Probably because they had seen how the technique could be abused and didn't want to go down that road.dperro wrote:I don't think I saw those notes. With me, it was Chris and Schibs yelling at us repeatedly to "never shift and trace" and so I didn't.
When I was at Sheridan one of our first year teachers , Dick Friesen, used to walk around to our desks while we were working and say: "Put out that light ! Roll those drawings and eyeball it , ya lazy bastards" . He wanted us to inbetween entirely by rolling the drawings , making marks (dots or X's) as guides, and building up the in-between drawing lightly with blue pencil before finishing the drawing with black pencil , all while constantly flipping/rolling the drawings and turning on the backlight only to check the accuracy of our line placement , but with no backlight turned on while drawing . This was very good discipline to learn to inbetween that way. Actually, the exercises we were doing at that point were breakdown drawings between two extremes , not close line-between-line inbetweening. Later of course he admitted to us that pros use the backlight all the time for accurate close inbetweening and trace-backs , but he didn't want us getting attached to using the backlight as a "crutch" .
Well, that's it , of course. Like so many other things in animation there's a knack to doing it properly that one picks up along the way. (most of this stuff is hard to put into books ; usually it's passed along from artist to artist as you describe: "at some point Nik secretly pulled all the inbetweeners together and gave us a class on how to do it properly" .) The technique needs to be used with a certain discretion and a well-trained eye.dperro wrote:Until one day when they pulled all the inbetweeners to look at a Ralph's eyes popping due to an inbetweener shifting and tracing. I was shocked to see it was a scene I tweened for Hilary. I went to Chris and told him I NEVER shift...and apologized to Hilary. The problem was due to the keys being far apart and NOT shifting. After that I figured it out and at some point Nik secretly pulled all the inbetweeners together and gave us a class on how to do it properly. Made my life a lot easier!
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