Friday, February 8, 2008

Rough Animation Example

One of the things you'll hear me emphasize over and over (except in ILL2D 346 Animation Assisting !) is to loosen up and draw rough in your first pass animation . Here's an excellent example of a real production scene animated very rough , but very expressively . This is Glen Keane's animation of Fagin and Oliver (the cat) from "Oliver & Co."


And here is the finished version of this scene , which is actually split into two scenes in the movie , with a cutaway inserted to show Fagin's point-of-view looking back over his shoulder at Jenny and Georgette .



It takes a lot of confidence to successfully pull-off a scene this loosely.
You'll find that working rough like this will help you to nail your performance a lot faster and you can tell sooner whether or not your staging and acting are working .

However, this sort of rough scene needs a very talented Assistant Animator to do the follow up work , or else the animator should do a second pass to tie down the shapes and details before passing it along to the clean up dept. You'll find that the challenge with a rough scene like this is to keep the expressiveness but at the same time refine it down to workable clean up shapes that are consistent in volume and detail .

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really like this. Is there a file we can download to study the action? Also do you have any idea how many key frames are here? It is so expressive. Oliver and Company is actually one of my favorite movies.

Anonymous said...

Hi, Kim -

I've re-uploaded the Rough Test as a Quicktime movie, so you should be able to click on it and Save As Source or Save As Quicktime Movie to download it to your desktop.

David said...

Key Clean Up on this scene was by ace clean up artist Bill Berg.