Release. Pressure. Animate.

the radio, switch off the cd, turn off the tape and close the door. (ib., p. 41) He mentions
how he learned it from the genius Milt Kahl and quotes him with a drawing where he
himself asks Milt Kahl if he listens to music while animating. In this picture Milts answer
is: “Of all the s-s-s-stupid god-god-god-damned questions I-I-I-I‟ve ever heard! I-I-I-I-
Never heard such a-a-a-f-f-f-f-stupid question!” Which Richard William explains with a
continuation of this quote: “Iy-iy-iy-iy-I‟m not SMART enough to think of more than one
thing at a time!”, explaining exactly what it comes down to. Creative and good animation
requires focus of the creative mind. “Animation is concentration.” (ib., p. 41-45)
Besides pure focus and intense teamwork traditional animation was done with
drawing tools you can probably come up with, like pencil and eraser, but it‟s worth
mentioning those you might not know. At the same time it‟s interesting to see its
influence and extracted abstract of what it comes down to
for the animator. And this is also a good starting point to
what an animator‟s desk looks like and what he has lying
around.
The traditional animator doesn‟t only animate, but also
logs the images with corresponding image numbers on a so
called X-sheet. The layout is created to contain information
about each frame in the movie where each row in the table
resembles a frame of the animation. The first column
depicts the action of that frame; the next column named
sound (or dial) is for writing down the dialogue or the
breakdown of the music into beats. Then there‟s the frame number, a couple of columns
numbered five through one and one for the background resembling the layers/levels of
the shot (think of characters for example.) Herein the animator writes down what
numbered drawing should be there. A six-frame character run cycle could go 1 through 6
over and over again. Though through time, complexity sneaked in with most animators.
Numbers got prefixes and suffixes like 1-C for “cat” or even worse “Y2B-2½” for “„Yak
Running‟” [sic]. (Williams, 2001, p. 74) (Yes, I got confused too!) As animation is
collaboration – it is teamwork - it is important to work in a structured and clear way.
Writing down that the layer is for the cat is unnecessary; because the camera guy can
see that the layer IS the cat. Ken Harris never missed the importance of simplicity. He
used only numbers and the occasional letter here and there, which actually meant the
same thing every time. Richard William writes about Ken Harris: “Nobody could figure
out how this sick old man could produce so much work – and of such high quality. He
just kept everything as simple as could be.” (Williams, 2001, p. 77) And Richard praises
Kens workflow saying that it is about 50% of why Ken was able to produce such high
quality animations in such short time periods. Controlling such data management by
2. The difference in Animation fields
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