Inspiration: Master Animators at Work - GLEN KEANE

These have been shared on a lot of blogs ,  but for completeness sake in this series I'm re-posting them here.


A great lecture (in three parts) by Glen Keane on his approach to animating a scene.   You can learn so much by just "looking over the shoulder" of these great animators as they animate.   

Badger Pencil Test - Fox & the Hound by Glen Keane ?

I've had photocopies of this scene from The Fox & The Hound for years. I've finally decided to scan them and make a proper pencil test of the scene so it can be shared. The person who gave the copies of the drawings to me said that Glen Keane animated this scene, but I'm not 100% certain about that because it didn't come with an X-sheet or a copy of the original scene folder. Could be Glen's ... If anyone has the draft from the film and can positively ID who animated this scene I'd appreciate it.

Ollie Johnston - Glen Keane : On Teamwork , Collaborating

If you haven't heard this little snippet of Glen Keane's remembrance of Ollie Johnston at the Ollie Tribute , then you should really drop everything you're doing and listen to this now: 

Glen on Ollie 

And take a look at this too: 

Rough Animation Example

One of the things you'll hear me emphasize over and over (except in ILL2D 346 Animation Assisting !) is to loosen up and draw rough in your first pass animation . Here's an excellent example of a real production scene animated very rough , but very expressively . This is Glen Keane's animation of Fagin and Oliver (the cat) from "Oliver & Co."


And here is the finished version of this scene , which is actually split into two scenes in the movie , with a cutaway inserted to show Fagin's point-of-view looking back over his shoulder at Jenny and Georgette .



It takes a lot of confidence to successfully pull-off a scene this loosely.
You'll find that working rough like this will help you to nail your performance a lot faster and you can tell sooner whether or not your staging and acting are working .

However, this sort of rough scene needs a very talented Assistant Animator to do the follow up work , or else the animator should do a second pass to tie down the shapes and details before passing it along to the clean up dept. You'll find that the challenge with a rough scene like this is to keep the expressiveness but at the same time refine it down to workable clean up shapes that are consistent in volume and detail .