After our latest move I was unpacking my office boxes. It always takes me some time to pack and upack my office and to get organized again. As you do as an animator, I have collected countless stacks of flip books, drawings, tutorials (not to mention the boxes of art supplies, animation paper and books, books, books....) over the years. Ususally I have kept the odd drawing here and there from most films I have worked on in the past. Mostly scribbles, thumbnails and so forth. For some reason I have kept my originals paper drawings of this runcycle of a crocodile, designed by my colleague and friend Len Simon. I actually never kept a line test of the animation. We used to create run and walk cycles for new characters as a way to explore the model and design. Also to start defining the character a bit more, usually going from concept drawings. Sometimes we would take a piece of dialog from an actor and animate a short scene to get an idea of how the chacrater would feel (or to use the animation to convince the ctor to sign on to the project) They rarely represent the final design of the character or animation style, but it is one place to start. Also, with a run cycle you only need a couple of frames of actual animation compared to a full acting scene with dialog .
Late last year our printer (yet another one) needed to be upgraded and we got an A3 one including a scanner. So I tested the automatic scanning function with this little stack of 15 drawings that make up the run cycle (The animation drawings are on 16 inch paper), importing the scans to Photoshop, adding some "color" and finally created a little comped scene with After Effects.
you can see a little scene on my vimeo site here: Crocodile sighting !
