The McGurk Effect

This is a very interesting effect...

When you are breaking down a dialogue soundtrack into frames, you learn right away that you don't have to put every mouth position for every frame of sound. What happens is similar to the effect above, you see the mouth switching into different positions almost too quickly especially if each frame is a different mouth. Its ok to have each mouth on two frames instead of one, because you will see the mouth before you hear the sound. Too delayed or shown too soon and the mouth will look out of sync with the sound.

I took the above soundtrack to see if switching a B mouth between a F mouth would have the same effect in animation.Watch the clip below and let me know how many Bahs you see compared to Fahs.

McGurk effect from Toondini on Vimeo.

Here's another example of the McGurk effect...

EFX Animation: Water Splash

Walt Disney Studios pioneered drawn animation effects by having a team of animators study how water moves and reacts as well as fire, smoke, rain, etc. These animators soon became known as "Effects Animators" specializing in environmental effects, so the character animators could concentrate on  characters performance.

When adding an effect to your scene, you want to make sure the effect or effects are on seperate levels. This will help in case you need to shoot it on 1s, while your character(s) are being shot on 2s. You also want your character animation to be as final as possible, because the effects may have to register or line up to some part of your character or background. Example, your character's hair is on fire. You've got him jumping around and the fire effect must look as if its on top of his head.

One effect that I think I have figured out how to explain is the water splash. In this example, we are dealing with an object that falls straight down into a pool of water. The water splash reacts to the size, weight and at what angle the object enters the water, but for this demo, the angle of entry is straight down.

Begin with a simple layout showing the bottom oval where the splash begins from and draw action lines which go up and curve over. As the splash goes up, the water curves over because gravity is pushing it back down and also the water curve is moving outward. The water curves up and out, not just going up and the down. Keep your water drawings curving outward, follow the red lines as a guide.

You need to create a few main keys to get the motion looking right at beginning. Deal with the shape of the splash which travels upward and outward as it travels back down to the water surface below. As the water returns, it makes more micro splashes and this is where most character animators want to stop and draw something else because of some many details to keep moving.

Here's a splash shown frame by frame with timing notes...

Water keeps moving and moving and slowly, slows down as it returns to normal again. Water never freezes, unless it becomes ice. The tedious part is trying to make all these bits look like moving fluid and all moving at different speeds. The ending of the splash is often ignored, because it is a lot of attention to detail to make it look right. My sample below is a good start, but my ending could be fixed up a bit as well. My splash ends with water splashes and changes to a rough ripple cycle to keep the water moving and returning to normal.

Watch these examples of splashes. This one feels more heavy like mud and notice how everything moves at the same time and ends at the same time. Water moves a different speeds.

This one looks pretty good, but the ending is a little rushed into a ripple cycle...

This one has the water going up and down, no outward motion and the second water blob. If the water splash moved outward in the beginning, I think this would work better.

Good animation. Can you spot the problem with this one?

Great Animation, a little too long on the splash shape which looks as if more water is pouring out.

All these examples of splash took a lot of time and effort to figure out and draw. It takes time, perhaps a lifetime to master these techniques. The main thing is to learn how to do it yourself and develop your animation eye. Work on a scene, test the scene, review the scene, revise the scene, reshoot the scene, ask others opinion and this should be for computer animators as well. The more you do, the better you'll get.

There are basic examples of effects in almost any drawing animation book you pick up and they are good guides for simplifying these types of animation. I found two books that I'm very interested in looking through called Elemental Magic, Volume 1: The Art of Special Effects animation and Elemental Magic, Volume 2: The Technique of Special Effects animation by Joseph Gilland. If anyone has these books and would like to tell us about them, I'd love to find out more.

Please give me some advice, feedback or constructive criticism or share your animation so we can all learn something new! Don't be shy, leave a comment below!
Thanks in Advance,
Jim

The Jump and the Take

 

As a kid, this was my first source for learning how to draw animated walks, runs, jump, etc, was from Preston Blair's Animation book. He wrote this book awhile ago, but its full of great insight into cartoon animation.

The Jump 

Here's a rough animated jump I learned from Richard Williams book which is more of a realistic character jump.  As I was figuring out the jump, I notice a few things. One is that the character's head moves in a similar way when a ball goes up, arcs over and falls back down and there's a lot of squash and stretch in the poses.

The line of action is an imaginary line which goes from the neck, down the spine and to the legs to define the pose of a character and its attitude. Animators often will rough in this line first to keep the attitude or action of a strong pose. Below is the same jump but I've added a red line of action.

When you are figure out your Key poses, you will often draw this line to make sure your character is moving the right way from pose to pose. Here's the jump, one more time, showing just the line of action. Even without the details you can still see the same motion.

The Take

As you can see, my character has landed to the far right side of the screen in the establishing shot. I have now changed my framing to a Close Up in order to see what he thinks. To set up the next shot, I animated this guy to do a "take". The cartoon take is in almost every cartoon, however is lacking in modern animated tv series like "Family Guy". The king of the cartoon take in my opinion is Tex Avery and if you don't know his works, click here to see a classic.

Take a look at this take and see what you think? Anything look odd to you?

The above video has a mistake in the animation. Can you spot the problem?  I know its rough.
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