The Fool’s Errand, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fool’s Errand, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to *create* great character performances?

Make a short film!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eddie Fitzgerald is a genius

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

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

Rats! (Duuuude)

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m calling baloney on this…

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

A quote…

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

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

YouTube Direkt

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

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

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

Fast and Big- I love it!

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

(click to play movie)

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

Acting classes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A thought about those acting ruts…

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

The short answer is observe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clay-styled CG fun!

From Cg-Talk….

New Academy Rules for Animated Features

From AnimatedNews.com…

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

Yeah, that really clears up the confusion.

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

What a week…

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

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

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

Another good read from last week: online dist stuff

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

The slumbering demand for cartoons

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

Flat space staging

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

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

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

Stupid Spammers

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

Screen Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoa…very cool lipsync lesson- Aardman style

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

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

Following Mayerson

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

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

APT Session #2 Student Reel

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

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

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

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

Spring Cleaning for the Site

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

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

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

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

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

APT Session 3: Sold Out!

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

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

OK, back to work for me!!!!

Housekeeping: Links, tutorials, rigging and such

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

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

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

Behind on stuff

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

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

Rats!

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

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

Now, for marketing that does the absolute opposite…

What the…?

Vinyl’s Attack = Fun!

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

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

Facial control GUI stuff

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

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

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

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



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

Animation Personal Trainer: Session 3!!

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

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

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

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

Wow, that was cheesy. heheh.

Some Misc. Eye Rig R&D

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

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


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

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

Worshipping at the altar of innefficiency: part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worshipping at the altar of innefficiency

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

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

I’ll let that settle in for a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do you seek the living among the dead?

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

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

Metapost: VTS20 now available in Back Issue Store

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

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

Toon Snap Tutorial now in Korean

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