Fiziwig's Animator Studio Tutorials

Gary's Anime Studio Experiments is my collection of experiments, in tutorial form, put together while learning how to use Anime Studio. I hope you find them useful.

In this first page I'm going to look briefly at the various aspects of limited animation. In later pages I plan to go into more details about each aspect, including some detailed tutorials on how to put these techniques to work.

Limited animation was used to make it possible to produce animation for television on a tight schedule and with a limited budget. Some early uses of limited animation, however, were used for artistic purposes, to break from tradition and to explore the possibilities of the medium. One notable early example is The Dover Boys from Chuck Jones.

Limited animation can be either a conscious stylistic choice with genuine artistic merit, or a short cut for producing cheap, poorly done animation. Treated as an art form in its own right, limited animation is not simply "the easy way out". One might argue that Southpark is terrible animation, yet Southpark is brilliant story-telling. There's art, and then there's art. If it's the art of animation that is foremost in your mind then you may not choose to use limited animation. If the art of telling stories is foremost in your mind, then I submit that Jay Ward's Fractured Fairy Tales has a great deal of artistic merit.

Using the techniques of limited animation to good effect requires careful planning and attention to detail, but first and foremost it requires a thorough understanding of the techniques, or "idioms" of limited animation. I will examine those techniques starting with the backgrounds and moving forward.

The richness and detail of background paintings varies from one animated film to the next, but in general, backgrounds in limited animation are nothing like the backgrounds used in traditional full animation. Compare these different forest scenes from Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland to several different forest scenes from Rocky and Bullwinkle. There is no attempt at realisim in the limited animation backgrounds. In fact, if too much realism is used it would clash with the simplicity of the characters and animated objects in the foreground.

Another study in contrast is the difference between a castle interior from Sleeping Beauty and a castle interior from Mr. Peabody.

As you can see from these background examples, limited animation often uses very stylized or abstract representations of background features.

Background cycling is another technique to reduce the amount of background painting that needs to be prepared. In traditional full animation, a character running through a forest would run down a path that twists and turns, discovering a different part of the forest with each new frame. With limited animation and background cycling, however, the character would typically run straight left to right (or right to left), in profile, against a flat background of the same dozen trees cycling over and over.

Traditional full animation often used multi-plane animation where background elements that are closer to the camera pan more quickly than distant background objects. Thus the character walking through the forest might pass nearby trees quickly, while distant mountains, and the moon in the sky, hardly pan at all. In limited animation, backrounds are flat, and all background objects pan at the same rate. Scenes that show sun, moon or clouds in the sky or distant mountains, are almost never panned.

In Anime Studio, that limitation does not exist. It is easy to create a flat background in the style of limited animation, and yet have a further back layer with the moon, or distant mountains, set to be immune to camera movement. Since the effect of multi-plane animation is so easy to achieve in Anime Studio there's no good reason for not taking advantage of it, unless you are trying to duplicate the look of the strict limited animation style.

Typical characters in limited animation, especially that produced for television, have a very large head atop a short, stumpy body. This allows facial features and mouth movements to be clearly seen on a small television screen. When animation was done by painting physical cels, the head and body were usually placed on separate layers so that animated mouth movements could be done with a fixed, unchanging body image.

To disguise the joint between the layers, characters very often wore clothing with a high collar, or some sort of single-piece collar, tie, or bandana around the neck. Even such supposed "wild-life" characters as Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound were never seen without their neckwear. Obviously, with Anime Studio there is no joint that needs to be hidden, but you may want to include neckware in your character design as a stylistic element or as an homage to the origins of limited animation.

Not as universal, but still often used, is the device of having the character's costume in the form of a coat, skirt, kilt, toga, or other garment that hangs down to cover the joint between the legs and the body of the character. When constructed in this manner, the walk cycle of the characters is simplified, especially where no distinction is made between the left and right legs, so that only one half of the walk cycle needs to be drawn. Having the clothing constructed this way also hides the joint between the two separate cels that were used to film moving legs on a non-moving body. Examples include Fred Flintstone (above) and the king in the Rocky and Bullwinkle screenshot above.

In full animation characters typically turn and move in a very fluid manner, presenting all sides to the camera. The positioning of the actors on the set is flexible, often with a great deal of motion of one character relative to another. In limited animation characters very often sit or stand side by side in front of some static backdrop, each presenting a 3/4 view to the camera. The characters seldom directly face the camera, nor do they often face each other. Almost never will a character perform any kind of 3-dimensional motion, such as walking in circles, or doing a ballroom dance. Walking motion is almost always side to side in profile, and seldom directly toward or away from the camera.

I plan to go into more detail on script breakdown, stage directions and planning shots in a later tutorial.

Head and body turns in limited animation are brief and usually animated with no more than 3 to 5 frames between the extremes. Often, such a character turn involves only the head, with the body remaining in full frontal view. Here is an example from Rocky and Bullwinklethat uses 3 intermediate frames in addition to the two extreme views. Below that is a more extreme example of a fast 180 turn with only one intermediate frame.

One character design technique frequently used in limited animation is to superimpose a profile view of the character's facial features on a full head outline to create the effect of a 3/4 view or full frontal view. Here are some examples from the 1967 book Cartooning the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm.

Another well-known example is Fred Flinstone, as seen above. This "beak" style mouth is also seen in Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle, as well as many other examples of limited animation.

Another frequently used technique is to present nearly full frontal facial features on a 3/4 view head outline to suggest a 3/4 view. In turning from 3/4 left to 3/4 right the features are simply slid across the face, with the direction of the nose flipped as it crosses the middle. A good example of this technique is seen in the female characters in The Flinstones

When stepping through a DVD video of an animated film, frame by frame, keep in mind that the film was almost certainly animated at 24 frames per second, while the DVD presents it at 30 frames per second. In order to project the film at a faster frame rate, yet still maintain the proper speed of action, as near as I can tell examining videos, there are two methods used. One is that every fourth frame is projected twice. Stepping one frame at a time you will not see the frames like this: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - etc, but like this: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 4 - 5 - 6 - etc. Notice that frames 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20 are shown twice. The end result is that frame 24 of the original is projected at frame 30 of the DVD version. If you want to analyze or reproduce an animation on DVD, and if you are creating your animation at 24 frame per second, then just ignore the duplicated frames as you single-step through the DVD. The second method blurs two frames together resulting in some frames on the DVD that are a blending of two original frames with partial transparency of the images. In this case the sequence of original frames, 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - etc., will appear on the DVD as 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 4/5 - 5 - 6 - etc. where "4/5" indicates that these two original frames are blended together to create a new extra frame. When this method is used simply ignore the blended frames when analyzing an animation. In either case, always bear in mind the difference in frame rate if you try to duplicate, frame by frame, a certain action from a DVD.

Full animation often uses exagerated flexibility, where characters show a great deal of "squash and stretch" as their whole body changes shape in response to some motion or another. In limited animation the body is often a single, unchanging cel, with head, arms and legs tacked on. When the character walks, only his legs and arms move. The body does not undergo any shape changes. Likewise, objects do not normally have their shape distorted in any way by motion. The classic bouncing ball animation demonstrating squash and stretch would not typically be seen in limited animation. Instead the ball would maintain its round shape as it bounced, with perhaps a single frame or two of squash where it hits the ground.

One trick commonly, if not universally, used in limited animation is what is called animation on twos. What that means is that each frame drawn is photographed twice, so that while the projected frame rate is 24 frames per second, there are actually only 12 new images per second being shown. This cuts the animation load in half. You will encounter this if you ever analyze limited animation films frame by frame on DVD. But with Anime Studio, the inbetewen frames, the tweens, can often be done automatically by the software, so this technique will not as useful.

Walk cycles in limited animation can vary from full walk cycles similar to traditional animation, to little more than three frames of feet flapping around as the character image is dragged across the background image. Here is a typical 3-frame walk cycle from Peabody's Improbable History. Notice that the pants are black and there is no way to tell which is the right leg and which is the left. That way the same three frames can be cycled endlessly with no need to have separate half-cycles for left and right legs. In addition, this walk cycle is filmed on twos so that these three frames actually occupy six frames worth of time. I'll explore limited animation walk and run cycles in greater detail in a future tutorial.

In traditional full animation much of the story was told by the animation itself. The typical Road Runner cartoon had no dialog at all, just action and sound effects. Listening only to the soundtrack would not tell the story. In limited animation the soundtrack by itself, without any animation, needs to stand on its own as an entertaining story. In that sense, limited animation is more like optional illustrations to accompany a radio drama. Very often, the characters will describe the action taking place in the animation. The dialog "Oh no! Billy Bob is headed for the cliff!" is accompanied by the animation of Billy Bob headed for the cliff.