Sergio Pablos "Dr. Doppler" Pencil Tests

Some wonderful animation by master animator Sergio Pablos of the character "Dr. Doppler" from Disney's "Treasure Planet".

(See the interview with Sergio on The Character Design Blog .)







Here are some of the same scenes , but in different form (note that one of the scenes is in much rougher form , so it's interesting to see how he roughed it out first , then tied it down more at a later point) .

Milt Kahl - Jungle Book roughs

[click on image to see it larger]


Michael Sporn has uploaded a series of rough drawings of King Louis by Milt "King" Kahl on his blog :

Kahl's Jungle Book Roughs

Check out the whole series of roughs on the link above (click on each image to see it larger) .


Here's a video of these key poses strung together with the timing based on the drawing numbers. Keep in mind that these are widely spaced Key drawings, so a lot of the drawings from this scene are missing :


The final version of the scene is here:

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 .