Rujukan - Case Study Scooby-Doo Animation Process!

'Scooby-Doo' Animation Process

As was the case with all television animation in the late 1960s,
"Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" was created through a process called
"limited" or "planned" animation, which was devised a decade earlier by
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.

Unlike full animation, limited animation does not require an entirely new drawing for every frame of
film. Only the part of the character that absolutely has to move --
say, an arm or head or leg -- actually moves, while the rest of the
figure remains stationery. This is accomplished by splitting up the
character onto different "cels" -- sheets of acetate or celluloid onto
which the figures are painted and then photographed. The bottom cel may
contain the character's body, while the cel laid over it contains the
arm or head, or whatever part is required to move.

Many of the
early Hanna-Barbera characters wore neckties or collars so that the
separation between the body cels and the head cels would not be
apparent, and their faces were often designed to have muzzles so that
the mouth could be animated on a separate cel. But in "Scooby-Doo,
Where Are You!" none of the characters had that kind of facial
separation.

SCOOBY-DOO and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and copyright Hanna-Barbera. Scooby-Doo's design was a challenge for the original animators.

wao
Takamoto, vice president of creative design for Hanna-Barbera Cartoons,
Inc., said, "When I designed the dog and the teenage characters too, I
got more flack from the animators because of the fact that none of them
had those muzzle lines. That influenced the animation because it became
a little fuller."

"Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" would set the
standard for a more full-style of television animation than had been
offered before. While the television animation of today has progressed
considerably since the earliest days of limited animation, the method
of creating a show remains essentially the same:

Scripting

Each half-hour episode is written in script form.

Storyboarding

The script is rendered visually on a storyboard, at which time additional gags are included.

Voice Recording

The
original voice cast of "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" included the late
Don Messick as Scooby-Doo and deejay Casey Kasem as Shaggy, as well as
Frank Welker, the only cast member who remained with the franchise. In
the current "Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get A Clue!" he not only voices
Fred, which he has done since 1969, but he has now taken on the role of
Scooby-Doo, too.

Layout

The
episode is "laid out," or broken down, into shots on paper. This phase
of production includes staging the action and designing the "sets,"
props, and any new characters the episode requires.

Animation

The
director passes the work onto the animators, who draw the scenes and
lip-sync the mouths of the characters to the voice tracks. Today,
virtually all television animation use overseas studios, and the style
is much less limited than it used to be. The studio for "Shaggy &
Scooby Get A Clue!" is Digital eMation, Inc., based in Korea.

Ink and Paint

In
years past, the animation drawings were traced with ink and then
painted (on the back) onto clear sheets of acetate; today the drawings
are scanned into a computer system and inked and colored digitally.

Post Production

Animation
is largely "pre-edited," meaning there will not be different takes of a
shot presented to the editor for intercutting. Still, there may be a
need for some editing. Post production also includes adding in the
music and sound effects.

"The animation itself [in 'Shaggy &
Scooby Get A Clue!'] continues to be traditionally created by hand,"
said supervising producer Eric Radomski. "The balance of the production
-- character color, background paintings, film compositing, editing,
music and sound effects -- are digitally created, and occasionally we
will incorporate some 3-D camera effects."

Writing and breaking
down a story for a half-hour episode takes about four weeks on average.
Starting from the final script stage, it takes about six months to put
the episode through the production process. Of course, the production
of the episodes overlaps -- many are in one stage or another of the
process at any given time.

Animation Process - A Case Study
By Michael B. Comet -

This article, all images, animations, and text are Copyright 2001 Michael B. Comet All Rights Reserved.

Introduction
This article is an attempt to explain and illustrate how I usually go about my animation
process, from idea to finished animation. If you haven't read it yet, you may also
want to read

my "Character Animation:
Principles and Practice" article on my site.
Keith Lango has a really really good animation
tutorial explaining blocking and pose to pose stuff more in depth than what I do here.
You should definitely check it out too!

Starting Out
This particular case study is from an animation done for the

10 Second Club.

The club is a little animation email group that has a 10 second length audio clip
every month that people can practice animating to, and then vote on.

The clip here is from November 2001, and is a soundbite of Christopher Walken from Mouse
Hunt, saying "You have to get, inside their minds...you have to know what they want,
need, you have to think, like a mouse."

You can Download the Audio Clip yourself.
Each part of how I approach and my animation process is described
below. At the end of each, is a link or image you can click on to
download that particular animation for that step, to see how my
progress looked.

Listen to This!

Probably the most important thing at this and later stages it to continually listen to
the audio itself. Figure out where it rises, where it falls, where the accents are,
what parts need major poses, what parts can be the same pose, but with smaller flourishes
and detail inside. And of course, what is the emotion, what is the acting behind it
all. What is going on inside the characters brain while he speaks and pauses?

I'm all too guilty many times of just running ahead of starting out, but if you can
take the time to sit there and loop the audio over and over again listening to it,
getting idea, it will make your animation stronger.

After listening, and usually physically acting out some of the
motions myself, I'll do one of two things. I'll either start right on
the computer blocking poses in, keeping in mind what I thought of, and
working with poses, but putting them in one after the other (in a
somewhat straight ahead fashion). Or else, I'll sketch out my ideas on
paper. Both are about the same, but the paper helps to have something
to look at and go back to later on. Especially if you mark down facial
emotions, it can help you out.

My sketches are usually quite simple and fast when I do them, just enough so that I
can remember myself what I am doing and where I want to go. I'll usually end up with
a variation of my sketch in the final product. That is I won't hold myself to it later

if I want to change something. But it's a good place for me to start.
Here is the sketch I did for this particular clip:



Layout & Blocking

The first 3D step I take is getting the character, background and camera all working
how I want. Layout is the first pass at this, which basically consists of me posing
out the first frame, getting the set pieces made if needed, and framing the camera.
Once I'm happy with the layout of the shot, I'm ready to actually start animating.
I'll look at my thumbnail sketches if I have any. I scrub the audio, and start
putting in my key poses.

At work I've used "Step" keys. This way if I have a pose at frame 1, and then another
pose at frame 20, I can just key those 2 frames. Everything "holds", there is no
interpolation. At work we've termed this "pop-thru" (once again see Keith Lango's
Tutorial as well), because everything seems to "pop" from one pose to another, because
there are no inbetween frames.

In MAX it's a bit of a pain to have to switch from step keys to linear keys and such,
and in addition, I wanted to kind of get a feel for the timing just a tad more,
especially since it is such a subtle clip. Therefore I opted to just use "Linear"
key interpolation instead.
If I wanted a pose, once again on frame 1 and 20, what I would
do is pose the first one on frame 1. Then figure out how long to hold
the pose, say maybe I want 15 frames, so I'd go to frame 15, key all
the character body parts there the exact same as on frame 1, and then
go to frame 20 and key the second different pose. That way things stay
the same and don't interpolate from 1-15, then there is a 5 frame
change, and then the next pose on 20.

I pretty much continue this cycle of new pose, hold pose, then new pose, hold pose,
until I am done. In some cases as shown here, I have some moving holds, because in
reality the poses weren't supposed to pop. However as you notice, it is still very
very rough.

The idea at this "Blocking" stage is to simply get a quick picture of what the poses
are, and what is happening in the shot to make sure it looks ok. The important aspect
of this block stage are:

• Very quick to do. You're just putting in the basic poses.
  
• You can tell what is going on overall body-acting wise.
  
• Interpolation and timing isn't too important right now, you're just doing a first shot at it.
  
• All parts of the body for each pose are keyed on the same frame. This makes it
  
  very easy to slide the keys/timing around later.
  

BLOCKING Movie



Rough Animation

After I am pretty sure of my main poses, acting, and basic timing, I'll go in and start
to tweak. Everything is still kept with "Linear" keys, so that I don't have to worry
about splines interpolating wrong. At this point I'll start by adjusting the timing
of the poses and their transitions.

Once I'm happy with that I'll also start to add more flourishes or sub-poses, which
are really just the same pose, with some variations in them. I'll also add anticpation
and follow through as I progress.

The idea here is even with linear keys, the animation should start to look more
complete. If I key more than one part of the body, then I'll still make sure all the
keys are on the same frame. ie: there is no offsetting. But there is more detail and
refinement in the poses, timing, and details.

I usually work in blocks, of 50-100 frames or so at a time. That way I can focus on
just a small chunk, make it look good, then continue forward. Below are 3 clips of my
progress through the rough stages.

Notice on the first Rough 1 movie, all I really did was start to
add detail to the beginning of the clip, since I hadn't gotten farther
yet. In the Rough 2 movie, things have been fleshed out pretty well. I
don't usually do any facial animation so the face is hidden, although I
did do a quick eye move to help me read what was going on.
In Rough 3, I decided to push the poses a bit more, exaggerating some
of the moves a
little bit more extremely to add some variation.

The important things about the Rough stage are:

• Timing gets corrected.
  
• Poses get refined, inbetween poses are added. Anticipation and followthrough
  poses are used.
  
• No facial animation yet.
  
• Everything is still using Linear key interpolation.
  
• At the end of the rough stage, the body animation should almost look as good as
  done, even though it has linear keys.
  

ROUGH 1 Movie

ROUGH 2 Movie

ROUGH 3 Movie

Facial Animation

After pretty much finishing up the body in a Linear state, I start work on the facial
animation. I'll typically start by doing just the mouth, and making the lipsync look
ok. This is the Facial 1 movie.

Then I'll go back and add some emotion into the mouth, adding more or less smile
or frown around what is going on in the lipsync. The keys are all still Linear in
this stage as well.

After the mouth is done, I'll go and start the eye motion. Typically I'll animate the
brows and lids for expression as needed. All Linear keys, but with no blinks yet. Just
keys for expression poses to keep things neat and clean in my timeline. That is the

Facial 2 movie. I'll also make sure the eyes are looking where they need at this stage.
Eventually I'll be ready to tweak any lipsync and facial issues and to add blinks
into the poses. Essentially fixing up the facial animation as needed, all with Linear
keys still. This is the Facial 3 movie below.

The aspects of this phase of the animation for me are:

• Everything is still at Linear keys, this helps to not have to worry about accidental
  overshoot due to interpolation.
  
• I tend to block in the proper lipsync mouth movement, then add emotion after.
  
• At the end of this stage both the body and face have been pretty much finished,
  but with Linear keys.
  

FACIAL 1 Movie

FACIAL 2 Movie

FACIAL 3 Movie

Cleanup Animation

At the end I start my "Cleanup" phase, where I adjust my keys to
be smooth. We have a tool at work for Maya, and one I wrote at home in
MAX that switches keys to "smooth", but without any extra accidental
overshoot. (See the keyManager script with cometSmooth available for
download on my 3D Help Page.

This allows you to get perfect smooth motion but with no computery accidental peaks
or valleys in the interpolation. Normally you'll have to change things to spline/smooth,
and then manually tweak tangent handles to get rid of overshoot if it occurs.

I then see how it looks, and tweak things accordingly, maybe offseting
some things, making slight adjustments etc... This is where you can
offset rotation keys from translate if desired, or just offset each
spine bone one frame later, and so on, as needed or desired.

I tend to preview these at a larger resolution since I want to make sure it
will hold up when it goes to video on a bigger screen.

This phase has:

• Smooth keys
  
• Offsets of keys if desired
  
• This is the final animation.
  

CLEANUP 1 Movie

CLEANUP 2 Movie

Final Animation

Once I'm done with the animation, I'll take care of any special lighting or rendering
issues. I may or may not tweak things a bit more if I start to notice stuff and have
time.


The final animation I did is shown below.

FINAL 2 Movie



That's All!

So how long did it take me? I actually tried to keep good track of my
time for his one... What follows is each stage of the animation I went through
and how long it took me. Each of these relates to a preview animation clip for
download above.

Thumbnail Sketch 0.5 hrs
Layout, Set, Blocking: 1.5 hrs
Rough 1: 1 hr
Rough 2: 2 hrs
Rough 3: 2 hrs
Facial 1: 1 hr
Facial 2: 1.5 hrs
Facial 3: 2 hrs
Cleanup 1: 0.5 hrs
Cleanup 2: 1.0 hrs
Lighting/Final Tweaks: 1.5 hrs
--------------------------------
TOTAL 14.5 hrs approixmate

That's about it. We tend to animate about 15-20 seconds a week where I work, so
this isn't too bad. There's some acting issues I probably would have changed, but
I opted to keep what I had when I started so that this article fit together nicer.