Part 3 - Character Animation
Developed by CARE Now in association with DreamWorks Animation Studios
Relevant Content Standards
Students will do the following as they complete Part 3 of this assignment:
• Choose from a range of materials and methods of traditional and contemporary artistic practices to plan and create works of art.
• Use sketchbook/journal to research, explore, and invent artistic approaches to connect and express visual ideas.
By now, you have watched at least one of the films in the Madagascar Film Franchise. Therefore, you know that the characters are technically considered to be anthropomorphic animals. However, you also know that the characters do not necessarily move around like real animals. For the most part, Marty the zebra and Melman the giraffe move like real zebras and giraffes simply because of how they are made. But Alex the lion, Gloria the hippopotamus, and King Julien XIII - the self-proclaimed King of Lemurs, do not move around like normal animals of their species. These characters all move around like people. They walk upright on two legs and talk and everything. For these three characters, the animators worked to draw their characters more like people with animal skins and likenesses. On the other hand, the character animators for Marty and Melman had to use their knowledge of how zebras and giraffes moved around to draw and animate those two characters in the film.
We can assume that character animators for animal characters have observed how animals actually move to help them to draw and animate their characters, and to make the animation look as realistic as possible. The fact that Walt Disney’s idea for Mickey Mouse was inspired by a family of mice that lived in his studio in Kansas City, Missouri, is well-known by many people. Animators can observe the habits of their household pets to help them learn about how to animate animal cartoon characters. They can be considered a type of observational research. Research can also be conducted in the wild, on safaris and nature reserves, at local zoos, and even by watching wildlife films and videos. Examples of organizations and agencies that have YouTube channels and videos online that animators can watch to learn about animals in the wild include National Geographic, the Smithsonian Museum, and the National Park Service. Wildlife videos can be accessed on the internet at no charge and are made specifically for educational purposes.
Animated films have featured animals as main characters since Winsor McCay made his animated short film Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914. The dinosaur in that film is recognized by many as the first anthropomorphic cartoon character. Even though it was technically a silent film in that Gertie did not speak, the animation was groundbreaking because McCay’s drawings conveyed the character’s emotion and personality. However, we also notice that Gertie does not move around like any of the dinosaurs that we have seen since then on screen. This lets us know that any research McCay may have conducted to animate this character must not have been extensive but it was still based on what was most likely available to him at that time.
Other early characters such as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Felix the Cat, and Mickey Mouse were animated anthropomorphic animal characters that became very popular. These and other characters were drawn to move and walk around like people, and not always like real rabbits, cats, or mice.
As the interest in cartoon animation grew, animators learned to hone their craft. They learned to draw better, and they began to learn to animate their characters in ways that made them look real. By the 1930s, animators at Walt Disney Studios began using common principles and standards of design so to speak, to produce films of a higher quality. Walt Disney, in particular, started observing and making it possible for his animators to observe animals in the wild and at local zoos so that they learned how the animals actually moved that they were planning to bring to life on the screen. Disney wanted the animation to be realistic and believable to the viewers as the films told the “magical” stories and fairy tales. To him, this captivated audiences and made it so that the film was a most memorable and entertaining experience. Disney’s practice of conducting “observational research” to create and design characters became a regular occurrence for many animation studios. It is because of this that we now know that aspiring animators should learn to study the animal’s anatomy to understand their skeletal structures and musculature, and observe their behavior in the wild to learn about their movement patterns, posture, expressions, and personality. Historical examples of how animators used these methods include feature films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Finding Nemo.
To observe animals and draw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney kept a variety of live animals at the studio for the animators to reference. They wanted to ensure that all of Snow White’s animal friends were captured just right.
To create the realistic characters of Bambi (1942), Walt Disney brought his artists living animals to study and draw direct from life. The team filmed a variety of animals in the wilderness in Maine, as well as at zoos, to capture the way they interacted with their natural environment.
Disney animators traveled to observe live animals to draw inspiration for the Beast in the animated film Beauty and the Beast (1991). Walt Disney unsuccessfully attempted to adapt the French fairy tale, which was originally published in 1740, into an animated film during the 1930s and 1950s. The drawing of the Beast in the 1991 Disney film was created by supervising animator, Glen Keane. He made his own hybrid beast by combining drawings that included the mane of a lion, the beard and head structure of a buffalo, the tusks and nose bridge of a wild boar, the heavily muscled brow of a gorilla, the legs and tail of a wolf, and the big and bulky body of a bear.
Animators traveled to Kenya to study and observe animals for The Lion King (1994). They also studied animal movements at the Miami MetroZoo. The Pride Lands in the movie are modeled on the Kenyan national park visited by the crew.
To observe animals for the movie Finding Nemo (2003), animators at Pixar took courses and auditied lectures in marine biology, oceanography, ichthyology, and scuba diving to get the accurate look and feel of the characters and their world.
Animation Vocabulary Update
In animation, a frame is like a picture that makes up a video. When many frames are played in quick succession, they create the illusion of movement, just like a flip book. Each frame contains a slightly different image or pose of characters and objects, making the animation come to life.
A keyframe is a special moment in an animation where you decide how a character or object should look and move. It's the start or end of a movement. The photo below shows seven (7) keyframes for a character’s movement as he jumps up in the air and lands. To complete the animation, the frames in-between the ones you see need to be drawn to fill it in, creating the illusion of movement. This photo is also an example of keyframes that can be used in pose-to-pose animation.
The Walk Cycle
A walk cycle is a fundamental animation technique used to create the illusion of a character walking. It is a looping animation, which means it repeats (or can be repeated) over and over as many times as is necessary. The photo below is an example of a walk cycle. It has eight (8) frames/poses that are drawn by an artist and that can be placed together successively by an animator to create the illusion of movement.
In this example photo, each frame is labeled. A brief explanation for how each frame is drawn is as follows:
Contact Pose (C-1): Heel-to-to-toe contact sets the attitude of the walk.
Passing Pose (P-3): Start with the planted foot.
Down Pose (D-2): Draw the Down Pose between C-1 and P-3. Bend the leg and make sure the head drops.
Up Pose (U-4): Draw the Up Pose between P-3 and C-5. Push up with the ball of the foot which raises the head. Extend the far knee forward.
The following video shows my attempt to use these walk cycle frames to animate the young man so that he appears to walk across the page.
To make this video, I used 18 different frames to animate this character. Some things to note in completing a walk cycle animation such as this one are as follows:
Be sure to place the foot of the character for each successive pose over or on top of the foot from the previous pose.
Notice the differences in each frame and make sure to alternate the character’s legs as he walks.
A natural gait includes a slight up/down motion of the character’s head. This should be noticeable in the animation.
Remember that even though it is more than one pose, it is an animation of one character or the same character in each pose. This means that for this example walk cycle animation, it is one young man walking and not eight young men walking who look the same.
The walk cycle is essential for animators as it allows for the efficient representation of the walking motion without the need to animate each step individually. Learning walk cycles helps an aspiring animator to understand key animation basics such as timing, spacing, weight, balance, and movement. They are a good way to visualize the basics of human movement. This technique is widely used in various forms of media, including animated films, video games, and character animations.
Your Assignment
1. Your assignment for this week is to first, watch the video of the real giraffe walking.
2. Open Microsoft PowerPoint and copy and paste the picture of the giraffe below onto the first slide in a new presentation.
3. Crop the picture so that it fills the entire left side of the slide.
4. Use the shapes tool to recreate general, individual parts of a giraffe that you will then animate. In my example, I used six (6) rectangles for each individual body part and one (1) triangle for its head.
5. Make the fill color for two of the legs on the same side of the giraffe slightly darker so that you will be able to tell them apart from the other two on the opposite side.
6. Insert a duplicate slide and make slight changes to your giraffe so that when you put them together, the giraffe will appear to walk forward. Think of the flip books you made last year and design it as a flip book with successive pages.
7. Save the presentation making sure to choose a memorable name and remember which folder you save it to.
8. Click on File, and then on More at the bottom of that menu, and a new window will appear.
9. Click on Create a Video, and then Create a Video again to the right in the middle of the screen.
10. Give what will become a video of the walking giraffe animation a name in the file folder of your choice. (It will be an MPEG-4 file._
11. Click “Export.”
12. Wait for the video to export.
13. Go to the file folder where you saved the MPEG-4 video.
14. Double click on the name of the file you exported/saved.
15. Watch your new walk cycle animation video.
"Giraffe Walk" by neopolitain