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) ).

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#endif
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//and all that.

Test animation

First test ever.