Thumbnail Sketches
Some animators do this and some do not. Every animator has their own personal way of approaching a scene. Thumbnail sketches provide you with a quick plan of the action taking place. If there are roughly 3 key poses per second and an average scene is 4 seconds in length, you’ll have 12 poses total. If a thumbnail pose takes around 30 seconds to draw, and 30 seconds to think about, it’ll take you 12 minutes to plan the scene. These are all just rough figures and depend on the scene action, character design, your abilities to draw, and the overall length of the scene. The point is, drawing a full sized key drawing will take a lot longer and it’s better to plan the scene in small as opposed to full size, so there.
