This was the first way I started animating when I was about 10 years old, making those fun little flip-books. (This was just before adolescence and ’80s Saturday morning cartoons soured me toward animation.) My mother would buy me these packs of memo pads, and I’d start my first drawing on the last page of the book. I’d turn the page, and trace the previous drawing, keeping anything I wanted to stay still in the same position as its predecessor, and any- thing I wanted to move adjusted and repositioned just a bit. When I was done, I flipped the pages, and voilà! I was an amateur animator. Without a camera or computer, it’s arguably the cheapest method of character animation and the most straightforward, by definition.
In straight-ahead animation, you do all your drawings consecu- tively, from start to finish. You make drawing number one, drawing number two, drawing number three, and so on. The primary advan- tage is it’s a more spontaneous approach and almost like
improvisation. It’s fun to watch because surprises happen that even you, the artist, may not have expected.
The disadvantage is a related problem… things unexpected start to happen that aren’t so much fun. The scene may go on too long (we’re given very specific lengths of time for our action to take place in the soundtrack), the size or proportions of the character may change, or she might not “hit her mark” on the stage at the right time. That same unpredictability that was so fascinating beforehand can just as easily work against us.
As usual, let me provide an unpleasant “straight-ahead” anima- tion experience. I was doing an animated public service
announcement for Frazer Methodist Church’s Singles Ministry with a little character named Mothley. He was sitting on a phone, which rang, and he jumped up with surprise in midair. For whatever reason (I can’t recall specifically), the soundtrack was not yet avail- able, and I was itching to make some progress on the project. (Yep, boredom is a dangerous thing in our branch of the Smith family.) So I went ahead and started animating the character, and though I was fairly new to professional independent animation at the time (I think about three or four years at that point), I was rather pleased with the results.
Unfortunately, after I did get the soundtrack put together and examined the number of frames that were to be filled within that brief shot of the 30-second PSA, I found I had almost twice as many drawings as necessary. What choice did I have? I had to scrap some of the drawings. And again, when you’re talking as many as 30 drawings per second of finished video, that’s a lot of wasted work.
Fortunately, there’s another method.
Pose-to-Pose
The pose-to-pose method introduces us to another term in anima- tion that you’ll hear used (and improperly at that, if we’re not careful)… key drawings. Pose-to-pose animation often starts out with the director doing the most important storytelling drawings in the scene called the key drawings. The director (or another anima- tor) may do drawings number 1, 12, 24, and 36 in the scene. He hands the scene over to his assistant animator, who may fill in drawings number 6 and 9, 14 and 18, 28 and 32. The assistant ani- mator will then quite likely hand the animation drawings over to the inbetweener to fill in the remaining drawings.
Or, if you’re working as an independent animator (like yours truly), congratulations, you’re responsible for every one of those drawings, from keys to inbetweens.
Those key drawings that the director (or animator) is responsi- ble for are storytelling drawings, as we just said. That means don’t be surprised if you see slightly more cleaned-up versions of those poses originally from the storyboards. A key drawing is one of the most important drawings in a scene. It has to be there. Without it, the scene would fall apart and the audience wouldn’t be able to tell what’s going on.
Often (but not always) a key drawing may actually be a drawing you hold on-camera for a whole second or more, so the audience can “read” what’s going on and is allowed time for the information to sink in before the story proceeds.
A key drawing is slightly different from an extreme drawing, which usually means contact drawing, where the character first comes into contact with something or someone, like the floor, the wall, or a prop. A scene may contain very few key drawings, but
several more extreme drawings. If a character is about to pick something up and look at it, the first key drawing in the scene might be when he turns around and sees the object lying on the table. The first extreme drawing might be his first step, when his right foot hits the floor as he walks toward it, and the next extreme drawing might be when his left foot hits the floor. The second key
drawing would be when he pauses before trying to pick it up, and the third extreme would be when he places his hand on the object. The next drawing might be the key drawing when he stops to look at it in his hand.
The eighth and ninth drawings I just added for fun.
So we’ve only got nine beginning drawings here, but that might be for six seconds (the average length of an animated scene). And that’s 30 frames for every second, people.
Now do those nine drawings complete our scene? Absolutely
not! We still need to do breakdown drawings (the drawings for the
assistant, if your budget is blessed enough to afford one) between the completed key drawings, and then the remaining inbetweens left between the breakdowns.
Now does that mean we have to do 180 drawings for these six seconds? Absolutely not. This is where a method called shooting on ones, twos, or threes comes in. We’ll discuss it in more depth in Chapter 6, but here’s briefly how that works: When you’re shooting on ones, you shoot each drawing once, giving you 30 drawings for 30 frames (one second) of video. When you shoot on twos, you shoot each drawing twice, so you end up with 15 drawings for 30 frames (still one second) of video. The rule of thumb is: fast action on ones, normal action on twos.
You may be able to get away with shooting each drawing twice (on twos) since these are fairly average, normal, everyday actions the character is going through, at a leisurely pace. Therefore, we’ve already cut our work in half for every department (animators’ draw- ings, inking and/or scanning each drawing, and painting each drawing, even digitally).
However, don’t forget, if these were fast-paced actions, espe- cially say two characters in a chase scene against a panning
background (say, I dunno, a certain desert highway), then the action
must be shot on ones. That rule of thumb once more: normal action
on twos, fast action on ones. And don’t forget, sometimes on video, even shooting on threes can work… sometimes.
In my case, I had a character carrying a Volkswagen through a doorway in one of my earliest TV commercials (is it any wonder I love animation?), and on ones, he just moved way too fast. He didn’t act like that Volkswagen weighed anything, even though his back was arched and his legs were bent.
I reshot the scene so that he was moving through the doorway on twos. Better, but it still didn’t look heavy enough. I mean, it may very well have been a cartoon Volkswagen, but cartoon cars, ocean liners, and hippos should have weight, just like any ungainly sized object.
Finally, I shot it on threes. Did it work? As I said, finally. That was enough. The character still managed to get through the door and out of the shot in the available time remaining, while still look- ing as though he had to exhibit just enough effort to move across the sidewalk.
Shooting on twos (left) is fine for normal, everyday actions like opening a jar of peanut butter. Shooting on ones (right) is best for fast actions, like trying wayyy too hard to open a jar of peanut butter.
Just judge carefully when determining whether to shoot on ones, twos, or threes. Simply put, it’s a financial answer to an artis- tic question. (As usual, in the words of Richard Williams.)
Don’t ever forget that nine times out of 10, animation will always look better when it’s shot on ones, because real life is on ones. Perhaps that’s why it’s so captivating to watch Richard Wil- liams’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Thief and the Cobbler. Both films were shot primarily on ones.
Another major advantage (aside from the fact that our scenes now run just the right amount of allowed time) to the pose-to-pose method is it’s easier to assist and therefore do more drawings in the same amount of time, with more artists working
simultaneously.
All right, while we’re still discussing the pose-to-pose method of animation, are there any disadvantages to it, like the straight- ahead method had its drawbacks?
Sadly, yes.
In fact, that very fascinating aspect of drawing on ones also applies to the straight-ahead method. Straight-ahead animation is more interesting to watch, and by using the pose-to-pose method, we lose some of that “magic” if we’re not careful.
As I usually ask my students at this point… isn’t it too bad there’s not a third method, where we, I dunno… take the strengths of both of these methods, and somehow… maybe… (are you think- ing what I’m thinking?) combine these two methods into one… and we could call this resulting method —