Siamés “The Wolf” is a music video animation driven by its use of positive and negative
space.
I’m going to talk about what that is and how it’s important for animation in particular
after giving you the chance to watch the animation.
Here it is.
A little bit of background on this video.
It is completely 2D, animated in Toon Boom Animate.
Don’t let parts like these fool you.
Careful attention to perspective is what gives the animation depth.
The pink lines in the process video are for measuring perspective while drawing the artwork.
I actually learned a new animation term while doing the research for this episode: Sakuga.
The word itself just means, “animation,” but fans of Japanese animation use the word
sakuga to describe a scene that has much higher quality animation than the rest of the episode.
Animators “do good sakuga” to heighten the drama of the moment.
So in The Wolf, there’s good sakuga during every climactic moment and action sequence.
Now to talk about positive and negative space.
Except for red eyes and one pink scene, The Wolf is entirely black and white, which makes
framing for every part of the animation very important.
With only two tones to work with, you have to be sure the viewer will see the main subject
of the art first and not get confused by all of the other black and white things going
on.
One of the ways to do this is by paying attention to positive and negative space.
Pick any image from the animation, and look: what is the main subject of the picture?
What is the less important background stuff?
The most important things you want your viewers to see make up positive space.
Everything else is negative space.
So if you’ve got a picture of a person, the person is positive space, the surrounding
area is negative space, even if there is no art there and it’s a solid color or transparent.
Picture of a glass, the glass is the main subject positive space.
Surrounding area is negative space.
You’ll notice some pictures have a really big area of positive space, and some have
a really big area of negative space.
People tend to notice positive space naturally, but for an artist it’s important to pay
attention to the shape of these negative space areas too.
Checking to make sure the size and proportion of holes in and around a subject is one way
to ensure your art is accurate.
An interesting exercise is to draw negative space, to see what is not there instead of
what is.
The resulting picture should still be the same.
The only difference is you focused on drawing the outlines of empty areas instead of outlines
of an item.
Okay blah blah blah, so what?
Well, artists who are really conscious of balancing positive and negative space can
do crazy stuff, like make negative space have its own shape and meaning.
They can manipulate emotions by shoving stuff in your face, or making it tiny and distant.
They can create optical illusions.
For animators in particular, checking the shapes of positive and negative space is important
for clear posing.
Is your character an unidentified lump?
Or does its silhouette actually communicate something?
Without colors to work with, The Wolf is forced to use distinct shapes, and to carefully balance
how much black and white are in the main subject versus the background.
So you get a picture like this, where the positive space and its shadow have more black
than the background to draw your attention.
And sometimes it’s the opposite - the positive space is predominantly white and the negative
space, black.
The Wolf uses black and white for lighting too, of course, so the animators did some
really cool stuff, like have the positive space emerge out of the negative space.
All of this is negative space, both the black and the white.
It’s just a background.
The wolf is the only positive space.
It’s hidden at first is all.
Our brain doesn’t identify white or black as more important, by the way.
What your brain does notice is contrast.
As a result, most of these scenes work just as well with the colors reversed.
So as long as your positive space is remarkably different (in high contrast) from the background,
your audience will notice it first.
The fact contrast draws attention is one of many reasons cartoon characters usually have
outlines darker than the outlines used on the backgrounds.
The Wolf doesn’t have that, so instead the animators decide when the outlines are going
to be black to set them apart from the negative space, and when the outlines are white because
the negative space is pure black.