Le' Illusionist trailer

Wow, this is just so gorgeous. The new Disney Tangled trailer is lush in its own way, but my heart really responds to this on a much deeper level. I hear Sony will have an end of 2010 US release for this. I'll be sure to catch it on the big screen...



A quick summary of the story proves intriguing as well...

Reverse Perspective animation

Stuff in the distance gets bigger, stuff closer up gets smaller. Trippy!

True Reverse Perspective from JMS on Vimeo.

Nick Cross' animation process

Animator/director Nick Cross (The Waif of Persephone, Yellow Cake) outlines his animation process, with lots of little video clips showing things as they progress. He's animating a new film called The Pig Farmer. A great, great blog post- especially for you guys who've never animated in 2d before. Those previous students of mine who adhere to the more 2d-centric way of animating in CG will find a lot of very familiar thinking and approaches.
Be sure to check out his other posts, he has one on his inking process in Flash, too.

Madame Tutli Putli

Madame Tutli-Putli is a visually striking stop-mo short film. Very moody. I love the eye work in this. They used an interesting technique of compositing photographed human actor eyes onto the puppets. But it's not  just a straight up projection of filmed eyes. The film is loaded with very solid choices about what to use and what not to use. The attention to the important details they have is amazing. A lot is made of attention to details in animation these days- mainly because the advent of CG allows us the bandwidth to explore such high frequency detail data where before we were limited by the medium of choice. But it's attention to important details that is key. If you don't differentiate between important and unimportant details you end up with a lot of useless, technical fluff. Like empty calories, empty detail in an animated film drags things down. Anyhow, this was nominated for an Oscar in 2007, I believe.

Big Story

Not sure how this flew under my radar, but I'm glad I caught it all the same. I came across this from a new post on Jamaal Bradley's Pencil Test Depot blog (great blog, by the way!) The animators Tim Watts & David Stoten roughed the animation in pencil first (see it here on Pencil Test), then animated it stop-mo. Here's the final version....



Too fun!

Look, the Gobelins chase animation meme- now in anime!

I think I've written this before (maybe not), but more than a few of those popular Gobelins short animated student films all seem to share a single element: the crazy, out of control speed chase/run/fall. It's been this way for at least 4 or 5 years now. Go ahead, look 'em up. It's a repetitive trope, but it has certainly been a good one if you want some popularity. One even was nominated for an Oscar. Well, the concept has flown from France to Japan-- somebody has made an anime short employing the same central concept. With panties.



Kinda like the love story angle, though.

Eye Like Pizza- short film in prod

Animator Jeff Robinson is working on a neat looking little short film project titled Eye Like Pizza. He has a production blog here. The image above is one of his main characters. I like the look. Jeff tells me it's gearing to have a "classic-cartoony vibe". I'm all for that. He's got a quick little motion test he put together in this post.  (note: Jeff- make this stuff embedable!)

Looking forward to seeing more soon.

Really cool video

Sent along by Paul Campbell and the crew at Corgan Media Lab. Great mix of CG onto live action.

Influences

Influences are a funny thing. They are rarely cohesive. I think it'd be very sad if one's influences all come from the same pot of fish. Sometimes a person finds themselves surprised by what influences them. And sometimes others are surprised, too. In some form or another- whether in large or small measure- influences tend to keep showing up in a person's work over time. Here are a few of mine, in no particular order....

The Muppet Show

Looney Toons

Woody Woodpecker

Benny Hill

M*A*S*H

Strange Brew (The McKenzie brothers film)

SCTV

Snoopy Come Home

A Charlie Brown Christmas

Rowan & Martin's Laugh In

Monty Python

Richard Scarry's books.

 

This is the stuff that I saw as a kid or a young teen and it stuck with me for some reason. As you can see my slice of humor runs a bit off center from the usual animated fare served up by ol' Uncle Walt. I like verbal humor every bit as much as visual. However it has to be character driven and intelligent, not just self aware pop culture references that the viewer can congratulate themselves' for recognizing. Shows like the Muppet Show, M*A*S*H, and SCTV had a grown up flavor of humor without being needlessly obscene. Benny Hill was winkingly raunchy, but in a tamed down sense. Laugh In was an odd 1970's thing, but I loved the various character sketches. It too had a bit of a naughty streak, but it never crossed line into crass. It was what Saturday Night Live was, only not live, and nearly 10 years before SNL. I liked it better. The Peanuts shows & M*A*S*H greatly influenced my sense of what it means to have a story with some heart and humor at the same time. Woody Woodpecker was just energy exploding all over the screen, pure visual joy. Meanwhile the various Looney Toon shorts were burned into my cerebral cortex from infancy. They too had smart verbal humor at times, very sharp, not dumbed down or condescending. I remember being a 5 year old kid sitting and getting lost in Richard Scarry's books for what seemed like days at a time. The characters were so simple, but extremely appealing and expressive. His illustration was whimsical without being cloying. I never grew tired of looking at them and even today when I see one I'll take some moments and travel back and get lost in them again. For lack of a better word, they're just magical.

Oddly, I was never inspired by Disney films. As a kid they bored me. The only ones I remember liking were Song of the South and 101 Dalmations, and even those were hit and miss. It wasn't until I had become an adult and a professional animator that I looked at Disney films more closely. They still don't really influence or inspire me, even though I can appreciate the craftmanship involved. I can admire them for what they mean historically and technically, but they still don't do much for me. Go figure.

Pups

Michael Sporn has a nice interview of the creators of a new indy short film, Pups of Liberty. It's a great read for those of you interested in how indy shorts usually get made (one word: slowly. heh). I had a chance to work with one of the creators of the film (Bert Klein) for a short while when I was working on Disney's Mickey Mouse Christmas show. Bert's a real gentleman and super talented. One of the nicest people you'll meet, very positive and encouraging. I'm glad to see this project coming from he and his wife. It looks pretty neat. Here's a trailer.

"I solve practical problems..."

Why am I posting this, besides the fact that it's really well done and funny? Well, because I've accepted an offer to be an animator at Valve Software in Bellevue, WA, creators of the above linked Team Fortress 2 and Half Life game properties (among others). I'm quite excited about the opportunity because even though the position is titled 'animator' it's really more of an animator/TD/CG generalist/creator type deal. I'll have opportunity to spread my interests across a broad spectrum of roles and tasks- something that I find really intriguing. As much as I understand the whole "focus only on animation" mantra that's preached among animators these days, I honestly get bored doing just one thing for months and years on end. I like a challenge and I love learning new things. As such the switch to the interactive side of media is a whole new deal for me- which is exciting. I'll have a chance to work with and learn from the best- the roster of artists, animators, designers, technicians and programmers at Valve is beyond impressive. It's gonna be cool to see where it all goes and I'm thankful to have the chance to play along.

Cacure San Valentine -- short film

A fun little short by Luis Angel Villalobos. I love the texture and hand made paper look of this. The timing of the animation to the music is neatly handled. The characters have simple expressions, but they read. This is another great example of finding the right match between visual style, motion and story.

"Yellow Cake" by Nick Cross

Saw this over on the Cartoon Brew, but I liked it so much I wanted to re-post it here. The background paintings in this are absolutely fantastic. They're just great. The story is a little dark, but it rings true. Overall it's a great and satisfying effort by a lone filmmaker.

 

Donuts

The world looks with hope to the one thing that can save the morning...

"I've got a real knack..."

I dunno, wouldn't you pay to see that? ;)

Squiggles!

An old trick in the world of limited budget 2d animation is to cycle through two to four drawings for a hold. This way you can chew up the scene footage with as few drawings as possible. The result is animation that kinda squiggles as it holds, maintaining the illusion of life more by an expression of energy than literal movement. This is very cost effective and the image stays alive due to the cycling. Since the animation stays so rough the audience accepts it for what it is- as well as whatever other limitations of the animation that come along for the ride. It's surprising what an audience will take in and filter through once they perceive the internal rules of an animated universe- a task that takes perhaps all of two seconds of viewing. Certainly I think this attitude of getting by with the least possible effort can be way overdone, but in the right balance I think there's real potential for cost savings without surrendering richness. The richness just comes in a different form, that's all. Nina Paley used this technique in Flash while making her solo feature film Sita Sings the Blues. You can see what I mean in the very first scenes in the following segment of the film....

It's rough as heck, but it totally works. In fact, it more than works. It thrives on a level that is completely different than if it were tied down tight, tightly polished and had the holds all animated in like a typical big budget Disney 2d film. The rough look has a kind of vibrancy to it that actually adds to the film. I don't have a fancy explanation for how it works- I just know it does.

Since I have these little stories I want to make, but I don't have a huge budget (natch: I don't have any budget) to hire an expensive team of animators and CG technicians, I keep looking for creative ways to leverage lessons and tricks from other mediums of animation into my little CG toolbox. I've lost years of effort trying to be a one man band making short films employing the big-studio CG film style. Those were lessons learned the hard way. So I've been messing with this squiggly thing for a few years now (off and on). It's taken that long to find something that works. Due to the rigidity of the meshes and well established visual norms CG just doesn't like to do this sort of thing. And nothing looks worse in CG than a cycle- of any kind. So I'd try something, but it'd look like crud- like some kind of mechanical or technical error rather than a purposeful artistic style. So I'd leave it for a while and then come back and try something different after thinking of something in the shower. More failures each time, each coming closer to what I wanted but couldn't see in my head because it just wasn't being done anywhere else. CG is so picky when it comes to the imagery it makes. There's so little margin for error it seems. It's too demanding, too rigid an artform at times. But like Edison and his silly light bulb, I kept at it. I finally feel like I got it. Here's my version (watch it in HD for a better look. Or best yet- here's a link to a full res QT)....



This is really fast to animate because I'm using flat out 'dead holds' on the controls and letting the squiggly part keep the scene alive. I hit a pose and that's it. I hold it. No 'moving holds' or overdone overlapping business. This 4 second scene took maybe 15 or 20 minutes to animate (compare that to 4 sec. per week doing it the "right" way in feature films). In fact I over-animated it at first out of habit, so I had to go back and rip out the moving holds I had started to build in. I tell you, the hardest part is de-programming myself from doing CG the "right" way. It's not as easy as it sounds to embrace simplicity and then trust it. Anyhow, here's a screen grab of my f-curves to show the dead holds on the major controllers... (click to see it larger).

This is what it looks like without the squigglies....



You can see that it's super dry and just goes dead without the squiggles. The squiggling really keeps it feeling vibrant. So yeah. I'm really, really happy with where I've ended up with this.

Cartoon CG fun

 

A former APT student of mine, Sunny Kharbanda, has really been diving into the whole 'cartoons in CG' experimenting. It's a lot of fun seeing him find new things. Since we're both tinkering in this area we communicate a lot, sharing what we find works, what doesn't, etc. Sunny just posted on his blog about his process for developing the backgrounds to work with his animation tests (you can see those here and here). Cool stuff. Check it out.

"9" = not a bad little money maker

Shane Acker's "9" had its brief stand as the only animated feature in theaters last week. This week Sony's Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs lands at your local cine-plex. "9" opened on an odd day (a Wednesday), but take away the few extra days and it's first weekend did a tidy little $10mil. So the film will probably yield in the $35-40mil range domestically, probably another $30-40 over seas. Add in home video and such and I think the producers have a nice little return on investment brewing. It's not an empire making block buster like Shrek or Ice Age, but it'll be a decent little money maker. Which is not a bad thing. "9" is not your typical animated film. Whether you like the film or not (and it has had some mixed reviews) the fact that it hasn't been an absolute bomb like Delgo or Battle for Terra is a good thing. Like those other films, "9" veers from some pretty well established patterns for success in animated fare. This will hopefully embolden other producers to be willing to green light projects that stretch the boundaries of the animated feature film market. The world will always make room for the big boys' stuff (well, until they don't), but I think as time goes by the broad viability of the feature marketplace will rest more and more with the second and third tier offerings.

Schmitty Walk cycle

Watch it in HD if you like. It's extra tasty at full rez.
This is just a generic walk for Schmitty. Walks are like chicken broth. You don't ever eat plain chicken broth, but it's the basis for a lot of tasty recipes. Walks should be adjusted for moment, character, emotion, physical limitations, etc.
On a technical note I'm exploring some new techniques for mixing up the shading texture as well as distressing the mesh silhouette in order to make a more "hand crafted" feel. I'm working on some other tests that will show that better which I hope to share soon.

More painterly CG

Another Gobelins effort. I like the shading, especially the active line within the objects defining light and shadow on the form. The clouds & FX are cool. The backgrounds are handled very well, but in the darker moments the characters get lost against them- something typically avoided when one employs an emotional palette as opposed to a literal one. The stark shadows work well. I think the animation, while good at points, could have benefitted from being dialed back into limited frame rates and not full on 1's the whole way through. It's that same bugaboo that has plagued NPR CG for the last decade. Looks like a nice painting until it moves. It's that visual harmony/cohesion thing again.