ANIMATION RESEARCH
Updated: Mar 18, 2022
Keith Osborn's "Cartoon Character Animation with Maya" (2015)
Pocoyo (2005) is designed with simple shapes to make the character animation less expensive with limited animation. The simpler the shapes used in the characters’ designs, the greater room there is to explore the extents of the characters’ animation. The character’s design determines the extent and idea of the walk cycle. In Japanese 2D Anime, several frames are reused where only the characters’ mouths actually move to match the heavy dialogue. Humans don’t stay still all the time. They have movements in some way. 2D animation can get away with this, but not 3D.
Ken Duncan, animation veteran and owner of Duncan Studios, explains how he plans out animation by thinking of gestures in 2D before filling out the details.
“I would pose it out, not working on any of the details, try to get the timing and posing of the personality, show it to the director, get his notes, then apply the changes. [...] It wasn’t about banging out five different versions of a shot, seeing which one sticks. It was really trying to say, okay, this is the reason the character’s in the shot, this is the scene in the story, this is how it works, and sort of having a plan before starting to animate.”
He further explains that defining the context behind the scene and clarifying the goal behind it narrows the choices of movements within the scene, which is rather helpful to determine the character’s goals and any obstacles to determine their movements.
There are three common ways to plan movement: video reference, thumbnails, or thumbnails based on video reference. Keith Osborn, the author, argues for using thumbnails strictly to heighten the imagination of the animator and to not be limited by “realistic” movements. Osborn admits perhaps the ideas may fall to cliches, but the thumbnails are raw, unpolished ideas and reiterates to focus on the posing, gesture and emotion within the character’s physicality.
Even though Osborn advocates for imaginative visual storytelling, he acknowledges Milt Kahl, one of Disney’s Nine Old Men and the few original Disney animators, and his perspective on video reference:
“If you use live action for reference, actually, truly just for reference, that’s great. I did this with Jungle Book. The way to use it, I think, is to learn so much about it that you don’t have to use the reference anymore.” —Milt Kahl, Disney Family Album, 1984
Osborn argues the reference is necessary to understand believable movement of a character, as opposed to directly copying the movement for “realism”. In addition, the movement and poses can be expressed in video reference and then exaggerated in thumbnails. Developing backstories or histories of this character can help provide context as to who they are and how they carry themselves, adding nuance instead of a boring archetypical performance.
Osborn clarifies that “Breaking a Rig” is important for visual translation of emotions through the character’s poses. He clarifies the Breaking Joints are necessary for poses which will help the animation and exaggeration to clearly depict a character’s emotions. The joints should not be broken according to the locked camera, and the audience will not be able to depict the broken joints either through different angles of the poses or the joints break in poses which appear briefly in an animation sequence.
Straight Ahead Layered Animation was a very popular method to animate, where each part of the rig is focused at a time until at a perfected quality before moving on to another. He begins by starting at the base of the character (i.e. hips, chest) and moves from the Primary Action towards Secondary Action. This would aid in providing a more mechanically sound and beautifully fluid animation which flows naturally away from the predetermined stiffness in Pose to Pose animation. Although the end product is advantageous as a scene, it comes with certain disadvantages: the difficulty of critiquing the work when in progress, and directors having difficulty seeing the animation until it is complete.
Although Pose to Pose is far more common now than previously, Straight Ahead animation is incredibly effective for animating “floppy bits” as Osborn refers to them: rope, hair, ears, etc. This is due to the Overlapping Action being “...better realised when layered on top of the main action.” (Osborn, 87)
Osborn speaks about the difference between Stepped Tangents and Copied Pairs when animating. Stepped Tangents refer to keying in the Keys and Breakdowns in Stepped, and using Maya’s help of Splining to fill the inbetweens. Copied Pairs refers to Pose to Pose animation, but each pose is copied and repeated in the cycle, so instead of a dynamic animation, it is a repetitive cycle of poses. Osborn argues that Stepped Tangents is the best approach to animating in Maya since it sets a strong foundation and minimal tweaking to Maya’s splining and inbetweens for strong animation. Although he argues this, alongside “every key should be purposeful,” he does make room for artistic freedom and suggests the method that suits the animator and the art style is ultimately the best choice.
Osborn determines several aspects when designing the pose: silhouette, Straight against Curve, Simple against Complex, Line of Action, and each appendage of the rig. I’ve spoken about Silhouette and Line of Action in Principles of Animation, so instead I’ll focus on the others.
“Straight against Curve” is a technique used to avoid perfect symmetry in parts of the body, where one side of an appendage will have a curve and the other side will have a straight edge. This is achieved in Maya using the flexibility (bendy controls) to alter the shapes of the rig’s polygons. “Simple against Complex” refers to the pose’s outer edges and portraying them in contrast with one another: one is a simple line whether a C-curve or S-curve, where the other edge is more complex with a number of sides and edges. If a character is sad, their back may be hunched over and provides a simple edge all the way to the top of their head, whereas their front side would be more complex with their drooping arms, facial structure, knees and arms dragging forwards.
Osborn reiterates the importance of Breakdowns, as without the animator’s own inserted breakdowns, Maya will try to fill in the gaps between the Keys and not create believable movement. Good poses do not translate to great animation, but many great poses do. Osborn determines the animator must “[take] the reins away from Maya” to get closer to what we as people like to see. (Osborn, 130)
The breakdowns are typically used to define the Arcs, Overlapping Action, and Slow In & Slow Out of the animation. The number of breakdowns necessary depend on the complexity of the action: high complexity typically requires six breakdowns and more, while more simple work needs a range of one to two.
Osborn recommends a keyframe (extremes and breakdowns) on an average of every four frames. It does not need to be a frame on every multiple of four (Keys 4, 8, 12, 16, etc.) rather it means to have a gap of a multiple of four between each. This helps when splining the stepped animation to avoid any errors. If a pose does not have a direct purpose or meaning to help your animation, there is no reason for that pose to exist.
In observing the movement of humans carefully, Osborn realised most actions originate from the hip where he begins human animation by keying the controls for the up and down movements of the hips. The major action which this does not apply to is jumping, where the movement is focused on up and down arcs of the character. He also invites for Opposing Action and Counter Poses for more natural and believable movement.
Osborn interview Pepe Sȧnchez, previously an animator supervisor on Pocoyo (2005-2010), who speaks on the importance of character design on character movement. Three bipedal characters in the aforementioned pre-school series (the titular main character Pocoyo, a yellow duck named Pato, and a pink elephant named Elly) are all constructed in different ways, and hence move according to their shape and size.
Pocoyo kicks his legs up high and quickly stomps them on the ground in a way similar to a young toddler who is making large movements to seem grand and bold, but swings his arms high and determined. His walk clearly showcases Pocoyo’s childish side through Exaggeration. Elly has a large torso, long legs and a large trunk, so her movements are a lot smaller and her legs clearly show her small steps to maintain at a similar pace to Pocoyo and Pato rather than grand strides she could make.
Sȧnchez also confirms that the crew did not use the Graph Editor or make use of any splining in Maya. This was to avoid fluid 3D motion and instead give the series a closer feeling to 2D Animation with self-made Keys, Extremes and In-Betweens in linear.
Richard Williams' "The Animator's Survival Kit" (2009)
Richard Williams' book is an invaluable resource, and for good reason. In his section about walks, Richard Williams speaks about the mechanics of a walk. Specifically how walks have a repetitive cycle: foot contact, the down, the passing pose, the up and finally the foot contact again. The process repeats again and again, a fairly straight forward posing of walking.
He references Milt Kahl's process to understand timing, specifically when it came to walks. He timed people walking by him, and he realised that the average paced walk was twelve exposures, and used it as his reference point for other walks which may have been faster or slower.
Although the contact poses are important, the passing pose (the breakdown between the poses) defines the movement of the character in an animation. A character could move sideways, come to a rest before starting again, etc.
Other Relevant Resources
I found a fair amount of videos I studied when trying to understand animations of the tasks we came to accomplish in this brief.
The First Resource I found was a YouTube Channel called "Endless Reference" which provided a wide variety of references for animation and movement reference.
The Second Resource I found was animations made by other artists of walks and pushes.
Through this, I feel confident in my ability to accomplish the tasks well and in an effective manner.
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