- Hey, how's everybody doing?
My name's Mike Stern.
I'm an animator at Pixar Animation Studios.
I'm working from home today, as I'm sure a lot of you are.
So today I was going to do a digital flip book
with you guys.
And I'm going to use the character Blazey from "Onward,"
which is the little dragon you see sneaking
around in the background.
And the reason I picked Blazey is I
think she's pretty great for the animation flipbook format.
You know, the idea of the flipbook
is, you start with one drawing and then do another and kind of
flip it back and forth and see how that feels,
see how it gives it life.
And I think a lot of us started animation
with that particular technique.
Along the way, we developed these other techniques
that we use.
But every once in a while, you find a shot or a character that
seems suited to that very first technique you started with,
and I think Blazey fits into that category.
So I'm going to go show you how I
used flipbook animation to bring Blazey to life
in "Onward."
All right.
So the first thing I do is get in and just add a little bit
of environment here.
So I'm going to create a floor.
We'll do that with just a line across here,
and then just indicate the door frame.
I'm using TVPaint Animation, but you could use whatever
software you have available to you,
or even a big stack of paper.
That should work for following along
with what we're doing here.
OK, so that should work for our purposes there.
Let's work on getting Blazey in here.
As I mentioned with Blazey, she moves
in kind of a snake-like manner, so the head is going
to lead a lot of this motion.
So let me start by just getting the head placed
between the door sides here.
And the body just kind of indicated by this line here.
Since this is the first frame, I can go ahead and indicate
the feet and even the snout, just so we can see how she's
composed in the frame here.
That looks good to me.
So now that we have her in there,
let's focus on that movement of the head.
So this first drawing, or second drawing rather,
his head's going to come down,
sort of coming down there.
And the next frame we have it come back up.
There are three drawings now.
One where the head's going down, next one is coming up,
have it come up again.
So I'm very much flipping through these drawings
and just responding by the feel.
You could feel your animation as you
flip the pages back and forth.
OK.
So something about what animation
is, that the closer these drawings are together,
the slower it's going to move.
And then the further apart they are, the faster it'll move.
So I've been keeping these pretty close together here,
and now I'm going to make a big gap for this next drawing
as Blazey starts leaving the screen.
I'm still going to draw it.
Because even though you won't see this,
it'll be behind a door frame, I'll come back and erase it
later, I want to know where the head's
going to be to kind of indicate where
I'm going to draw the body.
OK, so that's our head animation.
Let's see how that plays.
All right, so now I've got that head animation in there.
I'm going to come back again and start
thinking about how the body's going
to react to the head motion.
When his head comes down, his body is going to compress.
It's almost like a spring, you know?
You push this into the spring together,
the coils compress in the middle.
So I'm going to push this further out here.
OK, so these are the first five frames here.
Body compresses when the head goes down,
then expands as the head goes up.
And when this next frame happens,
the body is actually going to change shape and come around.
OK, and this one, now we're tracking
the body and that tail.
So I continue to follow the head.
So now we're just dealing with the tail.
Exiting sort of from here to the tail.
The next one, I'm going to try to add a little bit of flourish
where the tail meets the door.
I can come and clean this up a little bit now.
OK, so I can see that head with the body.
OK, so let's continue moving along one piece at a time.
We're building these drawings a little bit at a time here.
So the next thing we do is go and attack the legs.
And my trick for the legs is I like using two different colors
to help show contrast.
Because sometimes the legs like, climb over each other.
I'm just going to go ahead and mark this back leg here
with red.
Now he needs blue on the front leg.
I want to try to get the impression
of some kind of a scramble.
As Blazey's trying to get out of there,
the legs are moving kind of fast because they're reacting,
versus being controlled.
So let's see if I can create that type of effect.
So first, this leg comes up.
So that's kind of what we wanted.
A quick scramble on the ground, and then take off.
So let's look at those back legs,
which we're not going to see too much in the shot here.
But there will be a couple of frames
where they kind of sneak in.
So maybe here as we start leaving,
I'll cap one of these legs plant.
OK, so here's our rough animation.
Our body, head, and legs.
And I'll come clean here and say that, when I'm animating
a shot at Pixar, my drawings don't take
me too much further than this.
This is kind of where I switch over and start
using the 3D software.
For our purposes here, since we want to end up with a flipbook
of drawings, we're going to go and try to clean
some of these drawings up.
I'm going to use what we have here as reference,
and I'm going to lower the opacity on this layer
so I can draw over it.
So if you're doing this on paper, what you probably want
to do is put a piece of tracing paper over the paper you're
using, or use a light box, or find a way that you can
get this drawing beneath the drawing
you're currently working on.
All right.
So the first thing I'd do here is
start working on Blazey's eyes.
Blazey kind of has this vacant look in her face
where the eyes almost look unfocused.
So I'm going to see if I can achieve that
here just by favoring the pupil to this opposite side
of each eye.
OK.
So this first round of eyes, OK, on this next frame,
I'm actually going to go close the eyes.
So bring the eyes down a little bit.
Just do a line across and indicate that they're closed.
And here I might even go a little wider with the eyes.
Next I'm going to layer in the snout under the eyes here.
So I'll just start from frame one.
She has this kind of, almost like a bird beak.
And the lower jaw always comes out in front of the upper jaw.
And Blazey has this crazy tongue.
OK.
So up to this point, we've been using just
this really rough line and circle to indicate
the head and the body.
But now I'm going to go in and kind of tie those down
a little bit so we can actually see them,
and then we can place the legs and the ears
based on where the actual body will be.
So I do have to go in there and clean up the legs.
But I want to focus on something easy for now.
So maybe what I'll do is I'll just focus on that collar
and clean that up.
All right.
Let's go in there and do those legs.
All right.
So we're continuing to put the details in here.
We're going to have to do the ears and the wings here.
OK, now I'm going to go add in the horns.
OK, so I'm going to add Blazey's spikes.
All right.
Final details are in there, and here
we have our little flipbook.
OK, so there you have it.
There's our digital flipbook.
Hopefully you got something out of this
by watching me go through this process,
and I look forward to seeing what
you guys do with your own digital flipbooks.
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