Hey, I got something new to talk about today!
It’s called “twinning.”
But never mind what that means just yet, let’s watch Double King, a wonderful, imaginative,
fluid animation by an Australian fellow named Felix Colgrave.
I really love this film and there’s a lot I could talk about.
I think I’ll start with the style.
So in Adobe Animate aka Flash, there’s a tool called the pencil tool, and the way this
works is it creates a line as you draw.
The line is independent from any fills or paint strokes.
You can fill closed areas with the paint bucket tool.
You can make the lines thicker and give them fun shapes or strokes and drag them around.
But the thing about the pencil tool is it is maddeningly rough.
No matter what settings you use, you get all these stupid nodes everywhere.
Does this look like a circle to you?
What is this?!
And yet, it’s this exact tool that Felix Colgrave uses.
Double King absorbs your attention and you don’t notice it, but these lines are wobbly
like crazy.
Look at this mess.
It’s beautiful.
Felix takes the weakness of the tool and makes it part of the style.
The style as a whole looks so good, so organic, so real.
It’s not perfect curves you can get with the pen tool.
It’s gritty.
Textured.
Underneath the etchy lines is some exacting precision, though, so don’t let it fool
you.
Complementing the organic look of the artwork is the overall natural flow of Double King’s
story.
The storytelling has a strange spontaneous feeling to it, so I wondered how much planning
when into writing the animation.
As you probably know by now, most animations are storyboarded all the way through before
they hit the drawing room floor.
Double King is a two year production that started with the very first scene of these
little shell creatures.
Felix invented the rest of the film as he went.
Just made it up, with no plans.
If the process is to start with a scene and keep animating more scenes, how do you know
when you’re done?
Well, you’re done when you want your life back.
So just… stop the animation there.
The straight ahead writing method has some interesting side effects.
Look at how the king’s character design evolves throughout the cartoon.
It begins with a sloped back and neck, clearly revealing the black undercoat with big slappy
feet.
The neck goes away and the robe now covers the feet.
The feet and hands float independently from the body.
By the end the body is a nice, simple arch.
Felix has a lot of fun with shapes like this by repeating patterns like the arch.
Putting the character of the same shape through an arch, fitting crowns inside one another,
making a forest of arches.
Part of the visual appeal of the style comes from the shapes, especially a shot like this
one.
Which brings me to twinning.
Twinning is when both sides of the character’s body are doing the same thing at the same
time.
Go a bit deeper and it means the character’s pose has a bunch of flat angles in it.
Here’s a shrug with twinning.
Here is a shrug without twinning.
The two sides of the body are different over here.
Twinning is basically perfect symmetry.
Twinning is usually seen as a bad thing for two reasons.
One, in animation it makes it hard to see what the character is doing.
Twinning.
Not twinning.
Two, it is boring.
Twinning.
Not twinning.
One way to avoid twinning is what Felix does a lot, and that is to offset the left side
and the right side by one frame.
I’ll rewind a bit here, and watch how the left hand comes out later than the right.
Now they both lower the hat, and the right hand begins the retreat cycle two frames earlier
than the left hand.
Even though both of those hands are exact copies of each other, no twinning happens
because the timing is different.
Back to the shapes here, I’m going to slow this way down.
Watch how each of the flowers starts its animation at a different time.
The diagonal rows are all on the same frame.
Even though every object here is going through the same animation cycle, you avoid the twinning
problem by staggering in rows.
If all of the flowers bloomed at the exact same time, this sequence would be much less
trippy than it currently is.
But it’s fine to twin time to time.
Sometimes it’s even necessary to get the effect you want!
I’ll go back to five minutes in and show you some twinning in the king’s hands.
Perfect sync.
Here, the twinning serves a purpose, and that is to make the king look brutally efficient
while he dumps the butterfly.
There are not many more examples of twinning in Double King.
You can go through the animation a frame at a time and you’ll see very rarely are the
left and right hand doing the same action at the exact same time.
Any time they are, it’s for a reason, and it’s immediately preceded or followed by
a unique action from the other hand.
That’s your animation lesson for today!
If you enjoyed Double King, you can visit Felix’s channel and really dig deep into
the evolution of his style.
There are plenty of fantastical creatures and disturbing images.
Finally, some of you are dying to know, how many drugs did it take to make this stuff?
Answer: none.
None!
Come on, animators are naturally strange.
You know this.