The Animator's Holy Grail
When cartoonist Winsor McCay, famed creator of newspaper comic strip
Little Nemo In Slumberland, first wowed audiences with moving
pictures of a cute dinosaur named Gertie taking an apple out of his hand
and eating it people marveled and cheered and wanted more. Gertie was
instantly transformed from a simple series of drawings filmed in sequence
and played back before an audience to a representation of a living,
breathing creature. An "actor" if you will. This was the start of the
Twentieth Century's fascination with animated films.
The evolution of film animation has been long and interesting, going
through many changes over its evolutionary journey. With The
Animator's Survival Kit Richard Williams, award winning animator who
began working on his own animated films in the late fifties and was the
Director of Animation for the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit,
has written a fantastic book based on the series of Animation
Masterclasses he taught both in America and abroad. Classes attended by
traditional animators like those working for Disney and Warner Bros. as
well as up-and-coming computer animators such as PIXAR and DreamWorks.
And that's what really great about this book. Presented as "A Manual of
Methods, Principles, and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop
Motion and Internet Animators," it's not just an aid for aspiring
animators used to working with the classic pencil on paper method, but
its lessons and examples are finely suited for computer users and many
others as well. For the basics of animation have always been the same:
Use overlapping images to convey the illusion of movement, of life. And
Williams writes about true animation, not the herky-jerky stop-and-start
style you see in the Flintstones and so much of the cheaper anime
out there right now, but the real work that causes one to wonder and
marvel at the screen as the pictures unfold before you in a believable
and frighteningly life-like manner. He has an honest passion about good
animation: the classics such as Disney with its inventiveness and grace,
Warner Bros. and Tex Avery and their inspired zaniness, while he also
revels in the mind-blowing effects that can be achieved through the use
of computers, eager to be witness to the next step in the evolution of
animated films. For whether one is a classic pencil on paper animator or
a computer guru utilizing "high-tech marionettes" isn't as important to
Williams as the end result. He stresses that the animator's job isn't
just to move drawings around but to create believable actors with
personality and weight, who move fluidly, with believable actions,
conveying life.
Ultimately, what Williams hopes to accomplish with his book is to inspire
others to also create great animation, to invent as well as be
believable.
The book starts off with a brief illustrated history of animation before
taking you through the all important basics quickly in a manner both
straightforward and elegant. Loaded with drawings on nearly every page he
coaches without ever becoming condescending. His instructions are
economical and to the point; concise, with easy to understand
instructions, and sublimely executed, colorful and always entertaining
examples. Williams takes you through all the steps, breaking it down in
simple, easy to understand terminology.
After he's sure you're catching on he steps it up a notch, showing you
ways to create weight on your character (you're not working with lines
after all, but with shapes and mass), how to perform a believable walk or
a lip-synch, how to time actions accurately, and even teaches important
technical operations such as how to write out time sheets for camera
operators. (But he just doesn't show you the chart, he shows you how it
came about over the years, the stages it went through to get to that
point, thereby forcing it to make sense in a very clarified manner. "This
is done this way because it makes sense, because it works," he's telling
you. And you see the logic in it right away.)
Williams' book is also sprinkled throughout with his many varied and
often amusing anecdotes, full of great trivia and many stories about the
animating greats that Williams was fortunate to have worked with in his
more than forty years of being in the business. But even with this he
never wastes time or precious book space with extraneous fluff; at nearly
350 pages it's a fast, yet thorough read. (Many computer "How To" books
could learn a lot from this approach.)
This book isn't filled with the so-called "secrets" of animation, this
book is the holy grail itself. As an instructional self-teaching guide
this book is invaluable to anyone thinking about working in the field of
animation. A virtual classroom in and of itself.
