Beginning animators and students often wonder how the more experienced artists can create so much footage. What’s the secret? Well, two of the main techniques that might help you break through BOTH the quality and quantity barriers is the use of thumbnails and breakdowns.
Thumbnails are, as the name suggests, a preliminary sketch of the scene, an single static image, in which you plan out the action, timing, arcs, etc.
Breakdowns are the large gaps between the keys. By placing key action on breakdowns, you can loosen up your animation, and offload a lot of your animation work onto an inbetween drawing – which is far easier than creating yet another key.
LYNDA: Breakdowns & Thumbnails
LINKEDIN: Breakdowns & Thumbnails
Here are some sample images from the handout. This thumbnail is pretty clean (cleaner than it really needs to be – your’s can be much looser, as long as you can follow the action). The two keys are on #1 and #21, the breakdown in in red, with the antic and overshoot in blue. With this one image, the physical action is pre-animated! The timing estimate below also allows you to plan out the timing and spacing of the entire scene in one image.
The breakdown here is #8 (in red). Notice how the head moves down while the arm moves up. It’s the breakdown that creates the flexibility of the action, and stops it from being a bland tween.
A much rougher thumb sequence, planning out a drunken walk. This is the sort of action that you could also try straight ahead, but I’m really wedded to pose-to-pose, so planning it out as thumbs is best for me.
Really intricate actions are also great opportunities for thumbnails. If you want to walk a character from left to right, and to stop at a particular point, this is a good way to plan it.
This is more physical action – and again we can see how thumbs can be used (along with the breakdowns sketched in red) to save us from ‘thinking on the page’.
A really nice action here, with the breakdown on #22 adding a LOT of extra oomph to the action.
It’s also great for planning tricky gestures, like the rollup of the sleeves on #11 and 51. I’d hate to try to do that without good thumb reference.
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