Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Monday, November 09, 2009
Influences
Influences are a funny thing. They are rarely cohesive. I think it'd be very sad if one's influences all come from the same pot of fish. Sometimes a person finds themselves surprised by what influences them. And sometimes others are surprised, too. In some form or another- whether in large or small measure- influences tend to keep showing up in a person's work over time. Here are a few of mine, in no particular order....
This is the stuff that I saw as a kid or a young teen and it stuck with me for some reason. As you can see my slice of humor runs a bit off center from the usual animated fare served up by ol' Uncle Walt. I like verbal humor every bit as much as visual. However it has to be character driven and intelligent, not just self aware pop culture references that the viewer can congratulate themselves' for recognizing. Shows like the Muppet Show, M*A*S*H, and SCTV had a grown up flavor of humor without being needlessly obscene. Benny Hill was winkingly raunchy, but in a tamed down sense. Laugh In was an odd 1970's thing, but I loved the various character sketches. It too had a bit of a naughty streak, but it never crossed line into crass. It was what Saturday Night Live was, only not live, and nearly 10 years before SNL. I liked it better. The Peanuts shows & M*A*S*H greatly influenced my sense of what it means to have a story with some heart and humor at the same time. Woody Woodpecker was just energy exploding all over the screen, pure visual joy. Meanwhile the various Looney Toon shorts were burned into my cerebral cortex from infancy. They too had smart verbal humor at times, very sharp, not dumbed down or condescending. I remember being a 5 year old kid sitting and getting lost in Richard Scarry's books for what seemed like days at a time. The characters were so simple, but extremely appealing and expressive. His illustration was whimsical without being cloying. I never grew tired of looking at them and even today when I see one I'll take some moments and travel back and get lost in them again. For lack of a better word, they're just magical.
Oddly, I was never inspired by Disney films. As a kid they bored me. The only ones I remember liking were Song of the South and 101 Dalmations, and even those were hit and miss. It wasn't until I had become an adult and a professional animator that I looked at Disney films more closely. They still don't really influence or inspire me, even though I can appreciate the craftmanship involved. I can admire them for what they mean historically and technically, but they still don't do much for me. Go figure.
The Muppet Show
Looney Toons
Woody Woodpecker
Benny Hill
M*A*S*H
Strange Brew (The McKenzie brothers film)
SCTV
Snoopy Come Home
A Charlie Brown Christmas
Rowan & Martin's Laugh In
Monty Python
Richard Scarry's books.
This is the stuff that I saw as a kid or a young teen and it stuck with me for some reason. As you can see my slice of humor runs a bit off center from the usual animated fare served up by ol' Uncle Walt. I like verbal humor every bit as much as visual. However it has to be character driven and intelligent, not just self aware pop culture references that the viewer can congratulate themselves' for recognizing. Shows like the Muppet Show, M*A*S*H, and SCTV had a grown up flavor of humor without being needlessly obscene. Benny Hill was winkingly raunchy, but in a tamed down sense. Laugh In was an odd 1970's thing, but I loved the various character sketches. It too had a bit of a naughty streak, but it never crossed line into crass. It was what Saturday Night Live was, only not live, and nearly 10 years before SNL. I liked it better. The Peanuts shows & M*A*S*H greatly influenced my sense of what it means to have a story with some heart and humor at the same time. Woody Woodpecker was just energy exploding all over the screen, pure visual joy. Meanwhile the various Looney Toon shorts were burned into my cerebral cortex from infancy. They too had smart verbal humor at times, very sharp, not dumbed down or condescending. I remember being a 5 year old kid sitting and getting lost in Richard Scarry's books for what seemed like days at a time. The characters were so simple, but extremely appealing and expressive. His illustration was whimsical without being cloying. I never grew tired of looking at them and even today when I see one I'll take some moments and travel back and get lost in them again. For lack of a better word, they're just magical.
Oddly, I was never inspired by Disney films. As a kid they bored me. The only ones I remember liking were Song of the South and 101 Dalmations, and even those were hit and miss. It wasn't until I had become an adult and a professional animator that I looked at Disney films more closely. They still don't really influence or inspire me, even though I can appreciate the craftmanship involved. I can admire them for what they mean historically and technically, but they still don't do much for me. Go figure.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Ward Jenkins' step-by-step
The talented and friendly Ward Jenkins of the Ward-O-Matic blog has posted a wonderful in-depth look into how he does his illustration work. It's a great little read. I enjoyed it and even learned a thing or two.
(follow Ward's Twitter here if you like)
Saturday, October 03, 2009
And coffee...
Yeah, I know it's dumb to rip off the Obama Hope poster. That's sooooo 2008. But I still like it. It's an interesting study in iconography. Simplify a character down to their base elements. One image, one word that captures who they are.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Squiggles!
An old trick in the world of limited budget 2d animation is to cycle through two to four drawings for a hold. This way you can chew up the scene footage with as few drawings as possible. The result is animation that kinda squiggles as it holds, maintaining the illusion of life more by an expression of energy than literal movement. This is very cost effective and the image stays alive due to the cycling. Since the animation stays so rough the audience accepts it for what it is- as well as whatever other limitations of the animation that come along for the ride. It's surprising what an audience will take in and filter through once they perceive the internal rules of an animated universe- a task that takes perhaps all of two seconds of viewing. Certainly I think this attitude of getting by with the least possible effort can be way overdone, but in the right balance I think there's real potential for cost savings without surrendering richness. The richness just comes in a different form, that's all. Nina Paley used this technique in Flash while making her solo feature film Sita Sings the Blues. You can see what I mean in the very first scenes in the following segment of the film....
It's rough as heck, but it totally works. In fact, it more than works. It thrives on a level that is completely different than if it were tied down tight, tightly polished and had the holds all animated in like a typical big budget Disney 2d film. The rough look has a kind of vibrancy to it that actually adds to the film. I don't have a fancy explanation for how it works- I just know it does.
Since I have these little stories I want to make, but I don't have a huge budget (natch: I don't have any budget) to hire an expensive team of animators and CG technicians, I keep looking for creative ways to leverage lessons and tricks from other mediums of animation into my little CG toolbox. I've lost years of effort trying to be a one man band making short films employing the big-studio CG film style. Those were lessons learned the hard way. So I've been messing with this squiggly thing for a few years now (off and on). It's taken that long to find something that works. Due to the rigidity of the meshes and well established visual norms CG just doesn't like to do this sort of thing. And nothing looks worse in CG than a cycle- of any kind. So I'd try something, but it'd look like crud- like some kind of mechanical or technical error rather than a purposeful artistic style. So I'd leave it for a while and then come back and try something different after thinking of something in the shower. More failures each time, each coming closer to what I wanted but couldn't see in my head because it just wasn't being done anywhere else. CG is so picky when it comes to the imagery it makes. There's so little margin for error it seems. It's too demanding, too rigid an artform at times. But like Edison and his silly light bulb, I kept at it. I finally feel like I got it. Here's my version (watch it in HD for a better look. Or best yet- here's a link to a full res QT)....
This is really fast to animate because I'm using flat out 'dead holds' on the controls and letting the squiggly part keep the scene alive. I hit a pose and that's it. I hold it. No 'moving holds' or overdone overlapping business. This 4 second scene took maybe 15 or 20 minutes to animate (compare that to 4 sec. per week doing it the "right" way in feature films). In fact I over-animated it at first out of habit, so I had to go back and rip out the moving holds I had started to build in. I tell you, the hardest part is de-programming myself from doing CG the "right" way. It's not as easy as it sounds to embrace simplicity and then trust it. Anyhow, here's a screen grab of my f-curves to show the dead holds on the major controllers... (click to see it larger).
This is what it looks like without the squigglies....
You can see that it's super dry and just goes dead without the squiggles. The squiggling really keeps it feeling vibrant. So yeah. I'm really, really happy with where I've ended up with this.
It's rough as heck, but it totally works. In fact, it more than works. It thrives on a level that is completely different than if it were tied down tight, tightly polished and had the holds all animated in like a typical big budget Disney 2d film. The rough look has a kind of vibrancy to it that actually adds to the film. I don't have a fancy explanation for how it works- I just know it does.
Since I have these little stories I want to make, but I don't have a huge budget (natch: I don't have any budget) to hire an expensive team of animators and CG technicians, I keep looking for creative ways to leverage lessons and tricks from other mediums of animation into my little CG toolbox. I've lost years of effort trying to be a one man band making short films employing the big-studio CG film style. Those were lessons learned the hard way. So I've been messing with this squiggly thing for a few years now (off and on). It's taken that long to find something that works. Due to the rigidity of the meshes and well established visual norms CG just doesn't like to do this sort of thing. And nothing looks worse in CG than a cycle- of any kind. So I'd try something, but it'd look like crud- like some kind of mechanical or technical error rather than a purposeful artistic style. So I'd leave it for a while and then come back and try something different after thinking of something in the shower. More failures each time, each coming closer to what I wanted but couldn't see in my head because it just wasn't being done anywhere else. CG is so picky when it comes to the imagery it makes. There's so little margin for error it seems. It's too demanding, too rigid an artform at times. But like Edison and his silly light bulb, I kept at it. I finally feel like I got it. Here's my version (watch it in HD for a better look. Or best yet- here's a link to a full res QT)....
This is really fast to animate because I'm using flat out 'dead holds' on the controls and letting the squiggly part keep the scene alive. I hit a pose and that's it. I hold it. No 'moving holds' or overdone overlapping business. This 4 second scene took maybe 15 or 20 minutes to animate (compare that to 4 sec. per week doing it the "right" way in feature films). In fact I over-animated it at first out of habit, so I had to go back and rip out the moving holds I had started to build in. I tell you, the hardest part is de-programming myself from doing CG the "right" way. It's not as easy as it sounds to embrace simplicity and then trust it. Anyhow, here's a screen grab of my f-curves to show the dead holds on the major controllers... (click to see it larger).
This is what it looks like without the squigglies....
You can see that it's super dry and just goes dead without the squiggles. The squiggling really keeps it feeling vibrant. So yeah. I'm really, really happy with where I've ended up with this.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Somebody else is on the visual harmony train...
David O' Reilly (whose stuff I just wrote about earlier this week) has an article on the Illustrative-berlin blog. In his article he expounds on his thoughts on the vital necessity of creating an animated world that is cohesive- that obeys its own rules where every element fits together into what he calls "aesthetic harmony". An excerpt...
It felt like I was reading my own thoughts played back to me. Earlier this year I wrote about the necessity of Visual Harmony, and how this visual harmony is the primary (sole?) determinant of the audience's perception of 'quality' in animated works. Here's what I had to say back then...
It's very rewarding to see somebody else "getting it". Read O'Relly's article. You'll find quite a bit of neat stuff in there.
My central belief is that the key to aesthetics is coherence. In 3d we essentially create artificial models of worlds, I contend that what makes these worlds believable is simply how coherent they are; how all the elements tie together under a set of rules which govern them consistently. This coherence spreads to all areas of a film; dialogue, design, sound, music, movement etc. Together they create a feedback-loop which reaffirms that what we are looking at is true. The human eye wants this aesthetic harmony.
It felt like I was reading my own thoughts played back to me. Earlier this year I wrote about the necessity of Visual Harmony, and how this visual harmony is the primary (sole?) determinant of the audience's perception of 'quality' in animated works. Here's what I had to say back then...
Basically, visuals and motion and shapes and forms all desire to be in harmony. When they are not then a discernable (if not defineable) dischord occurs. ....
Once you ramp up one area of the visuals into a higher order of complexity (say, lighting or texturing) then all other areas need to rise accordingly to maintain that harmony. ...
Drop the level of complexity in any area and you create a sort of "off-key" feel to the animated film. General audiences understand this. When the visual harmony is well done they immediately perceive the animated film as having 'quality'.... There is such a thing as animation that lacks complexity or realism or literalism but yet still has a high degree of quality, simply because all the pieces 'fit'. So complexity or literalism is not the equivalent of quality- visual harmony is.
It's very rewarding to see somebody else "getting it". Read O'Relly's article. You'll find quite a bit of neat stuff in there.
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