Monthly Matinee September: Animatics

Good People Of The Crowd, Take Your Seats! Today On The Stage We Have the Prolific Zoe Sugg, With Her Work On The Proper Use of Animaniacs! 

Friends, I’ve fallen deep, DEEP into the wormhole that is the Hamilton fandom.

I’m also aware that I’m four years late to the party.

I’ve always been interested in seeing the musical, but I hadn’t checked out the soundtrack until, on a week-long hiking trip to Havasupai, one of my friends kept referencing the play and eventually sang “Aaron Burr, Sir,” and I was hooked.

No no, wait come back! This isn’t just an excuse for me be Hamiltrash for 500 words, I swear! This is about the Hamilton animatics, and how suddenly I understand things about facial expressions and contrasting-to-direct-attention that I just never managed to absorb before.

Different from Keyframes… But Not Really

If you’ve read any cartooning books or tips online, you’ve no doubt encountered material that talks about “Keyframes,” the drawings that mark the end and beginning of a smooth transition in a piece of animation. In order to break down complex movements, it’s often recommended that cartoonists look at a motion and break it down to its core elements (keyframes) and draw those.

The trouble with this is that, for most cartoonists who’ve been at it a while, comics are ALL keyframes. So, we end up recycling motions. There’s ways to change up camera angle and whatnot to make your image more unique, but it’s sort of hard to select the “best” keyframe to get your idea across, right? Like, take a punch: You have the wind-up, the swing, and the connection. There’s three motions here. Which one(s) do you choose to show? How much time do you spend on each panel, is it short and broken down into lots of small panels, is it two large ones?* Comics are all made of stagnant images, so it’s relatively easy to get the idea of an action to come across… but what about the drama? Animatics helped me figure this out!

Timing

Animatics are the bridge between a storyboard and a full animation: it’s a series of still images set to a track. It’s designed to get the idea of a scene across, without having to fully render the animation. This means an animatic video can be comprised of hundreds of still images, and your brain doesn’t always have a lot of time to absorb them (we’re talking <1 second sometimes).

Because of this, artists have to choose what movements they’re able to spend time showing the viewer. Also – it’s not always up to the artist. A lot of that actually depends on how the audio track plays out.

For example, let’s look at the animatic for “Farmer Refuted.” Krystaliaaa chooses to color certain parts of the animatic (often when Thayne Jasperson is sustaining a note) in areas where our eye is resting on the image for a time. But for the 0:43 mark that requires an overhead crowd shot and lasts for about a second? We’re getting a sketch for that.

In “The Room Where it Happens” by Don lluzzell, we see a really nice variation in the pacing of each of these frames: there’s a lot of extra drama added at 0:54 when the characters suddenly black out into silhouettes, showing the contrast in their motivations. At 1:45 there’s a cool little set of frames where the animator erases their layer- they have the time to do this since Jefferson is in the middle of a monologue. At 2:57 we get a LOT of motion suddenly and the lack of detail lends itself to the fast-paced idea of Burr falling through the floor. But finally, as the song reaches its climax at 3:24, we get the most detailed image of Hamilton in the entire animatic. The animator is able to do this because the “camera” spends a lot of time on this image, and it’s appropriate because this is a confrontation between Ham and Burr, so Ham is taking up all of Burr/the viewer’s attentions.

The decisions in both of these animations are of course made by the creators, but they’re necessarily shaped by the narrative and pacing of the song.

Contrast

Again, the artists making these don’t have a ton of time to spend on each frame – and they’re not about to waste time fully coloring or rendering a background if your eye is just going to skip over the whole thing in a second.

This is where contrast comes in. Check out the animatic below for “Your Obedient Servant.” A lot of the “coloring” here is a single, somewhat blobby, concentration of shade in one area (usually the foreground/character), with an extra layer over the face and eyes. The background has some forms in it, but as they’re not shaded they get read as unimportant (and therefore justifiably less detailed) parts of a room.

The “contrast” in these animatics is super interesting for me because it’s actually not a LOT of stark black-and-white: it’s more like, the presence of any shading on this blank white background immediately grabs your attention just because there’s anything there. The dark tone/background is only prominent in this animatic from about 0:20-0:33. The cool part about this one, for me, is how much drama Violet – Madness manages to create with such a little amount of detail.

These concepts aren’t new for most cartoonists- but it’s amazing how looking at something through a different lens will sometimes get a technique to “click.” Inspiration can be found anywhere. Lafayette is in favor of animatics.