From the course: 21 Foundations of Animation
Thumbnails and planning
- [Narrator] I've done an entire course dealing with this material in the library. It's called Animating in 2D: Breakdowns and Thumbnails and you can watch that if you want to go into this topic in way more detail. Thumbnails are used to plan out actions. Everything from a simple physical action, like this hand gesture, to a fairly complex acrobatic tumble. Thumbnails can be very crude stick figures drawn on napkins or scraps of paper, or they can be fairly detailed drawings with notes for timing charts, arc patterns, and all the rest of it. I planned most of the walk cycles for my walk cycle courses in physical notebooks using the lines on the paper as guides and this allowed me to plan the up-down actions, as well as to keep the character volumes consistent and to control the foot positions. This allowed me to work out most of the animation problems in thumbnail form, and that shortened the time spent animating and it increased the quality of the work. I also used thumbnails to plan out tricky facial expressions like this stylized blink. It was really nice to be able to see the transitions on one image and to control all the little folds of skin under the lower eyelid and to see exactly where they were going to go and how they were going to look on each frame. When I animate imaginary creatures like this monster plant where there's no visual reference, I use thumbnails 'cause here we have multiple overlapping roots, so I had to be able to figure this thing out and it's much easier to do this on one sheet of paper. You always thumbnail. You never leave it out. It's a false economy. If you think you're going to save yourself time and skip a step, you're wrong. You're going to make a lot of work for yourself, so thumbnail. Thumbnail. Thumbnail.
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