Ed Love: Connecting Held Poses

From :"Drooler's Delight":
Ed Love is great at varying how he connects his bold and clear poses. Here's a real simple general way:

STRETCH WOODY'S NECK

Here are the 2 poses we see and feel in the animation. They are holds. They are drawn with perfectly clear negative spaces, contrasts and lines of action. The action happening between them is visually obvious. Buzz stretches Woody up. The action is clear in just the still poses.

But to feel the the distance (or contrast) between them even stronger, Ed Love has created 2 more poses between them that caricature the held poses. He has made an anticipation pose and an overshoot pose. These 2 poses created more space between the extremes. That extra space gives the action more punch than if he had just inbetweened the 2 holds. (The farther you travel in the same amount of frames, the more punch the action has.)



Not every part of the second pose overshoots. The overshoot is focused on the main part of the action: Buzz' arm stretching Woody.
Focus of action gets to the final pose first. The rest catches up.

Here's a longer clip with more poses and more ways to connect them.

BUZZ ABUSES WOODY

A good animator like Ed Love varies the way he connects consecutive poses. He doesn't always do an antic and an overshoot, and he doesn't time the connections the same way for each pose. What he does do is control the whole sequence with a hierarchical structure of poses. Some poses and actions are more important than others, and he uses all the drawing and animation tools to keep your eye following the important parts of the action. He does it all with flair and fun too.

The more variations you use in your poses and actions, the more natural the characters and animation feel. Lesser animation uses the same handful of formulaic ways to connect the same stock poses over and over again and the action gets monotonous and robotic. At least for me.

Remind me to tell you about the stock Canadian anticipation pose sometime.

Methodical Study

My pal Jojo is a young whippersnapper who is constantly improving his skills.
I suggested he study some Tom and Jerry animation and copy some of the basic actions.
I have noticed over the past few years that students who study and even copy old animation do not in turn always apply what they studied to their own work.
So I suggested to Jojo to animate another character doing the same action as a Tom and Jerry action so that he would understand the principle behind the specific action.

In this case Tom is doing a simple small take.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4NRjuW2KcY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

Vary Your Antics

It's important for contrast and naturalness to not use the same exact antic and timing for every accent in your animation.

Here's a short scene of dialogue with 3 accents, plus a couple bookended actions.
Each important pose, the poses that carry the meaning and continuity of the scene needs to be accented. Otherwise every drawing will just float by like levitating soggy cereal. Accents are not all equal and have a hierarchy of importance according to the story, gag or acting. They shouldn't be randomly planned, yet they still have a lot of room for creativity. The accents are usually preceded by an anticipation, which gives each accent more punch.

Accents and anticipations are part of the punctuation of the message. In the best cartoons, punctuation is aided by poetic meter which can add beauty to the presentation of the message.

Start Pose
ANTIC 1
2) OVERSHOOT 1 "WOW!"
3) ANTIC 2
4) OVERSHOOT 2 "PSY"
- note that this antic is less extreme, because there are less frames to play with.
she has to immediately say "Psy" after "Wow", so I didn't want her to move too far away-just enough to create an accent that matches the dialogue.

5) ANTIC 3 - "SHRINK TAKE" (a Jim Tyer invention)
6) "KO!" Overshoot 3
7) Settle out of big accent
8) one frame of her dropping down
9) Land and cushion
10) Up into calm dialogue pose

Scroll through to see how it works:

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/01Principles/antics/AokiWowPsycho.mov

GREG MANWARING TO THE RESCUE

I was posing out the scene where she yells "Wow Psycho!" and wanted it to be wild like the scene at the end of Coal Black.

It kept jerking when I shot it, so I showed it to Greg and he said "Man, it's all there, you just gotta smooth it out. Lemme take a whack at it."

He took his whack and shot it and made it come out all shiny and smooth, saving the day.

I sent him another Sody scene lately that had the same sorts of problems and I'm counting on him to work his magic again.

The rest of the Aoki Pizza commercial was animated at Rough Draft from my layout poses.

A Basic Classic Antic

Woody is about to go from pose 1 to pose 2 - but not directly.

Here's a typical classic anticipation and overshoot.Moving away from the start pose and then going past the end pose - then settling into the final pose gives the action more space. More space for the same amount of frames = a stronger accent. If the animator had just inbetweened the start and stop pose, the action would have had no impact. It'd be mushy.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/01Principles/antics/WoodySolidanticMad.mov

Here it is with every frame:

1) Start
2) Antic DOWN
3) Antic Right4) one inbetween, arm overlapping the action
5) Overshoot (the furthest point in the action)
6) an inbetween and overlapping hair feathers
7) Final held pose - stop

Next: variations of antics

Disney Principles 7a - How Would You Anticipate This Action?

Bugs has to grab Elmer's gun.

NO ANTIC AT ALL

My point is that anticipations are overused in a lot of animation. You don't always need to antic every move and there are lots of different ways to get from point A to Point B. I think controlled imagination (using your imagination and knowledge to customize every move) is more interesting and natural than resorting to formula.


BTW, all the frame grabs and clips I put up from old cartoons have great drawings to copy and study.

Disney Principles 7 - Anticipations

antic first, then reach

Beaky in neutral pose

He moves away in the opposite direction from where he is going to go (he "anticipates")

He goes to the next pose and slightly "overshoots" it with his head and neck.

He settles in the final position (while moving within that position)

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/01Principles/antics/beakyantic.mov

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/01Principles/antics/ElmerBugsantics.mov

full anticipation

big space between anticipation drawing and Bugs jumping up and turning
then slowing out of the turn and jump with some close drawings on their way into the run pose




big space from the up and turn pose to the first running pose





It's good to know about anticipations, but it's also good to not use them at random or as a formula.

Not every action needs an antic. Some do. They shouldn't all be done the same way.

Standard Antic

Avoid too much anticipation and always doing it the same way

There is a style of of anticipation in Canada and Korea that drives me nuts. I wish I had an example to show, but they have a tendency to always do the same pose for the anticipation and it's way over done. The character will hunch down, his shoulders come up and the head sinks way down. Then they spring past the final pose they are aiming at and settle into it. The same way every time. They use this for every action and it becomes very obvious and monotonous.

Now there is the Flash style of antic and overshoot which is even more monotonous and robotic.http://www.xsheet.net/pictures/6teen.mp4

All principles can be abused or overused, when done without thinking or by rote.

Antics, like your other drawing and animation tools, should be customized to the action and story. You should learn them in the basic ways first, but then get to the point to where you can feel when one is appropriate and how to vary them and customize them to the scene, character and story. Once you get good and confident, you shouldn't have to calculate which tools to use for what scenes. It should just come naturally. A good animator uses a lot of variety in how he does things. A formulaic one does it the same way every time.

Avoid repetitive actions, poses and expressions - customize your actions to the story

On The Ripping Friends, I used to see actions done with this formulaic repetitive same antic for every pose, so I started adding my own customized antics in the layouts to break up the monotony.

So then what happened was the animators added MORE anticipations to anticipate the anticipations. The result was the characters would spring and bounce and boing from pose to pose as if they had the hiccups.

You can also see this formulaic overuse of antics and overshoots in many modern cartoons - especially the prime time ones that move like robots on springs. It's what I call trick animation. Always doing everything using the same tricks the same way. That may smooth out the actions, but it's unnatural and monotonous. It doesn't bring any soul, believability or uniqueness of life to anything. It feels phony.

Making fun of stock principles

Sometimes I make fun of principles in my cartoons and do them stupidly on purpose. There was a scene in Stimpy's Invention where Stimpy was reacting to Ren being happy with his new happy helmet.

I wanted to accent Stimpy's final pose with a big antic first. The way it was staged, combined with Stimpy's simple construction didn't allow for a normal antic, so I just squashed his whole body down like an accordion and sprung him up into his final excited pose.

Thanks to Dragan for putting this sequence together for me!

They animated it at Carbunkle and made it work perfectly. From then on, I tried putting lots of weird inbetweens and quick poses into scenes that you wouldn't really see unless you freeze framed the animation. Doing this in context makes your scenes more natural and rich with life and spontaneity.

Of course before you get to that point, you have to learn it the standard way first and just get it to work smoothly.

More fun applications of classic principles still performed their necessary functions but gave the animation a fresher, funnier and less predictable feeling. I'll show you some variety of antics in another post.

2 GOALS OF ANTICIPATIONS

1) To Create Space - between where you start and where you are going to go. By moving away from where you are going to go you give yourself more distance for the action to travel in. This makes the action quicker; it gives it an accent.



2) To Draw the Audience Attention - to let you know something is going to happen, instead of just letting it happen and have you miss it

Thanks also to Tara Sheppard, Brendan Brody and Mark Peel for your donations yesterday!