Bulges Against Dents
Construction vs. Sculpting IGGY: Bulges and Dents will be performing at the Star Theatre…
Constructing often leads to simple rounded shape characters or “rubber hose.” The danger of the construction process is that the drawings it produces can look
One way to avoid this happening is to imagine that you’re sculpting those forms mechanical and stiff. If you construct from simple spheres, cubes, and eggs it’s easy for
using concave shapes rather than all convex shapes. Add flat, straight parts such the drawing to end up looking like a wooden manikin. It’s actually perfect for drawing
as the forehead, some dented parts, and let other parts bulge. In this way you can robots or zombies! But not characters. Let’s look at some ways we can avoid this danger.
create a wealth of interesting shapes in your characters. The quickest way to avoid the construction trap is to use some asymmetry
in your drawings. Don’t make both sides mirror images. The asymmetry can be
subtle or wild for a more cartoonish look. Using perspective with stretch and
squash is great for asymmetry.

Stretch and Squash in Perspective

Stretch and squash is an animation principle that we’ll learn more about in the
next chapter. In this chapter we’ll look at how it saves a drawing made by the
construction technique from becoming mechanical looking.
Concave shapes can give an edge to your characters and can be clearly seen in
the difference between Disney and Looney Toon characters. See how the concave
versus convex shapes in the eyes totally change the feel of these characters.
 Secrets of Drawing 39

This drawing was a cleanup lesson from legendary

animation artist Bill Frake. Bill has worked at Disney, Warner
Brothers, and created the Scrat character for Blue Sky
Studios. In the cleanup we can see how the character is put
in perspective depth with many small clues.
The closer eye is larger and the other gets smaller
because it is further away.
The construction ellipse of the head gets distorted
showing perspective depth.
The closer hand is larger.
In addition to the perspective cues, this drawing uses The second version of Iggy hiding under a flour sack
tapering arms to create more interest than straight tubes. is a lot more dynamic because of the gestures and the
There’s also a play between straight and curved lines perspective depth created by the ground plane.
for interest. He stretches one side of the face while
compressing the other. This pushes the simple construction
beyond a simple technique into an expressive tool for the
artist.
An additional way to break up the uniformity of
constructed drawings is to add more simplified anatomy.
The body is a collection of tense and compressed muscles.
Anatomy changes shapes as limbs move. Try to create a
rhythmic flow between parts. Flow exists from the
insertion of muscles into other parts, they seem to flow
into each other, creating a sense of the gracefulness
It’s hard to focus on gesture if you’re struggling to draw
of the body.
the parts. So, let’s start by drawing something easy. We’ll
practice with drawing a flour sack. A flour sack allows you
to focus on capturing the gesture because you don’t have to
worry about complex anatomy.

Meet Sackenstein
The Life of a Flour Sack
If one thing could bring a drawing to life it would be gesture.
Gesture is the heart of drawing. As you can see it’s also easy to give a flour sack a sense
of volume. The floor plane helps you define the volume.
 40 Secrets of Drawing

Because flour sacks are so easy to draw, it’s easy to focus on the gesture and
timing. Thus they’re perfect for learning to animate.

Our flour sack has been waiting for us.

Secrets of Drawing 41
42 Secrets of Drawing

It wants to show us what it can do.

Sacks can even be artistic.

Sacks can be a lot of fun when you imagine them to act like animals.
 Secrets of Drawing 43

Here are two versions that I tried before deciding to go with

a simpler sack design.

Disney gesture drawing expert Walt Stanchfield told us

that while we draw we should describe what the parts of the
body are doing using verbs. This hip thrusts out here, while
this shoulder juts out here, and this arm sags, and the waist
twists, this ankle bends, while this bulges, etc.

They can even move like different types of animals too. Drawing is easier when you’re drawing characters engaged
in actions and it’s easier when you can name those actions.

GESTURE = LIFE. And check out Walt’s book, Drawn to Life. Highly
With the right attitude and some props your sack can recommended.
become anything you want—even the Sackenstein monster.
 44 Secrets of Drawing
Watch Your Angles
PRINCIPLE: Watch Your Angles
Classical figure artists need to really look and draw what they see rather than what
they think they see. The animator’s eye is different—we draw what we want to see.
The animator’s eye distorts reality to make it better. We exaggerate, make things
cuter, more beautiful, more terrifying, and funnier for the goal of entertainment.
Even though we animators draw differently from classical artists, there
are many things we can learn from them. When you see an artist behind an
easel holding up their pencil perpendicular towards the model, they’re doing
something artists have done for centuries: it’s a way to help them see.
It’s known as the sight-size method of drawing and the goal is to draw an
object exactly as it appears to the artist on a one-to-one scale or the exact size. So
if you stand where the artist stands and look at the model and the drawing, they
will both look the same size. Artists can use many tools but the simplest is to use
your pencil to measure the different parts and the sighted measurement will keep
the correct proportions between the parts.
The second quality being measured is the angles of the parts. Are they vertical,
horizontal or some angle in between. Measuring the angle consists of holding your
pencil at the same angle as the part and then drawing that part at the same angle.
You can see here that angles can change the whole feel of a character and add
interest.
It was my generous teacher Walt Stanchfield who kept pointing out that I was
unconsciously straightening up my poses. This would take the life out of them and
flatten them out. I still catch myself doing it.
I would highly recommend Alex Woo’s Blog to see wonderful gesture drawings
with great angles, perspective and proportions of figures full of life. They’re truly
inspirational: http://www.woohoopictures.com/
Caricature and Proportions
Caricature: Finding the Essence
Most people think of caricatures as funny, exaggerated drawings of people. Some
of the earliest caricatures drew people with animal features. Walt Disney reversed
this by caricaturing animals to have human-like behaviors.
Caricature is actually a way of seeing, an important aspect of having an
animator’s eye. It doesn’t apply only to people but caricatures of anything, from
soup to nuts. This includes caricaturing your characters, props, and even the
backgrounds.
How do you create a caricature? The first step is to look and find the essence of
the object to be caricatured. Specifically, how do you do this? You have to observe,
but you need to know what to look for. We each have our own sense of what a
“normal” face looks like. We want to look for variations from that reference face.
We look to see whether the features are bigger or smaller than the reference. We
also look for the positioning on the face as a reference. Are the eyes close together
or farther apart? Is the mouth lower on the face or higher? These show us the
essence of their individuality. We want to find these variations and exaggerate
them. Now all we have to do is draw what we see. It’s a difficult art that looks
effortless when it’s done right.
One of my favorite caricaturists is the Disney animation director, John Musker.
John has a wonderful way of finding and exaggerating the shape of things. The
following pages of sketches were inspired by the way John finds simple shapes
and exaggerates them.
 Secrets of Drawing 45

Caricatures, as part of the creative process, involve

looping feedback. You create one caricature pushing the
features. Each time you redraw the same thing or person you
can push it further and further. It’s a distillation process of
finding exactly what best shows the essence and progressive
elimination of what is nonessential for recognition of the
face or object.
This happens with political caricatures; at the beginning
of their term in office the caricatures are tame. By the time
they’re ready to leave office their caricatures often go way
over the top.
Study the work of famous caricaturists for inspiration.
Caricaturists throughout history include Honoré Daumier,
Thomas Nast, Al Hirschfeld, and Ronald Searle.
Mad Magazine had a stable of wonderful caricaturists
including Mort Drucker, Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Will
Elder.
Caricature isn’t only about the shapes of characters but
can also be caricatures of gestures.
 46 Secrets of Drawing

In summary, caricaturing is the process of using your animator’s eye to

discover the essence and exaggerate it and simplify the rest. Drawing for
animation should be a distillation process. You simplify and refine using the least
effort to maximum effect.

Proportions Are Your Casting Tool

The proportions and positioning of the features are the animator’s casting tool.
Age, character types, even nationalities are visually defined by combinations and
variations of proportions.
One way of experimenting with varying proportions is to use computer
manipulation. Software such as Photoshop or Belight Software’s Image Tricks offer
tools such as dent, squeeze, bulge and twirl that allow distorting and morphing
images to make interesting variations, as in these alligator images. Image Tricks
comes in a free and pro version. The first one is without any distortion.
 Secrets of Drawing 47

Here’s another wild creature going through horrendous

distortions using Mac’s Photobooth. Photobooth software
allows you to use your computer’s camera to see these types
of distortions real time. The first one is unfiltered.
48 Secrets of Drawing
 Secrets of Drawing 49

You can even caricature color by pushing the saturation

or hue. Here the saturation is pushed to the extreme.

Here are some caricatures based on the distortions from

the Photobooth images. I’ve pushed them even further.
There’s a wonderful variety all from one original face. This
is a good way to find inspiration when you’re stuck. You can
literally push any image around like Silly Putty.
 50 Secrets of Drawing

When the hands get closer together, the cloth in between has to bend so folds
start to develop between the tension points. The folds radiate out from the tension
points.

This is another example of our creative permutations, in this case

permutations based upon my face. Some areas are multiplied while other
minimized. For example, in the third and fourth ones the distance between the
nose and the mouth is tiny in one and greatly expanded in the other.

Cloth
A Well-Dressed Drawing
You don’t want a lot of naked drawings running around now, do you? Don’t
answer that. Putting clothes on your characters isn’t so hard if you keep in mind
several key points.
Cloth is inert so it just hangs. The most important key points are the tension
points that it hangs from. These are the points that support the cloth, as in the
hands holding the cloth here.
 Secrets of Drawing 51

When the hands get even closer, the folds force folds
within folds.

Finally, any time there’s too much cloth for the space
available it creates folds, as this character with the baggy
clothes shows. You can see circular folds as the cloth
bunches up around the limbs.

In the next drawing you can see how the cloth hangs
on the human figure. The red arrows indicate the tension
points where the cloth hangs from.
 52 Secrets of Drawing

Rhythm Balance
Balance works in our physical universe by canceling out opposing forces. We have
grown up observing a world where things need to be balanced. Since this has
become an unconscious way we perceive the world, it should be no surprise that
it also applies to balance in visual representation. In other words, our drawings
need to be balanced or they won’t feel right.
When we stand we’re actually balancing two forces. Gravity is pulling us
downward, while at the same time, the floor supports us and the two forces cancel
each other out. This is the case if we stand perfectly straight over both feet. Let’s
see how we achieve balance when this is not the case.

In the second pose the weight is over one foot. The other foot can relax and
bend at the knee. The hips and shoulders work in opposition to each other.
The bent leg supports the body from falling over but it doesn’t carry the
weight. The important thing to keep in mind when drawing is that the head
should be over the body’s support point or points. This is indicated in the red
vertical line of these images.
This pose demonstrates standing balanced over both feet. Our skeleton
supports our weight through our bones down to our feet.
 Secrets of Drawing 53

In this pose the body is in the process of falling.

In this pose the weight is centered over the center foot

while the other foot and the cane help balance the body.

In this pose the body has fallen but is caught by the front
heel. This is exactly what happens when we walk. Walking is
a series of controlled falls.

In this pose the body’s weight is supported totally by his

left toes. The head is slightly ahead of the red line because
the body is in counterbalance with the head.
 54 Secrets of Drawing

We can exaggerate the lean of a character when they’re running or in this case
caught in the jaws of a dragon.

If a character is carrying a weight it’s going to offset the body. In order to stay
balanced the character’s opposite hand reaches out as a counterweight.

As you can see the body is capable of interesting rhythms whether it is

In this pose the character has lifted his shoulder to support the extra weight. balanced symmetrically or asymmetrically.
 Secrets of Drawing 55

You can find it in art supply stores along with aluminum

armature wire.
The sculpting process requires some setup before you
can get to work. First you should have two drawings of what
you plan to sculpt. One should be from the front and one
from the side, both to scale of the sculpture you plan to
make. Next, you’ll need to make a wire armature to support
your sculpture or it will sag. Select a small piece of wood for
a base and drill two small holes where the feet will go. The
holes should be the size of the armature wire. Using a little
glue, insert the wire into the two holes in the wooden base.
Begin to twist the wire from the waist up and leave a loop for
the head. Next, add more wire for other appendages such as
the arms or a cape. Twist these onto the main armature wire
and secure them with an epoxy glue.

The next step is to rough out the line of action of the

These rhythms can even work with multiple figure based upon your drawings. To save clay or Super
characters as in this pile of jugglers. The different forces Sculpey, bunch some aluminum foil around large masses.
counterbalance each other.

Sculpting to Learn Drawing

Ironically, one way to get better at drawing in three
dimensions is to sculpt. Sculpting helps with seeing in three
dimensions because there really are three dimensions in
front of you when you’re working with clay.
Sculptures are a good way to get to know your characters’
proportions and shapes.
Super Sculpey is many animators’ favorite sculpting
medium. It’s very easy to work with and define fine detail.
 56 Secrets of Drawing

Now you’re ready to begin sculpting. Slowly build up the mass by adding thin beginnings of Iggy. Even at this early stage you can see his attitude begin to peek
layers of Super Sculpey to build up your shapes. Keep referring to your guide through.
drawings.

The whole goal of sculpting is to learn to see in three-dimensional space, so

make sure you turn your sculpture while you work on it. Continue refining using
a combination of adding parts and subtracting parts to get the shapes you want.
Use your fingers to smooth out the shapes.

Here’s the complete turnaround of Iggy.

The next illustrations are of the sculptures that I created for my characters.
While these sculptures started out as balls and tubes, the sculpting process
fleshed them out richer than any mere additive construction process. Keep this
in mind when you construct your drawings. In this illustration you can see the
 Secrets of Drawing 57

Here’s a close-up of Iggy’s head. Remember to work at it

from all angles.
 58 Secrets of Drawing

I particularly like this view, which really shows off Iggy’s personality. If you look
at his hand you can see how his hand started out as part of the tube of the arm.

Next up is Scared Bunny. I didn’t feel this was as successful as Iggy so I didn’t
take it as far finished. I felt he was too goofy looking. You can see how I drew
temporary guide lines for the eye shapes on the surface of the sculpture.
 Secrets of Drawing 59

Here’s Scared Bunny almost finished. You can see the

armature wire showing through the ears. For things like eye
glasses you can use the armature wire.

Sculpt to learn to draw better and deeper.

Here’s a couple of shots of the alligator.
 60 Secrets of Drawing
Why Do Drawings Die in Cleanup?
Or, how to keep your drawings alive during cleanup and not end up with zombie
drawings.
Part of the problem with cleanups dying can’t be helped. Roughs are
spontaneous, full of little imperfections but full of passion. Cleanups are cold,
calculated, precise lines. You have to deliberately decide where to draw the line.
When you clean up you lose the construction lines, which indicate volume.
Tracing the rough lines instead of redrawing the character loses the small
fluctuations of the line that give it character.
Here’s how to keep your cleanup drawings spontaneous feeling, even though
they’re not:
1 Make sure you have a solid rough. Sometimes it takes many attempts to get it
right. Use as many as you need.
2 Do not trace. You’re redrawing it, trying to get the subtle changes in the contour
of the line. Look for places where the lines are concave or convex and where
they straighten out.
3 Remember you are defining a volume with your line. Add hint lines to capture
the missing construction lines.
4 Make sure your key poses are pushed as far as possible, of course keeping
within the style of animation you’re going for.
5 If your style permits shadows, they can help—for example, using a slightly
thicker line on the underside of volumes.
6 Make sure you have a space stage to work within. This is like construction lines
but related to the perspective space of the drawing.
7 Don’t mix perspectives.
8 Let your lines overlap a little. This way if you digitally fill the shapes the ink
won’t “spill” out.
When you clean up, imagine you are in a martial arts tournament. Every
movement counts. Draw with attitude! Decide which lines are important. Which
ones just for decoration. Next, practice the line before putting it down, visualize
the line, know where you’re aiming. Beginners’ lines can waver. Having the
destination in mind can help avoid this.
Draw life, not zombies!
It’s Now Time to Trace?
What kind of animation book would suggest tracing? You want to get better, right?
Well, tracing is another way of learning. Find artists you like, or film stills, or
photographs and move your pencil around following the contours of the image
and it will help you to see differently. The trick is that you’re not just following
lines; you have to analyze them to see how they’re constructed. How do the lines
define the form? What kinds of simplifications are made?
If you find yourself always using the same types of shapes or hand gestures
to make your lines, give it a try. It’s a great way to break out of a rut of always
drawing the same way. Tracing can increase understanding of shape. You can also
learn how other artists use line to depict shapes in space and how they push their
extremes.
You can also copy colors as a way to learn about color. Try to match the main
components of color—the hue, saturation, and value. We’ll learn more about color
in the section on art direction and creating worlds.
Sketchbooks and Drawing Tips
Apple Computer used to advertise its product by the slogan, “Think different.”
Well, we want you to draw different. When you draw different you will also think
and see different. Different can be good, especially when faced with the blank
page. If what you’re doing doesn’t work, try something different. It can’t hurt and
you may discover something.
Try to keep your animator’s eye fresh by trying new approaches to drawing and
seeing. Try out different media. If you normally use pencil, then try ink without an
eraser. Try drawing with a brush. Try using the opposite hand from the one that
you normally draw with. Try drawing with your eyes closed. See what happens.
The way to keep getting better is to find what you have trouble with and
concentrate on improving that. It might be foreshortening, proportions, angles,
rhythm, or whatever. You can improve by putting effort into it.
 Secrets of Drawing 61

To really see your drawing and unconscious distortions

that creep in, try flipping the image in a mirror or flip it on
the computer. Look at it upside down to see how well it
works as an abstract design. This will also help to see how
well your composition is balanced.
You should bring a sketchbook everywhere and draw in it.
It’s a great conversation starter. People love to watch people
draw. It also gets you out of the house. Some of the ones
below were drawn at a local melodrama theater. Great place
for over-the-top acting. The high-tech version is to use your
iPad as a sketchbook. Then you can look cool while you learn.

Don’t worry about mistakes in your sketchbook, just draw

the correction over it.
Concept artist Richard Vander Wende created wonderful
architectural caricatures of Middle Eastern buildings for
Aladdin. They captured the essence of this style of architecture
but in an exaggerated, cartoonish way. Richard taught me
 62 Secrets of Drawing

a great trick for sketchbooks: critique your own work in your sketchbook. Write
annotations on your drawings. Richard could be a really harsh critic of his work. But
this also is what made him so good. You can see samples of his work on his website at
http://www.vanderwende.com/. Remember nobody has to see your sketchbook
or your critique.

Check out the drawing lessons on the DVD.

See if you can find a mentor to critique your work. Some websites offer a place to post your
work and get feedback but some “reviewers” can be hostile. A mentor can look at your drawing
and point out where the zombies are and provide the knowledge on how to fix them. Take your
sketchbook wherever you go.
Secrets of Drawing 63
 The Laws of Animation 65

Chapter Five “Straight ahead action and pose to pose” really pertains to
the working process.)

The Laws of
Animation
A. Physical believability based upon physics principles.
1 Squash and stretch
2 Anticipation
5 Follow-through and overlapping action
6 Slow in and slow out
“I never studied law.” Bugs Bunny 7 Arcs
8 Secondary action
9 Timing
The 12 Principles of Disney’s Nine 11 Solid drawing
Old Men

B. Inner life principles create illusion of life.

10 Exaggeration
12 Appeal

In Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson’s book The Illusion

of Life they list the famous 12 principles of animation.
These laws were discovered by animators through motion
analysis and trial and error. In a sense this was Disney’s
specific, methodical, and consistent recipe, which allowed
the Disney animators to specifically, methodically, and
consistently create realistic animation that followed the
real laws of physics. They are kind of like rules of design for
animation. C. Staging that makes sure audience can clearly see and
The 12 principles for animation can be divided into understand what’s happening.
three types — A, B, and C. (Their fourth principle of 3 Staging
 66 The Laws of Animation
Adding each principle brings more successive life to your animation. They’re
all stronger when they work together.
We’re going to re-explore these principles to see what other secrets may have
been hiding and maybe find additional as-yet-unknown principles. In this chapter
we will explore the principles related to physics. In the next chapter, on animating
emotions, we focus on the principles that add the inner spark of life. And the
principles that relate to staging we’ll explore in the chapter on art directing and
creating worlds.
Animation: How Does It Work?
It’s all in your mind’s eye. But how does it work? Is it the phi phenomenon or the
persistence of vision? Originally, the illusion of motion that movies excel at was
thought to be the effect of the persistence of vision. In 1912, Max Wertheimer in his
Experimental Studies on the Seeing of Motion proved it was the phi phenomenon
that accounted for the illusion of movement and not the persistence of vision.
The phi phenomenon is an optical illusion of our brain that allows us to
perceive constant movement instead of a sequence of images. In other words, we
are inventing information that does not exist in between two images to perceive
movement.
Phi is kind of a temporal gestalt. The eye sees two events and sends a message
to the brain that it interprets as “seeing” one moving object.
So what about the persistence of vision? Well, it still haunts film theory,
but it’s not why we perceive the illusion of movement. However, it is a quality
of perception that is important for us to perceive films as “representations of
reality.”
The persistence of vision refers to the fact that the human perception
of the decay of a visual stimulus is slower than the actual stimulus. The
afterimage persists on the retina for approximately 1/25 of a second. With
film running at 24 frames per second, this is just enough time for the next
film frame to be projected and allow the phi phenomenon to kick in. A film
projector uses a gate that hides each film frame as it moves into position
to be projected. The eye retains the image on the retina just long enough to
have the next frame appear, giving the illusion of “persistence” of the vision.
Without this effect of vision, when you watch a film you would see black gaps
between the frames.
It’s important to realize that our visual perception is not exactly like a camera.
It’s a complex process involving our vision and our mental processing. When we
see an object move based upon a phi effect we’re engaging our minds, because
we know that objects don’t magically transport from one place to another. From
experience our minds know that objects have to move through space to get from
one place to another so that’s what our mind sees.
However, in the wacky quantum world things can transport outside of time
and space. That’s the world we animators live in. We don’t need no stinkin’ rules.
As Wikipedia describes in their article on the phi phenomenon, the experiment
offers interesting uses for animators to pay attention to, because they are actually
creating a stream of phi phenomenon events, once again proving the animation
filmmaker’s role as master illusionist.
For example, how far is a phi before it’s not phi anymore? If the distance is too
far the illusion of movement won’t be perceived, but rather two separate events.
The animation would fall apart—zombies! The way to solve this if you need to have
the object moving that fast is to use motion blur, which will help connect the two
events into one illusion of movement.
Check out Wikipedia for visual examples of the phi phenomenon.

If we were to see these two images projected, we would
see a door close. Some dust blowing up would further the
illusion by engaging our mind with more relevant details.
A potential problem with the phi phenomenon occurs
when you have several objects moving on the screen
at once, particularly when they’re moving into and out
of the frame. It’s possible that the illusion can happen
between the wrong objects and they appear to move in
the wrong direction. I’ve personally experienced this
when animating explosions or groups of falling objects
like snow or rain.
If you want to see more examples of phi in action, flip the
flipbooks!
Animating: Step by Step, Frame by
Frame
“It moves but it doesn’t move me.” My mentor, animator
Dante Barbetta, used to tell me that my animation moved
but it didn’t move. They were moving drawings but weren’t
believable as living creatures. The character floated through
the action. There are several senses of the word “move”:
there’s “move” as in “go from place to place” and “move” as
in “affecting someone emotionally.”
Animation is about timing as much as it is about
drawing. Animation can create the illusion of life even with
abstract shapes.
Animation Process
There are many ways to animate, such as traditionally
drawn animation, procedural animation used for crowds,
and flocking behaviors used for birds or animal herds.
The Laws of Animation 67
Particle systems are used for fire, smoke, and water. Cutout
animation uses a collage approach, which can be mimicked
with Flash or After Effects. These can use skeletons, such as
in computer pose animation, where you animate a skeleton
or drivers of the bones. You can even pose real people
and have them move very, very slowly, taking one picture
at a time. Nowadays you can even do this with a digital
still camera and combine the frames into a movie in the
computer.
Learning Exercises for Animators
The three most important exercises for beginning animators
in fact are designed to teach you the various principles of
animation. They focus on creating believable movement
without worrying about the drawing.
The first exercise is the bouncing ball. It’s really exciting
when you first create some animation and see it move.
Sometimes that alone is enough to hook you for life. The
bouncing ball exercise teaches about mass, force and
momentum acting on the ball. It also teaches stretch and
squash of shape while retaining a consistent volume. And
it teaches the basics of timing using animation paths of
action.
The degree of stretch and squash as well as the timing
can make the difference between a bowling ball, basketball
and a water-filled balloon.
The second exercise expands on physical believability
by adding an inner life to a half-filled flour sack. We treat it
as if it’s really alive. A flour sack can be very expressive and
yet easy to draw, so you can concentrate on learning the
animation principles and exploring gestures.
 68 The Laws of Animation

(This was the last illustration to be completed for the book. When you really
feel your animation, it shows!)
All these exercises also teach you about staging. Your animation must be
staged so that the action is clear to the audience.

How to Animate, the Basics: Thumbnails

and Key Frames

The third exercise animators practice is walk cycles that combine the physical
with the inner life principles. Start out easy when you start animating walk
cycles-use the flour sack. Try out all different manner of walking to show how the
character feels. When you're ready for a real challenge, try taking a four-legged
creature for a walk. As a note of warning, let the computer animators handle
centipedes.

PRINCIPLE: Pose to Pose vs. Straight Ahead

Straight ahead and pose to pose are two approaches to animating characters.
They both have their own unique advantages and disadvantages.
First, I'll let Iggy explain straight-ahead animation.

STRAIGHT AHEAD!
The last exercise is performance. Get your characters to act, including lip
syncing some expressive dialogue.

IGGY: Straight-ahead animation is when you go straight ahead with no turns.

NARRATOR: I'll take over from here. Iggy is right that you animate straight ahead;
that means that you start with your first drawing, then proceed to draw your
second frame and then your third until you are finished.
IGGY: That's what I said.
 The Laws of Animation 69

Next, let's look at pose-to-pose animation. Pose to pose is much more controlled, kind of like Scared
Bunny. Each key pose can be carefully planned and timed
out. It makes it easier to get into and out of poses because
you know the route you will take in between. This method
POSE allows for pushed extremes. Most of the animation created
TO for The Animator's Eye was animated pose to pose.
Each key pose should have its own idea behind it. Animator
POSE and layout artist Bill Frake taught me to choose a word to
illustrate what each pose says. Very helpful.

BUNNY: Pose-to-pose animation is the process whereby you

create the main key poses, or extremes, of the action of
your scene. You make them as strong as possible and then
proceed to create action breakdown drawings and finally
inbetweens until the animation is smooth.
So what are the pros and cons of each method? Straight- The first pose says, "Greeting." The second pose says,
ahead animation often has a great spontaneity to it. It "Nothing to hide." The third pose says, "Here goes."
feels a little unplanned because often it is. It can yield wild
animation, perfect for the impulsive Iggy. The danger is that
sometimes this type of animation can feel like it's floating.

The fourth pose says, "In there somewhere." The fifth pose
says, "Ta Da!" The last pose says, "Thanks."

PRINCIPLE: Work Big to Small

Don't get busy too soon. Block out big shapes. Work out the
big masses and get them to work first. Otherwise it will get
 70 The Laws of Animation
muddy with unimportant details. Work out the animation principles by applying
them to the big shapes.
When you start out, try thumbnailing your ideas first. Thumbnails, as the name
implies, are drawings the size of your thumb. When you draw the size of a postage
stamp, you can’t get fussy with details.
Legendary animator Glen Keane once shared with me the evolution of his
thinking about animating. He began like most animators focusing on line. His
next stage was to focus on the mass of the characters. This yielded his masterful
bear fight during The Fox and the Hound. When Glen was animating on
Pocahontas his approach changed once more. Now he was focusing on shapes.
Watch the films and see how each feels.
What will you focus on? Experiment and try a different approach from what you
normally do. Try making your animation flat, like the UPA style of Mr. Magoo. Or
try pretending you’re animating with a fish-eye lens, getting as much depth and
exaggerated foreshortening as you can.
Here are some thumbnail poses created to explore an action.
Don’t worry about the drawing, focus on the movement—that’s the core of the
animation. Where are the forces that balance and move? How does the weight
shift during an action?
Inbetweening is the process of adding extra drawings to smooth out the action
between key poses. The danger is that just inbetweening everything evenly creates
an evenness to the animation. The way to avoid this is with timing changes. One
part of a character might be inbetweens so that it moves faster while another part
of the drawing might move slower.
Use and Abuse of Cycles
Cycles are characteristic of machines—the non-living. They repeat their action
exactly the same way. Over and over. Sometimes humans act like machines.
This in fact is one theory of comedy. However, humans never repeat an action in
exactly the same way.
Walk cycles have variations—maybe the ground is uneven or as they walk
they’re getting more tired with each step. In other words, our thoughts get in the
way and change things. The cycles get broken and modified.
You can also use secondary actions to enliven walk cycles. A character looking
around or talking and making gestures while they walk can maintain interest.
Use variety within cycles to keep them interesting. Cycles are a great way to
save time when you’re animating; just make sure that they are appropriate for
your animation style.
Laws of Motion Principles for a Believable World
Mass, Force and a Little Thing Called Gravity
In order to create believable animation, animate the illusion of a consistent mass
and movement according to the forces applied to it.
Where can we learn more about how to do this? Let’s look at the physics. Don’t
worry, there’s no math involved. We’ll describe it by telling stories.
I’m sure you’ve all heard the story of Sir Isaac Newton and his apple. One day
Sir Isaac was minding his own business sitting under a tree. Suddenly, an apple
fell on his head and immediately he thought, “That’s weird—this is a banana
tree.” No, seriously, he had an “aha” moment but I don’t know if he yelled, “Aha!”,
“Eureka!” or just, “Ouch!” Anyway, he discovered the law of universal gravitation.
 The Laws of Animation 71

In all likelihood, Sir Isaac had been thinking about this Newton law 2: “Force equals mass times acceleration
kind of physics stuff for a long time and he probably noticed (F = ma): the net force on an object is equal to the mass of
that when an object, such as an apple, falls it speeds up. He the object multiplied by its acceleration.” This simply states
reasoned that something must be causing that acceleration that the faster an object moves, the more force it has. Or it
and that something was the large mass we call the earth. It’s takes more force to move bigger objects faster.
called the universal law of gravity because not just the earth
but all objects attract each other. (Except for that pesky
quantum world.)
The law of universal gravitation is really Newton’s second
law of motion. Newton discovered three laws of motion that
greatly enhanced our understanding of how the physical
universe works. So without further ado, here they are:

Newton’s Laws of Motion

Sorry about the math sneaking in. It’s Bunny’s fault.

Newton law 3: Every action has an equal and opposite
reaction.

Law of Inertia 1: A body in motion tends to stay in motion.

This is the principle of momentum. It’s like when you slide
into home plate. The opposite is demonstrated by inertia,
which states that a body at rest tends to stay at rest.
When an object starts to move it accelerates and this is
demonstrated by a progressive change in timing or what’s
known as slowing in and out. This also applies when an
object comes to rest.

In addition to Newton’s wonderful laws, there are other

laws of physics that should be in the back of your mind
when you animate, unless you’re animating on the quantum
level.
Mass can neither be created nor destroyed. In animation
this translates to maintaining volume and the fact that
objects can stretch and squash.
 72 The Laws of Animation

Another principle is that of entropy—things go from order to disorder. You can

try this experiment at home. Take a picture of your room and then a week later They don’t call them EXTREMES for nothing!!!
take another picture. Compare the pictures and you’ll see entropy at work—your In animation, too much is never enough. Go beyond. Go way beyond. Go to
room gets messy. infinity and beyond. Well, maybe that’s too far, but you get the idea.

PRINCIPLE: Extreme Exaggeration PRINCIPLE: Arcs and Other Paths of Action

Know where you’re going with your animation—draw paths of action. Most
Exaggeration helps us to see. We make it bigger than life so the audience can’t
actions follow clear paths. Paths can follow the action of a character’s movement
miss it. Early cartoon design was based upon this need for visual clarity. The facial
or constrain a character’s movement, such as a bat zigzagging around or a train
features were enlarged and the hand was simplified to have only three fingers.
constrained to a curved railroad track.
This might have even evolved from the art of clowns. Clowns paint their faces,
wear big shoes, sometimes gloves, and simple colorful outfits, and perform with
very broad actions, all for the purpose of being visually clear to the back rows of
the circus.
Great still drawing doesn’t automatically mean great animation drawing. A
drawing may look wrong when you look at it individually but it works perfectly in
motion. Sometimes you need to exaggerate the movement, force it with twists and
turns in order to convey the effect you want.
See how far you can go pushing your extremes until they break, then just pull
back a little. Exaggeration can be applied to any aspect—twisting, stretch, and
squash, etc.
How much is too much? It depends on the style. Too much can make
animation rubbery and destroy an illusion of life.
 The Laws of Animation 73

Arcs are defined by rotations and gravitational arcs. Arcs of the body: objects will follow arcs defined by what
All characters and objects are affected by gravity. When they're connected to. The arms swing opposite the legs, all
a character is moving or an object is moved with a force, following arcs of movement. The head and body ride up and
the combination of the moving force and gravity creates down in a rising and falling curve. Twists and turns make
a curved path. Common examples are throwing a ball, animation more interesting.
shooting a cannonball, water shooting out of a fire hose, or
a skier going off a ski jump. If the forces were equal, things
would fall in a diagonal line. This never happens because
all forces are subject to the effects of friction, which slows
objects down. Gravity works in the opposite way. Gravity
accelerates the speed of objects.
The longer an object falls, the faster it goes. The result of
these two interacting forces creates the curved path of a
parabola.

Arcs in perspective show a change in scale and timing.

FORCE

GRAVITY COMBINED
Arcs from centrifugal force: a second type of curved path
of action is created by constraints on an action. Swinging a
ball around attached to a string is an example. Bones in the
body act in the same way; they constrain its movements to Opposing actions add interest. Newton's law states that
curved paths. These are rotational arcs. every action has an equal and opposite reaction so why not
make this another principle of animation?
 74 The Laws of Animation
PRINCIPLE: Opposing Actions
My mentor, animator Dante Barbetta, taught me this 13th principle of animated
life. Don’t have everything going the same way. Oppositional contrast of different
directions of movement makes things more visually interesting. This is similar
to the dreaded layout problem of twinning or symmetrically staged characters.
Conflict lies at the heart of drama and this is true for visual action as well.
PRINCIPLE: Anticipation of What’s Going to Happen
Anticipation is the feeling of something about to happen. It’s when we take the slow
ride up the roller coaster and know what’s going to happen right over the crest…
Anticipation prepares the audience visually for an action to take place.
Physically it sets the force into potential energy to launch into kinetic energy.
In animation, we anticipate our actions to prepare the audience for
something to happen. In order for humans or animals to perform any action
they need to prepare their muscles and position the body for the action.
Because every motion has an equal and opposite reaction, we have to move in
the opposite direction to the motion to prepare for it. Thus, the anticipation
pose becomes an extreme in relation to the opposite extreme, leading into the
action itself.
Animated movement comes from moving within the frame from one place to
another. The broadness of any action is determined by how far apart the frames
are spaced. Anticipation allows us to push that distance. This greater distance also
creates the illusion of more momentum and thus greater force.
In the first pose Iggy winds up anticipating striking the gong and in the second
pose he strikes it.
We can further push that distance by overshooting an action. Overshooting is
going beyond the limit of the action and settling back into the key pose.

In this series, I’ve pushed the wind-up more in the first
pose. In the next pose Iggy overshoots the hit.
PRINCIPLE: The Pull of Gravity
That’s How the Ball Bounces
How do we make a bouncing ball interesting? The bouncing
ball has been done in every animation book. The idea is that
it isn’t necessarily supposed to be interesting—it’s meant
The Laws of Animation 75
to teach you the basics. The bouncing ball is the simplest
way to learn the basic principles of animation. It covers path
of action, line of action, timing, acceleration, distortion of
shape, stretch and squash, impact and follow-through.
For the bounce the ball falls on an arc, speeding up as it
falls. So you first create a path of action and then space the
ball further apart on each frame. The ball also stretches in the
direction of motion. Make sure you leave the largest space
right before the hit. The ball flattens out on the frame in
which it makes impact with the ground. The degree of squash
is determined by three things. First is the speed that the ball
is moving. Second is the type of material that the ball and
ground are made of. And third is the degree of cartoonishness
you want. These three items will also determine how high
the ball will bounce. For example, if it’s a bowling ball falling
on grass, it’s not going to squash or bounce very high unless
you’re going for a very cartoonish effect.
The bounce follows a parabola arc coming out of the
bounce. As the ball travels up, it stretches but less this
time. It also slows down until it loses energy and comes to
a stop, losing any stretch or squash. For this, the drawings
get progressively closer together. For a split second there
are no forces affecting the ball, it’s suspended in mid-air.
 76 The Laws of Animation

Immediately after losing the upward energy, gravity takes over and it starts the
fall all over. We go back to the beginning with the ball speeding up. However, each
progressive bounce is smaller than the last one because it’s been losing energy
due to friction.
Let’s look at a fall with some cartoon physics. First I need to introduce two
other characters from the film. Sackenstein is the flour sack that Iggy brings to life
and the Eye-dea is the flying eyeball that represents the metaphor of chasing an
idea and how it can take flight.
Sackenstein walks following the flying eyeball, Eye-dea. It chases it off the edge
of the table. It scrambles to catch it mid-air. Finally, gravity takes over and it falls
at the speed of gravity, speeding up as it falls.
 The Laws of Animation 77

You can see here how I changed some of my from the

rough red version to the final black line. In particular, I
needed to speed up the sack fall, spacing it further apart to
give the illusion of gravity in the black version.
 78 The Laws of Animation

PRINCIPLE: Overlapping Actions PRINCIPLE: Follow-Through

Overlapping actions are actions that start and end at different times. This gives
variety to the actions making them more interesting. They can happen on one
character such as a cape overlapping the character’s actions, or among several
characters or props.
As we learned, actions have momentum force. A car will continue to roll downhill
unless you step on the brakes.
Follow-through means that connected parts will continue after the main
action is over. This makes the action less abrupt. There is time to settle from the
big action down to little details.

The kind of overlap also is a function of the type of object that is moving. It
depends on how heavy the object is and how flexible. A train on a track cannot
turn all at once. Each set of wheels turn only when that section of the train reaches
the curved track.
Successive straightening of joints is overlapping when the force gets applied to
each piece one after another. It’s the principle behind a conga line.

PRINCIPLE: Secondary Actions

Secondary actions are those following the main action and that make it more complex
and visually interesting. We can’t all be the star. Secondary actions don’t need to be
It’s related to our next principle, follow-through. connected by momentum; these actions can happen because the character moves.

Secondary actions add extra actions to the main action.
Iggy hugs the sack while the sack fights to get away. In these
illustrations, the main action is Iggy hugging the sack. The
secondary action is the sack trying to get away.
Secondary actions can be used to tell how that character
feels about the action they’re performing. For example,
someone riding a bike might wipe their brow with their
hand while pedaling, indicating they’re straining hard,
while a rider next to them might shake their hair in the wind
while riding. Both perform the same main action yet the
secondary actions tell us more about their involvement and
feelings.
Invent ways to add subtle secondary actions to enrich
your animation.
The Laws of Animation 79
PRINCIPLE: Stretching and Squashing
Stretch and squash is an animation technique that serves
two functions. First, it makes your animation more elastic
and less zombie-like. Second, it gives your animation a
sense of speed and direction.
Stretching and squashing makes the material more
organic feeling, more like things that are alive. Organic
things like plants and animals can bend and fold. Ladders
can too, but they don’t do it fluidly, they’re still stiff. (We
could call that another principle—stretch and fold.)
 80 The Laws of Animation

When an object stretches in the direction of motion it functions like a motion

blur. Objects look longer when they’re traveling fast because of the blurring of
motion. And what happens when an object hits something? It squashes to a stop.
So the principle of stretch and squash is an animated illusion derived from the
physics of real movement.
Let’s look at the scene where Sackenstein loses the Eye-dea and jumps over
Iggy to chase it.

Sackenstein reaches for the idea jar. He lifts it and the Eye-dea escapes.
 The Laws of Animation 81

Sackenstein ANTICIPATES by folding over and takes as

he watches it fly away. He anticipates again…

Sackenstein STRETCHES as he jumps up. He goes back

to normal size as he reaches the peak of the jump then
STRETCHES his leg down onto Iggy.
 82 The Laws of Animation

Sackenstein SQUASHES his full weight onto Iggy. Iggy’s body reacts overlapping
the impact. As Iggy settles, Sackenstein leaps STRETCHING out over Iggy. Sackenstein STRETCHES out as he flips over and falls to the floor.

One thing to keep in mind when you stretch and squash
things is to keep volume consistent. Things don’t get bigger
or smaller; their shape distorts so one side gets bigger while
the other gets smaller.
Animation Timing
PRINCIPLE: Timing
BUNNY: What is the key to comedy?
IGGY: Hmmm, I’m thinking, wait don’t tell me, ah, oh
yeah… timing.
BUNNY: C’mon, we’re late…
What kinds of time exist in animation? Ironically, timing
in animation is really about space. The space between the
drawings determines how fast an object moves. An object’s
weight factors into this, as it takes longer to get a heavy
object moving and longer to stop it. Time, space, and mass
are interconnected in animation.
The Laws of Animation 83
How far do you space the drawings? Usually you want
some overlap. If it’s something moving really fast, blur it and
have the blurs overlap. If the spacing is too far apart the phi
phenomenon won’t work; instead it will look like different
events. If they are very close you have to be very careful with
your cleanups.
Where does our sense of time come from? We humans
have internal clocks that keep time for our biological
processes. Our heart rate, breathing, sleep patterns, walking
pace all are variable within certain ranges. Originally many
songs were used to set the pace for working in the fields.
An animated action is comprised of three separate times:
the time of expectancy of anticipation, the screen time of
the action, and time for closure of the action. These can be
notated in timing charts or on exposure sheets.
Here are some things to think about when timing your
exposure sheets.
1 Time for Clarity
The audience needs time to process the animation. Be sure
to include pauses, pacing for breath, bodily perception.
 84 The Laws of Animation
2 Time for Excitement
High-speed illusions are created by speed lines that depict the blurring of objects
in the direction of motion.
3 Contrast Your Timing
If everything is evenly spaced it becomes predictable and thus boring. Ever drive
on a highway at night watching the dotted lines race along, one after another,
after another?
Variation adds interest. Try having slow characters interact with fast-moving
characters. The tortoise and the hare has long been a staple of many cartoons. Bugs
Bunny often took the starring role of the hare. The collected cartoon variations of
the tortoise and the hare are great examples of permutations of a simple story idea.
PRINCIPLE: Slow In and Slow Out
Acceleration and deceleration add lots of interest to animation, particularly if you
include overshoot and settling.
4 When NOT to Add Inbetweens
There are times when you will not want to use inbetweens, such as between the
heel of a foot hitting and the full foot smacking ground, or to keep the full speed of
gravity on a falling object.
5 Remember, People Get Tired
Time also affects energy levels. We can’t be at extremely high energy levels for a
long time. We must have periods of rest. Time-related art reflects this. Sometimes
the audience needs a break. Some nonstop action movies make us exhausted and
if the filmmaker doesn’t give time to catch our breath, we can begin to lose interest.
Iggy’s roller coaster theory of story incorporates these pauses automatically. As
the roller coaster reaches a peak it begins to slow down, before speeding up again
down the next hill.
Believable depictions of a character should account for characters getting tired.
They can’t keep going on without rest. Going from one energy level to the next takes
time. When you first wake up, you don’t immediately begin racing around the room.
You have some coffee and wait for it to kick you into gear. I know I have trouble
winding down at night when my mind is racing with ideas. Include those timing
changes in your animation. You could make a very funny short about a character
just getting up, dead tired, and going from 0 to 60 until he becomes just a blur.
6 Timing for Believability of Weight
You have to time your animation based upon laws of motion so things don’t float.
Timing is based upon inertia and momentum and the acceleration of gravity.
It takes time to get something moving and time to get it to stop. The faster it’s
moving, the more time it needs to stop unless it impacts something.
Timing for Rhythmic Interest
Music can guide your animation timing. Try timing out your animation using a
piece of music to guide you.
There are all kinds of contrasts in music: slow–fast, major–minor, swing–no
swing, big action–small action, loud–soft. It’s not all 4/4 time—the rhythms
change. There’s 2/4, 3/4, 7/8, and Beethoven’s infamous 3/15 × square root of −1.
Music has a flow and pace determined by the beat. John Powell’s How Music
Works finally clarified the mystery of the beat for me. He says that rhythm really is
composed of three separate items: tempo, meter, and rhythm.

Tempo is how often you tap your foot to the music.
Meter is how often you emphasize your foot tap to the
music. A waltz would be: One, two, three, One, two, three,
and so on. The emphasis is on the One. Pop and rock music
have four beats, so you tap: One, two, three, four, One, two,
three, four, and so on.
Rhythm is the pattern of how long and short each note is
held. Rhythm is often repeated as patterns. Powell uses the
example of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to demonstrate.
The infamous Da, Da, Da, Daah has a rhythm of three
short notes followed by one long note. This pattern repeats
throughout the piece, giving the symphony incredible unity
and power.
So what do those pairs of numbers mean on the music?
They are what is known as the time signature of the piece
and are expressed as a fraction.
The upper number is the number of beats in a measure.
Remember, the first number gets the emphasis. Most rock
music has four beats. Jazz can be more varied, such as
having 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 and it can change multiple times
during the music. That’s why jazz works well for animation.
There’s a lot of variety to the timing.
I always wondered about the bottom number. I thought it
was some mysterious equation. Powell once again clarified it
for me. The bottom number simply defines what the lengths
of the beats are. It’s always a 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 and these refer
to musical time of a whole note. A whole note has two half
notes, four quarter notes, eight eighth notes and so on.
So, in conclusion, 5/4 means that you count five beats
each measure with the ONE emphasized, at a quarter note
length of note. The tempo of the piece or speed is usually
marked with a separate number, something like 80 or 120.
This indicates that there would be 80 or 120 beats per
minute.
If a piece of music gets very fast, the conductor can
change the time signature to enable the orchestra to be able
to play it; 2/2 is called cut time and it’s easier and faster to
count One, two, One, two, One, two, than One, two, three,
four. Of course it doesn’t matter to us animators because
we don’t animate in real time, unless the animation boss is
breathing down our necks.
But wait, there’s more—syncopation! What is
syncopation? It is simply adding musical variety by
emphasizing beats that normally don’t get emphasis.
Reggae gets its unique rhythmic sound from emphasizing
The Laws of Animation 85
the second and fourth beats with the rhythm guitar while
the drums and bass emphasize the third beat.
By the way, I was just kidding about Beethoven’s
infamous 3/15 × square root of −1. Sometimes, it seems,
music notation seems more complicated than it should be.
Remember, even music is driven by a beat but melodies
are affected by breath. The phrasing of a melody fragment
often fits to the length of breath.
Timing can create different feelings of movement.
Wavelike, stuttering, scrambling, snappy, bouncy. Staccato,
legato, march, waltz—these are musical terms that apply to
animation timing moods.
Listen to all kinds of music and see what you can learn about timing
that you can use in your animation.
Try out animator Randy Cartwright’s Animation Timer iPhone app.
Might be the best $1.99 you ever spent.
Toon Physics: The Laws of Fun!
Contrary to the Disney animator’s quest for believability,
Warner Brothers and other studios took a different route.
They still followed the principles of animation, except
occasionally they ignored the requirement for adhering to
the real laws of physics.
Toon physics is not part of Einstein’s special theory of
relativity. It’s a toon version of physics whereby the laws of
physics and motion are exaggerated or suspended for comic
effect. In other words, it’s the wacky quantum land!
Mark O’Donnell wrote an article in his book, Elementary
Education, called “The Laws of Cartoon Motion” in which
he described his observations of these strange phenomena.
Let’s look at the unique laws of cartoon physics:
Warning! Do not try these at home, except on paper or
digitally.
 86 The Laws of Animation

TOON PHYSICS RULE #1. Gravity takes a holiday.

Characters can ignore the law of gravity when they walk out over a cliff, and
The Use and Abuse of Rotoscoping
be fine. Except when they look down and become aware that there’s nothing Rotoscoping is an animation technique of tracing over life-action reference
holding them up. Then they immediately fall, and fast, as if to make up for the footage. Originally it was done by tracing projected film footage frame by frame.
lost time. Many animation software packages allow you to import Quicktime movies and
This is an example of different types of principles interacting. In this case use them as a layer that you can trace over. Photos by Ryan Glebas.
the physical law of gravity combines with the mental recognition. The result is
trouble.
Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner cartoons often applied this toon physics
rule.
TOON PHYSICS RULE #2. Holes leave a silhouette.
If you smash through a wall, the hole will be in the shape of your silhouette.
This is kind of like the trick of pulling the tablecloth out from under a formal
table setting. This effect can be seen in the Road Runner and many other
cartoons.
TOON PHYSICS RULE #3. A reaction is not necessarily equal to its force.
Actions can have extremely unequal reactions. A wolf can blow down any
house except ones made of bricks. The Three Little Pigs offers an example of this.
TOON PHYSICS RULE #4. Sometimes it’s hard to tell a wall from a hole in the
wall.
You can walk into a wall if you first paint a tunnel on it. Be careful if you’re
chasing someone because the density of the wall can change abruptly. The
wall seems to only let you through if it likes you. You can see this in many Road
Runner cartoons. In Yellow Submarine, Ringo had a hole in his pocket with some
interesting toon physics properties.
TOON PHYSICS RULE #5. Matter under stress can turn into jello or taffy. Use rotoscoping to learn how to caricature your actions. Rotoscoping used
Solid objects can temporarily turn very elastic, as when a character gets in this spirit of inspirational reference can greatly enhance your animation by
smashed by a large object and instantly returns to their normal shape. Or a providing interesting shapes provided by twists and turns of the body, timing
character can, on impact, suddenly turn brittle and fall into pieces. and subtle secondary actions. Rotoscoping can help with spatial problems like
TOON PHYSICS RULE #6. When things move really fast you can be in more foreshortened actions and maintaining correct sizes when objects move in space.
than one place at a time. You can see this in cartoon fights when a character might
appear to have eight arms.
TOON PHYSICS RULE #7. The size of an exterior container is not necessarily
larger than the interior size. This is the clown car principle. It also works with
character’s pockets. Who would have thought you could pull an anvil out of your
pocket?
TOON PHYSICS RULE #8. The acceleration of gravity changes for anvils.
The speed of gravity actually accelerates faster if you’re holding an anvil.
All kinds of space–time distortions are possible, including moving in reverse
and reversing entropy. Humpty Dumpty can be put back together. That’s what’s
great about animation—nobody gets hurt.

Here I’ve used some rotoscoped footage to draw Bunny
taking a picture. As you can see, the proportions are very
different. I’m about six heads tall while Bunny is more like
three. The blue lines show some of the reference points that
I used to capture the essence of the live action while drawing
Bunny. The position of the feet and where the weight is
held is one reference point. The floor plane was also an
important reference to keep an eye on. I also used the waist
and shoulders. The elbows also came in handy for capturing
the poses. During the cleanups I’ll probably have to make it
more on model by adjusting the proportions even further.
During a commercial project for a dramatic children’s
show opening, we once tried to create a realistic boy walking
towards camera and putting a book on a shelf. It looked
totally wrong because the action was too cartooney and
overdone. In this case rotoscoping came to the rescue. I
shot the action using my younger brother and rotoscoped
the action adjusting the Super 8 film footage to fit the
proportions of our animated character. It worked perfectly.
Rotoscope is a wonderful tool to learn about timing.
Use rotoscoping to learn about events that are too fast to
The Laws of Animation 87
observe in real life. Special effects like water splashes and
explosions yield their secrets because you can study them
frame by frame.
In shooting rotoscoped reference, you need to stage the
action as clearly as possible so they read clearly. When shooting
rotoscope it’s important to light the action so it’s brightly
lit and clearly differentiated from the background. Wearing
medium-value clothes against a simple light wall is best.
Treat it as if you’re on a live-action shoot. Try multiple
takes from varying angles and try different types of
performances as if you were a live-action director—work
your actors. Evaluate your footage in terms of how useful it
will be to inspire your animation.
The abuse of rotoscoping comes from merely tracing
live action without regard for sculptural drawing or the
creation of characters with believable weight. The resultant
animation can feel like a zombie floating through their
actions. It looks too even and smooth. Animation actions
need to be exaggerated to enhance the illusion of weight
and its effect on movement.
Live action captures very small movements, details,
textures, and hundreds of muscles that don’t translate easily
into animation unless it’s being simulated by computer
graphics. However, even using rotoscoping for computer-
generated characters still needs a watchful animator’s eye to
bring it to life.
A related technique is called motion capture or “mocap.”
In this method, they rig an real actor with a series of points
and film the acting. In computer software the movement
of the dots is extracted from the life action which can be
mapped onto any type of character. When they map a face
 88 The Laws of Animation

to record acted movement it's called performance capture. Motion capture can
also capture camera movements.
In practice, motion capture can be very tricky artistically, because the actions
are so lifelike when they are applied to computer models they sometimes look ANTICIPATE
uncanny. They're real and yet they're not. Beware of zombies! Sometimes you can
see it in their eyes; there's something that is just not right.
At its best, motion capture can save lots of time and difficult work but at its
worst it's no better than tracing rotoscopes.
Be careful using rotoscoping or motion capture for animation—the
movements must follow real physics and thus fall short of the animator's eye.
Second, they don't clearly articulate or exaggerate the principles of animation
which are for clarity of action or expressiveness of movement.
Iggy, in the head section, anticipates the first step leaning back and raising the leg.
Motion Analysis

When we're ready to start a scene it's important to analyze what's happening in
terms of the action, the forces involved, and what the characters' intentions are. Iggy leans into the step, pushing his head forward and placing the first step.
Understand how these forces combine to create the action. To do this we need to However, Bunny's unaware that Iggy has started to move and isn't ready.
analyze the action. We look and break it down into the individual forces and find
when they each start and stop. Then, having that understanding, we need to stage
the action for visual clarity and apply the animation principles.
Let's look at Iggy and Bunny in their disguise as a horse. They're about to take
their first step.
STRETCH

RELAXED
POSE

Since Bunny hasn't moved and Iggy is still leaning into the walk, they end up
stretching out their costume. We're getting an opposing action, each going in
In the first pose they're both relaxed. opposite directions.
 The Laws of Animation 89

Let's look at a scene from the flipbook.

In this scene from the flipbook, Bunny has just rescued
DRAG Iggy from the swamp. Bunny's upset because the flying
eyeball idea they've been chasing got away. Iggy feels bad for
letting the idea get away.
FOLLOW
THRU

Bunny has his feet planted while Iggy is off balance. Bunny
has inertia on his side, so Iggy ends up being pulled backward.
This is the opposite reaction to the stretching action. As Iggy
falls backward, each part gets dragged following through.

They're looking down sadly. Iggy doesn't realize that

he's accidently caught the Eye-dea in the net. The Eye-dea
struggles to get free. Even though the characters are held,
the Eye-dea keeps the scene alive.

SQUASH

Bunny is thrown off balance as the tension of the

stretched costume is suddenly released. Bunny falls and
squashes on impact. His legs rise up in counteraction. This
creates visual interest by contrast. If everything is moving in
the same direction it's not as interesting as a visual variety of
movement directions. Bunny notices something in the net and glances up.

COUNTER
ACTION OVERLAP

SETTLE

The pieces settle. Bunny raises his head in counteraction Bunny reacts, leaning backward when he recognizes the
to everything else coming crashing down. Eye-dea. This action ANTICIPATES the next move.
 90 The Laws of Animation

Bunny excitedly points at the Eye-dea. There’s a STRONG LINE OF ACTION Bunny settles further and Iggy now looks at the Eye-dea caught in the net.
running from his pointing finger, through his arm and right through his body.

After holding a beat for the pose to read, Iggy swings the net around in front of
In this pose Bunny’s hand SETTLES back from its OVERSHOOTING in the them. The NET grows in size as it swings in a large perspective ARC.
previous pose. The muscles relax a little settling back.

Iggy’s expression has changed to excitement. When the net comes around,
While Bunny points, giving the audience time to read the pose, the Eye-dea Bunny leans back raising his arm in ANTICIPATION.
keeps moving to DRAW YOUR ATTENTION to it and keep the scene alive.
 The Laws of Animation 91

Bunny now quickly reaches into the net keeping a

clear silhouette with his hand about to grab the Eye-dea. Bunny holds the jar with the Eye-dea up to present their
FOLLOWING THROUGH on this action, his ears OVERLAP catch. It’s presented with a CLEAR SILHOUETTE.
AND SETTLE. Meanwhile, Iggy brings the net closer for
Bunny in an OPPOSING ACTION.

Now the characters don’t move much so our attention

goes to Bunny’s hand, which grabs the Eye-dea.

The original staging for this scene had Bunny’s arms

reversed. The problem was that Bunny’s arm obscured
Bunny moves the net out of the way for CLARITY. Bunny his own face. Switching the arms allows the Eye-dea to be
puts the Eye-dea in the jar. presented clearly.
 92 The Laws of Animation

After we analyze the action and lay out the key poses, then we can work on
refining the timing.

Zipped Out!
In this scene Bunny is frustrated with Iggy wanting to use his Eye-dea for experiments
in the lab. Iggy doesn’t want to leave so Bunny grabs his and pulls him out.

Bunny grabs Iggy. Rather than stopping and pulling him out, Bunny
overshoots pushing him further away. This helps anticipate the next move—the
pulling out.

Iggy’s oblivious to Bunny’s anger. Bunny’s hand reaches in.

Bunny pulls Iggy out. Iggy’s limbs and body drag behind.

Bunny’s arm reaches up in a small arc.

Iggy’s body stretches in a clear simple line of action as he gets pulled out of
The hand in clear silhouette anticipates to grab Iggy. frame.

As Iggy gets pulled out he accelerates. This is accomplished
by the drawings getting progressively further apart.
Since the action happens fast, we want the audience to
know what happened. The dust trail lingers allowing the
audience to see the results of the action. This is a cartoon
cliché created specifically for this purpose. It’s also funny.
Loco Motion, or Getting Around
in a Funny Way
The Laws of Animation 93
Loco means crazy in Spanish. That’s a perfect
description for animated walks, runs, sneaks, crawls, and
other ways of getting around. Do anything except boring
zombie walks.
I remember a Monty Python book on animation which
demonstrated a shortcut for animating characters walking.
It said to hide the feet and legs behind tall grass! Duh. Don’t
knock it if it works. But just in case you don’t have any
tall grass we’re going to look at the methods of animated
walking with two and four legs.
What is walking? Stand up and start walking. Easy,
huh? Now start to walk but think about what you’re doing.
Thinking about it breaks your natural rhythm. You lean
forward and put your foot out and begin to feel like you’re
going to fall. Guess what? You are going to fall but your foot
stops you. It catches your weight and you begin the cycle
again with the other foot. That’s walking.
Walking from the front is a little trickier because it
involves perspective foreshortening. You also have to
balance the body as the weight shifts from one foot to the
other. Try to capture a figure eight with the swing of the
arms.
 94 The Laws of Animation

Now try to walk without falling. Can you do it? It’s called sneaking and it begins
with your weight on one foot, then your other foot extends and lands. Only then
does the body weight shift off the first foot and onto the foot that just landed.

Iggy walks impacting with his heel, then snapping down flat foot.

Iggy Goes for a Walk

Let’s look at a character walking in an actual scene. Iggy has just prepared
the flour sack with the Eye-dea and now walks to turn on the power switch.
Remember, each character will have their own style of walking based upon how
they typically hold their bodies and will also be influenced by how they’re feeling.
Their goal for walking also plays a part; here, Iggy is walking excitedly with a In this pose, Iggy’s foot snaps down. The weight remains over the toes of one
bounce in his step and a quick pace to achieve his dream of creating life. foot while the other swings forward.
 The Laws of Animation 95

His weight shifts from the rear foot over the front planted
foot. The heel hits.

At this point the rear leg swings forward and his body
starts to lean forward.
The rear leg swings forward and catches the weight of his
body on the next heel impact. This continues as he walks
down the steps.
 96 The Laws of Animation

At this point we hold for a beat to add to the feeling of weight. More weight
means it takes more energy and more time to move. A few extra frames can make
all the difference.

In anticipation of the jump, Iggy bends his knees and swings his arms back.
He moves down before jumping up. Once again, adding four extra frames to this
At the foot of the stairs Iggy stops. Iggy jumps off the last step. This adds variety pose helps give the extra feeling of weight. It’s subtle but without it the animation
to the walk rather than each step being similar. would feel like it floats.
 The Laws of Animation 97

Iggy lands on his heels and his arms continue upward in

an opposing action.

Iggy jumps up, reversing his line of action.

His feet snap down, accepting his full weight. His arms
settle and there’s a slight hold.

As he rises up during the jump, his arms and legs rise up,
continuing the momentum. This movement also prepares
him to land.
 98 The Laws of Animation

Again, we add a few frames to add weight. Iggy now prepares to turn his walk.
His upper body turns into the new direction.

At this point Iggy anticipates by leaning back and begins his first step.
Again the heel hits first, followed by the planting and swing.
 The Laws of Animation 99

Notice how as Iggy walks towards camera he gets bigger

in perspective and also appears to move quicker.
This scene then cuts to the next scene, which continues
Iggy’s walk from the reverse angle. He walks until he reaches
the master switch.
 100 The Laws of Animation
Four-Legged Walks
As an animator you will probably find that sometimes you have to animate a
character with more than two legs. The principle of the walk is basically the same,
with both pairs of legs walking in opposite phase of each other. Thus, when the
right side back foot is front, the right side front foot is back and vice versa for the
left. This is much easier to visualize in a picture.
The opposing feet create a tripod so the animal doesn’t fall down.
The body is a collection of these types of counterbalance actions.
Now, if you have a character with more than four legs, either rewrite the script,
send it to the computer animators, or hide them in tall grass.
Here are some examples of four-legged walks.
When you add an extra pair of legs you can actually perform more types of
walks. With animals they’re called gaits. Most horseback riders know that their
horses can walk, jog, trot, canter, and gallop.
Check out Preston Blair’s Animation book or Eadweard Muybridge’s
photographic book, Animals in Motion, to learn more. You can find images from
both of these books, as well as many more about animal gaits, on the internet.
Some people have even edited Muybridge’s images together into film clips and
posted them on YouTube.
The Laws of Animation 101

Chapter Six
It's Alive!
Animating
Inner Life
The second set of principles is related to the inner life force
of your characters. These are principles that expand upon
the physical principles to make your audience believe
that your characters have volume and mass but, more
importantly, that your characters are truly animated with an
inner life force—they're alive.
Animation can create the illusion of life even with
abstract shapes, as long as those shapes move with
purposefulness. Shapes might move like they're blown
in the wind. They're moving but not alive. If those same
shapes start chasing each other we begin to get a sense
of life. They appear to seek a goal or avoid something
dangerous.
It's Alive! Animating Inner Life 103
There are several specific animation skills that bring
characters to life. Lip-syncing techniques make us believe
our characters can speak. Blinks add a believable richness to
the eyes. Breathing also keeps a character from becoming a
zombie by holding still for too long. Zombies have the ability
to stand very still for a very long time.
Don't freeze drawings. You can keep a character alive
by using moving holds. These are slow movements that
a character or secondary character makes to remind the
audience they're not part of the background. This can be
an animated cycle or just a slow change from one pose
to another. Of course the style of animation determines
whether it's appropriate to use moving holds.
Look into my animator's eyes
They say that the eyes are the window to the soul. Maybe
they're just holes that we can see out of. Either way, you
need to pay careful attention when drawing eyes because
they're what's going to make your audience believe that
your characters are truly alive and thinking. This is one of
the dead giveaways for spotting zombies. However, you
want to rely on other clues as well to spot zombies because,
by the time you can see their eyes, it might be too late!
 104 It’s Alive! Animating Inner Life

Tex Avery was a master of takes. He would have a character literally fly apart
into pieces before putting them back together. Takes are really fun to animate.

One of the funniest double takes that I’ve seen is from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s
film Micmacs. In it a surveillance camera is about to spot the hero and it does a
PRINCIPLE: Focus on the Eyes double take. All the camera does is pan back quickly and stop, pointed at the hero,
If you only have a little time to work on a drawing, focus on getting the eyes right. thus proving the old adage that the secret of comedy is timing and imagining a life
This is especially true in storyboarding where a rough drawing is acceptable. animating it from within. Why not try a triple take? Wait, that’s going too far.
Let’s explore the stages of a take.
Anticipation for Clarity
As we saw in the physical principles of motion, anticipation prepared the actor for
the action. The audience needs to be able to follow the action. They need to see it,
so you point to it using composition. But you have to let the audience know what
is going to happen and where it is going so they know where to look.
Anticipation also lets the audience know what the character is thinking and is
going to do or is thinking of doing. If an action is not anticipated, there is a good
chance the audience will miss it. This preparation also tells us as viewers where to
look.

Takes and Double Takes The first pose shows the character looking and recognizing what it is that they
A take is a reaction to seeing something that strongly affects a character, usually see. Before going into the take the body has to prepare with an anticipation. Then the
something desirable or something strange or scary. character quickly snaps into the take. Finally the character settles into the recovery.

Here are the stages of a double take. First is the look and recognition. Next the
A double take is a delayed reaction. The first take looks but does not see, or character goes about their business, ignoring what they saw. After a beat, there’s
rather it does not fully comprehend. The delay creates a tension in the audience the second recognition and the character quickly goes to look back again. Finally
and the double take releases that tension. there’s the recovery or further action.

Practice body language with a sack of flour.
Earlier, we learned about using the flour sack to explore
animation principles. Practicing with the sack can teach us
about deformations caused by stretch and squash, timing
and the other physical animation principles.
However, the secondary function of the exercise using the
flour sack is that it’s a great way to learn about the principles
of animation that create the inner life of a character.
PRINCIPLE: Gestural Life
Expressive gestures are the way we create performances
with your animation. Gestures allow us to show the
character thinking without relying on facial features.
tallgrassradiostudio.blogspot.com posted a blog titled
“That Poor Misunderstood Sack of Flour” (May 26, 2005)
describing the origin and usefulness of the half-filled flour
sack exercise.
“It may have had its origins in life drawing as an analogy
to the twisting human torso or perhaps it was just a close
approximation to a single muscle. The key point being that
it deforms naturally like an organic shape and it maintains a
constant volume which provides a natural limitation to the
It’s Alive! Animating Inner Life 105
distortions and deformations. With a little imagination the
end tabs of the flour sack could be manipulated to act like
the little guy’s limbs.”
Interview your characters in order to get to know them.
Emotion Wheel
Guess Your Emotion— Spin the Emotion
Wheel!
Robert Plutchik’s, psycho-evolutionary theory of basic
emotions is the best description of the basic emotions
that I’ve ever seen. You can search for his emotion graphic
online. He arranges emotions similarly to a color wheel
and this has an advantage over those who simply provide
a list of emotions. Just as a color wheel allows you to see
relationships among colors, his emotion wheel allows you to
see the relationship between different emotions.
Emotions usually do not jump from one to another,
for example from joy to dejection, except under extreme
circumstances, tragic news, or happy news. The chart shows
how emotions can progress and grow from one state to
another. For example, annoyance can grow into hostility to
rage all the way to fury, then shift to loathing.
His theory also shows how simple basic emotions can
combine to create composite emotions. For example, Joy +
trust = love. Trust + fear = submission. Joy + fear = guilt.
On the opposite sides of the wheel are the opposite
emotions—joy is the opposite of sadness. Fear is the
opposite of anger. Feeling opposite emotions makes up
“conflicted.”
We’re going to take Iggy for a spin on the emotion wheel.
I’ve pushed Iggy’s expressions for clarity sake. I was inspired
by Preston Blair’s emotion charts and Jim Borgman’s “How
Are You Feeling Today?” print on a shirt that I have. Jim is the
wonderful artist behind the Zits comics. I love the fact that
 106 It's Alive! Animating Inner Life

some of the Zits collections contain his rough drawings. Jeremy and his friends
would be fun characters to animate.

Iggy's Wheel of Emotions

So without further ado, here is Iggy's emotion chart. The emotions are laid out
like Robert Plutchik's psycho-evolutionary theory of basic emotions. We start
travel clockwise around the wheel from joy through trust, fear, surprise, sadness,
disgust, anger, anticipation, and end up back at joy.
Happy Shocked

Ecstatic Scared

The intensity of emotions starts high at the center and dissipates at the outer
edge. For example, if disgust is a strong negative reaction then boredom is a
similar but less intense emotion. This helps the animator because it gives the
character somewhere to go emotionally. We could start out with a character being Proud Surprised
mildly frustrated; as events take place the character grows progressively angry and
ends up enraged and finally goes berserk. Facially, berserk is probably similar to
enraged, but while enraged can still be an emotion felt passively, a character going
berserk explodes into violent action.
One other way to create story conflict is to have characters lie. It's always
fun for an audience to watch characters dig themselves deeper into trouble
because the audience knows they're lying. The classic television sitcom Leave
It to Beaver used this in practically every episode. Watch it to see some great
lying.
It's also interesting to watch characters trying to hide their emotions. Trying
to hide your guilt, disappointment, anger or jealousy are all actions that an
animator could have fun with, trying to capture how the emotions slowly
leak out. Hopeful Hysterical
 It's Alive! Animating Inner Life 107

Dazed Ashamed Disgusted

Sad Shy Bored

Depressed Guilty Enraged

108 It's Alive! Animating Inner Life

Angry Smug Suspicous

Frustrated Mischievous Exhausted

Jealous Cautious
 It’s Alive! Animating Inner Life 109

Show the Thinking Process

Bunny looks at Iggy’s pointing finger.

PRINCIPLE: A Change of Expression

Shows the Character Thinking
Characters come to life when we see the thinking behind their
actions. When they change their expressions we get to see what
they’re thinking. It’s played out mainly in the eyes, eyebrows
and mouth. It’s also supported through gesture. Now that
we’ve looked at some emotions let’s see how Bunny thinks.
In the previous scene of The Animator’s Eye, Iggy has Bunny follows the path of the finger and looks down
suggested to use Bunny’s Eye-dea to perform dangerous to see his Eye-dea in the jar. He moves the jar out in an
experiments in the laboratory. In this scene, Iggy points opposing action in order to see it better.
to Bunny’s Eye-dea in the jar. This scene is about Bunny’s
reaction to hearing this idea.

Bunny’s state of curiosity begins to change as he realizes

Bunny holds the jar in front of him and leans in, curious that Iggy wants to use his Eye-dea for the experiment. The
about what Iggy is proposing. change plays on his eyebrows and mouth.
 110 It’s Alive! Animating Inner Life

In the final pose, Bunny leans away from Iggy, wrapping his arms around his
Bunny looks back to Iggy now with a slightly angry expression.
jar with the Eye-dea to protect it. His angry expression intensifies. We hold on this
pose to let it read.
Bunny’s acting through body language has let us understand what he’s
thinking without one word being necessary. Show the thinking process. It keeps
the zombies away.
Let’s look at the same scene again, this time analyzing Bunny’s overall gesture
in each of the poses.

Bunny’s expression now changes to startled with his raised eyebrows and open
mouth.

Bunny holding the jar is hunched over, curious about what Iggy is proposing.

Bunny’s expression now changes to a defensive attitude, swinging the Eye-dea

around to his other side. He’s clearly angry now. In a counteraction Iggy pulls his Bunny looks down at Iggy’s pointing finger. His shoulders soften out of the
pointing finger back. hunch.
 It’s Alive! Animating Inner Life 111

Bunny straightens upright as he looks back at Iggy. Bunny now faces away from Iggy, hunched in the
reversed way. He looks back over his shoulder, angry at Iggy.
In terms of timing, imagine what the character is
thinking about and use that as a gauge as to how long
to keep the character thinking. In this case, Bunny
immediately knows what’s on Iggy’s warped mind and
quickly protects his Eye-dea. The minimum would be at
least 12 frames. If a character is concocting a plan, the
thinking process will take longer as the character weighs
pros and cons, tries out different ideas in their mind,
watching them fizzle out, until we see the excitement of the
plan that could actually work.

Lip Sync
Bunny holds out the jar in anticipation of moving it away. Ventriloquism in Slow Motion,
or How to Lip Sync

Bunny now twists away from Iggy.

 112 It's Alive! Animating Inner Life

Lip syncing is about illusion—don't spell out every syllable. Here are the basic mouth shapes. As you can see, the vowels tend to be
Animators can learn a lot from ventriloquists. You need to learn to think like a rounder shapes. Some consonants overlap the vowel shapes. "J" and "K" sounds
ventriloquist—you're creating an illusion of your character talking. Ventriloquist's end with an "A" sound. "C, D, G, T and V" all end with an "E" sound. "L" uses the
dummies can be totally believable and all they have to work with is the option of tongue under the teeth.
open or closed mouths. This chart also shows a red line indicating how the cheeks move to help
When my son was young I used to talk with him with a puppet. The articulate the mouth sound. A mouth follows the whole jaw. "E, X, C, D, G, S, T, V
ventriloquist illusion was so believable that he would share things with the puppet and Z" require raising the cheeks. "O" stretches the cheeks.
that he wouldn't tell me.
Consonants are difficult for ventriloquists because they're hard to pronounce
without moving your mouth. They require specific lip and tongue shapes. The
animator has the advantage of shaping the mouth to simulate different lip
positions used in speaking. Consonants are explosive. P's pop. Vowels sound
smooth.
Lip sync is just like ventriloquism except that you create it one drawing at a
F V
time. So it really is like ventriloquism in very slow motion.
Many animation books teach how to provide specific lip shapes to match
the sounds and syllables of speech. This is important for traditional classical
animation but it is not the most important thing. A living personality breathing
life into your character is more important than matching specific lip shapes.
Focus on the main vowels. They help us identify speech.
The eyes are just as important as the mouth for believable lip sync. If your
B& P M
character appears alive, most likely the audience will believe the lip sync. Head
tilts add emphasis. Some phoneme sounds require an A to B pose. "F" requires opening the mouth
Don't try to animate every syllable or your characters will get rubber mouth. to get air and then expels the air as the teeth bite the lip to create the "F" mouth.
You want to match phonemes, not individual letters and you don't have to match "V" uses similar mouth shapes as "F" but in reverse order; the "V" explodes out
them all. The phonemes are the sounds the combined letters make. This is where ending in the "E" sound.
studying ro to scoping can come in handy. Try watching movies with the sound "B" and "P" are explosive consonants also ending in the "E" sound. "M" is
turned off and see if you can read lips. You'll learn a lot about how people speak. similar to "F" in that the sound is shaped by the closing mouth but this time in a
full close. The red lines on the drawing show the bulging cheeks.
Now that we've seen the lip shapes let's see how this works in practice. Iggy's
going to introduce himself, "Hi, I'm Iggy Who are you?"

A, I E,Y,X O U,W

J , K C,D,G,S,T,Z L R "HI." Iggy begins smiling. He opens his mouth to a large "A" or "I" shape. The
"I" sound closes the mouth down, bringing the teeth together.

“I’M.” Iggy opens his mouth again to the open “I” shape
but this time the “I” sound skips the closed teeth shape and
blends right into the closed “M” mouth. In conjunction with
the lip shapes his head rises.
“IG-GY.” Iggy creates the closed “I” shape with high
cheeks and then closes down into a closed “E” shape. Now
his head can lower.
“WHO ARE YOU?” Iggy now looks at the camera, and
with raised eyebrows asks “who” with an “O” mouth this
blends into the “R” shape taking air in. “You” is shaped
with the “O” mouth again on the exhale. It’s important to
note that when someone asks a question they raise the
It’s Alive! Animating Inner Life 113
pitch of their voice at the end of their sentence. It’s a way of
indicating that the statement is a question.
Here is Iggy performing his line with his whole body.
You can see how his body language enhances the reading
of the line and the actual mouth movements become less
important.
Lip-Sync Timing
Keep Track of Timing with
Exposure Sheets
We usually see something first, then hear it. We see the
flash of lightning and have plenty of time to put our hands
over our ears before we hear it. Light travels faster than
sound.
In animation, sounds accompany actions, this is called
“sync.” Sync creates the illusion that the action causes the
sound. Sometimes we need to cheat this event to make the
illusion work properly. So we have to slide the soundtrack
a little forward or back. As little as a frame or two is often
enough.
See first, then hear. Mouth first.
The process of reading the track is not difficult but it is
time-consuming and repetitive. You basically scrub through
the soundtrack and listen for when the sound changes.
You then write down the phonemes that you hear onto
an exposure sheet. It takes practice to hear the different
phonemes. (Preferably use headphones, as it can drive
others around you crazy hearing the same slowed-down
dialogue over and over.) This is a list of what’s on every
level for each frame of film. Along the side are additional
columns for notes and mouth positions. Some animation
timers add little thumbnail drawings to further guide the
animator.
 1U It's Alive! Animating Inner Life

SCENE EXPOSURE SHEET PAGE Zombies have no life in their eyes. You don't see them looking around. Nobody's
ANIMATOR PROJECT
home. With a zombie, there's no thinking going on inside. Pay attention to the
NOTES DIALOGUE C B A BG CAMERA
eyes.
Zombies don't know how to act.
Zombies don't anticipate their actions.
Zombies can't dance. Maybe they can break dance but the keyword is "break."
Zombies sometimes float.
Zombies don't have skeletons. They're bendy.
Zombies ice skate when there's no ice—they slide. Make sure feet don't slide.

If, on the other hand, you wantto animate zombies, have them wave their arms around wildly
and make sure you add plenty of drooling.
Some software packages allow automatic lip sync, such as Toonboom Studio.
This works well for television-type animation, but for full-feature animation you'll
need to read the track and then hand animate to the track.

Tips for Spotting Zombies!

Check out the lip sync and gesture videos on the DVD.

Beware of those lifeless creatures that have forgotten their animation principles.
It’s Alive! Animating Inner Life 115

Chapter Seven
Creating Worlds
Creating a World on Your Desktop
What is Art Direction? It’s a Process
of Discovery
What is an art director? How do we see the world? With
what eyes are we looking at it? Are we truly seeing or “just
looking”? What is the training needed to become an art
direction or production design master?
Someone has to define the visual rules and style of a film,
and this role falls to the production designer and art director.
Often a designer or art director is brought on because they
have a unique vision that fits the tone of the film.
I’d like to thank my art director friends Dan Cooper,
Fred Warter, Tom Cardone and Bill Perkins for all they
taught me about art direction and color, which I hope to
share with you.
All artists have their own style whether they’re aware of
it or not. It’s their animator’s eye, or how they see the world.
Style comes though their specific way of using the design
elements and principles. Some artists work in flat graphic
Creating Worlds 117
style, like the UPA cartoons. Disney started with classic
rubber hose cartoons and later went for a stylized realism.
Snow White and Pinocchio were inspired by the art
style of early children’s books, particularly those of Gustaf
Tenggren. His style was a stylized realism using watercolors.
It was characterized by rounded edges and soft colors.
Bambi was inspired by the impressionistic pastels of
artist Tyrus Wong. His landscapes have a very evocative
Zen-like calm to them. They utilize tinted colors—that is,
colors mixed with white.
Eyvind Earle was known as the man who painted square
trees. His style was a stylized realism focusing on strong
textures. Walt Disney hired him as the designer of Sleeping
Beauty and his backgrounds for that film were stunning. He
used very rich, saturated colors. Eyvind used sponges to get
some of his textures. He would have had a field day using
Photoshop’s custom brushes. He had to do it all by hand.
In the male-dominated world of early Disney animation,
Mary Blair was a colorful exception. She brought a new
spontaneous sense of playful shapes and fresh exciting color
to the animated worlds of Alice in Wonderland and Peter
Pan, as well as Disneyland’s It’s a Small World.
The animator’s eye gets inspiration everywhere. This
includes classical and fine art painters. The artists of Peter
Pan were inspired by the spiraling compositions of Thomas
Hart Benton. It’s fascinating because he was a teacher of
Jackson Pollock.
Disney’s layout artist, Ken Anderson, had his own unique
style that inspired and defined 101 Dalmatians and Winnie
the Pooh with its emphasis on line.
Tim Burton is another animation artist with a unique
animator’s eye who created the style of Christmas meets the
macabre for A Nightmare before Christmas.
Design Everything! It’s Your World
Everything you show on film speaks to your audience. You
have to design everything in your world to bring it to life. You
need to take care that all of the elements appear as if they
belong to the same world. You have to design the organic
world of living beings as well as manmade objects such as
machines and architecture. The animator’s eye often blurs
this boundary by creating machines that appear human.
In designing your world, you’re defining your style.
A style is defined by how the elements and principles
 118 Creating Worlds
are utilized. What kinds of shapes are used and in what combinations? Which
elements are dominant in the design? How is color used?
Creating Worlds with Shape and Color
Using only shape and color, you can suggest completely different worlds.
Here is a composition consisting only of various gray rectangles. It instantly
suggests a city.
Just by making the image askew, we’re now looking up at the city.
Add a little color variety and rounded shapes and you’ve got a jungle.
Large dark background with swirling colors, circles and star shapes suggests a
space scene.
“Shapes talk to each other.”
Layout artist Bill Frake taught me this concept.
The key element for animated design is shapes. Learn the language of shapes.
Learn which types of shapes work well with other shapes. Discover which shapes
speak to each other.
Triangles are the most useful shapes. They interlock in compositions creating
triangles within triangles. Circles are hard to integrate into composition because
they are so complete in themselves. Shapes tell us what things are.
• Shapes tell us how to feel.
• Shapes have power.
• Shapes define space.
Staging Clarity
If the audience can’t see what’s happening in a scene, they won’t be “moved”
emotionally no matter how fabulous the animation is.
Clarity of staging should be in the forefront of your animator’s eye at every
stage of production. Clear staging underlines all of the animation principles. For
 Creating Worlds 119

example, if the audience can’t see the anticipation, then
there’s effectively no anticipation.
You have to direct the audience’s attention so they can
follow your story. Film is not like a Mad Magazine layout
or a Bosch painting, crammed with so many details that
you can look at the image for hours and see all kinds of
little surprises. Animation is more like you’re driving by at
60 miles an hour and you’ve got 1/24 of a second to look
at a billboard. It must read clearly, simply and boldly, with
everything else subordinate to the main message, or your
audience will miss it.
need to stay in the background. In gestalt terms, this is
known as figure/ground relationships; the action is the
figure that stands out from the ground that fades from our
awareness. The background is there only for support of
the action. It is best to simplify backgrounds in the way a
telephoto lens renders the background of a portrait. It keeps
the subject in sharp focus and softly blurs the background.

This image is a collection of solid squares within an

outline square in various shades of blue. If you focus on any
one square within the square, the rest of the image becomes
background. In this image the figure/ground relationships
can change easily.

Creating Style Guides

“Snowboarding on Mars” is one of those images where

you can spend time pouring over the details. But this would
never work in a film because there’s too much to look at.

Figure/Ground Relationships
The most important rule of staging is to make the
action read clearly. This means that the backgrounds
should support the main action and not upstage it. The
backgrounds may be beautiful in their own right but they
 120 Creating Worlds
What is a style guide and what is it used for? A style guide is your dictionary of the
design elements used to create the world of your film. It’s the recurring graphic
themes, elements and characteristic defining features of the world, with examples.
It includes the rules for dos and don’ts.
It’s like a musical piece with recurring themes and variations on those themes.
Only to the animator’s eye, it’s the visual reoccurrence of shapes and the various
combinations of shapes as they oppose and echo each other.
Style is used to create mood and atmosphere. Styles can represent your own
perception of reality. German expressionism was a style designed to portray
subjective experience and emotion; it used exaggeration and distortion. Some
styles are very effective for personal expression through animation.
Animation has evolved its own styles based upon time and budgets, but also
on artistic visions and approach to entertainment. UPA style, Disney, TV styles,
Collage styles—each evolved to meet certain needs of expression. There are no
right or wrong styles.
Why can we tell the difference between Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett
and Miyazaki films? Why can we tell their work apart from lesser directors? Artistic
styles are not always consciously decided. Artistic styles come out of experience;
they’re separate from a specific style guide for a film.
How much do you cartoonize everything? What percent caricature versus
realism? These are the decisions we need to make in determining a style.
All of these elements are organized in order of importance in a hierarchy.
By hierarchy, I mean choosing which elements should be thought about and
designed first, second, third and so on, or not used at all.
Traditionally animation, being hand drawn, has focused on line first. Volume
and space, light and shadow, and shape came second and third. Computers have
changed the rules, making it easier to focus on other elements of design in the
hierarchy. It was unthinkable to put the iridescent color quality of a compact disc
on an animated character using traditional animation. Now you can.
It’s a piece of cake for computers to focus on texture first, sometimes getting
carried away with hair and the like. Sprite Animation Studios has done wonderful
things by designing hair as defined shapes rather than a more fluid, changing
substance. You can see their work at their website at SpriteAnimation.com. The
hierarchy of design helps keep things more interesting by limiting your palette of
design elements.
The film 101 Dalmatians focused on line first, and large, abstract, flat color
areas second. Despicable Me focused upon simple shapes first.
A style guide can consist of model charts, color palettes and color script, rules
for painting backgrounds, and iconic shapes used in the world. If you compare
Horton Hears a Who! to Ice Age, you can see that Sid doesn’t fit into the Seuss
world of Horton Hears a Who!.
Styles can be formal or informal, tight or loose, open or closed. They create
consistency and the design element of harmony for the world of the film. They
show all of the various artists working on the same film how to stay consistent to
that world.
Style tells the viewer visual information about the world and lends an
emotional impact to that world.
Where do we find styles? What inspires a unique vision of the world?
How are Styles Related to Design?
Architecture, fashion, autos, machinery, furniture, dialects, artists, cartoonists,
costumes, art periods, photography, decorative arts, posters are all elements of
the world we live in. They reflect an attitude about life based upon how they’re
designed. Different attitudes bring out different styles.
If you look at the Quaker style, you’ll find it minimalistic using natural
materials. It’s serene and unassuming, just like their way of life. In comparison, if
we look at the futurists, we see lots of raw kinetic energy inspired by the then new
technologies of the automobile. Their art gives an impression of speed, like the
modern city life they lived.
Compare the style of Microsoft’s Windows computers with the minimalist,
intuitive design of the Mac. Style reflects the users of the style. Windows machines
are cheaper and generic-looking, while Macs have a zen-like grace about them
that says, “Use me to create.” It’s not that Quakers are better or worse than the
futurists, they just have different styles. And styles change.
We can use style to tell the audience something about our characters and help
tell the story. Try inventing your own style to do that.
Designing Style Guides
A bird is a bird, or is it? What is it about a bird that says “bird”? How far can you
distort it and have it still be a bird? What happens when we move the pieces
around? Is it still a bird?
Organic Designer is a computer program that creates simple colored graphics
of trees. The program has “information” about what makes a tree a tree. You
can create all different types of trees and they’ll all still be a tree. You set the
parameters for length of limbs, size of leaves and age of the tree, choose colors
and hit Go: instant trees, in all shapes and sizes. It’s a great design inspirational
tool and it’s free.
 Creating Worlds 121

Robot design has been inspired by the shape of human Here’s what should go into your style guide.
beings, geometry, bilateral symmetry, and organic shapes.
• Model charts of your characters viewed from all angles.
R2D2 looked like a souped-up trash can.
• Expression charts and gestures for your important
The history of robot design from the 1950s to the
characters. Often these may not be on model but they are
current day is visually fascinating and inspiring for training
very inspirational. Just note that they’re not on model.
your animator’s eye. The first robot design was actually
• Color script (we’ll learn more about this later in this
completed in 1495 by Leonardo da Vinci.
chapter).
Hobby Japan is a Japanese magazine in which you
• Sample backgrounds showing the painting style.
can find awesome robot designs. Beginning with simple
• Sample props displaying the style of the project.
anthropomorphic snowmen, robot design evolved to the
• You might even show sample animation to inform the
current robotic hybrids of medieval knights morphed with
animators how the characters should move.
bionic insects, sea life, birds, animals and transportation
• When using computer graphics, you can show
vehicles. This is an incredible journey of stylistic design.
examples of textures and lighting. The art director
You can find images on the web with a search for “Hobby
might even create plans and elevations for architectural
Japan.”
elements.
Each of these items should be annotated with things
to watch out for, so that each artist has the necessary
information to match the style. You can show a comparison
of dos and don’ts.

Composing Pictures
In this section you’ll learn how to design characters and
create and design a world that they can inhabit. The
primary goal of composition is clarity so you can see the
action. Composition is also your subtext. It visually tells the
audience how to feel.
As an exercise, try designing a prop in various styles.
Try designing what a lamp might look like as Egyptian, Art
Nouveau, futurist, Eskimo, art deco, Dr. Seuss, Tim Burton,
cave times, baroque, or classical.

Compositions are defined by the following design

principles: balance, position, dominance, unity, alternation
and repetition, contrast and similarity, symmetry and
This lamp has a style that is only made of trapezoids. rhythm.
 122 Creating Worlds

How do you visualize a world? However you see your world, you’re going
to need to translate it into graphic signs using good design. Cartoons provide
a shorthand for this. Paramount is that the audience can clearly see what’s
happening. You direct their attention using composition and lighting.

Contrast is probably the most important design principle, as it affects every

other principle. Use contrasts of every element of design: size, color, speed,
direction, value, shape.
Dominance is very important as a design principle as well as a working Here I’ve moved Iggy and the lamp out of the way of the main action. The
procedure. Work big to small. Start with getting the overall picture right, and then puzzle piece has the greatest area of contrast. The lighting creates a vignette of the
focus on details. main action. And both Iggy and Bunny look at the puzzle piece.
Unity and harmony are important to make sure that all the diverse parts of a
composition feel like they belong together. The style guide is helpful in achieving Avoid Space Killers
unity.
Avoid tangents and lines that are parallel to the frame, as they’re definite space
In addition the following help you create strong compositions:
killers. Tangents are those weird alignments, such as when you take a picture and
• Defining the composition using thirds and triangles. it looks like a tree is growing out of someone’s head.
• Using leading lines and directing attention with arrow shapes.
• Using lines to create depth.
• Choosing an interesting viewpoint.
• Keeping the background non-distracting.
• Choosing interesting cropping and framing devices.
• Focus—always direct the viewer’s attention.

Drama and Comedy

Drama and comedy require different kinds of reading. For drama the goal is to
enhance the dramatic impact of the scene. This might require Dutch angles and
distorted perspectives with strong light and shadows. Drama relies more on point
of view (POV) and sometimes letting the images slowly reveal themselves through
lighting or camera movement in depth.

Comedy often is staged flat or like a poster because it
needs absolute clarity. If you can’t see the punchline or
comedic reveal, it won’t be funny. Comic staging requires
the ability to withhold and reveal new information with
split-second timing. Comedy comes from the anticipation:
Uh oh! Then comes the surprise twist into a different
direction.
Staging and Laying Out for the
Viewer’s Eye
Look over here!
What are layouts and what are they used for? The
animation process requires a way to show how the
backgrounds relate to the character animation. So
once the storyboards are completed, the scene goes to
the layout artists. They create pencil drawings of the
backgrounds and show where the action takes place.
Creating Worlds 123
Often the background is drawn in blue pencil with the
character poses drawn in red pencil. The layout then goes
to the animator to know where to animate. An additional
copy also goes to the background artist to begin painting
the backgrounds.
This art is known as staging and in animation it’s known
as layout. Think of layout as a verb rather than a noun. It’s
an active process of “laying out” the elements of the shot
in depth and within the frame for maximum clarity of the
action. It’s the process of laying out all the pieces in an
imaginary three-dimensional space and mapping them
onto the two-dimensional picture plane. Staging and laying
out are also temporal processes that change as the story
moves along.
Negative space is an important but often overlooked
aspect of the staging process. In live action or stage
performance actors have to act within an actual physical
environment. We have to literally create that space when we
animate, so it’s very important to make sure there is enough
negative space for characters to interact in.
Stage Staging
Staging comes from the art of the stage production and
I think animation artists can learn a lot about the layout
process by learning how stage directors think. Directors
need to show the audience where to look and stage the
action so that the audience can see it clearly.
The stage director needs to shift the audience’s attention
when a new character comes on stage. They have developed
many techniques that filmmakers have adopted for clear
 124 Creating Worlds

storytelling. Stage lights can direct attention. Characters on stage can look to
where the action is happening.
There are so many things that you don’t even think about when you watch
a play or movie. For instance, when one character speaks to a crowd, the crowd
has to limit their actions to smaller and slower movements, otherwise the
audience’s attention will take attention away from, or “upstage,” the character
who’s speaking. Directing is choreographing the symphony of movement of the
orchestra of actors on stage.
The horror film The Craft uses the opposite approach to direct attention.
When the new girl arrives at the airport, there’s a scene where everyone is
rushing around and she’s the only one not moving—your eye goes right to her.
What did film add to theatrical staging? The ability to move the camera took
time, because originally cameras were bulky and heavy. Once they became more
manageable in size, film created the filmmaker’s eye by juxtaposing shots to
When you add depth and character movement the laying-out process gets
create an omniscient or “godlike” point of view. The action was free.
more complex. Scene 33 shows the three-point perspective in this scene.
Is moving the camera a good thing? It depends on whether it adds to the story
Actually the process was simplified because the laboratory was modeled in
or not. I’ve seen some multimillion-dollar special effects extravaganzas that I
three dimensions in SketchUp. SketchUp took care of the perspective for me. The
couldn’t watch because I didn’t know where to look or what I was looking at.
scene is a three-point perspective rather than the simpler two-point perspective
There was just too much movement. Laying out a scene is akin to cinematography
because I used a very wide camera angle that distorts the geometry. It almost has a
in live action.
fisheye look to it. The first two vanishing points are along the red horizon line. The
The function of layouts is to design the backgrounds using line. Layout artists
third is way up in the sky. As you can see here, sometimes the vanishing points go
using their animator’s eye also create value studies. Once the background is
beyond the edge of your artwork.
drawn, it is the layout artist’s job to show where the characters will act. In the
production flow, the layout artist takes the storyboards as their reference and then
prepares the layouts as a guide for the animator.
Let’s look at the layout process.

The laying-out process also plans where the animated action will take place.
Sometimes laying out can be very straightforward, as in this scene. Here Iggy In this case, Iggy starts by the table and walks down the stairs. In this instance,
basically stands in one place over a relatively flat background as they act out the I’ve used the final cleanups, but often they’ll be rough drawings that serve as a
scene. guide.

This is the second layout showing the continuation of
Iggy walking offscreen.
This scene hooks up from the previous scene as Iggy
continues walking towards the switch. This hookup is to
create a smooth continuity between scenes. One thing you
might not think about as part of the laying-out process is
how each scene hooks up to the scenes immediately before
and after. This scene comes directly after the previous scene.
Iggy walks off scene 33 to the right. In this scene 34 the
camera has rotated 180 degrees and Iggy comes walking in
from the left. This connecting process between scenes is
very important but easily overlooked.
This is another time when your checklists come in very
handy. Ideally, you’d catch problems of this sort when you
watch your animatic.
Creating Worlds 125
After I know where the character action will take place,
I can define my camera fielding. The fielding is always
proportional to your aspect ratio. It just changes in size,
position or rotation. Be careful with rotations because you
need to make sure you have enough artwork to cover as the
scene rotates around. The scene starts tight on Iggy by the
lab table and pulls out wide as he walks toward camera.
This screen shot from TVPaint shows how I adjusted the
curve of the camera move. The small box on the upper left
shows the rate of speed of the camera pull-back. The camera
starts moving right at the beginning of the scene. We follow
the curve that starts at the lower left corner of the graph.
There’s a small acceleration curve, or slow out, and then
it continues pulling out wider at an even speed along the
diagonal. Towards the top there’s a slight deceleration, or
slow in, before the camera comes to a stop. As you can see,
it holds the final position for about a quarter of the length of
the scene. This is represented by the flat line on the top right.
Staging and laying out also have to take into account
the frame of the image itself. Layout artist Bill Frake taught
 126 Creating Worlds
me a trick when laying out a scene. He suggested, when laying out a background,
to draw a large view of the scene. Then decide on where the camera frame goes,
cropping out what is unnecessary. In this way we can find just the right framing
for the shot that’s clear and dramatic.
Staging with Lighting
Shine a light to show your audience where to look.
We read values first, the pattern of light versus dark, before we see anything
else. This is a primary tool for staging your story. Shadows can improve
compositions by directing the eye where to look. Shadows are a wonderful way to
create mood. We’ll look at this further on the section on painting backgrounds.
Going for a Walk with the Camera
There are two ways to animate walks. The first is to animate the walk along a path.
This is a simple and straightforward approach. We just watched Iggy do this and
you can see it in the flipbook.
The second approach is where the character goes for a walk with the camera.
The camera has to track along at the same speed as the character or it might
appear as if the character is walking on ice because their feet will slide.
The process is that first you animate the character walking in place. You need
to calculate the length of the character’s stride, which is measured as a maximum
stride, or where their legs are extending forward and back as far as they will go.
You measure from one heel to the other heel. Now divide that by the number of
frames of the walk cycle. This new distance will be the amount you pan per frame.
If the pan rate at this distance per frame is too fast or slow for the length of
your scene, then you’ll need to change the timing of the walk either by having the
character walk slower or run faster.
Getting a Perspective of Your World
Let’s look at how to use perspective grids. One of the scariest things an artist
has to face is the blank page. The first thing we have to do is learn how to orient
ourselves spatially. If you look at a map of your own country, you will orient it with
north at the top of the map. East will be on the right and west on the left. South
is on the bottom. Now when we look at the map, if something is to the left on the
map we simply walk towards the left and we’ll eventually get there.
 Creating Worlds 127

Our second orientation is something we deal with every Plan your chases in deep space. Let things come into and
day and everywhere—gravity. As we saw with animation and out of camera, creating long motion trails. The screen is of
gravity, we can use this to help make our world believable. course flat but we have the wonderful ability to see infinite
One-point perspective gives us an orientation in space, but depth within it. Just think of the opening title sequence of
is not very exciting. Tilting the grid gives us more interest. Star Wars; those credits go light-years into space. So why
Bill Frake taught me a trick to push that interest even more. not use that illusion as another tool in your animator’s eye
By rolling the ground and sky planes, we start to visualize arsenal?
the effect of the lens. And rolling your skies suggests the
curvature of the earth.
Most animators don’t think about the effect of lens but
those few that I’ve seen who do create really interesting art.
Wide-angle distortion and perspective grids give unity to the
image. Wide angle adds a curvature.

In this shot we get the illusion of deep space, with Bunny

entering the frame very large and growing progressively
smaller as he reaches Iggy on the laboratory table.

Cartoonist and story artist Daan Jippes is a master

How to Choose Colors
of capturing the effect of lens distortion. He drew many In order to show the process of painting and choosing
Donald Duck comics and I had the pleasure to work and colors for characters and backgrounds, let’s start with a
learn from him on the production of Disney’s Aladdin. photograph.

Use the illusion of depth to bring the audience into your

world. This scene has an exaggerated fisheye lens effect.
 128 Creating Worlds

Beginners might start trying to match the colors until they come up with a
set of colors that could represent the scene. Usually what will happen is that the
colors chosen are of higher contrast and unrelated to each other. This will not
yield a convincing painting.
Value Comes First
ArtRage Studio is a painting program that allows you to automatically choose
colors from a reference photo and paint with simulated natural media effects.
Look at how the white paint on the buildings goes from bright white in the sun
to cool grayish blue in the shadows. In the context of the painting your mind still
sees them as white.

Value is the relative brightness of a color. To help find the values for your colors, In my own paintings, it took me a long time to learn how to work with values
look at a black-and-white version of your scene. Bright colors shouldn’t be correctly. My landscapes looked almost psychedelic. This was a look that I liked
brighter than the light of the light–dark contrast and the darkest colors should but I was trying for realism. (In the last chapter you can see some examples.)
remain close in value to the darks in order to remain in the shadows. We can Remember, value comes first.
number the value zones from one to ten to help us control our color choices,
much like Ansel Adams did with his approach to black-and-white photography.
Using most painting software, you can desaturate a picture so you can accurately
judge the values independently of the values. This judging of values can also be
accomplished by squinting or looking through a dark neutral or sepia-colored
filter. The next step is to do a value study in black and white of your scene.
Colors can very easily deceive the eye. The problem is that color is extremely
relative to its environment. One color can look completely different if placed in a
different color environment.
So how do we approach choosing colors from our reference photo? The first
thing to find is the area of greatest value contrast or the area of brightest light near
the darkest light. It is ironic that the most important color choice is not about
color but value.
In this version I’ve exaggerated the saturation of the colors. This adds
expressiveness to the image.

Value Reversal and Passage

One way to add excitement to a painting is to include what is known as a value
reversal. This is accomplished by creating a gradation in one direction that
reverses or crosses a gradation in another direction. At one point, on both
gradations the values will match. This is the point of value passage. Value passages
can be used to help unify a composition by creating links between the various
gradations within a scene.

In this painting the palm trees in the foreground change
value dependent on the background. When they’re against
white they get darker and when they’re against dark they get
lighter.
Control Contrast for Atmospheric Depth
Control of the value range gives us one of the first illusions
of color—that of atmosphere. A clear day will have sharp
and vivid contrasts of value, with textures clearly visible as
light defines their highlights and shadow areas. In contrast,
a day with fog as thick as pea soup will look totally grayed
out, almost as if it’s under water.
Aerial perspective is the effect of atmosphere on the
viewing of a scene. The further away objects are, the more
the atmosphere will affect their colors in the same way a
clear day versus a foggy day does. Far-away objects will
look almost foggy. They will have less contrast and a slightly
bluish cast to all of their colors.
In this painting the distant hills have much less
saturation and are cooler than the foreground.
Creating Worlds 129
Depth zones are also established by ranges of contrast;
the foreground has the most range of contrast of value
while the further away you go you have less value contrast
range.
After Choosing Value Comes Hue
When I was involved in a summer camp activity, we created
symmetrical patterns on graph paper using colored pencils.
It was here that I learned about the dreaded “coloritis”
disease. It’s very contagious. You’ll know you have it if you
start seeing spots before your eyes and the only known cure
is to limit your exposure to only three or four colors. You
see, as kids we wanted to try out all different kinds of colors
of the rainbow, but that just made a mess of the design. It
didn’t know what it wanted to be, because it wanted to be
everything.
 130 Creating Worlds

Color has Temperature

The next stage in choosing color is to find the hue of the color. This is the redness
or greenness or actual color of the color. Each color has a temperature associated
with it. Reds, oranges and yellows are usually considered warm colors. They
have the quality of feeling warm and they appear to approach us in a picture.
Greens, blues and purples are considered cool and they feel cooler and recede
from the picture plane. The color temperature is relative to the colors around it,
so a green on an orange background will appear cool, yet that same green on a
blue background will appear warm. The following images progress from warm to
neutral to cool and then to night.

Once we choose one color for our painting, we use a process of comparison to
judge whether this color is warmer or cooler than the color next to it.

Merlin Enabnit’s Coming to Light

By combining color temperature with value we can create colors that “come to light.”
I learned this technique from the Walter Foster book by Merlin Enabnit called Color.

You can take any color and create a progression from cooler and darker to
warmer and brighter and it will look like it’s lit with light.

Unified Color
If all your colors are shouting, “Look at me, I’m red! And I’m blue and …” none of
them will be heard.
Three ways to create unified colors are with a mother color, by using grayed
out or desaturated colors, and by using chromatic light. A mother color is one
color that is added to all the colors to unify them into the same “family.” Be
careful you don’t go too far and create muddy colors instead of colors united with
a mother color. This could kill the color contrasts and look like, well, mud.
This has been done in a variety of ways throughout art history. One way is
to work on a toned paper or lay down a base color of paint. Sometimes artists
will begin with laying down the complement color of the color scheme they’re
planning on using. I once saw a painter lay down a magenta base for a green
landscape and it worked wonderfully.

Think simple color progressions of warm to cool, not
full-out rainbows.
Mother Color Example
In this case, all the colors have a little of the yellow
background color in them. It makes Iggy a little more pink
and gives Bunny an aqua tint.
Saturated Color on a Gray Ground
Example
Creating Worlds 131
Gray is your friend. The second way of unifying colors is
to desaturate the colors. You almost can’t go wrong with this
method because you can choose colors all over the place
and by desaturating them they will feel like they belong
together. If you combine a desaturated color palette with
saturated accent colors on your characters they will really
come alive.
Chromatic Light Example
The third way of unifying colors is with chromatic light,
which simply means colored light. This effect can be seen
in theatrical lighting and doesn’t seek to duplicate natural
light. It’s used for expressive purposes like in theater. The
best example that I know of in animation is Chuck Jones’s
classic cartoon, What’s Opera, Doc?
Reflected Light
Another aspect of color is keeping in mind that, since color
is based upon the light that hits it, every object reflects back
its color to the objects around it.
 132 Creating Worlds

The simplest is to divide it in half; this is known as complementary colors.

Complementary colors are colors that are on opposite sides of the color wheel.
In theory, when you mix complementary colors they will mix to a neutral gray.
However, I have never found this to work in practice; you usually end up with
either reddish or greenish mud. This is due to qualities of paint rather than an
error in the theory.

One great but subtle example of this is foliage. If you look at leaves on a sunny
day, the sun shining through the leaves will look very saturated with a warmly
glowing green. However, the tops of the leaves where the sun hits them will
look varying degrees of washed-out and will have a slightly bluish cast from the
reflected light of the sky.

The animator’s eye sees the world differently from photographers, yet
maintains a firm grounding in the perceptual illusions of the world we live in.
The animator’s eye takes the colors of the world and manipulates them in various
ways. For example, we can posterize, solarize, invert, oversaturate, desaturate,
glow edges, constrain to the point of monotone, define chromatic lights, or create
the look of iridescence, sepia, neon or even ultraviolet light. The animator’s eye
looks for colors that evoke moods for toons.
So how do you choose colors that work well together with your animator’s eye?
Cartoonist and animation artist Rowland Wilson told me he used to find color
palettes from classical artwork. If it worked for Rembrandt or Vermeer, it was good
enough for him.
A more structured approach to choosing colors is to use a color wheel. The
color wheel is a representation of all of the colors of the rainbow arranged into a
circle. Various ways of splitting the color wheel will yield great color combinations.
 Creating Worlds 133

Other color splits are triangular split or a split

complement, which is where the triangular split favors one
side. You can also choose a square split. Rotating the angle
of the splits will yield many color combinations that work
well. If you add variations in value and saturation, you’ve
got a universe of permutations in your arsenal.
By choosing colors from opposite sides of the color
wheel you effectively balance the wheel. If you don’t balance
the wheel, it tilts in one direction or another, creating an
unbalanced color palette that mimics the moodiness of
chromatic light.

Unbalanced Wheel
 134 Creating Worlds
Each of these only uses a part of the color triangle.
Strong color contrasts in value, hue or saturation will draw attention to
themselves, so make sure you use these to direct the viewer’s eye where you want
them to look.
Most paintings have balanced color wheel palettes. Film can play with the
balance because it is a time-based medium. You can choose to have several scenes
of predominately one color, followed by a scene of its complement for greater
color impact.
Animation Noir
Film noir was a film genre visually associated with deep shadows obscuring the
characters. It symbolically represents the light and dark sides of life, showing
that life is mixed with both. Light represents clarity and the truthfulness of
seeing things as they are. Dark suggests the unknown and possibly sinister forces
working in the shadows.
Shadows are a great way to create mood and in animation they can take on
a life of their own. Think of Peter Pan chasing his shadow. The color rule for
shadows is that warm light has strong contrast and cool shadow colors. Cool light
has less contrast and subtly warm shadows.
Color Script
A color script is the equivalent to a script or storyboard that tracks the emotional
arc of the story over time by showing the progression of color palettes. The
progression of color relationships throughout a film is designed to enhance
the emotions of the story. This progression is tracked using a color script. The
progression should visually show the emotionally intense moments and turning
points during the story. It also tracks the emotional subtext of the story through
the use of color. For the color script, the dramatic moments and moods are
reflected by color choice alone.
The key designing tool for a color script is strong contrast versus gradual
progression of color groupings. For example, when the experiment to create life is
started, this is a big emotional moment. So there should be a big color contrast to
the previous sections. Even the colors within the scene may have more contrast of
value and hue. This change is “motivated” with the story by all the flashing lights.
The flashing lights say, “Pay attention, something’s about to happen.”
I have seen color scripts that are simple bands of colors and others that used
small thumbnails focusing solely on the lighting and color of the scene. Color bars
are objective; you only judge the colors themselves in progression.
In my story I chose to use thumbnails, which have several advantages over
color bars. I just imported my storyboard panels and painted over them. Then
once I had the completed color script, I imported the color thumbnails into
each scene, which allowed me to choose the colors with the paint program’s
eyedropper color picker. The extra benefit is that it allows you to represent the
lighting qualities of the scene, which color bars do not convey.
I prefer this latter method because it helps me see where I am in the story,
whereas the pure color swatches do not provide that information. Feature films
might combine both approaches to color scripts.
The color script is further utilized during production as color keys for the
background painters. This allows the art director to maintain color consistency
throughout the project.
Here is the color script for the flipbook. I used the storyboard roughs and
painted over it. In some of them you can still see the original sticky-note drawings.
 Creating Worlds 135

the Brown Derby, where the building itself looks like an

object. There’s a place that sells eggs on Long Island that
looks like a giant duck.

This is the second part of the color script. Sometimes

ideas can come from any point of the process. In looking at
the color script, I got the idea to have the flour sack change
color as its emotions changed.

Color Summary In this version, I combined the lips with a more

traditional tower. It has a sinister eye staring out from under
Try working with cutout colored paper to learn about the
the tower roof.
effects of color.
In trying to keep contrast between the two scientists,
Think value first. Simplify your color palettes using
for the female, I also tried a more natural version where her
light versus dark and warm versus cool color changes.
laboratory was built into a tree.
Remember, your backgrounds can be beautiful but they
should support the clear read of your characters.

Lab Exploration
For Sale: Castle, Stunning Views,
Recently Renovated
As the story changed and evolved, the design needs of
the laboratory changed. An early draft had two scientists
competing to create life, so I created two labs. These images
were drawn in my sketchbooks and then further rendered
using TVPaint Animation.
For the crazy male scientist, I wanted a more traditional
castle and tried a simple tower approach.

This lab was the female scientist’s lab. I thought it might

be fun to model it like some of those iconic restaurants like
 136 Creating Worlds

In brainstorming, I decided to try incorporating a scary skull into the design.

One is smaller with just the skull, while the other uses parts of the rib cage.

A simple way to think about architecture is the building-block approach.

When you're designing a stage for your animation, think simple floor plans
and combinations of shapes, like building with blocks. You could even try out
designs using a child's set of blocks. After you've got your basic shapes, then add
architectural detailing to set it in a specific place and time. If you start with the
details you can end up with fancy-looking structures, but they might look like
they're ready to fall over.

skewed blocks

The skull version also has the feel of a tree house with a pulley system.
Although most of these were not used, they did inform my design process in
arriving at my final castle. Remember, it's a process journey that often explores
many dead-end streets. Sometimes they lead to wondrous sights.
Building blocks
As you can see, I wanted to push the style a little further so I came up with
trapezoid-shaped blocks. These look like regular blocks that are skewed.

Castle Interior
Creating a Mad Scientist's Laboratory
The laboratory required more pragmatic design thinking than the exterior. This is
because part of it helped to tell the story. Originally the story had lots of chasing
going on so I needed to design spaces that allowed for that.
In the beginning, I tried to think of the major shapes of the lab. I knew I
wanted a central tower area with some sort of scaffolding. This was probably
inspired from the Frankenstein movies. One shape that came to mind was a key In this more finished approach to the lab, using repeated trapezoid design
shape. elements gave it an art deco feel.

I also tried a more traditional castle interior. Interesting,
but nothing too original about it.
In a more radical departure, this next one had a more
organic approach, almost like a Dr. Seuss drawing.
I liked this one a lot, but it would have taken a long time
during the modeling phase given my limited modeling
experience.
The final lab interior used some of each of these
elements. So the experimenting process is always worth the
effort. Besides, if you find something cool but can’t use it in
your current project, maybe it will be just what you need for
a future production.
Once I had decided on the basic architectural layout
of the laboratory, I started to imagine the machinery
that I would need. This is the sack’s brain-swapping
machinery.
Creating Worlds 137
The leader sack, the one on the ladder, places the funnel
over Iggy’s brain. The sack on top of the machine pumps the
bellows, causing a suction that carries Iggy’s brain through
the machine tubing and puts it into the third sack, the one
strapped to the table.
I didn’t develop this design too far because, as the story
changed, I didn’t need this machine anymore.
This illustration was an exploration of some of the spaces
required by one of the early storyboards.
Design of the Mad Lab
SketchUp to the Rescue
To create the mad scientist’s laboratory, I used one of my
favorite programs—Google’s SketchUp. SketchUp is a three-
dimensional modeling tool; creative modelers use SketchUp
 138 Creating Worlds

for all kinds of modeling, but its forte is architectural modeling, so it was perfect One special type of model is mathematical primitives. These simple-to-
for the lab. Compared to other computer-modeling software, SketchUp is very complex shapes are built upon mathematical principles. These include geodesic
easy to use. And there’s a free version. domes, pyramids, spheres, donuts, spirals, etc., that you can use to build up your
My first step was to design the lab. I experimented with multiple variations in models. The pro version offers the ability to use plug-ins that generate these types
the design. I tried putting in a bridge to the center with twin stairs going down but of shapes. One of my favorite plug-ins is the window maker.
it got too complicated. Remember, the function of structures needs to be visible Let’s look at the process. First, I sketched ideas in my sketchbook.
from their shape. The bridge interfered with the central placement of the table. The next step was to start building the model in SketchUp. I had an idea in
That provided my solution to keeping the central placement of the table while mind and started building parts of the model, sculpting it as I went.
giving the multistory space, allowing more vertical angles for my camera. The
spiral stairway curves up along the back wall. It also solved my problem of the
outer chamber with the lab below.
The structure of the lab changed as the story needs changed. Originally the
flour sacks multiplied and chased Iggy. The next version of the storyboard had
Iggy chasing the sacks. Next I rewrote the story with two flour sacks and finally
ended up with one sack, Sackenstein. Each story version required different
architectural elements for the laboratory. Once I had the final story, the lab
continued to change as I added extra elements to the design.
Many times our inspirations are unconscious and can go back far into
our pasts. The circular staircase is a recurring architectural feature in many
I continued adding elements.
Disney films from Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice. I also was inspired by Tim Burton’s designs for Nightmare before
Christmas.
Consciously, I knew I wanted to look at Frankenstein and The Bride of
Frankenstein as reference. This led to my discovery of the Hammer Film versions
of Frankenstein, which had alternate versions of the laboratory.
I loved the way they had the body on the platform and sent it up to the
lightning storm. But why did they need to have the body up there in the rain? Why
couldn’t they just run wires from up there? They did this purely for visual effect
and it worked. I thought of using the elevated platform but eventually removed
the scaffolding because raising and lowering the platform added nothing to the
As I worked, throughout the process I made printouts of my progress. I used
story and just took extra time.
these to make notes and further develop my ideas and designs.
Using SketchUp is very easy; you just choose a rectangle tool and lay down
some rectangles. Then you take the push tool and pull them up to the heights you
want. You can draw freehand shapes too and push those up.
You can also do subtractive sculpting by punching holes or other methods of
cutting parts away.
The wonderful secret about SketchUp is the SketchUp 3D Warehouse. This
warehouse is bigger than the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And
you don’t need to have secret security clearances to see the models.
People have modeled many of the famous architectural wonders of the world.
In fact, this model warehouse is itself a wonder of the world. You can download
the models into your models or just use them as an inspirational starting point.
Just check with the model creators for any copyright issues. The Warehouse also I often would draw over the designs. I used the same process to work over
has vehicles, vegetation, people and other props. They even have movie-making the storyboards. As you can see, I decided to add electric columns in front of the
props such as camera stands and lights. upper entry. I also decided to place the control panel off to the side. This included
 Creating Worlds 139

the infamous switch. I also added the beam shooter

machinery.
These additional elements were not just added for their
addition to the story, but to help balance the design.

This view shows the addition of the beam shooter.

I love the curving stairway because it adds an interesting
asymmetry to the composition. One problem that arose was
that the stairway was too low and visually interfered with
the lab platform. I wanted the stairs to frame the action, not
interfere with it.
One of the advantages of SketchUp is that it allows you to
try different camera fields of view. This is a normal camera
angle with little camera distortion.

Adding the glass electricity columns helped frame the In comparison to the last view this version shows the
down shot looking into the lab. progressive effect of a wide-angle distortion.
 140 Creating Worlds

SketchUp, like most 3D packages, can display the model as a linear wireframe
or shaded. SketchUp allows this as well as the ability to show shadows and fog.

Once I had my model completed, it was easy to move the camera around to
find layouts to fit the animation. I then could import those into each scene and
use that as a guide to paint over. You’ll see this in the next section on painting.
The following are a selection of other views of the laboratory.
 Creating Worlds 141

The outer hallway was also created in SketchUp. Here are

several images from that model.

Bokeh Backgrounds
Bokeh?
No, this section is not about broken backgrounds. Bokeh is
a photographic effect caused by how a lens renders the out-
of-focus area of an image. Usually bokeh is most visible in
the highlights of the out-of-focus areas. Visually the effect
looks like soft edge shapes of light. They can be circular or
hexagonal or other shapes, dependent on the type of lens
used.

Environments—the Background Part

of Figure/Ground
The most important thing to remember about designing
backgrounds comes from their name—background.
Backgrounds should not attract attention to themselves;
they need to stay in the background.

Value Comes First

As we learned in the section about color, the most important
element for making an image work is the value relationship.
This is the relationship between lights and darks, including
the range of grays in between.
Value will tell you all about the light sources and shadows
in a scene. Light and shadow define forms. And the degree of
contrast between values can be an effective way to achieve
atmospheric depth in your painting.
 142 Creating Worlds
This image contains only value information, not any color indication. The
black-and-white version represents the depth planes more clearly. There’s higher
contrast in the foreground, progressing to a more diffuse grayed-out quality as we
move toward the background.
Now the color information is added, keeping the exact same value
relationships. If you squint your eyes, you can see the similarity of the two.
However, the background image feels very unfocused or dreamy due to the lack of
any hard edges. Everything is painted with soft edges.
In this final image the line work is composited over the background and the
image pops. The line work gives it great structural integrity, making it feel solid
and grounded.
I learned this technique from Walt Disney’s films, 101 Dalmatians and Winnie
the Pooh. It provides a beautiful graphic look to the backgrounds that fits perfectly
with the linear style of the characters.
Since the line work holds the background together, you can get very creative
with your color choices. Remember to keep the value relationships working.
Put textural detail in shadows or highlights but not both. Putting detail in the
shadows or highlights not only saves work, but makes the image easier to process
for the eye.
Think about how dream imagery often appears surrounded by nebulous
fog. You pay attention to the action of the dream and the rest fades away into
nothingness. The same thing happens when we read; we see the words we’re
reading and the rest of the page recedes. Let that be your guide to deciding where
to put detail. Put details near the scene’s focal point.
I find detail and texture to be a problem with a lot of computer-generated art.
The computer renders every detail “perfectly” and evenly. Computers are perfect
for creating zombies. All that gorgeous sparkling detail and no soul.
The animator’s eye makes choices based upon good design and directing
the audience’s attention. Choose where to put your lights and choose where to
put your details. Use your animator’s eye to make it easy for your audience’s
eye. Disney artists teamed with software designers did that on Disney’s
Tangled, which had a more painterly look, putting the texture where they
wanted it.
Painting Technique
Finding Your Color Relationships
Sometimes inexperienced artists, before their animator’s eyes are trained, will
choose colors randomly or, worse, choose colors based upon what they think a
color should be. This is the children’s approach—tree equals brown trunk and
 Creating Worlds 143

green leaves. But if you look in nature, it’s actually hard

to find true brown tree trunks. Often they’re gray, gray-
brown or even greenish. Birches are an off-white. And
Japanese maples have reddish or even magenta-tinged
leaves.
What’s more important for a painting is that the colors
you choose work together harmoniously. Or if you have
tension-filled scenes, you might want colors that clash
discordantly. The point is, you have to carefully choose your
colors to achieve the effect you want.

This is a great trick to unify colors—desaturate them.

Now they’re unified even more because they all contain a
little gray. The background also drops to the background
where it belongs.

In this image there is no color unification. They’re

chosen randomly and without regard for value. Pretty yucky
looking.

This is the value scheme that I envisioned for the scene: a

main light hitting the table and other assorted spots of light
to keep the scene alive. The viewer’s attention goes right
where we want. Our animator’s eye is doing its job.
IGGY: I could do this!

In this next version the colors begin to relate to each

other. They’re variations of a green, and blue-green mixed
with a dull orange. Most of the colors are mixtures of these
base colors.
There is still not much regard for value except that the Iggy has chosen a lovely green color that complements
focal point of the table is the brightest area of the image. his pink skin.
 144 Creating Worlds

Here I’ve laid in the basic color areas. I actually started by blowing up the color
script thumbnail. You can see the stair-stepping pixels that were enlarged. This
saved a lot of time, giving me a base to work with, and it allowed me to keep the
color palette of the color script.
As Bunny points out, you need to be aware of the contrast of extension of
colors. Many people learn of this rule the hard way. They’ll find a color they
love and then paint a whole wall with it. The problem is that larger proportion
magnifies the effect of the color.
This color is hard on the eyes. Just looking at this green is giving me
afterimages of pink. An afterimage is an optical effect that occurs when you look
at a color for too long and then look at blank white—you see the opposite color.
Stare at the bright green for a while and then look at a white piece of paper. What
do you see?

Now, I’ve taken a large blur brush and gotten rid of all of the pixels that were
showing. The line work is on a top layer that guides the painting process. You can
also see the clear stage where the action can take place.

In this image we’ve grayed out the brightness of the green. It recedes, whereas
the bright green was in your face. I also laid out some of the colors I’ll be using
for this painting. The color palette on the bottom center corner shows the colors
I plan to use. It contains many colors but notice how many share a similarity Any plane that faces a light will be lighter. Here we see how planes that face
with the gray-green background. The reds and oranges provide a complementary the light in the center are lightened to start to define the planar structure of the
contrast. background. We’re starting to define the value relationships.

Here I’ve started to add some color variations. The glass
columns are an aqua color that goes well with the dull green.
Now I’ve started to define some of the dark areas. I lay in
some color and then blend it in.
Do not make your darks black. This kills the illusion by
creating a hole in the picture. It looks like something has
been cut out of the image.
Creating Worlds 145
Now it’s time for the bokeh effect. To create this effect I
take a fairly large soft-edged brush and add circular points
of light. Within some of the larger circles I’ll add smaller,
brighter circles. This creates a sense of texture without
having to do extensive rendering of background details.
I also used the bokeh to create highlights within the
composition.
Be careful with white too; most things that you think are
white are not fully white. If you use too much white, your
images can look chalky. I learned this by experience when I
painted the backgrounds for one of my student films. Save
pure white only for small, true highlights.
 146 Creating Worlds
The next step was to add some complementary colors for variety. And cool
light from the exterior was added. This cool light color was also added to the top
surfaces to create more sculptural solidity.
Here’s the final background with and without the line work.
Once I had my completed image I was free to experiment with color variations
that could be completed with the software controls for BRIGHTNESS, CONTRAST
and SATURATION.
In this image, I pushed the CONTRAST making the darks a little darker. This
additional contrast made the lights glow more.
In this variation, I selectively erased parts of the line work. I decided that I
liked the complete line better. That’s what experimenting is all about—sometimes
you find something better, sometimes you don’t.
As a further experiment, I pushed the SATURATION of the colors. I really like
what it does to some of the color relationships. With such strong saturation, you
have to be careful that the backgrounds don’t overpower the character animation.

Opening Pan from Layout to
Background
Let’s look at the process of going from layout to finished
background.
My original concept had Iggy and Bunny traveling through
the jungle and arriving at the top of the hill. This would have
set a nice mood but, ultimately, it would have been a very long
scene. It also doesn’t tell us anything about the characters.
Creating Worlds 147
This is a page from my sketchbook where I got the idea
for Iggy rappelling down the cliff. This scene works much
better. It’s exciting, and demonstrates Iggy’s personality. He
leaps before he looks!
I drew up the layout of Iggy rappelling and here’s the
painting process for this exterior scene. The base color has
been laid in. The sky and swamp will be created on separate
levels.
In this next step I lightened the background using the
BRIGHTNESS command. I knew I wanted to put a rock-
like texture on the background and if I didn’t lighten the
background the end result would have been too dark.
 148 Creating Worlds

Most paint programs such as ArtRage Studio, Painter, Photoshop and TVPaint
will allow you to paint with simulated textures. I found a rock-like texture and Here I’ve removed the test swatches and started to define fissures in the rock
brushed over parts of the blank area to test it out. The two versions represent face.
different degrees of softness.

I brushed over the whole painted area with the alpha lock turned on. What this Now I start to apply the bokeh effect; choosing a similar but warmer and light
does is only allow paint to be applied where there is paint already applied. This color, I randomly apply points of light along the rock fissures.
gives the clean on the side of the cliff. If you wanted more control you could paint I’ve also decided I should add another cliff in the foreground, and some
the texture on a layer above the base layer. detailed rocks where Iggy is going to land.

The sky and swamp are added on separate layers. The sky
is created with a large airbrush. I chose the magenta color
to suggest that a storm is coming, yet not wanting to show
storm clouds.
In this version I’ve added more color modeling on the
cliff and a subtle purplish band in the sky. It helps minimize
the intensity of the magenta.
Creating Worlds 149
Darkening the foreground cliff brings it toward the
viewer.
In checking the layout, it appears that as Iggy rappels he
would land right at the tip of the foreground cliff. This is a
bad tangent and would have looked like Iggy jumped from
one cliff to the other. This is the value of keeping different
elements on their own layers. It makes it easier to adjust
them. Remember to label your layers.
 150 Creating Worlds

Here I use a TRANSFORM tool to change the shape of the cliff. This one is too Here I start to work on the foliage on the top of the cliff, once again using the
pointy and calls attention to itself, a case where the background is not staying in bokeh style.
the background.

The magenta glow is added to minimize some of the texture of the

Finally, I find a cliff shape that works to create depth without being intrusive. background. This helps separate the cliffs in space.

Distant palm trees are added in a color similar to the purple
sky. This color is bringing down the value and minimizing
some of the saturation. Using the bluish color helps the
illusion that the palm trees are under the same atmosphere as
the sky. We don’t want too much detail in the far distance.
In contrast to the defocused background, the rock where
Iggy lands is an area where I want detail. We’re going to look
at this point, so I added extra detail where needed.
Additional foliage is added using the bokeh style.
Creating Worlds 151
The foreground is added. Notice how it has darker darks
and lighter lights than the rest of the image. This keeps it in
the foreground. I kept it soft focus because I want the depth
of field to be the zone where Iggy is going to rappel down the
cliff.
More added foliage brings the foreground to life.
 152 Creating Worlds

Here the image is complete. I went back to the darker sky and added subtle clouds. As another experiment, I tried some low-lying fog. This again I found
distracting. It’s a good thing I put these on separate layers.

I thought it would be fun to have Iggy descend through the clouds. As an

experiment I added clouds hovering around the cliff. I decided that they were Here’s the final background with the camera path and field sizes
distracting. superimposed.

Here are two close-ups of the background where Iggy
lands. As you can see, I put the details where I need them
and leave the rest up to the viewer’s imagination.
Creating Worlds 153
Learn the power of suggestion. We animators are magicians and
hypnotists. Don’t paint every brick; let your audience’s eye and mind
do the work. They’ll fill in the gaps using their own imaginations
One Final Background with Characters
Here’s my rough plan for the background and the
placement of the characters.
As you can see, the background is a simple spattering
of circular spots. These were painted with a brush with
50 percent transparency. I was actually just laying in base
colors and I liked how it looked. This is actually how I came
up with the bokeh style effect—accidentally.
 154 Creating Worlds

I ran a BLUR filter over the background. The characters are prominently A simple out-of-focus overlay brings it all together and makes it feel like
featured but overall the image feels a little flat. One more step to go. they’re in the jungle.
Creating Worlds 155

Chapter Eight
Postproduction
Putting it Together in Post
Post means “after,” so postproduction is what happens
after you finish the production work. We’re not out of the
woods yet, but it’s almost party time! When you finish a film
it is customary to throw a party. Everyone involved has put
in a tremendous amount of work and effort to make the
film as good as possible (even if it’s just you), so it’s almost
time to celebrate. Each of these final components of the
postproduction process brings something to the party.
The postproduction process actually takes place
simultaneously during the whole production process. In
animation, postproduction begins with the completion
of storyboards. Editors assemble an animatic of the
storyboards with temporary music and the voice recordings.
The animatic provides feedback as to what’s working and,
more importantly, what’s not working yet. As the scenes
are animated, the editor replaces the storyboards with the
animation. First the rough animation is cut in, then the
completed color, and then the final composited version.
The process for computer graphics might also include the
pre-visualizations for each scene.
The editor will also replace the scratch dialogue, which is
often recorded with the crew as a placeholder until the real
actors are recorded.
When the editing is completed then the composer can
get to work creating the final music score. The temp music
serves as a guide for the emotional tone and tempo.
Remember, this is a creative process, so feedback
dictates that you go back through the stages of creativity.
You experiment, trying out different versions of the cut and
different kinds of music.
Postproduction 157
Compositing Puts it All Together
Compositing is the final stage in which all of the visual
elements of each frame are put together. In live action
special effects, an actor shot against a green screen will be
combined with a matte painting or computer-generated
background. The images are combined in an editing
program such as Final Cut Pro Studio. The computer
removes all of the green in the frame with the actor and
adds or composites it to the background, resulting in the
final frame.
This process goes back as far as one of the pioneer
filmmakers of the early twentieth century, Georges Méliès.
Early filmmakers didn’t have computers to composite their
images; what was exposed on the film was what they got.
Méliès’s secret was that he realized that you could expose
the film more than one time. He would have dark areas of
his frame where he could re-expose the film, shooting new
action. In this way he could create ghosts, duplications of
the same actor or have actors or other objects disappear
or materialize. For many years his films were a mystery
to audiences until slowly other filmmakers discovered his
secrets and created competition for him.
In The Playhouse, Buster Keaton used this trick to appear
on screen nine times simultaneously. This required great
skill in timing the performance to synchronize the multiple
actions.
This process was quite inefficient and filmmakers
required more control. Filmmakers experimented with rear
projection, mattes and matte paintings and other ways to
composite the images of a film. A special camera called an
optical printer could composite multiple images complete
with mattes.
With the development of digital computers there was no
longer a need for these techniques. This was one case where
the computer was faster, cheaper and better.
Animation has always been an art of composited
images. In the simplest case of the traditional method, a
cel, or inked and painted image of a character, is placed
over a background and a single frame of film is shot with
an animation camera. The only other option is to draw the
animation and background over and over on each frame,
which some artists do with beautiful results.
 158 Postproduction

If you have never used traditional cels to animate with, consider yourself very Special Effects Add the Sizzle
lucky. They are a nightmare to work with for many reasons. First of all, you can
What are special effects? In animation we’re going for the illusion of a world of our
only use about four or five layers before they get so thick you can no longer see
own making and most often we base that world in our own world. There are many
through them. This is because they have a slight color tinge to them.
elements of our world that can enrich an animated world, through it being more
My first job in animation was to mix colors for the characters. For each color
exciting, moody or believable. Any activity in a scene such as weather, fog, smoke,
of the character, I had to create three variations depending upon whether the
water, wind blowing objects, speed and impacts can be considered a special effect.
character was on the bottom, middle or top layer. I had to match the color so they
I was about to say that an effect is anything in a scene that is not a character when I
all looked the same when viewed through the cel layers. It was a fun job that really
realized that with computers, everything has changed. I’m not referring to character
helped my animator’s eye sensitivity to color. It was also great because it got me
animation because that would still be handled by a character animator and not
off the night crew where I was just painting cels and onto the daytime shift.
an effects animator. I’m thinking of a procedural animation process known as
Cels also don’t lie perfectly flat, which creates shadows of the paint, but the
“flocking.” This kind of animation is a particle system in which multiple flying birds
worst problem is that they attract dust. You may not think this is much of a problem
are created and the birds have “intelligence” so that they don’t collide with each
until you’ve seen a dust spot projected upon the screen to the size of a small car.
other; rather, they flock. In an interesting twist of science borrowing from animation,
Digital animation comes to the rescue. Digital animation is created in the same
I understand that they now have groups of small drone planes that will “flock.”
way, only the whole process can be completed in the computer. Since there are no
Special effects can also be used to highlight an action by adding a “wow, look
cels tinting the colors and no dust, you can have as many layers as your computer
at me” factor. This can help chases and fight scenes. For example, you could add
can handle. The computer also has a much wider range of color values than you
sparks when swords clash during a fight. Adding a camera shake gives a physical
could ever achieve with paint.
sense of being there.
There are also hybrid processes where the animation is drawn on paper and
Here’s a scene of an alligator crashing out of the window with the breaking
these are then scanned into the computer. Once in the digital world they can be
glass enhancing the scene. Without the breaking glass the scene looks empty. The
inked, painted and have effects added such as tones and shadows.
exploding glass acts like an exclamation mark for the scene.
Many animation software packages allow you to render “toon” shading. You pick
a color for a shadow or highlight and it’s applied automatically to your characters.
This can be very effective for adding a feeling of light and depth to your animation.

This flour sack has a base color of red. Two applications of toon shading have
been applied in opposite directions. The yellow effect is applied from the top right
and appears as highlighting. The magenta toon shading is applied from the lower
left in a smaller amount and appears as light bounced into the shadow areas.
Additionally, a subtle lavender glow has been applied around the edges.
 Postproduction 159

What are Blend Layers?

What are blend layers and what are they good for? If you've
used Photoshop you're probably familiar with blend layers.
Basically, blend layers use a different algorithm to combine
the layers together. In other words it's a regular layer that
you tell the computer to mix in the image in a different
way than usual. The default method is COLOR or NORMAL
blend, that just puts the images together without changing
any colors.
In order for compositing to work, parts of the image have This is the composite of the character and the
to be transparent. This is taken care of by the alpha channel, background without the gradient. This is also in DEFAULT
which tracks that parts are opaque, transparent, or partially mode.
transparent.
Blending can be applied to the current layer with a
painting tool or combined among multiple layers. Some are
simple and others can be very exotic. The simplest way is to
try them out—experiment. Each software package may offer
different blend modes.
This illustration shows how the layers fit together.
The top is a color gradient that is blended over the other
layers. Next is Iggy's character eel layer. Below that is the
background line work. This is all placed over the background
layer.

Blend Layer
MULTIPLY blend tends to darken an image and create a
nice subtle, glowing effect.
Iggy Cel layer

BG line layer

Background

Here is the color gradient in COLOR or DEFAULT mode.

In this mode you can't see anything underneath it; it's
totally opaque.
ADD mode adds the two images together and brightens
the image. This creates line work that takes on the color of
the superimposed blended layer. ADD mode works well for
candlelight glows.
 160 Postproduction

OVERLAY is a subtle blend mode. Light parts of the image become lighter and
dark areas become darker. The colors harmonize very nicely in this mode.

SUBTRACT mode tends to darken the image more than multiply. TINT mode tends to grey out some colors.

Special Effect Examples

DIFFERENCE is one of those more exotic blend modes. It can be used to create Creating a Storm
interesting color combinations. Let’s look at the compositing of a special effects scene from the flipbook. In this
sequence Iggy and Bunny discover an old castle in the distance. There’s a raging
storm brewing with pouring rain, rolling fog and lightning flashing.
 Postproduction 161

This is the layout guide for the background painting.

I drew it in blue because it was a night scene and the blue
shows up well over the black.

These first three images are the rough storyboard panels Here is the background without the special effects.
for the scene.
In this sequence I used TVPaint’s integrated particle
system for the rain and the rolling fog. It is important to
understand that a particle system requires two important
items, each with multiple parameters. First is the emitter
and second is the particle itself. Many times I tried
various software to create particles and I couldn’t get any
particles to show. You need to define the particle that gets
emitted from the emitter. I didn’t see anything, because
it wasn’t emitting anything. This is actually very useful
because you can make the particles anything you want.
It can be as simple as a raindrop or as complicated as
Here is a frame of the rain. The particles are actually
an animated snowflake. Yes, the particle can be a short
streaks with a head that tapers towards the tail. For this
animation cycle.
illustration in the book, I duplicated the layer several times
so it would show clearly against a black background. When
the particles are moving it’s easier to see them, so they don’t
need to be so pronounced.
 162 Postproduction
I blurred the rain because, originally, it had a harder edge that called attention
to itself. The rain is to add a feeling of atmosphere to the scene. It is not the focus of
the scene. The emitter is a line-shaped emitter that runs across the top of the frame.
Here is a frame of the rolling fog. I believe in this case the particles are small
points. They are quite convincing with some degree of turbulence within the
fog. Once again I’ve duplicated the layer so it would be visible in the book. If you
want more variations you can run a particle effect multiple times with different
parameters. In this way you might have a fine distant rain, a mid-level rain and a
larger rain in the foreground.
Now we have the lightning flash. This was hand-drawn lightning with a
blurred edge. Lightning is a blinding flash of light so any objects nearby will be
illuminated. To simulate this effect I highlighted parts of the castle and road. I
studied video frames of real lightning and learned some interesting things. The line
does not animate down from the sky. It just appears. That’s because it’s traveling
at the speed of light. What it does do is it flashes on and off. During the flashing it
doesn’t change shape. If you’re using toon physics you don’t have to pay attention
to this—for example, if you wanted the lightning to be chasing somebody.
The trick to creating convincing lightning is to capture the stroboscopic effect
it creates. It appears as a very quick series of high contrast flashes. I’ve included a
white frame, silhouetted castle, a black frame and silhouetted castle in reverse that
give the stroboscopic flickering effect. The lightning streak itself lingers for a while.
Postproduction 163
 164 Postproduction

Here you can see samples of the color progressions.

Here is the sequence with all of the elements composited together. You
can see how I reverse the value of the images to get a strobing effect. Get your
raincoat!

Mood Lighting for a Mad Scientist’s Laboratory

Most people don’t think of lighting as a kind of special effect but, with its ability
to create moods, it’s very powerful. The laboratory was fun to bring to life with
colored lights. In this sequence the flour sack has just come alive and chases the
Eye-dea like a moth chasing a light. In this scene I created a separate layer for
the lab table, because for part of the scene the flour sack is partially hidden from
view behind the table, and later in the scene the flour sack is in front of
the table.
TVPaint allows you to create interpolations between frames. This is a kind of
cross dissolve. I created several misty color images with a large semitransparent
brush. Then I had TVPaint create a number of in-between interpolations. The
effect is that of shimmering lights like the Northern Lights. It helped keep the
lab alive and added interesting color variations to the scenes.
Here is the foreground without the color effect.
 Postproduction 165

Here the foreground, background are a composited

image with the glowing lights. The glowing color layer was
applied with a MULTIPLY mode.
 166 Postproduction

Bringing Weird Machines to Life

I wanted to have the columns in the laboratory filled with interesting light effects.
I didn’t want to hand animate them because time was of the essence, and there
was still a lot of character animation to complete. I ended up using a stock
firework effect from Apple’s Motion. I exported the frames of one firework.
It’s often the case that the elements of a scene are created in different software
packages and brought into a compositing program such as AfterEffects or Motion.
Keep in mind you need to have a good file-tracking system so you can locate all
of your elements when necessary. This is important in case you have changes you
need to make after your project is completed.
Here is the layout for the scene. It’s two columns of globes that frame the
laboratory table.
 Postproduction 167

Here is the firework over a blue background.

168 Postproduction

Here’s a sample of the sack trying to grab the

flying Eye-dea enhanced with speed lines.

I then imported these frames into my TVPaint file.

I duplicated the firework onto several layers. Next I
scaled and offset them into position on the globes in the
background. The next step was to offset their starting
points so it appeared that they would start at the
bottom globe and slowly work their way up the column.

The Illusion of Speed

Speed lines are trails added to motion to help smooth
out fast actions. They are a kind of hand-drawn motion
blur. Traditionally, speed lines were created with a dry
brush to give a transparent effect. Working digitally,
you can use a brush over a texture or use a transparent
brush to achieve the effect. The color of the speed lines
is the same as the moving object’s color.
 Postproduction 169

Bubbles
Sometimes effects provide important information about a
scene. In the scene where Iggy sinks into the swamp, he just
drops out of frame. We don’t really know where he goes until
we see the bubbles and understand that he sunk underwater.

The bubbles here are stock bubbles from Apple’s Motion.

 170 Postproduction

Editing Makes Sure the Story is Told Clearly

The director's job is their story—controlling what happens and who gets to know
what, when, and how about what's happening. The editor's job is to try out
variations on this to see which version works the strongest.

Cut!
Here's what's happening: Bunny is trying to free Iggy from the lab table.
Sackenstein has climbed the ladder trying to catch the Eye-dea. The Eye-dea has
escaped his grasp. Meanwhile, the alligator, who's been chasing Iggy during the
Editing is the art of juxtaposition where context creates meaning. whole story, has arrived.
It's been said that editing is where a film really gets made. This is particularly Film images break this into a sequence of partial views of the same story. In
true for live action where the elements can be cut and reordered into new other words, it chops up the whole vision and places each piece in a temporal
contexts to discover new meanings. When they film a live action movie, they order.
shoot what is known as coverage, which is extra footage shot from different Shot breakdown:
angles. Editors use this footage to "cover" breaks in the action when necessary to
make the story flow.
In animation, the editing process is equally important; however, it happens
at a different stage of the process. Instead of working with the final footage, the
editors of animation work with the storyboards during the beginning of the
process to complete an animatic.
The animatic gives you a gauge to judge the film in terms of the emotional
content of the storytelling and whether the comedy plays. The animatic then
becomes the guide for the film and, as the animation is completed, the scenes are
cut into the animatic and replace the storyboards.

Storytelling Images are Constructed

An image in a children's book often tells a section of a complete story. To read
this type of image requires time for the viewer's eye to take in the different
parts. Bunny arrives.
 Postproduction 171

Bunny sees Iggy strapped to table.

Bunny tugs at straps on Iggy.

As Bunny runs downstairs. The Eye-dea flies past. Alligator coming down stairs.

Bunny runs to table. Bunny frees Iggy. They run.

172 Postproduction
Alligator goes for them.
Alligator swallows Eye-dea.
Sackenstein falls onto switch.
Machinery comes to life.
Alligator gets zapped!
This was the same information as presented in the master shot broken down
into ten separate shots. Each shot focused the viewer’s attention on one thing.
When we watch a film we put these pieces back together in our mind. We
reconstruct an imaginary geography of where people are in relation to each other
and the events going on around them. The editing process must maintain that
imaginary space in order for the audience not to get lost.
The 180-degree rule was defined to help accomplish this goal. However, this
rule was meant to help during the shooting process; it says to keep the camera
on one side of an imaginary axis through the action. If the line is crossed and the
shots reach the editing process, it’s too late. This is where the coverage comes in.
The editor must cut away to something else in order to cover the fact that the two
views don’t match properly.
As you can see in the sequence of shots, I keep the camera on one side of the
stage. The only shot that shows the other side is Sackenstein on the ladder. Since
these are cutaways they don’t confuse the audience.
 Postproduction 173

Use Shot Framing to Lead the Eye

A static formal shot doesn’t lead the eye anywhere; it’s a
self-contained closed composition that circulates within
itself. That’s the function of composition in painting—to
lead the eye into the picture and prevent it from exiting the
frame.

An off-balance shot feels incomplete and leads the

viewer to the next shot. It’s kind of like walking. We start
to get off balance because we’re literally falling; then the
other foot comes and catches us and starts the process
again. Characters looking at something also lead to the
next shot—we want to know what they’re looking at. We’re
playing on the audience’s desire to see and know, which
pulls the audience through a series of shots like pulling on
a thread.

In these shots Iggy tries to persuade Bunny to use his Eye-

dea for the experiment. We go back and forth between Iggy
and Bunny until Bunny wins. The editing itself enhances the
storytelling by making the shots feel literally like a “tug of war.”
In this way the camera actually is the storyteller,
revealing just the right amount of information to keep the
audience on the edge of their seat. Once again, I have Bill
Frake to thank for teaching me this concept. Watch the
 174 Postproduction

opening sequence that he storyboarded for Ice Age with Scrat to see an excellent
example of pulling your eye through a series of cuts.

Basic Cutting Rules

When we tell a story, we raise narrative questions for the audience. In The
Animator’s Eye story the audience wants to know if they’ll find the wild idea
and what they’ll do with it. Will Iggy create life in the lab? The audience wants
to know what happens next. What they really want to know is the answer
to the narrative question. In order to keep the audience’s interest, we delay
telling them the answer. We give them clues so they can try to piece it together
themselves. We tease them and then suspend them with tension as we show
what can go wrong.
The editing process is where we construct this sequence of questions and
partial answers, building in suspense until the final climax where the answers are
revealed. It is the goal of the editing process to make sure that the audience can
clearly follow this story and not get lost.
There are certain rules to follow to make sure that the audience doesn’t get lost
during the journey.
Basic editing rules:
• Rule number one is to make sure the story is clear.
• Keep the story moving. Trim everything that is not providing new information,
interesting performances or moments to build tension. Don’t repeat things;
instead use variations. One time to use repetition is with comedy. You repeat
something to build a pattern, and then the next time you surprise the audience
by fooling their expectation about the pattern. The usual method is to repeat
twice to build a pattern and then surprise.
 Postproduction 175

• Don’t cut without a reason. The reasons to cut all involve

providing new information to the audience with the goal of
moving the story forward. You can cut to start a new scene.
You can cut to show a new view or to show the audience
something that was hidden. You can cut to reveal where
you are. You can cut back and forth to show two actors
talking. You can cut away to show someone’s reaction to
what’s going on. But don’t cut without a clear reason.

We start with a wide shot of Bunny pulling Iggy out of the

swamp.
Cut in tight to show net catching the Eye-dea.
Cut wide to show Bunny seeing the Eye-dea in the net.
Bunny reaches in net and grabs idea and puts it in the jar.
Cut tight to show Bunny showing off the Eye-dea.
Even though this is a continuous action that could have
been shot in one wide shot, the framing of each cut shows what
I want the audience to look at. I am directing their attention
with the cuts. They say in effect, “Look at this. (Cut) Look at
this. (Cut).”
• Cut passage work or shoe leather. This is when a
character travels from one place to another. You
shouldn’t show every step of their journey. Jump ahead
to where they’re going or use a montage sequence of
shots to sum up the journey. This is if nothing significant
happens on the journey. If something important
happens, then show it.
176 Postproduction

Iggy and Scared Bunny see the castle in the distance. They slide out of frame
down the hill. Cut to Bunny at the door. He takes, seeing Iggy who’s reading
Dr. Sackenstein’s diary.
We could have shown them sliding down the hill, getting up and walking up
the road to the castle. Then they’d have to open the door and Iggy would have
to walk to the book, open it, etc. The audience would have gotten bored because
they already knew where they were going. Stay a little ahead of your audience by
having them try to keep up with the story. Give them only the information they
need to follow. Give them great narrative questions and they will.

Color Correction
Once the film’s elements are finalized and then composited, there’s one final step
necessary to lock the picture—color correction.
The basic goal of color correction is to adjust the color of each scene so they all
feel like they belong together. The art director’s job is to make sure the color in the
final matches what the director and he or she has first imagined.
 Postproduction 177

These images don’t flow together. They have different

color spaces. The first image is the one we want. The second
is too cool; the colors have a bluish cast. The third image
is too dark. The fourth image is too “contrasty.” The fifth
is too warm or yellowish. We need to individually adjust
each scene to match the first image, our target scene. If the
second image is too cool, then we need to make it warmer.
(The colors of these frames have been pushed quite off for
demonstration purposes.)
178 Postproduction

Here are the scenes again, color corrected. Notice how they all feel like they
belong together.
Color correction is an art form of its own, requiring a great sensitivity to color.
While it’s not the same as having your own color corrector, Apple’s Final Cut X
has quite competent automatic color matching. One way to assemble a film is to
collect a sequence of TIFF frames and do the final edit in editing software, such as
Final Cut, and let it match your scenes.

Sound and Music

Sound Brings Life and Music Brings the Emotion
With animation we’re creating a world and now we’re going to create a sonic
palette for that world. Make sure you can tell your story without words, totally
silent. Once you’ve accomplished that, then every sound added brings life. Music
brings emotion.
When filmmakers start assembling a movie in editorial, they often will use
scores from other movies, classical music or other music as a placeholder. This is
known as temp music. They’re trying to find the right tone for the sequence. Later,
the temp music is used as inspiration and as a communication tool between the
director and composer.
The temp track is your timing guide. A click track is a track of click sounds that
set the pace of the music. Speed them up or slow them down to fit the tempo you
want. This is your guide track, like an animation guide path. Just turn off that layer
when you export the score.

The Basic Structures of Music

I’d like to give you a very simplified version of music theory for adding music to
your films.
The first element is the clock. The clock breaks down time into segments.
The musical clock is the beat and it runs fast and slow. Everything takes place in
relation to the clock. The clock runs in relation to events taking place on screen.
The musical events all take place in reference to the pace of the clock. In
traditional music terms, this is known as the time signature and beats per minute.

Now, think of music on several layers. On the bottom layer,
we have the percussion. This keeps the beat of our clock.
On the next level we have the bass. The bass gives the
sound a rich, supporting base. You can think about it in
architectural terms. This is your basement foundation.
Next, we have a layer that provides a rhythm and
harmony. A chord is simply several notes played at the same
time, with at least three notes. The relationship between the
notes determines the chord type. What is interesting for our
purposes is that every chord can evoke a mood. That’s what
we’re going after. Sometimes all you need is to play a chord
or repeatedly play the notes of the chord. Just as showing a
change of expression shows the character thinking, a change
of chord can evoke a change of mood.
We can have several layers of the rhythm and harmony.
In fact, a chord can be played using three different
instruments.
On top we have the humming line. That’s the melody of
notes that we can hum. This part tells the story in … guess
what kind of shape? That’s right, a roller coaster. Part of the
fun of listening to music is that you never know if the music
will take you up or down. It provides patterns, where we begin
to suspect the music will take a certain turn, and then breaks
that pattern. Repeating the patterns can build tension, which
can be released into surprise, humor or sublime closure.
This overview is enough to allow you to create a simple
score. Of course, you could spend years studying music if
that’s where your interest lies. I want you to experiment. Don’t
think in terms of the usual instruments. What about using
cowbells and trash cans for the percussion? What about using
a didgeridoo for the bass? This is an Australian instrument
that provides a droning bass sound. What about a kazoo
harmony section? And on top, for the melody, a slide whistle?
Listen to Spike Jones and his City Slickers to hear what this
might sound like. Spike Jones was a musician and bandleader
who performed the classics of his time in a satirical way using
unorthodox instruments and sound effects.
Frank Zappa was another musician who explored music
in a nontraditional way. He structured rock songs as if they
were written by Bach, and other fun experiments. He also
questioned the belief that music had to be serious. He
wanted to make it fun and even funny.
Learn to think of sound effects as instruments in your
orchestra. Your voice can also be a source for interesting
sounds and effects.
Postproduction 179
You can use the permutation idea for stories and
animation in your music as well. Many composers will
take a musical phrase and play it upside down (invert) or
backward (retrograde) or repeat it (repeat) or change the
duration. This is one of their main composition tools.
The other thing you can play with is genre mixing. What
would swing mixed with rock sound like? Rockabilly? Rock
mixed with classical gave us progressive rock. What if you
mixed surf music with jazz? We can play the score straight or
go for the wacky quantum version.
When you’re thinking about music for your film, here are
some things to consider:
• The excitement level: This comes from the tempo or
speed of the music as well as contrasts. Loud versus soft,
fast versus slow and other contrasts will create more
excitement. More instruments will also create more
excitement. Calm comes from a slower, breath-like pace
with maybe a single instrument.
• The tension level: Tension comes from rising up and
stopping, only to continue to rise again. It also comes
from fast repetition such as tremolo violin strings. This
is a classic effect you’ve heard in horror films. Deep bass
sounds can also create a sense of tension. Dissonance is
the clash of notes that don’t go together. This definitely
creates tension.
• Closure: Once you’ve created tension for your audience,
eventually you’ll have to close that tension. In music
theory this is known as resolving the tension. Certain note
or chord progressions can accomplish this, such as going
from a minor to a major chord or the notes of “Amen.”
• The emotional mood: Mood comes from many factors,
including chord color. Tempo also can set a mood.
Get in sync—remember to trick the mind!
Sync sound is when a musical accent hits at the same
time as an event on screen. They’re said to be in sync.
As a teenager, I directed my friends in our version of
Frankenstein. We didn’t have sound then so we played a
record when projecting the film. I used Bernard Hermann’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth. What was amazing was
that it worked. It felt like that was the score for our movie. In
sync, no less! Even if we started the sound a bit later, it still
appeared to sync up.
 180 Postproduction
Our minds naturally connect sounds with moving images as if they belong to
each other. Try it.
Music Software
Music in the Digital Realm
If you’re not at all musical, try asking your friends. My friends created a lot of
music for my early films. Another route to go musically is to try automatic music
generation software. This comes in a variety of approaches.
One of my favorites for generating ideas is Band-in-a-Box by PG music. You
supply a chord progression, select a style from a wide variety and press play.
Instant song! You can further tweak many of the parameters including instrument
type, change the harmony or even generate a melody in the style of a particular
artist. I like to use this as raw material and export a MIDI file.
You can think of a MIDI file as the digital equivalent of a player piano score.
Even though it contains much more information, basically it tells the computer
when to start and stop each musical note.
Another wonderful MIDI program is U&I Software’s XX. This uses a graphical
interface that allows you to draw MIDI notes and then manipulate them with a
wide range of permutations.
If you know more about music you might find Apple’s powerful Logic software
useful. I discovered this back when it was Notator Logic. I was working on
Fantasia 2000 and I wished for a way to see the music score scroll in front of me to
help me visualize how the pictures would work with the music.
Sibelius, Finale, MOTU’s Digital Performer and Myriad-online’s Melody
Assistant and Harmony Assistant are all music software packages that allow you to
play and see the score.
MIDI is one way the computer handles music. The other way is digital audio. This
is a digital recording of an actual performance. MIDI is just a set of on-off instructions.
Logic and its baby sibling, GarageBand, use both MIDI and digital audio.
When you record digital audio you’ll need to make sure you have a quiet space to
record it. A clothes closet works great because the clothes dampen all of the sound
reflections. This way you can get a dry, clean sound.
This is great for recording voices. Try creating your own cartoon voices. It’s
really fun. You can add effects to further manipulate your voice.
You may also need to record your own Foley. Foley is the sound of actions you
see on screen, such as footsteps, doors opening, impacts, punches or explosions.
Of course, you should have fun with these: go over the top or mismatch the Foley.
When a refrigerator door opens, we hear a lion’s roar?
Sound design is a whole other field of study, which has its own software as
well. My two favorites are U&I Software’s MetaSynth and Native Instrument’s
Absynth, both of which allow you to really mangle sounds in musical ways and
create wonderful worlds of sonic surrealism for your toons.
Carl Stalling
What I Learned from Carl Stalling, the Cartoonist
of Sound
Carl Stalling was the composer for Warner Brother’s early Merrie Melodies and
Looney Toons. Many people may not know that he began composing music for
Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies.
I consider him to be the perfect cartoon composer. He had a vast musical
knowledge and access to the Warner Brothers music library and was able to find
a musical pun whenever needed. He would find a song and match the title to the
action. If a character had big eyes, he’d play something like “Jeeper’s Creepers”
which includes the lyrics, “Jeeper Creepers, where’d ya get those peepers,” or for
a character walking he might play, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” But, amusing as that is,
that’s not why I marvel at his work.
Carl had Warner Brothers’ whole 90-piece orchestra at his disposal when they
weren’t scoring live-action films. They could play classical, jazz or the pop tunes of
the time. I am grateful to Carl because he started me on my education in classical
music. His cartoons introduced me to so many wonderful pieces of classical
music. I followed this up years later by checking out a new composer from the
library each week. I recommend it to help educate and train your animator’s ear.
What I loved was his frenzied conducting with lightning quick changes in mood
and style. All of which were perfectly synchronized to the cartoon action. His musical
gestures helped tell the story, clarifying the intent of the characters through music.
In order to achieve such tight synchronization, Carl invented, along with Max
Steiner and Scott Bradley, the click track for recording the score. This allows the
orchestra to perfectly synchronize their music to the picture.
Many of his cues were short musical fragments, sometimes as simple as the
notes of a scale going up. The notes of a clarinet would rise up expectantly but
instead of musical closure, he’d surprise us with a gunshot! He used sound effects
as if they were another instrument in his orchestration color palette.
Sometimes the expectancy would build and then break out into
pandemonium. Carl got a lot of musical mileage from Raymond Scott’s
composition Powerhouse, which captured the feel of modern mechanical life.
At other times he might accompany footprints with a single instrument,
such as a harp played pizzicato. Even using one instrument, he was a master of
matching the action with the appropriate feeling through the music. His choice of
scales often had strange tonalities, which produced eerie moods.
They would follow tense action up or slide down with a downward action. His
music functioned as punctuation for the action on the screen. He could follow the
action at full gallop or create a slight pause, like a musical comma or full heart-
stopping exclamation point!
Bottom line, his music makes you happy. There was a reason they called the
cartoons “Merrie Melodies.”

Watch some Looney Toons to hear Mr. Stallings’s work and smile.
Sonic Visionaries … Audioaries?
Sound design is a whole art in itself that creates the sonic
world of the film. Sound designers take sounds from all
kinds of sources and subject them to the same kinds of
manipulations that we saw earlier with how ideas evolve.
Besides being recorded, sound can be generated
by electronic means, such as the electronics used by
synthesizers. Now these once extremely expensive synths
are being recreated in software. My two favorites for other-
worldly sound design are Native Instruments’ Absynth and
U&I Software’s MetaSynth. MetaSynth appeals to artists
because it lets you draw the music.
All kinds of permutations are possible but equalization,
playback speed and reverberation are the most important
ones in getting the sounds to fit into the acoustic mix of
the film. Sound and music are often treated separately, but
remember they go in tandem in a film.
Are there sonic visionaries, as we saw for visual
visionaries? Great composers and musicians are. They bring
us new ways of hearing and being immersed in our world.
Beethoven was certainly a sonic visionary. Is it tragic that he
couldn’t hear his Ninth Symphony, Ode to Joy? Or was it more
like Walt Disney, who died before Epcot was actually built? I
think Beethoven heard this music in a deeper way than any
listener, and Walt saw whole communities of Epcots.
Evelyn Glennie is a visionary of the sonic realm. She is a
Grammy Award-winning percussionist who also happens to
be deaf. Docurama’s 2005 documentary Touch the Sound:
A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie will open totally new
ways to think about our experience of sound. The fact that
she’s deaf challenges our whole idea of what it means to be
a musician.
Postproduction 181
It’s All Gone Pete Tong is a fictional film about a famous
DJ who goes deaf. Once again, this film challenges our ideas
about our senses but I really like it because it shows the
most character change of any movie I’ve ever seen, except
maybe for Ordinary People. Pete goes from being the biggest
self-centered jerk to a wonderful human being.
Marketing and Distribution:
It’s Time to Show Your Creation
to the World!
Once your film is finished, your job becomes that of getting
the world to see your vision. Marketing is all of the ways to
tell the world about your film and distribution is providing
the opportunity to actually get to see your film.
For myself, marketing and distribution were some of
the hardest parts of the process. This was the age before
the internet when there were few avenues for independent
films. Growing up as a very shy child, I found it hard to
talk to people and the process of self-promotion was very
difficult. It was easier for me to complete a 20-minute
animated film myself, with a little help from my friends,
than tell the world about it.
Nowadays, the simplest solution for showing the world
your film is one word—YouTube. Vimeo is another film-hosting
service which seems a little classier unless you consider “stupid
pet tricks” to be avant-garde art. I know of animators who have
put their films online for free and people still want to purchase
DVDs of their work to have high-quality versions and other
works by the same artists or groups of artists.
Creating a DVD is now very easy and affordable. Small
runs you can burn on your own computer or for larger
quantities you can find services online.
Create a blog and link to your friends’ blogs. In
searching for artists to inspire me, I look at the links of
artists whose work I admire and follow where they lead.
They can yield wonderful surprises and, when someone
likes something on the internet, it’s very easy to send their
friends the link.
Another advantage of posting your work online is to get
feedback so you can grow as an artist. Be careful, though—
there are a lot of frustrated or jealous people out there with
an urge to destroy, so make sure the critique fits your work.
 182 Postproduction

Constructive criticism is descriptive and specific about the work itself. There are
many people out there as well who will offer insightful criticism.
Film festivals are a great way to promote your work because those who watch
the film festivals are looking to find new talent and visions.
Withoutabox.com is an online submission service for getting your film out to
the film festivals. They list all of the upcoming film festivals and how to apply on
time. It’s your all-in-one stop.
Amazon.com is developing its own film branch, offering large prizes for its
film- and screen-writing competitions.
Postproduction 183

Chapter Nine
Genesis of Idea
The Evolution of The Animator’s
Eye Flipbook
Preproduction: Genesis of the Idea
Every project starts with an idea and this book was no
exception. This project began with the suggestion from
Focal Press to write a book on animation after I finished
my first book for them, Directing the Story: Professional
Storytelling and Storyboarding for Animation and Live
Action. This is the documentation of the creative process
of how and why I did what I did to make this book and the
movie for this book. So how did I begin? It all started with a
question.
“What Would be the Best Animation Book?”
I’m going to share with you what went into the choices for
this book and film, but you can apply the lessons to your
own film project.
I had to compete with the many excellent books on
animation. You can find some of my favorites in the
bibliography. Additional questions arose while I pondered
my question. What would be the best book that I could
create on animation? How could I make it unique? What
would it include to provide the best learning experience
possible? Treat questions as your friends. Questions are how
we can continually make something better. They are the
catalyst for the evolution of a project and bringing it to life.
One of the problems with teaching animation in a
book is that animation is a moving medium. The answer
was obvious—include a flipbook. And, as usually happens
Genesis of Idea 185
with good ideas, they lead to more good ideas. Why not
show the whole process of making an animated film
from start to finish? This is how I could make the best
animation book that I could make. It worked well with
my first book, Directing the Story, where I storyboarded
a story called “Dumb Love.” I used it to demonstrate the
principles of directing and storyboarding, so why not create
a movie to demonstrate animation principles? It would
include the genesis of the story idea, the storyboards and
rough animation, through cleanup, layouts, art direction,
backgrounds and right through postproduction. In
addition, the animated film would be included on the
accompanying DVD.
The next question was what would the animated film
be about? What was my theme? I knew what I wanted for
the theme. Animation is the process of bringing ideas,
characters and stories, which exist in our imaginations, to
life to share with others. That’s what I wanted to make it
about, although I didn’t know what the story would be yet.
Constraints: Friend or Foe?
Constraints are limitations you have to work within.
Everybody continually has constraints on everything.
Constraints are different from requirements, such as the fact
that you have to go to work—on time. You have to actually
work. You have to eat, and so on. Constraints are limitations
on how we do things. For example, if you’re in a Chinese
restaurant, you have to choose one from column A and one
from column B.
The trick is to treat them as an ally rather than something
to fight against. Let’s examine some common constraints.
The biggest ones for animation are time, money, talent
and marketing. You always have to balance the three
interconnected constraints of time, money and quality.
Constraints are variable depending on your own passion
and motivation. For most people, the constraints of creating
an animated feature are overwhelming. Richard Williams
didn’t let this stop him from spending 25 years to create
The Thief and the Cobbler, a full-length animated film—by
himself! Sometimes constraints can seem to be your worst
enemy, as when you have to sell a product in 15 seconds,
on a $1000 budget, delivered on DVD in one week, only
to find out they wanted changes a day after the supposed
“deadline.”
 186 Genesis of Idea
What were the Constraints on The Animator’s Eye Film?
The following is a list of the educational constraints that I faced in writing The
Animator’s Eye:
• The Animator’s Eye had to demonstrate all the steps of how to animate.
• I had to create and tell a good story.
• The film had to be entertaining and fun to watch.
• It needed to include acting and performance.
• It had to demonstrate the animation principles.
• I wanted to include camera moves.
• I wanted to include fun special effects.
An additional list of constraints involved deadlines and these included the
following:
• I had to be able to complete the animated film and write the book within the
specified deadline.
• I had to research and learn what I needed to know in order to write a book on
the subject.
• I had to make sure I had the software and other tools available to complete the
process.
• I had to make sure I had the energy to work full time, have a family life and write
and animate the book.
• I had to work within my varied skill sets, some of which were stronger than others.
• I need to complete every step of the animation process and document it.
In other words, I had to entertain and educate while balancing time, money and
quality.
Often constraints break down into smaller steps, which sometimes compete with
each other. On the one hand, I had to tell a story that I would be able to animate
given time constraints, but on the other I had to tell a story in a limited number of
frames if I wanted to show the whole story in the flipbook. This constraint wasn’t as
limiting as I thought when I realized that the reader could flip the book at any pace
desired and see the basic principle of the animations. Normally animation is created
toron at 24 frames per second, or 30 for video. Additionally, the complete movie
would be on the accompanying DVD and that would include the proper timing of
the animation.
As a way to roughly gauge how big the story should be, I defined the story and
counted the storybeats. I multiplied roughly 12–24 drawings per storyboard beat
to allow for anticipation and follow-through of the animation.
An additional constraint would be that the story would have to be silent. Books
don’t have soundtracks. The flipbook would have to read purely visually, like a
silent movie. This also furthers the cause of good filmmaking—let the images tell
the story. Sound and words are like icing on the cake.
The DVD could have multiple soundtracks demonstrating how sound can
totally change the tonal character of a film, as well as its most important role of
completing the illusion of life.
Constraints Evolve During the Creative Process
Telling a story became “telling a story about the process of bringing an idea to
life.” This was my thematic metaphor for the book and it became so for the film
as well. I would show the stages of the process from start to finish. It would begin
with collecting inspirational images and brainstorming story ideas. I had to come
up with characters and their designs. Model charts would be needed. Next I would
create a rough storyboard, and then create a timed animatic. Next up was rough
animation, and layouts. From the storyboards I would create a color script and
then paint backgrounds. The rough animation would have to be inbetweened
and cleaned up. This would be composited with the backgrounds, composited
lighting, special effects, and camera moves, until I had a finished film.
I also wanted to include some 3D graphics work, but this became outside of
my area of expertise so I settled for creating the interior set in 3D and used that for
the layouts.
Every animation project needs a flowchart of the process. This can be in the
mind of a single animator working alone or it can be presented as a chart for a
whole crew to follow. Working digitally, this chart should also show the workflow
in terms of which software would be used for the different phases of the project.
You need to create one appropriate for your workflow.
Questions are also a means to continually make our projects better. They are
the catalyst for the evolution of bringing an idea to life. This process is iterative.
That simply means that you repeat or recycle the creative process. You take what
you create and continue the process again to refine it, using the same creative
steps, until you are happy with the result.
Initial Brainstorming Ideas
The early stages of a project can be either very exciting or very scary, depending
on how you look at it. Basically, you start with a blank page—infinite possibilities.
This is where all of the fears we talked about in the chapter on creativity come
in. The trick is to force yourself to start. Just find something you like or feel a
connection to and go with it. It will change, and grow and evolve. At this stage let
it—it’s your creativity at work.
So I began thinking about things that I wanted to include in the story and,
equally importantly, what would really be fun to animate? This is a crucial step.
You are going to be creating thousands of images. What would be fun to animate?
What kinds of things do you like to draw? If you don’t answer this question and
feel passionate about your project, you’ll end up bored or not finishing or both.
Look for the fun!
Character-Driven Story
I wanted a character-driven story. I had to know what my unique characters
would do in any given situation because of who they are. They would drive the
story forward through their decisions and actions.

Moviemaking Staples
I also wanted to include classic moviemaking staples—
spying, chasing, cliffhangers, transformations and blowing
things up! Defeating bad guys and rescuing the heroine
(or hero). This is all the stuff you can’t do in your real
life, which animation is perfect for. I think Spielberg did
this when he created Raiders of the Lost Ark. I imagine he
thought about all the things he wanted to see in a movie
and put them in.
Why should these things be important for movies?
Movies are about action. They’re not just about movement,
but action. The difference is that action means that things
are happening for a reason and having consequences.
Movement is just things moving.
Spying reveals the connections between actions that
have cause-and-effect relationships. This in turn reveals
to us what things mean and, as I showed in Directing
the Story, when we know what something means it can
evoke emotions. In A Christmas Carol, when the ghost of
Christmas Future shows Scrooge Tiny Tim’s cane by the
fireplace, we know that he has died from his illness. The
meaning of seeing the cane evokes sadness in us, because
we know that he has died. Meaning evokes emotions. In
The Animator’s Eye story, Bunny wakes up and sees the light
in the castle tower. He immediately knows Iggy is up to
trouble.
Chases are exciting visual dramatizations of our
striving for goals against obstacles. Real life is a series of
our striving for goals and facing obstacles. Sometimes
we’re chasing. Other times we’re the ones on the run.
They’re great in movies because they’re full of action
motivated by a character’s desire, and that’s fun to
watch.
A chase might be driven by a MacGuffin. Hitchcock
described a MacGuffin as an arbitrary thing that drives
the story because everyone wants it. It doesn’t even
have to make sense; what’s important is that everyone
wants it.
Chases can also be driven by emotions like desire in
a romantic comedy. Oktapodi from Gobelins L’Ecole de
L’Image is a wonderful film about two octopuses in love
who desperately want to be together. It can be about greed.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a hysterical movie based
upon a chase to find lost treasure. Under the influence of
Genesis of Idea 187
greed the characters do things they would never consider
under normal circumstances.
Survival has provided frantic chases in the Road Runner
cartoons and with Ice Age’s Scrat the squirrel. Scrat chases
his nut and has to try to survive the consequences of his
trying to bury it. The Coyote repeatedly destroys himself
trying to catch the Road Runner. In both these cartoons, it’s
almost like the Coyote doesn’t really want to eat the Road
Runner and Scrat isn’t hungry for the nut because he buries
it—rather they do it for love of the chase!
What would a movie be without blowing things up? I
actually feel that it is a requirement for a movie to blow
something up. It’s visually exciting and provides a temporal
structure to a film, leading to a climax. A fuse is lit, providing
tense anticipation of the big bang. Even in realistic dramas
an emotional fuse can be lit, leading to an emotional
blowup among characters. If they don’t blow up, the movie
might be boring.
Explosions, like action for the sake of movement
only, don’t drive stories and the result of all the
destruction should be transformation and growth.
Characters change, as a result of the chains of
interconnected causes you’ve set up in your movie. Your
movie is a demonstration of how the world works (in your
view). Rebirth happens from the destruction, and a new
world is born.
First Efforts Derive from Old Interests
The initial ideas began with things I already knew or was
interested in. I always loved Alice in Wonderland for its
surreal world. Alice in Wonderland is a perfect metaphor for
the crazy world of animation. Another long-time interest
has been Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This terrified me as a
child but the story stayed with me. Frankenstein was about
bringing the dead back to life. “Bringing inanimate matter to
life”—hmmm, what does that sound like?
Another question arises, “How has animation been
taught before?”
Animation is typically taught by having the student
learn three basic exercises: the bouncing ball, the flour
sack, and then progressing to walk cycles. These teach
the basic principles of line of action, timing, stretch and
squash and body language, character movement and
locomotion.
 188 Genesis of Idea
How could I make these fresh and fun? Most animation books show the
principles, but wouldn’t it be more interesting to show these principles in the
context of a story demonstrating how ideas and characters can come to life within
a story using these principles? It is the story that holds our attention and entertains
us. The principles of animation support the story by allowing it to be brought to life.
The Process
The idea for the flipbooks evolved from thinking about Frankenstein and how
to make an interesting animation book. Images came to mind and I began
writing these down into the form of a story. Then I began drawing thumbnails
of how I might see the story progressing. Next, I began a very rough storyboard
drawing with Redisharp markers on sticky notes. I actually like “Stickies” from
Staples. They’re a very pale shade of yellow. Don’t get the accordion type—go for
the standard stack where the stickiness runs along one edge. The Ticonderoga
Redisharp is a permanent black marker that doesn’t bleed through the paper or
have dangerous fumes. It can create a very expressive line. The sticky notes were
stuck on a large foam-core board so I could see the whole project at a glance and
easily rearrange the sequence.
I scanned these images into the computer and placed them into a timeline in
Final Cut Pro where I could watch the flow of the images, making sure that they
told a clear story that you could follow visually.
Flipbook Version 1
The first idea for the flipbook was to have five separate flipbooks, each of which
focused on different areas of animation principles.
Stalking the Wild Idea
Stalking the Wild Idea was an attempt to treat ideas as real things that you
might hunt for in a jungle. It was to include chases through high mountainous
canyons, narrow paths, rope bridges, rolling boulders and jungle swings, all
to demonstrate cartoon physics. Part of bringing something to life through
animation is the creation of a believable mass in your characters, creating
the illusion that they live in a real world of gravity, weight and forces. Cartoon
physics, as already discussed, is a special imaginary branch of physics that
acknowledges the real laws of motion to bring things to life with believability, but
which occasionally ignores those rules for the sake of comedy. I didn’t develop
this idea too far but some of the ideas within it evolved and managed to make it
into the final film.
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Soccer Game?
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Soccer Game? was a flipbook idea designed to
demonstrate the classic bouncing ball in a fresh context. Once we’ve gained the
basic lessons it has to offer, suppose we wanted to make it interesting. How do
we make it fresh and original? Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the
other side. What if a chicken has to get to the other side of a soccer field while

avoiding the ball? That sounds like something that would be
fun to animate. It would also feature walking and running.
The idea was to have a chicken crossing the field during the
middle of a soccer game.
The Flour Sack of Frankenstein
The Flour Sack of Frankenstein was to be a parody of the
Frankenstein story; however, instead of a dead body, the
classic animation flour sack is brought to life. This flipbook
was designed to demonstrate how body language gives
objects life.
This could also demonstrate the kind of dramatic
chromatic lighting that Maurice Nobel used in What’s
Opera, Doc? It would have been a great showcase for
special-effects animation such as lightning and the inner
spark of life, and maybe a glowing beating heart in the
flour sack. Thoughts about the design were also inspired
by What’s Opera, Doc? including cartoonish line work with
high-contrast values, saturated colors and tilted frames,
also known as Dutch angles.
Hamlet and the Heckler
Hamlet and the Heckler was an idea to use the Grim
Reaper as Hamlet’s heckler. This flipbook was designed to
demonstrate dramatic acting, contrasted with “over the
top” comic acting including cartoon takes, or exaggerated
reactions. Hamlet is in the middle of his famous “To be or
not to be” soliloquy when he is heckled. Hamlet gets so mad
he throws his skull prop at Grim and knocks his head off.
Grim’s body wanders around looking for his head. The head
keeps heckling Hamlet.
This flipbook would also demonstrate how to use
rotoscoping, or the process of shooting live action for
reference for acting and lip sync.
Genesis of Idea 189
Design thoughts for Hamlet were to be a theatrical
setting with a single spotlight on the stage. It would use
volumetric line-work animation with chiaroscuro (dark/
light) lighting, rim lighting and deep shadows.
Alice Stuck in Wonderland
Alice Stuck in Wonderland was designed to show the fun
of animation in the creation of crazy worlds with frenetic
animation. Alice has to run away from the Red Queen and
her playing cards. It would include high-speed scrambling
chases, occasionally going backward, as in a dream. It would
travel through moving perspective hallways and garden
mazes.
Other random ideas included the Mad Hatter tea
party spilling tea over into the pool of tears. “No room!”
A looking glass fun-house mirror would be fun if each
reflection had life of its own. “Which way should I go?”
“You’re asking me?” Of course, this would be a nightmare
in itself to animate. But during the brainstorm stage we
don’t censor ideas, just create as many as possible and
begin to mine for gold.
Alice could find The Animator’s Eye book and when she
opens it, it unleashes a Pandora’s box. She has to struggle
to get everything back into the book. Alice’s flowers in this
version could be carnivores and vampire vines.
Design thoughts here might include paradoxical or
Escher-like 3D space, intense color, and frenetic activity
with motion blur, surreal juxtapositions, crazy characters,
and anthropomorphism everywhere you look.
 190 Genesis of Idea
The Big Bang
The Big Bang was inspired by scientific, imagined accounts of the beginning of
the universe, in this case the animated universe. It would include psychedelic
morphing animation, wild colors and lots of particle effects. Multiple layers of
images would rush at us, like seeing your life flash before your eyes, in that split
second of the origin of the universe.
Merge Flipbooks
Evolutionary Change —What if I Merged
the Flipbooks Together?
This was a big turning point in the evolution of the project. Instead of five separate
flipbooks, I could use a version of the Frankenstein idea to thematically combine
the flipbooks into one story. A scientist would dig up a body to get a brain. The
brain would be put into the classic flour sack. Big-bang sequence of the rush of
life could happen as the scientist turned on all the machinery. The monster then
runs amuck through a basketball game or cross midtown at rush hour, or, how
about, out-of-control monster ruins Alice’s tea party?
Or, as an alternate, the scientist could play Hamlet, mourning loss of the
monster heckled by the grim reaper. “It’s dead!” opposite of the classic “It’s alive!”
And then the monster is reborn!
At this point, it’s still raw and unformed, but I like the direction it’s headed.
And all because of a question driving the process.
Flipbook Version 2
This was the first full idea I had for the flipbook that addressed many of the
constraints and intuitions that I wanted to put into it.
I wanted the ideas to act as a thematic metaphor for the creative process. What
if an idea was like a wild animal? You’d have to track, hunt and chase an elusive
idea, and the idea would grow, change and take on a life of its own, have some fun
and die but not before giving birth to other ideas.
Bringing an idea to life is like bringing inanimate matter back to life, just like
Dr. Frankenstein did with his monster. The animator is more like Dracula—he or
she is driven to drink the blood of creativity. These ideas flow as my mind goes off
on tangents. Vampire goes to bite woman but it tickles so she squirms so much
that the vampire can’t bite her.
All this preparation finally paid off in the idea of a contest.
First Solid Idea for the Flipbook: The Contest
It’s a frantic race to be the first to get an idea and bring it to life. Two creative
scientists, a male, SAM, and a female, JANE, both race to create life. The male scientist
creates a monster and the woman scientist creates a girl monster. The monster starts
as a flour sack that comes alive and morphs its shape into the monsters.
It’s a start but now we have to ADD COMPLICATIONS that can make the
story interesting. What if scientist SAM has writer’s block? Or maybe ideas don’t
like SAM and he can’t get an idea; they fly away from him. SAM’s solution to his
problem is, of course, to cheat.
Story ideas create STORY NEEDS in the form of more questions to be answered:
How does he cheat? We look at the elements of the story we have and see what we

can utilize. Well, JANE has ideas, represented as sticky notes,
so SAM could spy on her and steal one of her ideas.
CHARACTER-DRIVEN STORY: It’s best when the story
is driven by the actions of the characters themselves rather
than being acted upon only by external events. So when
JANE discovers that SAM created life first, she’s disappointed.
STORY TURN: Just when a story gets going too far in
one direction we turn it. It looks like SAM is winning and
gloating in his success. That is, until he slips and JANE
learns the truth—that he stole her sticky note idea. Once
again, the character’s action drives the story. SAM’s pride
causes his own downfall.
When JANE learns that SAM stole her idea, she is furious
and tries to destroy SAM. This action leads to … CHASE ONE!
Meanwhile, SAM’S monster, ID, sees JANE’s monster,
FLORA. ID falls in love with FLORA at first sight. This leads
to CHASE TWO!
COMPLICATION: When FLORA sees ID monster coming
after her, she freaks out and runs away in terror.
Now, we have two chases, which cross paths with each
other. We can intercut between the two. Just as one reaches
a suspenseful tense moment, we cut to the other leaving the
first one as a cliffhanger.
ID monster is about to catch FLORA. JANE gets more and
more angry as SAM keeps getting away. She shoots a rocket
at cheating SAM, STORY TURNS, but she misses SAM and
hits ID monster. This prevents ID monster from catching
FLORA. JANE feels terrible.
HOW DOES THE STORY END? We have to stop the story
somewhere and it should come out of the questions raised in
the story. There are many ways to end a simple story like this.
TRAGIC ENDING: JANE accidently kills ID monster and
they all mourn his loss. ID was a good idea after all.
COMEDIC ENDING: After ID has been shot, FLORA
monster’s tears fall onto ID and these tears bring the ID
monster back to life. Meanwhile SAM doesn’t see that his
ID monster is reborn. SAM thinks that JANE killed his idea,
which of course he stole from her, and SAM wants revenge
so he now chases JANE. JANE is now on the run.
The story’s not over yet. FLORA monster now falls in love
with the ID monster, but her tears have ruined her makeup
and she looks scary so, now, ID runs from her. The chases all
begin again but flipped with who’s chasing whom.
Animators often see the world through a comedic world,
so that’s what I chose.
Genesis of Idea 191
Critique of the Contest
Now that I have an idea for the flipbook, it’s time to critique
it before committing a lot of time and energy to it. I have to
look at it objectively and see what works and what doesn’t.
Chuck Jones always said they made the Warner Brothers
cartoons for themselves. Remember, it has to be fun. I also
had to keep in mind my constraints—did it teach the lessons
that I wanted? And could I accomplish it with my skill sets,
time and energy?
Positive Qualities
This story has lots of E-motions (emotions in action), like
sneaking, spying, anger growing to fury, apprehension
growing to terror, falling in love, fear growing to coyness,
seductiveness, sadness, guilt turning to sheepishness and
grief turning to joy!
It demonstrates many animation principles, and it’s a
fun and complete story about creativity.
Areas for Improvement
The story needs a TICKING CLOCK. We need to set a time
limit that makes tension increase in the story. The story
needs to build or otherwise the audience will grow tired.
The chase is full of frantic activity but doesn’t provide a
structure to shape it. In other words, the chase could go
on forever.
We need to SET UP THE EXPOSITION for the audience
so they know what the contest is all about. This aspect could
be tricky to convey silently. I would continue to think about
the story and finds ways to improve it. My next step was to
start to storyboard it. This would give me a better picture of
how it might work, while other variants continued to brew
in my unconscious. Even though a story sounds good in
written form, when it’s imagined in pictures it changes. It’s
literally changing it to a different language. First we hear it,
now we need to see it.
You can see an animatic of the Contest on the DVD.
A Change of Direction and Why
At this point I decided to change direction. This is why it’s
good to work rough initially. I roughed out the ideas but
didn’t spend a lot of time on them, because I knew things
were going to change. This could have been a fun short, but
 192 Genesis of Idea

the problem was that I didn’t really know who my characters were. They were very
generic.
Meanwhile, my constraints were closing in. I was still working out the story
and I still had a book to write and an animated film to create. Story is the most
important part. Everything else is riding on it, so it made sense to spend time
trying to get it right.
I decided to use two characters that I already had created and worked with
before: Iggy and Scared Bunny. I knew how to draw them and I knew how they
would act in a given situation. So the first approach was to simply put them into
the same situation of the contest. But stories are more complex than that. You
can’t simply swap out characters without it creating a domino chain reaction of
other changes. This led to thinking about going with several flipbooks again. Iggy
and Bunny would be the unifying factor.

Storyboards with Iggy and Bunny

Even though the ideas weren’t fully worked out, I felt I had enough of a direction
to start storyboarding this idea and see where it went. As you’ll see, many ideas
kept evolving. Some were lost as new ones were added. Your animator’s eye needs
to be ever alert so that the changes are actually making the story better and not
simply different.
 Genesis of Idea 193

A tiny figure runs and leaps off a cliff face. It’s Iggy the
impulsive pig doing what he does best—leaping before he
looks!
(Serendipity — this new opening was unplanned in terms
of how well it introduces who the characters are just by their
actions. This visual action of Iggy not only shows him in an
exciting action, but demonstrates his personality as well.
Bunny is carefully trying to photograph a wild idea, the Eye-
dea.)
 194 Genesis of Idea

Iggy lands at the bottom and begins to climb the

next hill.

As the camera moves ahead we discover

Scared Bunny about to take a photo of a rare idea, Iggy bursts through foliage behind Bunny and
Eye-dea. scares the Eye-dea. The Eye-dea flies up to the sky.
Genesis of Idea 195
 196 Genesis of Idea

Bunny watches as the Eye-dea flutters away.

Bunny turns to Iggy. He’s an angry bunny.

Iggy feels sheepish after his blunder. However, he

notices the Eye-dea has flown back and landed on
Bunny. He focuses in on it.

Iggy swings the net trying to catch the Eye-dea but

catches Bunny instead.
 Genesis of Idea 197

Iggy slips into the pond.

198 Genesis of Idea

Iggy is unaware of the shape under the lily pad.

As Bunny pulls him out, an alligator leaps after Iggy.
Bunny begins to pull him out. Iggy swings the net around, accidently bopping the
alligator on the head.

Without realizing it he also catches the wild Eye-dea.

Genesis of Idea 199
 200 Genesis of Idea

Bunny sees the Eye-dea in the net. Iggy swings

it around so Bunny can grab it. He puts it in a
jar. Iggy and Bunny are excited. Their safari is a
success.

They pose for a victory photo, but just as they

say “cheese,” they get hit with a sudden downpour,
changing the bright day sky to darkness. (Art
direction note: have the daytime sky a pinkish color,
hinting at bad weather to come.)
 Genesis of Idea 201

They see an old castle and head off towards it to find

shelter.
 202 Genesis of Idea

Inside the great entry hall Bunny cautiously looks

As they cross the castle’s moat they don’t see that
around. He sees Iggy has jumped in again without
the alligator has followed them.
looking. He overreacts, doing a cartoon “take”!
Genesis of Idea 203
 204 Genesis of Idea

Iggy has found Dr. Von Frankensack’s diary that

describes the process of bringing inanimate matter
to life! Iggy flips the book and we see a series of old
sepia pictures telling the story of the creation of the
Monster.

True to Iggy’s nature, he wants to try the

experiment and points to all the equipment and
Bunny’s Eye-dea. They’ve got everything they need.
 Genesis of Idea 205

True to his nature, Scared Bunny freaks out, grabs the

book and shuts it.
 206 Genesis of Idea

This idea changed to Bunny protecting the

Eye-dea.

Iggy only pretends to go along with Bunny as

Bunny pushes him back outside into the rain.
Genesis of Idea 207
208 Genesis of Idea

In their tent and retire for the night. Iggy sneaks

out back to the lab taking the Eye-dea with him. (In
the interest of time compression we don’t bother to
show them setting up the tent.)
Iggy enters the laboratory to begin work
performing his experiment.
Genesis of Idea 209
210 Genesis of Idea
 Genesis of Idea 211

It’s like he’s conducting an orchestral light show as

machines whir, flash and electrify the night. Iggy puts the
concentrated Eye-dea dust into a flour sack.
Iggy creates life in the lab. Iggy and Bunny prevail when
the monster falls out of the window. We’ll see more of what
happens in the lab later in this chapter.

Iggy throws the switch.

 212 Genesis of Idea

The monster falls as Iggy and Bunny come to the

window in time to watch…

…as it splashes into the moat.

 Genesis of Idea 213

… from beneath the deep dark waters flying Eye-deas

rise up, filling the night sky with ideas as abundant as stars.

Effortless? Are You Kidding?

When ideas begin to flow, the process and results can
look effortless. The painter Cezanne was famous for his
cubist canvases that looked effortless. The final painting
hid how much actual effort went into the effortless-
appearing results. Below are some of the rough ideas that
led to the ideas in the previous storyboard version of the
Iggy and Bunny watch as … flipbook.
I knew I wanted to start the story with a visual bang. So
in order to get some visual excitement into what could have
been a boring scene of them walking through the jungle
I decided to have Iggy and Bunny rappel down the cliff. As
they land they scare the wildlife and ideas scatter off. The
original idea was a slow multiplane shot with them climbing
up. Rappelling down is a lot more exciting and moves the
story faster.
A comedic idea was to have Bunny reaching the base
and beginning to walk. But instead of walking he swings
along because he forgot to disconnect his climbing rope.
Animals trying to catch him miss as he swings in and out
of their grasp. Sometimes gags need to be cut because they
stop the story flow or there’s just not time for them.
My first inclination was to have Iggy and Bunny sneak
through the dense jungle underbrush stalking wild ideas.
The problem with this scene is that it is just passage work.
In other words, it’s characters just moving from one place
to another. The new version tells so much more story and
much faster.
Cutting this did involve losing a fun gag. As the alligator
stalks Iggy, Bunny hops right on the alligator’s head.
 214 Genesis of Idea

When you’re doing quick brainstorms don’t worry about continuity. Here Iggy
and Bunny have switched places between frames. You can fix them later as the
story refines itself and when you clean up the drawings.
I liked the idea of Bunny being followed by lots of Eye-deas but, as the story
progressed, it seemed better if they were more rare. I also wanted the contrast at
the end of the story where we see the heavens become full of them. If good ideas
were so plentiful in the beginning, it would have lessened the impact of the final
scene. Bunny setting up the tripod could be a fun opportunity for comedy with all
the things that could go wrong as he does it. This could have been a great flipbook
in itself, but it wouldn’t have worked in this short story.
Visual flourish: They trudge back home in the rain, being followed by Eye-deas
like fireflies. This could have been visually interesting, but I had already decided it
was better for them to only find one Eye-dea.
AFTER
Character moment: Iggy accidentally releases Bunny’s Eye-dea. Iggy feels
guilty about it and when he sees a bad idea he replaces the one that got away
with a bad idea, maybe without knowing it’s a bad idea. This idea morphed and
resurfaced at the end of the final story when Iggy feels guilty over the trouble he’s
caused. He tries to sneak away unnoticed.
Comedic obstacle: Quicksand. Always try to find additional fun obstacles for
your characters. One way to think of a movie is that it’s an obstacle course for your
characters.
Story twist: They pose for picture—surprise downpour. Originally this scene
took three beats: They pose, sky goes dark and then downpour. Combining the
darkness with the downpour is much more immediate and thus dramatic.
BEFORE

Character moment: Bunny makes him promise not to go back into the lab, but
Iggy puts his foot in the door. The door slams on Iggy’s foot and he struggles not
to scream. Comedy comes from his trying to hide the pain he’s feeling so Bunny
won’t notice.
Originally, Iggy was going to sneak out of his room in the castle. The graphic of
the tent outside seemed to tell the story clearer and quicker.
 Genesis of Idea 215

Visual excitement: Iggy goes back into lab and recreates • Flipbook 7-10-2010 — Contest to create life with Iggy &
Frankenstein’s experiment. Pouring test tubes, shaking, Bunny.
putting over Bunsen burner. This is business which could • Flipbook 7-17-2010 — Minor changes.
be fun but it’s similar to passage work; it doesn’t move the • Flip 7-21-2010 — Thematic introduction of characters’
conflicts of the story further along. personality through their actions. There will be more
Cut for time: Iggy and Bunny create life in their lab but changes to come.
they don’t know it. They fall asleep and a little FLOUR SACK • Flipbook 8-1-2011—I added the ending with Alligator. I had
under the microscope comes to life. It grows too big for set this up by putting the alligator in earlier in the story as
under microscope so it grows arms and turns the microscope a threat to Iggy and Bunny. I also reminded the audience of
knob to free itself. Then it splits to duplicate itself. The first his presence as he follows Bunny into the lab.
sack gets to say the “It’s Alive!” line as it creates A, B and C
Always ask, what’s not working or not clear, and how can I
sacks. Even though this was a fun idea, it fell by the wayside.
make it better, clearer, more dramatic, and surprising. This
The sacks start doing stupid stuff like making funny
is how the power of questions comes to your aid.
faces and silly walks and stretching like taffy. Maybe they
do impressions? They get each other smashed with various
machines in the lab and laugh hysterically at the results. Iggy’s Problematic Switch
I thought about the section with Iggy all set to create life.
Continued Flipbook Refinements Now, it’s time to throw the switch. It was also time to ask
the “What if?” question. WHAT IF the switch was stuck? This
This process of refining the story took a long time. I had
could yield a really fun performance of Iggy struggling with
many constraints to work within. I was always looking for
the switch. Fun performances are fun to animate and fun for
ways to make the story clearer, and more fun. I kept looking
the audience to watch.
for ways to condense the story to prevent having to have
passage scenes which didn’t move the story forward.
One of the most important things was to find ways to
efficiently add comedy bits. As I added and deleted beats
to the story, often the rest of the story had to change. Some
changes were as simple as creating hookups between scenes
to provide better continuity, while others were more major,
involving changes to lots of scenes. One of these was the role
of the alligator. Initially, the alligator was a throw-away gag
that grew into a major turning point in the story.

Major Story Transformations

Below you can see a list of how many versions were
storyboarded and rough dates when they were completed.
The storyboards did not take months to complete each.
They were completed while I was working full time and
researching and writing The Animator’s Eye book itself.
• Initial idea for multiple flipbooks. Only the chicken
crossing the soccer game was storyboarded.
• Flipbook 3-1-2010 — Contest to create life first starring the
two scientists.
• Flipbook 5-16-2010 — Minor changes.
216 Genesis of Idea

Then, what if he got the switch to turn on, but knocked himself out doing so?
The whole lab lights up with electricity and then we cut outside to Bunny waking
up and seeing the sky lit up by lights from the lab. The audience won’t know what
happened yet, providing a great suspenseful delay. After Bunny goes to enter the

castle and lab, the audience sees the flour sack come to life
walking like the infamous clichéd monster.
The problem still to solve is the duplication part.
Maybe the flour sack looks in Von Frankensack’s diary
or sees himself in a mirror to get the idea. This idea still
needs work. Once I have the flour sacks duplicating
themselves and Iggy knocked out, a simple idea came
to mind. I saw an image of the sacks jumping over the
passed-out Iggy and the last little one can’t make it and
lands on his stomach, waking him. Now, Iggy gives chase
around a corner and then … Iggy didn’t know that there
were lots of them and now the tables have turned. The
chase is on.
The next question was whether the flour sack leader
being sucked into the vacuum gag added to the story. I
thought to cut it and then I tried to visualize the film without
it. I realized that the ending became kind of flat and not very
suspenseful. This was a fun, exciting beat. Then I literally
watched it play out in my animator’s eye and didn’t feel it
had a strong climax without it.
So far, the story is that the flour sacks are going to suck
Iggy’s brain into another flour sack. Bunny had sneaked in
to find Iggy is captured and has to rescue him.
The master shot shows where everyone is with the flour
sack adjusting the vacuum funnel on Iggy’s head and Bunny
sneaking in behind the equipment. This gives us a silly
image of Iggy with a funnel on his head. Iggy turns to see
Bunny.
Bunny motions for Iggy to be quiet, as the leader
flour sack tells his minions to throw the switch. However,
Genesis of Idea 217
throwing a switch was already used for the electricity part.
It was more of an interesting variation to have another flour
sack pumping the vacuum machine. This solved another
problem that bothered me. I wasn’t showing how this thing
worked. The pumping showed what it did.
So far this is great because they’re beginning to turn on
the brain transfer vacuum while Bunny is quietly racing to
free Iggy. Great suspenseful cross cutting between the two
action streams makes the audience wonder if Bunny will
make it on time to save Iggy or whether the flour sack will
see him.
The flour sack does see him but it’s too late. He gets
sucked into the vacuum funnel. In storytelling, timing is
always wrong. It’s like the old surfing expression, “You
should have been here yesterday.” (Implied, when the waves
were really great.)
The process of asking the question about whether a gag
should be kept in the story led to making the sequence a lot
more dramatic and suspenseful by juxtaposing two lines
of action at once—the brain transfer and Bunny’s rescue
attempt.
When they pull the leader out, the vacuum machine
pumps air into the other sack and it grows gigantic and
chases Iggy and Bunny.
At this point, once again, I’m faced with the blank
canvas—how do I incorporate and execute the duplication
of the flour sacks organically into the story? I begin by
asking questions of two types. The first type of question
is, what has to happen in the story? What are the needs of
the story itself? In this case, the flour sack has to get the
idea of creating copies of itself and it has to actually make
copies.
The second question is the magical “What if?” question.
The sack could see a picture of groups of things. The sack
could read Dr. Von Frankensack’s diary and get the idea.
What if the flour sack saw himself in a mirror and got the
idea that way? I like this idea because it’s very visual. The
flour sack sees itself in the mirror. It sees itself moving and
then goes around to the back of the mirror to see that there’s
no other sack there. So maybe the sack is lonely.
The second question is how to make the copies.
Unconsciously, I realized that there were several possible
places this idea came from: Snow White and her seven
dwarfs, Mickey and his brooms from Fantasia, Calvin and
Hobbes’s duplicator machine and the scientific process of
 218 Genesis of Idea
cellular division. Originally, the flour sack was going to grow from a microscopic
size.
I decided to go back to the simple science lab idea and the sack just gets under
a jar and—poof—another sack appears in another jar. Maybe that unconsciously
came from the old Star Trek transporters. A character would just stand under a
beam of light and, poof, they’d disappear from the star ship and then transport to
a beam of light on the planet and materialize.
The great thing with animation is that it uses the flux capacitor theory. In
Back to the Future, they send a car back in time using the “Flux capacitor.” The
science of movies doesn’t have to actually work—you only need to make your
audience believe that it does. Flour sacks can duplicate in jars just as easily as
Calvin can duplicate in a cardboard box labeled duplicator. What counts is the
fun that it provides the audience once you’ve got the multiple copies running
around.
Once I’m happy with the flow of the story with these very rough scribbles,
I need to draw them up in clear storyboard panels and work out the continuity
or flow between the shots.
But, I’m not happy yet.
Where’d All the Copies Go?
So far, the flipbook stories have evolved from the first version of five separate
flipbooks to one complete story about capturing ideas and bringing them to life.
FLIPBOOK STORYBOARD VERSIONS
Version 1. Five flipbooks.
Version 2. The first version was the life contest with the two scientists racing to
create life.
Version 3. Iggy and Bunny join the contest. They’re fun, I know them as
characters, and easy to animate.
Version 4. The contest idea was replaced with Iggy and Bunny stalking the
wild idea. Iggy creates many sacks. The sacks capture Iggy and plan to transfer his
brain into a sack.
Here’s what happened to the sacks. Iggy is the main character and the sacks
are secondary characters and I felt like after Iggy creates the sacks, he only has
one emotion, fear. He’s also not the one driving the action, he’s only reacting to
it. I have Iggy tied to a table. What kind of hero is that? He’s not an active hero, so I
tried something different. I tried Iggy chasing the sacks. But when you change one
thing in a story, everything else can change.
Version 5. Big reversal — in order to make Iggy an active hero, I reversed it to
have Iggy chase sacks rather than them chasing him. The additional obstacles are
that there are too many to catch. This is fun business in itself and causes Iggy to
go through a range of emotions, such as deviously trying to catch them, gleeful
when he catches one, frustrated when the others let the captured ones loose and
so on. It’s much more fun than the last version. But now, there’s a whole lot of new
unanswered questions. For example, what happens next?
New creative phase — PANIC!
I’ve been working on the story for almost a year and I’m not happy with it yet.
So what do I do? I panic. In my panic I scramble to find ways to make it work and I
begin thinking about new, totally different ideas.
When you reach a DEAD END you need a new map. Try a new idea. At Disney
we had a storyboarding exercise where you had to storyboard your pet trying
to get your dinner. I think it was story artist and character designer Sue Nichols
who created it. Since the classic flour sack exercise proved so fruitful, I started
to play with a pet wanting the owner’s dinner. This led to: The dinner game.
Dinner Game Story Beats
Notes to self: Criteria: Fun to animate and watch and learn from. Watch date
movies for reference.
What’s the premise? Hunger leads us to do stupid things.
Brainstorm dinner routines: serving, pepper? Pour drinks, toast, clink, dinner
appreciation, rub tummy, help clean up, look at time.
The concept: A dating couple have dinner and flirt. They get caught looking at
each other, turn away, smile. They want to impress each other but don’t want the
other to know that they’re interested in them. While this is going on, her cat tries
to get their dinner.
Here are the rough beats:
They look for an opportunity to kiss but…
shyly wait.
They nearly get caught glancing at each other.
The cat reaches in between them and takes food off his fork.
He raises the fork and eats nothing—embarrassed laugh.
Or maybe the cat switches his food with the cat food.
He tries to pretend, mmm, good.
She’s ready to kill her cat for ruining the date.
But already the cat is off to his next trick. She has to cover for the cat,
pretending nothing happened.
She sends angry glances at the cat, but the cat is determined to get dinner.
Maybe she tricks the cat by giving it hot pepper. The cat racing to get water
pushes her into him and they finally kiss. After the kiss she glances at the cat to
say, “thank you.” Cat licks its paws.
Panic’s Over and Madness Ensues…
I go back to the flour sack idea and I’m reading about theater and I start thinking
about the tragic and comedic masks often used to represent theater and drama.
How could I use this?
Version 6. The next version had two sacks, one tragic and the other
comic. When Iggy creates life there’s a second sack that gets some of the
idea dust. Iggy gets knocked out. Sack is going to shock him to bring Iggy
back to life.
Genesis of Idea 219
220 Genesis of Idea
Genesis of Idea 221
222 Genesis of Idea
Genesis of Idea 223
224 Genesis of Idea
Genesis of Idea 225
226 Genesis of Idea

Version 7. After storyboarding the version with the two
sacks I realized that I didn’t need the two sacks. It would be
simpler and clearer with one sack.
Version 8. Finally, I came up with an ending that I liked.
The sack and Eye-dea were eaten by the alligator and fall
into the moat. As Iggy and Bunny mourn, the sack climbs
back into the room. The sack returns the Eye-dea. Bunny
hugs the idea and it turns into a beautiful woman. She gives
him a kiss. Iggy sees this and hugs the tragic sack. It doesn’t
transform. They look out the window and see the night sky
filled with ideas.
Sometimes you’re lucky and discover accidental
creativity. In this case, a problem led to a funny gag. The
eyeball motif itself was another accidental creative spark.
Originally the idea was going to be a sticky note that acted
like a butterfly.
Discipline and Checklists
The weight of the approaching deadline was crushing at this
time. The key is to keep the goal of the finished project in
sight. Animation has so much to keep track of that it’s easy
to forget things. Checklists allow us to keep track of all of the
different elements and keep the goal in sight.
Use checklists for:
• Keeping on schedule.
• Tracking progress on the project.
• Keeping track of all the pieces and layers for scenes.
• Checking that you’ve met your constraints.
• Checking that you’ve applied the animation and design
principles to make it interesting.
Genesis of Idea 227
• Keep track of changes to be made. It’s very easy to lose
sight of all the changes required. This is an important
checklist.
In addition to their pragmatic value, checklists remind you
that you are making progress.
You climb a mountain by taking one step after another.
Focus on one drawing at a time. You have to keep pushing it
along, even if some days it’s just baby steps. On some days I
only had the energy to complete roughs.
The other obstacle was self-doubt. Many days I hate
my drawings. I found that the only way to feel confidence
in my drawing was to keep drawing. When drawing, the
most important thing to focus on is the emotion of the
drawing. Then work on the gestural forces. After that,
work at the spatial structure. Finally, work on your line
quality.
Animation Principles
Beginning animators need to have the animation
principles pointed out to them. When I first started it was
a thrill just to see characters move. Once you learn the
principles, then you’ll see your characters begin to really
come to life.
Keep your animator’s eye out for where you can apply
the principles to your animation. Learn how they apply
to different materials. Stiff materials will overlap very
differently than flimsy materials. Light materials will have
less momentum than heavy materials. Rigid materials will
have less bounce than rubbery ones. The principles help
your animated illusions come to life.
 The Production 229

Chapter Ten

The Production

Production—Now We’re Cooking!

Before I could start final production, I had to work through
the story four times. First, I wrote the story. Second, I
created the storyboards. Third, I created the color script. The
fourth version was a checklist to track my progress through
the scenes.
Then I was ready for production.

Animation of Iggy and Bunny

As an animator, I needed to decide how each of the
characters would move. Their movements should reflect
their personalities. Scared Bunny moves carefully but
super quickly when necessary. Impulsive Iggy moves with a
theatrical flair, often over the top. All his actions say “Look
at me!” Sackenstein imitates Frankenstein, but with real
determination.

Continued Question Probing

For the production process we need to continually ask how
to make this funnier, clearer, more surprising, more exciting,
with more interesting staging, better utilizing the camera to
tell the story, and so forth. How can I make the animation
more exciting? How can I make the animation come alive
more? How can I make the spatial setting more believable
with deeper space?
Following are some problems that arose during
production and their solutions.
 230 The Production

Continuity Cheats
Objects going through other objects: you can’t do this in 3D. Continuity is not
as important in animation as it is in live action. The normal rules of reality are
changed anyway. Any character can act like a magician.
I added Iggy’s goggles just because they looked cool and they’re funny. Why do
they glow? I don’t know. Funny trumps continuity every time in cartoons. If the
audience is laughing, they’re not paying attention to continuity.

Transparent Goggles
In the scene with the stuck switch, I want to be able to see Iggy’s expressions, so I
made the goggles partially transparent. It helps to show what he’s thinking when
the switch is stuck.
Fun to Animate
Sackenstein, the flour sack, proved to be fun to animate, as it allowed the drawing
process to be very forgiving. I had to watch when Sackenstein and the Eye-dea
were on the screen at the same time so as not to have Sackenstein upstage the
Eye-dea. I kept Sackenstein still at times when I wanted the audience to pay
attention to the Eye-dea.

Draw Till You Get it Right

I used many layers of roughs to get the drawings right. This is often necessary
when you have two or more characters interacting, as in the scene of Bunny
pulling Iggy out of the swamp.
 The Production 231

Added Reaction Scene You can see in this scene the color of the eye has taken
on a little of the yellow of the background and the wings are
When the lab starts to crackle with electricity, the flying Eye-
slightly transparent. This keeps it feeling like it’s in the same
dea reacts by zipping to a safe place to hide. Then it peeks
color space.
out so it can observe the strange happenings. This scene
I brought down the contrast of the glowing machinery so
is for the audience; it cues them in as to how to feel about
it would stay in the background. I added the hanging wire on
what Iggy has set in motion.
the opposite side to help balance the composition. In terms of
continuity, the wire doesn’t appear in the wider shots of this
view but it worked well here. This scene is also isolated from
the other shots so you can’t compare them. That one shot has
it and then not the next shot doesn’t matter here.

Bunny Takes
This scene was a challenge because I didn’t want to go
too extreme with Bunny, who doesn’t get that extreme,
yet he’s really scared about what Iggy is up to, reading
Dr. Sackenstein’s secret laboratory journal. It might be a
little out of character.

When Bunny finds Sackenstein about to experiment

on Iggy he takes for a second time. This time I added
excitement through color circles in the background.
 232 The Production

Drawing Notes The intense saturation of the colors is a personal choice that made the scenes
more fun, as if they had been lit theatrically with gels over the lights. Gels are
Sometimes I felt that my line work was too light and I found a simple
transparent colored heat-resistant plastics used in front of lights in live action or
solution—duplicate the line layer. This worked very well and it didn’t require
theater to tint the light a certain color. I wanted to use color expressively rather
additional drawing.
than realistically. I felt it fit the fantasy tone of The Animator’s Eye film and its
In creating this book and film, I created several thousand drawings. My
theme of bringing ideas to life. Color adds life.
last book, Directing the Story, had 1900 drawings, but since it was a book on
The color progression goes from the stylized jungle greens with a threatening
storyboarding most of those drawings were rough. In this book I needed to clean
pink sky to the sudden downpour, which turns the scene into an ultraviolet night.
the majority of them up. So, in addition to my full-time job as a storyboard artist,
When we first enter the laboratory, it’s a glowing warm orange. But Bunny takes
I did a lot of drawing. The effort was worth it; I felt more confident and expressive
them back out into the stormy night.
in my line work. As Chuck Jones says, we’ve got over 100,000 bad drawings in us,
so I’m still throwing out the bad ones.

Camera Moves
One of the things that surprised me was that I ended up adding many small
camera moves during production. TVPaint makes it very easy to add a camera
move and it’s a great way to direct the viewer’s attention and add life to a scene.

Art Directing by Color Script

The color script actually served an unexpected time-saving function. I imported
the thumbnails into each scene, blew them up to full size and I had an instant
rough for the layout and color palette ready for my eyedropper.
 The Production 233

Iggy sneaks back into the lab but the warm colors of the
outer hallway revert back to the eerie aqua and ultraviolet
glows of the lab. Once the experiment starts, the colors
become more intense, suggesting lights and life itself.
The sack starts out a cool blue but quickly becomes fully
saturated, energized by the bright orange sparks.

Sackenstein comes to life chasing the Eye-dea when it

comes upon Iggy’s unconscious body. It now goes through
a range of emotions, morphing into different colors. The
method of color morphing consisted of creating a dissolve
between colors and then applying each step in the color
progression to the successive frames of Sackenstein.
 234 The Production

The color script is there as your guide; however, sometimes you may not
realize that some abrupt, unexpected color shifts occur between scenes.

Progressive Color Shift for Depth

As the alligator falls out of the castle in the final shot, I made his colors go from
bright and saturated to dull and desaturated to account for him falling into the
darkness below.
This happened when Iggy holds up the idea jar in close-up in one shot and
then we cut wide. The colors didn’t match so I added a glow over the jar in the
wide shot to help match the previous shot. Ironically the close-up shot was also
added as a correction. There would have been a jump between Iggy walking down
into the lab and the wide shot of Iggy holding up the idea jar by the table. The
insert close-up of Iggy holding the idea jar up creates a short time jump and eases
the transition between the two scenes—after I corrected the color jump.

Background Adjust for Sparks

In the scene where the sparks fly out of the switch, I had to lower the brightness
and saturation of the background so the sparks would feel luminescent. On the
original version of the background the sparks just looked like colored streaks and
not glowing sparks.

Depth of Field for Directing Attention
The jungle overlay was blurred to keep attention on the
main action. This also gives the illusion of a wider space
because of the depth-of-field simulation.
Production Help
The Creative Gremlins Attack
Creating an animated film is not a task for the dilettante.
It is an overwhelming amount of work, with “blood, sweat
and tears.” Well, maybe not the blood part. During production
of the animated film I had to actually write the book that is
documenting the film as well. At this point in the journey, I’m
finished with eight versions of storyboards, three-fourths of
the film, about 3000 finished frames, about 60,000 words of
rough drafts, maybe another couple of hundred illustrations
for the book itself, but the book deadline is too rapidly
approaching. Using another cliché, I’m between “the rock”
of self-imposed constraints and “the hard place” of externally
The Production 235
imposed constraints. I wanted this to be the best instructional
book that I could imagine to teach “how to and why to”
in creating an animated film, and my publisher, like any
excellent publisher would, wants it on deadline. Since we do
not live in a perfect animated world, something had to give.
Seeing the tremendous amount of work ahead of me,
I panicked. When that didn’t work, I got sick. This meant
I didn’t have to go to work, my day job, but it also meant
that I was confined to bed, exhausted, not able to sleep
and in pain. Not fun and not recommended to anyone.
Remember when you’re animating to eat your vegetables
and make sure you get out and go for a walk in the sunshine.
The Rescue!
At this point during the story there’s usually a dramatic
rescue. Well, my rescue wasn’t dramatic, but it did have a
great soundtrack. The first cavalry to come to the rescue was
that, before I got sick, I had finished most of the problem
formation and research and a lot of the experimentation
stages of the creative process. Many ideas were created and
now they were flying around in my unconscious. Anyway,
even though I was panicked or sick or just plain exhausted,
the work was still progressing. This gave me hope when
ideas landed lightly on my shoulder.
The second arrival of the cavalry was a simple checklist.
I had written about the value of using checklists. I had even
used them in the creation of The Animator’s Eye flipbook
movie. Why hadn’t I thought to use them in the production
of the book? For the future this would be a good question,
but right now I had to make some checklists. I had been
overwhelmed with the 60,000 unedited words awaiting a
pass for clear, coherent, understandable content. That was
actually the easy part.
The hard part was sifting through the literally thousands
of images and finding which ones still needed to be cleaned
up and where they all went in the text. I also had notes all
over the place that came literally and figuratively from all
over the place. Some were written during a lunch break at
work, or while parked on the side on the highway during my
commute, or scribbled out of a freshly woken dream.
The parachuting cavalry came in the form of a gift from
the heavenly muses—music, the soundtrack of life. I tuned
into iTunes. My first book was written during the time I lived
in Vancouver, Canada, working on Space Chimps. I’d get
 236 The Production
home, put dinner on and work on the book, have dinner and then go out in the
freezing cold all bundled up with my earbuds fashion accessory. Music heals me
deeper than the cold can reach.
So right now I’m taking another baby step of typing up this section, and then
I’m off to create some checklists of what is yet to be done and compile all the
notes to be incorporated into the final product. Wish me luck.
Software Procedures
My Software Toolset
Any production is shaped by the talent of the artists as well as the tools they have
available. I’d like to share my workflow in creating The Animator’s Eye movie.
Most of the actual production work was performed using TVPaint Animation.
I completed the storyboards and animation using TVPaint. TVPaint also allowed
me to import a selection from a QuickTime movie for rotoscoping.
The architectural backgrounds were modeled in Google SketchUp and then
exported into TVPaint. Once inside TVPaint, I painted the backgrounds using
TVPaint. I also like ArtRage Studio Pro for painting backgrounds. Of course, for
many artists, Photoshop is their program of choice.
The psychedelic images for the book were created with U&I Software’s
ArtMatic. This is a procedural program to create images. It’s very fun and easy,
or as deep as you want to go. I also love their MetaSynth for other-worldly sound
design.
My particle effects were also created within TVPaint. One exception was the
creation of a firework effect, which was a stock effect generated in Apple’s Motion.
This was composited in TVPaint.
For the storyboard animatics and final film I used Final Cut Pro. The finished
frames were exported as tiff files from TVPaint and imported into Final Cut Pro.
Remember to set the length of your still image import before you import the files
into Final Cut. For the animatics, I imported one-second clips for each storyboard
panel. For the final film I imported each frame as a one-frame clip; in this way I
could just drag the whole scene right into the timeline.
One set of software tools that is underrated is image browsing and cataloging
software. There were so many images to keep track of that this software
proved invaluable. My two go-to software packages for this were Lemkesoft’s
GraphicConverter and Microsoft’s Expression Media 2, which is now owned by
Phase One and called Media Pro 1.
GraphicConverter will allow you to browse the hierarchical folder structure of
your hard drive. This program excels at converting graphics files from one format
to another, as well as adjusting the look of images.
Media Pro 1 is a photo manager and catalog software. One very useful
feature is the ability to drag a folder full of other folders to its window and all of
the images within will be displayed. GraphicConverter only shows the current
window. This makes it possible to batch, rename and export selected files
spanning multiple folders. Both programs are indispensable for my workflow.
Creative Birth and Postpartum
Saying goodbye and letting go. This can be more difficult than you imagine. When
I was a sophomore in college I began working on a film called Guardian of the
Grin. It was 20 minutes long and a combination of cel animation, rotoscoping,
multiplane effects, and some real elements like lights and water. It was full sound
and full color. I probably spent over six months working on it over the summer
and during the school year. When it was over, it was received well. I was relieved
that I had completed it and I was proud of that achievement, but I experienced
something that I hadn’t anticipated—I was depressed. I was practically living the
film for that whole time; in fact, I was even dreaming about it. It was a loss to let
it go. In a very real sense you have created something living, just like a child being
born. Be prepared, and remember your next film will be even better because of all
the experience you’ve gained.
Postmortem
When a studio completes a project, in addition to all of the marketing and
distribution work, they do what is known as a postmortem. I know these terms
seem a little strange to be applied to animation but they’re useful metaphors.
A postmortem is like an autopsy, only in this case you’re not trying to find out why
someone died but what went wrong during the production, so you won’t make
the same mistakes on your next film.
I will now share with you what I learned during the making of the flipbooks. The
more honest you can be, the more you can learn from your mistakes. This to me is
one of the hallmarks of being a professional—continuing to improve your skills.
I should have hired a PA (production assistant) to keep track of everything.
This was limited by my budget constraint.
I tried to make constraint choices that would have the least impact on the
teaching content. After all, the goal was to produce a teaching book; the film was
secondary to that.
The film has many continuity mistakes. These are small ones and not harmful
to the story. One that almost got through was that Sackenstein was chasing the
Eye-dea up the ladder at the same time the alligator swallowed the Eye-dea. This
was more than a continuity error, it was a story flaw. These kinds of errors need to
be remedied.
A big mistake was that I took on too much. I knew the deadline was going to be
tight and I even negotiated for more time but it still wasn’t enough. I should have
made a much shorter film.
I cheated on inbetweens; had there been more time there would have been
more inbetweens. But, each inbetween meant more clean up and painting and
therefore a lot more work.
I didn’t have finalized model charts. I just knew the characters but not as well
as I thought I did. Their proportions changed often.
The second part of a postmortem is to document what you learned and what
things went well and could be useful for future projects.
 The Production 237

Complete Color
Here are full-color frames from the completed project.
238 The Production
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It’s your turn to play director. What would you do to
make it better, funnier, more dramatic and engaging? Would
you change colors, change the timing, change the story? You
can do this every time you watch any film. Think about how
you would improve it.
The Production 253
You can compare the earlier versions of the story, the
finished animatic and the final version of the complete film
on the DVD. Enjoy the wonderful score composed by Hans
Karl. You can hear more of his work on his website www.
hanskarlmusic.com
 The Evolution of Iggy and Scared Bunny 255

Chapter Eleven

The Evolution
of Iggy and
Scared Bunny

How These Two Figments of My

Imagination were Brought to Life
Who let these two in here? Where did they come from?
And how did they come to take over this book and film?
This is the story of those two madcaps, Iggy and Scared
Bunny.
256 The Evolution of Iggy and Scared Bunny

Just as Calvin and Hobbes are parts of Bill Watterman, Iggy and Scared Bunny
represent different sides of me. I didn't intend that to be the case—they just came
to me out of the blue. Later, I saw that they represented two sides of me. One side
was scared of the whole world and wanted to just be by myself and draw cartoons.
The other side was the exact opposite; it was impulsive and fearless. This shy
artist flew to Japan and London in order to direct a movie crew of over 200 people.
They're both part of me, although I wish I had a little more Iggy.
Scared Bunny has stage fright and Iggy has to coax him out to come on
adventures. Bunny's attitude is, "You go and tell me all about it." But Bunny is very
smart. Let's listen to a typical conversation between the two of them.

BUNNY: If all language is experientially based in metaphor, then the animator's

eye, which uses metaphor, looks at the inside of our mind as a visual language,
allowing shy people to communicate their desires unconsciously using pictures
instead of words.

IGGY: What in the world are you talking about? Let's go surfing!

Here is the evolution of the Iggy and Scared Bunny characters.

Iggy's replaced by a bat

 The Evolution of Iggy and Scared Bunny 257

Looking back, my unconscious sources were probably my Iggy and Scared Bunny Star in Storychasers
early experiences watching cartoons. Crusader Rabbit and his
tiger friend Rags were the first animated characters created
especially for television. Crusader Rabbit was a heroic rabbit
while, in an ironic twist, tiger Rags was a scaredy cat. Maybe
this is the origin of my characters. Later, I loved watching
Looney Toons with their pig and rabbit, Porky and Bugs. Rocky
and Bullwinkle was another favorite. Scared Bunny probably
has some connection to Rocky, the flying squirrel.

Iggy and Scared Bunny next became adventurers in a pitch

Iggy and Scared Bunny Star in a Scary Movie
I had the idea to make a DVD to teach filmmaking and
thought to use Iggy and Scared Bunny as examples for
demonstration purposes. I put them into a story called
“Abducted!” It starts with a dark and stormy night, with Iggy
racing to Bunny’s house, where Bunny’s watching television.
for an animated TV series idea called Storychasers. Iggy and
Scared Bunny were adventurers who traveled the world to
find stories. Invariably they get the story wrong by getting
involved. They’re mistaken for characters in the story, or
in some other way mix up the story. The stories would end
when they got everything sorted out.
Around that time I took a sculpture class with instructor
Kenny Tomkins. I had to choose a subject to sculpt, so naturally
I chose Iggy. The result was that I learned to sculpt and got a
sculpture of Iggy. I even tried making a 3D model of Iggy.
I tried to pitch Iggy and Bunny at the studios. One of the
studios already had too many pigs, so I transformed Iggy
into a guinea pig.

When I finished Iggy creating life in the lab, I realized

that there were comparisons between the version with
Iggy being chased by the sacks and the aliens chasing Iggy
from “Abducted!” I think we all have themes in us that we
gravitate toward.
 258 The Evolution of Iggy and Scared Bunny

Iggy and Scared Bunny Transform Again in Bat Bunny Iggy and Scared Bunny’s latest incarnation is here in The Animator’s Eye. Great
ideas don’t die, they just change and take on new forms.

Pitching Ideas
We’ve seen how animation is made, but did you ever wonder how TV shows
or movies get chosen to be made by a studio? The process is called pitching.
Advertising men used to be called pitch men because they were always pitching
ideas in order to sell them. Pitching your animation concept is really selling. Once
you come up with an idea, you need to sell it to someone or a studio that has the
funds to produce the project and the channels to distribute it.
The most important thing about a pitch is that you can convey the excitement
of why your idea is great in two sentences.
Here are some pitches that I created and the quick sum up of the concept.

Homeless Ghosts

You never know where you’ll find an idea. Bat Bunny was a new idea inspired by a
drawing my son did of a bat and bunny superhero. I made it into two characters, a
bat and a bunny and called it Bat Bunny Best Buds.

Lindy invites two homeless ghosts, Rose and her son Oz, to live with her
and her father. Together they form a happy if untraditional family, as Lindy
struggles through the joys and pitfalls inherent in coming of age. And by the
way, her dad can’t see the ghosts. (I created this with my writing partner Kim
Beyer-Johnson.)
 The Evolution of Iggy and Scared Bunny 259

The Bacteria Brothers Wishing to hear earth’s rock music, an alien musical group
crash-lands on earth. They tour the country playing music
while searching for a way home. In the meantime, they must
avoid the FBI and the fame of being in the spotlight.

The Jesters

Burt and Bob run Skinny Flats Last Gasp gas station, serving
up fuel to traveling bacteria. They’re two hypochondriac
germs desperately afraid of catching human emotions!

Band on the Run

JayJay is the last of a long line of prestigious court jesters.

There’s a riot at family get-togethers. JayJay’s problem is
that he’s not funny.
All of these were pitched to several studios but without
success.
The process is that you call a studio and ask to speak to
the development department. The creative executives are
the ones whose job it is to find new projects for the studio.
You’re likely to face a catch-22 because each studio has its
own rules about accepting unsolicited pitches. The only
advice I can give is to be persistent and network.

Chapter Twelve
The Animator’s
Eye
Beginner’s Corner: How I Got My
Animator’s Eye
I’d like to share how I got my animator’s eye. I believe
that, like most kids, I’ve always had one. How did I get into
animation? I’ve been drawing as long as I can remember. I
enjoyed all types of creative activities. I was untrained and
did it mainly for fun. Just look at children’s art from birth to
about six or seven. It’s spontaneous and full of life.
I remember liking to draw as a child and I remember being
encouraged when a teacher liked a tree that I drew in first grade.
We were outside drawing nature. I was a very shy and quiet
child who liked to explore everything. The encouragement
made me want to do it more because I got some attention for it.
So because I drew a lot, I slowly got better at it. That year I was
particularly into drawing birds for some reason.
The Animator’s Eye 261
Different years I was into drawing different themes.
My inspirational artists led to me imitating them. Mad
Magazine and Disney films fostered my love of drawing.
Big Daddy Roth’s monsters driving souped-up hot rods
were the thing in the 1960s. So I drew monsters and
race cars. Imitation is part of the learning process. Art
apprentices copy from the masters to learn their craft.
My favorite treasure was Preston Blair’s big yellow book
Animation. It was thin but chock-full of incredible
drawing and animating tips. So that was one of my
beginnings.
I remember exactly when the school system tried to
take away my animator’s eye. It was in second grade after I
transferred to a Catholic school. It was around Thanksgiving
and we had “art” class. The nun had us following step-
by-step instructions to draw a turkey out of circles and
triangles. Having already considered myself an “artist,” I
didn’t wait for the nun’s instructions and started drawing
a realistic turkey. The principal came by our class and I got
into so much trouble for not following instructions. I drew
my vision of a turkey. It was probably pretty bad, but it was
my vision. We had a roomful of turkeys that all looked the
same (the drawings, I mean). It was tragic because a whole
class of animator’s eyes died a little that day. This was not
an isolated event. Many artists have similar stories. Life
went downhill from there, but I kept my animator’s eye
protected.
While I couldn’t find the original turkey drawing, I found
one of a duck. You can see where the “art teacher” put her
grade mark prominently on the front of the drawing, totally
ruining the composition.
 262 The Animator’s Eye

There are actually two types of death to the animator’s eye. This mass
destruction of creativity in the name of “art” education was one of them. The
second one is more insidious and I had already succumbed to it. This happens
when we start to draw what we think things look like rather than what we really
see with our eyes, or our animator’s eye. When we draw what we think we see,
we begin drawing clichés. My turkey was probably a cliché, but at least it was
my cliché. What we lose is our ability to see the life of design, how it creates
balance, harmony, unity, rhythmic life and depth. And we lose our
spontaneity.
So, part of how I got my animator’s eye is more the story of how I retrained it to
see like a child again.
I felt that I had some success with watercolors once I understood that you
My Beginner’s Corner need to let the white of the paper show through. This was an automatic way for
the values to be correct.
I’d like to show you some of my early art work, to show the progress from early
problems to later, more successful solutions. I learned to paint with watercolors in
high school. At this time I had already been making films and animated films, but
I didn’t know what kind of artist I wanted to be yet.

Here’s another watercolor snow scene. You can see from these paintings that
my color sense was limited to what I thought I saw before me. It’s a very safe color
palette. I also needed to work on my composition. I cut off the horse’s head with
the top of the frame and the picture feels flat.

This first watercolor is a landscape completed on location at Yellowstone

National Park. It’s not terrible but not terribly exciting either.
 The Animator’s Eye 263

In this composition sketch I’ve exaggerated the ground

plane and lowered the horse’s head. The composition feels
much more dynamic and spatial.

In this version of the same scene, a year or two later, I’m

trying to utilize more color. I’m totally out of control with
wild color that’s more expressionist than impressionist!

I had wanted to try acrylics and oils but didn’t have

much success with them. This painting was intended to be
in realistic style. It turned out more impressionistic. I’m only
using about three values in the painting: light, medium and
dark. Three values might work for a poster-type image but
not a representational painting.

Here’s another one from the same time period. In this

This first painting was another attempt at a realistic
landscape painting. There’s a little more value control but
again the painting is very flat.
one the composition is much more interesting than the
previous one. The red swirls lead your eye around and
through the painting.
In looking back at some of my early paintings I discover
something interesting. So many of them were symmetrically
balanced and flat looking. I wish that I had known Walt
Stanchfield back then; he could have straightened me out.
 264 The Animator’s Eye

(I mean, he could have helped me not be straightened out, and added some
interesting angles!)
 The Animator’s Eye 265

I also became very interested in surrealism and tried my

own attempts at it. Most of them were derivative and not
very original.

I’ve drawn over them in red so you can see how much I
straightened everything out in a symmetrical pattern. Yuck!

In this painting I’ve overcome the symmetry a little, but

now all the shadow areas look solarized. They’ve got too
much color and too high a value.
266 The Animator’s Eye

I had much more success with my own brand of fantasy art inspired by Disney,
The Hobbit, Brian Froud, Alice in Wonderland and Tudor architecture.
The paintings I’ve shown so far were all completed in New York, where I
lived before going to work for Disney in California. When I arrived at Disney
I began taking all of the classes that I could to improve my skills. There were
two that changed my life and my art. The first was Walt Stanchfield’s gesture
drawing class. Check out his two-book series, Drawn to Life. The second was a
class on color by Judy Crook. It was as if I was seeing color for the first time.
Armed with the knowledge from her class, I went out with friends during our
lunch hours to paint watercolors. We called ourselves the High Noon Watercolor
Society, which included Ed Gombert, Bill Perkins, Dan Cooper, Vance Gerry and
myself. You can see the transformation of my work that good information can
have. I went from having no sense of tonal control to images filled with light that
captured a sense of place and time.
 The Animator’s Eye 267

I also went back to trying acrylics and here are some of

the results.
 268 The Animator’s Eye

Make Movies!
Everybody has to Make Student Films…
When I was 13, I got my first movie camera. It was a small Kodak Super 8 without
a single frame release. I used it to direct my friends in our own versions of Star
Trek, Frankenstein, The Mummy and Jekyll and Hyde. I learned a few things about
moviemaking, but mostly we had fun. I felt our constraints were crushing. Three
minutes of film per roll and you had to wait a week to get it developed. And no
sound. In retrospect, this was a good thing, because it forced us to tell our story
visually. This is the heart of moviemaking—telling the story with pictures.

I also tried making animated films. Here is a series of frames I rotoscoped of

me surfing. I made the wave a lot bigger in the animated version. In animation we
don’t have to stick to reality.
 The Animator’s Eye 269

It was sophomore year when I decided to study

animation in college and over the summer I worked on my
epic, Guardian of the Grin. Here are some of my storyboards
from the film.
270 The Animator’s Eye

This film was 22 minutes long with an accompanying tape soundtrack.

Here are some of my rough animation drawings; as you can see, the animation
is pretty primitive. At this point I had never heard of the principles of animation.
The most instruction that I received was from Preston Blair’s classic Cartoon
Animation.
 The Animator’s Eye 271

These are some images from the final film.

272 The Animator’s Eye

These are images from other films that I completed as a student. This was
a time to experiment, explore and learn new things. I had to improvise a fake
camera single-frame release made from a lever and string in order to shoot one
frame at a time. I also made my own primitive multiplane setup. On one shot I
had a watercolor background and foreground, and between them I put a glass pan
with water to get the look of water drops onto a pond. It worked well.

How I Learned a Little about Computer Animation

Everybody is doing computer animation these days and I’d like to share my
thoughts about learning it. First of all, read the manuals! There are tons of time-
saving and creative tricks you might miss if you don’t know what your software
can do or how to do it.
Check the web for tutorials—there are lots of free tutorials out there for most
programs. Watch them and try out what they suggest. When the time comes that

you’re an expert and have discovered something new, then
give back to the community. Post your own tutorials. Also post
your appreciation. All creators like to know that others find
value in their work. Particularly, if they’re sharing it for free.
If you’re really serious about learning computer
animation, find a mentor, take a class or enroll in a school
that specializes in it. Find out who their instructors are and
what they’ve done.
Try learning origami; it will help with your understanding
of shapes in space.
Develop an inventive attitude. Filmmaking has always
been part art, part business and part invention. When you
make an animated film, you’re inventing a world down
to the last nut and bolt. Learn to develop your inventive
attitude. If you face an obstacle, look for ways to overcome
it. It’s all part of developing your animator’s eye. Animators
should be inventors. As they say, “Necessity is the mother of
invention.” (They never tell you who the daddy is…)
Common Beginner Problems to Watch
Out for
Think about having to watch someone else’s home movies.
Usually, there’s no editing, it’s too long, there’s no coverage
of scenes so they don’t hook up, there’s no attention to shot
beginnings and endings, no attention to continuity, often an
unsteady camera that loves to zoom in and out and finally,
and worst of all, a complete lack of story. Don’t do that to
your audience.
REMEMBER: Don’t ask, “Am I good enough?” Just do it and then
ask, “How can I make it better, what do I need to work on?”
Creativity
Now that you’re not a beginner anymore, I want to share
some ideas about creative paradigms.
The Animator’s Eye 273
What is a paradigm and who cares if one shifts? Is it like an
earthquake? In a sense, yes, it is exactly like an earthquake,
as the whole world becomes radically different. The old
rules no longer apply.
Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1962) defined a paradigm shift as a change in
the basic assumptions of a theory of science. A paradigm
is the set of basic assumptions that the world of belief
rests upon. A paradigm shift reframes the whole world. For
example, the shift from a flat earth to a round one.
This is kind of abstract so let’s look at some real-life
paradigm shifts. Who creates a shift of this type? Most often
it is by visionaries.
Anybody See a Visionary?
What does it mean to have an animator’s eye? Is it different
from a photographer’s eye or a painter’s eye or a writer’s
eye? Each works in different media and underneath it all
they are similar. I believe having any of these eyes has to do
with being a visionary. What is a visionary?
“Of or pertaining to a vision or visions; characterized
by, appropriate to, or favorable for, visions. Affected
by phantoms; disposed to receive impressions on the
imagination; given to reverie; apt to receive, and act upon,
fancies as if they were realities. Existing in imagination only;
not real; fanciful; imaginary; having no solid foundation;
as, visionary prospect; a visionary scheme or project. One
whose imagination is disturbed; one who sees visions or
phantoms. One whose imagination overpowers his reason
and controls his judgment; an unpractical schemer; one
who builds castles in the air; a daydreamer.”
(Visionary: http://www.brainyquote.com/words/vi/
visionary237713.html)
It actually doesn’t sound too good, does it? In fact, in the
past visionaries were often persecuted or killed, believed to
be witches or in touch with evil powers.
However, if we look at some of the visionaries of history
we may find ourselves in pretty good company. Where
would we be without Thomas Edison? In the dark. He tried
over 11,000 attempts at the lightbulb because he believed
in the vision of his imagination. Albert Einstein certainly
dealt with things existing only in his imagination. He used
to imagine himself on a train chasing light beams. The
implications and applications of his mathematical vision of
 274 The Animator’s Eye
E = mc2 changed our world forever. Not only scientists, but artists and writers can
be visionaries.
“Other visionaries simply imagine what does not yet exist but might some day,
as some forms of visioning (or gazing) provide a glimpse into the possible future.
Therefore, visioning can mean seeing in a utopian way what does not yet exist
on earth—but might exist in another realm, such as the ideal or perfect realm as
imagined or thought. Examples are Buckminster Fuller in architecture and design,
Malcolm Bricklin in the automobile industry, and some of the pioneers of personal
computing such as Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak. Some people use mathematics
to make visionary discoveries in the nature of the universe. In that sense, a
visionary may also function as a secular prophet. Some visionaries emphasize
communication, and some assume a figurehead role in organizing a social group.”
(Visionary: Wikipedia.com)
The creators of the television series Star Trek imagined a little hand-held
communicator that could reach a starship in orbit. This was decades before the
cell phone was created. Jules Verne and Leonardo Da Vinci were both artists who
imagined scientific marvels like submarines and helicopters. Aldous Huxley’s Doors
of Perception, Salvador Dali’s paranoiac-critical method, Pablo Picasso, all were
visionaries. James Joyce wrote literature in which he punned in multiple languages.
Stan Lee created a whole alternate universe with his unique comic marvels. He
asked a simple question no one dared before: “What if the superhero, Spiderman,
was a nerdy teenager?” and grounded the story in real teenage emotions.
George Méliès was a pioneering filmmaker who sought to learn about
everything. He studied old languages, photography, magic, performance,
showmanship, stunts, painting, drawing, piano, storytelling, movement, invention,
literature. Méliès wanted to make movies, so he converted a movie projector into a
camera. He shot his movies but later realized he didn’t have a projector to project
his footage. He used everything he learned in his films. Magic performance taught
him visual effects and illusions. He painted his own backgrounds. He even did his
own stunts. Having a real understanding of the art of film, he even played piano
while filming to give his performers a sense of rhythm to act to.
The field of animation itself has produced its own visionaries. What would
animation be without the wonderful and terrifying world of Snow White? This
existed first in Walt Disney’s imagination, and then he and his talented artists
brought his vision to the light of day for the rest of us to see and enjoy in the
form of theme parks, memorable characters, and wonderful stories with classic
music. Walt truly was an entrepreneur, businessman, entertainer, inventor, artist,
cartoonist, visionary and animator. However, it is not true that he drew all the
Disney cartoons himself. Believe it or not, the public, myself included, had this
perception. What the visionaries all had in common was that they expanded the
vision of what’s possible with animation.
Winsor McCay and his dinosaur, and Max Fleischer and the creatures of his
inkwell were visionaries. Brad Bird’s The Incredibles and Eric Goldberg’s genie
from Aladdin were first products existing in their own imaginations only, brought
to life through their hard work and shared with the world. Miyazaki has almost
created his own genre of imaginative, heartfelt films, like Kiki’s Delivery Service,
My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. Their imaginations
have enriched our imagination and the frontier of what was once impossible is
now part of our world view.
Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame offers his take on how his characters
came to life. “When I first came up with the characters, Calvin was little more than
a mischievous loudmouth and Hobbes was simply his somewhat more sensible
friend. As the characters expanded, Calvin’s and Hobbes’ personalities became
more like my own. Their worlds and actions are fictitious, sometimes the opposite
of what I would say or do, but their emotional centers are very true to the way I
think. Hobbes got all my better qualities (and a few quirks from our cats), and
Calvin got my ranting, escapist side. Together, they’re pretty much a transcript of
my mental diary. I didn’t set out to do this, but that’s what came out, and frankly
it’s pretty startling to reread these strips and see my personlity exposed so plainly
right there on paper. I meant to disguise it better.” (The Complete Calvin and
Hobbes, Bill Watterson, Vol. 1, page 13).
Jeremiah Zagar was a visionary who covered whole buildings with murals, mirror,
tile, drawings and glass, turning them into objects of beauty. They say architecture is
frozen music. Maybe murals are frozen animation. Looking into his life might give us
an idea why an artist creates and why we artists are driven to animate.
The short film Paints on Ceiling, about Jeremiah, describes why he became an
artist. His mother saw him drawing on the ceiling and screamed. He felt that if he
could get that kind of response, that’s what he wanted to do.
There often is an obsessive quality to art, that it must be done over and over
to get it right. This is certainly true with animation. It may have to do with things
buried in the past but it is also often the most alive thing in our lives right now,
which brings aliveness to others in the form of rich, emotional entertainment,
aesthetic experience, and/or instruction and information. Check out In a Dream,
a film by Jeremiah Zagar, 2009, Indiepix films DVD.
On another front it was a group of computer scientists with animator’s eyes
who had the imaginative vision that computers could actually create moving
imagery. Dr. Ed Catmull wanted to be an animator but couldn’t draw that well.
What he did know about was computer science, and he had the vision to believe
that computers could create striking art and animation. He and the others followed
this vision to bring the world the first completely computer-generated film, Toy
Story. I was actually one of the artist “guinea pigs” who got to test their systems.
There were also the business leaders who believed in this animator’s
eye computer vision. Dr. Alexander Schure, founder of New York Institute of
Technology (NYIT), had two passions—technology and animation. He created the
Computer Graphics Lab in the 1970s and brought scientists together with artists
to create the tools the artists would need to create animation on the computer.
 The Animator’s Eye 275

To accomplish his goal he created a computer
laboratory and a functioning animation studio. My first
job was working on their film, Tubby the Tuba. It was an
animated musical comedy. Unfortunately, the music was
mediocre and there was no comedy. But, the lab brought
forth computer creations that were the showstoppers at
SIGGRAPH for years to come.
Lance Williams, another scientist at the Lab, wrote a
sci-fi script, The Works, which we began working on between
commercial production. In 1980, we calculated that, using
all the available computer power that we had at the time,
The Works would need 20 years of rendering time in order
to premiere in the year 2000. (The real problem was that we
would have been upstaged in 1995 with the release of Toy
Story.)
Eventually, when computers got smaller, faster and
cheaper, the expensive dinosaur computers of the lab in
their air-conditioned rooms could no longer compete.
My Macbook Pro laptop has more speed, memory and
power than the whole Computer Graphics Lab had in their
mainframe servers. Several scientists eventually left the Lab
to create Industrial Light & Magic’s (ILM’s) digital editing
process and later left ILM to create a very small company
called Pixar.
You can find more on the creative process on the DVD.
color mixer and my knowledge of color got me onto the
day crew.
As the film progressed, they needed more inbetweeners
and they had a test for three positions. The test took a full
day but I was one of the three accepted. Unfortunately, I
learned that, even though I had graduated with a degree
from an art school, I couldn’t draw. I rapidly set about
to correct that oversight. I found a mentor and began
drawing and practicing animating. I drew hundreds of
figures from Muybridge’s book, The Human Figure in
Motion.
My break out of inbetweening came when I successfully
created animation using Ed Catmull’s Tween system.
This was a very early computer system that generated
inbetweens from key frames. The limitation was that you
had to number each line for each key frame. It was limiting
for classical cartoon animation but excelled for cinegraphics
and limited animation. I was promoted to director and our
team completed about one hundred commercials using the
system.
One day, out of the blue, Disney came calling. It was right
after The Little Mermaid and they were recruiting. I thought,
“I’ll go on the interview, I don’t have anything to lose.” Here
is the portfolio that I used to get hired at Disney.

Job Tips
How to Get a Job and Keep Learning
When I was a child I dreamed of working for Disney. I went
off to college and stumbled onto an animation class. That’s
what I wanted to do. My first professional experience was
working for a tiny company in lower Manhattan. They had
a unique process of animating and we won awards for
several television commercials. I wore many hats there,
including animating, art directing, painting backgrounds
and painting cels.
When I graduated college, I sent my portfolio off to
Disney and didn’t get in. After painting houses for my
first summer out of college, it was sheer chance that I
knew someone who knew someone who was working at
a new animation studio on the campus of NYIT. I started
painting cels on the night crew. Luckily, they needed a
276 The Animator’s Eye

The next thing I knew, I proposed to my wife and asked
her to go to California with me. It was delayed gratification
but I finally got to work for Disney during their second
golden age.
I began in Disney’s story department and my first film
was Aladdin. Disney offered me many opportunities. It was
there that I continued the teaching and mentoring that had
begun when I taught a cutout animation class at a summer
camp.
The Animator’s Eye 277
Disney created its infamous “Gong Show,” where
employees could pitch ideas for future projects. I thought,
here is an opportunity. Many people would love to have
the chance to pitch their ideas to Michael Eisner, Jeffrey
Katzenberg, Peter Schneider and Roy Disney. So I forced
myself to come up with ideas and pitches for every Gong
Show. The result is that I have the most accepted ideas for
future projects.
One of those ideas was Pomp and Circumstance, starring
Donald Duck as Noah’s assistant. It was his job to get all
the animals on the Ark. One day they announced that the
director had left to work for another studio so they were
putting it on the shelf. Here was an opportunity and I took
it. I requested that I be given the chance to direct it. Four
months later my request was granted and I directed my first
project for Disney.
My silent storytelling on Pomp led me to getting the job
directing Piglet’s Big Movie. It’s always about connections
and being seen.
Once I was working at Disney and was in the Animation
Guild, there were more avenues and network connections
to find new work. This led to jobs at Warner Brothers,
Universal, Sprite Animation and Vanguard.
My latest adventure is with the wonderful crew at Blue
Sky Studios, in their story department.
Lessons Learned about Job Searching
Looking back over my job history I wish that I had been
more able to create opportunities for myself. When an
opportunity presented itself, I was able to go for it but cold
calls were very difficult for me. This was the limitation of
my shy artist side. I also should have talked to more people
and networked more. You can’t get a job if you don’t know
about it, right? And if they don’t know about you they can’t
hire you. One way to get noticed and build a network of
professional colleagues is to create your own blog and link
to other bloggers. Ask if they can link to your blog.
Build and cherish your network of friends. Animation
is a very small world and you’ll probably cross paths with
people several times over the course of your career.
There are two types of people who do well in animation.
One is those who have a lot of talent. The other is those who
have talent but also have moxie. I think they sometimes go
further. It’s up to you to decide your path. You also need to
 278 The Animator’s Eye

honestly assess your own talent. Don’t just rely on one or two people’s opinions.
Every person and job is different. If you draw in a Disney style, you might not get a
job on The Simpsons and vice versa.
The final piece of advice is to have as much persistence in your job search as
you do in completing all of those thousands of drawings that animation entails.
I want to wish you luck, but I think luck is something that you have to create for
yourself. So, may I wish that you do it well.
Time to Say Farewell to Iggy and Scared Bunny
Roller Coaster of Emotions
Dealing with changes! Even though your first response might be Ahhhh! Change is
a part of life. Change is a verb—it’s alive. Better to be an impulsive pig or a scared
bunny than a zombie.
an artist when all eyes are on your work? The way to ride the roller coaster is to
become a professional.
The coolest thing about drawing for a living is you get to say, “Well, back to
the drawing board,” and really mean it. So, I wish you well, and I’m going back to
the drawing board. Only go into animation if you can’t see doing anything else
and are passionate about putting in all of the work it requires. If you meet these
criteria, then welcome to the world of the animator’s eye, a return to childhood
where work becomes play. If the animation bug bites and you succumb,
remember that at the bottom of Pandora’s box, filled with all the evils that she
unleashed upon the world, was hope.
I wish you a wonderfully imaginative animated life and much success with
your own projects. Thanks for coming on the journey. Oh, by the way, Iggy and
Bunny say “Goodbye.”

Keeping the Dream Alive!

No one is born with an animator’s eye but if you have the passion and work at it,
you can achieve wonders. Plan that you will hit creative plateaus continuously
throughout your career. Sometimes you’ll hit setbacks. Other times, all the past
research, knowledge and practice will pay off and it will click and you’ll jump to
new heights. Just as in Iggy’s Roller Coaster Theory of Storytelling, the journey of
being an animator is an emotional roller coaster. So how do you deal with being
 Appendix 279

Evaluating Changes
Appendix EVALUATE the change by remembering your constraints.
• Does it serve the story’s drama?
• Does it make it better?
• Do you have the time/money to make the change?
• Pocahontas digging for gold in Virginia because it was in the pipeline.
• If it unravels everything else, is it worth it?
• Is it your job to make the change?
For example, I asked story artist Maroni Talyor to see if he could help add any
gags. This request for help led to a reevaluation of whether my story was telling
the theme that I wanted. No, it wasn’t. I changed Iggy from being chased to
chasing. This allows his expression to change from one note— scared—to a wide
range of emotions. Painful to have to redo it, but worth it.

How to Improve Appendix Principles

Checklist of Animation Principles

1 Draw only the silhouette shape: anti-coloring book.
2 Draw with your other hand. ANIMATION WORKING METHOD
3 Pretend you’re a critic watching the film. • Straight ahead or post to pose
4 Pitch film while you watch: are your ideas matching what you see? • Use and don’t abuse cycles
5 Don’t be afraid to throw out ideas or experiments (but don’t actually throw
them out, keep a file). Animation Principles for Believable Physics
6 With characters on a separate level try adjusting brightness, saturation, hue • Real “normal world” physics
and contrast till they fit into the background. • Law 1. Inertia
7 Think in verbs. But take a breath in between. • Law 2. Force = Mass x Acceleration—Slow in & out
8 Many ways to do any one action—find the most interesting or funniest. • Law 3. Every action has an equal & opposite reaction
9 Keep it clear, and show the audience where to look with all the tools at your • Gravity
disposal. • Timing for believability, clarity & excitement
10 Design everything. • Stretch—illusion of speed to maintain mass
 280 Appendix

• Squash—illusion of impact to maintain mass

• Anticipation
Webography
• Path of action
• Arcs
• Overlapping actions
• Secondary actions
• Contrast—opposing actions
• Contrast—reversing lines of action

Exceptions for Toon Physics

• Defying gravity and other forces
• Reversing entropy
• Changing the elasticity or stiffness of a material
• Animationarchive.org
Animation Principles for Believable Emotions ASFIA-Hollywood Animation Archive collection of animation history.
• Blackwingdiaries.blogspot.com
• Animated inner life
Great examples of drawing and animation hosted by Jenny Lerew, story artist.
• Extremes
• Budplant.com
• Takes and double takes
Great source for art, comic and animation books.
• Show the change of expression
• AnimationMeat.com
• Gestures and line of action
“Wanna really learn something about animation?” They have a wonderful
collection of links to many animation websites.
Art Direction Staging Principles for Clarity • Animationmentor.com
• Appeal Animation mentor is an online school that specializes in teaching 3D animation
• Anticipation with Maya. It’s taught by professional animators working in the industry.
• Extremes • AWN.com
• Exaggeration Animation World Network publishes Animation World Magazine.
• Staging • Cartoonbrew.com
• Design principles: balance, position, dominance, unity, alternation and Animation historian, Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi’s site, Cartoon Brew is the
repetition, contrast and similarity, symmetry and rhythm. place to go for the latest in animation news.
• Characterdesign.blogspot.com
Art Direction Color and Light Principles Character Design blog is a source for interviews and galleries of animation art
• Balance the color wheel in frame or within a sequence and more.
• Minimize your color palette • Coldhardflash.com
• Use emotional color to support your scene This site is devoted to the world of Flash animation.
• Creativetalentnetwork.com
Editing for Drama and Clarity Principles Created by award-winning animator, Tina Price, the CTN is an online
community for the world’s leading creators of animated films.
• Cut to the chase—remove passage work • Jasonryananimation.com
• Motivate your cuts—don’t cut randomly Jason Ryan animation offers tutorials and online classes on animation. His
• Picture tells the story, sound adds life and music adds emotion. tutorials give an excellent understanding of force and timing in animation.
• Johnkstuff.blogspot.com
And the Most Important Principle John Kricfalusi is the creator of the Ren & Stimpy Show. His blog is a treasure
• Make it alive! trove of drawing analysis of animation and comics. John, Thank you.

• Penciltestdepot.com
Jamaal Bradley’s Pencil Test blog is “the blog for people who love pencil tests.”
• Rainplace.net
Rainplace is described as “Life’s Journey from an Inner Perspective.”
• Sevencamels.blogspot.com
Temple of the seven golden camels is Mark Kennedy’s blog which he describes
as “An online repository for eveything I know about storyboarding, filmmaking,
drawing, and animation but mostly storyboarding. Also, curses lifted, relics
appraised and fishing licenses sold Tuesdays 10-2.”
• SpeakingofAnimation.com
Speaking of Animation are four animators who offer informative podcasts.
• Splinedoctors.blogspot.com
“Animators by day, animation teachers by night.”
• Spungella.blogspot.com
Spungella is an animation website hosting workshops and animation links.
• Stuartngbooks.com
Great source for art, comic and animation books.
Appendix 281
• Ted.com
Technology, Entertainment and Design is a global set of conferences hosting
speakers from a diverse collection of subjects. Always surprising, often
humorous and truly inspirational.
• Drawingboard.org
The Drawing Board is a forum about drawing for animation, comics,
storyboards, illustration and more. You can post your own work and get
feedback.
• Yetischool.com
Yeti school is the online storyboard school from industry pro, Moroni Taylor.
Moroni is also the creator of Yeti vs. Gnome web animation series hosted on
YouTube.
In addition, many artists host their own blogs filled with inspirational work.
Many provide links to other artists. When you make comments please make them
constructive, as this helps the community rather than giving it a bad name.

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Blair, Preston (1994) Cartoon Animation. Walter Foster.
Beiman, Nancy (2007) Prepare to Board. Focal Press.
Cervone, Tony (2000) Animating the Looney Tunes Way. Walter Foster.
Cheeseman-Meyer, Jason (2007) Vanishing Point: Perpective for
Comics from the Ground Up. Impact.
Collins, Jim & Hansen, Morten T. (2011) Great by Choice. New York.
Dancyger, K. (2002) The Techniques of Film and Video Editing. Focal
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Gawandethe, Atul (2011) Checklist Manifesto: How to get things
right. Picador.
Gilland, Joseph (2011) Elemental Magic, Volume 1 & 2: The
Technique of Special Effects Animation. Focal Press.
Glebas, Francis (2008) Directing the Story: Professional Storytelling
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Goldberg, Eric (2008) Character Animation Crash Course. Silman-
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Halas, John (2009) Timing for Animation. Focal Press.
Johnson, Steven. (2011) Where Good Ideas Come From. New York.
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Sound Cartoons to 3-d Animation. Three Rivers Press.
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Mateu-Mestre, Marcos (2010) Framed Ink: Drawing and
Composition for Visual Storytellers. Design Studio Press.
Mattesi, Michael D. (2006) Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for
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O’Donnell, Mark (1986) Elementary Education: An Easy Alternative
to Actual Learning. Faber & Faber.
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Powell, John (2010) How Music Works. Little Brown.
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Index
Note: Page numbers with “f” denote figures; “b” boxes.

A Animation noir, 134 Balance, in drawing, 52–55

Absynth, 180–181 Animation Timer iPhone app, 85b Ball, David, 17–18
Acceleration, 84 Animation:Master, 12 Band on the Run, 259
Adam and Eve story, 35, 37 Animator’s eye, beginner’s corner, 261–268 Band-in-a-Box, 180
Adams, Ansel, 128 Animator’s Eye, The Barbetta, Dante, 67, 74
Adobe, 12 character-driven story, 186 Bass, 179
Aerial perspective, 129 constraints on, 186 Beats per minute, 178
Aladdin, 61, 127 efforts into, 213–215 Beethoven, 181
Alice in Wonderland, 117, 187, 266 genesis of idea, 185–186 Beginner problems, 273
Alice Stuck in Wonderland, 189–190 moviemaking staples, 187 Belight Software’s Image Tricks, 46
Amazon.com, 182 process, 188 Benton, Thomas Hart, 117
Anderson, Ken, 117 refinements, 215 Best animation book, 185
Angles, 44 storyboards with Iggy and Bunny, 192–213 Big Bang, The, 190
Animals in Motion, 100 Anime Studio, 12 Bird, Brad, 274
Animation Anticipation, 74–75 Blair, Mary, 117
exaggeration in, 72 for clarity, 104 Blair, Preston, 30, 100, 105–106, 261, 270
paths of action, 72–74 Apple Blend layers, 159–160
persistence of vision, 66–67 Final Cut X, 178 Blender 3D, 12
phi phenomenon, 66–67 Logic software, 180 Blinks, 103
pose to pose vs. straight ahead, 68 Motion, 166, 169, 236 Bokeh backgrounds, 141–154
process, 9–11, 9f–10f, 67 Arcs, 73 Borgman, Jim, 105
work big to small, 69–70 of the body, 73 Bossom, Jack, 1
Animation, 100, 261 from centrifugal force, 73 Bouncing ball, 75–77
Animation law Art directing, 232 exercise, 67
anticipation, 74–75 by color script, 232–235 Bradley, Scott, 180
follow-through, 78 ArtMatic, 236 Breathing, 103
loco motion, 93–94 ArtRage Studio, 128, 148 Bricklin, Malcolm, 274
motion analysis, 88–92 ArtRage Studio Pro, 236 Building-block approach, for architecture,
opposing actions, 74 Autodesk, 12 136
overlapping actions, 78 Avery, Tex, 104 Burton, Tim, 117, 138
pull of gravity, 75–77
rotoscoping, 86–88 B C
secondary actions, 78–79 Back to the Future, 1 Camera fielding, 125
stretching and squashing, 79–83 Backgrounds, 123, 147–154 Camera moves, 232
timing, 83–84 adjustment, 234 Canfield, Jack, 20
toon physics, 85–99 Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Cardone, Tom, 117
12 Principles of Disney’s Nine Old Men, 65–72 Reading Plays, 17–18 Caricatures, 44–50
Animation: Learn How to Draw Animated Cartoons, 30 Bacteria Brothers, The, 259 Cartoon Animation, 270
 286 Index

Cartwright, Randy, 85b Craft, The, 124 Drawing

Catmull, Ed, 274 Creating worlds angles, 44
Characters, creation of, 18–19 art direction, 117 balanced, 52–55
Chases, 127 background, 147–154 basics, 32–37
Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things bokeh backgrounds, 141–154 caricatures, 32, 44–50
Right, 10 castle interior, 136–137 cleanup, 60
Checklists, 10–11, 227 clarity of staging, 118–119 cloth, 50–52
Chonin, Tenny, 1 colors. See Colors constructing, 37–39
Chord, 179 compositions, 121–123 contrast straights against curves and bulges against
Chromatic light, 131 designing style guides, 120–121 dents, 38
Circles, 118 figure/ground relationships, 119 flat style, 32
Click track, 178 lab exploration, 135–136 force, 30
Cloth, drawing, 50–52 Mad Lab design, 137–141 gestures, 34, 39–44
Clowns/clowning, 19–20 painting technique, 142 notes, 232
Collage style, 120 with shape and color, 118 own style, 31–32
Color, 130 stage production, 123–126 practice, need for, 29, 72
Color script, 134–135, 232–235 staging, 123–126 proportions, 46
Color wheel, 132–134 style guides, 119–120 realistic style, 31
Colors, 118, 127–134 styles and design, 120 scribbling, 30
“coming to light,” 130 visualization, 157 and sculpting, 55–62
animation noir, 134 Creativity, 273 small drawings, and silhouette, 31
chromatic light, 131 Criticism, 62, 182 and thinking, 29
completed project, 237–253 Crook, Judy, 266 tracing, 60
hue, 129–130 Cycles, 70 Drawn to Life, 266
mother color, 130–131 Drucker, Mort, 45
painting technique, 142 D Duck Amuck, 20
reflected light, 131–133 da Vinci, Leonardo, 121, 274
saturated color on a gray ground, 131 Dali, Salvador, 274 E
and temperature, 130 Daumier, Honoré, 45 Earle, Eyvind, 117
unbalanced wheel, 133–134 Davis, Jack, 45 Ed, Edd n Eddy, 32
unified colors, 130–131 Deceleration, 84 Edison, Thomas, 273–274
value, 128, 141–142 Depth of field, 235 Editing, 170–174
value passage, 128–129 Despicable Me, p220 color correction, 176–178
value reversal, 128–129 Detour Theory of Creativity, 24 cutting rules, 174–178
Comedy, 122–123 Digicel’s Flipbook, 38 shot breakdown, 170–172
Complementary colors, 132 Digital animation, 158 shot framing, 173–174
Compositions, 121–123 Digital Performer, 180 Einstein, Albert, 273–274
postproduction, 157–169 Directing the Story, 23, 185 Elder, Will, 45
Computer animation, 10, 272–273 Disney, 32, 261 Elementary Education, 85
Computer graphics, 10 Disney, Walt, 18, 274 Emotion wheel, 105–111
Constraints, tackling, 185 Disney style, 120 Enabnit, Merlin, 130
Construction, 37–39 Dominance, 122 Entropy, 72
vs. sculpting, 38 Doodling, 33 Exaggeration, 72
Contrast, 122 Double takes, 104 Experimental Studies on the Seeing of Motion,
Cool light, 134 stages, 104 66
Cooper, Dan, 117, 266 Drama, 122 Exposure sheets, 83, 113–114
 Index 287

Expression Media 2, 236 Gray, 131 K

Eyes, 103 Guggenheim, Ralph, 24 Keane, Glen, 32, 70
focus on, 104 Keaton, Buster, 157
H Kuhn, Thomas, p220
F Hamlet and the Heckler, 189
Fairytales, 16 Harmony, 122, 179 L
Fall, 76–77 Hash, 12 Law of universal gravitation, 71
Fantasia, 17 Hermann, Bernard, 179 Layout, 123–126
Fantasia 2000, 17 Hirschfeld, Al, 45 Learning exercises, 67–68
Fantasies, 16–17 Hobby Japan, 121 Leave It to Beaver, 106
Figure/ground relationships, 119 Homeless Ghosts, 258 Lee, Stan, 274
Film festivals, 182 Harmony Assistant, 180 Lemkesoft, GraphicConverter, 236
Final Cut Pro, 157, 236 How Music Works, 84 Life of a Flour Sack, The, 39–44
Final Cut X, 178 Hue, 129–130 Lighting, 126
Finale, 180 Human Figure in Motion, The, 275 mood lighting, 164–165
Flash and After Effects, 12 Huxley, Aldous, 274 Line of action principle, 30
Fleischer, Max, 274 Line work, and background, 142
Flocking, 158 Linklater, Richard, 16
I Lip sync, 103, 111–113
Flour sack, 217–227
Ice Age, 173–174 timing, 113–114
exercise, 67, 105
Iggy and Scared Bunny, 5–6, 192–213 Loco motion, 93–94
Flour Sack of Frankenstein, The, 189
evolution of, 254–259 Logic software, 180
Foley, 180
in Bat Bunny, 258
Foliage, 132
star in a scary movie, 257 M
Follow-through, 78
star in Storychasers, 257 Mad Magazine, 29, 45, 261
Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators, 30
Illusion Mad-science laboratory of animation, creation of, 11f
Four-legged walks, 100
of depth, 127 Marketing and distribution, 181
Fox and the Hound, The, 70
of motion, 66 Marx Brothers, 18
Fractured Fairy Tales, 23
of speed, 168–169 Mass, 71
Frake, Bill, 39, 118, 125–126, 173–174
Illusion of Life, , The, 65 Mass, force and gravity, 70
Frankenstein, 187
Image Tricks, 46 Matisse, Henri, 30
Fuller, Buckminster, 274
Inertia, 71 Maya, 12
G Inner life force, 103 McCay, Winsor, 274
GarageBand, 180 See also Eyes Media Pro 1, 236
Gawande, Atul, 10 It’s All Gone Pete Tong, 181 Méliès, George, 157, 274
Gels, 232 Melodramas, 15
German expressionism, 120 J Melody Assistant, 180
Gerry, Vance, 266 Jesters, The, 259 MetaSynth, 180–181, 236
Gestures, 34, 39–44, 105 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 104 Meter, 85
Glebas, Ryan, 86 Jippes, Daan, 127 Mattesi, Michael D., 30
Glennie, Evelyn, 181 Job tips, 275 Micmacs, 104
Goldberg, Eric, 274 Jobs, Steve, 274 Microsoft, 236
Gombert, Ed, 19, 24, 266 Johnson, Ollie, 65 MIDI file, 180
Google, 124, 137–141, 236 Jones, Chuck, 131, 191 Mimes, 20
Gravity, 73, 127 Jones, Spike, 179 Miyazaki, Hayao, 274
pull of, 75–77 Journey to the Center of the Earth, 179 Mocap. See Motion capture
 288 Index
Modbook, 12
Mood lighting, 164–165
Mother color, 130–131
Motion (software), 166, 169, 236
Motion analysis, 65–88
Motion capture, 87–88
MOTU, Digital Performer, 180
Moviemaking, 268
Murphy’s law, 10, 22–23
Music
basic structures of, 178
editing, 173–178
software, 180
and timing, 84–85, 86
Musical clock, 178
Musker, John, 44
Muybridge, Eadweard, 100, 275
Myriad, 180
N Postproduction, 10
Nast, Thomas, 45
Native Instruments, 180–181
Negative space, 123
Newton’s laws of motion, 70–72
first law, 71
second law, 71
third law, 71, 75
Nightingale, Earl, 20b
Nobel, Maurice, 189
O Shapes, 118
O’Donnell, Mark, 85
Oktapodi, 16
180-degree rule, 172
101 Dalmatians, 120
Opposing actions, 74
Optical printer, 157
Organic Designer, 120
Organization, 10b
Orientation, 127
Overlapping actions, 78
Overshooting, 74
P drawing notes, 232
Painter (software), 148
Painting technique, 142
Paradigm, 273
Paths of action, 72, 73, 188 Iggy’s transparent goggles, 230
Pencil (software), 12 postmortem, 236
Performance capture, 87–88 progressive color shift for depth, 234
Performance exercise, 68 reaction scene addition, 231
Perkins, Bill, 117, 266 software procedures, 236
Persistence of vision, 66 Proportions, 46
Phi phenomenon, 66–67 Psycho-evolutionary theory of basic emotions, 105
Photobooth, 47, 49
Photoshop, 12, 46, 148, 236 Q
Picasso, Pablo, 274 Quaker style, p250
Piglet’s Big Movie, 17
Pinocchio, 17
R
Pitching, 258
Raiders of the Lost Ark, 187
Pixar, approach to stories, 18
Reality, 16
Playhouse, The, 157
Re-exposing, 157
Plutchik, Robert, 105
Reflected light, 131–133
Pomp and Circumstance for Fantasia 2000, 1, 20
Rhythm, 84–85, 179
Pose to pose approach, 68–69
Robot design, 121
Postmortem, 236
Roller coaster theory of storytelling, 20–21, 84
Rotoscoping, 86–88, 112
blend layers, 159–160
bubbles, 169
compositing, 157–167 S
description, 157 Saturated color on a gray ground, 131
editing, 93, 170–174 Schure, Alexander, 274–275
illusion of speed, 168–187 Scott, Raymond, 180
light effects, 166 Sculpting, 55, 138
mood lighting, 164–180 construction vs., 38
music editing, 180 Searle, Ronald, 45
special effects, 158–159 Secondary actions, 78–79
Powell, John, 84–85 Sendak, Maurice, 16–17
Powerhouse, 180
Shelley, Mary, 187
Preproduction, 10
Shot framing, 173–174
Principle of momentum, 71
Sibelius, 180
Production, 10
Sight-size method of drawing, 44
art directing by color script, 232–275
Sketchbook Pro, 12
background adjustment, 234
Sketchbooks, 60–62
Bunny takes, 231–232
SketchUp, 124, 137–141, 236
camera moves, 232
SketchUp 3D Warehouse, 138
complete color, 237–253
Slapstick, 19
continued question probing, 231
Sledge, Robert, 17
continuity, 230
Snow White, 17–18
creative birth and postpartum, 236
depth of field, 235 Sound
editing, 178–274
fun to animate, 230 sonic visionaries, 181
getting drawings right, 230 Spacing, 83
help, 235–264 Special effects, 158–159
 Index 289

storm creation, 160–187 Tangents, 122 Visionary, 273–182

Speed lines, 168–169 Taylor, Moroni, 24 Visualization, 158
Spielberg, Steven, 187 Temp track, 178
Sprite Animation Studios, 120 Tempo, 85 W
Stage production, 123–126 Tenggren, Gustaf, 117 Waking Life, 16
Staging, with lighting, 126 Thief and the Cobbler, The, 185 Walk cycles, 70
Staging clarity, 118–119 Thinking process, 109–111 exercise, 68
Stalking the Wild Idea, 188 Thomas, Frank, 65 Walking, 94–99, 126
Stalling, Carl, 180 Thumbnails, 70 four-legged walks, 100
Stanchfield, Walt, 43–44, 266 Time signature, 178 Warner Brothers, 32
Steiner, Max, 180 Timing, 83–84 Warter, Fred, 117
Stories lip sync, 113–114 Watterson, Bill, 274
animated performance, 19–20 for rhythmic interest, 84 Wende, Richard Vander, 61
anticipation in, 22 Toon Boom, 12, 38, 114 Wertheimer, Max, 66
characters, emotions of, 25 Toon Boom Studio, 114 What’s Opera, Doc?, 131, 189
characters, creation of, 18–19 Toon physics, 85–99 When the Wind Blows, 16
dramatic structure of, 9–15 Topete, Alex, 1 Where the Wild Things Are, 16–17
fractal storytelling, 23–24 Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie, Why Did the Chicken Cross the Soccer Game?, 188–190
getting started to write, 21–23 181 Wide angle, 127
getting them right, 13–18 Tracing, 60 Williams, Lance, 275
kinds, 16–17 Traditional process of animation, 11–12 Williams, Richard, 185
message from, 17–67 Triangles, 118 Wilson, Rowland, 132
Murphy’s law, 22–23 Triangular split of color, 133 Withoutabox.com, 182
Pixar’s approach, 18 TV styles, 120 Wong, Tyrus, 117
power of, 16 TVPaint Animation, 12, 38, 125, 148, 164, 168, 236 Woo, Alex, 44
relatable, 24 12 Principles of Disney’s Nine Old Men, 65–72 Wood, Wally, 45
roller coaster theory, 20–21 Wozniak, Steve, 274
structure, analysis of, 21 U
things in a movie, 24 U&I Software, 180–181, 236 X
Straight ahead approach, 68–69 Unified colors, 130–131, 143 XX, 180
Strangest Secret, The, 20b chromatic light, 131
Stretch and squash principle, 38, 79–83 color desaturation, 131
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The, 273 Y
mother color, 131
Style. See Creating worlds YouTube, 181
United Productions of America (UPA) style, 32, 130
Style guides Unity, 122
creation of, 119–120 Z
designing, 120–121 Zagar, Jeremiah, 274
V
Super Sculpey, 55 Zappa, Frank, 179
Value, color, 128, 141–142
Syncopation, 85 Zits, 105
passage, 128–129
Zombies, 19–20, 34
reversal, 128–129
T tips to spot, 114
Ventriloquism, in slow motion, 111–112
Takes, 104 Verne, Jules, 274
stages, 104 Vimeo, 181