A reposting from former Ohio animation studio Character Builders's detailed Space Jam feature on their website from 1997. Link at https://web.archive.org/web/19970128200431/http://www.cbuilders.com/fear.htm.
No, not just fear...abject terror.
That's the emotion I was experiencing as I sat alone in my office staring at the blank sheet of animation paper on my desk before me. The expressionless white surface mocking me, challenging me to fill it up with something of real value, with something of real meaning, with something like real art.
"Go ahead," it taunted, "you can draw anything on me. My potential is limitless. Can you handle it, or are you gonna blow it, bunny boy?!" And it laughs a kind of dry papery laugh while a tall stack of its punched brethren titter at me from a nearby shelf...
Hours earlier Jim Kammerud, our sequence director on Space Jam, had called me into his office to offer me a rare and wonderful opportunity. He wanted me to animate Scene 24/1, the very first time the audience would see Bugs Bunny in this, his very first starring role in a full-length feature film.
"It's a pretty important scene," Jim concluded. "Do you want it?"
"Sure!" I chirped eagerly. Gulp.
Of course, I face every new scene with this same curious mixture of apprehension and excitement. Usually, the fear is only momentary, and then the enthusiasm kicks in. (Although I have been known to waste several days procrastinating in order to avoid starting a particularly daunting scene. Funny, the crap you can find to distract you!) But this scene was a little different. It was the first time we would see Bugs, so it was also the first opportunity the audience would have to decide whether or not we were going to give them the same old irascible rabbit that they know and love or some cheap hollow impostor. Would he look the same as the Bugs they cherish, move the same, act the same? Would he make them laugh? The reaction to our version of Bugs in this first scene could color the audience's perception of him for the rest of the film. Especially if it was bad.
So, how do I approach such a scene? (That is, after I get over my histrionic bouts with stage fright.) First, I pore over the storyboard. Not just the panels that involve my scene, but the entire sequence. No scene should be approached out of context. You have to be sure that you understand exactly how the moment you'll be animating fits into the flow of the story. And not just for simple continuity reasons (although these shouldn't be ignored), but for the more subtle aspects of the character's motivation. All films contain "emotional arcs" for the characters that drive them, and individual sequences contain similar progressions of the characters attitudes and states of mind. Don't just animate what your character is doing, animate why he's doing it.
As it happens, I already had an intimate knowledge of the scene in question. I had storyboarded it myself months earlier as part of the sequence where the little aliens first meet Bugs. The capsule description is this: After the alien spaceship arrives in the skies over "Toonland", we pan down to the forest floor where Bugs comes racing over a distant hill and towards the camera. As he nears, the camera "picks him up" and tracks with him as he flees a pursuing, but still offscreen, Elmer Fudd. But just as it seems Bugs is going to leave Elmer (and us) in the dust...he stops abruptly and addresses the camera: "I'll be wit' ya in a second folks, just as soon as I finish wit' nature boy here!" In response a rather large shotgun barrel enters from offscreen and slams up against Bugs' cranium! He turns to face his pursuer, adopting an expression of characteristic Bugs Bunny cool.
The boards communicated the ideas pretty clearly (If I do say so myself!), so I next began to listen to the audio track over and over and over and over and over and--O.K. you get the idea. I listen to my track until I know every word, every inflection, every little pause or breath by heart. And I like to begin conceptualizing what I'm going to do with the scene by "acting" to this track while watching myself in a mirror. This miming is where I work out the basic gestures and expressions I plan to use. I'll try many different approaches before settling on my favorite.
Then, I sit down at the drawing table and begin thumbnailing the hell out of my ideas, using what I've worked out in front of the mirror while reinterpreting it for Bugs' structure and looking for ways to "juice" it up. That is, trying to add that extra dimension which makes animation better than mere reality, that caricatures movement and expression in a way that makes it compelling to watch. Animation is a distillation of life.
When I have thumbnails that I like, I'll generally do a rough timing and shoot these simple poses on our Amiga pencil-test system. This system allows me to easily adjust the timings of my drawings and lets me gauge whether or not what I'm trying to do is working. I review this "pose-test" with the director as well as other animators to get as much constructive feed back as possible.
Everyone seemed to like what I had, so I moved on to the hard part. You see, at this stage you frequently feel like you've accomplished a lot. You've got a bunch of drawings and they move...but you haven't really begun to work out the subtler aspects of the animation yet. That's next, and it's the time consuming part. The pose test only shows the potential for a scene, now you have to pay off on that potential.
As you recall, my scene involves Bugs racing over a hill towards us, passing us, stopping to deliver a wry line to camera, and getting a shot gun against his noggin. I usually tackle what I feel is the hardest part of a scene first. In this case I decided to concentrate on the line of dialogue and work my way "out" from there.
One very long week later...
I'm ready to shoot a complete test of my scene. I've been doing little tests here and there, refining and reworking bits and pieces of the action, trying to make the whole thing gel. Now, finally, I gather up my mountainous stack of battered drawings and march proudly through the halls of Character Builders on my way to shoot "the big test". I hand my drawings to our p-test camera person (the personable Tonya Hill) as though I'm handing her my firstborn. An unruly child perhaps, but my mine nonetheless!
Tonya tells me it will take a couple of hours to shoot, so I spend the afternoon biting my nails. I've seen every part of the scene a thousand times by now, but this will be the fist time I've seen it all together with the correct camera moves et al. Sometime after lunch I get the call from Tonya: it's done. I race to the p-test room to see what I have wrought. Jim and fellow animator Dan Root happen to be there already. We run the test and prepare to view the result of weeks of hard work that should culminate in several seconds of sheer cinematic magic...
...and it sucks.
Well, not entirely. That is, parts of it are quite good, but we all decide that there's still lots of work to do: Bugs' run over the hill is too mechanical and repetitive, he's drawn too skinny, his dash past the camera is too slow and lacks energy, his timing during the dialogue could be tighter in places...the list seems endless. In fact, it is endless. Like all art you're never really finished, so you just have to prioritize and hope that you can get the scene as close to perfect as possible in the time you have left.
So, several all-nighters later...
The scene is done. I managed to address most of my major "fixes", and I think it's come together pretty well. We retest, and everyone approves. Congratulations! Cigars all around, let the champagne flow! And yet...there's still that one drawing I'd like to change a little...and that one expression could still be stronger...and...and...and...
Oh well, time's up. And besides there's another tough scene already on my desk. I hear this one has a major attitude...
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