The Midnight Diaries of Catty Wampus

Every frame is a drawing. Every frame that’s in your final animation will be on the screen for 1/24 of a second, which is a significant amount of time believe it or not.

Okay, so that’s all fine and good to hear, but what does that mean? “Every frame is a drawing.” Well, “every frame is a drawing” means that you should make conscious decisions about what your characters are doing on every frame in your scene. Every time you pose a character, that is a drawing that will end up on the screen, from the angle of the hips to the crook of the fingers, from the shape of the brows to the direction the toes point in. Everything you key on that frame is part of that drawing.

Now for stop motion animators and hand-drawn animators, this almost goes without saying. You have to put pencil to paper in order to come up with a frame of animation, and you have to adjust a puppet in order to come up with a frame of animation. CG is a little different, in that you don’t actually have to do anything on a particular frame in order to have it move. If you have a pose on frame 5 and a pose on frame 15 then the computer can figure out those frames in between without you ever having to touch them.

(you know what’s coming next, don’t you?)

But the computer is horrible at figuring out how a character should move from one frame to the next. All of the things we think about when we’re animating, the computer throws that stuff right out the window. And if we’re lazy (or if we’re new), we let it. We’ll just let that computer throw in any flabbity-flu it wantsta, and call it good. Something about CG makes it take our eyes a lot longer to actually see that it’s not good at all. It’s bad. Bad bad bad.

The reason that so much 2d and stop-motion is successful is that the [successful] animators actually pay attention to every frame, every pose, every silhouette, every bit of spacing. We forget about this meticulousness in CG a lot. And so I’ve come up with a little game you can play to help make sure you’re watching every frame. I call this game Is It A Lithograph?

The notion is this: have you ever purchased or received a lithograph from an animated movie? Or even just a cel drawing that you framed later? Maybe it wasn’t even a complete character (Mickey Mouse from the waist up, fading out at the legs), or a fully realized pose (it’s an inbetween, somewhere between one pose and the next), or an unused drawing from a pencil test (uncolored and smudged). If you have, no matter if the drawing was a major point of the scene, or just an inbetween, I’ll bet you thought “Hey, this is pretty cool! It looks so recognizable and professional!” You were proud to own that lithograph and hang it on your wall.

So when you play Is It A Lithograph? you should look at every frame of your animation and ask yourself if a collector would hang it on their wall. Now, I know this may sound intimidating, especially if you’re just starting out (and I include myself in that “starting out” category, just to be clear). It may seem impossible to make every frame look like a work of art. But it can be done, I promise you. To prove this, I’ve gone through a bunch of animated clips (stop-motion, hand-drawn, and CG) from my hard-drive and randomly selected a frame from each of them. Some of these frames are key poses, but most of them are likely to be inbetweens. But whatever they are, I’d be thrilled to have each one as a framed cel hanging on my wall–they’re that pretty. Check it out:

Very nice, huh?

Again, I chose all of these frames randomly. I didn’t try to find the prettiest ones, and I didn’t exclude any because they were too unpleasant. They all look pleasant to me–they all tell the story of the scene and you can see what’s going on with the characters… whether it’s their emotion, their movement, their overlap, their anticipation, or all of the above.

Now, if you were to choose a random frame from one of your own personal CG scenes, how confident would you be of its appeal? If you’re anything like me, you’ve got some ugggly ugggly frames in your animation, and your brain has told you “Ah well, it’s the rig” or “Ah well, that’s how the computer wants it to be,” or some other lame excuse like that. But it’s nonsense! You have the control! You can set keys on every body part on every single frame if you want to!!

Listen to me carefully here, and cover your kiddies’ ears: Fuck the computer! The computer doesn’t know you, and the computer doesn’t like you. It’s not your friend. It is absolutely okay for you to go against the computers’ will and move your character’s limbs wherever you want to. You’ll thank yourself for it later.