Weightlift Tips
... (and other stuff too)

You are to animate the given character in a slight 3/4 front view, standing beside an spherical object (a Ball). Within the field of view and close to the character (within one or two steps) there should be a box like object at a height between the character’s waist and shoulders (but not above or below these parameters, just use the layout sketch provided).

The character is to look at the object, estimate it’s weight, then anticipate back and grab the sphere close to the bottom and recover. The character, with effort, should then anticipate again and lift the sphere off the ground, up to their waist, then slightly collapse under the weight but recover with two bounces. The character then anticipates back and steps forward as necessary, stops, and recovers, then anticipates down and lifts the sphere onto the top of the box. After the sphere has been placed, the character should then step back and recover.

Thought Process

For most people, this will be your very first “full character animation”. By this I mean that it’s the full body of the character and it’s not a cyclical action like the walk cycle. This has a beginning, middle, and end to it. There is also a certain amount of acting involved although you could get away with just sticking to the described actions and have the character go through them. The core piece of “acting” is the lifting of the ball off the ground. You need to have the character act as though the ball is heavy.

Over the years that I’ve been teaching, this is usually the first assignment of the 2nd semester. Invariably, at least half of the students in the class will fail this assignment for a few different reasons. Part of it has to do with the motivation you have for learning animation in the first place and the general “type” of student you are. At the writing of this book, I’ve been teaching for 20 years at the college level. I’ve seen lots of students; easily over 2000. Believe me when I say, “I’ve seen every type there is” (although a brand new species always seems to pop up now and then just to keep me on my toes). Here are a few general types (see if you fit any of these):

The Keener
This is the student who really wants to learn animation and tries to become your buddy during the school year. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, they tend to use it to manipulate the instructor during grading, assessments and missed deadlines. They may honestly be really interested in learning but they use devious mind control tricks to get their way.

The Animation Geek (a.k.a. Animation Fanboy)
This is the student who lives, breathes, and sleeps animation. They talk about it ad nauseum either through critique (“that was such a bad show”, “I would have done it this way”) or sheer adoration (“that animator is the greatest, I wish I could work with them”, etc.). They have a huge animation collection and can talk authoritatively about any animation ever produced.

The Perfectionist (type 1)
This student has to do it right the first time or not at all. If they don’t get it right the first time, it’s usually the instructor’s fault for not giving the proper information during the lecture.

The Perfectionist (type 2)
This student wants to do it right and will redo it several times until it is right and usually gets it on the second or third try.

The Perfectionist (type 3)
This student wants to do it right and will redo it several times but just can’t get it to work and can’t understand why.

The Perfectionist (type 4 a.k.a. God’s Gift to Animation)
This student wants to do it right and through lots of hard work, does.

The Question
This student can’t stop asking questions about their work. Asking questions is fine, that’s what the instructor is there for, but eventually you have to sit down and just do the work and start to question yourself. This person ignores their own internal thought process and relies on the instructor to do their thinking for them.

The Hard Worker
This student may not be as good as the perfectionist but they work hard at their animation and eventually come up with some good stuff.

The Mid-Life Crisis
This student is usually older than the typical 18 year old/just out of High School student. They’ve gone through College for something else or have been working at a job for a number of years, discovered this is not where they should be and that they really should be in animation. Sometimes this works, but 9 times out of 10 they should have stayed where they were or perhaps taken up cooking. (See the “I’ve Always Loved to Draw” student)

"I’ve Always Loved to Draw"
This is similar to the Mid-Life Crisis student but this one comes in straight out of High School. They dabbled in drawing or cartooning throughout their High School years but when it came time to decide on what they wanted to do in College they figured they’d “give animation a try” and see how it worked out. They usually lack the drive and initiative needed to get them beyond the first year.

The Slug
These are the dreaded ones. I ask myself, “What the heck ever possessed you to think that you could do this?” Somehow they make it into the program and make your year miserable. Usually they can’t draw very well because they’ve had no formal training in High School or they just managed to scrape by through an Art Fundamentals program. They take up most of your time in class and just don’t get it. These students usually fail within the first year. Sometimes they are very persistent and try to come back to redo the year again. If they end up failing again, they tend to file formal complaints and ask for refunds because, “it’s the instructor’s fault they couldn’t learn”.

I had a student like this once that I called, “The Blimp” (in my own head of course). He would hover around me while I was giving feedback to other students. When it was his turn, I’d critique his work or answer his questions but while I was talking he would have this blank expression on his face and I could actually see the words that came out of my mouth, bouncing off his head. For some reason, I tend to get one of these every two or three years.

Mr. (or Ms.) Consistent
This student is o.k at the start but then consistently improves over each assignment. They usually tend to be very intent on taking in the feedback you give them and it shows that they’ve actually done something with it in their work.

The Problem Student
This student is similar to the Slug but instead of it being a mental comprehension problem, It’s life problems that tend to interrupt their learning. For whatever reason, problems seem to cluster for these students. They are usually family related but can also be in the form of boyfriend/girlfriend issues.

I’ve had students whose parents have broken up, divorced, died, had severe health problems, grandparent deaths, physical accidents, car accidents, job problems, rent issues, money shortages, fights, you name it, I’ve probably seen it.

I’ve had students puke on me the morning after an all night party, have seizures in class, totally freak out and throw desks due to mental breakdowns, cry in my office after learning they have cancer, drop out due to unforeseen circumstances. I haven’t had anyone die in class yet, although one student was suicidal and was eventually hospitalized.

Everyone comes in with their own baggage. Some people can handle it and others can’t. This isn’t every type of student (I could write a thesis on it if I really wanted to), but perhaps you can recognize a part of yourself in one or two of them.

The key thing I wanted to say here is that when you’re learning anything, you have to want to learn it. That’s where we are right now. You have to want to learn this stuff. I can’t make you. You have to do the drawings, I can’t do them for you. It all comes back to your own personal motivation.

The "It's not MY fault" Student
I haven't had a lot of these over the years but just recently, more and more seem to be cropping up, and they tend to run in packs.

This is the student who tends to start struggling on some of the more complex assignments, the "weightlift" being one of them. They mess up on some part of the action analysis (more about this in a bit) and leave out the anticipation or reaction to the main movements and end up failing the assignment. They get angry about failing and rather than take the blame for not doing the animation properly themselves, they lash out at the instructor and blame them for not having taught them how to do it.

It's only about every 4 - 5 years that I'll get a group of these. I'll sit back and reassess what it is that I'm doing in class. I'll give out questionnaires and ask for feedback from the students on what I should be doing differently, then retool the next session. Over the years, this is what has prompted me to write my books, to give the students more in-depth information. Then in the early 1990's I jumped into the internet and set up this website, which I still continue to add onto almost on a monthly basis. By the late 90's I started video taping my lectures and then producing the DVDs. Recently, I started doing more animation through the 11 Second Club to give the students some more current examples of my work. I photocopy drawings from in-class demos and leave them in class, do extra breakdowns to show line of action, basic shape movements, hand-outs for lecture notes... I keep adding more and more stuff for the students to use, but it's never enough.

This is how a conversation with a student will go after they complain about their grade: "Did you read the section in the book?" I'll ask them,

"Yeah, but I didn't get it."

"Did you look through the website at the examples?" "No, I couldn't find the page. Your website's too confusing."

"Did you follow along with me during the lecture and demo?" "I forgot to bring my paper and pencil."

"Did you look at the notes I gave you in class?" "I lost them."

"Did you show me your keys and breakdowns the week before it was due?" "I had another assignment that was due, so I couldn't get them done in time to show you."

It's the student who must deliver their own work to prove what they can do. There's the old saying: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink." I can show you how to do it and explain the theories, but the student still has to do their own animation.

This very assignment is the one where people mess up because they don't animate either the anticipations or the recoveries to the actions. I'll tell the students before-hand, "If you have an assignment where you need to submit 3 drawings and each drawing is worth 33.3%. If you don't do the first and last drawings... just the 2nd one, what kind of grade will you get?"

"33.3%" is the answer they'll give. Is that a passing grade?

"So, if the anticipation is worth 33.3% and the action is worth 33.3% and the recovery is worth 33.3% and you don't animate the anticipation or recovery, what will your grade be?" I can't give you a grade for something you don't do.

I say all this when I'm giving out the assignment but it always happens that they fail for this very reason. Was it my fault that you didn't animate the anticipation or recovery?

The "It's o.k., I'll just pull an all-nighter" Student
Perhaps, one of the most typical of all student traits. This student has, let's say, 2 weeks to do an assignment. They put it off and put it off, for whatever reasons and then realize, "Oh, crap! The assignment is due tomorrow." So, they have to pull an all-nighter. For those of you who have never done this before, an "all-nighter" is where you stay up all through the night without sleeping and work away on the assignment.

Hey, I'll admit, I've done lots of these in my time. Some were forced... "Either you get this done for tomorrow, or you're fired!" (yes, it happens). And some were my own fault for leaving it too late.

On the one hand, there's a morbid curiosity about whether or not it works. Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. The quality of the work is definitely sacrificed as you get closer to dawn.

For students, it's both the quality level on the project itself, and the physical price you must pay around 3:00 the following afternoon. If you have any classes, or lectures, you can pretty much guarantee that you're not going to get anything out of them because your brain will feel like a marshmallow and you're going to fall asleep. (One of my major pet peeves is giving this really amazing lecture and demo in class and every time I look up over the top of the desk at the students, half of them are face down asleep. In my mind, I just say to myself, "Too bad for them, they're missing some pretty important stuff here.") These students later have the opportunity to turn into the "It's not my fault" student.

Another reason some students fail this assignment is because they don’t do the proper amount of “action analysis”.

What is Action Analysis?

Action analysis is the process of taking the action that your character goes through and breaking it down into separate components. There are three basic components that all actions can be broken down into: 1) Anticipation, 2) Action, 3) Reaction (or Recovery).

These are three of the main “Principles of Animation” that I went through at the beginning of this book. As amazing as it may sound, many students don’t think the action through using these three principles. The Action principle is absolutely necessary, otherwise the character wouldn’t even move. For whatever reason, the students who fail this assignment simply don’t use Anticipation or Reaction in their animation. If the grading was divided equally between these three principles, giving each one 33.3%, if a student doesn’t use anticipation or reaction, that’s 66.6% of the grade which means the best they could do would be 33.3%, which is a failing grade. I often put it to the students this way: If I gave you an assignment that required you to draw 3 circles on a sheet of paper and each circle was worth 33.3% and you only handed in one circle, would you expect to get a passing grade? Of course not!

This thought process on the student’s part always baffles me. So, let me be absolutely clear on this: every action, always requires an anticipation of some sort at the beginning and a reaction/recovery of some sort at the end.

The third reason for failing this assignment is the issue of realistic timing. If you act this assignment out yourself (using a stopwatch to time it), you’ll probably end up somewhere between 8 and 10 seconds. The heavier you want it to seem, the longer it will take. If it’s 10 seconds long, that means you’ll have 120 drawings. That’s 12 drawings per second, shot on two’s for 10 seconds: 12 x 10 = 120.

If you’ve done it and you only have 60 drawings, and you shoot it on two’s, it’ll be 5 seconds long which is way too fast. If you take those 60 drawings and shoot them on four’s, it will be 10 seconds long but you will only have half of the drawings done. If someone did this and handed it in to me for grading, I’d start their mark at 50% and assess it down from there. You can’t get a passing grade if you only hand in 1/2 the assignment (well, technically, you could get 50% which could be a pass depending on the passing level your school has. Some schools have 60% as a pass and others have 50% as a pass.)

The final reason which is basically a combination/result of all three is the failure to create the illusion of weight through the acting of the character. The ball has to look like it’s heavy.

So now, let’s get to the assignment.

I’m one of those people who believes that you need to act the scene you’re going to animate, physically with your own body. You need to go through all the motions that the character will, thinking through each minute movement, weight shift, torque, twist, bend, everything. You need to do it several times, trying out different paths of action, exaggerating more here and there, trying to push the extreme positions further without compromising the intent of the scene.

Get up right now and go through all the actions of the assignment from beginning to end.

Once you’ve done this a few times you’ll have a better idea of what it is that you want your character to do.

The next stage is to visualize it all in your head.

Mental Visualization

This is the mental process of seeing the action of the character inside your mind’s eye. Many people have a difficult time understanding this process. Everyone can do it, you just need to practice it to get it to do what you want it to.

Let me explain it this way: everyone has a memory. You can think back about things that have happened to you earlier in the day, last week, or way back when you were a child. You can play back the events in your mind almost to the point where you can sort of see them as a hazy image. Some memories are very vivid and clear depending on how much the event effected you.

Visualizing your animation works the same way. You think about the character design and the positioning of the character at the beginning of the scene and then play through the actions.

Do this several times until you have a very firm idea of exactly what you want the character to be doing. Now you need to go through and draw out some quick sketches of the main action poses in thumbnail form.

Thumbnails

The thumbnail stage is where you can quickly jot down the ideas you have in your head. Each of the sketches should be very fast, like 10 - 20 sec each at the most. You’ll want to make adjustments to the poses to push them and make them more extreme. For this assignment there should be around 28 poses if you want to show all the extremes and be completely thorough. This stage of the process should take you about 15 - 30 minutes maximum.

Rough Key Animation

Now we get into the full sized art. You can do this on 8 1/2” x 11” paper or full sized animation paper (11” x 14”) if you want.

Work from the initial layout drawing that I’ve provided as your start off point.

The first phrase of action is the character looking at the ball and assessing it’s weight. This can be done any number of different ways. The character can do something simple like, just look at the ball with some head tilts but it’s your job as the animator to come up with some interesting action. Perhaps the character could lean forward a bit and touch the ball with one hand to see if it can move with a nudge and feel what it’s made of. This would make the primary action the leaning forward and putting a hand on the ball.

The character might also take a short step forward. This action would then require a weight shift off one foot which becomes your anticipation. Even without the step, you should still anticipate the character back a bit... not too much, maybe half a head width. Remember, anticipation goes in the opposite direction of the action. If the character moves forward, the anticipation is back.

The action is not broad so the reaction on the end should be fairly soft and be more of a seaweed action as opposed to a straight back recovery. Just put a slight bob up and down on the head.

The character next moves closer to the ball with their feet to get a better position for picking it up. This will require a step, step action as well as the repositioning of the hands around the bottom of the ball. The first step should be preceded by a slight anticipation of the back down, then up and then the foot comes up into the step. The foot farthest away won’t be seen but there should still be the movement in the back to suggest the leg movement. The arm action would overlap with the shoulder moving first and then rippling down to the fingertips.

Next is the lifting action which is the core of the assignment. You want it to appear as though there is weight to the ball and the character needs to use a fair amount of effort in getting it off the ground. There should be an anticipation bob in the legs and butt and a downward movement to the head before the jerking back of the head and following through with the back, hips, and legs in that order. This will create a seaweed overlapping action that moves through the character and helps to jerk the ball up. Put lots of stretch on the arms on the way up.

Let the ball reach it’s high point and then fall back down into the character’s pelvic area. Be sure this forms a slight arc going back. If it’s too big, it’ll throw the character off balance and if you don’t move the character’s feet, it’ll create an off balance pose. You can do this if you want, it’ll just require a slight rotation to the character’s body as they step back with the one foot. Don’t have the character jump back with both feet as this will make the ball seem lighter.

The recovery out of this action is really important. If you don’t get the right bounce, it won’t look heavy. I suggest a double bounce that descends in energy. A single bounce won’t be enough to make it look the proper weight. Treat the legs as though they’re shock absorbers.

Complete the recovery to a complete stop before you begin the anticipation into the steps forward. You can even add in a slight animated hold for about a second and a half. The anticipation to the steps should be down, not back because of the heavy weight of the ball. Put a little bounce on each step and then another anticipation into the next step. This will really sell the weight.

Put a double bounce recovery on the final step and a slightly longer animated hold here to show the character getting ready for the final lift up onto the box.

Anticipate down and then pull the ball up and forward onto the box. Be sure it moves in an arc forward and goes slightly higher than the box before coming back down. You can also add a slight step forward to this action.

Be careful that you don’t animate the ball going through the box. Keep the character back far enough so it doesn’t interfere with the action.

Once the ball hits the box, it can roll just a bit but not too much. The character should now be moving back in recovery from the lift up and forward. Lead with the hips and seaweed the character back into an upright position. The arms should pendulum swing to a stop as the final overlapping action. Have the hips stop first, then the shoulders, head and finally the arms. Finish it all off with a two second animated hold of the final pose.

The key thing here is to time it all properly. Most students make it too fast overall. This is partly due to a misunderstanding of the timing but also just sheer laziness. They don’t want to do all the inbetweens so they cut the number down in an effort to save themselves the extra work. If you really want this to work well, aim for around 10 seconds overall.

Once you have your keys drawn, shoot the pencil test and play with the timing until you get it the way you want it. Once you’re happy, start working out the timing charts on the keys.

After you’ve done this, go through and draw the major inbetweens or breakdowns and shoot another pencil test. These new drawings will fill in the broader actions and give you a better sense of the overall timing. As you add in the inbetweens the timing may appear to slow down. This is natural, so don’t start to freak out yet. Complete all the remaining inbetweens and then shoot the final pencil test. Confirm the timing. If it needs to slow down a bit, then go in and add some more inbetweens where necessary. If it’s too slow, then you’ll need to go in and take out some inbetweens or possibly shoot some drawings on one’s instead.

Don’t stop until you’re completely happy with the results.

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