The fractal beauty of a mountain range that takes our breath away can be seen in ocean waves heaving in a storm.

To accurately illustrate these patterns is one of the greatest challenges in creating beautiful, yet accurate, special effects design drawings. For some reason, there is a human tendency to create repetitive shapes and to err on the side of bilateral design. Our left-brain takes over and forces our drawing hand to repeat shapes whether we want to or not. This is an aspect of drawing effects, which confounds every practitioner of the craft. Even after all these years, I’ve noticed this annoying tendency can still grip my drawing and turn it into a boring, often symmetrical affair full of repeating shapes and parallel lines, which then need to be reworked again and again. Sometimes the intuitive feeling of natural phenomenon flows from every stroke of the pencil, other times I find it is necessary to seek out and destroy those pesky repetitious shapes (or parallelisms). What is essential in most forms of architecture and technical drawing is the death of a successful organic effects drawing. (I say “organic” because effects that are “inorganic,” such as props, moving machinery, crumbling buildings, etc. require a more linear, pragmatic mode of thinking and drawing). Much of this tendency is a result of pattern recognition, and our equating certain phenomenon with clichéd images, like employing symmetrical repeating popcorn shapes to describe clouds. Iconifying an object may work for hieroglyphics and corporate branding, such as the CBS eye logo, but it has nothing to do with the true mechanics of the object it describes. An eye is not an almond shape with a circle in the middle, just as water is not a series of repeating scallop shapes.

If you were to take a single water splash and darken it in completely, we would only be left with its silhouette, which is to say its primary shape. Within the primary shape, there are secondary shapes, where most of the intricate details occur; this also happens to be where much of the twinning occurs. In hair, fur, and organic objects such as grass and leaves, it is common to unconsciously draw buzzsaw patterns. The solution is to make sure the spacing is not too even or that shapes do not tangent directly, and that there are a variety of big, medium, and small shapes. This creates contrast, and in every aspect of effects animation one is confronted with the need for it, whether one is drawing splashing water, magic particles, powdery snow, bubbles, a cluster of rocks, or a shattered object. There is a tendency for the new effects artist to “noodle” the secondary shapes, but neglect the primary silhouette. This often results in highly detailed drawings, which are confusing to look at and even more confusing to animate.

Sometimes the most complex phenomena happen right under our noses, when we rinse our razor in the sink, when we pour cream into our morning coffee, or when let out a large breath of air in the freezing cold when we reach for the paper. And yet we automatically default to a mode of non-observation, where these things have no particular significance. Every human being has an innate feeling of how the world works because of these rote, almost unconscious daily observations. That’s why even a car mechanic or a civics teacher could watch an animated film and actually sense whether or not the effects are well animated. Why? Because they know what water looks like…. they drink it and shower every day! Therefore they have a built-in sense of what it should “look” like, even if they couldn’t articulate why. But if you put a pencil and their hand and said, “Draw water,” most laypersons would simply draw the iconic representations they have used since childhood. This brings me back to the importance of observing nature rather than observing modern art or the graphic arts advertising world, which is filled with simplified representations and clichés (which do little to honor nature’s pure design). If you want your special effects to feel natural, observe the forces at work in the natural world, and put those forces into play through your pencil! Remember, water doesn’t think about what it’s doing, neither does a ceramic bowl being dropped on the floor. All these phenomena are informed by the laws of physics and follow fundamental patterns of energy.

The same principle of avoiding patterns of repetition and symmetry can be applied to the timing of effects animation. Repeated, even timing quickly becomes apparent and unnatural; to make effects animation more dynamic, we need to overlap the timing of our elements and the directions of overall movement as well. There are endless ways we can practice the art of avoiding repetition (or “twinning) in effects design, motion, and behavior. If a bottle smashes on the floor, some of its broken pieces will bounce, others will slide along the floor, some will fly off into the air, spinning. Yet if all the pieces do the same thing, if they all uniformly scatter and resolve at the same time, our breaking bottle will look very boring and unnatural. Animation appears stiff and mannered if there is no contrast in the shapes and their respective timing. We call this variety of movement choreography. Think of it as a magic trick, or ad copy: we need to direct the viewer at all times where to look. So even in moments of supposed randomness and chaos, as in an exploding planet or a huge avalanche, there’s always an underlying logic to what is happening, whether one is looking at a single drawing or the a series of drawings.

It is interesting to note that in every crew, there are always those more disposed to drawing certain types of effects. Some specialize in organic elements, and others thrive drawing inorganic things. Both are critical for completing a film. I have always had an affinity for animating water and magic elements, and found that both came naturally to me, whereas to others more comfortable drawing explosions or props, the learning curve might actually be steeper. There are nuances of fire or smoke some might understand more readily than others, whereas I’ve sometimes struggle with a simple smoke scene. If you desire to become a truly proficient effects animator, you should work extra hard on those effects which do not come naturally.