Some Useful Animation Quotes

Some Useful Quotes


Art Babbit: "Know what you are going to do. Thumbnail it. Know where you are going. In planning, lock down the important poses. Bill Tytla spent days working on thumbnails, he had everything worked out in miniature. You must think. Plan. You can't wing it."

Ken Harris: "I time things out way ahead; I time things about five feet ahead smoetimes. If I want a guy to do something, and I want him to land over there, five feet later, I'll number the drawings, and put the drawings down, and number the end one; Then I'll work up to it."

Ollie Johnston: "Don't ever start a scene without knowing the exact actions and attitudes that will take place. In the planning of a scene, you will see from the rough sketches of character attitudes whether you are going to have too much movement. Don't try to do too much in any one scene. Milt and Frank and I average ten feet or more a week. I think it's in the planning. If you plan the stuff out so you really know exactly what you are going to do, so your not just saying "Well, let's see if this will work" and try it, you know....But if you know exactly what you are going to do, and have it visualized, you can go pretty fast. I find some weeks I do fifteen -twenty feet of stuff. That's kind of hard to do actually; but it's only because I know exactly what I want to do. If I'm struggling, I can do two feet a week - if I'm having trouble."

Milt Kahl: "Sometimes I work straight ahead, and sometimes it's a combination. I'll go through the stuff where I'm going to go straight ahead and I'll kind of plan where I'm going to be at various places in the scene, so I'll have something to kind of aim at, and I'll go straight ahead to it."