"Warner Bros. has just announced plans to bring a new theatrical Bugs Bunny movie to the screen. The film, to be a mix of live-action and computer animation, is being penned by Elf and Spiderwick Chroniclesscreenwriter David Berenbaum. The project is currently without a release date."
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.
Another good, fun read. Unfortunately in today's media conglomerate system this approach to animation isn't really applicable. But as things slide forward and we see more and more opportunities for individual directors or small, nimble teams I think we'll see a resurgence in this kind of animation approach. And when that time comes these ideas espoused by Mr. K. will come into play more and more.
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.
Long time readers here know how much I enjoy the golden age theatrical short film (1930's through 1950's WB, Lantz, MGM, et. al. etc.). There's just something about that format that seemed to invite the animators to really go for the gusto in the gags, the animation, the motion, the exaggeration- all of it. It was in some ways technically less polished than Disney feature animation (now emulated by most film animation studios), but in terms of pure energy it was in a class by itself.
Consider this scramble "take" from Tex Avery's very funny Bad Luck Blackie. Just watch this and feel how perfect the cat's scramble fits the moment.
Who thinks like that today? Who even tries it? But this stuff is really cool! If we're not careful this would slip right by us. In fact it slipped by me the first 20+ times I watched the short. Then it jumped at me. "What the heck was that?!" So I framed through it and I was even more confused. Here are the drawings (shot on 2's, meaning each drawing is exposed for two frames on the film resulting in a 12 frames per second playback)
In motion those drawings absolutely work. We understand it as controlled chaos that has a rhythm and a flow that fits into the film so seamlessly that it easily escapes our notice. It makes perfect sense to our eyes. But laid next to each other in stillness these drawings defy easy analysis. From drawing to drawing the body parts go all over the place, seemingly with little sense of connection between where they were and where they are and where they are going. There aren't many well defined motion arcs going on here and pretty much no breakdowns between the extremes to give a sense of continuity of motion. Conventional wisdom might suggest that this should not work- but it does. How? Is it because it's shot on 2's that we give the motion some freedom to be interpreted more loosely? Does the simplistic coloring and cel painting contribute to the overall effectiveness of the action? Does the ludicrous nature of the 'story' cause us to let it slide? Would this only work in hand drawn animation? Could the same work in CG? What about stop-motion? Or cut out? Is the current trend for using animation on 1's (especially in CG) something that wouldn't allow such craziness? And is there anything in the TV limited animation realm of today that would preclude using this technique (other than the drawings being very 'off model')? I'm very curious as to what combination of ingredients are absolutely critical to making this work.
Sadly most of the old experienced practitioners of this animation style have passed on. How many animators today have a firm grasp on these techniques and can pass them along? For many of us this kind of analysis is the only way we can learn it.
