Following Mayerson

Mark Mayerson has decided to post his master’s thesis (in chunks) on his blog. The paper is title Six Authors in Search of a Character: The Collaborative Nature of Performance in Animated Films. He is exploring the challenges facing animators in the creation of a cohesive character performance. The prime obstacle to doing this well is the fact that animators rarely ever have 100% control over a character for the entirety of a film or project.

Mark has been a thoughtful commentator on animation for a good long while now and I’m always interested in his writings. He doesn’t usually get too caught up in navel gazing- a common problem with animation writers. I especially like his intelligent analysis of previous animation efforts. The stuff he’s posted about Pinnocchio recently has been wonderful and insightful. I’m willing to bet that this effort will be no less interesting.

APT Session #2 Student Reel

Well it’s two weeks late, but it’s done- I am proud to present the APT Session 2 Student Highlight Reel.

Session 2 was a great session in ye olde’ APT. I want to express a huge “Thank You!” to all of my APT session #2 students. You guys were awesome!

I enjoyed it a lot, the students were great and they made some wonderful progress. In doing the student reel for this session I decided to skip the “before & after” approach and just go for the “after”. There are a few reasons behind that decision, none worth going into here. But if you look at the “previous experience” info for each student you’ll see where they’re coming from. We had a wide range of folks- absolute newbies, old pros, students of varying degrees of advancement, young pros and a Flash animator who had only tinkered in CG before. And while I don’t think even the students themselves would say any of the pieces on this reel are “perfect” - every piece could use a little tweaking here and there (who wouldn’t say the same about their own work?) every one of them would agree that the work here is much better than what they were doing before they started the APT. Everybody had their own unique curriculum and set of exercises and they all responded great to the teaching. I always find it rewarding to see that folks are showing greater confidence and ability after one of these APT sessions. Putting the reel together certainly reminds me that the hard work of running the program is well worth it.

APT Session #3 is sold out and I’m already excited to get going with this new crop of students. If you missed out this time or are thinking about taking part in the APT keep checking back here to find out when APT Session #4 will be. And once more, a big Congrats to all of my APT Session #2 students- you guys did wonderfully.

Spring Cleaning for the Site

Last night I finally got fed up with how bloated and slow Firefox had become as a browser. Remember the early days of Firefox? It was like a breath of fresh air compared to Netscape and Internet Explorer. Light, fast, simple. Ahh, those were the days- a mere 3 years ago, fer cryin’ out loud.

Anyhow, I was looking around for a faster, less bloated feeling browser. So I tried a few different flavors. I found something though- my site looked like poo on a platter in more than a few different browsers. Of course I knew why- when I updated the style of the site last year I wasn’t too up on CSS and PHP and all that jazz. So I hacked and sawed and filed the edges, taped, glued and nailed some pieces into place and voila! I had a new, nice looking site held together by the webpage equivalent of duct tape & bailing wire. Ahem.

So after finding my new browser to mess with (I’m going with Opera, in case you were wondering. I’m liking it a lot so far) I decided to get a new template for the site/blog that was a lot more compliant, flexible, easier to maintain and update, blah, blah, blah. I went with Mandigo and just tweaked a few things here and there- certainly far fewer tweaks were necessary this time because this new theme supports sidebar widgets for ye olde’ blog.

Another nice thing is the theme handles some nice features internally, which allowed me to turn off a few plug ins that I was running. So we should see an overall speed boost as well. The site was a bit too pokey to load before, for sure. This will be much easier for me to maintain moving forward. And it will look better across the browser spectrum. I just need to twiddle with the color of the text a bit- it’s a little too electric for me right now, but that should be an easy fix.

Not that anybody cares, but I feel better about it.

APT Session 3: Sold Out!

The title says it all- we filled up all of our spots for APT Session #3 for this summer- and this without me even getting session #2 reel done. Oops! (It’s coming by Monday for sure!)
Thanks to all the students who signed on. I’m eagerly looking forward to getting going in early July.

For those of you who are interested in another APT session, good Lord willing I hope to have APT session #4 before the end of 2007. However I know that life- especially my life- is very unpredictable. So if we’re not able to have session #4 before the end of 2007 then I’m pretty confident in projecting an early 2008 start date for APT Session #4. As always keep an eye out here for dates, info, etc.

OK, back to work for me!!!!

Housekeeping: Links, tutorials, rigging and such

Reader Patrick Barroca felt he would offer another attempt at translating my old Pose-to-Pose Organized Keyframe tutorial into French. Now I’m no French scholar, but he felt there were issues with the first translation. So I’ve put Patrick’s French translation alongside of the French translation done by Pascal Hang. I’ll let all you francophiles decide which is better. All I can say is a big thanks to both Pascal and Patrick for their kind efforts to translate the tutorial into French.

Another reader, Dwayne Elahie, is a technical director. He has created a video tutorial (WMV or QT) that adapts a version of my facial rigging into 3dsMax using bones. So for you Max folks check it out to see the concept applied in your particular flavor of CG-ness.

I’m almost done rigging another new character. He’s about the 4 or 5th different R&D rig I’ve made in the last year or two- all in an effort to keep refining what I want to use in my own rigs with an emphasis of reducing the technical distance between the animator and the CG puppet. At times I have folks write me and ask if I’d be willing to rig their characters (for hire, that is. I don’t rig characters for free unless I REALLY like you and I have known you for many years. Heh. All I can say is that I’m not a terribly good production rigging TD. I’m more about R&D, exploring new ideas. The practical necessities of production rigging are too exacting for my tse-tse-fly mind to keep track of. Production rigs tend to need watertight solutions- be as close to unbreakable as possible. My rigs, much like my MEL scripts, are buggy and leaky affairs. Fine for me- I understand their quirks and problems- but a sure fire recipe for frustration and pain for anybody else. So I’ll take this as another opportunity to suggest that Maya users who need solid, production ready rig making capability to spend $99 and get Anzovin’s The Setup Machine for Maya. It does a fine job and it does it affordably, quickly, reliably and has a built in level of consistency that all production environments require. Not to mention it’s a pretty nice rig. Last I heard Raf’s team is developing a facial auto-rigging tool as well. I don’t know where that’s at, but you can check out some early R&D videos and such here. Rumor is it may ship soon.

Behind on stuff

Good things are popping up in our water filter ministry project here like spring thunderstorms over Oklahoma. As such I’ve been busy with that and I’m a bit behind on other stuff. What stuff? Well, the APT Session 2 Student Reel, for instance. It’s almost done, I’m just making a new bumper for it. Hopefully it’ll be done by the weekend. We’ll see!

Meanwhile there are still two student slots available for this summer’s APT Session 3. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t really had a chance to promote session 3, but even so it’s almost full. If you want to grab one of the last two spots be sure to follow the link to learn more.

Rats!

I know I’m a bit behind on this, but here’s something I thoroughly enjoyed…

This 9 minute sneak peek of Pixar’s upcoming Ratatouille was a lot of fun to watch. Good story telling, good filmmaking in this little clip. I’m surprised that Disney felt the need to put out 10% of their film online free before release. Somebody in marketing must be really nervous about this thing flopping. I dunno, for all the people who say that a rat in a restaurant is gross and offputting, I think it’s a great premise that kids will automatically take a shine to. Only grown ups think rats are gross. And when you make your rat look like a Jim Henson inspired muppet you just can’t help but think he looks cute.
The acting didn’t feel rotoscopy - which is a pleasure to see. I thought the animators did a marvelous job making Remy feel like a rat while still maintaining his unique character and personality. I think the secondary human characters had great design, but the primary ones kinda suffered from the “Alice In Wonderland” disease of toning down the design to make them more generic and “accessible”. As usual the details are handled well and - again as usual- Pixar does a very good job of putting the details in the proper visual heirarchy. So far this sneak peek has me keen to go see the film. I think this has a lot of promise to be a nice come back for Pixar after the soporific Cars.

Now, for marketing that does the absolute opposite…

What the…?

Vinyl’s Attack = Fun!

As a huge fan of 1950’s era black and white space horror B-flicks this little 95 second bit of fun just made me smile.
Vinyl’s Attack! (click image to play)

I saw this over on 3dTotal.com. Congrats to Niko for making this great little homage to one of the best film genres ever to have a crowd munch popcorn in front of it. Check out the other short subjects on Niko’s MySpace page- the Moovie spot is pretty cool, too. I dunno who Niko is, but it appears he is French, he has a neat eye for stuff and he spent some time at Supinfocom (gee, no surprise there).

Facial control GUI stuff

Enough wheels have squeaked, so here comes some grease! Actually this is something I’ve been meaning to do for a few months already, ever since I first showed an R&D character rig I was messing with back in January. Seeing as the next few months of my life are going to be pure craziness on a stick I figured that now’s as good a time as any to get it over with.
And so with that enthusiastic opening, may I present to you the How Do I Make That Nifty Colored Ball Facial Control Rig Thingie (or HDIMTNCBFCRT for short.)
Because the idea of making a written tutorial gave me hives I just did a screen grab walk thru of the concept. Thus it is a 29 minute movie. Yeah, you heard me. 29 minutes. Hopefully it’s a worthwhile half hour watch. The good thing is it’s the second attempt. I had the first one almost all done when the computer crashed while I was recording and I lost the movie- and the Maya file. Oops. Forgot to save. So you guys get to benefit from that rehearsal run.

For those who like to poke about under the hood, I’ve made a ZIP package that has a before & after Maya file for you to peek at. It was made in Maya 7.
Anyhoo, enjoy the obscure control rig stuff. And once again my apologies to the non-technical types who come here for animation stuff. I’ll get back to that pretty soon. But first I gotta put a ribbon on that APT Session #2 student highlight reel. Whee!

Eye Rigging R&D 2: Cluster/Joint arrays for lid deformation

OK, more geekery with apologies for the non-CG folks who stop by to read. Some folks asked for a further explanation of the cluster array I described in my previous post about eye rigs. I mentioned that I use a fanned out array of clusters to bend and shape the lid to plus the emotion of the puppet. Even though I used clusters you could do the same thing with joints, and to illustrate the concept joints are actually easier to use. So follow along and see if this makes sense. (click the images to see & read things better)



I hope that makes sense and fills in some blanks. Rigging is extremely difficult to be brief with because it is so technical. I hope to do more of these little quick hit rigging R&D posts as time goes by. The hard part is finding the time- as always. heh.
Now I gotta get back to other stuff I’m falling behind on.

Animation Personal Trainer: Session 3!!

It’s that time again- time to gear up for another APT session. We recently wrapped up APT session #2 and it was another great session. The students did some amazing work and made some great progress. I’ll be posting a session 2 reel sometime next week so keep an eye out for that. Some of the stuff the students did was really impressive.

I wanted to get a jump on things and announce that I have scheduled APT Session #3 for July & August of 2007. Class will begin Monday July 9th and will run through the end of the first week of September. Unlike previous sessions I will open registration immediately rather than wait for a specific date to take enrollment. So if you’re interested in taking part in the next APT class, be sure to check out the updated APT FAQ and head on over to the kLango Online Store to register today.

And I have a nifty deal going, too! If you register before June 1st 2007 you’ll get a 10% early bird discount on the cost of the course (that’s almost $200 savings. Who says I’m not generous? heh).

Space- as always- is limited, so head on over to sign up for your turn at proven, personalized animation training the kLango way!

Wow, that was cheesy. heheh.

Some Misc. Eye Rig R&D

Awhile back someone emailed me about how I rigged the eyes for this character. (click to watch a movie of him being posed)
Anyhoo… I wrote back explaining a few things. Earlier this week I was going through my sent email looking for something else and I found my reply. I thought- Hmm. This looks interesting. Might make a nice little blog post. So here goes…
I’m just using “clam shell” eye lids. The lids aren’t modeled into the over face mesh but are just two half globe shells that rotate around the eyeball. This makes them easy to set up for a system like this. Plus I’m not a gifted modeler and it’s always hard for me to get the built-in lids to look/work well. For the rendering style I hope to use for this guy it doesn’t end up being a problem with the clam shell approach. The actual shells are nurbs revolves.

Each lid is then deformed by a series of clusters that work together like a folding fan along a hull of the NURB. Each cluster is centered at the eyeball center and each one is driven a certain percentage to create a smooth, fanned out deformation to shape the lid.


Then I put an FFD (free form defromer- aka: Lattice) around the whole eyeball/pupil/lid system. The idea here is that when the lattice is deformed the whole eye system shares that deformation. This way I can layer the clusters that shape the lids underneath the larger lattice that shapes the whole eyeball/lid complex.

Then the lattice is deformed with a wrap deformer. A wrap deformer in Maya is like using any geometry as a kind of lattice itself. In this case I’m using the face rig mesh to deform the lattice. So if the brows or cheek are deformed using other controllers this deformation then affects the eyeball/eyelid complex at the same time. So with one controller I can shape the brow and shape the eyeball shape as well and still have the lids rotate around the eyeball and be deformed themselves. This is how you get the eye to deform with the brows all at once.
Here you see the grey mesh has been deformed. This grey mesh then drives the grid lattice around the eyeball system which then deforms the eyeball and the lids all at once.
One caveat to a system like this is that it doesn’t play nice when it moves through space. To solve this I rig my facial system on a seperate copy of the rig that only works for the face. It’s still in the main rig file- just hidden from the animator. The animator controls the face with controllers on the main rig, but the output of the controllers affects the face rig. Then the deformation result of the face rig is piped back onto the main rig using a morph target blendShape. So animator controls main rig A for all body & face animation, but any facial controllers really affect face rig B and the result is then piped back onto main rig A. This is a fairly common approach in rigging these days- to use a seperate face rig that doesn’t move through space. It’s hard to do complex facial set ups right on the body deforming mesh. The key to having the facial output and the body rig play nice is to keep the face blendShape input come lower in the input list for the body mesh than the body deformation stuff.
OK, that was real geeky. Rigging is one of those black arts that makes CG so much more of a pain in the butt to do than other forms of animation. It’s a bit of a puzzle solver’s game that requires a person to be extremely creative but not necessarily highly artistic- if that makes any sense.
But for those who are interested in this kind of stuff, there you go.

Worshipping at the altar of innefficiency: part 2

Read the previous installment to catch up. Some good comment action going there as well.
I think there are other contributing factors that attribute to why current day animators are significantly slower (and arguably make poorer animation) than those of a bygone era.

First- The tools define how we do the job. In the infancy of Cg animation programmers invented new ways of doing things that weren’t even close to being based on the way animation had been done for decades. Language was borrowed and bastardized to mean something else. Techniques and tools had some loose association with old established methods, but in practice were completely different. As a result for a long time CG animators couldn’t see any parallels in how animation was made “back then” and now. To this day a huge number of CG animators can’t read a timing chart. It’s so foreign to them as to be unusable and irrelevant. But if you can read a timing chart then you have the ability to understand timing in a very practical and useful way- something which is of great value to all animators in any era regardless of medium. And that’s just one example. The result is that we have lost out on generations of “back then” know how. It kinda happened by default, but it was like there was this new tool and all the old ways don’t even apply. We could read the right books, but the practical “how to” parts seemed like a long lost craft- like wooden ship building or clovis point arrowhead making.

Some folks in the comments for the previous post mentioned rigs as being a problem. I used to think rigs were a major problem- and I do think the general craft of rigging is in need of fresh ideas and new solutions. But I don’t know just how much a rig has to do with animator speed. An experienced animator can make even a slow rig work for them. Rig limitations for obtaining a certain shape is one thing- but that’s more of a qualitative complaint, and a valid one at that. It does have a bearing on getting things qualitatively and that reflects itself quantitatively as well. But in my eyes the primary way a bad rig can slow down productivity is if it is too cumbersome in how it utilizes the computing power. Meaning- if the animator has to wait 10 or 15 seconds to see the puppet being moved into place on screen, then we have a valid speed issue. Thankfully most rigs aren’t quite that slow (but I’ve worked with some that were. Pure pain.). So unless your rigging folks are making a rig that is agonizingly slow to update, redraw and deform in the given buffer memory space for the frame you’re on I don’t think it has a lot of bearing. Now if you’re a timeline scrub monkey, well then the problem isn’t the rig. The problem is you and the way you animate. After all pencil animators can’t scrub in realtime either and they’ve been animating for a long time with good result. So I don’t buy timeline scrub speed of a rig as a major problem because I think a workflow that relies heavily on timeline scrubbing is a flawed workflow. Allegorically I liken it to a cabinet maker who instead of measuring twice and cutting once instead puts his saw away and decides to sand the piece of wood down to the proper length, constantly stopping to see if it fits yet.
The visual style of CG is generally pedantic. All those details, all that versimilitude to reality pushes our efforts into the little things that used to be exaggerated out. What old masters used to distill down into an illusion of life we spend lionizing in replicating life. This is true from design down to motion and then on to rendering. Smooth trumps strong nearly every time. The realism of Cg has always been a siren song and all that fine twiddling makes the entire process achingly slow.

It doesn’t help either that we fill out the ranks of our studios with younger animators who have never benefited from apprenticing under an experienced animator as an assistant. Economics dictates that we need to fill out a good chunk of the staff with young animators right out of school or with less than 2 years working experience. The quick rise to full film animator status adds a kind of legitimacy to the workflow of the young animator, thus cutting short many advances in their development. After all, why should we bother learning to do things a better way? We’ve got our job at (insert big name studio here) already- seems good enough for us. But there’s a danger in this- the stagnation of learning only cements bad methodologies and as time passes these weaker methodologies become the new defacto “right way”. Youth by nature has a dismissive hubris toward age and experience. Sometimes this is good. Often times it is bad. Old knowledge is devalued or lost. I am convinced that if I had spent 2 or 3 years apprenticing under an experienced traditional animator that I’d be much further along in my skill than I am today. But these opportunities don’t even exist in CG and they are increasingly scarce anywhere in the world now.

Then there’s the endless noodling of CG animation. The “easiness” of change in CG is a trap. Animators noodle. Supervisors noodle. Directors noodle. Producers noodle. Executives noodle. In an effort for everybody to take part in the decision process nobody is decisive- so the work constantly gets reworked. There does come a point where continual tweaking makes a scene worse- not better. Sometimes a thing really is better the first or second time instead of the 8th, 9th or 20th time. Of course for that to be true you do kinda have to know what you’re doing. And just as often after a scene is noodled it’s not really any better- it’s just different. When I was a supervisor I always asked myself The note that I want to give to this animator about this scene- will it really make the scene better/clearer/funnier/stronger? Or will it just make it different in a way that is more like the way I would have done it? The former is a valid supervisory note. The latter is ego stroking and frustrating to the animator. We have far too much of the latter in the business these days.

Whatever the cause, the reality is that it takes us a lot longer to get the job done than it used to take this other bygone generation of animators. But I don’t think the task is beyond us if the current marketplace was different. I think experienced professional animators of this CG generation could match the old 1938 numbers if we cut out the noodling and decided to use a more exaggerated style of motion. But even then fixing those two conditions isn’t enough if you really don’t know how to animate and you have to rely on brute force to get things looking good. Brute force doesn’t scale well.

Worshipping at the altar of innefficiency

Have you ever had your entire concept of the craft of animation shattered? About 3 or 4 years ago I did and it blew my mind. I’d been talking with some older hand drawn animators, listening to their stories, as well as reading some interviews and such. When I found out about how much footage old school Disney animators and Warner Bros animators used to do back in the golden age of animation and I just couldn’t believe what I heard. They were absolutely smoking what we do now- and they were making work that was magnitudes better looking than what we do now. This so ruptured my concept of what it means to do quality animation that I then went on to try and understand what it is that I had gotten so wrong all these years.

I got to thinking about this again when Hans Perk posted a 1938 Disney memo on his blog the other day. The memo details the footage accomplishments of various animators in the Disney studio at that time. The numbers are mind blowing. The average animator at the Disney studio in 1938 was producing 3.75 feet of animation per day, 18.75 feet per week or roughly 14 seconds per week.

I’ll let that settle in for a moment.

For many years I labored in CG animation under the illusion that if only I had a lower footage quota- then I could do top notch work. I recall wistful conversations with younger animators in lower tier studios about the low footage quotas of 4 seconds per week at places like Pixar, Blue Sky, Dreamworks, etc. It was like some holy grail for those of us laboring away in the 12-18 seconds per week world of direct to video. If only we didn’t have such cheap bosses then we too could make really high quality animation. Today I’m not convinced that this is necessarily true.

Of course footage quotas are always sliding depending on shot complexity, etc. But in general your typical feature film CG animation studio has an average per animator footage quota of roughly 4-6 seconds per week. 4 in the beginning of production, 6 towards the end. Some studios do more, some less, but these are the typical numbers for your “high end” feature shops. I was under the misguided notion for many years that if only I could have such luxury then I’d be a good animator.

I’m of the opinion now that I was wrong. How else can we explain that Ollie Johnson, considered a slow animator at Disney in 1938, did almost TWICE that? Are we making animation that is 2x better than Ollie Johnson did on Snow White or Pinocchio? I’m not convinced of of that. And what about guys like Norm Ferguson who kicked out a staggering 23 seconds per week? I read recently on Michael Sporn’s blog that during the 70’s on the Doonesbury film that animator Tissa David was doing 100 feet per week of nearly full animation. That’s over a minute per week!! What did they have in the water back then? Clearly there must be something else - or a combination of somethings- at work here.

I used to have a number of arguments to excuse away my own inefficiency and poor results. “Yeah, but those guys didn’t have to clean up their work. They had assistants do that.” True. They usually had just one assistant. So even if you cut the footage in half the numbers are still impressive by modern film standards. That means Norm Ferguson and his assistant combined were doing 12 seconds per week of final polished animation on Snow White. Frank Thomas and his assistant were doing 10 seconds per week of final polished animation combined. Milt Kahl & assistant over 7 seconds per week. Same for Art Babbit, Grim Natwick and Ward Kimball. But I think perhaps even this is too simplistic a point. The assistants drew everything based on the keys, breakdowns, extreme drawings and timing charts invented by these animators. Meaning the animators defined every single creative aspect of the performance and the assistant drew the inbetweens and did clean ups based on those decisions. Every single creative performance decision - all created, drawn, noted and communicated to another person- without the benefit of instant video feedback at the push of a button! Think of it. How many of us could do 10 seconds per week of final animation at a level that Frank Thomas did in 1938 without making 20 playblast previews a day?

“Yeah, but these guys are legends. They’re not like us. Give us 40 years in the business and I bet we could do the same.”. Not quite. The footage numbers on Hans’ blog are from 1938. Long, long, long before these guys were the 9 Old Men or whatever. They were young guys. Probably not a gray hair in the entire crew except for maybe Grim Natwick. They even had the added burden of inventing the entire medium while hitting these numbers.

“Well, they were animating on 2’s. They didn’t need to clean up 24 drawings per second like we do.” Kinda. Often they worked on 2’s, but in full feature animation back then more often than not they worked in a mixed 1’s and 2’s format. A lot of CG animators wouldn’t even begin to know how to handle that. I know I didn’t until I took the time to learn how to do it- from an old school animator, of course. Mixed timing in many respects is more complex than fixed timing on 1’s.

One by one I learned that my excuses were just that. Sooner or later I had to face the fact that the reason I was slower and made poorer results was that I really did not know how to animate. I could make fine enough animation results, get work. I had an eye and a talent for motion and performance, but that’s a different thing altogether than knowing how to animate. It’s the difference between being a food critic and being Emeril Legasse. The critic knows food and definitely knows what he’s talking about- and if given the opportunity probably could plunk about in the kitchen and whip up a nice meal from a recipe in an hour or so. But the chef is the one who could make the dish from scratch in under 20 minutes and give you 10 variations on the theme. Both know food- but only one really knows how to cook. In the same way I had to admit that I knew animation, but I didn’t know how to animate.
More to come…

Why do you seek the living among the dead?

Today marks the great celebration of life over death. Today marks the day that Jesus Christ- the Son of God- walked out of a tomb after his body lay cold, lifeless and without a pulse for 3 days. Today marks the day when a way for us to get back to God was sealed because the seal on a gravestone was broken. For two millenia now men and women the world over have gone to their graves full of hope- often with great pain and sacrifice- because they believed the same thing. For two millenia now unbelieving men and women have mocked and scoffed at those who believe the resurrection of Christ is true. For centuries men have sought the body of Christ in vain. Technology has not made this search any more fruitful. It will never do so. The reason why is simple: You cannot find a living body among the dead.

So to everyone who believes- and even those who think all of this is foolishness- I wish you a Happy Easter!!

Metapost: VTS20 now available in Back Issue Store

I don’t hype my back issue store here a lot. I dunno why- guess I’m not the world’s smartest self promoter. Anyhooo, I do have an online store where non subscribers to my Video Tutorial Service can download individual videos a la carte. One hitch is that non subscribers have to wait 6 months longer than subscribers to get access to videos. It’s kinda an incentive to make my awesome subscribers feel like they’re special- which they are!

Anyhow, at the beginning of each month I make a new back issue VTS video available for public purchase. This month I’m releasing VTS20 (subscribers are currently on VTS26). The topic is Blocking & Breakdowns Part III. I think the whole Blocking & breakdowns discussion is some of my better work in the VTS if I may say so myself. You can check it out in the back issue section of my online store.

Toon Snap Tutorial now in Korean

Special thanks to Choi Kyu-bo for his efforts in translating my older Toon Snap quick tip tutorial in Korean. So for you folks who like to read animation tutorials in Korean- and we know there are many of you - then enjoy this new translation.

More info on Blender puppet plug in…

Andrew, the author of the PuppetVision blog wrote me to explain in further detail about the Blender puppet plug in he’s helping to develop called Panda Puppet. He said I could share his thoughts here….

Thanks for taking notice of my digital puppetry project! I had actually been
looking at a bunch of the tutorials on your site earlier today so it was neat
to see that.

Just to clarify though, Panda Puppet isn’t really motion capture. Although it
could certainly work with motion capture and it is possible to have direct
control over over a character’s movement, Blender’s real-time engine is kind of
lousy so the easiest way to control a character is to assign hand-keyed Blender
“Actions” (short animated movements like a hand gesture…I assume Maya has
something similar) to different controls. A large library of actions can be
developed and then what a puppeteer is really doing is mixing different actions
together on the fly to create a performance.

The effectiveness of this type of system is really dependent on having a
skilled animator setting up and rigging the character (I am trying to recruit
some experienced Blender animators to help out with the project). The
rudimentary-looking tests right now are more of a testament to my very limited
character animation skills than any real limitations with this technique.

So there you have it- hopefully that helps fill in the blanks for everybody. I think it sounds like a pretty cool system in theory.

Circuit City Stinks

I’ll never shop there again. This is such a low class, corporate baron move that it borders on the immoral. I realize that this sort of thing goes on in an unspoken way all the time in corporate America- but that they’re being so brazen about it shows a callousness that defies description.

Circuit City to cut more than 3,500 jobs

NEW YORK - A new plan for layoffs at Circuit City is openly targeting better-paid workers, risking a public backlash by implying that its wages are as subject to discounts as its flat-screen TVs.

The electronics retailer, facing larger competitors and falling sales, said Wednesday that it would lay off about 3,400 store workers — immediately — and replace them with lower-paid new hires as soon as possible.

That’s right. You’re getting your head handed to you in the business arena so the first place you look to save money is the little guys who work for you. Because you know shaving off $2 per hour for 3500 people who need every dollar they can get is really gonna be a huge advantage for you. Let’s see, if those 3500 people are fulltime employees, that means they work 40 hours a week. So that’s a saving of $80 per week per laid off employee. That comes out to about $4,100 per year per laid off employee. Multiply that by 3500 and you get a yearly payroll savings of about $14.5 million. How much does the CEO of Circuit City make each year? Funny you should ask. If you look on page 13 of the May 2006 Proxy Statement for Circuit City you’ll find that CEO Philip Schnoover had a 2006 compensation package that equalled roughly $4.85 million. The poor dear, he can’t afford to buy his own private jet with such a paltry wage. All the other CEO’s are laughing at him, I’m sure. And if you added up all the 2006 stock options for the executives who lead this foundering ship it comes to a tidy little $17.5 million- which is more than they’ll save by taking away the livelihood of 3500 people who were most likely their most loyal employees (It stands to reason in the world of retail that if the folks have a higher wage then these are the people who have stuck around the longest and been your go-to people). Logic dictates they should actually show leadership and refuse those lucrative stock rewards since they’re doing such a crappy job running the company. Nope. It’s easier to just fire 3500 people making $7.50 per hour and replacing them with people making $5.15 per hour because you know, it’s the floor people’s fault Circuit City is getting it’s butt kicked.

Nice.

I realize that I’m tipping at windmills here, but if enough people actually called dirty dealing what it is instead of passively rolling over and saying “Well, that’s the way it is in business” then maybe things would be different. I’ll do my part here and now. If enough of us Quixotic types tip at these windmills maybe one day they’ll get the idea. I’ll be in the market for TV’s and appliances again someday. I think you know which store won’t be getting my money.
Read the full, pathetic story here.

Blender + realtime puppetry = interesting

I found this post over on the PuppetVision blog to be very intriguing. He’s developing an open source real time puppetry input device that will work with the free CG content program Blender. Early tests seem pretty rudimentary and rough right now, but I’m willing to bet it’ll be a very interesting new toy when it’s done. At the very least it’s a step forward in creating a kitchen-table-top version of the kind of technology that larger budgeted filmmakers have had access to for a while. He says you can use all manner of interfaces to drive the thing- even a Wii controller. Once completed it promises to open some interesting doors for independent non-camera filmmakers. And I am sure it will generate a new wave of conversations in the “animation” world.

I’ve seen some work done by the Henson folks with their realtime puppetry input devices on rendered CG before. Blur Studio did a pilot for Fox a few years back, forget the name of the thing. Something about a space alien named Fred or somesuch. Needless to say it wasn’t quite up there with hand keyed facial animation. In fact it really wasn’t even close. But for realtime… not bad. But remapping systems of facial capture might suffocate this realtime puppetry baby in the cradle. Depends if a good and affordable facial capture/remapping system can be developed. Right now any capture systems are heavy on the hardware/software side. I wonder when you’ll see $500 home motion capture systems? With the Youtube-ization of the world I’d say maybe 5 years? I’m sure there will always be those who prefer the hands on (hands in?) approach to traditional puppetry. But full body puppetry has been a mainstay of the art form for a long, long time. The lines between what we call mo-cap or perf-cap and puppetry are getting blurrier. In the end it’s all about taking some motion in realtime and remembering it and putting it into some kind of rendered avatar. The rest is semantics and hype.
Right now anything that has a processed or ‘rendered’ image seems to be lumped into the animation categorization. Any advanced machinima efforts will probably face similar ghetto-ization. Too bad for them- they’ll get stuck at the kiddie card table at the family reunion just like us animators. heh. Still, for the shoestring budget indy “non-realist’ filmmaker this could be a revolutionary new toy. Puppetry is a fantastic art form and craft. By the strictest of interpretations (seemingly not much of a concern to most) it’s not ‘animation’, though. Digitally rendering the performance capture of a digital puppet does get the idea engine running, though. I dig puppetry- it’s a lot of fun. I still like sock puppets, though. for me the rougher the puppet the more entertaining it seems to be. I don’t know why- I think it’s the absurdity of it all that makes me laugh.

Anyhow…. interesting times indeed.

Interesting reading items this week…

From CinemaTech… Google’s CEO: Old and New Media Have Different Views on Content’s Value
Google’s decided to not worry about that whole “Do no evil” motto. Significantly they seem to have adopted a cold corporatist ideal about the value of media content. Namely, it’s only valuable if lots of people go to see it. So popularity = value. I dunno, but when it comes to art & media that seems like the crassest of all possible evaluations. No room for the important works that speak truth to the human condition. Not unless it can get millions of views and Google can monetize it with AdSense. Pretty pathetic if you ask me.

John K Talks Up the Sponsored Ad Approach
He makes a very valid point. People today skip ads like the plague. The common sense solution is to make the ads entertaining and fun to watch. Right now we only have one media event where this is a stated goal and people wait in anticipation to see how they’ll be entertained next with the ads- the Super Bowl. The problem is the ads are only fresh for a little while until they are run into the ground 6 months later. An episodic entertainment concept with an advertising undercurrent seems to me it might work. Not sure the current Raketu stuff K’s been doing is the answer (it’s OK for what it is, I guess. John K’s stuff always leaves me cold and the actual execution on this feels really rough and cheap), but I think the concept holds water.

J.J. Sedelmaier waxes eloquent about the wonderful variety and texture of animation.
His fullisades against the motion and design hegemony of the current CG craze echoes some of my own thoughts exactly. His final stance is fairly optimistic. The best thing to happen to animation diversity is to be squeezed by a giant 880lb style gorilla. I’d have to agree. The crushing dullness and boredom of the current CG style of animation has pushed me to try and find something else to charge my creative batteries- to find a different variety and style that has more of that human touch to it.

O-Meon tells a crazy tale about the world of Disney’s TuneStudio’s Tinkerbell film.
I’m so far waiting to turn in my score card on my take on Lasseter’s running of Disney’s creative efforts but on this issue it seems like he’s on the right track.

London Times article on Sylvain Chomet’s newest film

Read this nice write up. It holds some interesting perspectives about living life under the radar of the big budget Hollywood animated film formula. Oscar nominated animation director Sylvain Chomet is developing an old unproduced Jacques Tati script (titled The Illusionist) into an animated feature for about $19-20mil USD. That’s not bad money for a Euro production. His latest film, Triplettes of Belleville was made for somewhere around $10-12mil USD. Having seen how much production budget in big Hollywood projects gets literally wasted I think that it’s quite possible for a director driven film to be very successfully made for $20mil. And by “successfully made” I mean “you won’t be tempted to gouge your eyeballs out using your Slurpee straw/scooper”. I think this $20mil mark is actually a kind of ’sweet spot’ for indy animated features. It’s almost right in line with the average production budget for a live action Hollywood film. Being thus far under the insane-o-sphere $100mil budget means the money comes with a lot fewer strings attached- and a good deal less “executive meddling”. Now obviously you’re not gonna wow the world with some new gew-gaw technology, but you do have a better than average chance of being left alone long enough to actually tell a real story. This as opposed to selling Happy Meals and linens. Of course to actually get that $20mil you need to prove that you can deliver the goods for significantly less a time or two, so this is no quick road to glory.

Max the Hare Cycle from 1935

Not sure if everybody here has Michael Sporn’s Splog on their daily RSS feed (if you don’t then well shame on you!), but juuuust in case you haven’t seen it yet check out the drawings he’s posted of the animation hop/run/strut cycle of Max the Hare. This was done in 1935.

That’s 72 years ago people.

Here’s a Quicktime version I put together from the drawings. Sadly I don’t have the short film here to reference. This first QT is a simple 12fps (shot on 2’s). Feels a little floaty-ish to me so I suspect that maybe there’s some 1’s intended here. But maybe not.

http://www.keithlango.com/video/MaxHareRun.mov

I don’t have the timing charts so I don’t know exactly how the animator wanted it to play out. There are 8 drawings to the stride cycle (heel contact to heel contact) so if it was on straight 2’s it would come out to a 16 beat- which is really kinda slow (thus the pokey feeling on 2’s). If you played it on 1’s you’d get an 8 beat, which is about the fastest action beat you’re gonna find in a golden age cartoon. So my guess is it’s a straight 12 beat cycle with some drawings on 1’s to add some pop. Here was my guess after messing around a bit in a pencil shooter. This is a 12 beat cycle (each stride takes half a second) with mixed 1’s and 2’s…

http://www.keithlango.com/video/Max_MixedOnesAndTwos.mov

That one feels like it’s got the sass that I can see in the drawings. It’s fun to dig in and guess around how the animator wanted this to time out. It’s like trying to get in their head 70 years later. I love doing this stuff.
Anyhow…

Michael notes…

It’s interesting that he’s off the ground for 5 out of every 12 drawings. It helps create a delicate buoyancy overall. This is feasibly impossible, but it makes the run richer.

For all our modern wizardry this is the kind of thing that a lot of us CG animators seem to struggle in capturing well- the playfulness of cartoon physics. I have my theories as to why, but I’m gonna solidify them before I say anything more. But rest assured- I will say more. Eventually.

Bradford Animation Festival Panel Talks

Want to listen to some fun animation type discussion while you work? Check out the podcasts of the panel discussions from the Bradford Animation Festival website. The panels discuss various animated things and feature animation directors Marc Craste (he of Pica Towers and JoJo and the Stars fame) and Peter Lord (he of Aardman fame), as well as others. Good stuff, a fun listen.

Thanks to Richard Drumm for the link/tip!

It’s just plain funny

click image to watch clip on DailyMotion

Saw this Tex Avery clip posted yesterday at Kevin Langley’s Goober Sleave blog. I must have watched this 20 or 30 times yesterday and I laughed everytime. Man this is good. It’s such a simple idea but it’s done so well. The voice acting is great, the poses are hysterical. The animation isn’t over the top outrageous, but it possesses a deft touch and is very funny. Timing is impeccable. I think Tex’s timing is just genius. I just love the absurdity of it. Please Lord, let me do something this good and funny some day. Heh.

Nice interview with Oscar winning director Torill Kove

Torill Kove just won the Best Animated Short Film Oscar for her film The Danish Poet.

Animated Views has a nice interview with her. She seems so very down to earth and matter of fact about her animation and her outlook on it. I really admire her point of view. I very much liked her previously nominated film, My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts, too. Her work has a very unassuming style- she’s just confident in who she is as a filmmaker and what her films are. There seems to be no hint of trying to impress anybody or silence any critics, just pure storytelling and charm. Congrats to Torill for her success and her wonderful films.

Boy, You Just Gotta Hand it to Disney Marketing

Rats run wild in KFC-Taco Bell in N.Y.

By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - New Yorkers are used to seeing rats where they catch their trains — not where they buy their burritos. About a dozen rats were having a grand party Friday in a locked KFC/Taco Bell restaurant, scampering around the floor, playing with each other and sniffing for food as they dashed around tables and children’s high chairs.

Onlookers could not keep their eyes away from the jaw-dropping sight — a gang of urban vermin invading a restaurant that had been taking people’s chicken and taco orders just a day earlier. Video of the rats was seen around the world, disseminated on TV stations and the Internet…

full story

Coming soon to a theater near you… Ratatouille!!

Hee-hee

The Annie Awards break into the Mainstream Press

Man Charged With Uploading Animated Film Flushed Away onto Internet

LOS ANGELES - A man who allegedly uploaded a copy of the film “Flushed Away” onto the Internet after getting a copy from an Oscar voter faces a felony charge.

Salvador Nunez Jr., 27, was charged with copyright infringement and faces up to three years in prison if convicted. He was scheduled to appear in court March 1.

Prosecutors said he obtained a copy of the movie after it was sent in advanced to his sister, an Oscar voter and member of The International Animated Film Society.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences received a tip in early January that someone put “Flushed Away” on the Internet, and a digital watermark identified it as an Academy screener film.

When interviewed by FBI agents, Nunez acknowledged he uploaded “Flushed Away” and the Oscar-nominated film “Happy Feet” onto the Internet, court documents said. However, investigators only found a copy of “Flushed Away” in his computer hard drive.

“Flushed Away,” won four prizes on Feb. 11 at the Annie Awards, honoring achievements in feature film and television animation.

It wasn’t immediately known whether Nunez has retained an attorney. His home phone number was not listed.

Oh well. You know what they say. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Victor’s F-Curve Tutorial

New to CG animation? Confused by function curves? Does the Colored Spaghetti Box intimidate you?

The talented, kindly and handsome Victor Navone has written a tutorial explaining how to see, understand and use those little threads of color in your CG scene. Part 1 is like a primer. He says it’ll be a 3 part series. Kinda like Lord of the Splines. Or Spline Wars. Anyhoo, check out part 1.

And this…

American writer Charles McNulty waxes poetic about the plusses of British acting chops. A snippet..

But it’s not just glorious sound that sets British veterans apart. It’s their ability to wring complex meanings from a single line. They invite us not just into their characters’ minds but into their intricate thought processes as well. Still, it’s not a strictly realistic affair. These talents are drawn from a theatrical heritage that recognises drama as more than a slice of life. Too many US actors have become enslaved to a form of behavioural banality in which the highest value is placed on mimicking everyday life; at its worst fetishising the commonplace at the expense of the revelatory.

Let’s face it: realism for realism’s sake grows tedious. But don’t blame the Method, whose greatest practitioners, such as Marlon Brando, were master stylists, selecting and distilling their actions to endow an appearance of reality with interpretive understanding.

I’ll let you connect the dots.

(yes, I know… but I’m just sitting here waiting for this month’s VTS video to compress and reading my RSS feed. So sue me.)

Just read it

The Animation Guild’s Steve Hulett offers a spoonful of his wisdom toward the young and idealistic animation worker bee.

No further comment from me. Just read it.

Two things

First…

If you like the Corel’s Painter program and wanted to have a copy for use at home or for your own personal projects, but you are kinda scared by the sticker price then you have got to check out Artweaver. It looks and feels a lot like Painter. It’s fast, light and stable and has a lot of the natural media tools and brushes of Painter.

click to make bigger-ish. Excuse the doodle. I was just messin’ around.

And the price? Yeah, it’s kinda like FREE. As in you don’t need to pay for it but you can still use it kind of free. They have a PayPal donation button on their site. Definitely drop a few pennies in that tip jar, man.
And the installer download? Under 7mb. Gosh, who doesn’t like OpenSource software? Makes me glad I never spent the cash to upgrade my old copy of Painter. For what I do this is plenty strong enough.

Second…

I only regret that when I had my chance to work on Mickey Mouse that I wasn’t good enough to do anything even close to this excellent with him.

click for a better look

Just look at that pose. I know we were stuck doing him in CG and we had all kinds of challenges with rigs and stuff, but that’s no excuse. When you’re not good enough you just need to own up to it. And I wasn’t good enough to make it sing. Not like this. If only I knew then what I know now. It makes me sigh for opportunities lost.

Next…

While it’s been fun having the mic for the last year or two, I need to take step back on this whole blogging thing. Posts will be significantly less frequent and the topics will tend to stick to the business of my VTS or APT programs. Occasionally I may put up a post showing some cool stuff I’ve found or that I’m doing. However right now I have some doors that I need to walk through and I need to put my focus in the right place until I reach the other side. So I leave the stage to other well versed and intelligent commentators on the state, nature and potential of this thing we all love called animation.

ps: And no, the recent idiocy among some troll commentators on the Bee Movie thread has absolutely nothing to do with this. I couldn’t care less about such silliness as it doesn’t affect me at all. Seriously, this is just a personal decision and the time is right for it now.

Now this looks like fun

Thousands aim to break snow angel record

BISMARCK, N.D. - Among the thousands of people frantically flapping in the snow Saturday in an attempt to set the record for the most snow angels ever made were parents, children, even snowplow drivers. And then there was Pauline Jaeger — who on her 99th birthday, was making her very first angel.
“It’s fun,” Jaeger said. “I feel just like a kid.”

Read the full story here.

I should be doing stuff like this instead of blabbing on about animation. Heh.

To Bee CG or Not to Bee….

New trailer for DW’s Bee Movie…

click image to go to the trailer
Alright, at the risk of being a downer, was I the only person more entertained by the live action than the animation? And the first trailer (also live action) was really funny as well. But this…. I dunno why, but it felt like the fun just fell out the bottom of the piece once it went to animation. For an advert to an animated movie isn’t this supposed to be the other way around? Don’t get me wrong. I really, really, REALLY wanted this to make me smile. When I heard they had animation in this trailer I thought “Cool!”. After watching it I thought “Gee…”.
This was funny…

This was supposed to be funny.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Don’t judge a whole movie just by a trailer (but isn’t that what trailers are for?). And yes, of course I’m just bitter and I can’t hold the jock of the least animator/artist working on this film and if I’m so smart why don’t I just shut up and prove it by making something better, blah, blah. All valid counter points so please feel free to ignore me at your leisure. I’m just sayin’ — I really had hopes the animated part would make me smile.

Truth be told I’m digging the whole premise of Jerry trying to do a preposterous children’s bee movie in a costume. So far it’s been pretty funny and it has potential. Ironic.

Update: I’ve had to turn off comments for this thread. A few stupid fraudulent comments and some trolling have pretty much ruined the fun for everyone and I don’t have time to be playing games straightening out the idiocy. The troll comments came from the Dreamworks IP and the ReelFX IP addresses (I do have decent admin tools for this blog, you know). Nice work, boys. A real high water mark of professionalism. I’m sure your studio bosses would be proud.

Fun Animated Music Video- “Word of Mouth”

Thanks to friend of the blog Frank Ladner for the head’s up on this one. This music video was directed by Chris Oatley. His site has some other really nice cartoony stuff as well. He credits Pablo Smith with the animation. Pablo’s got some fun pencil tests in his link as well. Fun stuff.
You can tell this music vid was done on a budget but it’s still quite imaginative. I appreciate how it makes nice use of design and some really well crafted limited inbetweens to keep it feeling lively. Music’s kinda cool, too.

I know how it feels….

The talented Sean Hayden (who has a really nifty blog) is working on a personal short film project and he touches upon a problem I can really relate to.

It seems that he, like many creative types, has a kind of weariness for the actual implementation of the cool ideas he cooks up. In his latest post he shares how he keeps that spark alive while not de-railing the current project– Make something new! Just don’t do anything with it for now.

It’s a great way to keep yourself fresh. Creation and development of a thing is certainly more adrenaline & excitement laden than the drudgery of actually making it. And don’t be fooled- drudgery there is in the making and no shortage of it. Anyone who has made a short film or any artistic project that spans months or years knows what I’m talking about. You cannot avoid those grey days when the ideas are lame, the dialog is stupid, the jokes aren’t funny and the art is hackneyed and second rate. It usually takes stepping away and re-engaging your creative side to get back on track.

When I was younger I was a tad bit more militant about the doing of something. Success required focus, effort, discipline, etc. So I used to not allow myself to even start a new idea until I finished the old one first. After some time I realized that I was losing good ideas and hurting my execution of the current one. So if I had a new idea I allowed myself a short two or three day stint to get the initial thing down and store it away for later keeping. The flurry of thought and energy that came out in that brief hiatus was a great tonic for the production blues. It really seemed to scratch that itch and I was able to come back to my old project with my brain de-funked enough to see the old things more clearly and with fresh eyes.

There is another benefit to this “take a break and make something new” approach- perspective. Every idea seems cool and fantastic when you first think it up, but with the benefit of distance and time you get to see how it might not have been the coolest thing that you thought it was. This way if the idea was only a passing phase (like a bout of creative gas after a bean burrito) you only lost a few days on it- and hopefully still had fun with the idea even though nothing more will come of it. And for those ideas that are still fresh, exciting and funny a full 6 or 10 months after you initially recorded them, well those become your next project. Hopefully.
Anyhow, for some nifty stuff check out Mr. Hayden’s blog. His has like real art and stuff on it. Unlike this one. (to my great shame).

The Art of Joyfulness

I’m no art historian (not by any stretch) so it’s difficult for me to offer many insights into the underpinnings of fine art like Uncle Eddie can. However I can still try my hand at it. In that light I really enjoyed reading this Guardian article on the unapologetic pleasantness of Renoir’s paintings. The article begins…

We have no language in which to praise gentleness. A century of revolution since Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon has made it almost impossible to say: “This art is pretty, unchallenging and middle-class, and I like it.” Well, I like the art of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and it is all those things.

I’d love to be able to show you the dark side of Renoir’s art, but close as I look, I can’t find social criticism or anxiety in his canvases. Even when it rains, his Paris is a joyful place where people don’t so much cower under their umbrellas as flirt and chatter beneath a dancing cluster of bobbing blue canopies. His painting Les Parapluies (The Umbrellas) in London’s National Gallery may as well be called I Love Paris in the Rain.

While other ’serious’ artists of the time mocked and derided his work, I think there’s a lot to be said for trying to find a way to celebrate life through art. I’m sure I betray my unwashed bourgeois tastes when I admit that we had a few Renoir prints in our house in the States. I liked them. The pictures just added a lightness to whatever room they were in. I mean life is hard and dark enough already, why gloom it up at home? I’m sure if I had attended art school I’d have been informed about how low minded I would be to like Renoir. Thankfully I never attended art school. But I am reminded of this helpful little passage from The Good Book…

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

A refreshing imperative in the age of post modern de-constructivism, no? This Guardian piece has come at a good time for me. I’m in the midst of some deeper self critique right now and I’ve come to realize that I’ve picked up a bit of a negative habit from ye olde’ family tree. Namely, I easily tend toward being a bit too critical in life. In time one wakes to find he sees a crumudgeon in the mirror. Crumudgeons make great cartoon characters, but they’re utterly sorry traveling companions on the road of life. Thus a new effort is under way to arrange my constitutional cupboard to be a bit brighter and a good deal less spider-webby. Our little animated corner of the world has enough rancor as it is. Who needs another big mouth being negative about it? I think that constructive critique is good and necessary and you can be sure I’ll not shy away from it. Yet the polarity of dialogue in animation is astounding. I’m thankful for the few reasoned voices out there and I quote them and their blogs here often. But critique is necessary to improve and refine. The key word is ‘constructive’. Critiques can be offered in a pleasant- even joyful way. In fact the critiqued individual is owed this level of respect. Moving forward I hope to be more pleasant, kind and joyful in my life — including my writings and my animation.

Speaking of which, I need to get crackin’ and post some new stuff I’ve been messing with. But I still have the CG Character controls thread to wrap up and I have a backlog of Ant Bully scenes that I have ripped that need to be plunked up on my gallery page. (not that they’re that great, but they’re at least newer than what’s already there.) I’m such a slacker. Heh.

If You’re Gonna Play Ball….

Then play ball to win. Just remember to play fair.

What in the world am I talking about? Well, I know this is last week’s news, but I’m only now getting around to getting my thoughts clear. On the Cartoon Brew (love the new look) last week Amid called out Cuppa Coffee studio for their online animation contest and he wasn’t exactly delicate about his disapproval, either. Cuppa responded and it seems a bit of a spat was on. Now I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I do have some observations and maybe a word of caution to you younger folks out there.

The basic gist of Amid’s complaint was that Cuppa-Coffee was being — shall we say exploitative – of less experienced animators’ ignorance of the current mechanisms of the TV animation development market. The rough idea of Cuppa’s contest is this: You submit your animation short film to their online contest. The winning animation ideas will be developed by Cuppa (”development” probably means they do some additional art and story idea work to get it ready for a network pitch) and they will pitch it to TV networks to try and get the show picked up. So far, seems reasonable, right? Well, there’s a little bit of a catch- you surrender all rights to your work forever. And you surrender them regardless if you win, regardless if your idea gets developed or anything ever comes of the contest. In the very act of submitting something to them you surrender your rights to it. The reason this is kinda dangerous for you is that the landscape of media distribution is changing. There’s more than just TV and good marketable ideas are at a premium. If in 10 years your idea is the perfect idea for an internet show then Cuppa Coffee owns your idea and you don’t. Or if Cuppa Coffee wants to use your character as their new mascot, then you don’t have any say over that. Or if they have some down time, take your cool looking character, make an Oscar winning short film with it that then gets them a lucrative feature film deal with the Weinsteins doing something totally unrelated to your idea (but your idea won them the deal), you can be sure you have absolutely no claim on that. Or if they like your character and they decide to roll that character into another idea and create an amalgam of the two to make something new and that takes off as a new animated ringtone downloaded by tens of millions of iPhone owners, then you own jack diddly squat of that as well.

I think you get the picture.

Of course they say it’s implied that you’ll be included in some kind of remuneration negotiation should the network option your idea from Cuppa, which sounds all fair and reasonable. But in the game of business-ball all such implications are just of cotton candy wishes and rainbow dreams if it’s not written down and agreed to. The artist should try to retain rights with an understanding that if it gets optioned you can negotiate the rights at the proper time. Of course if that happens then the poor little artist would actually have some negotiating leverage and that’s not a winning business-ball play for the contest sponsor. Nope, better to sew up the rights before anything gets out of hand. It’s a pretty simple hardball business move. Nothing illegal. Maybe not even immoral- though I have my doubts. So why do I bring it up if I don’t want to get involved in some other fella’s fight (and I don’t)? I see that my job is to let you the artist know this one thing- the reality is that you as a creator just don’t need to surrender your leverage like that.

I’m not gonna pretend to be all indignant about what Cuppa Coffee is doing. They’re just playing business-ball (though it appears by their response they don’t want us to think they are. It’s probably not the best idea to play the offended party on this one, fellas). It’s not that Cuppa Coffee was being dishonest. They put it right out there in their disclaimers- you surrender all rights to the work hereafter forever and ever amen. It’s there in black and white and it’s not even written in hard to understand legal-ese. So they’re not hiding anything and they weren’t trying to trick anybody. But this whole notion of trading exposure for the inexperienced artist while corporate benefactors enjoy the fruits of those labors- well, it’s as old as the hills. And it’s not exactly the most genteel of arrangements. It’s a pretty standard hardball business move. It’s an effort to expand the studio’s “idea potential” for very little investment. Call it reducing the cost of acquiring the raw materials of doing business. Heh. They’re doing this by getting a volunteer crew to give away their ideas in exchange for an opportunity. Of course they kinda forget to mention that it’s an opportunity which the animators already have in a highly liquid market, they just aren’t aware of it yet. But hey, you’re playing business-ball. It’s not your job to make sure everybody knows what their rights and opportunities are. If they can’t keep up, you score and take the lead. And harvesting ideas is the true gold in the development biz. The rest is window dressing. This contest isn’t illegal. It’s not uncommon. It is not without precedent. If it weren’t for the rights grab it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. But that rights grab is a pretty calculated corporate kind of move. Which is fine if that’s how you wanna roll. Most big companies make no bones about it- they’re playing hard ball and they are playing to win. Adjust accordingly.

Listen, you only have one thing to your work- you own it. Whether it makes you a dime or not, you own it. Even if you can’t monetize the actual work itself, your ownership allows you to leverage the work to promote something you can monetize. Rights are THE value in this game. Rights are not something you should give away without negotiation or compensation. Ever. Period. Really. The guys at JibJab have turned down opportunities to do projects that were worth tens of thousands of dollars simply because they have one rule for their studio- they absolutely retain all rights and ownership of the work. Period. They did this even when they were unknown nobodies. They did this even when those tens of thousands of dollars would have come in real handy. But there it is: The JibJab Law #1- Keep Your Rights. Why did they develop this rule? Well, one of the founding brothers is an MBA business school grad. Hmm. Do you think there’s something to this idea of rights retainment that maybe us artsy types aren’t understanding?

I’ve had the unique blessing of licensing the use of two of my creations to a media company. I licensed the use of my short film Lunch to Big Idea for them to put on a DVD home video. And for our children’s book property Gruntly & Iggy’s The Great Cheese Squeeze , Bryan Ballinger and I licensed that to Big Idea as well. With Lunch is was a simple, non exclusive right to use the film in exchange for a flat fee. They were a big company- having revenues that were in the $40-50million per year neighborhood, but somehow I managed to maintain all rights and ownership to my work. And trust me, they weren’t doing me any favors just because I worked there, either. But it was simple to see how the field was laid out. They had a need for suitable, quality content in a hurry. I had the content already finished and ready to use. The deal was plain- they could use it, but I still own it and they gave me X amount of dollars in exchange. Would they have liked to have gotten it for free? Sure, who wouldn’t? But in business-ball (as in life) you don’t always get what you want. For my part I was happy with the deal. For their part I think so were they (the DVD went on to sell about half a million units, so it couldn’t have been all bad.)

With the G&I book Bryan and I did sign over rights because the publisher (Zondervan) insisted that Big Idea own all copyrights. So in order to get the book published we signed over the copyrights. But that was part of the negotiation- not just a blind offering for free. In exchange we received additional value back on the money end to recompense our signing over the rights. And we didn’t just sign away the rights in perpetuity with no conditions attached. Bryan had a smart idea to negotiate the contract so that it had provisions to allow that the rights could come back to us should the company and publisher leave the property un-utilized for any period of 12 consecutive months. And in fact when Big Idea Productions filed bankruptcy it was decided by their new owners that they weren’t interested doing anything further with the property. So we employed the services of a lawyer and exercised our right in the original contract to reclaim ownership of the property. I am happy to say that today we own all rights to the property again. It was a solid seller in the children’s market and the property is pretty strong with lots of potential. We’re not doing anything with it- yet. But who knows what life will bring? Opportunities come along unannounced and luck favors the prepared, dahling. And if you don’t own your work, your quiver is empty when the targets come into view. Again, we were just two artists and we somehow managed to make provisions so that we retained opportunities to do something with our work. This is because we understood one thing- in the game of media business-ball ownership rights have real value.

All this to say, don’t ever, ever, ever give away rights to your work blindly, without condition and without real value in return. Rights have great value. The other player in the ballgame knows this. That’s why they want you to give it to them for free. Now you know, too.

North Korean animation

Well, this was an interesting find in ye olde’ feedreader this evening…

Seems when they’re not busy making nukes and being a general menace in Asia the fellas up in NoKo bang out their own animated TV shows for the kiddos to watch. Guess they gotta do something while they slowly starve in their bunker society. Thing is, on a TV level this stuff isn’t half bad. Oh it’s not good, no. But it’s not horrible like I expected, either. I’ve seen worse on US air/cable-waves, that’s for sure. Of course the stories might be a tad, um… “different”. To quote the story…

It ain’t exactly Warner Bros.—the cartoons are designed to “implant into the minds of children warm patriotism and towering hatred for the enemy,” according to official news agency KCNA.

All I gotta say is if you’re gonna have hatred for your enemies, make sure it’s not some half hearted wimpy hatred, but a towering hatred.

Check the full report from the Foreign Policy Passport blog. What? You mean you guys don’t read the FP? *tsk tsk*

The Altar of What I Like

I wonder what it is about animation that brings out the exclusivist in so many people? We all have our preferences true enough, but for some a preference isn’t enough. Rather something in them causes their preferences to rise to the lofty, holy position of The Only Right Best Way for animation. Anything that doesn’t fall in line with the preference is dismissed as “bad” or “crap”. It’s almost like animation for some has taken on a kind of religious fervor and in their fundamentalist zeal a sort of cartoon legalism sets in. It’s a very odd phenomena to behold, that’s for sure. I mean, really. It’s animation, not the cure for world hunger.I really have only two dislikes in animation. One is pointlessly offensive or prurient content that really doesn’t have anything positive to say about the world (or so overpowers the positive as to nullify its impact) and second would be dominant style hegemonies. The minute something becomes regularly declared as “the best” according to conventional wisdom is when you find me starting to look for a way off the ride. I guess I’m just enough of a contrarian to want to go the opposite direction from the crowd. That’s not saying that I have some higher degree of artistic integrity, either. I’m not motivated by a need to be in some exclusive club where the unwashed masses can’t possibly mingle for their lack of refined taste. I’m as unwashed as they come and my tastes are about as refined as a grilled Velveeta sandwich. I just always like rooting for the Davids in the battles of life rather than the Goliaths. Either that or it just means I don’t like crowds. Heh.

One thing that I find exciting about animation is the wide variety and texture of it. No doubt I have my preferences as well, but far be it from me to say that my way is The Only Right Best Way. We have deep seated rivalries that hold to all manner of fundamentalist ideas about TORBW to animate. Each style, culture or choice has it’s legion of worshipers and followers. European, Western, Japanese animation. Old TV, new TV, shorts, features, experimental, Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, Blue Sky, Aardman, Clampett, Jones, Avery, Hubley, UPA, MGM, Warner Brothers, Spumco. In many, many instances (some more than others) they each have been propped up like graven images of The Only Right Best Way to animate by somebody, somewhere. And heaven help you if you disagree.

And as if we don’t have enough verbal jihads over directors, cultural influences or studios, we have the whizzing matches over different forms of media. Hand drawn, CG, stop-motion, paper cut-out, oil on glass, mixed media- it’s just a wealth of textures, ideas, influences and expressions. They all have so many different things to find interesting in them. And naturally each one of us likes one or the other more than the rest. But to say that what we prefer is the absolute best animation ever is kinda silly. It’s like trying to decide what the best kind of food is in the world. It’s impossible, so don’t even try. Just enjoy them all and those that you don’t like, well… don’t eat ‘em.

The oddest thing is that this tendency to hold these polarizing views about animation seem to grow more insistent the longer one has been in the biz. Some of the most entrenched animation fundamentalists I know of are top level people, giants in the biz, really. Something happened along the way and the preference became something much more. The rules were carved in stone, the worship order set, the catechisms established and certain Hell awaits those heretics who do not bow down before The Only Right Best Way to animate.

I really can’t go along with any of it. I see no point in serving up animation Kool-Aid –of any flavor.

Thank you, Aardman!

Thank you for reminding me how fun animation can be.

Thank you for sticking to your charming, low-tech roots.

Thank you for not getting caught up in the latest dollar chasing craze.

Thank you for reminding me that “story” isn’t necessarily the most important thing in animation.

Thank you for your unapologetic avoidance of the snarky and cynical.

Thank you for the smile which grows across my face while I watch your animation.

Thank you for inspiring me to move forward in my own work simply by going back.

I happily lost almost an hour today watching these spots.

You can just tell– these guys were having an absolute blast when they made these spots.

Tell me this wouldn’t make a GREAT cartoon?

Psycho Space Chicks!!!

Space, spaceships, a dashing captain, girls, jealous catfights, kidnappings, wigs, weapons, pepper spray. Tell me you wouldn’t watch this. Somebody needs to get on this pronto! Heh.

Dig the Beat, Yo

I’m not sure how much the cool PuppetVision blog gets read in the animation world, specifically with CG guys, but I figure I’ll help with the cross pollination.
As for this clip, it’s a nifty little piece about how to make a funky smooth beat. Made by a group in Australia. Me likey.

I picked up the trail on this clip from the very friendly and fresh PuppetVision blog. I like PuppetVision because he seems to have a good bead on what’s happening in the puppetry world. One of my favorite shows in my teen years was The Muppet Show. Yes, I was that pathetic as a teen. But I just loved that show- never missed an episode. So puppetry has long been something I have a great appreciation for. Animation and puppetry are like kissing cousins. On the Ant Bully I had the great privilege of working with former Muppeteer and all around super fun human being Karen Prell. The life she could bring to anything in her hands was nothing short of magical. To watch her perform with a puppet for little kids was mesmerizing. She disappears and you find yourself relating to this flop of cloth on her arm as a real living breathing being, just like the 4 year olds in front of you. I’m thankful that over a decade ago Pixar took a flyer and hired her and trained her how to animate. She animates her characters with a great sense of fun as well. I know I always enjoyed going to dailies when Karen had a scene in the same sequence as mine. She’s just one of many folks from the DNA crew that I miss being around.

Too funny