[PLAYFUL MUSIC]
Hi, everybody.
I'm Pete Docter.
I'm a director at Pixar.
I did "Monsters, Inc," "Up," "Inside Out," and "Soul," which
we're hoping is going to come out in theaters just
a few months, November 20th.
I was asked to come here and describe animation
and talk about flip books.
And I'm here in my closet because there's
some kids playing outside, and it's the only place I could
find that's relatively quiet.
So what happened for me -- when I was a kid,
unlike the noisy kids outside, I was a pretty quiet kid.
I sat inside a lot.
And somebody gave me a flip book.
I don't know if you've seen these.
They're, like, basically -- I made one recently.
I made a bunch when I was a kid, but my mom has all those.
So this is one that I did in 2004.
And you can see, basically, here's me under the mistletoe,
and I'm waiting for a kiss from my wife.
Oh, she walks right by.
So then, oh, here come the kids.
Oh, no kiss from them either.
[MOANS] Oh, there comes the dog.
And it's an introduction of our new dog, which we just
got at that time, named Bailey.
So the cool thing about these are, though, is that it tells--
you can tell a whole story.
You can get all sorts of cool movement.
But basically it's just a bunch of pieces of paper.
And each drawing is just a little
different than the last one.
And when you flip through them, it creates
the illusion of movement.
Now, the thing is, at Pixar we make computer-animated films,
but it's the same idea.
It's basically just that we use computers to help
us to draw the pictures.
But each one of them, when you watch a movie--
here's a little flip book of Dug.
There's Dug.
And he's excited about getting the ball,
and then Carl throws it.
So it's basically the same idea here.
Each image -- there's 24 of them every second --
is just a little bit different than the last one.
So it's a great way, if you are interested in animation,
you can get going on this right at home
without a lot of expensive equipment
or electronics or anything.
This is one that my friend did when I gave him that flip book,
and he just did this.
"Thank you."
And you can make your own.
Either grab, like, you know, one of these notepads from, like,
a hotel.
Oh, you know what actually works really well are
those 3M Post-it notes, the yellow, you know,
that have the stick-'em on the top.
You can flip through those.
That works really nice.
Or you can also just get one of these clips, like this,
and a bunch of either note cards or just pieces of paper.
And let's -- I'm going to make one for you right now.
I'm just going to use these blank pieces of paper.
I'm going to draw a little picture on each page.
And then when we're done, we'll clip it together like that
and see how it looks.
Let's see.
I'm going to move the camera.
[PLAYFUL MUSIC]
OK, so here I've just got all these pieces of paper.
And the nice thing is, you can do a drawing.
If you make a mistake on one, you can just get rid of it.
So it works nicely.
The simplest thing would just be, like, a bouncing ball.
So here we'll start with a ball.
And what you want to do is kind of be able to imagine where
that previous drawing is, because animation's
really all about, like, the movement from one
frame to the next.
So here, you can see, it's kind of staying in the same place.
It can hang there for just a second.
I'm going to go down just a little.
Go to the next page.
Now I'm going to have it stretch out a little bit
because it's falling, and then smash on the ground.
Let's imagine the ground's about here.
[BLOWS RASPBERRY] So that smushes.
And then it's going to kind of come out of the smush
and then bounce back up into the air,
although maybe not quite as high as it was before, we hope.
So let's see how that looks.
[TAPS]
Sp here you can see, very simple.
Boing.
Ball bounce.
Boing.
So let's try something a little bit more complicated,
although still I don't want it to get too complicated
because you have to draw a ton of these drawings, so--
OK, let's do something slightly more complex this time.
Let's start with a person standing here.
And it's going to be nice and simple because we're
going to draw a lot of these.
We don't want to spend a lot of time drawing each image
because there's going to be tons of these.
And then what I think I'm going to do
is have the character jump that way.
So to go that way, I first have to go the reverse.
So that's what we call anticipation.
So if you try this yourself, like,
if you were going to jump that direction,
what would you do first?
You'd bend your knees, right?
So let's-- the next frame is going to be kind
of bending the butt back a little and getting
the knees bent slightly.
OK, and then I'll go further with that.
The head's down even further.
The butt's back further.
The knees are bent even more.
See, that's a really bad drawing.
Look at that.
That's awful.
But it doesn't matter because you can throw
it away and get another one.
And it doesn't matter anyway because in animation
it's all about the movement.
It's not about the individual drawings.
They don't have to be really pretty.
They can be pretty sloppy, at least to start out with,
and then maybe you go back and make them look nicer later.
But-- OK, so now here you can see already
this character is starting to bend down.
Let's go even a little further with that.
So push it-- push the extreme.
So now he's really --
she -- I don't know if this is a boy or a girl,
it doesn't really matter --
is really bending down to get a lot of anticipation
so that we can really leap off.
So then we're going to have him or her shoot out
[IMITATES WHOOSHING] from where they
were, [IMITATES BOUNCING AND WHOOSHING] kind of like that.
And then-- so that's going to be the maximum thrust.
And then, after that, we're going to kind
of slow it just a little bit.
You know, it doesn't travel quite as far this frame.
And the next frame, his body's kind of catching up.
Maybe this leg stays back a little further and that arm.
OK.
And the next frame, let's say this knee is bending up nice.
But this one, we're going to do kind of like a follow through.
Like, let's see how that works.
Nope.
Whoops, I got two pieces of paper.
The thing is, I'm not really sure where this is going.
I didn't plan it out at all.
Sometimes it's kind of fun.
You'll just see what happens because, you know,
you go from one frame to another,
and you're kind of like, oh, wait a minute.
Let's say in this frame, you know,
we can see this person didn't plan very well for their jump.
They're starting to twist and fall over.
And now legs are coming up this way.
Let's say this arm's there.
And then-- and the legs are falling down.
Actually, that arm should probably be about there.
This barely looks like a person anymore,
but hopefully you get the idea.
Whoa.
I forgot to add the face on those other ones.
But I can come back and do that.
And let's just say that's where the impact is.
And then you go splat on the ground.
[GRUNTS] Actually, we should have
a little bit the legs and arms kind of coiling off the--
[GROANS] you know--
and then landing.
Now, normally-- I'm just kind of doing this to show you
how animation works, but normally you'd
want to plan this out a little bit better
so you have an idea of what it is you're doing.
But let's see.
Oh.
OK, so he jumps up, whoop, [IMITATES BOOM] lands--
I probably would have reworked that a little bit,
but you get the idea.
So from there, it's just a matter of making those drawings
look a little better.
Here's another flip book that I did a couple of years ago.
And I spent a little more time on these drawings,
you can tell.
So here's this one is, we're putting our stockings up.
There's my wife and my daughter, and there's
my son with a giant stocking.
And my daughter says, hey, what the--
and he goes, what?
Because I have giant feet.
Ha ha.
So again, you can see, it's just each drawing a little bit
different than the last one.
That's the trick.
And that's how you make flip books.
[PLAYFUL MUSIC]