Saturday, October 03, 2009

Brave Little Tailor - animation exercise



I watched the Disney short "Brave Little Tailor" for the first time the other day, and one sequence clearly stood out with complex animation and great appeal. It was the sequence in which Mickey tells the king his tale of bravery. I later discovered it was animated by Frank Thomas, which explains the outstanding quality.

I was inspired to do a classic animation exercise with it. Here's what I did: I quick-sketched about 20 drawings that seemed to be the major key drawing (they are the ones with the circled frame numbers). Then, I animated the scene according to theses keys, without looking at the original scene again. The idea was to compare my results with the original animation, and see what I might have done better. It was a great exercise and I feel I learned a lot from it. The result also shows, I think, how solidly you can define 4 seconds of animation with just 20 very quick sketches.

Note: YouTube is apparently not so good with short videos like this (it won't play it through. To get a better look at it, try the mp4 file here.

4 comments:

elin rozen said...

nice (:
looks like fun exercise!!

Liron Topaz said...

Dude, that's so cool! I always wanted to do such an exercise but never really had the chance. This is like an animation master copy. So cool. Do you feel you learned from it?

How are you doing, Haven't talked to you in so long. post more drawings! always an inspiration :D

Enosh Bar-Tur said...

Great stuff, Doron!
Really inspiring.

Olly said...

It's great!
This exercise inspires me to do something similar!!!
Thank you!!!

Olga Shefranov