journal entry

"I applied to SVA and couldn’t go, just like Harry couldn’t’ go to Hogwarts right away. That’s why I like the series so much, it reminds me of my optimistic side of seeing dragons and wizards everywhere."

- from my journal January 3, 2006.

some more tests

head moving down 

This is a test of Richard Williams' chapter on in-betweening. He was talking about the differences between straight in-betweening where a middle position is picked versus a more interesting in-between like having a person go to gasp slightly from a straight face into a frown rather than a straight into the frown from a straight face.  Ken Harris, one of the nine old men, would draw in-betweens that would favor one of the two extremes. In this case, my head tilts down, then forward (not the best animation, but...). Instead of moving from point A to B, the in-between gives what is normal a little more character. The idea is to use overlaps in the in-betweens. Have them work for the movement by directing the change in the drawing towards the breakdown positions. We all know we're going to get there, so we might as well throw old it back for as long as possible until we have to do it. Or we can so something else entirely before we get there. 

So this is the test with my character. First I decided on what I wanted my character to do: move his head down in a serious and heavy way. I decided to go with a 24 frame animation to make it easy on myself and picked 9 as the breakdown drawing. Then i did my charts, which you can see if you pause the video right at the beginning. The chart spans my 24 frames and shows the easing into and out of my breakdown position. Finally, I got to animating. I did a straight ahead from #1 - 9 easing into my breakpoint, another from #9-15 easing down towards my ending position, and another from #16-24 with even spacing. I worked on twos at first (every other drawing) and then went back to add in-betweens. I spend a lot of time afterwards cleaning up the eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth (half of my Calc class, actually). I still need to do hair, and was thinking of adding frames at the end to make him move forward more.  

Scene 02 - second rough pass

This is my second attempt at scene 02. This scene has 3 layers: one is the background, then the background birds, then the bird animation.

Here's another iteration of this scene. I added a flickering for the background birds (which took longer to do than animating the entire scene), and anticipation in the beginning before the bird arrives. 

Let me know what you think and what I could change. 

trapped in the system, Pigeons

cage sees and kicks a dead bird in the streets of new york @ :45 seconds.

Pixar and the Oscars playlist

I searched for pixar in the Oscars channel on YouTube. here's the playlist. They wouldn't let me embedd it (assholes.)

Ads and Stats

Added google ads. ... why not. In doign so, I had to open it up to become a searchable blog.

I also added Analytics: how.

Animation Supplied

I bought some supplies:

• Tombow Pencils
  


• COL-Erase Pencils (red)
• Round Beg Bar (5 set)



• Finch Animation Paper (1000 sheets)








• 12F lightbox

I intend to spend as much as I need to for this project, but I also have to keep in mind that I will be running through paper and pencils while learning. So the best quality paper and pencils are not warrented, but pencils don't cost too much, so I wanted to try them.

The colored COL-Erase pencils are special pencils that are easier to erase and write over. In animation red is for the construction of the line, blue is for a committed line (light blue for traces) and black for final commited lines. Other colors are sometimes used to designate other types of lines, such as purple for corrections to make it easier to clean up. A cornerstone of animation is to draw the same thing over and over, adding and refining in the process.

As for paper, I'm using a 12F paper, that's a little bigger than Xerox (8 1/2 x 11) paper and is more animator friendly. They go for about $35 for 1000 sheets + shipping. Good paper is about $75, and pro (Pixar-Disney) quality ranges from $100-400/1000 sheets based on the size. I'm getting this from animationsupplies.com which does round hole punching. That means i can use a normal hole puncher on regular paper if i run out of animation paper. They did advise against buying prepunched paper Xerox paper, as the punches are a little too big.

As for the lightbox, I wish I had a giant one, but this will do for now. It can sit beside my small wacom tablet.

Animation Timeline on Dipidy

wow.

Damn, it's been almost 5 days... I have been doing stuff, but just wasn't satisfied enough with it to show anyone. But i know that incubating work like this for too long is bad. Pixar has made it a point for artists to routinely show their work in its incomplete form for early criticism, feedback, and a sense of progress. Pixar's President, Ed Catmul, says this way when you're done, you're done. It sounds obvious, but when you incubate an idea for 2 weeks to get it perfect enough to present, there's still going to be something wrong with it. So you're not really done.

Anyway, here's a rough animation of the second scene (the first one being the pan of the city for setting)



I did two more. Here's scene 3:




Here's 4. This one was a pain. This one was frustrating. I had to do it over more than once.



So, i went back to the Animator's Survival Kit and looked up a walk from behind. I traced over his "boring" normal walk and threw a rough version of my character on top of it. After some tinkering, this is the second version of that walk:



So, i should really post my storyboard reel up here... I'm really really unhappy with that: very rough, no sound, no dialogue, no real music... it's also 200mb and in need of compression.

Fresh Air

Andy refered Kaiba, a 12 piece anime by Masaaki Yuasa of MadHouse, to me last week.

It's minimalist style quickly breaks into an extraordinarily surreal world which truly transcends convention. I know, I know, convention can never really be transcended. And conformity does show here with its share of stereotypical anime characters and animation. But I've always secretly believed in the use of convention as a kind of lure that draws you close and sucks your brain dry! This anime uses the ground to jump off into space with. After finishing it, I realize that the simplicity of its style becomes enormously complex and moving with just a little bit of emotional investment. There is lots to talk about, but I specifically found the creative style inspiring. It blows my mind how they choose to capture situations like people dying or an explosions through style and animation.

I know I haven't really described anything, but I don't really want to. You've gotta discover the wealth for yourself.

Speech

Neva Again by Vordul Mega



This took about 5-7 hours and four attempts. I tried doing it straight ahead by imitating the mouth movements and drawing random mouth shapes, recording myself and copying it frame by frame, looking at The Animator's Survival Kit for reference (I also watched the Making of A Nightmare Before Christmas), and finally tried to spell out the words being said frame by frame.

Here's what I learned:

Dialogue for animation is dominated by vowels. If you wanted to simplify it you could use six or eight basic mouth shapes: (1)A, (2)E/S, (3)I, (4)O, (5)U/Sh, (6)M, (7)P/B (8)F (i did that on the fly so i might have missed lots), some in-between mouths, and, of course, some random ones for giggles.

Programs that automatically lip-sync animation like Flash and Toon Boom use a system like this where they try to detect these sounds and use one of these images for it. This, however, almost always looks horrible, unless there is a bit of randomness in there (or you can design your mouth system well). The article I mentioned says Hanna Barbara used a 6 mouth system, which makes a lot of sense when animating a hundred million cartoons, but it does dimish "belivability" if the voice makes the mouth look dubbed.

I always used some random mouths snear or grins, and noticed differences in accents. Some people have a "z" in their words: pops vs. momz, for instance, which makes z an exaggerated s.

Once you've got your mouths, you plan out your dialogue on a exposeure sheet (X-Sheet/Dope sheet), which lists frame by frame how many drawing you will need (up to 100 on a sheet). You will have to listen to your sounds and try to map out which frames they are being said on so you can position your mouths accordingly. Use either the words themselves broken up into syllabals, or the sounds: "popz" would be P-A-M/N-Z, a P mouth shape, an A (which is the key), a closed mouth (M) and a Z. If you wanted to skimp, you could get away with jsut doing a A cushioned by two M's on either side (wiggaddy-wack).

I also noticed a delay effect where the animation works better if you position your mouths a little bit ahead of the moment the vowel is sounded. There's also lots of anticipating and reaction going on there. This song is a perfect example becuase you anticipate keys with the beat. Every time the base hits, your brain makes that the key frame which hits and slowly fades as the next base hits. I almost want the animation to do this two-step thing, going back and forth in a cosine curve. In the Survival Guide, Williams talks about the masters having a built in timing in all their animations with the best example being Road Runner. Everything is beautifully timed meaning there is a frame by frame rhythm and pattern throughout the entire animation. Musicians pick this up and can either run with the built in tempo, or go against the tempo to mess with anticipating and reaction. They're swiss watches, man, or OSX's. Most people will never know how elegantly the code is written. Anyway, so just like every word has a emphasis, so does every sentence. Dialogue, then, has a pattern depending on who's saying it.

All and all, I have a a pet peeve about mouths cuz of anime vs. cartoons, where anime is infamous for skimping on mouth movements. I hate it. Plus, i like angry expressive characters.

Sketching in Class

I did these a week or so ago after reading parts of this online text on sketching for animators. You can find it on my space: Gesture Drawing For Animation by Walt Stanchfield (8.6 mb).

Math Class:

Management class:

Toon Boom Straight Ahead

I wanted to animate something so I did. I shouldn't have spend so much time on it but going all out on this one helps me visualize what is possible for other scenes. All the animation is by hand... by tablet, which is hard to use! I used myself for reference and mouthed out the words in slow motion. Anyway, I'm happy with it (sorta).




As you can see, I hide the amateur animation behind color and a moving camera. That's bad. If this were a class, i'd probably have to demonstrate a clean performance before I color and move it around. Here's a earlier version. I added a bunch of small things to the animation after this: hair, body, background... When i do this again, i'll have planned the scene out better and made sure my animation is solid before i color it

First Toon Boom tests

I'm trying out Toom Boom. The first one is a wrecking ball. I tried doing Andy's Her growing out of a puddle, but it becomes too complicated. So I did a simple pendulum swing instead, then did this wrecking ball.



The next one is more interesting. I made a loop of a bird flapping its wings. Then There's this Motion curve that makes it look like the bird is flying away by scaling it.

knew it

Background research

This is where my "Down" scene takes place: Public School # 6 in Jersey City.


My scene will actually be of a side view.


But i'll study these anyway.

Walk 04

Still learning how to walk. This is my fourth one. The book said to mess around with the breakdowns so I did, but it looks very strange. Then I decided to color it. I wanted to add a moving background, but it was hard (and my hand hurts).

Update [11/21/08]
Doesn't it look like he's walking like that because his feet are sticking to the floor?

Making of features on Youtube

Update [10-15-09]: The youtube account was suspended. =( Here's what I got around to watching

Inspiration

• Paprika
• Grave of the Fireflies
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame ✓
• Monster House ✓
• Antz
• The Jungle Book ✓
• Anastasia ✓
• Mulan ✓
• Sleeping Beauty ✓
• The Incredibles ✓(incredible)
• Lilo & Stich ✓(incredible)
• Hercules ✓
• Aladdin ✓(my brother has the DVD with footage)
• Peter Pan
• Pocahontas ✓ (I don't understand how they can do animation like this)
• Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron
• Chicken Little
• The Prince Of Egypt ✓
• The Road to El Dorado ✓
• Treasure Planet ✓
• Tarzan ✓
• Cinderella
• Sinbad
• Little Mermaid
  
• Nightmare Before Christmas ✓

Learning to Rotoscope

Rotoscoping images is easy but time-consuming. In the article I used to do this, an animater from A Scanner Darkly said he expects to take 5 hours on a complicated image.

Tutorial: mMm-MHmm

2cents:
Do a few (5 hour) test runs. Try to mimick the style of A Scanner Darkly. That should make you very irritated and more experienced, but will allow for your style to show through the medium. Get the techical stuff of learning out the way quickly so you can start doing your own thing.

Pigeons

My intro and outro frames have pigeons, so I'm practicing drawing them.







I'm learning rotoscoping also: pigeon in black and colored.

Update: Took Hux's advice and took away from the background near the pigeon's head.

Today's the day

"If you were a Rembrandt today, you wouldn't be able to resist animation. Instead of etchings, he'd be making stuff move." - Richard Williams

Watch his documentary.

Clubs

This is really depressing:

The golden drawing

Everyday, I draw looking for that touch that will tip over the image and spill lines onto the paper. It is frustrating trying to create life in a matter of minutes, imitating what looks so seemless. The character's we've grown up with were alive to us, and were as much a part of our lives as friends that've come and gone. It takes effort to realize they are carefully constructed. Watching a pencil test of a scene from the Lion King is like watching a mechanical city huff through time. Each line comes to life, lives, and dies to make way for the next.

Making of Feature of Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke
A great colleciton of classic Disney Animators speaking about their work

Those are the giants that made the dirt we're standing on.

Wacoms

I finally got a tablet.

The textbook

I scanned the "Walks" from The Animator's Survival Kit. You can download the chapter here: Walks.

Walk test 02

We went to the archie building today to look for the giant lightbox there. It reminded me of PageMaster with all the old scrolls of blueprints that and old books and boxes we had to move off of it. I drew more from The Animator's Survival Kit, and with its magical powers, here is the walk test i did with some cleanup and editing.


Here are some others:
Both of these animations use the same drawings but with different timings. The first one uses a sort of S curve with a quick bang, but a slower recoil. The second animation is evenly spaced at about 7/100 sec each on Fireworks.

the Story

//I'll definetly revise this. I think i need to have something down.

Andy, Anand and I had our first real discussion about our stories. Each of us presented an idea for a story we would like to develop and the other two listening helped to mold it philosophically and structurally. 

My story is part of a daydream I've been having since 11th grade of an animation film about a boy in his junior/senior year in highschool with a pessimistic attitude about the future after graduation. The story revolves around this boy and his close friends who are intelligent enough to be in the moment but not smart enough to recognize it. They can't seem to understand why something needs to be recognized and therefore do not have much value for anything. 

My Story

While this story is much bigger than 2 minutes can convey, a small slice of it is something i would be much happier doing than just a short demonstrating my newfound ability to animate. 

My story starts with the boy walking home. He passes his old school, PS6, and maintains his pace as the children look upon him like animals behind cages. As he approaches the end of the block his hands retreat into his pockets. He feels he is onto something. He looks up at the the clouds beautifully billow about a sky that looks all too impersonal for him. He doesn't seem to quite get it yet and keeps walking. 

That is a "down" scene characterized by his being alone and in a paralyzed state of contemplation. His thoughts handicap him from being in any sort of moment, so life passes him while his headphones blast violent lyrics about really living. 

Immediately following his calm walk through desolation and his abrupt but ultimately uneventful burst of something about the clouds is another scene, an "up". This scene is characterized by a whole-hearted understanding of the moment through small subtle revelations. I haven't yet finalized this part of the scene, but I worked out most of this with Andy and Anand today.

Andy's story

Andy is pushing more content from his Lost Boy universe, a comic that he has made about a boy who loses his heart and is on a path to retrieve it. 

The short, as Andy describes it, is supposed to be more of a demonstration of animation than a plotline based story. The story focuses on animation dynamics that he will learn from Anime like FLCL, honing his animation skills through heavily action oriented animation. 

The story itself starts with a boy smoking while looking at a picture. He then either loses consciousness or enters his own consciousness, a white world with one giant picture frame that cycles through images of his past. The last image to be shown is of him looking at the image he was just looking at. Startled, he tries to run away and finds a puddle of blood. Intrigued he stares as a female figure oozes out of it. Suddenly she pierces his chest and he begins to realize what he's running from. This begins the erratic transformation of him into Lost Boy and the short ends. 

Anand's Story 

Anand is the most versed in film knowledge, so his stories will be much more solid than ours. 

His starts with a train whistle in pitch black until the scene starts of two guys playing racketball. During the game one of the guys begins to tell a story and it flashes back to a girl crying and him being upset. He breaks up with her, gets on the train and leaves all while the girls is portrayed as very emotional until the end, where she is shown fully and just standing as the train passes by. 

The story ends and the other guy decides to start jogging. The first guy is lying on the floor and starts laughing because he made it seem like it was her fault that they broke up. The footsteps of the other guy jogging got slowly closer to him as he started to whistle like a train. They both start laughing and the short ends. 

So far Anand wants to animate this with lots of scribbles or scribbled animation. It will be cluttered and rough except for when there are close-ups of the characters. The short also will be intentionally dark like a faint memory because it is supposed to be a random short glimpse into this other life. 

Andy suggested that it be rotoscoped and Anand may go in that direction or combine both. 

Animation 101

I've been ignoring this for too long. I've had my eyes set on animation and film making since I hid under my blankets to protect me from monsters at night. I was making animation shorts in my head walking to and from school everyday. I was directing music videos for every other song I heard. This is where I want to be, but I was somehow led astray scared. I guess it had something to do with being poor, but the way I see it now, my computer science skills will land me in McDonald's just the same. I might as well get to it with something that I actually have potential doing to a place that better suits me.

I've set out to do an independent study of 2d animation using Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit as a textbook. Mr. Williams was the Director of Animation for 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' and had studied with the wise men of Disney. The 8 wise men were Disney's 8 leading animators in the 30-40's that made Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, and Fantasia. They created a school of thought when they wrote down the idiosyncrasies of moving pictures like people walk at about 12 frames per second and squashing and stretching an image gives weight. The rules they wrote down for themselves and those described in the book are used today in all forms of animation including stop-motion and CG (computer generated animation).

I plan to learn the basics of animation, improve my drawing skills, and make a short 2 minute film from concept art to final edit by December 5th. I'm not sure at all if this is possible, but I will at least have a 50% version with rough animation and a completed story. I've created a syllabus that can be downloaded here that outlines my goals for this project as well as its structure.

My friends, who are also lost doing things like Civil Engineering, C++, and PHP, got in on this with me. Emi, Andy, and Anand will be making films of their own all under the umbrella of 2d animation. We are working closely but on separate projects which allows cooperation as well as a competitive motivation. We hope to have four films by the end of a semester, but more importantly a blog full of stories and work (TONS of work, showing that we're there (we ain't never scared) ).

return zeros;}
}
#endif
} //close namespace

//and all that.

Test animation

First test ever.