The Manufactured Image: 25 Assembly Accidents

Continuing our discussion of the manufactured image, I’m not willing to go the easy road and say the artists, animators, technicians, designers or whomever just suck and that’s that. It’s not that simple, and more so, it’s not true. For me this is a discussion about what I think are some core problems with how stuff gets made in the manufacture/assemble paradigm. Personally if I’m going to be ballsy enough to call out a whole system then I need to do better than pick on one image. Thus in an effort to back up my ideas I want to show that the problem isn’t limited to just Shrek 3.
I’m sure on this point many will disagree with me, but here are some stills from various recent CG animated films that I think are good examples of what I call assembly accidents. I just grabbed these off the net after doing some quick searches. In doing this I am not trying to say that I think these films are bad, nor am I saying I could do anything in them any better. And it isn’t my intention to call out any individual artists or TD’s. For the most part the individual artists did very fine jobs on their specific task or element. In some examples I actually know some of the people involved and I know they did their level best they could and made some nice parts- they just weren’t responsible for the whole. I doubt anybody really was- thus the accidents.
No, these images are merely examples of the kind of visual accidents that are bound to happen under the current manufacture/assemble production paradigm that rules big budget Cg films. And this is not to say that these images aren’t good, either. Some of them still work pretty well. It’s just they have a few things that aren’t clear due to the accidents of assembly.

Check out the examples after the jump…

1) Where does the squirrel end and the rocks begin?

2) The bgrd directly behind the characters is unfortunately the most visually complex part of the bgrd. The lines all muddle the performance. Shift the characters to the screen left a bit on top of the quieter visual space there and this would be better.

3) Too many competing lines. Try the “Squint Test” (clear images work on a macro level even when viewed all blurry)

4) Color similarities between characters and background makes reading this a bit tricky.

5) Ditto, especially for the boy and the paper.

6) Top of image is ok, but the ant emerges from the boy’s gut like “Alien” due to tonal similarities of armor and ant color.

7) When saturation and tonal hegemony ruled the land

8) No comment.

9) Not bad, really. It’s a nice image. But how about if you put the yellow character over the blue bgrd and the blue character over the yellow bgrd to help them separate better? Plus the smaller character in front of the tire sculpture would be clearer. Right now it looks like there are tires stacked on top of the yellow car.

10) The crowd overpowers the scene, making it difficult to read the ball in the player’s hand. Tinting the whole crowd a similar hue to push them back and unify them into a single idea of a crowd would help.

11) Another case of a nice layout that could have been a little stronger. Put the darkly dressed boy on the left where the bgrd is light and the brightly dressed girl over the dark bgrd to the right. Just to add balance and separation from the bgrd a bit.

12) A little hard to read what’s what. Squint test.

13) Under the squint test Dory almost disappears.

14) I gots me the blues, baby. (foreground and background mush)

15) I generally love the look of the Ice Age films, but even they suffer their share of assembly accidents. In a lot of ways this shot works well, but the foreground character disappears into the mammoth. Silhouette on the armadillo character is nicely done, though.

16) Foreground works very well, but the darker shading lines in the background compete and disrupt the flow.

17) Trees behind E compete with her dark silhouette. Tree behind Bob crowds his face and breaks the staging space between the characters. Great pose on Bob, tho.

18) Another one so close. Mr. Incredible? Great! Syndrome? Lost.

19) Visual overload.

20) TMI.

21) Where does Rodney end and the machine begin?

22) The disappearance of RJ. AKA: Put the SUV in the garage.

23) Another close one. I like the facial expressions here- very appealing. But the brown squirrel over the brown log when you had a bright oppossum to put there instead? Assembly Accident.

24) Foreground is background part 2. The color tones flatten this one.

25) The Mother of All Accidents. There’s some really fun stuff going on here. You just have to find it.

I’ll stop there since (I hope) the point is made. Again, this isn’t a slam on anybody (although I am sure some will feel that it is). There’s some really great craftsmanship in just about every individual element shown here. It’s just that once all the elements were assembled they just don’t work together quite so well. Some images work as is, but could have been just a leeeeeetle bit better. So no death threats, please. I’m just trying to point out a flaw in the system.

The Manufactured Image: A Microcosm

For a primer, read my previous post.

Let me focus on one problem that will be a microcosm that mirrors the larger issues at hand. As I noted yesterday one of the things that big budget CG imagery lacks is a sense of connectedness. For years called “stiffness” or “coldness” by reviewers, CG has had a difficult time warming the eyes of it’s viewers. It’s not universally true of all CG projects. There are some smaller groups, short projects or individual artists who are doing some very fresh things artistically in CG, so the problem isn’t the medium. And I do think occasionally feature films do a fair job of creating pleasing imagery for many scenes (I’ll show some in later posts). But the klunky nature of the imagery in CG happens much more than it ought to. Why? As I said in my previous post, I think the system in which the images are made has flaws- it is a manufacture & assemble system. And even how we pose and animate characters in CG is a micro-mirror of this problem- the assembled image is made from characters whose poses are assemblies of many controls and parts.

For example, check out Ogre Fiona’s face, arguably the better of the bunch in the promo image from Shrek 3.

Yet it doesn’t completely work for some reason. Why? Well, it’s two emotions on different sides of her face. This side says one thing…

And this says something else…

Let’s examine how one creates poses and animation in CG. In CG every part of the facial control system (in fact every system) is isolated. That current paradigm has been necessary so that you can get the detailed control you need to get the shapes you need. But ultimately these things are just very complex articulated puppets with many restrictions to their ability to change shape. They have more variables to control than any other form of animated character. The most complex stop motion puppets have a miniscule fraction of the control of Cg puppets. Handdrawn characters are as direct as the tip of a pencil. Clay characters are totally malleable directly with your fingers. Animating Cg characters is a bit like handling uranium. You touch them only through thick gloves inside a box. One friend of mine, a 10+ year Disney veteran animator, described that his experience animating CG characters was about as easy and elegant as “drawing with boxing gloves on”. So we have these nifty digital toys- highly detailed, almost infitely subtle- yet burdened under their own complexity. Again bright minds are working to install a new paradigm of creating shape and form with these puppets, but for now the current system reigns.

The reality is that which is so easy to get in one clean line in a drawing is accomplished by an arrangement of multiple rigid elements in CG. So how we even pose the characters is an assembly of moved parts to create a sense of something alive and breathing. The best CG animators can rise above this limitation, many others lack the experience to do much more than get all the kinks out of their motion. With so many disparate and isolated pieces to move it’s a huge workflow challenge to make everything feel like it’s moving together, motivated by will or emotion and with purpose (this one fact alone accounts for perhaps 90% of the cost of cleaning up CG animation.) Many younger and less experienced animators working in film (and there are a lot) are doing all they can to just get the basic stuff working right. Never mind thinking about a higher plane of existence. If we could find ways to allow animators to work at the speed of thought on creating these performances and set them free from the assembly or parts paradigm then we can tap into a wide talent pool that currently is stifled by the technology.

The Manufactured Image: Henry Ford would be proud

OK, kids. This is where I put on my crumudgeon hat and in the process no doubt make some people upset. Sorry, but it’s not my intent to make anybody feel bad, but instead try to point out some fundamental issues with the system.

OK, let’s have a look at this….

(click to enlarge)

I’m sorry, but I can’t get drunk enough to make this look good. Without a doubt this is a forest located deep down in Uncanny Valley. But this is merely a continuation of a problem that has been evident for some time. I’ve been saying for a while that big budget CG has been lumbering under the burden of it’s technological roots. It is difficult to deny that the current bent of big budget CG is toward over detailed and klunky visuals. There’s a lot to take issue with here. The lack of contrast, few quiet areas in the image, jangly poses, cliche’d layout, the haphazard accidental relationship of the background with the foreground, etc. It’s almost like nobody ever saw this all together until it was too late. The thing is, if it was made like 99% of the imagery in big budget CG then most likely nobody did see it until it was too late. The problem is not so much with any single artist. That’s because in all likelihood no single artist is responsible for this. It is assembly line imagery. The flaw is in the system under which this is made.

Imagine taking 10 talented solo singers and asking them to sing the US national anthem to the same instrumental track. But due to scheduling conflicts they have to each perform in solo, not as a group. Oh, and gee, we don’t have everybody’s performance here yet so you’ll need to just do your part the best you know how without hearing the others. Naturally these singers are to going to make it the best national anthem they know how. So they sing and sing, beautiful notes that rise and fall- all creating fabulous solo performances. Now take these 10 solo artist’s performances and mix them together in editing. The overall result would be hideous. There are no background singers, nobody is doing harmony, nobody takes the lead because all take the lead. It’d be like some kind of gladiator battle of voices. The jumble of notes flooding forth would cause ears to bleed.

This is the musical equivalent of CG feature film production. Read why I think so after the jump.

It is apparent to me that the production pipeline itself contributes to this sense of disjointedness we see in many scenes of CG feature films. In my experience as a Cg Supervisor on several long form projects it is clear that large CG animated projects are run more like a factory than anything else. Before becoming an animator I worked for almost 7 years in a wide variety of factories. I know factories. CG film production is a factory paradigm. These various CG assets are built in individual tasks, much like manufacturing widgets. The idea is that in the end all the various widgets are assembled to make a single image. So in many ways it’s no surprise at all that the end result feels haphazard and disjointed. It’s not the fault of the individual task-doers. They’re doing their best within their small isolated task (and small window of information about the whole) to make it the best they know how. Like the solo singers in the above example we do our best to make it a kick-butt (insert asset type here). And increasingly in the world of CG artists the measure of success or ability is in the artists/technicians ability to master details. It’s a micro focused paradigm. Left to our own devices individual Cg artists will over-detail things. It’s what we know and it’s what the CG world celebrates as having higher quality. I know because I’ve done it in the past myself, so you’re hearing it from one of your own. Thus the disease of detail-itis is built into the entire economy of CG production almost by default. There is little macro focus on the relationship of all assets in the creation of the image. Nobody can see the whole elephant at once, so we make our pieces based on our belief about what kind of object we think it ought to be (snake, tree, rope, etc.). But let me be clear on this- Detail-itis isn’t an unbalanced love for details over macro view of art. It’s merely the result of an inability to even be allowed to think on a macro level. Thus we focus our energy where we are given permission to put our mark on the art- in the details too small to be managed.

In a CG film production you usually don’t see everything all together until it’s almost done. More often than not the asset tasks are assigned with little information about how these individual elements fit into the larger collective whole of the imagery for which they are being created. When a modeler makes a lamp he is not shown all the scenes in which that lamp will be seen, where it appears in screen each time, how close we are to it, etc. Similarly animators have no information about the tonal qualities of the background to work with and zero info about the lighting or FX usually. Texture artists are given modeled props to paint, again in a vacuum. And so it goes. Lacking an understanding of context it is impossible for the individual task artist to make well informed priority judgments. The approval system isn’t any better. The director (via an endless string of departmental meetings) is shown models, environments, textures, materials, lighting, animation, cameras and FX all in different meetings. There is a significant gap of time where a director (or art director) on a CG project never sees the image with its elements all together. Once he approves the concept image or the color key (which are painted traditionally and usually not accurate representations of the true final look of CG) it is all broken apart. He or she just won’t see everything together again in the context of a given scene in the film until months later when the first lit and rendered scenes roll off the render servers. But on just about every production by the time they get to see everything together (usually lighting dailies) the production schedule is in crunch mode. Thus all they’re usually able to do is fix the technical problems (hopefully) and get the frames rendered without mistakes and with some measure of consistency. There’s no time to change sets or camera angles or animation or models or textures or anything to make the scene work as a piece of art. It’s all most crews can do to get the darn thing rendered, assembled, comped and done on time. Because of the huge cost involved lighting is not the place to be making changes, but ironically it’s the first place where you have all of the pieces ready put together. It’s only here that one can begin to arrange these elements to create pleasing singular works of artistic imagery, but the ability to do so is a luxury that cannot be afforded. The paradox is staggering.

Artistry isn’t assembled. Cars, disposable razors, radios & lawn mowers are. The primary benefit of manufacturing is consistency of product combined with cost control. Is it any wonder then that many CG films feel the same? To combat this somebody needs to be allowed to think about the film from the standpoint of appealing artistic imagery. And they need to be able to do this before the money and time runs out. This is supposed to be the director’s or art director’s job, but in CG a director is often little more than parts inspector- whether by chance or by choice.

No doubt this film has a ton of talented & skilled people working on it. All CG films do. Great modelers, texture artists, lighters, animators, etc. All people who’s skills put them at or near the top of the heap. I have close personal friends working on this and I know for certain that they’re way better artists than this- when they are responsible for the whole image, that is. But in the current CG film production paradigm they’re not allowed to be. It would seem no one is.

So besides complaining about this, what do I have to offer? Well, I’ve got some ideas. I’ll share those as I go along. Stay tuned.

Do Me A Favor… Now in Dutch!!

Big thanks to my friend and colleague (we worked together at both Blur & DNA) Wim Bien for taking the time to translate my latest tutorial about favors, eases and spacing into the entertaining language of Dutch. Dutch seems so foreign to me, but I do have a Dutch favorite word now.

Voorbeeld.

Go ahead and say it out loud. Isn’t that fun sounding? You can’t help but smile when you say “voorbeeld”, can you? Oh, it means “example”. I think. Anyhow, check out Wim’s fine translation of this tutorial if you’re into the Dutch thing. And check out Wim’s site as well. He’s got some nice animation there. I remember when he did this one.

I really liked it then and I still dig it now. Willi Hammes did the scene set up/modeling/texturing/lighting. Wim did the animation. Both did an amazing job on this screen test for a film we were bidding on at Blur. Too bad it never got made.

Happy Birthday, Mike!

Today (October 25th) is my brother Mike’s 39th birthday. I dunno if he’ll be reading today, but just in case- Happy Birthday! I hope you have a good one, bro.

Animation Workshop in Sao Paulo

This weekend I am in the lovely city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I’ve been invited by the good guys at Melies, an animation and Cg graphics school here. Yesterday I gave a fun filled 6 hours workshop on animation and today we’re getting ready to do it all over again for a new crowd. The enthusiasm of the students is always the funnest part of these things. John & Marcelo of Melies have gone out of their way to make me feel welcome here and I am having a great time. They even invited me to play soccer (futebol) with them on Thursday night and everybody was so cool and friendly. Every week they get their students and faculty together for a friendly night of running around. It’s a great way to bring everybody together and to shake off some of that Cg blubber that can build up from sitting in front of a monitor all day and night. If I’m lucky I’ll soon have photos of me running around in my shiny new soccer shoes. I’ve even had a chance to meet a few VTS subscribers in person. How odd that they see me each month- and they STILL decided to come and listen to me. These poor people need help. They’re obviously deranged. Heh.
Keep your eye on this school. Seriously, I’m impressed. In just over a year of operation they’re already doing great things and I believe that they will quickly establish themselves as one of the better animation & Cg schools in the world.

VTS20 is…. coming!

Sorry for the slight delay folks, but it will be released later today. Uploading the thing often takes a number of tries and then it doesn’t go as fast as it used to when i lived in the States. I apologize for the inconvenience. I’ll update this post as soon as it’s up.

A World Away…

Check this out…

Almost 2 feet of snow in my home town of Buffalo, NY. Now this is not newsworthy. If it happened in December or January. But the second week of October??!! This is the kind of thing you expect to hear about the northern rockies in Idaho or Montana- but in New York? Totally unheard of. Crazy stuff.i do not envy those poor souls who have to shovel all that sloppy wet snow. I hated shoveling snow.

Meanwhile I’m enjoying the steamy rainy season here in the jungles and swamps of western Brazil. The concept of snow here is a world away indeed.

Do Me A Favor… (new animation tutorial!)

While I admit that I am a no account blow hard, I am a generous no account blow hard. Heheh. So in the spirit of the blind leading the blind into a black hole I present to you another abomination on the surface of the animated planet. Yes, dear readers, I have written another free web tutorial.

“What’s he bloviating about this time?”, you may ask. What indeed! The name of this new tutorial is Do Me a Favor: Favors, Eases & Other Mysteries of Space.

In this episode I get down under the hood of what marks the difference between an ease, a favor, spacing and timing. Have you ever wondered-

• Do eases or favors affect timing?
• Do favors or eases affect spacing?
• If so, how and why?
• Are eases and favors the same thing?
• Is timing and spacing the same?
• Why should I care about this stuff?

All these questions and more are answered (and illustrated with lovely animated grey spheres!) in this new free tutorial.
So if you’ve ever struggled to understand the nature of eases and favors and such, feel free to come and read my new tutorial. Hopefully it won’t further confuse the matter for you.

Enjoy!

Power Centers Tutorial: Now In French!

kLango Animation friend and translator extraordinaire Guy Wallart is at it again. This time he’s taken my Quick Tip Tutorial about Power Centers and translated it into French. The ladies just looooooove when you talk about power centers in French. Indeed.

Anyhow, all you french speaking animator types who want to win with the ladies (and add some zest to your poses at the same time) need to check it out and offer up a toast of fine wine to Guy for his efforts!

Kiwi!

A cute (if not a little sad) little bit of animated fun from Dony Permedi. It’s nice study in minimalist CG that has some energy & charm. There are some very fun little moments in this. Anyhow, I liked it so now I blog it.

Must Read Material: Design for Animation

John Kricfalusi’s blog is a place to find strong opinions, offered without apology or flinching. There are times when I don’t always go along with the polarity of his notions and I occasionally find myself not liking the look of some of his work, but you can’t deny the dude’s got passion about cartoons and he’s got loads of skill, knowledge and talent to back it up.

Well today Mr. K. put something up on his blog that is just fantastic stuff. He discusses the lost art of layout compositions that work with the character animation. He rails against the current crop of TV animation style for 2d stuff, but I see the desperate need to apply the principles he outlines in CG animation today. In the larger world of Cg art it is evident that we suffer from a terrible disease known as Detailitis. Symptoms include obsession with digital photos and video reference, an unnatural affinity for normal maps, the overweening attachment to detail as the arbiter of excellence and a slavish dedication or recreating the visual versimilitude of one’s front yard. If you’re a young a designer for animation then you need to go read this. Shoot, if you’re a professional designer for animation then you really need to go read it.
Brilliant stuff.

Now this is cool!

I don’t remember exactly how, but I came across Bernhard Haux’s nifty website with some neato stuff on it. Anyhow he has this amazing looking tool he developed for CG animation that has me drooling! Click to watch the tech demo reel.
It’s a very cool screen space mesh deformer that lets you sculpt the geometry based on the image plane, not just with deformer nodes in the rig. Think of it like a Photoshop grid deformer that works on the mesh based on camera angle. And it’s animatable, too? Be still my beating heart! He has a great little toony body rig as well, but I am sold on the idea that we need more solutions like this grid deformer thing to go to the next level for making cartoons in CG. I’d gladly pay to have this kind of ability for my studio (if it works well and is simple to use). Any of you Maya geniuses wanna take a whack at cooking up something similar?

Thunderstorms = Power Outage

We had some fun times yesterday! While they don’t have tornadoes here in Brasil, they do have some nasty microburst straight line winds that will do a number on you. Kick over trees, tear down awnings over petrol stations, rip up billboards, knock down power lines, plunge your home and neighborhood into darkness. Fun! But things are coming back online now. It almost felt like Texas there for a bit. Heh.

Mmm. Tasty Pork Flesh!

Update: We have some new links now. You folks killed the first server. Silly kids. Heh.

Friend of the site and VTS subscriber Brecht Debaene shared some recent commercials he’s animated. Yum!

First up…. Geisha swine mushing about fleshy, pink pork.

One question: Does she use massage oil or bar-b-q sauce?
(click to play video)

Psycho Pig Theater.

What’s not to be slightly disturbed by? Heheh.
(click to play video)

Nice work. I dig the groove we’ve going on here. Either that or I’m just hungry.

Arc D’ Triumph Tutorial: Agora Em Portugues!

A big thanks goes out to André Moreira Forni for translating my arcs tutorial into the fluid language of Portuguese. Just you wait and see: Soon all over the lands of Portugal and Brazil we will see men, women, children, dogs, cats, birds and alligators moveing with much better arcs! I predict that the Lula government will declare a national holiday once they learn of this fine work. Be one of the early adopters of the new chic and go check it out!
Or, maybe not. Either way, muito obrigado, Andre’!

Butter!

Excuse me while I beat this drum a little more…

Back when the first CG animated film came out there was a certain kind of limitation to the motion. Things weren’t all super smooth and polished to the level they are now. In fact some folks say that in a few more years that the animation in Toy Story will look very dated, kinda like the Cg version of rubber hose animation. Quaint, but sorely lacking in a certain level of refinement that many presume to be necessary in feature film animation- especially CG. There’s just too many motion artifacts. And artifacts are a cardinal sin in CG. It’s like letting the girl from Kansas see the man behind the curtain. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

For me I like stuff that has some edges left on it. Something happens when you smooth it all out, you take the interesting corners and edges off. I think some of the best handrawn animation has that rough feel to it. I am entranced when I see pencil roughs moving. There’s a kind of life to it. Bill Plympton has made a career out of a motion style that is very rough but lively. Certainly stop motion has that edge-filled feel, that handcrafted artistic roughness. Aardman’s short film The Deadline was a fantastic early foray into adapting the stop-mo look into the Cg environment (go check it out and you’ll see what I mean). But is it just me or does today’s CG animation feel like it’s all finely machined to tight tolerances? Smooth. Buttery. Slick. Might we be sanding off the baby with the bathwater here?

Too much slickness can leave an odd taste & feel in your mouth. A little oil on a salad is a good thing. But drinking a glass full of olive oil is nasty. A pat of butter melting on a hot stack of pancakes is heavenly, but eating a stick of butter would make me barf. And I’m feeling like we’re getting a firehose of buttery smooth animation that has all the interesting edges sanded off of it (for safety’s sake?).
My buddy and colleague Mark Behm was recently interviewed on the StrutYourReel.com site. Mark’s an insanely talented & bright chap (fantastic character design and painting, animates like the wind and he can program or write scripts/tools a wee bit too. Like a lot bit.) And I should add in that he is a super cool guy to boot. So of course he should be shot to remove any further threat to our egos. Heh. But Mark was asked this question in his interview.

Q: Each Animator often has their own tips and tricks for polishing their animation. Can you provide one of your tips that you use?

This is definitely not my strong point and I feel that CG seriously overemphasizes it. I’d rather see a shot that’s really got that spark of life, but a bit rough than one that is dull and buttery-smooth. Don’t get me wrong, it’s like leaving it unfinished if it’s not polished, but I think it should be the last thing you worry about.

Having said that, there’s really no way to avoid spending time in the curve editor to get things clean and polished. What I don’t like is when people “clean their curves” without paying attention to what’s happening on screen. I feel that’s kind of missing the point.

I LOVE that answer!! It’s refreshing to see somebody say it. I think right now the technology is driving the bus in CG animation when it comes to motion styles. Something about CG artists (and I include animators, too) has this adverse reaction to seeing anything with the slightest imperfection to it. Check this little illustration out for an example (click to blow it up for a better look)…

The shape on the left is rough- but bold. You can see some poly edges here and there, some of the arcs and sweeps of the edges have a little awkward swing to them. There are definite corners, and a strong self shadowing line. It is a strong shape that does not equivocate. Sure it could use a little spot cleaning, but I dunno, I think it’s got something going on for a simple little shape. On the right we have the same shape cleaned up to the point where a lot of that life is gone. Yes, it’s the same general shape, but it feels like some vitality has been lost. But the ‘positive’ is that there are no edge artifacts, all the corners are silky smooth, that harder shadow is gone, the intersection with the floor plane is smoothed out. It’s clean, safe, polished, smooth. Dull? In the world of CG this would be chosen as the better result. And to me that’s kinda sad.

In the land of big budget feature animation we either have uber-polished hyper kinetic animation or uber-polished reserved animation mimicing live action. But in the pursuit of the geat Golden Ticket of polish we animators have left the door open for the zombies to eat our brains (and our lunch!). Now we have massaged mo-cap that looks a lot like highly polished CG animation (Monster House’s results don’t look all that different than most of the handkeyed features being done). Give that technology a few more generations to improve (and trust me, it WILL improve) and soon the smart business choice will be “Why hand key in the first place? It looks the same as this cleaned up captured stuff.” Heaven knows audiences won’t know the diff. They’ll just know it’s smoove and buttery. By and large we’re all coming to the same place. Soon there won’t be much of a reason to hand key stuff. The sameness of it all is starting to eat at the foundation of things. Same stories, same designs, same genres, same scenarios, same talking animals/insects, same motion styles, same render look, etc.. How much longer before there’s no discernable difference between the cleaned up mo-cap of the next Monster House and the hand keyed polished slickness of every other feature being made? I mean if all we’re doing is re-creating a bunch of “man in a suit” motion, what’s the point here? Are we losing our cartoon soul? Is our obsession with polish the smoking gun? Somebody needs to explore a bit and find a way to make animation fun to watch again. It’s very rare that the motion or the poses or the facial distortions of a character in an animated film makes me smile anymore. I think it’s all just too polished to be all that interesting. Maybe somebody is doing something right now that will shut me up and blow my socks off. I sure hope so!

That pseudo Aardman style of Flushed Away looks refreshing. Some have mentioned that Chicken Little had a fun style at times as well. Madagascar took a good kick at the can. Parts of Ice Age 2 were nifty to see moving. But I dunno… there are ways in which all of these efforts, though brave and appreciated- aren’t venturing very far off the well trodden path we’re on now. Are these small attempts going to be enough? If we want to keep animating feature films in 6 or 7 years and not just doing clean up on capture data then I think we need more varied motion style voices to keep the zombies at bay. Call me crazy, but I think somebody needs to make an unabashed, unflinching, full out cartoon. Crazy motion- dare I say physically impossible motion, impossible acting ideas, insane concepts. We need it.

Gosh, I’m starting to sound like John K.

OK, fire up those flame throwers. I’m ready. :)

I dare you to watch this and not smile.

You know what I think? I think that animation needs to be fun to watch. And if it’s not meant to be fun (John Canemaker’s recent short film is a great case in point) then it had better darn well be interesting, arresting, grab you by the shirt lapels kind of good. But for entertainment animation I think we need to make it fun. And this Pocoyo stuff, my dear friends, is pure fun on a stick. So what if it’s “limited” animation? It has energy, it is imaginative in it’s own charming way. Sure the story is simplistic for pre-schoolers, but dang! It’s fun to watch!

I watched a section of animation for Song of the South that Thad K. posted on his blog. Man, that was fun to watch. Fun energy to the animation. Almost kinda Looney Tunes-ish for a Disney film. Then I thought of animation today and I realized- sadly we don’t see anything with this much strength and imagination being done. I can’t help but wonder: Is the whole business just making boring animation these days? When did animation become all about mimicing live action movies? When did we lose the fun? Why are we trading the fun of animation for the re-enactment of dramatic live action films? When the bulk of hand keyed CG animation gets to the point where stylistically it looks nearly indistinguishable from the cleaned up ‘performance capture’ of something like Monster House (and it’s almost there I think), the inevitable question will arise: why animate it at all? Why not just do what Zemeckis has done, capture it and clean it? If truly it turns out to be that mimicing live action acting is the end game of animation accomplishment- Why not indeed?

Here’s something else that looks like it could be fun…

But I can’t help thinking that if Dr. Suess is handled with the same “shoot it on 1’s and slather on the buttery smooth highly polished f-curve CG sugar” that it might not fit the Suess gestalt. If there’s anything a Dr. Suess bit of animation needs it would be this: Make it fun to watch! Dr. Suess is so fun, whimsical and lyrical to read, so the animation needs to be the same. So please, make it fun. Don’t try to make an animated version of Good Will Hunting. I only ask because I care.

Meanwhile, I have hopes that Flushed Away will capture some animation magic in a bottle. At least in an Aardman stop-motion sort of way.

New Free Web Tutorial: Breakdowns Can Be Such a Drag

Hey Kids,

I have released a new web tutorial relating to the troubling topic of how to build in proper overlap and drag in your animation. Here’s some excerpts:

A number of years ago I wrote my Pose to Pose- Organized Keyframe tutorial. In it I advocate a method of acheiving overlap and drag on objects that- at the time- I thought yielded decent results in a quick and easy fashion. In the ensuing years I have come to change my opinion about the merits of such a workflow. In this follow up article I hope to point out the problems with my earlier ideas and propose a better solution to the challenge of creating great overlapping action and drag in your animation. So think of this as a self repudiation of my earlier ideas. As I grow as an animator I feel it’s my responsibility to correct my own mistakes. So follow along as I trash my own theories!…

… One last caveat. This way of working does require a little something extra. Namely, it requires that we actually know what we’re doing. I can already hear the cries of lament: “Hey, no fair! You suck, Lango!” Yes, sad as it may be, we have to grow up and learn how to animate if we want to work this way. But that’s a good thing. I mean, think about it. This is the only way you could do this for over 80 years. The only way. Generations of animators have come before us. They learned this. They eventually learned to animate. Let’s not be content to be merely talented discoverers of happy accidents, but really, truly know how to animate.

Anyhow check it out. Hopefully you find it helpful and you learn some old school ninja tricks that make your animation better. You VTS19 viewers can rest happy knowing that this is the new free web tutorial that i mentioned in this month’s video. Huzzah!

VTS19 coming later today…

I still have 18 hours before the day officially ends here. I’m not late until then. ;o)

Update: Well, my part was done on time. But Brasil Telecom is doing their best to keep this from you with their rather spotty connection status. But we shall not be deterred! ‘Ere before dawn’s pure light lands softly upon the land we shall gain victory! (even if we don’t gain any sleep.)

Principles for Lipsync Animation: Ahora en Español!

Thanks are in order for Victor Escardo and his efforts to bring my article on lipsync animation into Spanish. Check it out. In his email to me Victor states….

The spanish language is the second language most speak in the world, but is not in the Internet. And this is because Spanish speakers are in the third world (Specially central and South America). Now is the second language in USA. So I hope with this and other future translation of your materials we are helping to end the digital gap to spanish speaking people.

Right on, brother! So better lipsync power to the spanish speaking people. :)

Viral marketing study

This 28 page study of the effectiveness of online recommendation based viral marketing strategies is a pretty dry and technical read. Yet it is illuminating in a sort of hypnotic fashion. Here are what I found to be the highlights of the study’s findings…

1. Viral marketing via the internet recommendation system is not as effective as originally imagined.
2. Smaller, tighter niche groups are better fits for viral marketing than broad general market consumer groups.
3. Received recommendations have a personal saturation point after which the probability of success declines. (too many rec’s result in a resistance behavior)
4. The vast majority of recommendation networks are extremely shallow (those who bought on a rec rarely ever then reccommended the item to another third party).
5. The more two people exchanged recommendations, the less effective those recommendations were at initiating a buying action. (this breaks several conventional wisdom models. oops.)
6. If you had an anime DVD that caught on in the recommendation game you pretty much printed money.
Here is the final sentence of the study authors…

Finally, we presented a model which shows that smaller and more tightly knit groups tend to be more conducive to viral marketing. So despite the relative ineffectiveness of the viral marketing program in general, we found a number of new insights which we hope will have general applicability to marketing strategies and to future models of viral information spread.

What does this mean to the ever hopeful independent animator? I have my opinions, but I figure why not open it up for discussion in the comments? So, fire away!

Animation Arcs Tutorial now in Korean

A big thanks to Korean choi Kyu-bo for taking the time to translate my Arcs D’ Triumph tutorial about animating good arcs. You can find his fine translation here. So all you kids on the peninsula go check it out. You know, if we’re not careful soon we’ll have the whole library in korean.

Korea, hmm? Do you think I have what it takes to be the Korean David Hasselhoff? The world wants to know.

On a somewhat related note: I do have another free animation tutorial almost ready for the site. It’s been a while since I’ve made a freebie, so I figured I was due. I hope to have it ready by the end of next week. Who says I don’t love you?

Because toucans ROCK!

My new favorite bird, the toco toucan. Give way, over-hyped penguins. You have met your match!

There is a park/zoo about a quarter of a mile from my house here. They have cool animals and stuff. Kinda like most zoos, I suppose. But the thing about this zoo is that even though they have these animals here, they didn’t have to go very far to get them. They’re all local animals, which at first thought would be kinda dull. A local animal zoo for someplace like Cleveland, Ohio would have rabbits, squirrels, pheasants, hawks, white tail deer, racoons, opossums and such. OK, but not much to write home about. But a local animal zoo here in the Pantanal? Jaguars, oncelots, anacondas, capybaras, alligators, giant anteaters, iguanas, emu’s, tuiuiu’s, giant river otters, tapirs, monkeys, macaws and of course- toucans! These things are like living cartoons. They’re even proportioned like a cartoon. And they look absolutely hysterical when they fly with those huge beaks. You half expect them to fall out of the sky when you watch them. Their preferred way to get about is to hop and I can see why. Their beaks are so big they have to constantly tip their head to look at anything. They’re chatty and very sociable birds, too. What’s not to like? I’ve seen a bunch of these flopping about in the wild already and I couldn’t help but smile each time. They’re like God’s little jesters.

Little tweaks…

I’ve decided to license my stuff on this site under the Creative Commons license. Non-commercial, non-editable category, thank-you. It’s just formalizing the way things have been for years anyway.

I’ve also decided to make getting my RSS feed a little simpler by getting a FeedBurner SmartFeed. If you don’t know what a feed reader is just click on my little RSS Subscribe linky-doo over on the right and see more info. The rest of you kids who know what’s going on can carry on. Oh, and I also added a nifty little plug in that does groovy things with the images that I upload here. Click on this one and check it out….

Kinda cool, huh? Yeah, I thought so, too. But one little thing eludes me. This theme isn’t Wordpress Widget friendly and so I can’t find a way to do short asides posts in my sidebar that works. I’ve tried a few different plug-ins for WP but none of them do the trick (or even function for that matter). So the search continues for this one final piece of my website puzzle.

Aw, who am I kidding? You know I’ll keep tinkering with this thing.

Rain

Rainy season seems to have arrived a little bit early here in Cuiaba’. Oh, and the roof leaks. A lot. Looks like I’ll have to move the computers to higher ground.

Online It’s a Short, Short World

Check out this Reuters article…
Poll:Online Viewers Shun Lenghty Videos

An excerpt:

The new survey found that relatively few — 7 percent of video users — have paid to watch any video online. Nearly three-quarters of online video users prefer free videos with ads.

You won’t find Vanita Butler sitting in front of her computer watching a full-length movie or television show, even though she’s an avid viewer of video on the Internet.

The 43-year-old saleswoman from Newark, Ohio, said she sees the Internet as more of a tool — for catching a news story or highlights from a

NASCAR race. When she has time for entertainment, she and her husband prefer the television set.

“It’s a little bit more of an intimate environment,” Butler said of watching television. “We can sit and do it together.”

Cheryl Landers, 50, a retail manager in Dedham, Mass., said she finds amateur clips funny and entertaining, but with two foster kids, she can never spare more than five minutes at a time, let alone a whole hour to watch an entire television episode. She said she usually has the TV on as background noise.

“I’m pretty much against paying for stuff on the Internet,” said P.J. Park, 25, of Mount Rainier, Md.

The gist is simple: online viewers of video content don’t like to watch long form media there (movies or full length TV shows). Oh, and they don’t like to pay for it either. (7% paid, while 75% think it should be free). Shorts, news clips, YouTube diet coke stunts, music videos, short funny clips from longer media they already know- yes. All these and more are the stock and trade of the online video media soup. Watching a 100 minute feature film… not so much. It would appear that when it comes to our big movie experience we prefer big movie platforms. But this only verifies the notion that the online world is the place to put out your short films and build some manner of a following. But that following, unless it is in the order of millions & millions of people, will not put butter on your bread. Not with such a large proportion of online users thinking this stuff ought to be free.

Pose to Pose Tutorial: Now in Italian!

Special thanks to Gianmichele Mariani for taking the time to translate my original animation workflow tutorial about working pose to pose with organized keyframes. Now you can read about how to use the dope sheet in that classy, groovy continental flow that all the ladies love- Italian! So go check it out.

Interesting times for indys, indeed…

This might be interesting if it works. I just read that MySpace is setting up a system where their users can directly sell original music to their fans right on their MySpace pages- without any gatekeepers. Distributor free distribution? As with all things like this the dreck will pile high, but there will be success stories to come from this. I don’t think it will displace the current big media comglomerate driven market system, but it’s a window for a different way to function. And alternatives are good to have, even if small and limited compared to the larger systems in place. I still think the need for indy’s is to give away their content in some form to generate a demand for a personalized copy in a higher quality format. But it’s good to know that should the demand be sufficiently created for purchasable copies that demand can be met outside of the current gatekeeper system. This isn’t too far from the current independent path of setting up your own site and driving traffic to it to create a following. A daunting task indeed- one that takes years. But the thing that makes the MySpace idea intriguing is that the whole MySpace system has an inherent referencing and recommendation infrastructure built right into the portal. So instead of using Google to find your music, now you see what your “friends” have linked in their profiles. It’s a much more powerful referencing system for finding independent content because it has the inferred approval and value assignment of a human being with whom you ostensibly share common interests. This is always going to end up being more effective than asking the Google Robot what it thinks you will like.
Read this Reuters article and think for yourselves what this might mean if the format were expanded to include selling of other downloadable content. Say, oh, I dunno. Animated films? Hmmm.

And while we’re talking about gatekeepers and animation, this little news item came and went without much discussion by the animation crowd. It appears that Apple’s iTunes is partnering with distributor Shorts International to expand its animated short film offerings to include more thann just the Pixar & Disney vaults and TV shows. Now award winning independent short animated films will find some distribution on iTunes Store. It will be interesting to see which of these two distribution paradigms ends up being more useful to the independent content creator- the MySpace solution or the iTunes solution? Perhaps neither? Perhaps both? Like all things for the independent I believe that the mosaic approach is going to be the winner, not the “all your eggs in one basket” approach.

Update: after just a little bit of clicking around I see that Shorts International is promoting their iTunes hosted animated film offerings on… yup, you guessed it- MySpace.

This stuff never gets old for me….

Thanks to Brecht Debaene for reminding me of this today. I swear I could watch pencil roughs all day. Seriously. This is pure magic. It’ll be nice when the day arrives when people are doing stuff like this again….

Don Hahn narrates the wonder of hand-drawn animation in The Beauty & the Beast.

Free Character Rigs

I am getting a alot of emails these days about where to find good, free character animation rigs for folks to mess around with. Well, I finally took some time to look for some. And I found a lot - all in one place.

Here!

There are rigs for Maya, Max, Lightwave, Xsi, Houdini, Motion Builder, etc. So go get your free rigs for the program of your choosing and enjoy a life of happy animating on the computer.

PS: Thanks goes out to the StrutYourReel forum for having this and making my life easier.

Clean up time!

OK, anybody who dropped in during the weekend probably got an eyefull as thy watched me restructure this site from the ground up. Heh. As you may (or may not) have noticed I updated my page a little. The site just got massively UGLY recently. Like awkward adolescence the site was gangling between two phases of life. It was a noodle soup of mixing color schemes, half HTML, half CSS/XML, frames that RSS inspired visitors couldn’t see, etc. Plus those big honking store banners annoyed me- and I made them! This is a little better. When I switched to Wordpress earlier this year this is more the kind of site I had in mind. Lots of cool things you can do with WP. So what’s new?

• Random page headers. Now everytime you come back you have the chance of seeing a new header. I have just 4 now and two of them aren’t going to last very long, but more will be coming. I plan on mixing in some stills of environments from my short film as well as some Myopia vistas. What can I say? I like stuff to look nice.
• I got rid of the frames around the blog. My stats were telling me that more and more people were coming to this site through feedreaders and RSS links. Which is cool, but when you click on a post in a feeder you don’t see all those other HTML frames around the blog page. So now everything is in the blog/site itself. No lost and wandering images or words. They’re all safe and warm here.
• Got me a nice fading slideshow of various images of characters and stuff I’ve made over the years. I’ll be adding to that show as time goes by with sketches, maybe some stills from my past work projects and other fun stuff.
• The links to my tutorials, animation clips, short films & contact were all out in frames before. I thought I should bring them in out of the rain. The launch pages are all handy Wordpress pages now.
• Of course a (more tasteful) link to the kLango Online Store for those who want to get their VTS groove on. The FAQ buttons for the VTS as well as the Animation: Personal Trainer program are now in WP world.
• A countdown meter so folks will know when the next VTS is due. I get about 25-30 emails a month from subscribers wondering when the VTS is coming out. Heh. Of course I tell everybody in an email the first week of the month, but email is sooooo 1996 and nobody really reads it anymore. So if you wanna know when to expect the next VTS, just come here and have a look.
• I figured since I have so many different translations of my tutorials, why not make it so you can translate any blog page on my site? But if you speak some obscure language like Welsh or Tibetan chant, well, first- you’re really cool and I wish I could take you to parties. And second, you’re on your own when it comes to figuring this thing out.
• The archives are now all searchable and the post categories are in a drop down list. This is mainly a screen real estate solution.
• Ditto for the links. My blog roll and link list was HUGE! I am blessed to know so many cool folks, that’s all. Anyhow, those links are all still there. Just click to expand the list you’re interested in.
• Of course a unified color and design theme that doesn’t immediately induce convulsions when looked at.

I still have stuff I want/need to do. I need to make each of the movie files pop up in a sized window with a player. I have a Wordpress plug in to do this, but it’s just going to take some time to get it working and I’m out of time for this round of improvements. Doing the same with the tutorials should be pretty easy as well. Then I want to get something set up for an asides (side bar mini-blog) where I can toss up some of my little stories about living here in Brazil without cluttering up the space for the animation stuff. Anyhow, I hope you kids like the new digs. The site was a mess and it was bugging me for months. I’m finally able to sleep a little better now that it’s been cleaned up some.

Bio-Sand Water Filters

I was down near the city of Corumba’ Brazil the last couple of weeks. This is the base of our work with the extremely poor folks who live along the Paraguay River basin and Pantanal wetlands. As I noted in other posts my wife and I are involved in a medical boat work there that brings healthcare services to these remote and forgotten folks. One of the primary causes for their many health issues is that they have no access to clean drinking water at all. So all manner of preventable diseases cause no end of suffering for these unfortunate folks. A primary cause of childhood death is simple diarrhea. One of the first goals we had in coming down here to live and work in Brazil was to find a way to solve this problem. Amazingly, we found an answer to our prayers by being introduced to the great folks at Living Water International, based in Houston TX. So last week we took the time to learn from two of their experts on how to make simple water filters for these folks. You can click the video clip above to see how it turned out. If you want to know more, follow me after the jump. I have some more pictures, too.

It’s all very simple and amazingly inexpensive- around $40-50 per filter and a single filter can serve an entire family. First you make a concrete box with a PVC pipe that runs back up the side of it. You fill this box with clean gravel, clean medium sized pebbles and clean fractured sand. Then you pour water in. That’s it. The sand/pebble/gravel mix percolates out the solid contaminants like metals, suspended solids, etc. Because the sand in the box stays submerged (this is due to the PVC pipe running back up above the interior sand level and the water in the box stays at that level) a layer of bio-mass grows out of the ambient bacteria. This bio layer survives by eating the bacteria, viri, amoebas and parasites that exist in the dirty water. So in goes yucky water, good bio stuff in the sand eats the unwanted bio stuff in the water, the sand and gravel filter out the rest and -ding!- clean water. 99.9% clean as confirmed by tests. It’s an amazingly simple, easy, low maintenance, very low cost clean water solution. It can filter about 1 litre of water every 1-2 minutes. Our goal is to get one of these in every home along the 200 mile stretch of river we serve. And, Lord willing, we’d like to see the program expand to meet the need in other areas in Brazil. Often there’s plenty of water, but it’s not fit to drink without treatment.
Anyhow, we’re excited to see this implemented here. We’re starting by installing around 10 of these in homes pn he river in mid September. After we see how that goes and make any adjustments we’re off to try and get more done. Here’s some pix, just for fun!

We made a steel mold for making the concrete filters. The fellow in the hat is Pr. Carlos. He’s in charge of running the Pantavida medical boat work. The fellow next to him is the boat captain Giovino. He was born along the river and has a huge heart to help his people. The fellow standing is Rene from Living Water of El Salvador. He oversees their bio-sand filter program, which installed over 1000 of these things in rural El Salvador last year. His boss, Paul (another Yank like us) came along to help us with the larger stategic planning initiatives for our program. We also had a pastor from our local church with us - a fun guy named Belmiro. He’s studying water treatment and has ideas for doing this in our part of Brazil here. And none of this would have been understandable without our great interpreter, Marcy. She made the whole Portugues-English-Spanish thing work so we knew what was going on!

Anyhow, after the mold is assembled, then you mix up some concrete the old fashioned way.

Pour it in and let it set overnight.

The next day the filter is ready to be extracted from the mold.

Belmiro washing sand for the filter. His favorite job.

After the concrete cures for another day or so you fill it with the clean sand & gravel in layers. It’s now ready to start putting water in.

Here is a before and after. The dirty water on the left is right out of the Paraguay River. People just walk up to the river with a cup, scoop that brown stuff up and drink it. Nasty! But it’s the only thing that have. Until now.

The water that comes out is clean enough for me to let my little boy play with it. He came along to keep us all entertained.

Principles for Lipsync: Now in Korean!

Oh yeah, the K-kids are representin’ HUGE today! Not to be outdone by the fine work of our french friends, (which would be different than the fine taste of french fries, but I digress)- Lee Jong Pil has taken the time to translate the Principles for Lipync Animation article into Korean. That’s right. When it comes to translating animation tutorials those Koreans are hard core. Heh.

Anyhow, read, enjoy and sync well!

Principles for LipSync Animation- Now In French!

I’m back after a week down on the Paraguay River. I’m terribly behind on all my work, but it was a great trip. I’ll post more on it in a little bit.

But first, I need to say a big Thank You to VTS Subscriber and nice fellow Guy Wallart for taking the time to translate my Principles for Lipsync Animation article into the lovely sounding language of French! So all you suave’ sounding Parisians can now read all about animating lips in your mother tongue. So check it out! Principes de la synchronisation labiale
All that talk of tongues and lips, I think I’ll leave the french kissing jokes to the kids in the back seat. Heh.

Exploring Power Centers for Personality: Now in Korean!

Big Thanks goes out to Hong Joong Kim for yet another translation! He previously translated Life After Poses to Pose in Korean, and now he’s back with another fine translation. This time he’s taken the Power Centers study and made a very nice Korean version. So all you cool Korean cats can check it out and enjoy!

Animation: Personal Trainer Program

UPDATE**: There’s just one spot left open for this session. Just in case you were on the fence or anything.

UPDATE #2** Uhm.. never mind. that lasted all of 15 minutes. Heh. All the spots for this session are taken! If you were interested keep an eye out for the next session which will be taking enrollment in January.

I’m happy to announce a new training program for animators, the Animation: Personal Trainer program. Ever since successfully launching the Video Tutorial Service I have been thinking of ways to provide even better animation teaching and training. The best way by far is personal, hands on, in-the-same-room working on real production scenes kind of training. This was the usual way you learned to be an animator for over 70 years. Sadly this doesn’t much exist in the animation business of the 21st century. So I decided to do the next best thing: offer a program where I can take my years of experience training and teaching animators as an animation supervisor and apply that experience to be your personal trainer for animation. The idea was simple: provide a completely customized, personalized, unique animation curriculum for each student based on their current skills to address their areas of greatest weakness. What if I could be like an exercise personal trainer where I can help you target specific goals for improvement? Thus the idea for the Animation: Personal Trainer program was born.

Using proven methods for online training in animation I want to provide folks the opportunity to have completely customized training for their goals and needs. Rather than a one size fits all approach, the Animation: Personal Trainer seeks to create specific assignments, milestones, teaching moments and feedback sessions for every student. Are you already a professional animator and you just want to improve your lipsync animation in an effort to break into film? Or what if you really want to master walk & run cycles for games? What if you just want to take your acting to a higher level? What if you struggle with process? What if you want to better understand how to polish your animation? What if you don’t have the time to be involved with an animation training program for a long time? Or what if you’ve completed other schooling in animation but you still feel you have areas of weakness that need some personalized training to improve upon? Basically, sometimes we just need to work out those problem areas that give us trouble, or we want to focus and improve in specific ways to get over the hump in our work. Often nothing short of a highly personalized approach can help us do that. That’s what the APT was designed to do.
The APT program is an 8 week online course. Students meet with their trainer (me- there are no other trainers) at least once a week via webcam, are given uniquely designed assignments to help their area of focus, are given video and face to face feedback, enjoy personalized video lectures and email support. And it’s all designed around each student. By necessity this means that classes will be VERY small. In order to provide the best training for each student enrollment will be capped for every session. The first APT session will begin the first first week of September and run through the end of October and I’m taking enrollment now.

Want to know more about the APT? Want to sign up? There’s no reel review or admissions screening- I believe that anyone can benefit from personal attention and help. Anyhow, if you’re interested then follow the store link or the promo banner link on the left side of this page for more info on how to order. There’s also a handy dandy FAQ ready for you to check out. And as always, VTS subscribers will get a tasty 10% discount when they enroll.

I’ve been cooking this idea up for a good long while and I’m really excited to be able to offer this to folks. I hope that it meets a need in the animation training universe. I desire to fill in the gaps where folks often get lost. I hope that for some the APT is exactly what they have been waiting for and I hope that their wait will be rewarded with a rich and fantastic exprience. I’m pretty jazzed about this, so let’s get learning!

Life After Pose-to-Pose: Now in Korean!

A special thanks to Hong Joong Kim for taking the time to translate my article about polishing out your animation from it’s old stuffy English into new, flashy and uber hip Korean. So you folks of Korean persuasion- or those who want to show off at cocktail parties by reading animation articles in a foreign tongue (it’s all the rage at chic nightclubs in SoHo), head on over for a peek!

The Ant Bully: My Take (part 2)

cont'd from part 1...

And it seems that Warner Brothers’ marketing wasn’t at it’s usual incompetent worst. They weren’t great, but there were a lot of ads and promotions. It wasn’t an all out media blitz, but it wasn’t a repeat of The Iron Giant fiasco, either. Yes they still failed the single most important task in film marketing: delineating a clear and concise message about the opening date. Good grief, if some clod with a blog (ie: “me”) knows that you can project a film’s financial success or failure based off of a single weekend’s numbers, then what in the world are all those MBA’s in Sherman Oaks doing? But you can’t pin the whole thing on WB’s marketing or a crowded market. These weren’t optimal conditions for success, but I’m not sure they are absolute arbiters of failure, either. In other words, given these two things remaining the same I think you can still have a successful launch to an animated film. So why did TAB not succeed?

There are two kinds of animated movies. Both can end up like a pile of poo, but in my opinion only one can end up being something audiences get excited about. The first is the director driven story. A person (or two, no more) has a burning story idea in his mind and heart. He has the passion to bring it to life. Often these poor sods are chewed up by the Hollywood system and their movies are turned into derivative piles of crap, but somewhere way, way back in the beginning there was something fun going on. If they’re lucky some remainder of this sense of fun and passion ends up on screen. Great examples of this kind of movie that survived the creation process fairly well intact would be The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Toy Story. And as much as some people might be offended at this, I get the sense that Hoodwinked was this kind of a film. You got the sense that audiences enjoyed the thing, and from reading about it I got the idea that it was a few guys who wanted to make a film and made it for what money they could. You can’t fault them for agreeing to let Weinstein distribute it in all of it’s low production glory. You’d have done the same exact thing. By contrast an example of one of these kinds of director driven movies that got ridden roughshod by execs would be Chicken Little. Yet even through all of Mikey Eisner’s meddling I still felt some of the original fun of that story on screen.

The second kind of family feature films are the cynical corporate creations. They’re merely products and they are assembled at the behest of a variety of business minds. The core driving principle is their market value and potential profit returns. There is no one person who has the passion or personal investment to fight back against the snarky efforts of those who would rather productize the film because no one person thought this thing up in the first place. And I believe that no matter how slick or well done that lack of a soul shows up on screen. The director is a hired gun, the story is usually borrowed from some book or other successful property. Examples of these kinds of films would be Garfield, Scooby Doo, Quest for Camelot, The Cat in the Hat and… The Ant Bully.

I think John Davis and the DNA team did a very fine job with the film. However in the end it was a fine job of dressing up the bride of Frankenstein. The original screenplay for TAB had some heart, but the rewrites traded heart for slap-dash fart jokes. Crude humor is always the ready friend of execs looking to ‘punch up’ a film for test viewing scores, and the rewrites for TAB were pretty heavy toward the end of production. In its primary form it wasn’t the funniest movie and the market demands that animated films be funny. So out goes the character motivations and some more serious ideas, in come the cynical sarcastic asides. And since everybody in charge was a hired hand nobody had a really strong personal investment to fight that. This all started because Tom Hanks noticed this little kid’s book and thought it would make a good movie. But Tom Hanks didn’t write the story, he didn’t direct it, he didn’t voice it. In short, it would appear that he had no real passion for it. He just thought it would do well as a movie in the market. A product made by hired help. And hired help - even the best and most competent of hired help (and by all rights they hired some of the most competent and qualified help)- isn’t the same as somebody who gave birth to the story. Somehow this too ends up coming through on screen. I don’t know how, but I think it’s true.

My friends who worked with me on The Ant Bully probably aren’t gonna like what I have to say here- but I’ve always felt that we were making a big stinking pile of average corporate mush. Honest. We did. We worked hard, we did our best to bring passion and life to it, we put a lot into it, there’s a TON of talent on screen and folks have a right to be proud of their work- but in the end, in the cruel indifferent world of the marketplace it’s just kinda bleh.

It had all the ingredients. By the spreadsheet and by the focus group feedback scores in test screenings The Ant Bully should have been a success. It should have been the perfect product. Yet in the end this is the ultimate corporate movie. It’s a product devised according to formulas and ingredients, preened and pruned from the very beginning to be a pop-culture product in the mass market to force feed the kiddo’s another round of pixels in exchange for their parent’s disposable income. And despite the valiant efforts of the artists and technicians hired to make this thing look good people aren’t usually going to get excited about such things. We can’t forget that this is still entertainment. Within the audience there’s still some shred of a desire remaining for something to come from someone’s heart, not a spreadsheet. For some reason I think audiences can sniff out a film that’s just too corporate. I don’t have much of an empirical reason to believe this, but anecdotally I think it holds water. The declining interest in sequels and derivative films has been a steady parade downward. I am convinced that other similarly corporate concoctions, regardless of the level of excellence in their execution- are doomed to the same fate of audience apathy. If there’s no initial soul behind the idea then you can forget about it. Sure executives can screw up a good movie idea from a director- Disney did it for years! But if all you start with is a pile of successful ingredients stitched together then I think you’re going to be in trouble more often than not regardless of how good it looks or how well it scores on rottentomatoes.com.
But if you do go see The Ant Bully in a theater, see it in Imax3d. It really is amazingly freakin’ cool there.

I’ve spoken my bit. If you disagree then by all means, fire away!

The Ant Bully: My Take

Wheew! It’s been an absolutely insane week here. I have so much stuff going on and I’ve been busier than a one legged man in a butt kicking contest. However I did want to take a moment to get in some trouble and express an honest opinion. So I’m here to spill my guts on The Ant Bully film, which came out in the U.S. last weekend to rather tepid results (a mere $8.4mil opening weekend, failing to unseat a wavering Monster House even in its second weekend). When it’s all said and done if TAB follows formula it will end up pulling a rather anemic $25-29mil in US box office. Not exactly a real winner there. Maybe it will grow some legs, but I’m too pragmatic to think that’s very likely.

Most folks know that I worked on this film, but unlike many others I don’t tie my own personal success to that of the projects I work on. I guess that makes me a rotten artist or something, but I just don’t. I had a great time working on the film, made some good friends and I had a chance to do some really nice work, and to me that’s where the success is. I measure my success by the experience, not the box office. That’s for other people to take credit (or in this case blame) for. The film can flop for all I care, it doesn’t affect me much at all. Yet I do allow that for other artists who worked on it it’s very important for TAB to do well. That’s cool and I hope my friends don’t hate me for anything I say here. But TAB does present us with a bit of a curious case. It had so many earmarks of what should have made it a successful film. It had all the right ingedients. And in the end, that’s why I think it is a failure. It’s just a wee bit too calculated to succeed.

In animation circles lots of folks have been panning the film. Many in the biz have been describing it as a kinda of Pixarn’t effort. I guess you could say it’s the Anastasia of 2006. For some reason folks just knew this one wasn’t ’special’. We don’t know how, we don’t know exactly why- but the feeling out there was a collective yawn. Why? Well, let’s take a closer look at all the reasons why The Ant Bully (at least in the minds of its masters) should have been a success.
First, TAB was not a “cheap” movie by any stretch. The end budget was well north of $60mil, probably closer to $70mil if you add in the Imax conversion. That’s more than Ice Age cost to make. It’s not far from Shrek 2’s numbers. It’s also not far from Pixar’s lower numbers. So the problem wasn’t somebody’s tight wallet in production. And it didn’t wallow much in development churning through tens of millions of dollars with no footage to show for it. It’s not a repeat of the Kingdom of the Sun/Emperor’s New Groove scenario. Most of that money ended up on screen.

You also really can’t point too much at the actual execution of the thing for its failure. There was no shortage of experience and talent working on the project. There are some scenes that are just gobstoppingly fabulous to look at- some real fantastic demo reel pieces in there. And all the top studios agreed. When DNA had other studios in for recruiting (since DNA had to let everybody go after TAB production) there was a noticeable scooping up of talent. Pixar, Sony, ILM, Dreamworks, PDI, Blue Sky, Digital Domain, Laika- they all nabbed people as fast as they could.

Additionally we’re not dealing with an inexperienced director, either. John Davis had great success with Jimmy Neutron. He knows animation, he’s not an outsider to animation. So it’s difficult to dismiss TAB on the grounds of inexperienced hubris. Plus with Tom Hanks behind it you’d think he knew a thing or two about what works in Hollywood and what doesn’t.

Another plus- outside of animation circles TAB is not viewed universally as a stinker of a film. Aside from the reviews that dismiss it as a sort of Marxist manifesto for kiddies, most of the reviews for it on Rotten Tomatoes are positive. In fact it’s got a rather healthy “Fresh” rating of 65% from critics and 83% from users. That’s a better rating than other more successful Cg animated films like Robots, Sharktale, Madagascar, Ice Age 2. This is not “The Wild” (19% rotten) or “Doogal” (5% rotten) or “Valiant” (28% rotten). All of whom tanked rather badly and all of whom had convincingly poor “Rotten” score on the tomato site. So it didn’t flop because the critics overwhelmingly panned the film because, in general, they didn’t.

There was no shortage of wattage in the star power of the voice cast, either. Nick Cage, Julia Roberts, Paul Giamotti, Bruce Campbell, Glenne Close- those are some good names to ride behind for public awareness.

Yes, it’s crowded out there. It’s been a busy year for animated films. The busiest ever. And we’re in a 3 week stretch where 3 of them open back-to-back-to-back. That’s historic, it’s never happened before (and I wager will never happen again). So there’s a diffusion of family film dollars. To a large extent that is a zero sum game. Still, give people a reason to go to the movies and they will. Pirates of the Carribean 2 is proving that.

cont'd in part 2...

kLango Store is now Live!

OK, finally! After months of trying I’ve finally got an online store that works! Those of you on a feedreader can’t see the new snazzy sidebar graphic, but you’ll like it when you see it. So now you fine folks who have wanted to subscribe to the VTS but couldn’t because of PayPal problems or what-not can now do so using a major credit card. I’ve also added a nice handy FAQ about the VTS. So if you’ve had a nagging question about the VTS, check out the FAQ. You’ll probably find your answer there.

Another new thing is that select back issue videos are now available to the non-subscribing general public. So if you’ve wondered if the VTS would be something you could use but you didn’t want to subscribe to find out, well now you can get some videos to take a look and you don’t have to be a subscriber to get them.

A big “Thanks!” to the willing beta testers for helping me get the big kinks worked out of this thing. If any of you use the store and find something kinda wonky just send me an email and we’ll see what we can do to shore things up. And thanks for your patience while I worked on getting this store up and running. I’m hoping more people can get to have the VTS as a result of this now.