Tuesday Tips- Crowd Characters When I Need To Fill A Crowd With Characters, I Usually Try To Pick A Few

Tuesday Tips- Crowd Characters — When I need to fill a crowd with characters, I usually try to pick a few simple shapes and use those to build a series a characters to complete the scene. I may switch it up by adding a hat, glasses, switching gender, or a slight difference in posing. In essence, the goal is create a variety of characters without spending too much time on each one. That’s why repeating shapes or even entire characters saves a tremendous amount of time. -Norm

Other things to consider

You don’t always have to draw the harsh light line if you just want a soft scene. You can just use the ‘bounce'as the light source.

You can also transform the harsh light line layer to any layer mode options your art program allows.

Feel free to experiment. Also, it takes time and experience to learn the quantities of line thickness, opacity you want of your light layers. So if you find yourself getting frustrated that your work looks nothing like mine don’t worry you’ll get there :)

I would like to make a new bunch of tutorials… I wish I could carry out my intention. Incidentally, It’s going to be “How to draw poses by using gesture drawing method ”, 

Animation Process Part 1: Thumbnailing, Keys, and Extremes

A week or so ago I finally finished this little dance animation that I’ve been chipping away at in my spare time! In the end it took me about 45 hours over the course of 8 months.

I documented each stage of the process in gifs and wanted to share in order to give anyone just starting out an insight into my workflow and how I break a complex motion into digestible, accomplish-able chunks so that I don’t get overwhelmed by the amount of work that’s ahead.

In this first part I’m going explain a little bit of my approach to thumbnailing. The great thing about this part of the hand drawn animation process is that I would approach it the same way in ANY piece of software. This stage is just about drawing and timing. Even the lowest tier programs can do that. It’s not until the cleanup stage that any of the bells and whistles matter.

The Research Stuff

Before starting any drawings I like to search around youtube for inspiration; especially if it’s an action I’m not entirely familiar with. I had just watched the webseries The Earliest Show in which Lauren Lapkus and Ben Schwartz do a lot of really great dancing, so I studied a couple of those frame by frame. I also looked at some swing dancing competition videos to get a feel for the basic steps.

https://youtu.be/plOMomN9F5g?t=25m25s

For stuff like dancing or even playing an instrument I’m not familiar with I like to sometimes look up a couple beginners’ tutorials just to get some ideas for how to approach the movement.

This isn’t days of research. It’s just half an hour to an hour to get a feel for what you want to accomplish. Anything more than that and it can easily turn into procrastination.

The Drawing Stuff

Once I’m satisfied with my research I begin the thumbnailing process. As you can see, my drawings at this point are only slightly more detailed than a stick figure. I’m not worried at all about mass, I’m just trying to nail down some simple, clear poses.

The Animation Stuff

In order to not be overwhelmed by everything I like to approach scenes in a very systematic way. I’d say 90% of the animation I do is Pose to Pose meaning that I break actions up into 4 different types of drawings

Keys: The main storytelling poses. If the story of the shot is “Man hears news and is disappointed” then you only have two keys to do - the man hearing the news, and the man being disappointed. I’m not thinking about how he’s going to get from pose to pose at this point, I’m just thinking “What’s the best drawing to show that this man is really disappointed”.

Extremes: These are all the poses that have to be there in order for the action to work. If someone is walking across the room it’s every drawing where their feet make contact with the ground. If someone’s jumping in the air it’s the anticipation down and the highest point of their arc. The way I think of them is that they’re the furthest up, down, left, and right the character is going to go as well as any drawing where they make contact.

Breakdowns: These are the poses that establish or reinforce the physics behind the motion. If an arm is swinging forward and the hand drags behind this is the drawing that shows that. When a character does a high kick and puts the entire weight of their body into it this is the drawing that shows the hips shoving forward as the foot just starts to lift from the ground.

Inbetweens: The drawings that smooth out and polish the movement. Here I’m focused solely on the spacing of the drawings. Is it slowing out or slowing in? How far do I want to favor one way or the other? What’s the shape of the path of action? Are the drawings following a nice arc?

This is one of many ways to categorize the drawings. I’ve seen a lot of people who combine extremes into their keys phase, and others who combine extremes into their breakdown phase, and others still who do breakdowns while they’re inbetweening. This is just what works for me.

(For a more thorough explanation of Keys, Extremes, Breakdowns, and Inbetweens see pages 64-68 of Richard Williams’ The Animator’s Survival Kit)

For the thumbnails I’m only focusing on the Keys and the Extremes.

First I do the keys which for the first dance involve these four drawings:

As you can see there’s no thought about the weight of the movement. That’s fine. I’m just establishing how he’s going to hit each accent.

From there we go to the Extremes

Here I start to add a little bit of weight to it. The main things the extremes (in green) are establishing is the foot pattern. How is he passing his weight from one leg to the other?

With the torso I wanted to loosen it up a little bit. If you look at the keys they all have a really similar line of action. I reversed the line of action for the extremes which adds more change of shape and helps it feel more lively - even at this early stage

The arms are just establishing the passing positions of the arm swing. They’re fairly straightforward.

If you notice, these extremes have a lot of qualities of breakdowns in them. If I had to label them more precisely I’d say that what I’m calling the extremes are the contact drawings of the legs combined with the passing positions (breakdowns) of the upper body. I call them extremes instead of breakdowns because the legs are the most important part of these drawings and I wouldn’t consider those legs broken down at all; they’re just contact drawings. These hybrid drawings are the reason that so many animators categorize drawings differently. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what you call any of this stuff as long as it makes sense to you and the end result looks good.

The Technical Stuff

At this point the entire animation is just a rough drawing on one layer. I would do this exactly the same in Harmony, Flash, Photoshop, or TV Paint. As long as you have drawing tools and a timeline you can thumbnail out animation like this

Extra Pro tip: It’s really helpful at this stage to establish some kind of basic ground plane or perspective - even if it’s just a character dancing in a void. This really helped keep the 3 Dimensional space in mind while planning his footwork. It also reminded me to have the character lean a little forward and backward in Z space as he’s moving. It’s easy to forget that kind of stuff when a character’s facing camera. Without it the animation will always feel a little flat.

That’s it for my thumbnailing process! If you found it helpful check out the next posts in the series! Part 2: Rough Keys/Extremes and the Shift and Trace Technique

Storyboarding Trick?

In storyboards you can’t animate out everything but for a demo reel or a short motion where you want the movements to ‘flow’ better there is a certain trick you can try on programs on Storyboard Pro or Photoshop. 

Lets start with this:

This is just a rough board snippet of a guy punching air. It feels kind of choppy. It is made up of 8 unique drawings. 

But if you take a drawing of the punching guy and using the select tool you transform skew/translate/rotate/ certain parts of his body you can get this:

And the timeline looks like this: 

But I didnt draw any more unique drawings because I just slightly modified the existing 8 unique drawings. Transform an arm slightly and that is enough to fool the brain into bridging that big gap between two animation frames. Even moving the arm slightly down like in the picture below is enough to get this effect. 

In Photoshop just use the lasso tool and transform the selection but the vector drawings on SB Pro make this a lot easier. 

***For actual production work I would not try this because boards are always scrapped or changed and trying this can lead to frustration down the pipeline during the revision stage.

If you want to try this out just for fun or for your portfolio demo reel I highly suggest trying it out since if done just right they can really make your boards flow better panel to panel. Have fun!

Ahaha Someone asked me for some tips on how I draw simple muscles. Unfortunately, my inbox glitched on me again and that message was no where to be seen. I apologize to that person who sent me it and, hopefully, I can make it up to you with this.

This is a short and simple tutorial.

I just use basic shapes that goes well together. Mainly, these two shapes, oblong and square, when I draw big characters.

The arm muscles are basically like big curves to me.

Apply this with a line of action and this is what you get.

Your muscles don’t necessarily have to be big. They could be slim, long, round and etc.  This could also work really well if you have the basic anatomy down, but don’t stress about it. Just simplify them as much as you can without stressing over perfect details.