First Steps For Ross - Basic Construction

This blog is getting so big now and so full of every level of cartooning concepts that it might be hard for students to find some of the basic lessons.

Here are what I think are the most important first tools of cartoon drawing. Constructing the body and the head. Without understanding these, almost every other artistic concept will be vague and mysterious. You can't really understand any of this stuff just by reading it. You have to actually do it, and do it a lot. Practice and self-criticism will help ram the understanding into your head for good.


Whether you want to do animation, inbetweening, story, storyboards, layout or almost any other aspect of cartooning for animation, the key to all those concepts starts right here:

animation-school-lesson-1-construction

top-cat-turnaround-toy-construction


toy-construction-2-advanced


animation-school-lesson-2-squash-and stretching The Head



animation-school-lesson-3-how-to-check your copies

animation-lesson-4-2-legged-characters

animation-school-lesson-
5 hands


http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/10/heckling-hare-step-by-step-construction.html

Oh and thanks to all who have contributed!

Oswald Ex Sheets, I'll help you out

Here, I partially filled out the ex sheets for you.

I marked off all the beats and bars to the left.
Each key pose happens on the beat that is numbered next to the drawings.

I wrote which beats had what lyrics and how many inbetweens to get to each post.
Note that beats 6 to 10 re-use a few drawings that cycle left and right.

So you don't need to redraw the same drawings over and over again. Draw them once, then repeat them where the ex sheets tell you to.

Animation Lesson 2. Oswald Dance, animating to a 12x beat

Here's the latest lesson from the world's cheapest animation school.

ANIMATING TO A BEAT: The 12x Beat

12x is a very standard unit of time in cartoons. It's roughly the time it takes for a human to take a step in a normal walk. A fast walk would be 8x per step. Pepe Le Pew's hop cycle is 12x per hop.

Here is a perfect scene to learn the essential concept of animating to tempos. The scene is very simple and basically just moves from one pose to the next to the beat. No fancy overlapping action or secondary motions to distract you from the core concept of beats.

It's good to study just because it is so simple. A beginning animator needs to get used to how long a beat is in frames. This song is a 12x beat. Sing along and tap your foot to it, until you memorize the rhythm. Then do it later when you don't have the animation in front of you. After a while you will know what a 12x beat feels like.

THE FIRST FEW "KEYS"

The music in this scene is 2 beats per second, or 12 frames per beat.
Each of these frames below is a key drawing. They are the drawings that you see and feel for each beat - the important drawings. The rest of the drawings are on the way to these keys. Those are the inbetweens.

Each key is either 12x or 24x away from the other keys next to them.
You should number the keys according to which frame they would appear in your animation test. Number your ex sheets that way too.This would be frame 25 (1 frame past the first 2 beats of pose 1.)

THIS IS THE SECOND POSE IN THE SONG

In the beginning of the song Oswald holds each pose for 2 beats.

Add 24x to to frame 25 and you get frame 49. Got it?

Then it goes to a new pose on every beat. Watch the film frame by frame. Number the inbetweens by counting backwards from the key. If there are 4 inbetweens on the way to frame 49 and they are on "1's", then they will be numbered 48, 47, 46, 45
The mouths are animated on separate levels, so that the body and head animation can be cycled or reused. When you animate this scene, animate the actions first. After you shoot it and see it working, then go back and animate the mouths on a separate level.
Some of the poses are held for a few frames once they stop. The face keeps singing while the body is stopped.




Watch the clip. The song starts on the second scene. If you copy this animation, you will benefit greatly. If you shoot it, send me a link and I will post some of them.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THIS LUCKY RABBIT DANCE!


Just to confuse things, the clip is running at 30x per second ... like video. Film is 24x per second so you have to calculate a bit. Some of the frames are repeated to make it run at 30x per second.

That's why you see some double images in the clip. If you follow my instructions above as to how to number the drawings, it will end up at 24x per second.


CLICK HERE FOR 11" x 17" PRINTABLE VERSION OF AN EX SHEET

Pedro Vargas - The Winner

I think it's great that so many cartoonists are taking the trouble to learn how the classic animators discovered animation's fundamental skills and properties.

Anyone who does this consistently will learn fast.

Here's one test that I thought was particularly good.

Not only did Pedro figure out the timing and the flow of the animation, he made sure Bosko looked like Bosko and that his proportions and volumes stayed consistent which is what a director would normally want.

Good drawing is every bit as important as smooth movement in animation.

Bosko_study
Uploaded by PMVR

Go read how he approached the assignment logically:

http://pipsqueakscorner.blogspot.com/2007/08/mr-slither-animation-john-ks-animation.html


Good job, Pedro! Now apply some of this to your own animation! Use the beats!

Bounce Cycles By Commenters

Well, a few people who visit this blog are really smart!

They are actually copying classic cartoons because they want to learn the best way to animate.

If they keep at it, they will surpass many folks who just kind of wing it and try to teach themselves.

***BTW, count your drawings. There should be 24 drawings in the whole cycle, and each one shot for 1 frame-at 24 frames per second...

Here they are:


Treasure


Groo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woFiSFeTzLY

Mad Taylor

http://madsbasement.blogspot.com/



Anne-Arky

I think Anne just made one up...




Chet

OK, Chet. I watched it. It's good but you shot it on "2's". You need to shoot it on "1's". Just one frame for each drawing. Then it will move faster-it should be 2 beats per second. 12 drawings per beat....makes sense?

Bosco Swing by ~Thunderrobot on deviantART


Guilherme

http://2dflashart.blogspot.com/2007/08/john-k-bosko-exercises.html

I can't get Guilherme's to play either, but maybe you can

Matt Greenwood

http://mgreenwood.blogspot.com/2007/08/bosko-animation-study.html

Matt's action is good, but the volumes keep changing.

Kate Yarberry

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=15097788


Now if all these dedicated folks keep studying the old stuff, they might get to the point where they can animate as well as this:


Milt Gross (thanks to William) - note how everything moves o musical beats!

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl28k_jitterbug-follies-1939-milt-gross


So where are the rest of you wanna-be animators?

Animation Course Level 1, Lesson 1 - The Beat - Kali Does Bosko

Did you ever wonder how animators got this good in such a short time? This is 1942. only a few years later than rubber hose animation. Who wouldn't love to be able to do this?

Coal Black, Bicycle

Great animators started simple

40s animators were so great because they learned to animate like this below. They started with really simple character designs and animated to musical beats.

Bosko Dance

Early sound cartoons moved to musical beats. Here Bosko is bouncing up and down on a 12X beat.

Every 12 x, he squashes down. The lowest position - with his knees bent- happening on the beats. That means he bounces twice every second. A second is 24 film frames.
This is a 24x cycle. He is waving his arms left and right. Each wave is 12x to go with the beat.


I'm convinced that the quickest way to learn the basics of animation is to start by animating fundamental animation techniques using rubber hose designs. I mean Hell, it worked for all the greatest animators in our history. It could work for you too and you the advantage because you have their stuff to study. They didn't have any reference. They were making it up from scratch through trial and error.

But they were very logical and methodical about it too.

1) Animate Simple Characters - why?

If you are teaching yourself to animate and you start with hard to draw characters, you are obviously going to slow your learning curve.

The more details your characters have the longer it takes to draw them, and the harder it is to control the details in motion.

Tall characters with long legs are much harder to animate than short characters with small proportions.

You want to learn basic motion when you are starting out, so keep your characters very simple (and rounded) and you will learn much faster and better.

2) Animate to beats

Animating to a regular beat teaches you:

Rhythmic timing: it feels better- imagine a song with no beat, it wouldn't be much fun. It would meander.

General timing - you get used to what different amounts of frames feel like - what 12x feels like as opposed to 8x.

Classic animators and directors were like drummers. They automatically thought of their scenes as rhythms and that helped make their timing so crisp.

Kali's First Bosko StudyIf you wanna learn animation fundamentals, you can copy these animated cycles and shoot them, like Kali is doing.

As you copy them, analyze what you are doing, so that you can apply general techniques to other scenes. Count how many frames it takes to do each action.
Note the wave action that the arms are doing. This concept can be used in infinite variety.
Note in these bounces, that there are less drawings going down into the accent, and more coming up. That is what gives the beats a noticeable accent. If the timing was even, it would just seem to float up and down. It would be mushy.


Kali animating:


Compare the Bosko animation to the McKimson animation from Coal Black. The fundamentals are the same.This is animated on an 8x beat-the music is faster than the Bosko scene. The accents are stronger too.
Every second beat is accented stronger. 8,8,8,8 etc.
Her right foot moves down faster than her left foot (the one closest to us). That foot moves at a more evenly spaced timing as it circles the pedals.

This scene is way more layered than the Bosko animation, but it's based on the exact same concepts. Learn your fundamentals and soon you will be able to apply them to more complex scenes.

RUBBER HOSE TAUGHT THE BEST FUNDAMENTALS:

Learn to animate to beats using simple cycles and simple circular characters. This is a good first step towards understanding motion and rhythms.

Scenes like this are the foundations of the American style of animation. Snow White, Bugs Bunny, Popeye, Gerald McBoingBoing... all these different styles are built upon the same foundations.

There are 3 cycles in the Bosko clip we put up. Copy them all and stick with this free course and you will see yourself advance past your more stubborn peers in no time.

If you post your tests on your sites, I'll link to them in another post.

Once I have 20 people who have copied this Bosko animation, I will post lesson 2. Rubber Hose Walks.

What basic concepts you learned from this lesson:

Beats

Bouncing

Accents

Wave actions

Cycles

Animation School Lesson 10 - Copy Old Cartoons and learn from the best

Wacky and Silly
http://classiccartoons.blogspot.com/2007/02/woody-woodpecker-1941.html

Genius
http://classiccartoons.blogspot.com/2006/08/so-white-never-looked-so-good.html