Thursday, November 06, 2008

Inbetweens Can Be Fun Too

I animated this scene sort of "straight ahead" - at least the part with Ranger Smith. I actually worked it out first in a tiny flip book at the bottom of a lined yellow pad - my favorite medium of invention.
I had every line of the cartoon memorized, and this was one of my favorite Corey Burton readings. He did an amazing Ranger Smith and I pushed him to his limits.
Anyway, I played the line in my head and quickly made this flip book, then transferred it to actual 12 field paper - which was not an easy task. Boy are guns hard to draw!
You can see that not only are the keys goofy looking, but so are a lot of the inbetweens.
Believe it or not, none of the drawings are at all arbitrary. They aren't just weird for weird sake. My ideas in drawing the scene are completely subject to Corey's reading of the line "YOU THINK I WANT THIS MORE THAN YOU???"


I don't want to animate something that competes for attention with Corey's great acting. I want to drive the acting home - to complement it.
Like I said in the last post - try freeze framing some live action actors sometime. You will see the craziest inbetweens as they wrinkle their brows stuggling to spit out certain words, or in the transition between 2 emotions. People's faces are in constant motion, not only the head action, but the crawling skin and writhing lips and twitching brows. Especially when they are going through a big emotion. Even pretty girls make nasty inbetweens in real life!




A lot of these drawings go by so fast that you don't see them all in real time, but they all add to the emotion - you feel them.
I sometimes hesitate to show stuff like this, because I'm afraid cartoonists will get the idea to just animate everything crazy. To me animating in context of the specific emotion of the scene is much more fun than just arbitrarily drawing everything wacky.
This still follows the basic concepts I talked about in the head-bob posts, although there are a lot more drawings here.
I've never been able to afford a whole cartoon of full animation, but now and then take the time to put a couple scenes in just because it's so much fun.




http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/HB/JohnHB/BooBooWildClips/youthinkIwant.mov