See also Body Rotation.
Head rotations can be very intimidating. Not only are you expected to keep the eyes and mouth on-model, you have to contend with complex hair, blinks, and acting in a lot of head turns, too. Luckily, the basic rules are fairly simple.
Let's start with an example without acting, just a simple rotating head in space (again provided by the wonderful Julius De Belen!). This is an exercise you've probably seen before, but there's a lot to pick apart.
First, you'll probably notice the "nose position" leading to the head. Just like we need to find the middle of a set of inbetweens when doing douga, we want to find an even, consistent point to help us judge how to proportion a complex, symmetrical form like the face. The nose is perfect for this since it never really changes position based on character expression.
The concept of arcs is still at work here. We can draw a dot on any point of the head and trace it out across every frame – the result is a circle. The one area this won't always apply is in the hair, particularly if it's complex. We'll deal with that later. For now, just fix it in your mind that every single point on the face is going to follow an arc even in a simple rotation like this.
Now, when it comes to actually drawing this kind of a rotation, we have a few important things to consider. The first is the number of drawings we need, total. All in all there are 16 frames that make up this turn.
To get the head from facing us front-on to a side view we need a total of 5 drawings.
First, it's important to look at the spacing of features. Let's look at the ear first. look at how far the ear is spaced on Frame 1 and Frame 5. It's on the exact side of the head at A1, and the exact center in Frame 5 – but it has uneven spacing. It favors Frame 1 all the way through its arc on A2, A3, Frame 4 despite the rest of the head's features being evenly spaced! Why? Well, let's compare what it looks like when A2's ear is evenly spaced compared to biased.
Adding even spacing to the ear makes it feel like the ear is creeping onto the front of the face. This is because as the head turns, it's less of a ball and more of a box–and the ear juts out over the back of the box. It's actually pushed back quite far into perspective. Perspective problems don't go away in douga either! No matter what stage of the animation process you're working on, fundamentals like perspective are always going to be important.
You might have also noticed that the pupils favor the direction the head is turning to. This is called "leading" with the eyes. It's natural for someone to look in the direction they want to turn before they actually do it. If they don't, they'll probably smack their head directly into something as they turn it.
Finally, the nose sits a ways out from the face, so as it turns more towards Frame 5 it will favor Frame 5's position more and more, breaking the edge of the face on Frame 4 – again, not quite even spacing!
OK, so now we know that most of the face can be evenly spaced except the ear and nose, and we want to lead with the eyes, but how do we draw each of those new frames with even spacing? Can you guess? Are your fingers reaching for your paper, ready to lift it free of the pegboard? Good! We're back to the classic tap wari technique.
Like I've mentioned several times now, this is pretty easy if you're working digitally. Just slide the layers around. If you're working with CSP or similar animation software, the light table should be your absolute best friend since you can even space your drawings automatically. We'll be creating A3 first, since it's the middle of the turn.
The first thing we need to do is make sure that the shape of the closer eye squashes appropriately. Overlap the two eyes and trace out a shape somewhat closer to Frame 1 than Frame 5. You can slide this shape around to fit it properly once you have the rest of the face drawn. You should also shift the pupil more towards the direction the character is turning.
Drawing the rest of the face can technically be done from on tap if you want. After all, the Frame 5 ear is dead in the center of the Frame 1 face – which gives you an in-between spacing. The result can be OK, but as a douga artist you're going for better than OK.
Instead, you can inbetween A3 by staying off tap, picking a point on the character that stays turning at a consistent rate (not the ear!) and measure out 50% from there. This gives a better overlap of parts and will make a much more accurate final set of inbetweens.
The last difficult feature to consider is the far eye. Like the ear, it's moving into perspective at a different rate than the rest of the features on the face. It starts favoring the size and shape of the Frame 5 eye in A3, but mirrored.
(CROPPED IMAGES)
The same process can be used in Creating A2 and Frame 4. With Frame 4, there is an extra consideration–the nose "breaks" the side of the face. Sometimes the eye does this, too.
Now, shows like Precure or Shinchan intentionally simplify the nose into something like a dot shape, and it only protrudes from the face in a true profile view so this is much less of an issue. When you're dealing with a somewhat more realistic face like this, making that protrusion feel natural is really important. The example here requires that you show the transition as perspective forces it further out from the face. Honestly, getting features like this right sometimes requires a lot of re-drawing and experimentation. Remember, you're working digitally and it's completely fine to lasso and move around the drawing until you're happy as long as the final drawing is nice and clean. Just keep flipping between frames and remember to follow a consistent arc. Take your time.
The rest of the head turn still uses all these same rules. From Frame 5 - Frame 9 the ear starts to lag behind a bit. Frame 7 and Frame 8 keep the nose and eye protruding.
As the head starts to come back around the other side, everything is done in exactly the same way, but mirrored and in reverse. In fact, for any sort of repetitive motion like this, it's usually possible to use the same, or very similar, drawings for different parts of a cycle. We'll see this with flapping, walking and running in later sections, too.
In a complete head rotation like this copy-pasting your drawings works out OK. The reused cels are separated by enough time and mirrored. So it is difficult to notice that this was done and even if someone notices they are likely to be unoffended by it. Be careful, though. The hair is different between some frames since the character isn't perfectly symmetrical. Still, the basic turn will stay consistent–just be sure to account for the asymmetry and modify accordingly for each frame. In this case, that just means having an extra swoop in one place.
I know this has been a ton of information, but head turns are a case study that we can use to help explain lots of other concepts in douga. Before we finish this section out, I want to touch on two final points: tracking "changing" details and making a believable head-turn.
So, first, take a look at this little character design:
These sideburns are completely different when seen from the front and the side. They stick out from the head in the front angle, while being flat and long in the side view. The spacing and line length is completely different between the two, and volume changes, too. How are you supposed to inbetween this properly?
The answer is to think about how you can morph those shapes as an inbetween. You'll see this a lot in complex hair with lots of lines or strands. Rather than being a simple solid object that you turn in space you'll be subtly morphing the shape between the views provided in the settei. Sometimes a character design will have hair geometric and rigid enough that it is like tracking anything else through space, but even in these situations the number and positions of lines on the hair tend to change subtly. Your job is to make that feel natural.
If we overlap the two sets of strands we can imagine a new set of shapes that connects them for the middle frame in the headturn. Since they're small, irregular shapes, this inbetween set of lines does not have to be absolutely perfect, just a good approximation. Your viewing audience isn't going to be freaked out by hair subtly morphing, it looks natural–as this completed head turn shows:
You can apply this same logic to other small details like blush lines, hatch marks indicating damage or wear, and small, repetitious detail in objects like plants.
Finally, we can end this section by talking about what to do when you're actually animating a head turn in production. You've probably guessed that most shows aren't going to want you to cut off all their character's heads and spin them around on a plate.
(HEAD ROTATION)
What do they actually want?
Well, in most cases head turns are only given two in-betweens–the start and end of the turn. If the layout artist wants to communicate something particular about how their head is turning, they may also include a guide for the middle inbetween, but this isn't common unless there's special action.
They'll also give a spacing chart on the second frame to help you create inbetweens that match the way a character is turning. The examples to the right show how biasing spacing towards the start or the end of the turn changes the feeling of the inbetween drawing quite a bit in headturns. In an actual shot, this can have a bunch of applications. A shocked character might snap their head around in an instant with very widely spaced timing, while a relaxed, happy character turning to talk to a friend might have close spacing that eases into the turn. Pay special attention to the mood of the cut to help you figure out how to execute these acting effects.
Animating a character's head turning exactly like the smooth rotations shown so far is usually not the best idea since it looks pretty robotic. I mentioned briefly in the genga section that a character often drops their head and blinks as they turn their head. It's up to the layout artist to decide whether the blink happens by writing which frames they want the eye open and closed on, but a slight drop of the head is almost always a better idea than a robotic turn unless there's a good reason for it. As the bottom right example on this page shows, throwing in a simple blink and dropping the head a little does quite a bit to help the turn feel more alive.
Properly executing a blink in a head turn is pretty much the same as in a still shot. The timing won't be different (both blinks and turns are usually done on 3s). You will need to go off tap in order to keep the eye size consistent, however.
Phew! That was a crazy amount of information. Take a big breather here and review if you need to. I highly recommend practicing some head turns–both full rotations and simple looks like you might see in a show. They bring together every element in douga, from an understanding of spacing to drawing techniques and drawing quality. Don't get discouraged if you make mistakes! In my interviews with Julius we often had to redo drawings, experiment with spacing, and add missing features. This is still an iterative process and you shouldn't expect to be perfect in every line. Even experienced artists make mistakes. If you can do a head turn, you should be able to handle almost anything else douga might throw at you.