George Liquor Setups

Boy, can Jim draw funny back views

George In Context

Once I have figured out the basic construction of a character and am comfortable with drawing him from different angles, and I know his basic personality, then I find it much easier to create poses and expressions if I have a story to tell.

This is the big difference between drawing random sketchbook doodles just for fun and drawing functional drawings in context. The functional drawings have a purpose, other than just floating on a page cluttered with more competing doodles. Functional drawings have to tell a story, and for me those are actually easier to draw than random sketches.



When I have a story playing in my head, then the drawings just pour out. I don't have to consciously think up an expression. I just feel them happening as I make drawing after drawing of a character acting out the scene he is in. People make fun of me when I am drawing storyboards or layouts, because my whole body convulses and my face distorts as I personally experience what the characters are feeling with each drawing. When they try to interrupt me to ask a question, I barely even know they are there. I don't want to stop the natural flow of the story I am drawing. I never knew I did that until people started laughing at me - or got mad!

I don't know if I am recommending that to anyone else, but it makes another point - it is important when doing continuity to be totally focused on your drawings and story. You have to immerse yourself into the scenes. Don't "multitask". Don't watch TV or rock out to your IPOD if you want your drawings to feel natural, alive and performing at their best.
Sketchbook virtuosos sometimes have trouble making the transition from the random to the purposeful and here's why.

When you first try to draw poses and expressions with backgrounds together on purpose, you stiffen up because you are not used to balancing so many requirements at once. But that's the name of the game. Luckily the more you do it, the quicker you lose the stiffness and soon a whole new world opens up with creative possibilities your random mind never would have dreamed of. You can't give up just because the stiffness discourages you. Suck it up and keep going until it becomes more natural to tell a story with drawings.
I've said it before, but I can't stress it enough: "Functional drawings" are what you need to make a cartoon. A functional drawing is a totally different animal than a sketchbook scribble.
Once you get used to doing drawings that have a purpose, other than just looking sorta keen floating on a page full of other doodles, you'll open a whole new wonderful world to yourself. You'll be performing instead of merely doodling, and performance is what entertainment is all about.Drawings on these comics were done by me, Jim Smith and Vincent Waller. Those guys also live their stories as you can see.

Take note of how George's expressions and poses move from one to the next. They connect from pose to pose in a logical way that tells the story and his emotional state at every important moment.

In the above pages, George is basically cocksure about his ability to outwit a stupid creature of nature. Most of the poses convey this, but the odd pose is an accent "That's a dirty mouth bass!"

Accents occur naturally in acting and not at random. They serve functions and tell us quick inspired emotions that burst from the characters.
If you have already become comfortable with George's construction, then the next step is to draw him performing a scene or 2 from a story.

Here are plenty of stories:

http://johnkpitch.blogspot.com/2007/10/george-liquors-cartoony-type-variety.html



Points to remember:

1) Learn how your characters are constructed first. Before you attempt to get creative with them. This is more important than anything. If you are still struggling with drawing a character even in his most basic generic state, then you won't be able to do functional drawings of him acting.

Learn the generic first, then the specific.

2) Learn the personality of the character by reading stories with him in it, or watching the cartoons.

3) Take a scene from a story that hasn't been drawn and rough out a sequence of the character (or characters) acting the scene.

I do this in rough first - storyboard style, straight ahead in continuity. I'm not trying to make finished cleaned-up drawings. I'm trying to stage the scenes and get a good performance out of the actors.

Rex Learns To Storyboard

Rex is a young cartoonist in Canada (a dirty Canadian!) who doesn’t actually have the Canadian cartoon style. He has a blog that many of you folks probably frequent. His style is loose and really cartoony and appealing. He posts tons of fun doodles on his blog and must fill up a whole sketch book every day! I’ve sort of taken him under my stinky wing and he is progressing, so I asked him if I could share his learning curve with many of the young cartoonists who come here to learn how to make cartoons. He bravely assented.




http://rex-h.blogspot.com/

That’s very nice of him to share and maybe even be a little embarrased, so I hope you will tell him you appreciate him sharing.

Awhile ago I asked him if he had done any functional art yet in any cartoon department-

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/functional-drawings1-draw-with-purpose.html

whether it was storyboards, layouts, animation, background painting etc. –Anything that has rules. He said no, not yet but wanted to. He admitted doing functional art was a lot harder than just free-styling neat cartoon drawings floating on sketch book pages and asked me for some tips.

I suggested he try storyboards, because you don’t need to draw tight on-model drawings on a storyboard, and I guessed his free wacky style would be great inspiration to do animation poses from. Rex asked if he could try boarding one of my George Liquor stories and I said sure.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/02/george-liquor-stories-1.html
He picked one out and started drawing straight ahead and filled pages full of fun doodles but no direction or continuity, so I suggested I could help him out step by step.

1) Get used to drawing the characters

Every function has a process and the first step of any cartoon job is to learn to draw the characters. Especially if you want to write for them.

Here are Rex’s first sketches of George.

2) Do Setups

I put up a manual on setups to help him out and told him to read it then draw his setups.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/04/scene-planning-for-tv-setups-for.html

Here’s what he came up with:




I realized he didn’t quite get what the purpose of setups was so I explained it more carefully in an IM. These 3 drawings above are almost the same angles, not enough difference to make it worthwhile to do all the extra backgrounds. So he started over.


I asked Rex to draw a master shot of where the scene takes place.
And after that to draw the same scene from different angles and with the camera at different distances from the characters.






Not at random either. All these decisions are made by reading the story and deciding from what angles and distances the gags will best be presented.

3) Start the Continuity

Once you’ve got some working setups, you can start the continuity. Rex is about to now, and I hope he will let me share those with you too.


Here is my conversation with Rex today.

Rex Setups and tips from John

Rex (10:24:33 AM): Wussth up?
John (10:24:52 AM): hi
Rex (10:25:06 AM): did you see the stuff i sent you?
John (10:25:14 AM): new stuff?
Rex (10:25:17 AM): yeah
John (10:25:25 AM): hang on
Rex (10:25:27 AM): from a couple days ago
John (10:26:56 AM): downloading
Rex (10:27:27 AM): i hope it's not a let down
John (10:28:46 AM): much better


Setups are different angles and different camera distances

John (10:28:59 AM): but you might not need so many wide shots
Rex (10:29:00 AM): yiiiiipppeeeeeeee
Rex (10:29:28 AM): just one of the couch and the rest close ups?
John (10:29:49 AM): well they're all good
John (10:30:02 AM): so keep em handy if you need em
Rex (10:30:08 AM): ok

John (10:30:14 AM): but like when you stage the gags
John (10:30:43 AM): stage them so the gags read. Pick your angle and CAMERA DISTANCE where it best shows the gag

John (10:30:59 AM): like that spray can won't read from so far away
John (10:31:26 AM): but it's good you drew all those angles
John (10:31:42 AM): because now you know where everyone is

Rex (10:31:47 AM): couldn't i have a close up of george with the spray can and then go to a shot where he's spraying them on the couch?
John (10:31:53 AM): and it will be easier for you to do the continuity
John (10:32:05 AM): yes
Rex (10:32:08 AM): yeah, this set-up stuff helps a lot
John (10:32:12 AM): now....
John (10:32:20 AM): next thing to think about

Know your characters' motivations and personal quirks

John (10:32:26 AM): their personalities
John (10:32:33 AM): esp George
Rex (10:32:45 AM): uh huh
John (10:33:06 AM): you should watch all the clips and read all the stories so that you get a feel for his motivations and quirks
Rex (10:33:13 AM): ok

John (10:33:30 AM): look at the acting in the comics too
John (10:33:40 AM): you can really see how he thinks
Rex (10:33:42 AM): yeah
Rex (10:33:48 AM): i love the fishing one

John (10:33:49 AM): he's not mean
John (10:34:06 AM): but he explodes when he has no rational way to resolve something
John (10:34:18 AM): he likes to be in control and thinks he's doing you a favor

John (10:34:27 AM): he distrusts women
John (10:34:41 AM): he thinks they are satan's spawn, out to corrupt men

John (10:34:57 AM): he loves Jimmy and is very protective of him
John (10:35:06 AM): he talks slow to him, like he's talking to a baby
John (10:35:18 AM): except when he is
John (10:35:20 AM): hang on
John (10:36:27 AM): can i post your DRAWINGS AND THIS IM?
John (10:36:31 AM): whoops
Rex (10:36:46 AM): yeah, i guess
John (10:37:02 AM): no?
John (10:37:09 AM): it would be helpful to others
Rex (10:37:10 AM): yeah you can
John (10:37:14 AM): cool
Rex (10:38:09 AM): aren't the drawings a bit too shitty, though?
John (10:38:30 AM): no, they're fun
Rex (10:38:46 AM): ok
John (10:39:02 AM): they are perfect storyboard drawings
John (10:39:10 AM): loose and lively
Rex (10:39:16 AM): alright, cool

John (10:39:37 AM): back to George's personality...
John (10:40:00 AM): he wouldn't gleefully do anything to punish the kids
John (10:40:14 AM): he does it because he has to (in his mind)
John (10:40:47 AM): although he does like discipline and is proud of scaring people into good behavior

John (10:41:05 AM): he likes Sody, but thinks she is up to no good
John (10:41:35 AM): because she is inherently a seducer of innocents
John (10:41:38 AM): like all women

John (10:42:05 AM): when you draw Sody and Jimmy's reactions, treat them differently
Rex (10:42:20 AM): sure

John (10:42:26 AM): she is not an inactive particpant in the story
Rex (10:42:41 AM): i know
John (10:42:45 AM): she loves George and sort of plays with him
John (10:42:53 AM): she loves his discipline


John (10:43:14 AM): but when he explodes abruptly will definitely get scared
John (10:44:01 AM): she thinks his old fashioned ways are funny and sort of plays with him


John (10:44:33 AM): when he lectures her, there is great concern on his face
John (10:45:48 AM): like he's trying to hold back a full explosion because he likes her, but fornication is a very serious matter, so you have to see his face struggling with the emotions and seriousness
Rex (10:46:06 AM): haha, ok


John (10:46:07 AM): I hope I'm not putting you to sleep
Rex (10:46:15 AM): nope

John (10:46:17 AM): Jimmy is just an idiot
Rex (10:46:22 AM): does he lecture jimmy, too?
John (10:46:35 AM): who tries to have the right emotions and expressions but really doesn't know what's going on
John (10:48:06 AM): he is just basic urges and fears
Rex (10:49:33 AM): does he only lecture sody, or is jimmy there too? because in the outline i think it says he's thrown in his room.

John (10:49:44 AM): so yeah, look at how George acts and reacts with Jimmy in the comics
Rex (10:49:52 AM): ok
John (10:50:18 AM): maybe George packs him up and puts him in his box
Rex (10:50:33 AM): haha
Rex (10:50:33 AM): ok


John (10:50:42 AM): his sin-free protective box
John (10:50:54 AM): it has a little window for his eyes
Rex (10:51:22 AM): haha
Rex (10:51:29 AM): just a cardboard box?
John (10:52:11 AM): his eyes peer out now and then during the lecture

Rex (10:52:36 AM): ok, i guess I'll need to make a set-up for that
John (10:52:49 AM): if george says anything about dirty stuff, Jimmy's ear sticks out of the box
Rex (10:53:04 AM): haha
John (10:53:12 AM): and then an eye peeks out the earhole
John (10:53:21 AM): and sweats
Rex (10:53:29 AM): incredible


John (10:54:22 AM): make Sody pretend to be real concerned about everything George says
Rex (10:54:30 AM): alright
John (10:54:54 AM): like she understands the seriousness of remaining pure for at least 5 years after wedlock

John (10:55:19 AM): her normal behavior is like in the Raketu commercial
Rex (10:55:24 AM): she just wants to get through the lecture
John (10:55:30 AM): like a teenage girl, bubbly and wacky
Rex (10:55:50 AM): i get ya

John (10:56:03 AM): but she feigns maturity during the lecture
John (10:56:14 AM): maybe this is all too much information!
John (10:56:22 AM): so I'll shut up now
Rex (10:56:42 AM): no, it's great

Rex (10:57:51 AM): do you have any of the dialogue for the cartoon?
John (10:58:28 AM): there isn't any in the little outline?
Rex (10:58:39 AM): just about the 5 year thing
John (10:59:12 AM): why not get started and send me continuity as you do it and we'll build it up as we go
Rex (10:59:20 AM): sure thing
John (10:59:24 AM): cause there ain't no dirty script!
Rex (10:59:39 AM): ok
Rex (10:59:55 AM): it's better that way
John (11:00:00 AM): ok, let me prepare the post
Rex (11:00:07 AM): alright
John (11:00:08 AM): talk to ya later!
Rex (11:00:12 AM): seeya, john
John (11:00:13 AM): funny drawings!
Rex (11:00:15 AM): thanks
John (11:00:19 AM): you too









I sent Rex a little more detailed breakdown in the form of an outline of a couple scenes:

Sody in “Daughter Of Satan”

George In Stuffing Room
George is in his favorite room in the house-his stuffing room.
It’s a workshop for taxidermy.
There are tools on the walls.
Animals half stuffed.

George is stuffing an elephant seal head.
The head skin is on a steel stand on a thick wood table in front of him.
He’s standing on a stool, whistling happily.
He wipes his brow and greets the audience.
“There’s nothing like hangin’ out on a Sunday afternoon with good friends!
Meet Earl here! I bagged him up the arctic last week! (He pulls the seal’s limp face apart to make him smile at camera)
I’m taking out everything God put in there and replacin’ it with man-made innards!”

George points to a wheelbarrow filled with guts and looks up.
“There ya go, God! You can have all the wet stuff back!

God’s a recycler!”


Pheromones Stinking Up The House
A waft of hormones enters the room through the front door.
George’s nose scrinches up.
“Yegads!! I smell the fumes of filth!!”
He rushes out the door with guts in one hand and the face in the other.
He is facing the kids on the couch but we don’t see them yet.
He does a shocked take at what he sees and drops the guts.

George Catches Kids Making Out
George’s POV
We see Sody and Jimmy on the couch making out.
They are kissing and petting.
“FORNICATION!”

George hops up on the coffee table in front of them.
He smacks Jimmy with the seal face.
Sody looks scared.
Her chest is covered with red blotches-lust hives.

Spray Can
George whips out a can of

Lust Killer

Makes Your Crotch Smell Like a Moose Snout!

And sprays their laps.
Jimmy’s boner inverts. Sody’s hives smooth out and fade.
George points an enraged shaking finger in Sody’s face.
“Daughter of Satan!”

Retard Box
George is about to lash out at Sody, but glances at Jimmy who is baffled and scared.
George packs him up and tosses him into his retard box.
The box has a small openeing in front where Jimmy’s eyes can watch in wonder at the workings of the world.

Lecture
You kids today have no morals!
“Him, he’s an idiot. He doesn’t know what’s right and watch’s wrong!
But yoooouuuu…
You spoiler of innocence!
You spawn of the Devil!
You know exactly what’s goin’ on!!
Shame!!!


You know, you kids today don’t know right from wrong!
You got no moral fiber!
In our day we didn’t partake in hanky panky until after we got married!...

George pauses a split second as he thinks about it.
“In fact, 5 years years after for me and Mable!”

And we always apologized to each other after!”

Sody promises to be good
Gosh, Mr. Liquor, you’re right!
I’m so ashamed of my needs!
(George nodding his head in agreement)
What would we do without you to guide us??
I don’t want you bringin’ him home all knocked up!
George: I’ll tell you what you’d do! You’d bring home that young lad all knocked up one night!
And then you’ll be doin’ a stretch in the big house! They’re comin’ down down hard on unwed mothers these days!

He’s a Minor! Sin Proof Suit

Scene Planning For TV - Setups for storyboard and layout 4

Here are the original 18 scenes in sequence, for reference. By using good scene planning and setups, we saved the background painters and background designers 11 backgrounds. That would have been a lot of extra work to do for no added benefit to the story. We also saved the layout artists and animators and assistant animators a lot of extra work too.

Scene Planning For TV - Setups for storyboard and layout 3

Once a layout/pose artist has drawn all his setups with all his character poses complete, and he has done a rough indication of a background, he gives to the BG designer to draw a more finished BG.

Hanna Barbera used the simplest possible staging in their first cartoons because of the severe budget restrictions. This drives Eddie crazy.

I used their staging in this manual just to give people the basic idea of how to reuse shots in other scenes.
Here is a sequence of storyboard from Ripping Friends which had a wider variety of shots.

If you look through these boards you can see shots that have been reused from earlier scenes. There are reuses and "works out of" poses and expressions too.

I still planned the show to reuse shots, but the layout artists were redrawing the same angles from scratch every time, because of the strange production system being used at the service studios in Canada. (This happens at overseas studios too-they hand out the same setups to different artists who don't know that someone else already drew a setup and BG that they themselves could use to save time, so they redraw everything 20 times) This cost extra time and money, and way too many backgrounds to paint when we couldn't even afford real background painters. The production managers tried to tell us they could paint in photoshop and we would never be able to tell the difference between fuzzy photoshop paintings and real paint. Now the Ripping Friends live in the Land Of Fuzz.


So I made this manual to help the production managers save time and money and make it easier on the artists. Unfortunately, the manuals sat on a shelf hidden away from the artists who could have used them to save some sweat.

Maybe they will help someone out there in the ether.
These gutsy manly storyboard drawings were done by Jim Smith. http://www.jimsmithcartoons.com/index2.html
The extra doodles and notes under Jim's drawings are my additional breakdowns of expressions for acting. All this stuff was way toned down in the layouts, and so I then had to make another manual explaining how to not tone down expressions and poses. Those production managers had impressive looking shelves, piled high with Spumco manuals that
were never opened!

BTW, this section is all exposition. In the story, it's meant to make fun of shows like Superfriends where there are too many characters in a scene and they all just talk and explain what's going on to each other. Those scenes are always hard to board, because you have to come up with interesting angles for static mouth flapping characters. Jim solved it by putting them in funny heavy poses and making funny compositions.

We were always trying to figure out how to make fun of seriousness. Serious superheroes to me are automatically funny, but not so to the audience, so we tried to emphasize how silly serious superheroes are.


more to come....

Scene Planning For TV - Setups for storyboard and layout 2

to be continued

If you take some time before you start straight ahead drawing your scene out you can plan what you are going to do and save setups.

The less new setups you have to draw, the more time you can spend on the entertainment-the drawings themselves.

Who cares about fancy camera angles and lots of cuts if what's happening in the scene isn't fun to look at?

Note how all the principles I have been talking about are now starting to be used together in actual functional practice.

The scenes have specific acting poses, continuity, gags, LOA,...many things I have been talking about for a year are being used together in these layouts.

All these concepts are not merely artistic abstractions to be used for their own sake. They are your artistic tools with the ultimate purpose of entertaining the audience.

Animation is an art of performance. It is not a written art. Although it uses writing as one of the tools, it is only one of many tools and a tool that is in service of the performance. The performance-the drawing entertainment is the number one reason to watch cartoons-or for that matter any visual medium.

Animation is a specific type of performance art that contains elements of the others, but it also can do things that no other art can do and if it doesn't, what good is it?

NEXT WEEK! A NEW SERIES:

FREE TIPS FOR EXECUTIVES: HOW TO DO A SHORTS PROGRAM RIGHT

Scene Planning For TV - Setups for storyboard and layout 1

All storyboards should have some logic in their planning, whether for full or limited animation, but it is especially important in limited animation.

Hanna Barbera developed an extremely intelligent system in the late 50s that allowed them to animate whole cartoons with one animator-one American animator.

Of course they used the simplest possible system, just 3 shots basically, but we can add more shots than that and still get a lot of good stuff out of it. They only had $3,000 per short back then so what they did with it was pretty amazing. We have a lot more money these days to play with, even taking inflation into consideration. We just waste most of it.

Storyboard theory today, thanks to Dic and some other studios in the 1980s developed storyboard practices that are not only creatively preposterous, but also way too ambitious for how much money they actually had to put into the cartoons. Downshots, crowd scenes, 3/4 animation and other expensive practices that are difficult to pull off in even fully animated features became standard practice in the 1980s. Many producers feel cheated if you use actually practical common sense thinking when planning your cartoons. Executives tend to like storyboards that look like the animation will be very hard to do. They want to imagine they are getting Sleeping Beauty when they look at the storyboards for their low budget kiddie cartoons.

They had crazy rules in TinyToons from what I hear from the artists who worked on it. Everything had to be hard to do, or it wouldn't get accepted. Something simple and entertaining was cheating. So the board artists developed tricks to fool the execs into thinking that their cartoons would call for the most expensive and time consuming techniques. Techniques that do not add up to entertainment or good drawing, acting or story.

The ugly result of this is that all this ambition upfront ensures that the cartoons will have to be animated overseas at lightning speed and the animation coming back will look like hell and disappoint everyone back in the states who worked on the cartoons.

The amount of money that is spent on cartoons today could easily bring back animation to our shores. We'd have to eliminate a lot of wasted money on this end-on market research, development, executives, crappy scriptwriters-believe me there is a ton of wasted money that never makes it to the screen.

And we'd have to plan our cartoons efficiently and logically. Then we'd have to train the artists to follow simpler staging procedures. We wouldn't be making Bambi, but we could make Ren and Stimpy quality this way.

I made a manual for artists that had worked on these crazy cartoons that all started with a downshot, just to try to cure them of irrational practices and concentrate their staging on telling the story in the simplest, funniest and most effective way. You get it for free.





Using simple staging buys you more time and money that you could use to put some animation and maybe even acting in the cartoons.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/04/my-animation-1.html

More to come....