The CG “Look”

As I’ve noted before I am enjoying my own little spelunking exercise with my Cg animation and art. It occurred to me that it might be beneficial to take some time to define what it is that I want to avoid. The tools, techniques, de-facto forms and visual styles of CG are so deeply ingrained into the mindset of most CG artists that I think it’s important to define them so as to more easily spot when they are creeping into my work. Plus I figure if I’m not quite sure where I want to end up on this little adventure at the very least it’d be good to know where I don’t want to go. And to be sure - while it is a big money maker and highly popular- the normal “CG look” is not a look that I’m interested in pursuing for the umpteenthousandth time in my career. Now before you get all up in arms I’m not saying the usual “CG Look” is bad or lacking artistry or has no value. It’s fine for those that wish to pursue that. I’m just on a different path, that’s all. You’re free to take your own path with blessing.
OK, caveats aside, just how do I define the “CG look” that I wish to avoid along this different path? It’s too simple to label it realism and it’s not expansive enough to say that the CG look is overly detail dense (both mistakes I’ve made before). A more subtle and sophisticated definition is needed. Perhaps this one will suffice…

One thing that CG has always been excellent at is expressing a thing (whether it be an object, a character, texture, light, shadow, movement) in a very specific and literal way. Even when stylized in form the tap-root of CG’s strength lies deep in the soil of specified literalism.
This of course begs the question- What do I mean by specified literalism?

Let’s look at these dictionary definitions for the word Literal:

Literal (adjective)
1. Being in accordance with, conforming to, or upholding the exact or primary meaning of a word or words.
2. Word for word; verbatim: a literal translation.
3. Avoiding exaggeration, metaphor, or embellishment; factual; prosaic: a literal description; a literal mind.
4. Consisting of, using, or expressed by letters: literal notation.
5. Conforming or limited to the simplest, nonfigurative, or most obvious meaning of a word or words.

And Literalism:

Literalism (noun)
1. Adherence to the explicit sense of a given text or doctrine.
2. Literal portrayal; realism.

And Specific:

Specific (adjective)
1. Explicitly set forth; definite.
2. Relating to, characterizing, or distinguishing a species.
3. Special, distinctive, or unique:

Specified being

tr.v. spec·i·fied, spec·i·fy·ing, spec·i·fies
1. To state explicitly or in detail:
2. To include in a specification.

So this is what I mean by Specified Literalism. It is the technique wherein there exists an overall exactness in visual representation. Objects, movement, elements, materials and substances -regardless of macro variations in design- are described using a visual vocabulary that is precise and generally not open to interpretation.

Example: A tree. To represent a tree using Specified Literalism you would make a trunk with an exterior of bark, branches that cascade in size inverse with complexity and tens of thousands of leaves. There may be any number of macro design decisions about the tree regarding it’s shape, color, species and proportion, but the visual vocabulary for representing this tree would be precise. To wit, a sampling of CG trees from films through the years:

Here we see literalism in not just the trees but the rocks, ashphalt, car paint, etc.

This is a close up so excuse the wizard hat. The trees have different form and proportion and color, but their elemental representation is still quite specific and literal.

Same thing only with tropical tree and plants. These may seem stylized but having lived in a tropical environment for a little bit now I can say that these trees aren’t too far from what we see in nature.

These here with the cow are kindergarten-ized trees, very simplistic in nature, yet still specific and literal in expression.

If you watch Geri’s Game closely you’ll see that Good Geri has yellow tree behind him and Bad Geri has red trees behind him. A nice storytelling touch. Still the trees are pretty literal outside of their color choices.

Another example: A building or room. Using the language of specified literalism you would determine what base material of construction the parts of the building are made up of. Then you would go about creating specific material and shape representations to express these objects or elements. Again a myriad of macro design choices aside, the visual language of specified literalism denotes that each brick will be defined, every stone represented, every material rather faithfully recreated in order to express a building. Again, some CG buildings culled from various films:

Here we see decorative elements meant to add an alien-esque flavor to the otherwise very literal and specific building materials we all are familiar with. Looks just like Mars should look. Ahem.

Very specific and literal, yet artfully done.

Again we see decorative elements mean to make this monster-esque but the materials remain specific and fairly literal.

Wonky angles, slightly off proportions and lots of literal glass, brick, grass, concrete, fur, etc.

Here the specificity of materials is downplayed (the concrete doesn’t scream LOOK AT! ME I’M CONCRETE!), but the forms are quite literal.

Fairly specific and literal take on your average American suburb

More alien-esque decorations and design choices laid over top of specific and literal expression of forms and materials.

The metal shelled quansit hut, floor materials, etc. all very specific and literal

Nice art deco style in the form, very specific expression of that design.

Another subject: Flesh. Regardless of species (whether real or imagined) to denote flesh in a specified literalistic manner you would be sure to include pores, wrinkles, body hair, blemishes, freckles, marks, scars, sub surface light scattering properties (a more recent technology) or other anomolies all with some significant degree of exactness. Again, examples…

Yes, green ogres don’t exist thus this is not ‘realism’. Still the flesh is represented in a very literal fashion.

The entire production design of The Incredibles values understatement in materials (like the building noted above). Even so understatement means it’s still literal, it’s just being whispered instead of screamed. Get out your DVD and watch those close up shots to see what I’m talking about.

Less whispering. The humans in the Shrek franchise have skin that is very literal.

Lots of close up’s of Al’s skin perhaps dictated a more literal approach.

With Skinner we see more subdued literal elements of pores, blemish and surface, but the subsurface scattering is turned up. Note the lip texture as well- quite specific and literal. Still a fun design from the realm of proportion. He was my favorite character to watch in the film.

All the humans in the film have a very healthy application of rouge to the cheeks- except the Anton Ego character. Here we see the freckles thing.

With all of these you can almost pick any substance and find the same visual law at work. Cloth, hair, atmosphere, etc. Certainly there are many variations of design, color, form and proportion at work- all evidence of artistic decision making. Again, I’m not saying that any of this is bad or lacking imagination or anything- I’m just examining the visual evidence to try and work out some definitions. There is lots of room for artistic license within this look. But even when presented with fantastical realms, materials, colors and things CG reverts to a specificity of form that labors to lend a specific sense of realistic-ness (not realism) to the work. Regardless of scenario, theme or topic the technique of greatest recourse is a specificity with regard to elemental accuracy. No significant attempt at material or elemental abstraction is made. It’s this lack of abstractness in the majority of CG animated film efforts that has defined the de-facto “look” of CG.

Real life (and death) interrupts our fun…

It’s with a heavy heart that I report that a friend and former animation student of mine passed away last Thursday. Micah Eberhard, a young fellow of 20 years in age, died from massive head trauma following an automobile accident. Micah’s family live here in Cuiaba’ Brazil. His dad is a missionary who is working to translate the Bible into a native language for a small tribe in remote western Brazil. Micah grew up a missionary kid but always had a love of art. He attended SCAD in Savannah as an animation student for his freshman year, but left the school due to running short on finances. (Missionaries don’t make a lot of money, in case you didn’t know). Micah’s parents- good friends and sweet generous people- asked if I’d be willing to teach Micah some animation while he came back home to live and sort things out. I agreed and for the next 6 months or so I took time to train Micah in various skills, especially animation. He was one of those kids who had a real knack for motion and performance.

Earlier this summer Micah moved back to the U.S. to be near his fiancee’. He was living and working near her family in northern Ohio when last Tuesday he was hit at high velocity by another car at an intersection. He was Mercy flighted to a hospital in Columbus where he was in a coma. He lived another two days- just long enough for his parents to arrive at his bedside from Brazil. They had just visited him 2 weeks ago. Endings can come suddenly like that.

Stuff like this never ceases to remind me how silly alot of this animation business really is. I love animation, it’s my favorite unimportant thing in life. But I must continually remind myself- it’s not an important thing in life. As sobering as moments like these are I am thankful for the recalibrating affect they have on me. Someday we’re all going to meet the end of our path, whether it happens suddenly in our youth or unsurprisingly in our grey headed years. I believe our true legacy among those we leave behind will not be defined by how great our art was, but by how we treated each other. We’ll be judged on another criteria altogether. Micah put his faith in Jesus Christ as his salvation. He’s home and I look forward to seeing him again someday- along with many other friends who have gone on before me. A lot of folks don’t like to hear expressions of faith in public. That’s fine. Send me an angry email if you feel you must instruct me about how foolish I am to believe what I believe or how inappropriate it is to be so public with my faith. I need the entertainment. But I’m not ashamed of my faith in Jesus and I’m not about to keep it in a box, especially during times like these.

Those of you so inclined to do so, please pray for Micah’s family and his fiancee’. And if you’re wondering if there’s something you can do to help, actually there is. This surprise event will no doubt put a massive strain on Micah’s family’s finances. As I mentioned before missionaries don’t make a ton of money. If you want to lend a financial hand to help offset some of the medical, travel and funeral expenses send me an email via the contact form here on my site. I can put you in touch with a not-for-profit organization that can accept your donations on behalf of Micah’s family. I can personally guarantee that 100% of what you give will make its way to the family.

And remember, be good to each other.

Dangerous Opinions

Mark Mayerson has a pretty strong take on the Alvin & the Chipmunks project as well as Fox/Blue Sky’s Horton Hears a Who effort. All I can say to both of his points is- “Dang, it’s hard to argue with that.”. For me I knew the chipmunks thing was going to be a derivation of the Garfield efforts, so there was no surprise or disappointment from me about the thing. I’ve yet to see either Garfield film and I doubt I’ll see the Chipmunks as well. But the Horton trailer… boy. Talk about lost potential. That one left me a little sad. The earliest promo images were so tantalizing. They really did a great job with the production design and art direction, but it seems they totally fumbled the soul. And if there’s anything that always set apart Ted Geisel’s work it was the soul of it all. I began to have my doubts when I saw the first billboard for Horton, the one with Horton doing the shading the eyes scout thing from a tree. I saw that pose and thought “Uh-oh, he doesn’t appear to be acting like the Horton I remember from the book.” So at the risk of outing myself, I have to agree with Mark. Horton doesn’t seem to be working- for a lot of reasons. Speaking of strong opinions…

Over on the Thinking Animation blog there’s a post where Angie Jones (I think it’s Angie, I can never tell who’s posting. They need a by line like Cartoon Brew or Drawn have) anyhow - somebody - posted an anonymous thought about the relative career value for animators of working on a mo-cap film like Beowulf (or Monster House, Polar Express, Happy Feet or any other number of mo-cap-imated films that are popping up like weeds). Go read the whole post, but I offer here a quote…

These films provide work and steady employment, but do nothing for animators creativity or career expansion. There is little to gain in terms of skill set growth, or animation knowledge by working on these films….

Some folks try to rationalize”animating” on these films by figuring that they learn a lot about natural motion. But animation is not about natural motion, it is about caricature…

Bottom line, stay away from this work if you can, and if you must, then make sure to spend your free time actually animating and keeping your skills fresh and sharp. Because, in this fast paced animated world, your skills can quickly sink below the bar within the time you spend working on a mocapped film.

The name of the author of these raw thoughts has been withheld in order to protect their career- a sad but necessary precaution even though this person is not alone in their ideas. These are what you call Dangerous Opinions. Anybody bold enough to express them “on the record” and who is willing to put their name to them will often face a rough road in their career in film production studios- especially in CG. And the truth is that a lot of people in the biz think the same way as this anonymous animator quoted on Angie’s blog. (While I’m being dangerous, I’ll come clean and admit- I totally agree with this anonymous animator). Probably the worst thing you can do for your career (short of maybe punching a director in the throat because they asked for fixes) is to express an honest, real opinion about the merits (or lack thereof) of the work being done in the big film studios these days. There’s a reason this other highly acidic opinion is posted on a blog where the author remains anonymous. But I can tell you the honest truth that a lot of people in the biz hold that exact same opinion about this stuff. Artists are a sensitive lot. Anything short of fawning praise is sure to rankle somebody who has thin skin. (How such people make a living in an industry where your work is torn to shreds every day in dailies is beyond me).

So who are the people who come right out and say what they think- with their names attached? People who aren’t worried about getting another studio job, that’s who. People like Sporn, Mayerson, Amidi, Kricfalusi, Barrier, etc. These guys don’t really care if some sensitive animation supervisor in some big studio doesn’t like what they say about their work- they’re not looking for a job in these studios. Granted I don’t like a site filled with constant harangues about how anything done since 1950 is o good or anything done on a computer is no good or anything done by Dreamworks is no good. A site that is always ripping things down is as much of a cypher as one that does nothing but cheer-lead the industry. I just want some honesty. Some things are honestly really cool. Some things are honestly just a steaming pile. Most things are somewhere in between with a mix of both cool and steaming pile attributes. I’ve always appreciated a balanced view on things. Few things are ever as awesome as everybody says and few things are ever as terrible as people say they are. Anything but the company line is a welcome site to my reading eyes (it’s the tone that I like to keep here).

Folks who know me know I’m not short on opinions. It’s one of my tragic flaws in life- I have opinions and I am terrible at pretending that I don’t have them. I’m not very good at the politics of faking it. If I like something then I like it and it shows. If I don’t, well, then I don’t. And it shows. I’d be a terrible poker player. Much misery has come to me in my days because of this trait. I wish I could change it, but alas, I believe I am doomed to being utterly transparent. Thankfully this blog doesn’t always show my face when I see things and I have the luxury of editing my posts over time to temper my thoughts with some fabric softener. Still on my braver days I venture out into expressing some of my riskier opinions. Even so I’ve never really let loose. Why? Simply because I don’t know if I’ll ever need a studio job again. I’ve been burned by being too honest before- there are studios where I’ll never get hired and I know it. So I keep a lid on my most controversial thoughts and peck around the edges of things. In such an insular industry as film animation feathers ruffle very easily and grudges are carried for a long, long time. I have a number of half written posts in a folder on my hard drive labeled “Career Suicide”. If I ever posted them that’s exactly what I’d be committing. Maybe in time I’ll be in a better position, but since discretion is the better part of valor I think I’ll keep those thoughts to myself and only share them with friends whom I trust. Unfortunately anyone who wants to be sure they can get a job at a CG film studio would be wise to follow the same path. Either that or be sure to remain anonymous when you say what you’re really thinking.

A little home cooking

Obviously I’ve been doing a lot of studying, thinking (and too much writing!) recently about exploring different visual and motion styles for CG. (Or rather more properly “visual and motion aesthetics“- thanks to Erik for the nomenclature help). Anyhow, just to show that yapping my trap isn’t my only area of activity- here’s a little test that I cooked up this weekend. Just a little something that was fun. Maybe different?

I puttered around for about a day on it- most of that time spent trying exploring different ideas for bringing the background to play a role in accentuating the performance. I have an earlier version with a totally different method for making the background plate, but I abandoned it for being too complicated to set up. Simple is the watch word here. The character rig is a freebie rig I downloaded from HighEnd3d.com, not my own creation (Although I did apply some different shaders that I made to get a different, non-literal look for it). I expect when I start using my own rig (it’s almost done) that I’ll be able to push the animation technique a bit further with regard to deforming the shapes of the character in motion. Obviously this isn’t the end of my efforts, just a stumbling step along the path. I’m not trying to emulate any specific animation style or medium. Rather I’m trying to borrow flavors from all different kinds of sources, all rolled into a (hopefully tasty) visual recipe. That’s something that I believe that CG is uniquely positioned to do better than any other medium.

But the best part was that this was fun for me to make. Fun is the ingredient that all audiences can taste. I hope that part shows through at least.

OK, I’m gonna take break from typing for a while. Back to the kitchen!

Kevin Langley breaks down Dan Backslide

Dan Backslide-Frame By Frame
Uploaded by klangley

The wonderful Goobersleave blog has a fantastic post today- Kevin does some slow-motion presentation of a few Dan Backslide moments (animated by Bobe Cannon) from Chuck Jones’ seminal short The Dover Boys.

I’m always surprised when people say this is an early example of ‘limited animation’. On the contrary I’ve always thought “The Dover Boys” represented a wonderful expression of what full animation could bring to the table. There is no pretense of literalism in this film- it is utterly, fully animated. The things that are done here could only ever be done in a fully animated world. An animator employing what is typically called ‘full animation’ (let’s say a Disney animator from the same time period) would have Dan Backslide walk from the passenger side of the car and go around the car and get in and sit down in the driver’s seat in literal movements and steps. The animator would proceed based roughly on how a person might literally accomplish the same movement. The good animator would bring a sense of entertainment, music, rhythm, life, charm and expression to this. But in the end the scene would require maybe 80-100 drawings to complete (give or take). In “The Dover Boys” Bobe Cannon manages to accomplish the same action in 4 or 5 drawings. The way he does it is, in my opinion, one of the greatest expressions of full animation that has ever been done on planet earth. The solution to the challenge wasn’t to pick 5 milepost drawings out of the 80 that the full animator would use. That’s usually how limited animation has been done, often with less than inspiring results. But this- this is something altogether different. This instead is the act of taking multiple drawings and combining them into a single one that is all about perception and flow in movement. It’s a masterful expression of what it means to understand how animation functions on the atomic level.

Speaking as a teacher of animators I think we now we labor under the opposite problem- too many drawings without a clear understanding of how to make many (any?) of them meaningful. CG animators have no poverty of drawings to work with. We’ve got our rigged puppets, we have our timelines filled with a world of free inbetweens and we have our limitless inbetweened previewing capabilities at the push of a button or the scrub of a mouse. Thus equipped we happily press forward. Yet the price we pay for such modern conveniences is that we don’t think in terms of how images & drawings can express motion. Sure we pay some grudging tribute to the idea in our ‘blocking’ but then happily dive into the world of free inbetweens and endless scrubbing twiddles as soon as we possibly can. CG animators tend to discover their solutions as they go as a result of innumerable previews and tweaks over time. When every frame and drawing is given to you for free you don’t really understand the power of each one. Ours is a soft-minded way. Take away our ability to rip off 10, 20 or 30 playblast previews a day and some Cg animators would literally freeze up. When we learn that in the old days animators were lucky if they could pencil test their scenes once before turning them in we’re incredulous. Once? Seriously? Many of us can’t fathom such a way of working- and I think our own work suffers for it. A lot of animators who’ve only ever worked in the CG medium don’t understand the guts of how animation works well enough to know how to accomplish something like The Dover Boys. I know I didn’t when I first saw it and I was already a working professional! When I first tried to study this Dover Boys film it was like some kind of dark magic to me. — How could they do that? How would they even begin to know how to do that? And with pencils and no timeline to scrub around in? Surely this stuff must have taken months to make, right? What?! They did this at 15 feet per week?! No way! — These were the questions that echoed around my cranium when I first started analyzing this cartoon ‘lo these many years hence. It’s been a long journey for me since. Each time I’ve ever shown The Dover Boys to a group of younger CG animators (usually already working pros not many years out of school) they lose their minds in a similar sort of fashion. Like me they’re beside themselves- many had never seen anything like this. Or if they had seen it they’d never stopped and studied how it was accomplished. They could never fathom that getting from point A to point B in a scene in 5 frames was even possible, much less how to do it. This isn’t a knock on anybody- we only know what we know. We only have the experiences we have and we learn the way we’ve been taught. To this day most CG animators are still animating in some adaptation of the way computer programmers thought animation should work two decades ago. Of course the current rigid puppet rig paradigm hasn’t allowed us much freedom from this. Nor does the status quo for the technology give us a lot of room to employ this smear technique in CG. As a result some may dismiss this as an academic exercise or the grumblings of an old crank with an axe to grind with CG. “Stop harping on the past, get with the times.” That sort of rot. But remember, I am a CG animator- I really think the medium has untapped potential, and as such I think this is something worth exploring. When I initially studied The Dover Boys I experienced some of my first glimmers of understanding about what I call the ‘guts’ of animation. I began to see that one of the core secrets of excellent animation lay in the power of the drawings chosen to represent motion. Since then I have had several other major influences to thank for showing me that this is true regardless of how you make those drawings, whether you make them with a pencil or by pushing a puppet around on a computer.

But back to the cartoon- sadly the practice of employing this smear technique seems to have been mostly a one off experiment with not much further extensive use even among Golden Age cartoons. True enough it was used in spots throughout the years, but I don’t recall any single cartoon or film that embraced this technique so boldly (or to such great success). Which is too bad, really. It’s really interesting once you study it. Most big moves can be described as 3 drawings where the motion is broken out as 15% 70% 15%. Occasionally for larger moves you’ll see a four drawing move with a 10%, 40%, 40%, 10% sort of thing going on. The percentages are my loose way of defining how much of the motion for an action is represented in each specific drawing. The real genius of those ease drawings is of course in having some parts of the drawing be 95 or 98% of the way to the next pose while other parts are still dragged back at 60 or 70%, but that’s getting pretty technical. The cool thing is that even though there is a kind of motion formula at work here, all you need to do is to string a few smaller moves like this together with some stillness between them for rhythm and you can get great texture in the motion. The scenes of Dan Backslide “running” up to the cabin door to open it are fantastic examples of just how far you can push this technique and still have it hold up.

An example of 75% of the motion all wrapped up into one drawing.

A big huge thanks to Kevin for taking the time to break this down and put up examples. It’s like a clinic for free. You all should be reading his blog.

Right on cue….

Aardman releases a couple of online clips to their recent short film The Pearce Sisters. Go see ‘em!

It’s fantastic! I love it! I’m jealous of the creativity here. The mixture of CG and traditional medium is great- the solution for the water is imaginative and seamless. I love that they spend so much time lingering over the quiet, dull moments of the sisters’ daily life. It brings a charming pace and texture to the work. As they say over yonder -”Brilliant!” I want more!

edit: I forgot to mention I got wind of this via Steve Ogden’s ever nifty Animwatch Blog. Steve does solid work with his AnimWatch site and it deserves a good plug.

The Fool’s Errand, Part 3

In my previous post in this series I related how I’d gotten stuck in my own quagmire of a short film production. The source of this Slough of Despond was the amount of work I had set up for myself- a noble if somewhat Quixotic venture. You see, way back when I started this thing, I had fallen for a false value statement. I believed the myopic industry hype that there is really only one way for great CG animation to look- namely the uber polished, highly detailed and technically impressive big budget feature film style. Anything that wasn’t that style was “good for what it is”, but it wasn’t really good. It was good* (with an asterisk). To rise above such a terrible fate I determined that the drive for my project was to show a mastery of a technique or a style. As a result I got caught trying to craft a short film that could stand up to the visual style and standards of larger CG feature film projects.

But why did I believe this in the first place? I suppose the answer to that is found in why any of us would believe it. Clearly many folks in the business (or who would love desperately to be in the business) believe this. Some in the film biz have a self interest in perpetuating the myth. It keeps them on top of the mountain with all the wannabes looking up, drooling, clambering to climb that same hill. Perhaps we believe this hype out of a misguided need for affirmation, to be considered part of something exclusive, something with meaning. Too many labor under the pretense that until they work at Pixar (or insert name of your favorite studio here) their animation careers and efforts are invalid, inferior and without full expression. If we’re honest most of us would have to admit that we all believe this same thing at some point in our animation walk. Many of us still do. Thus the need to do something “on that level”. To prove something to the demo reel watchers in the ivory towers of film studios. My previous short films didn’t show this- they weren’t made to be demo reels but were intended to be films. Thus the animation in them wasn’t the most polished stuff in the world. Fine for a short, but it wasn’t going to do the trick in convincing people that I could animate “at the highest level”- whatever the heck that meant.

I determined that I had to show that I could do feature film quality animation. So I would pull out all the stops. As to why I chose a short film to do this I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps because down inside I really enjoy making short films more than doing “just” animation. Whatever the reason I decided that this project was going to be the one that showed that I could pull off that high polish style. Of course at that moment the Fool’s Errand was in full stride and almost four years of lunacy have since transpired.

Of course I eventually did end up doing film animation, but the short film project that I thought would serve that end didn’t get me there. Instead what got me doing film work was a demo reel of solid, professional work. In effect my career had eventually spoken for itself and I didn’t need to prove anything with a short film.
But a funny thing happened on the way to my career goal- or rather in obtaining it. I found the highly polished film style of work was –I hesitate to say it for fear of offending– boring. What I mean is that the actual making of that style of animation doesn’t get me all excited. It’s just not as much fun as putting out something fun and energetic that has a few rough edges to it. This isn’t to say that the highly polished CG film style is bad. It’s clearly not. It’s just not my favorite style of animation to actually sit down and animate. But even with personal style preferences aside, I’ve come to see that the highly polished CG film style of animation is not any more the “best” than anything else. To return the charge: It’s good for what it is. Like all styles it has its place where it works well. But I don’t believe that there is one single “best” style of CG animation. Just lots of different good styles. The key (for me at least) is to be about doing the one that works for me, the one I enjoy. I remember when I used to smile at the stuff I made while I was making it. I’d like to do that again.

Which is why I doubt I’ll ever finish the space man short. It’s too much like the boring work I don’t like to do. If I’m going to animate in my free time I’m gonna have fun. I’m not going to do a style of animation that bores me just to prove a point that I no longer believe is valid. Maybe some day I’ll do something with all those assets. Who knows? But for now I’d rather do something fast and fun.
What are the lessons that I learned from this story?
First, don’t make a short film to try and get a job as an animator in feature film. That’s what demo reels are for. I’m not saying that a short film will never get you a job. Enough people have gotten work from their student films to prove that this isn’t true. I’m just saying that I believe that making a short film should be about the experience of making a film, not getting a job as an animator. If you happen to get work from the short- fantastic! But don’t make a short just to get a job.

Second, don’t allow the narrow-mindedness of others to narrow your own mind. Open your eyes to what is possible. There’s more than one style or design that is “good” or “great”. Don’t let the style hegemony of the current feature film market dominate your thinking. Somebody very bright and very confident decided that Pocoyo was going to have a different, fun style of CG animation. We’re all the better for it. Who will make the next Pocoyo?

Third, don’t make your film to impress industry types. Make it to entertain audiences. Or entertain yourself at the very least.

But most of all have fun or don’t do it. In the end I think that fun shows through in the work. Let the high brow types pan your short film for its animation “flaws”. Audiences can tell when you had fun. That often more than makes up for the rest.

The Fool’s Errand, Part 2

Wow, 10 days since the last post. As you might have guessed I’ve been super busy, but I didn’t want to let this topic die just yet. In my first post on The Fool’s Errand topic I noted how it’s not all that feasible a goal to try and imitate the bigscreen results in your personal short film (especially if CG is your medium of choice). There’s been some great discussion in the comments, so let’s hope we can keep the conversation rolling. In this installment I put my cards on the table to demonstrate why I believe what I do about all this.

This is a test render from a short film that I had been working on for about 4 years in my spare time. This was an early “look of film” concept test, done sometime in the summer of 2004.

This is a rendered push in on the character in the set. Caveats: It’s rough, the animation is totally scratch (as in Definitely Not Final) and there are some render glitches (flickering shadow maps, etc.). All par for the course for an early test.

And from way back in early 2004 is a walk cycle test with the original version of the character design and rig. The reason it plays all stuttery is because it’s 12 fps. My early tests are often on 2’s to keep things light and simple.

Here are some other test renders as well as some boards from a sequence from early on in the short… (click on each to see bigger)

As you can plainly see this stuff nowhere near as detailed or lush as the Ratatouille scenes mentioned in my previous post. There are all kinds of style and design deicisions in here meant to keep the workload as manageable as possible. I consciously chose to work from simple sit-com type stage sets. Most sets don’t have a fully built 4th wall. In addition I was careful to not overbuild things that won’t be seen up close. I had no plans on building a set so completely detailed that I had total camera freedom without fear of showing the technical uglinesses that come for free in CG (model faceting, low texture resolutions, crawling shadow maps- all computationally and laboriously expensive to fix). The shots were already in mind when the sets were built. Additionally I consciously chose color and lighting schemes that were roughly monochromatic, thus reducing the demand for highly detailed textures to give objects their sense of meaning and presence.

On the technical side I borrowed some techniques I’d learned in the film biz. I developed lighting rigs and production tools that would allow me to quickly block in my lighting - all while automatically taking into consideration which set or location the character was in. That would speed up baseline lighting and allow me to focus on finer details. Render scripts were developed, again to automate a lot of the gruntwork of getting images out. Compositing scripts and recipes were also created, as were color correction recipes and widgets. Animation wise I’ve got my library of various tools that built up over the years to help me move quickly. A pose library tool was adapted to allow me to quickly block in broadstroke foundational poses for detail areas like fingers and faces, again allowing me to focus my time on working the details and finer subtleties rather than build everything from scratch.

In short, I used every trick or technique I’d ever learned in the biz about how to streamline production without sacrificing quality. I just built smaller, home versions for my own use. There wasn’t a single area of production where I was not leveraging my many years and many different kinds of studio experiences.

Yet even with all of these design and production shortcuts I was doomed. The amount of work was too much. I bogged down. Animation tests revealed that the character rig wasn’t going to hold up. Skinning fat characters that maintain good volume but are still flexibile and have the ability to be pushed to some extreme poses is perhaps one of the hardest rigging tasks in the business. This rig had 60+ pose deformers just on his hips and belly to maintain proper volume and it still was not enough. It was looking like a bag of grape jelly in even moderately extreme poses and motions. Seeing as feature film quality was the standard and The Incredibles had totally redefined what the bar was for this kind of stuff I had to completely rethink my approach. I started to see that a muscle & fat simulation solution was going to be the only thing that would make him look right. After some messing with Michael Comet’s cMuscle system (I still had my old beta testing copy lying around) I saw that I could do it, but it’d take me a year probably to get it right. It’s at that moment that I said Enough. I’d already rebuilt the guy 3 times over the previous two years. It was too much. And it’s not like I could throw him away and go with a skinny guy because so much of the short’s story was built around his bumbling, fat, clumsy and slovenly ways.

Aside from the rig problems, there was the sheer workload of the animation. The animation was going to be highly polished film level Cg work- something I have experience doing and can do pretty well. But that takes time. Even though I work fast the best I could hope to accomplish for my own film would be 2 or 3 seconds of final, full, CG feature film quality animation per week. I lacked sufficient man-days to do any more. To do a minute would take me 6 months of animation. To do the full 8 minutes for the story would take three and a half, maybe four years. Pre-production had already cost me almost four years. Re-working the rig for the fourth time would take another 8 months or more. I haven’t even mentioned lighting, FX, rendering, compositing, sound engineering, music, etc. In effect I had chosen a style of animation and design that required far too much labor.

I fell into the trap and the technique was the goal. I was trying to match the visual tones of a larger film production all on my own. And I wasn’t even trying to match that level of detail exactly. I did make plenty of compromises along the way. Yet even with all that I was still left with a project that was easily 10+ years from completion.

I know, I know. Shame on me. But understand- I could do the job. I could do it all well enough to make it work. I wasn’t on track to embarrass myself here. Yet I learned a very hard lesson in my youthful exuberance: Just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should.

In another post I’ll explain why I made this doomed choice in the first place.

The Fool’s Errand, Part 1

Seeing as I just made a call for animators to get in the game and make some indy short films I thought I’d offer up some thoughts gleaned from my experiences in such ventures (both good and bad). Oddly enough I think I learned more from the failures than the successes, but life’s funny that way. First up, the painfully obvious (which somehow seems to not be painful enough to keep us from trying it)…

If you are going to make a short film all by yourself then don’t even try and match this!

This being just one set from Pixar’s latest film Ratatouille. As other blogs have noted, Disney has decided to put a QuicktimeVR of the environment up online for you to poke around in. What can I say? This stuff is more than impressive. The level of detail and craftmanship is astounding. Every surface holds up regardless of how close you get to it, everything is maxed out. It’s a technical marvel of an accomplishment.

Which is exactly why it would be all wrong to try and do anything even remotely close to it in a personal short film.

But why not? Doncha wanna compete with the best of the best? Are you being a chicken, Lango? Gonna back down from the challenge, give up without a fight? Heh. You’ll learn in a little bit that’s not the case. No, simply put- it’s just not feasible. The answer can be found in two words: Man Days. What is a ‘man day’? Easy– How much work can a single person do in a normal 8 hour day of work? That is a man day. How many man days does a task cost? Add up all the people that are working on it and mutliply that by the number of days they spend on the task. That’s your man day cost. All tasks in the creation of a CG film are estimated, budgeted, assigned, tracked, measured and paid for in man-days. This one set- a major set in the film- required many artists and technicans working many weeks and months to make it to this level of detail and quality. In other words, it has a ton of man days in it.

Well, duh. So what does all that have to do with you and your short film? You’re not out to make a 100 minute feature but a 4 or 5 minute short? Why can’t you do this? I’ll tell you why- Unless you are independently wealthy or super human you have very, very few man-days to work with. A person who is working to pay the bills, live life and is making a short film on the side has at best maybe 3 man days a week to give to a personal project. And that’s hammering. Typically you’ll have 2 man days spread out over a week. Two. Not twenty. Not ten. Not even five. Just two. At two man-days per week it would literally take you 10 years to faithfully recreate just this one set from Ratatouille. That’s not hyperbole.

It has been pointed out in comments here and elsewhere that it’s a ton of work for not a lot of pay off to make a short film. There is absolutely no disputing that. Mark Mayerson astutely points out that the real gold in a short film is the end result. All techniques regarding the visual presentation are merely servants to this end goal. The trouble comes when we make the technique the goal.

Many indy animators filmmakers (especially those who opt for CG as their weapon of choice) have been victim of being too focused on trying to recreate what we see on the big screen. Those films are the result of huge budgets and crews of hundreds and hundreds of artists and technicians working for years. But our pride says “I want my film to look that good!” Of course we do. We love what we do. Many of us are good at it. Many of us who have done this stuff professionally for years know that we can make something that good- we don’t lack the skill, experience or talent. And we certainly wouldn’t want to degrade our good name by making something crappy. But that’s a dangerous place to be. Pride is one thing (and bad enough). But the ability to back it up, though- that is the critical ingredient to hubris. To try and match blow for blow against the big boys is pure madness- even if only for 3 or 4 minutes of screen time. The effort involved doesn’t scale down linearly and we’re fools to believe otherwise. So what do we do? We don’t want to make our personal stuff look like a Nasonex Bee commercial, but we can’t make it as good as we know how because the workload is insane. There’s a 22 here, go try and catch it.

To get an indy animated film done then a complete paradigm shift of what we perceive as “good” animated filmmaking is needed. In short- we need to step back from the edge of the abyss and open our eyes to the possibilities that various style and design choices afford us. In other words, stop making the technique the prize. Think outside of the box that everybody tells you you need to live in. Don’t buy the hype that there is only one kind of “good” animation and that anything that isn’t that style is somehow a lesser thing. Don’t believe this tripe– especially if you’re a CG animator/artist. There’s more out there than trying to duplicate the results of the big studios. If you want to finish your short film you need to kill your little fantasy of single handedly creating a film as fully animated, technically sophisticated and visually detailed as No Time for Nuts or any 4 minutes of Ratatouille. Kill it, then put it in a simple pine box and bury it in the backyard of your mind with fresh flowers on the grave. If you don’t you will set yourself up to fail. I’ve already taken this tragic journey once. The results were predictable. I’ll share my thoughts from my own fool’s errand here in the coming days.

Want to *create* great character performances?

Make a short film!

That’s the conclusion I draw from reading the entirety of Mark Mayerson’s master’s thesis (he posted the final installment on it today). Of course I am making a distinction between creating a performance and contributing to one.

The bulk of Mark’s thesis points out that almost from the start animators on commercial productions have been marginalized in their contributions to a character’s performance. A myriad of decisions and developments in animation over the years have all worked to reduce the animator from an ‘actor with a pencil’ to junior member of a larger committee that contributes to character performances. Character designers, voice actors, live action reference actors, directors, storyboard and layout artists and now actors in mo-cap suits– all have taken a chunk out of the animator’s domain of being the creator of a performance in the same sense that an actor creates one. By the time a film animator gets their scene the larger substantive decisions regarding the performance have already been made, most often without the animator’s input. Mayerson shares this anecdote…

Story artist Bill Peet felt that he was the prime contributor to One Hundred and One Dalmatians and that others simply enhanced his contributions. “The public probably thinks the animator sits down and starts doing it from scratch. I did storyboards, thousands of them, and character design; I would direct the voice recordings. Then guys like Marc Davis, Ken Anderson, and Woolie Reitherman would take credit for my Cruella De Vil and all of the personalities. Those personalities were delineated in drawings, and believe me; I can draw them as well or better than any of them” (Province 163).

The above not only exposes the tension over credit, it also shows that the artists themselves can’t agree on where control of a character lies. Peet wrote the script and did the storyboard for One Hundred and One Dalmatians, based on the book by Dodie Smith. Marc Davis, cast by character as Barrier would prefer, animated Cruella De Vil. Live action reference footage of actress Mary Wickes was shot for the role of Cruella (Frank Thomas 320). Betty Lou Gerson recorded Cruella’s voice track. Does this character represent any one contributor’s point of view? Can any of the above people claim the same level of control that an actor routinely has over a character. …

While within the industry animators are routinely compared to actors, perhaps a better analogy is to musicians in a symphony orchestra. Such musicians are responsible for playing the notes on the page while filtering them through the interpretation of the conductor. Within the ensemble, how much room is there for musicians to assert themselves?

Surprsingly little if you think about it. What’s left is delivering a performance, not creating one. It seems like a slight distinction, but it is a real one. Allegorically speaking, the second trombone music is written. Is your second trombone player quitting the orchestra? No worries. Find yourself a competent professional trombone player and the symphony can succeed without the audience noticing any difference, or even caring to. Fine work for the trombone player, pays the bills and all– but it’s no jazz gig, that’s for sure.

But here’s the sunny ray of opportunity- independent animation. Mayerson again…

It’s only on short projects that animators have the freedom to control a character without having to collaborate, but just as silent animators were limited by their backgrounds as cartoonists, many independent animators are limited by their backgrounds in fine arts. They prize the image over believable characters. Norman McLaren is an example of an independent animator who controlled his films but was more interested in design and the formal aspects of the animation process than he was in creating characters.

How ironic. The one place that offers the most performance freedom from the limitations of the commercial world is independent animation, yet it is largely absent of professional level character animators.

I don’t want people to get the impression that I think working in the film biz is bad or somehow beneath you. It’s a fun and honorable profession and I’m thankful to have had a chance to do it. I’m just saying don’t just settle for being in the film biz, that’s all. There’s more out there than working on the next big film. I think we animators should be engaged in the struggle to create independent animated films and not give all our energy to the homogenized committee. Even if all you make is one or two independent films in your career that’s still a valuable enterprise (I don’t think student films should count since most of them were made when we didn’t know what we were doing. I’m talking about films you would make *after* you became a pro film animator, not your student work). Imagine if every year a few different professional film animators released their own short films filled with rich, professional level character animation and unique performances of note? Imagine how fun the festivals would be! I love the studio shorts that are being made, but I’d love it even more if the animators who worked on them did their own thing as well. Why let Goeblins and Supinfocom have all the fun? Take inspiration from the graphic novel world for comics. Many, many great artists who work in animated film studios express their own creativity outside of their day jobs by creating their own works- you see them at Comicon. These guys and girls aren’t cranking out the industrial DC or Marvel stuff, but these animation film pros are bringing the weight of their experience and skill to apply fresh voices and expressions to the medium. Certainly the comics world is all the richer for it. Why shouldn’t film animators do the same thing?

Eddie Fitzgerald is a genius

Today he riffs on acting classes, something we talked about here recently, and I just gotta say- it’s pure gold.

You gotta read the rest. I dunno why but his doodles just make me giggle. I want Uncle Eddie to make more cartoons. Please, Unc? Please?

Rats! (Duuuude)

Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille came in with a $16.6 million Friday box office take in the U.S. Already somebody is having a bad weekend.

Why is that? Well, by the time studio executives go to bed on Friday they pretty much know (with some measure of certainty) whether or not their film will hit their projections. Once the Friday numbers are in, from there you can almost run the numbers like a formula. Typically a film’s Friday box will be one third of its initial weekend box office. Friday represents the median number, Saturday’s numbers are usually a little higher, Sunday’s numbers are usually a bit smaller. So if you run $16.6 million x 3 you end up with an opening weekend box office for Ratatouille of about $50 million. That would be a full $10 million less than Cars $60 million and $20 million less than Brad Bird’s last film, The Incredibles’ $70 million. And if you take the opening weekend box office you can multiply it by about 3.5 to get a decent idea about where the film will finally bow out of theaters. That means that Ratatouille runs the risk of being the first Pixar film to gross less than $200 million domestic box office since A Bug’s Life’s $168 million. This just weeks after audiences proved that animation can still score big, evidenced by Shrek the Third’s take of $311 million (and counting). Ouch. It’s surprising that Ratatouille didn’t do better considering the enormous 95% fresh rating from RottenTomatoes.com and countless other critics’ enthusiasm for the film. Animation vets have been calling it the “best animated film since Pinocchio”. Wow, heady stuff. Of course things can change, but I’m just looking at the typical outcome for any given film based on opening day numbers.

Granted, a $50 million open pretty much ensures that Ratatouille will make money for Mickey and friends — just not as much as they’d like, especially when you consider that those rat themed merchandising deals aren’t going to be pulling as much weight as those for Cars did. It does kinda boggle the mind, though. It seems like Bird can’t win for losing. He makes great films that are almost universally loved by those who see them, but folks just don’t flock to see them. This isn’t an Iron Giant redux, either. Unlike Warner Brothers Disney marketed the snot out of this film. So why did less than half the people who watched Shrek the Third go see it? Is it really the rat thing? The cooking thing? No big name stars thing? Is it a French thing? Puzzling indeed.

(note: I haven’t seen it yet. I was on a plane back to Brazil the day it came out in the U.S. It’s available here in western Brazil, but only in Portuguese. I want to see it in the original english, so I have to wait for the DVD this christmas. Poo. )

Meanwhile, Sony’s rather entertaining little ditty Surf’s Up is limping its way out to a run of about $70 million domestic box office. That’s too bad because I kinda thought it was a refreshing change of pace. I didn’t care much for the main penguin character or his love interest, but the penguin played by Jeff Bridges was nicely acted- both in voice and in puppet. Most of the things I liked about Surf was the surrounding cast of characters. There were some fun ideas and performances there. The problem was that the lead character kinda came off whiney and hard to like, which usually doesn’t translate into big money for animated films. If you make him funny and whiney then that can work, but playing him straight and whiney… not so much. I did like the mockumentary conceit, but I felt they wobbled in and out of it and the overall affect was less consistent. The water was indeed brilliantly executed, but families usually aren’t big on watching Siggraph demo reels. Still, I thought it was a fun film. It’s just too bad that it’s getting drowned by bigger waves this summer. I’ll get the DVD, though. So far Sony Animation has some pretty looking films, but they haven’t found their first big hit yet. Hopefully they don’t get discouraged and pull out of the game. It’d be nice to see them keep developing their style.

Monday July 2 Update: Well, turns out I was a wee bit generous in my guesses. Disney-Pixar’s Ratatouille turned in the lowest opening weekend box for a Pixar film in 10 years- $47.2million. Unless this thing grows legs like Finding Nemo did (it opened with $70 million but kept going strong enough to top out over $300 million) then Ratatouille is on track to pull in well less than the “normal” $200 million we’ve come to expect for a Pixar film. Again I’m kinda puzzled by it all, but I guess there’s no accounting for taste with the American film going public. *shrug*

I’m calling baloney on this…

Wired.com runs a fluff piece (or should I say “recycles a press release”) about a brand new ‘invention’: Toon Shading in Maya.

A quote…

“Maakie-Mation is a new kind of animation that I invented to convey Tony’s vision,” said director and co-writer Eric Kaplan, who is also a writer for Futurama and honcho of CG animation production studio Mirari Films. “It uses the flexibility and power of CGI, but renders everything in 2-D so it looks like Tony’s strip. No one has done it before.”

I love that they even branded it- “Maakie-Mation”. Behold the genius at work…

YouTube Direkt

(Part of the pilot episode is on YouTube as well. Definitely not for the kiddos.)

Wow. We’ve never seen anything like that before. Nevermind that free toon shaders for Maya have been publicly available on HighEnd3d.com for the last 7 years. And never mind that Maya itself has had built in toon shading solutions for the last 2 and a half years. Now, I admit that the cross hatch ink lines in the texture maps are a nice touch, but they’re hardly ground breaking.

As for the show itself, seems like your typical Adult Swim fare- not really my cup o’ tea.

Fast and Big- I love it!

This year’s Goeblins Annecy bumpers didn’t catch my eye as much as previous years, but I really liked the feel of energy in this one.

(click to play movie)

I think it has a great mix. The traditional media background elements combined with what seemed like CG matte painting manipulation give this a fantastic sense of energy. Very imaginative use of abstract shapes and colors at the right time really punch this out. I just love how they dip in and out of moments of lucidity and near drowning in energy. The timing is really strong. The animators did a very good job of capturing a sense of speed, energy and scale- all extremely tricky challenges in animation. Don’t look for any real deep character performance, but just soak up the flow of the energy. Very cool, very inspiring. I’ll be “borrowing” a few of those ideas myself in my own project.

Acting classes

I have a few hours this afternoon to myself, so I thought I’d do some sacred cow tipping and continue with the acting stuff as I sit here in a local Starbucks…

In a comment on my last post the idea was brought up that animators should just learn how to act in the classical sense (ie: take acting classes, engage in improv or theater groups, etc.) if they want to create sincere, believable and moving performances.

It sounds good on paper, but acting for theater or film is a completely different skillset than animating. It’s easy to get confused on this point, though because animating and acting share the same end goal: communicate believable and sincere performances that speak truth to the human condition and tell a larger story with effectiveness. However in most respects this is where the similarities end. Each one gets to this goal by different roads. The skills the actor develops to reach this goal are almost completely incongruent to the skills an animator needs to develop to reach the same goal. My thoughts on why after the jump…

I’ve taken enough acting classes over the years at various studios and on my own to have developed a decent idea of what they’re trying to accomplish. The basic goal of acting classes- regardless of which school of modern acting you subscribe to- is to learn how to “be in the moment”. Sounds great, right? Problem is, as acting teacher Ed Hooks has pointed out before in his writings and classes, animators don’t even have a moment to be in. The difference lies in the medium used to communicate the moment. The primary media the animator uses to communicate the illusion of a moment is a mere representation of a person- the drawing or the puppet. The entire craft of animation is about knowing how to manipulate that representation of a person to get the audience to buy into the illusion that there is a real person experiencing a real moment where only a stack of drawings or renderings that took weeks to create actually exists. All the principles of drawing, pose, weight, timing, motion - every animation principle- speaks to this task of manipulating this representation of a person in such a way as to imbue it with a sense of believability.

Actors also have a medium to communicate to the audience- their bodies. Actors use their bodies to express everything and the camera catches it all on film the very moment it happens. The body can be trained to behave certain ways via repetition and rehearsal. In modern acting this is considered a rather poor and mechanical approach to acting. The primary focus of modern acting training operates under the belief that the body will react naturally and sincerely to the situations the mind believes are real. Basically you get the reaction out of the puppet (ie: the actor’s body) that you desire by first tricking the actor’s mind into believing in something that doesn’t really exist. There are all manner of effective techniques to accomplish this, but they generally are simply ”mind games”. The actor essentially tricks their mind into thinking they’re really experiencing something that is not really happening. They fool themselves into believing that they are not on a film set with an unshaven keygrip holding a microphone 1 foot over their head as the script girl chews her bubblegum and the camera with its cameraman is literally inches away from their face. Either that or they trick themselves into believing that the woman hanging 2 feet above a green pad with a fan blowing their skirt is indeed dangling off a tall building or that the person accusing them of being insensitive isn’t another actor making believe but is really their scorned lover. The best actors are the ones who can fool themselves the best into believing that the make believe set of cirumstances is indeed real and the reality that surrounds them doesn’t exist. These are usually transcendant performances. In the end it’s all mind games and the body just comes along for the ride.

Actors are hardly EVER taught to be aware of their bodies. (Laban motion analysis is a different thing and actually does have some practical use to animators I think). Some older school animators from the British tradition will use physical techniques to portray a moment. Michael Caine has some well known videos where he discusses such tricks and Anthony Hopkins is an older school technician in some ways as well. But most American actors nowadays are taught to not think about the body at all. Get into the moment and trick your mind into believing the moment exists and the body will follow like a puppy on a leash. It really doesn’t matter what the acting technique is, it’s all about tricking the actor’s mind into believing in the moment, the body will follow orders from there.

Animators have no such luxury as an auto-responding medium (ie: the human body). We study motion and performance in order to externally recreate it in unique ways with our non-living representation of the person (the drawing or the puppet). In all acting classes I’ve taken (with the sole exception being Ed Hooks’ class) the relevance to my craft as an animator is quickly lost as we get into role playing, listening, word reflection and page reading exercises. These techniques for tricking the mind of the actor have practically no application to the animator who builds a performance from their mind and then constructs it from the outside in using an abstract representation of a real person. These techiques may have usefulness if you’re a big believer in using video reference of yourself acting out the scene as the basis for developing your acting performance, but if you ask me I think that’s an approach to animation that is handicapped from the very start. That’s another controversial post for another day, though.

Most acting classes that animators take are like teaching musical composers to dance. Learning how to dance will not give you many practical, concrete techniques to become a better musical composer. Will it be helpful in some more abstract or philosophical ways? Maybe, probably. But the physical techniques and exercises for doing a proper toe spin have absolutely no practical use to a composer as they try to arrange the woodwinds and strings for a symphony they are writing. Those skills just don’t translate at all. In the same way, the techniques learned in acting classes are for a totally different skillset than animating. They may be helpful in an abstract way to broaden your understanding of what goes into the skill of acting, but taking acting classes and becoming a good film actor is no sure fire shortcut to being a great animator anymore than taking dance classes will make you into the next Mozart.

I still think observation, and more importantly, living a life of real empathy (along with a mastery of the principles of animation) is the key to coming up with meaningful animated performances. I know animators who couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper sack and they make amazingly sincere performances in their work. And I know other animators who are very clever actors who are also very good, but certainly not vastly superior to the non-actors. So there is no real connection between animation performance sincerity and the ability to act on stage or in front of a camera. But every animator that I personally know who is genuinely sensitive toward the plight of their fellow man can make the most moving animation performances. Something about their acting performances just feels right and deep and very sincere.

For even more insightful thought on the animator’s dillemma in crafting a performance, I hope you’re reading Mark Mayerson’s discourse on his blog.

A thought about those acting ruts…

Often younger animators or students will write me asking for some ideas on how to avoid cliche’s in their acting choices. Well, the answer to that can be long winded or short.

The short answer is observe.

The longer answer usually doesn’t add anything to the short one- except words.

But there are things you can do that can help you develop your skills in seeing the difference between your own cliches and what’s more natural. In a recent email reply to a fellow animator I touched on the subject …

Sometimes to help me break out of acting ruts I will visit a site like Moviewavs.com and find a movie that I am sure I can rent or borrow, but that I haven’t seen before. Then I listen to several different audio clips from the film and I imagine they are scenes that have just been handed to me at work. I usually have a character rig or a character design in mind already- nothing special, just a specific character so that I can “see” that character acting out the scene in my mind when I listen to the audio. The idea is to develop the ability to see the performance in my head and to be as specific about it as I can be- I want to see the character doing the scene, not some generic idea of a character. Visualizing the performance is a powerful tool in animating.

Anyhoo, I listen to the selected audio clips over and over and I close my eyes and try and to see the character doing the scene. I’ll then maybe do some quick rough thumbs or notes on it and move on to another scene and do the same to that one. It’s all just planning- I don’t move on to actually animating the scenes. The point is forcing myself to get a clear idea in my mind first and then record what that idea is via thumbnails and notes. Maybe I’ll do 3 or 4 of these clips for a movie.

Then I’ll rent the movie and watch these scenes as they were shot and compare my ideas to how it was filmed. The point isn’t to see if I can guess how it was filmed, but to try and see how the professional actor approached the scene compared to how I did. I’m looking for things that maybe I missed or didn’t think of. Maybe my gestures in my imaginary blocking were all too overdone and the film scenes are more understated? Or maybe I underplayed it? Whatever, I’m looking for differences and I’m looking to understand those differences. The goal is to develop my ability to compare my stuff against natural acting and note the differences- and where applicable, adjust my acting to be more sincere and less cliche’d.

Anyhow, every once in a while I’ll do this exercise as a way to kick my acting ideas in the pants a bit. It’s a good tool for stretching my imagination as well as sharpening my observational skills and pushing the boundaries of what I normally think of for a performance.

I don’t know if that helps anybody, but over the years this little exercise has helped me. So there ya have it, for better or for worse. Enjoy!

Clay-styled CG fun!

From Cg-Talk….

New Academy Rules for Animated Features

From AnimatedNews.com…

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has approved several new rule changes to take effect starting with the 80th Annual Academy Awards. Among them is a change in the definition of an animated feature film. The revision appears to have been made to avoid any possible controversy with motion capture technology now being used in the production of some movies. The previous rule stated that “An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture created using a frame-by-frame technique of at least 70 minutes in running time with a significant number of the major characters animated, and in which animation figures in no less than 75% of the picture’s running time.” The new rule states that “An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture of at least 70 minutes in running time, in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. In addition, a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time.”

Yeah, that really clears up the confusion.

So what does this mean? Motion capture is or is not a “frame by frame technique”? Seems to me it really isn’t, but I can see how folks would argue that it is if people “clean up” or “plus” the performance. So for all the cloudy wording that existed before, this new batch of wording seems just as cloudy. Oh well.

What a week…

Travelling in the U.S. this month I have had the following technical “issues”…

• My homesite was hijacked by a spam site causing me no shortage of alarm and scrambling to get it back up and secured.
• My primary workstation laptop was completely hosed by a virus (thankfully I had backups and didn’t lose any data). And this despite me having four different programs (anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-adware, firewall, etc.) to keep this from happening. Sometimes the bear eats you, ya know? I couldn’t do a system re-install because I didn’t bring the recovery discs with me. (dumb, i know). So the old laptop is down for the count. I needed a way to get work done since life doesn’t wait for the technically challenged, so I upgraded my computing a little earlier than planned. I’ve been getting this new laptop all set up to do work- all while borrowing wi-fi hotspots, friends and family’s internet connections. Starbucks has been a lifesaver so far. Fun!
• My digital video camera bit the dust after 6 years- just as I was trying to make this month’s VTS video.

When it rains it pours, eh? heh. But the sunny side is this: if i had to replace a camera and a laptop in Brazil I would have spent 3x the money. Technology and electronics is expensive there. So I just upgraded some things before I planned on it. Sometimes you just gotta roll with the punches and smile.

Another good read from last week: online dist stuff

Cinematech’s Scott Kirsner shares some thoughts from an online indy-film distributor, Filmbaby.com. Interesting reading, especially the revelation that their top selling film is a 20 year old 16 minute documentary that already had a strong underground cult following- and it’s still only moved 8000 units or so. My short take; online distribution is still a very unchartered bit of water for filmmakers. I’d sum it up as pretty much a “beer money” proposition. It’s better than letting the films sit idle, but you’re not gonna get much more than “beer money” from the deal. It just hasn’t broken into a place where it can be a highly profitable means of building revenue for filmmakers (especially for animators who’s cost of production is usually orders of magnitude higher than your typical digi-video hound). I wonder if it will? For musicians or audio recordings online digital distribution seems to be a bit more solid with the iPod and iTunes driving the market. Two years after its release the video iPod hasn’t kicked online distribution of video or film in the fanny as much as some had hoped, I don’t think. Unless a work is available on iTunes or it’s distributed by a traditional distribution company (via Netflix, et al.) it pretty much falls between the cracks. Fine if your digital film cost you 2 weekends and $1,000 to make with a Sony-cam. Not so fine if it took you 2 years of nights and weekends crafting full art and animation to flesh out that funny idea. The lotto mentality still applies to online distribution of animation- hope to get lucky and make something that just happens to resonate with the public and maybe you can make a few thousand bucks. In that paradigm production value has a highly risky return on investment component. Cheaper Flash product that relies more on verbal humor or extremely crude humor is a less expensive approach (and thus it has lower risks and will continue to dominate the online animated world). Even Jibjab’s famously popular musical riffs, while they hold a higher humor level than the shock-jock mindset, are still pretty low on the animation production value. They (wisely, it seems) put their money into different emphases. Same with Homestar Runner. The persistent theme so far in online distribution is that higher animation production values rarely translate into higher film views and thus, higher revenues. It seems that even advertisers and sponsors have figured this out as well. Why pay a lot for high quality production value in animation if cheap but verbally funny gets you the same amount of notice? By all appearances in the online world a funny 3 minute short film lovingly lit, professionally acted, shot on film, edited on an Avid and scored by professional composer has zero competitive advantage over a grainy 30 second mini-DV cam video of a kid crashing his skateboard on Ebaum’s World. Absolutely none. There’s next to no pay-off for visually rich online content right now.
The really scary idea: the price structure for online content has solidified at a position only slightly above free and it’s only going to go down from there. Those who would make content for this medium will need to find a way to get their production costs down to as close to zero as possible. In that world I think puppetry is a better online product than animation.

The slumbering demand for cartoons

I’ve been traveling a lot lately so I’m kinda behind on things. But last week Uncle Eddie had a great post on the slumbering, waiting market for funny, visually oriented cartoons. He makes a great point that other previously declared “DOA” ideas suddenly turned into giant money making machines. Add in the fact that the internet seems to be the preferred delivery medium for short funny laugh out loud video and the moment seems over-ripe for exploitation. The question is who will be brave enough to try it? Visually funny cartoons are expensive. The current crop of Flash output isn’t measuring up to the cartoon standards set 60 years ago. I think the high cost of entry is what’s keeping the lid on this movement and so we’ll still see a lot of talking head pun driven verbal humor. For now….

Flat space staging

I’m kicking around some ideas on backgrounds for a cartoon piece of animation that is less literal and more expressive. One of the things that’s been coming up in conversation with friends and colleagues is the trick of taking CG characters and using them more in a flat space camera arrangement. “Flat space” is a way of saying that the action primarily takes place on a single plane in depth with other objects/set pieces/visual elements used to define foreground planes and background planes. The concept is that the character action doesn’t move through those various depth planes but plays itself out on the single depth plane it starts on. This clip of Daffy and Bugs shows this concept really well. The foreground and background plates work to establish a scene with depth (stylized, but still with depth) while the character animation takes place on a primarily mid-plane level. Even when Bugs plays the xylophone he doesn’t really play the whole thing in depth, just a small part of it.

I forget where I found this clip online. If you know who originally posted this please leave a comment so they can get proper credit for taking the time to grab the footage.

If you look at a lot of the WB, Lantz, MGM cartoons they use almost all flat space staging except for specific shots meant for emphasis. You get into UPA and it’s almost all flat space. Seemingly only Disney bothered much with characters moving in depth in animation because only his shop could afford all the thrown away drawings it required to get a character moving in depth to look right. And even then the Disney shorts are almost all flat space work. I’m sure they didn’t have the budget to do too many fancy depth scenes in the shorts. Plus the multiplane camera rig did a lot of the heavy lifting of suggesting depth. Of course depth comes by default to CG so we don’t often worry about how to use CG without depth. For some the idea never even crosses their mind- why would you purposefully limit yourself? The challenges involved with a strict flat space staging paradigm are interesting to CG. CG tends to do better with literalism by default- build a static set, let your characters play out in the full depth of it and make them feel like they’re really “there”. In fact most of the rendering improvements in Cg over the last decade have been to heighten a sense of realism and “there-ness” to the objects and characters. Camera work has also had a greater emphasis on “there-ness”. Taking a look at CG animated films and VFX bonanzas more and more we see a heightened use of characters and objects moving in depth (specifically from depth to near camera) as a tool. Add in the latest hot buzz for 3d projection and you take this the next step. While it makes for cool theme park rides, I’m not fully convinced that full freedom in depth is inheirently superior. Overused it becomes a club to beat the audience with, I think- like putting too much sugar in a recipe.
In a flatter cartoon staging scenario the pedantic need for explicit “there-ness” is minimized. This flat approach is not literal, but it’s been highly effective for a long, long time. The trick in using a strong sense of flat space staging in CG I think is to get puppets that can be effectively pushed into shape for stronger flat space work and choosing a design and render style that from the first frame communicates that literalism is a lower priority in this world. Of course we’ll need to back this up with some pudding that has a hint of proof in it.

Stupid Spammers

For those who tried to come here to keithlango.com only to find some Find.FM front page crap, I offer my apologies. Seems they hijacked my site for a few hours. I was on the road and didn’t know about it til this afternoon. It’s fixed now and I’ll be doing a security upgrade through out the day to keep it from happening again. Ahh, the joys of the internet. *sigh*

Screen Business

In Mark Mayerson’s recent post about Pinnocchio,
he offers this neat bit of observation…

One thing this sequence excels at is the use of stage business. In too many modern animated films, characters stand around yakking with nothing else to do. The animator is stuck trying to find arm gestures and head bobs that go with the dialog. In this sequence, Stromboli is working with a prop in almost every scene and using the prop to perform specific actions.

That nails it pretty well, don’t you think?

So as usual, I got to thinking, well, why is it this way? The best answer I could come up with is the heavy production process that every CG asset labors under. If it exists on screen, then it has to have the following tasks completed-

• designed
• color designed
• modeled
• rigged
• UV’s
• textured
• render tested
• animation tested
• pipeline asset coordination & compliance
• multiple version publishing (render version, layout rig, animation rig, etc.)
• placement & tracking within the scene as it transits from dept. to dept.

And that’s the basic minimum for everything you see on screen, from the smallest ball point pen or coffee mug to a complex machine. The task list is the same, and each task is the domain of a different department, usually. And each task needs to be tracked for schedule, modification, approval, etc. In other words- props in CG are expensive, even “simple” ones. With such a heavy price to pay, naturally the prop list will take a hit when producers are looking for ways to maximize their production pennies. Not to mention that CG character interaction with other objects is still one of the biggest technical pains in the gluteus maximus that exists in the animator’s workday. It’s just a beating. So we take stuff out of the character’s hands and leave the animator to try and find some interesting way to combine hand gestures- of which the general library tends to be somewhat shallow.

Prop interaction (or ’screen business’ in old days speak) allows for a greater variety of actions for the characters to perform, immediately adding a sense of depth and believability to the milieu onscreen. And when you can draw you props as easily as anything else, well, it’s no wonder that 2d films have more of it. A fine example in a recent traditional film was the sequence where we see the introduction of Mr. Silver in Disney’s Treasure Planet. The stuff they have him do in that 2 minute section of him cooking and then sharing his stew would cost many, many millions of dollars in CG.

As in other areas, a good place to look for comparison to CG in this regard seems to be puppetry or stop-motion animation. But even there they’re ahead of CG on ease of implementation. A physical model of a clay coffee cup takes about 15 minutes to make and bake and the animator can put it in the character’s hands easily with a bit of sculpy on the backside. Puppeteers using the glove hand can just pick up the object after they come back from buying it at Target or Walmart. Compared to the flaming technical hoops that CG animators need to jump through just to have something for a character to pick up, and then have that character pick that something up- it’s child’s play.

It’s just another example of how the technology of the medium can get in the way. What would revolutionize things is to come up with an asset production paradigm that was as intuitive and simple as it is in 2d films. Unfortunately the massive command and control requirements of a large scale CG film kinda preclude such low level action.

Seems to me there could be some innovation of thought that would streamline the process and open some doors creatively. Maybe there’s a technological solution, but I think CG practitioners tend to look to the Technology Genie to give them their magic wishes a little too quickly. I’d be interested in hearing if some production of size had managed to find a way to quickly and effectively introduce props or assets in a way that still allowed it to get onscreen with acceptable quality without such a heavy task/workload toll? Do any commenters have any examples or anecdotes that might be had by way of improvement?

Whoa…very cool lipsync lesson- Aardman style

This is like finding a $100 on the sidewalk. How is it that I never saw this when it first came out?

Stefan Marjoram offers a quick tutorial on doing lipsync in Maya in the Aardman style. It includes his incremental Maya work files and the sound track, too!! Of all the studios in existence today the one whose work I enjoy more than any is Aardman. Yes, even more than Pixar, though I’ve heard they’re pretty good, too (StudioAKA, home of director Marc Craste, would probably be my third choice. After than I probably stop keeping track). Second, after seeing his short film The Deadline I’ve been a fan of Stefan’s approach to animated acting. He has the impeccable ability to find those little subtle things and bring them out of the audio track in a fun and unique way (something he talks about briefly in his tutorial, by the way). His characters have such amazing sense of depth and life to them and he uses the simplest of methods to pull it off. He’s one of those super talented guys who can’t seem to make anything I don’t like. So to be able to poke around in some of his work files- well, I kinda geeked on it. His method of manipulating the puppet is rudimentary compared to higher end GUI’s and controls, but to see the principles of how he builds his performance under the hood was like a small treasure. My guess is this tutorial was first published a few years back. Anyhow, if you want to try a different, fun, interpretive approach to facial animation with an Aardman flair, then check this tutorial out. You won’t be sorry.