Walt Disney - Tests/Animatics

I know this is an animatic but i love the roughness to the animation the 'unfinished' look this is what i am going to try and aim for however i can't seem to master hand drawn animation which is all drawn i can't seem to get the movements right so i am thinking of rotascoping ... so filming the basic shape and drawing around this how i want it to look. It will be hugely time consuming but i have gone through the first to years with set briefs and not being able to pick them up and create something amazing so i would like to give this ago as i think drawing (expressive drawing) is a strength of mine so with the help of rotascoping (slightly cheating) my throw me in the right direction. Hey, i might eventually crack some hand drawn animation but for now i want to start with rotascoping to try and get my head around things.

Here is another one i found from Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast but there is commentary from the producer Don Hahn and its really interesting to get a feel of how they work at Walt Disney. One thing i did find especially interesting is that one animator will start off by drawing the main, major poses for a character then someone else or a number of people will fill in the in between shots and they call these people the 'inbetweeners' so for one character 2 or more animators will have worked on it with slightly different drawing styles (obviously) but it is to look as if one person has animated it.

This is a quick snippet of James Baxter working on the ballroom sequence in beauty and the beast, this by far is the most phenomenal piece of hand drawn animation with a hint computer graphics i have ever seen, it is drawn to look as if a camera is panning around a ballroom, it is absolutely stunning and it is interesting to see it in a pencil test.
"The ballroom sequence is the bonding moment of the film when the two main characters finally get together," says Hahn. "For us as filmmakers, the computer offered us a way to get heightened emotions on the screen and more dramatic effects than we could have gotten conventionally. It allowed us to move the cahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifmera around and take a look at the room instead of just looking at a flat piece of artwork. Technology as a whole is an extension of our fingers, hands, and minds. Computer graphics let us go beyond what we can currently achieve with pencil and paper or paint and a brush." Don Hahn
http://www.digitalmediafx.com/Beauty/Features/originalbeauty.html

Here is the finished scene in the film and it is amazing i have never really looked that close at it before but the representation of a camera flying around the room is almost mind blowing it looks so realistic and almost makes us believe the characters are within real life surroundings. AMAZING!