With a timeline from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 through to The Princess and the Frog in 2009 this huge diagram charts 250 scale drawings of the Disney characters. Main characters, villains and secondary characters are defined with differently coloured silhouettes. Artist Juan Pablo Bravo has posted this on his Flickr Photo page for anyone to download. The original is a whopping 20779 x 440 pixels.
Home made animation rostrum
How do you support your webcam when you are filming pencil tests? Do you use a tripod, a chair or a pile of books? This post will tell you how to build a simple webcam rostrum using just a screwdriver, a drill and a saw. If you get your wood merchant to cut the wood to size you won’t even need a saw. If you opt for the bracket method you may not need a drill.
Before we start building lets take a look at a couple of ready made rostrums that I found on the
Animation Supplies.net website.
A large Animation Rostrum complete with lights.
This rostrum has a rigid stand and decent lighting system. The base board is 45cm x 45cm and the column is 92cm high.
It includes a baseboard, column and 2 Lights. Price £149.99.
A small Animation Rostrum.
This compact rostrum is for lightweight compact cameras. It’s a good choice for those starting out in animation. Its baseboard is 30.5cm x 23cm and column height can be set from 7 to 30.5cm.
It includes a baseboard and telescopic column. Price £20.99.
Materials.
You may already have some off-cuts of wood in your workshop that can be utilised. Or your local wood merchant may have an off-cut bargain bin.
Baseboard: Chipboard 18mm thick, width and depth about 150mm larger that the animation paper you are using.
Column and top arm: Planed Smooth Timber 44mm x 44mm square, length around 400mm.
Camera bracket: Planed Smooth Timber 44mm x 18mm x 100mm.
Screws: 60mm long.
Camera bolt: ¼ inch Witworth fits most cameras. If you are unsure take your camera to the hardware store and try it. Be careful not to damage the camera thread when testing.
Click diagram for larger version.
Method.
Click diagram for larger version.
Measurements
Top arm = A – B.
Column = C – D.
Base board depth = E + F.
Baseboard width = animation paper width + 20mm.
The length of the column (C – D) can be be worked out by holding the camera above a sheet of animation paper and moving it up and down until you get the best fit of the paper on the screen.
Cut the materials to size.
Drill, screw and assemble using the diagram as a guide.
An alternative method of assembly is to use brackets.
Lighting can be the available light in the room since webcams usually work in low light. Or you could use a couple of small desk lamps, one either side, to give more consistent coverage.
DigiCel FlipBook enables you to draw 2D animations with your mouse or tablet pen. You can also import drawings captured with a webcam or scanner. It creates a movie file you can watch on any media player, post on the internet or record onto DVD and play on TV.
It is a good tool for practising drawn animation because it allows you to make key frames and then space then out to add in-betweens. Once you have created a few drawings you can play them back at various speeds and decide if you need more in-betweens.
The DigiCel FlipBook workspace, displaying a demo animation that comes with the software.
It can also be used to review pencil tests of drawings made on paper and captured with a webcam. A number of big name animation studios use FlipBook for this purpose. It has a built in exposure sheet system with a display of the sound track so is useful for testing lip synch animation.
The FlipBook lightbox showing three layers of drawings.
This is a tool for the serious animator. It does not come with lots of special effects, but it does have tools to help the hand animator. These include layers, light box, background and trace functions. The Light Box lets you determine just how visible previous and next layers are when adding drawings. The Trace tool makes it easy to redraw roughs as finished line work. The drawing tools include variable line thicknesses, flexible lines and ovals. Colour can be added by brush, can or spray.
There are several easy to follow instructional videos on DigiCel website and there are a number of animations created with the software on YouTube.
You can try it out for yourself by downloading the trial version from the DigiCel. It is fully working but the movies it creates have a large permanent watermark.
Tip: if you decide to buy the software from the DigiCel website shop then look for the special offer on the home page of their website to get 50% off.
Pencil Test Depot is a blog for the people who love pencil tests. Jamaal Bradley has amassed a collection of pencil tests from classic Disney films plus interesting pencil tests from other sources. A recent addition is a series of pencil tests from Disney’s Princess and the Frog that were animated by Matt Williames.
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MonkeyJam is a free digital pencil test program that runs on the Windows operating system. It lets you capture images from a webcam, camcorder, or scanner and assemble the separate frames into an animation. You can also import existing images and sound files from your computer. Although it is designed for pencil and paper, MonkeyJam can also be used for stop-motion animation. Once you have created your movie it can be exported as an AVI file.
MonkeyJam information panel (click pic to enlarge)
The MonkeyJam software downloaded and installed on my PC without problems. The program starts with a window containing an information panel and a frame list. There is a help file with a quick start section to give the basics.
The first step is to select a folder to store your image files. The nest step is to select a method of adding your images to the frame list. This can be from a video source such as webcam or from a scanner. Alternatively you can import existing image files that you already have on you computer.
For the purposed of this test I decided to use the stills that I had created for my bouncing ball demonstration. It was simply a matter of selecting the images from the computer and clicking the import button. To view the animation you select Preview from the Tools menu and the software builds your movie and opens another window to play it back. It is as simple as that. You can then export your movie to an AVI file for sharing with others, such as uploading to YouTube.
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Colors! is a painting program that takes advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the Nintendo DS touch-screen to create a digital sketch-book. Animator Sheila Graber, who has been experimenting with it, told us; “It is great for ‘smudge and click’ as I used to call it in ye pastel days when I used 16mm film. It is SO much easier using this programe and you don’t get your hands dirty! I can recommend it for animators of today”.
During her long and illustrious career Sheila has produced a number of “face to face” movies where one face dissolves into another. Now she has produced one using Colors! called “Facelife”. It covers life from cradle to grave through various faces.
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Exaggerated squash and stretch is a great way to add amusement and believability to your animation. I have created a demonstration using a bouncing ball made of very flexible rubber.
This demonstrates Newton’s third law of motion, more commonly called action reaction. For every action in one direction, there is an equal and opposite reaction in the opposite direction; even if the object does not move.
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The Animationizer in use
Stop-frame animation is a method Chris Neale has been using to create paper prototypes of website forms to explain them to his clients. To achieve this he has written some software for the Mac that will capture pictures from a webcam and convert them into a QuickTime movie.
Chris suggests that the software “might be helpful for artists looking for a simple tool to make animations with.
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Model sheets from The Battle of Wangapore.
The basics of classic film animation remain the same whether you are creating a flick book or computer animation. Much can be learned by studying cartoon films frame by frame. Things to look out for are:
Anticipation – before a character moves forward they will make a small movement in the opposite direction.
Cycles – a series of movements such as walking that can be repeated several times.
Squash and stretch – this is best demonstrated by a rubber ball bouncing. When it hits the ground it will flatten slightly. When it bounces up it will return to the round shape and then go elongated. The same effect can be used on cartoon characters when they go through fast moves.
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