Animation from Pencils to Pixels

Classical Techniques for the Digital Animator

Tony White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136144219
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Computer Science

Just add talent! Award-winning animator Tony White brings you the ultimate book for digital animation. Here you will find the classic knowledge of many legendary techniques revealed, paired with information relevant to today's capable, state-of-the-art technologies. White leaves nothing out. What contemporary digital animators most need to know can be found between this book's covers - from conceptions to creation and through the many stages of the production pipeline to distribution. This book is intended to serve as your one-stop how-to animation guide. Whether you're new to animation or a very experienced digital animator, here you'll find fundamentals, key classical techniques, and professional advice that will strengthen your work and well-roundedness as an animator. Speaking from experience, White presents time-honored secrets of professional animaton with a warm, masterly, and knowledgeable approach that has evolved from over 30 years as an award-winning animator/director. The book's enclosed downloadable resources presents classic moments from animation's history through White's personal homage to traditional drawn animation, "Endangered Species." Using movie clips and still images from the film, White shares the 'making of' journal of the film, detailing each step, with scene-by-scene descriptions, technique by technique. Look for the repetitive stress disorder guide on the downloadable resources, called, "Mega-hurts." Watch the many movie clips for insights into the versatility that a traditional, pencil-drawn approach to animaton can offer.

1 Development

DOI: 10.4324/9780080475851-2

Dare to look through the keyhole—anything’s possible!

Everything begins with an idea.

Everything begins with an idea, and a film project succeeds or fails in direct proportion to how well that idea is developed. I have always advised students that what you get out of a project at the end is in direct proportion to what you put into it at the beginning. Therefore, if you want your project to achieve everything you hope for, you should ensure that its development stage is approached meticulously and conscientiously.

Development is taking a basic idea—a thought, a line of text, even a piece of music—and expanding it to its maximum filmic expression. The most formal development process possible is implemented for a movie or a TV series, but the development stage should be applied to all kinds of projects, whether they are large or small, commercial or personal. The stages of an animated film development will include anything that will enable a viable project to be understood, funded, and produced, including:

• idea creation
• evolving the storyline
• creating a script
• character design or modeling
• background/environmental design
• storyboarding
• scheduling and budgeting

Each one of these stages is extremely important to the success of the whole project, but some are more important than others. On the assumption you are reading this book because you not only want to animate but equally wish to produce your own projects too, let us examine each aspect of the development stage in more detail.

Idea Creation

Ideas can arrive in an untold number of ways. They can come from a phrase uttered by someone in a conversation, from a line read in a book, newspaper, or magazine, from a picture or illustration you happen to glance at one day, or from an event or moment you experience in your daily life. Perhaps the latest novel you read or the magazine article you recently finished inspires you. You may have sketched a curious character who suggests a storyline to you, or maybe you just have a thought buzzing through your head that won’t go away no matter how hard you try.

You can even be inspired by another artist’s work, or a technique you saw in the last movie you watched, or a dream you had one night. Or the idea just popped into your head when you were using the restroom! Ideas can come from everywhere and anywhere. Life speaks to us constantly. We just have to have our eyes and ears open to it when it does so.

Storylines can come from characters, and characters can come from storylines.

Intellectual Property and Copyrights

Idea block is the hardest thing to cope with. We desperately want to make something. We have the energy and we have the talent, but we just can’t seem to get a good idea. This is the most frustrating thing on Earth. But it is also not a time to panic. Ideas abound and we just have to find a way of coaxing them out of their hiding place. The one thing that the inexperienced person can find himself doing in this circumstance is take someone else’s idea and run with it. Don’t! Now this is not to imply that you are a blatant plagiarist and will steal someone else’s concept and claim it as your own. It is more usually a case of seeing something in a magazine, on TV, or in a book somewhere and naively wanting to animate it. Apart from the genuine satisfaction of actually creating your own idea and bringing to the world something that no one else has thought of before, there are significant legal implications in using something you have seen elsewhere.

Make sure that what you have is your own.

Intellectual property—something that you or someone else has created or originated—is so powerfully protected these days that if you so much as draw a recognizable character someone else owns for anything beyond your own personal amusement, you will have the lawyers of that object’s owners bearing down on you like a ton of bricks! Can you imagine, therefore, taking years to animate your pet project, only to find you cannot show it anywhere as its original idea infringes someone else’s copyright? Plus the fact that, if you actually make money from it (and, trust me, it is virtually impossible to make money with a short, animated film), then you will have to pay back all of your earnings to the owner of the property, in addition to a daunting fine and all the legal costs!

There are gray areas connected with intellectual property that can have the lawyers delightfully wrangling with each other for year after profitable year. It is possible to copyright anything that is tangible, such as a line of text, a drawing, even a doodle on a piece of paper. Indeed, anything you create is automatically copyrighted, simply because you created it. This is recognized and acknowledged. However, you cannot copyright an “idea,” that is, something in abstract form such as a thought or concept. If an idea is not specifically defined, if it is not written down in black and white, or seen and heard in any other way, then it is not protected by copyright. For example, if you hear somebody say, “I’m going to make a film about a mermaid who marries an alien,” you can actually proceed to make a film about that idea yourself. However, if they produce a drawing and say, “I’m going to make a film about this particular mermaid and this particular alien,” you cannot make a film with a similar mermaid or a similar alien. Now, if you are persistent in your aquatic ambitions, you can still make a film about another mermaid and another alien, just not the ones that have been defined already.

That acknowledged however, if you decide to make a film about a mermaid and an alien from a story that you just read and proceeded to create your own characters to go with that story, you will still end up in court if you follow the precise plot line that the story contained. Written ideas, regardless of visual content, are most definitely defined by the printed word. However, you can still make a film about a diffierent mermaid and a diffierent alien, using an entirely diffierent plot line if you like, even if the other mermaid and alien story is a major hit, as long as your plot line and your design elements are nothing like the other. There are even more gray areas when it comes to idea origination and usage, so it is clearly always most advisable to come up with something that is entirely original and owes nothing to anyone else. That way sanity, and possibly a healthier bank balance, lies!

A pencil can be still mightier than the sword!

Purchasing or Optioning the Rights

That said, if you absolutely love someone else’s idea (or book, or comic character, or toy, or whatever) and want to animate it as a film, or a game, or whatever, you will need to consider purchasing the rights (in film terms, often known as the “underlying rights”) to this intellectual property.

Alternatively, if you want to see if you can raise the money to make your film of this property, before buying the rights outright, then you could option the material instead. An option is a legal document that states you have formal permission to work with the intellectual property in question through a pre-defined development stage, so you can endeavor to bring the project to the attention of potential financiers or distributors. Options are usually only granted over a specific period of time at a set amount of dollars per year. If you fail to finance your project idea in this time, you either lose the right to do so thereafter or pay for an additional option period that may be granted to you by the property owner.

Full rights are where you purchase the privilege to use someone else’s intellectual property outright, for all time (in perpetuity) and in all specified media (dependent on the terms of the contract) for a single (usually large) fee. Purchasing full rights for a property is clearly a very risky thing to do at the development stage, when you have absolutely no certainty that the project is going to be financed. If your project is never financed, any money spent on full rights is pretty much money down the drain, hence the attraction of optioning the rights at the development stage.

The best approach to take is to build into the option agreement a clause which guarantees you the full rights on acquiring full production funding. For example, you might option the rights to a book for two years, develop it and even find the production finance to make your project. You then simply pay the owner of the property a pre-agreed fee for the full film rights, and the rights are automatically yours. This clause ensures that, after all your hard work during the development stage, the property will indeed be yours. On occasions, some unscrupulous property owners have taken an option fee from an unsuspecting filmmaker, waited until that filmmaker has finally secured their financing, and then upped the full rights price unacceptably or even sold the property on to someone else who offers them more money. This is especially a danger if the property proves to be a hot one, with many competitors seeking it. Avoid this scenario by building a full rights clause into the option agreement.

There are usually strings attached to any contract!

Needless to say, whatever approach you take, it will require a significant amount of money for you to obtain even an option agreement for a major intellectual property. It is more likely that you will choose a low-profile or undiscovered property. If so, the owners of this property could well give you a real option break, with perhaps no money passing hands or, at the very least, only a token amount. If the property owner has no expectations of any other offers, he or she might take a chance with you, on the basis that half a loaf is better than none. Even in these generous circumstances, however, it is wise to pre-agree the full rights aspect of the acquisition, however generously you are treated at the outset! Just remember though—the higher the public profile (and there-fore commercial value) the property is, the more hoops you will have to jump through and the more money you will have to raise to pay to acquire that property. Yet pay for it you must, because if you attempt to proceed without such an agreement on something that is not your own, then you are setting into a dark and troublesome abyss!

The temptation for many animators is to simply bury their heads in the sand and draw away regardless of practical realities!

Public Domain Material

Copyright laws have changed recently so extended rights to a particular property are protected for its originator (or the family or Trust that represents the interests of that originator, in the case of such long term rights). Copyrights are now secured for 50 years after the creator/owner’s death (75 years if that creator/owner is an employee of a company or corporation). After this period, the material is considered public domain and is free for all to use. This means that even familiar works that might have been assumed to be out of copyright are quite possibly still in copyright at the present time. (For example, the song known worldwide as “Happy Birthday to You” is still subject to copyright and will continue to be so until about 2030!) The good side to this law is that if you are the owner of an idea that succeeds and attracts significant commercial success, then that copyright remains yours (or that of your descendants) for a significant amount of time.

Protecting Your Own Ideas

The best and safest route is to create your own original idea in the first place. But here lies dangers too. If you create an entirely new project with a colleague, friend, or partner who contributes to the development of your idea, character, project, etc., then technically that person also has a copyright interest in your project, especially if they gave you the seed idea in the first place.

Unless you create your new project entirely on your own, you do need to have a written agreement in place with whomever you have collaborated with, giving you access to the full copyright and, usually, indicating some kind of remuneration to the collaborators for their contributions, all before you progress further. The reality of life is that friends, partners, and lovers tend to fall out from time to time, sometimes terminally so, and many a creative project has found itself grounded until an often painful and expensive legal dispute over the mutual property rights is resolved.

Always carry an umbrella in the form of clear and legally accurate copyright agreements!

If you think that your concepts might have a high profile or commercial value, and sometimes even if not (for it is surprising how something rejected at one moment in time becomes a valuable property at another!), it is essential to protect the copyright. Protection of copyright is essential if you intend to develop a project idea and then show it around to others in the search for production support or funding. Many people are honest, but you would not be the first to have a valuable idea stolen by others while it is still at the development stage. Consequently, be cautious about who you show it to, the circumstances in which you show it and, of course, have proof that you have ownership to the rights.

Ideally, you should have an agent, manager, or entertainment lawyer represent you in all these matters, as they will have a far greater experience in negotiating, and understanding, the complex nature of the contracts involved. You can even protect your idea in so...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Development
• 2 Character Design
• 3 Project Financing
• 4 Rules of Filmmaking
• 5 Soundtrack Recording and Editing
• 6 Storyboarding and Animatics
• 7 Digital Desktop Production
• 8 Principles of Animation
• 9 Animating Step by Step
• 10 2D Animation Overview
• 11 2D Animation Basics
• 12 Finessing 2D Animation
• 13 2D Vector Animation
• 14 The Paperless Animation Studio
• 15 3D Overview
• 16 Creating 3D Movement
• A Oh, I Almost Forgot …
• B Glossary
• Index