Research - The Animator's Survival Kit

               
               Having discussed about the animation principles in the last blog post, I have done some more research and stumbled upon a book called ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’ by Richard Williams. I have spent some time reading the book throughout the week and found several interesting topics that I will be taking notes on today. Although the book is aimed mostly at 2D animation and hand-drawn animation in general, some of the topics presented techniques that are still used to this day.

Greek pot illustration found in the book
               
                In the first several chapters of the book up to page 41, Williams talks about his career as an animator and his experiences. He also takes on the history of animation and how animation progressed since ancient times, when ‘The Ancient Greeks decorated pots with figures in successive stages of action. Spinning the pot would create a sense of motion.’  Although I found the chapters to be rather interesting as I enjoyed reading them, there was nothing that could’ve helped me with my dissertation to this point.




                The following chapters all talk about the way the animation industry works (or used to work), the roles of animators that draw the key and extreme frames and animator assistants that usually did the ‘in-betweens’ , what needs to be done and when and by who, etc.  Williams also describes the workflow and the charts used to streamline the work that has to be done. If anything, what I have found to be relevant to my work is something that I was already aware of, and that is the frame timings when one wants to speed up part of the animation or slow it down. It was regarded as ‘slowing-in’ and ‘slowing-out’ before, but it is known today as ‘ease-in’ and ‘ease-out’. The idea behind it is that the more in-between frames you have in a part of an animation, the slower that part will play. So for example if we take a pendulum, we will want to have more in-between frames at the extremes of the animation, when the pendulum reaches the ends and changes direction with each full-swing.

Images of a progressive pendulum animation and a representative animation chart



                The other useful chapter was the one titled ‘3 Ways to animate’, a chapter that takes on the different techniques used to create animations. I have in fact, prior to reading this book, summarily discussed about the animation techniques in my ‘The 12 principles of animation’ post. However, I did not go in depth at that point which is why I have probably missed a third technique, a hybrid of the two initial techniques. Williams refers to it as ‘The combination of straight ahead and pose to pose’ in his book, and he also specially states that ‘it is the best way to work’ out of the three techniques. I will be using the images found in his book to display why the hybrid technique is the best.


 Straight ahead animation                              Pose-to-pose animation                         The combination of the two


                Although Williams talks about 2D animation when referring to the three techniques, they can also be adapted and used in 3D animation in exactly the same way they are used in 2D animation. I will be using this technique when creating my set of animations as I believe it combines the accuracy and control of pose to pose animation with the unpredictability and creativity (or ‘magic’) of straight ahead animation, if done right.
References:
Williams, R. (2001). The Animator's Survival Kit. Unites States of America: Macmillan USA, pp.1-83.




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