Richard Williams Passes It was with shock that I read of the death of Richard Williams last week, just after I had posted about him (No. 193: Page One-eleven). He was 86 years old, but that doesn't lessen the regret I felt for his absence from the 2D animation world; he loomed larger than anyone in his reverence and enthusiasm for drawn animation, and for all that he did to try to sustain it and make it into a noble art. We have his great book, The Animator's Survival Kit, and we have the instructional DVD collection that he created afterwards, and we have all his films and drawings to treas ..read more

My Page in Richard Williams' Book...Maybe I have referred fondly to Richard Williams' book The Animator's Survival Kit, published in 2001, and I even believe I may take credit for a small bit of it. Years ago, a friend and I attended the first ever of Richard Williams' Animation Master Class workshops. This was held in Vancouver, BC, November 9, 10 and 11 of 1995. These classes were the basis for the book, or helped work out the ideas to be included in the book;  I am not sure which.  But he was already calling his class "the Animator's Survival Kit" at this time. It was perhaps on the s ..read more

The story so far...Last time I showed you the first version pencil test where I had mainly focused on the legs and feet. Here is the promised version two, featuring the final hand and arm action. Yet this was still only half the work, as the remaining 8 inbetweens had yet to be done.  And are these straight inbetweens, with every line or point on the inbetween  halfway between the two corresponding lines or points on the drawings it connects? The answer is, certainly not.  At the extremes, there are ease-in or ease-out spacings, and also certain of these "simpler" inbetween drawings may even ..read more

A New Walk CycleEvery once in a while, I get down Richard Williams' book from my collection of something like 150 books on animation, and I go through it from beginning to end. This does not count the times I get it down to look up something specific, as for example recently when I wanted to review what he had to say about someone clapping their hands. The Animator's Survival Kit by Williams and Illusion of Life by Thomas and Johnston are the two  most influential and informational guides to the process of traditional animation that I can imagine. Of the two, Survival Kit is actually the more ..read more

Getting the Whole Picture When I began my film, Carry On, I had to decide on an aspect ratio; that is, the proportion of height to width of the film frame. I chose to use the 16:9 ratio, a very wide ratio similiar to those popularized in movie theaters in such formats as Cinemascope, Vista Vision and Cinerama, which they say were conceived to give the moviegoer an experience that could not be had on the medium that had become a threat to theatrical movies:  television. Well, as we all know, television has found a way around that limitation. But in social media there are still examples of a f ..read more

That Heavy Trunk Here is the final version of my first scene to be finished in color for my film Carry On. My next scene, Scene 1-3, precedes this one in continuity; it will show the taxi with Old Man and trunk arriving at the airport ..read more

Although character animation is for me the most satisfying part of 2D animation, it is sometimes necessary to do other animation along the way. This is animation of objects, like the Old Man's trunk, that are tedious to draw and yet give conviction and substance to the scenes. I did a recent post talking about the difficulty of imitating 3D animation in 2D (No. 182), but it is not so bad if you are not trying so much to imitate 3D as to simply make a convincing 2D interpretation of the movement of 3D objects. In the scene we are looking at here, there is a wide exterior shot of an airport te ..read more

From Paper to Digital After a month of vacation travel, I am back home and at work inking the first scene of my film Carry On. The traditionally paper-animated drawings were scanned and imported as vector images into Animate Pro, and now I am inking them onto a new layer where I will also apply color and the background. It seems that many animators now have gone to TV Paint in preference to Toon Boom or other software, but Toon Boom Animate Pro is what I have, and I am happy with it. Onward ..read more

Size and WeightHere is a drawing you will feel but not see: a single frame of the trunk on impact, showing its squashed form. Back in posts no. 142 and 144, I discussed this scene in detail.  It shows how even a large, strong man has trouble lifting and moving the Old Man's ponderous trunk. It is key to the whole film because you will keep wondering how that old man is going to move the trunk at all, let alone get it onto the airplane. We come back to it now because I have chosen it as the first scene I intend to finish in ink and paint and with a background. Let's look at the scene again, i ..read more

How Many Frames per Second? Early on, I learned that it was not a good idea to think of timing in terms of frames. That is, how many frames it took to do something: throw a ball, take a step, do a take. A couple of decades before, there wouldn't have been any reason not to, because everything was projected at 24 or 25 frames per second (fps.) A couple of decades before that, before 1928, the standard projection speed was 16 fps; it was the advent of sound that standardized the speed at 24. And film animators often learned to think of their timing in terms of feet, because one linear foot of 3 ..read more