Make a Rough Pencil Test from Key Poses for an Animated-Series Pitch
Make a Rough Pencil Test from Key Poses for an Animated-Series Pitch
Hold a single storyboard panel on screen for twelve frames and you have learned that the shot lasts half a second at 24 frames per second. You have not learned how the character moves. Those are two different instruments, and they get mistaken for each other constantly. An animatic gives duration to drawings you already have. A pencil test asks what happens in the frames you have not drawn yet.
For a series pitch, that is the whole reason to bother. "The character reaches around the cup and lifts it carefully" is a sentence. Whether the shoulder leads or the wrist leads is a character statement, and a sentence cannot settle it. A short stack of your own rough drawings can, and it gives the people in the room something to point at instead of something to nod at.
The method here is small on purpose: one action, three key poses, two deliberate breakdowns, and a way to compare two versions without changing everything at once. It will not produce finished animation, and it is not a production pipeline. It answers one movement question, which is what a pitch test is for.
Reduce the action to what must remain readable
Choose one action and one movement choice inside it. Not a scene beat — a reach, a turn of the head, a step that shifts which hip carries the weight. If the action needs a second decision to make sense, it is too big for this exercise. Cut it until it is one decision.
The example runs through the rest of this piece: an original simple character sits at a table and reaches around a cup to lift it. The action earns its place in a pitch because the way this character handles an ordinary object is part of how the series looks. Three poses hold it together, and each one has a job.
Pose 1 — intention. The character sits upright. The right hand lies flat on the table to the right of the cup, head turned toward it, weight even across both hips.
Pose 2 — contact. The hand has closed on the cup: fingers curled around the far wall, thumb on the near side, wrist outside the cup's right wall. The shoulder has come forward and dropped. The weight has moved onto the left hip. Contact and change of balance belong in the same drawing here; separating them is what makes a reach look like a mime.
Pose 3 — result. The cup is clear of the table and held at chest height, the elbow folded, the weight settling back toward even.
Three checks on each pose, and they are quick.
Fill the pose in solid black. Can you still tell what it is doing and which way it is facing? If the arm disappears into the torso, the pose will not read at speed, and no amount of cleanup will rescue it.
Mark every place the body meets something: table, cup, floor, its own limbs. Contact relationships are the first thing to break when you draw between poses, and they break quietly.
Keep one simple construction system and do not switch it mid-test. A box ribcage, a ball shoulder, a cylinder for the cup with an ellipse at the rim. If the cup changes size between Pose 1 and Pose 2, you can no longer tell whether the reach works or whether the prop drifted. Drawing the cup first, on its own, as a fixed guide for every other drawing is one cheap way to hold that steady.
Save the costume, the face detail and the shading for a version that answers a different question. Rough is fine. A hand that visibly fails to meet the cup is not rough — it is a wrong answer, and the reader will see it before they see anything else.
Draw a breakdown that chooses a path
A breakdown is not the midpoint. The midpoint is a path selected by arithmetic rather than by a body, and bodies do not work that way. It is a legitimate place to start. It is a poor place to stop.
Here is what makes that concrete in the cup example. Draw a drawing halfway between Pose 1 and Pose 2, moving the hand in a straight line toward its destination. The hand lands inside the cup. The fingers pass through the near wall of a solid object sitting on a table. You can check this with your own pencil in about a minute, and no amount of careful rendering makes it read as anything but a mistake.
So the breakdown has a job: it chooses the route. Compare two, deliberately different.
B1 — direct. The hand travels in a straight line. The shoulder barely moves; the elbow performs almost all of the travel. The result is an arm that looks boneless and a hand that intersects the cup.
B2 — arcing, shoulder-led. At the same moment, the shoulder has rotated forward and down. The elbow rides high and outside the cup's silhouette. The hand has risen to rim height and is travelling around the cup's right wall, fingers beginning to curl toward the far side. The hand goes around the cup rather than through it, and the body has already begun the weight shift that Pose 2 will finish.
Notice what changed besides the path. The order of operations changed — shoulder first, then elbow, then wrist. That ordering is the movement choice your pitch is actually testing. Whether it suits your character is not something this article can decide for you; it is the thing you are about to look at.
There is a second breakdown, and it has a different job. Between Pose 2 and Pose 3, the hand and the cup travel as one rigid pair. The breakdown drawing there must keep the cup the same size, at the same angle in the hand and in the same relationship to the palm. If the cup wobbles or the palm flattens, the audience reads a handling error rather than a lift. One action, two breakdowns, two unrelated problems — which is why one automatic halfway drawing is never enough.
Two checks on the arcing breakdown specifically. First, the elbow should not melt into the torso's silhouette; if the arm and trunk become one lump, the viewer loses the hand at the exact moment they need to find it. Second, check the cup's silhouette against the hand's. A wrap that swallows the cup entirely means the audience stops tracking the object.
Worth saying where part of this ordering comes from. Animation Mentor's write-up of a fall-and-recovery workshop describes blocking the major story poses first and adding purposeful breakdowns after, rather than spacing drawings evenly and hoping. That account is a publisher summary of a 3D workflow by Justin Milgate, and the embedded workshop itself was not available to consult here. Lifting the ordering into a 2D drawn test is an adaptation on my part, not something the workshop demonstrates in pencil. The pose logic travels; the technique does not automatically follow it.
The pose plan above is a plan for drawings you make, not a finished test. The stack, the exposures and the playback are the part that happens at your desk.
Expose the drawings without confusing numbering and time
Now give the drawings a sequence and a rate. Two settings matter, and they are genuinely separate.
OpenToonz 1.7.1's drawing-level documentation, in its section on the New Level dialog, describes Step as setting exposure repetition and Increment as setting drawing numbering. Those are different controls. One sets how long a drawing is held on screen; the other sets which drawing appears in the next cell. Version-labeled documentation is not a claim about how your particular install behaves, so if your build differs, look for the equivalent control in your own dialog before committing.
The practical consequence is worth more than the setting names. Name your drawings by identity, not by frame. D1, D2, D3, D4, D5 — and D1 stays D1 whether you hold it for two frames or eight. If you renumber drawings to match the timeline, then every exposure change also renumbers your stack, and you lose track of whether you altered the timing or the motion. You usually lose track in the direction that flatters the new version.
That is also why the documentation's split matters artistically: a repeated drawing is a hold. It is not a newly drawn in-between. If your sequence stutters and you cannot remember drawing the stutter, you did not draw it. You held something.
For the cup action, the level is five drawings.
- D1 — Pose 1, intention
- D2 — the breakdown, B1 or B2, and this is the swappable one
- D3 — Pose 2, contact
- D4 — the breakdown between contact and lift, cup rigid in the hand
- D5 — Pose 3, result
Then three short tests, each changing exactly one thing.
Test A. D1–D2–D3–D4–D5, with D2 as the direct breakdown. Every drawing exposed for two frames at 24 fps: ten frames, a little under half a second.
Test B. The same five drawings at the same two-frame exposure, with D2 replaced by the arcing breakdown. Only the path changed.
Test C. The preferred version of D2, now with every drawing exposed for four frames. Twenty frames, about four fifths of a second. Only the duration changed.
Uniform exposure across all five drawings is a choice, and it is the right one for a comparison. Varying the spacing drawing by drawing is how finished animation breathes, but it changes several things at once, and a test that changes several things at once answers nothing. Hold the exposure flat until you know which breakdown you are keeping. The flatness is a control, not a style.
Decide whether to redraw or retime
Run A and B against each other before you touch the timing again. Same drawings except one, same exposure, same playback rate. What you are looking for is a mismatch between what you intended and what the drawings show.
Redraw when the movement relationship itself is wrong. The signs are specific.
The contact slips. The hand is not in the same place relative to the cup from one drawing to the next, and it reads as the prop drifting rather than the arm moving.
Volume goes. The cup or the palm changes size as the arm passes, or the shoulder collapses into a point when the elbow rises.
The silhouette disappears. At the decisive drawing, the arm, torso and cup merge into one shape and the viewer cannot find the hand.
The path jumps. The hand appears to change direction between two exposures with no drawing that explains the turn. That is not a timing problem. A longer hold on a broken turn just makes the break last longer.
Retime when the movement is correct and the rhythm is not. The contact is clear in every drawing, but the arrival has no weight — or the whole action reads as a flinch when you wanted patience. That is exposure work. Change the step and leave the drawings alone.
Then check the other variable again anyway. Exposure changes what a path looks like, and path changes what a timing feels like. A drawing that read as a smooth arc on twos can look like a snap on fours, and you will not know until you look.
Keep the discarded version. Rename it rather than overwriting: 04_reach_arc_2f and 04_reach_direct_2f sitting side by side in the same folder. A redraw you cannot compare against the thing it replaced has cost you the evidence you need to know whether it improved anything.
The last comparison is short. Flip the direct breakdown and the arcing breakdown at the same exposure, one after the other, and stop. One drawing puts the hand through the cup. The other keeps it outside. Which one reads as a reach is your judgment to make, and the playback is where you make it. Redraw when the path is still wrong. Retime when the path is right and the weight is not. Stop when the comparison has answered the question you asked — a pencil test that keeps receiving polish after it has done its job is no longer a test, it is procrastination with a light table.
What goes into the pitch is the pair of them, labeled as a rough movement study: direct vs. shoulder-led reach, twos. That label tells a collaborator what they are looking at and what you already know is unfinished. The roughness is allowed to be visible. The hand and the cup have to be believable, and no style choice excuses a contact that does not hold.
Frequently asked questions
What does a rough pencil test ask that an animatic does not?
An animatic gives duration to drawings you already have. A pencil test asks what happens in the frames you have not drawn yet, such as whether the shoulder leads or the wrist leads, which is a movement choice a sentence cannot settle.
How do you reduce an action for a pitch pencil test?
Choose one action and one movement choice inside it. In the cup example, three key poses hold the action: intention, contact, and result. Contact and the weight shift onto the left hip belong in the same drawing. Check each pose in solid black for readability, mark every contact, keep one construction system, and draw the cup first as a fixed guide.
Why is a halfway breakdown not enough?
A midpoint selected by arithmetic can send the hand straight through the cup. The breakdown's job is to choose the route. A direct breakdown B1 travels in a straight line, barely moves the shoulder, lets the elbow do the travel, and intersects the cup. An arcing shoulder-led breakdown B2 rotates the shoulder, keeps the elbow outside the cup's silhouette, brings the hand around the wall, and begins the weight shift.
What is the second breakdown between contact and lift for?
It keeps the hand and cup travelling as one rigid pair. The cup must stay the same size, at the same angle in the hand, and in the same relationship to the palm; if the cup wobbles or the palm flattens, the audience reads a handling error rather than a lift. Also check that the elbow does not melt into the torso and that the hand does not swallow the cup's silhouette.
How should the drawings be exposed, compared, and carried into the pitch?
Name drawings by identity, D1 through D5, and keep Step, which sets exposure repetition, separate from Increment, which sets drawing numbering. Hold exposure flat for comparison: Test A uses the direct D2 on twos, Test B swaps in the arcing D2 on twos, and Test C uses the preferred D2 on fours. Redraw when the path is wrong, such as slipping contact, lost volume, lost silhouette, or a jump; retime when the path is right and the weight is not. The pitch gets the pair labeled as a rough movement study: direct versus shoulder-led reach, twos.