PCA Work Blog: Handed Down From A Master

Richard Williams is, simply put, an animation master, only kept from legendary status by having his masterwork stumble at the last hurdle and sharing his biggest success with a live-action director. The latter was the classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit, for which he directed the animation, and the former was the tragic case of The Thief and the Cobbler, which was produced over the course of three decades, saw many big names of early Disney animation working on it in their twilight years, passing on knowledge and techniques that otherwise may have been lost to younger generations, and had the potential to be one of the most technically impressive animated feature films ever produced. That was, of course, until the investors got tired of waiting and, despite the fact that there were only ten minutes of footage left to complete before the film would be finished, Williams was removed from his own film and the film was cut to shreds, low-rent animation added to fill the gaps and add some sub-par musical numbers, retitled and released as Arabian Knight, which ended up being snubbed as an Aladdin knock-off despite the absurdly long production history of the former and the rather suspicious amount of visual and story similarities in the latter Disney work, which was produced in part by Cobbler alumni.

However, the film that I'll always remember Williams for is his excellent half-hour rendition of A Christmas Carol, which was the definitive version that I grew up with.

So, in short, he knows what he speaks of when it comes to animation. Thus, when I embarked on this project, I immediately ordered something that has been on my Amazon Wish List for a while: his doorstop-sized tome The Animator's Survival Kit.

It has been a peerless source of reference and research material throughout this module. Even though I haven't read every single page yet, it has still given me invaluable tips and guidance. It is also an endlessly fascinating read in of itself, as not only is it Williams passing on his own knowledge, but also referencing his encounters with the old guard of animation, throwing in anecdotal titbits about how a certain animator taught Williams how to get his head around a particular piece of animation theory, generally giving him guidance and insight into how they worked.

Just for one example, it introduced me to the concept of 'spacing'. This is an animation principle used to create more life-like movement. In the example given in the book, it shows a penny moving across the span of a second. The comparison it shows is to first space it equally, having it move the same which results in very stilted, unnatural motion, and then have it with 'easing', which is where the spacing is more uneven and starts slow, speeds up, and comes to a stop again, resulting in more natural movement. Anime Studio Pro uses easing automatically on all movements, so that's less of a concern for this module's limited focus, but that can be a problem for more complex animations. For example, one time I tried to make a pendulum animation just as an exercise, but the default easing the program put on the movement mad it very jerky and unrealistic, so I had to go in and manually create the movement. Of course, although I was aware of easing to a limited extent, I wasn't aware of how important it was at the time, and just had uniform spacing between frames, which resulted in an animation just as stilted as the default spacing.

Another thing that I learned was 'slurring' in terms of lip sync. Although I've previously done limited testing with building a head and mouth movements, one principle I kept in mind from this book was that people don't go from one extreme mouth movement to another, and doing so in animation feels like the character EES OH VERR ANN UNN SEE AY TI NNG their dialogue. I think I achieved that to some extent, I specifically tried to make sure that there was no sudden jumping between mouth movements, trying to get a flow between the static mouth shapes that felt natural.

Honestly I could keep going with the little things that I picked up from this book, but it would essentially boil down to a cliff-notes version of the book itself. Thus, I'll just go over the last major takeaway from the book thus far: dope sheets. I was recommended I look into them by Corrie separately, so the coverage in the book was satisfactory exploration of the concept. In essence, dope sheets are to the nitty-gritty of animation what scripts are to film, or what storyboards are to animation on a larger scale. They lay out the timings of the animation in a spreadsheet, marking off different actions and where they relate to each other. I did do a dope sheet for the first shot, but I found that since I already had a very clear idea for the action anyway, coupled with the flexibility of digital keyframe animation which can be completely changed by the drag of a mouse in an instant, made the thing more busywork than it was worth. The absolutely hideous and immensely laborious way that you add text to a PDF didn't help matters, so I abandoned it for the second and third shots and just played it by ear, which allowed for more flexibility and ability to alter little details to get it to work better. Here are the dope sheets I produced: