The Animator's Eye

Composition and Design for Better Animation

Francis Glebas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136130212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

First published in 2011. Enhance your animated features and shorts with this polished guide to channeling your vision and imagination from a former Disney animator and director. Learn how to become a strong visual storyteller through better use of color, volume, shape, shadow, and light - as well as discover how to tap into your imagination and refine your own personal vision. Francis Glebas, the director of Piglet's Big Day, guides you through the animation design process in a way that only years of expertise can provide. Discover how to create unique worlds and compelling characters as well as the difference between real-world and cartoon physics as Francis breaks down animated scenes to show you how and why to layout your animation.

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 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.) 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• On the DVD
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 My Introduction
• 2 Mad Science or Magic?
• 3 That Reminds Me of a Story…
• 4 Secrets of Drawing
• 5 The Laws of Animation
• 6 It’s Alive! Animating Inner Life
• 7 Creating Worlds
• 8 Postproduction
• 9 Genesis of Idea
• 10 The Production
• 11 The Evolution of Iggy and Scared Bunny
• 12 The Animator’s Eye
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index