Step Up Step Down
This will possibly be your first assignment that begins to deal with non-cyclical animation. Some years I've done the Weightlift assignment at this point and others this one. It doesn't really matter which one you do first, they just deal with slightly different principles.
This one is an off-shoot of the standard Walk Cycle assignment but the character doesn't cycle. The character starts at the bottom of the stairs, walks up to the top, turns and then comes down the stairs and stops. There are a number of different variations to this assignment if you want to mix things up a bit. In my book, I give you a layout BG that has two sets of stairs:
The character goes up the ones on the left and comes down the set on the right. If you wanted to, the character could go up and down the same stairs.
To make things more interesting, and introduce you to the idea of doing some character animation, I've asked that you give the character a specific emotion for the stepping up action and as they get to the top, their emotion changes and they come down the stairs differently. For example, they can go up the stairs confidently and when they reach the top, they can become scared and then descend cautiously. Or go up happy and come down scared. Up with energy and bounce - down exhausted and dragging themselves, etc. The two emotional states should be opposites and very easily identified by the character's physical stance and posing.
There should also be a few moments at the top where the character pauses and thinks about where they are and allow for the emotional change to take place. We'll discuss this more in the breakdowns later.
In each section of the animation, there needs to be proper anticipation and reaction to what the character is doing, both in the broad sense: anticipate before stepping up to the fist step and then recovering when they reach the top, and in the minute actions where the character needs to anticipate and recover on each and every step they take (some of this may blend together in that the recovery action after the foot lands also becomes the anticipation to the lifting of the back foot off the ground).
There are three sections to the assignment: 1) stepping up the stairs to the top, 2) turning and pausing to assess the situation and think about how and what they are going to do, and 3) stepping down the stairs and stopping at the bottom.
Each section will require a different type of timing, depending on what you choose to have the character do. This is where the assignment differs from all the others that you've done up to this point. All the other assignments have had basically one action. Think through them all from the beginning: Perpetual Ball Bounce, Descending Ball Bounce, Pendulum Swing, Seaweed, Walk Cycle, Jump Up & Down, and Broad Jump. The other major difference will be your drawing count. Aside from the Descending Energy Ball and the Broad Jump, most of the assignments were between 11 and 36 drawings. In this assignment, we're going to be in the 130 - 160 realm which is quite a bit more than you're used to, plus the fact that it's a character, and we have to make them think!
O.k., take some deep breaths... I don't want you to get scared... you can do this.
Step 1 - Character Design
The first thing you'll need to do is come up with a character design, just the basic body shapes and proportions. Don't worry about any details at this point - no face, ears, clothing or anything like that. Let's keep it simple. If you have my book "Designing Cartoon Characters for Animation", on pages 88 - 98 there are 50 different body designs based on established cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny, George Jetson, Donald Duck, etc. Pick one of them for your design, or come up with your own but keep the characters simple as I have them. Here's a .pdf of those design pages.
Step 2 - Think
Now you need to think about the emotion that the character is going to have on the way up, what they're going to be thinking at the top and how they're going to come down. Run the actions through your head right now a few times and come up with some different variations.
Now pick the combination that you like the best and will be animating for this assignment.
Play it through in your head over and over again. Visualize your character doing that action. Start to see all the little points that they will be doing as they go up, then pause, think, and decide to come down and then settle to a stop at the bottom.
Break the actions up into the key positions now and slowly step through the whole thing. How does the character shift their weigh at the very beginning to lif their foot off the ground to go up to the first step. What direction does the upper body move in? Does the arm flair out to counter balance? Does the leg of the foot still on the ground bend slightly and then straighten up as the opposite foot goes up? Where is the high point in the step? When the foot comes down is their a cushion? Is their overlapping action in the upper torso? Where are the arms right now? Is their drag on the opposite foot as it comes up? Is the body counter-balancing?
That's a lot of things to think about... and we're only on the first step up!
Go through the whole assignment this way several times. If you're going to animate it, you need to know how it's going to move. As you already know, these drawings do not animate themselves. Who is in control of the pencil?? You are. If you don't think this through beforehand, when you start animating, you're just guessing, and as a professional animator, you can't do that.
Step 3 - Thumbnails
Draw some quick thumbnail sketches to record your thoughts on how this is going to play out. These are fast 10 second drawings. Overall, you should have somewhere in the realm of about 30 keys and breakdowns - give or take a few depending on your actions that you choose. At 10 seconds each, with another 10 seconds to think between each one, it should take you around 10 minutes to plan this whole thing out on paper. Leave enough room between each drawing so that you could put in another one if you decided that you didn't like the original drawing and you want to revise it. Then you could just scribble out the one you don't like. Or you can use the space to draw in a breakdown to the action or even a timing chart.
Thumbnails are probably new to most of you at this point. You don't need to thumbnail simple actions like a ball bounce or walk cycle (although depending on how weird it is, a high and low point thumbnail could be helpful for the walk cycle). It's once you get into the more complex and extended scenes that they become necessary planning tools.
In most cases, they are simply drawn scribbles that indicate the pose for that particular part of the action. You really don't need to worry at all about model, proportions, or the design of the character in these sketches. Sometimes just a single line of action will do.
Here are my thumbnails for the demo on this one.
It took me about 8 minutes to complete these 19 sketches. Watch the video of me drawing these here.
Here's the template I used to do the thumbnails, so you don't have to draw the stairs over and over again.
Step 4 - Assess Your Work
Take a breather. Have a coffee, coke, bathroom break, whatever, but get up and stretch and step away from the drawing board.
When you come back, take a fresh look at what you've planned out. Does it look right? Do the actions make sense? Now act out what you've planned to do. You don't necessarily need a set of stairs to do this but it would help. Act it out exactly as you drew it. You may need to make allowances for any eccentric actions you may have decided to add in like bending a leg in an opposite direction or something weird like that, but do your best. Does it feel right?
Can you act out the emotions properly and do they fit the actions you've chosen? If not, go back and revise your thumbnails until it does work. Don't try to barrel ahead with a bad plan and say to yourself, "Oh, I'll just fix that up in the key stage." Big mistake, you're back to just guessing again, and that rarely turns out good. Go back to Step 3 and fix it up until you know it's going to work.
If you wait to see if it works in the key stage... and it doesn't, you'll have to go back and restart all over again and you'll have wasted a lot more time and probably end up being discouraged.
This is one of the major areas that people mess up in. If you don't plan properly it won't turn out the way you wanted it to. There are no "Animation Faeries" that come along at night and magically fix your animation for you. If you don't do it... it won't get done.
I stepped away from these while I was writing the Step 5 section below here and then for about two hours after that. I thought about what it was I wanted the character to do and think as well as the emotions. I don't think my thumbnails above show what I want them to. It short changes the animation and I think I can do better than this, so I'll go back and redo the thumbnails and make it better.
Step 5 - Key Animation
After you are completely confident that you know what you are doing, move onto the key animation stage.
Step 5a (alternate)
Now you could try shooting your thumbnail poses as a very rough pencil test to see if the general action is correct. This would require that you time everything out. You can do this in whatever software program you're using by simply shifting the length that each of the drawings is held for. You would have to rough register each of the drawings either under the camera or later in the software program. (I did it in Premier straight from the scanned drawings.)
Here's what I came up with from my original thumbnails.
So, it's crude, but it gets the idea across properly. It's a neat way to see for sure if you're on the right track.
And now, back to the original Step 5
Using your thumbnails as your guide (if you're good to go), and with your Layout BG on your disk, draw the character in the first pose.
Again, keep the drawing simple and loose. You can label it #1 or A, (doesn't really matter at this point). 1 is o.k because it is the first drawing and nothing will likely change that.
Lay a fresh sheet of paper over top of this one and do your next key pose, the anticipation. Label this one "B".
Move on throughout the scene doing only the key extreme positions (and the odd breakdowns if you have to).
Look for high points & low points as the keys and weird passing positions or movements with "odd" major breakdowns that have a unique path of action that is different from the standard arc.
Once you've gone through and finished them all, shoot a pencil test the same as you did for the thumbnails (if you did that step).
Time the drawings out appropriately. Don't just default to 2 frames or 4 frames or 6 frames per drawing all the way through. Figure out how many inbetweens you'll most likely put in. Think about slow-in and slow-outs and possibly any favours. Think about hang time on the high points and cushion on the low ones.
For the parts at the top of the box where the character is thinking. Time out how long it takes you to think something. Say the words that the character is thinking about in your head, like "Oh crap, this is pretty high, I don't think I can walk down these stairs... c'mon now, you can do it!" How long does it take to say those words in your head? That's how long it should take the character as well. It's amazing how some people will time this out to just 12 frames and it just zips by. No one can think that fast and have it register for the audience. You have to act it out in real time. Now suddenly you're faced with the fact that that dialogue took 6 1/2 seconds, that's 156 frames or 78 drawings shot on twos.
Here's where the rubber meets the road. If each drawing takes you 10 minutes to draw, that's 780 minutes or... gulp... 13 hours of non-stop drawing. Realistically, it's two solid days of drawing with breaks for lunch and stretching.
The rough thumbnail test I have times out to 11 seconds total. I really should stretch out that thinking section longer to match the dialogue that I wrote. That would make the whole thing about 14 1/2 seconds total. That's 348 frames or 174 drawings times 10 minutes each equals 1740 minutes or 29 hours of non-stop drawing. 4 1/2 days to animate. Two days of that to animate just the thinking part, no wonder so many students choose to cut that section short. Will the character look like they're thinking and acting properly at that point in the assignment? Probably not.
It's the student that, at this point realizes, that they can choose the easy path or take the high road and become the better animator.
You need to stop and make a decision right now. What are you going to do?
Yeah, you could probably pass the assignment without that think time in there. It's probably only worth about 15% of the overall grade. You can worry about the acting stuff later when you get to the lip sync assignments - no big deal. Is this how you want to go through your life? Finding ways to cut corners and deal with stuff later? Or, do you want a really nice piece of animation that you can proudly stick into your portfolio? This is one of the first assignments that falls into the realm of portfolio ready assignments. No one wnats to see a bouncing ball or pendulum swing. Maybe a few cool walk cycles, but acting and think time... that's what they want to see. That's what will get you the job.
So, with that all said, I guess I'd better come up with some pretty amazing examples here.
Here are my revised thumbnails.
So you can see that I've added in more than double the number of thumbnail drawings. I put more into the thought process at the top of the stairs and changed the attitude on the way down to more hesitant and scared.
Here's the pencil test rough timed.
It's almost 16 seconds in length now and will probably change a bit once I complete the rough keys. So, I'm looking at close to 32 hours of drawing for this one, which will work out to about 5 1/2 days... probably a bit more. I'll set my stopwatch on it... and, GO! (tic tic tic...)
Step 6 - Rough Keys
Now at this point, you can follow your thumbnail drawings verbatum, but there's nothing to say that you can't still make changes and improve things even more. I'll be honest here, I'm not a big thumbnail animator. I usually let the ideas stew in my head for a while and then jump in and start keying the whole thing out. I'm not guessing at anything at this point because I do have a very solid idea of what I'm going to do. There have been a couple of times, usually when I'm doing straight ahead animation, that I will get lost in the middle of the scene and have to step back for a bit to get my bearings and come up with what I want the character to be doing... but that's typical of straight ahead animation. When you're doing something like this where there are specific things that the character must do, it's not that difficult. If you have lip sync or an audio track with sound effects, it's even easier, because the timing is set in stone with accent points and you must hit them or else it will not work. So all this to say, work the way you feel most comfortable. If you don't want to do thumbnails, don't do them.
Here are my rough keys for this assignment. These are for the first section of the assignment where the character walks up and then turns at the top of the stairs. They took me two hours to complete. I've kept them exactly as I drew them to make a few points.
1) Keep the drawings loose and rough. Don't waste time on the details and making the lines nice and clean. You want to focus on the attitude of the character and positioning the head, arms, legs and the line of action through the body. You'll notice that my drawings tend to degenerate as they go along. The first pose is always pretty tight. I want to be sure I'm starting from the right position. I will be going back over these again to tighten things up.
2) The character shrinks from beginning to end. I keep telling people to watch out for this but fall into the same trap myself as well. I can go back later and adjust the size by simply blowing it up a bit on a copier and retracing the image as I start to tighten the keys a bit more.
3) You need to look closely for this one, if you take another peek at 'D, E, F, and I' you'll notice that I've redrawn the tail. That's because I goofed up on the action the first time through. When I got to F, I knew I was doing the wrong thing, so I didn't do it for G and H, but for some reason drew it on in I... wrong again. Then I left them off on the remaining keys. I then went back and flipped them a few times to get the idea of what the action should have been and redrew them all in again. At this rough stage, don't be afraid to make corrections as you go along. If you know you're doing the wrong thing, go back and fix it right away. The longer you leave it, the harder it will be to make the correction.
Next I'll key out the thought process at the top of the stairs. I've decided to make this a "medium waist shot" rather than a "full body long shot" so I can focus on the character's facial expressions. I'm not suggesting that you do this as well for your assignment. I'm doing it so you can see how far I wanted to push it..
Again, there's a bit of shrinking and growing and the character is slipping off model slightly here and there, but mostly on the last two drawings, Q and R. I'll fix all this stuff up later when I go back to tighten them up more. You may or may not have also noticed that right after F, I have A and B again. I did this on purpose to indicate the action at this part but not the facial expressions. After I do the pencil test to see if the action is o.k., I'll go back and redraw these two new keys and insert them as F1 and F2
Here's the pencil test rough timed.
Like I said, it's just rough timed at this point. I need to go in and play with it a bit to get it just the way I want it. The arc action on F, A, B, G keys works properly but obviously the faces are wrong, so I'll go back and make new keys to correct them. My timing is now up to 21 seconds... that's 10 seconds more than the original pencil test I did. That now means I have about 2,520 minutes of drawing or 42 hours, which is 7 days. Yeesh.
Next I'll rough out the walking down keys.
I did the very last few keys in a rush at the end of the class. I'm not happy with the final action of him jumping to the floor at the end and will change this to a step, similar to the others, but with a bit more confidence as it is the last step. I'll finish it off with the proper recovery and maybe a satisfied expression of, "Yes! I did it!"
Check here for a .pdf of major things to watch out for in this assignment.
Back to the Step Up Step Down Assignment