This is a perfect example of "stupid"

A bunch of college students has been told they can't gather together as a Disney fan group to watch Disney films- of which (as noted) they are big fans. Why? Because allegedly any showing of a DVD (bought at a store with money that went back to Disney, mind you) to a "large" group of people is copyright infringement. To show to a "large" group of people you need to secure a "display license", which is not what you get when you "buy" a DVD. What number of people in a gathering is the tipping point? 10? 20? 50? If you have 49 it's OK, but that 50th person gets you nasty letters from the legal department of a giant multinational conglomerate receiving tax dollars as subsidies? What if that 50th person sits in the hallway? The sheer stupidity of this is mind boggling. It's intellectually bankrupt and it's business suicide.

This is why the old models of the entertainment business are dying and will die. Like a slow lingering illness that eats away from the inside it may take a while, but it's a done deal. The death rattle can be heard down the hall. The only way to keep the old business model alive in a world where people can get content pretty much for free is to punish your fans. And those fans are your customers. I wonder how many thousands of dollars in Disney merchandise those college kids have bought collectively? How many trips to a Disney theme park have they taken- or planned to take? No, they may not be paying the proper license fee to watch a DVD as a group, but they're Disney fans. Logically who else would gather as a group to watch? So this action by Disney has no intended target other than the very people they should be catering to. Instead they're bullying them. There's no doubt Disney has made tons of cash from these kids over the years. This, my friends, is terrible customer service. As a businessman there's one thing I learned and it's this: the very air of life for your business is your customer service. You can even have an inferior product or product at a lower price point and still thrive if you have amazing customer service. Old media systems must rely on lawsuits, coercion, threats and cease & desist orders in order to survive. Not a one of those methods gives the fan (who in one way or another is a paying customer) the warm fuzzies about your company or its products.

There's an old, old law in the Bible. It's not followed in today's society at all, but there's a principle of fairness behind it. It's the law of gleanings. Basically God said to the people : Don't go back over your fields a second or third time to gather every last bit of grain that you may have missed or dropped. Leave it for the poor, the hungry, the downtrodden. Don't be a greedy jerk and squeeze people for pennies. Be gracious and generous and things will go well for you.

Disney's squeezing people for pennies after they've already milked them for countless hundreds or thousands. My prediction: things will not go well for them.

What is content and what is its value? -- Part 2

First, a big thumbs up thanks to my friend, the brilliant Hamish McKenzie (if you're a Maya animator/rigger and you're not using Hamish's fantastic ZooTools then you are living a life of needless pain and woe) for sending me some links to TechDirt, a blog that covers a lot of things about content, copyright, new age and social media based business models, etc. 

In my last post I noted that I have drawn the conclusion that content (music, photographs, art, film, video, stories, etc.) is of no direct economic value outside of it's physical storage/delivery mechanism or the exclusive group experience of it (concerts, cinema, plays, etc.). This is a conclusion that a brief inspection of history itself seems to support. And as if that weren't enough, now in the digital internet age that limited value has become even less valuable- the point of direct economic worthlessness. The reason is simple- in the digital era there is no scarcity of digital files. The copy of a file does not diminish the existence of the source file. It is, literally, an infinite element. And anything that is (practically) infinite in availability is by nature economically worthless in a direct sense. Fair value for labor and all other "moral" constructs have no bearing. It's not a moral issue, it's a simple gravitational one. Let go of something, it falls. Whether that's right or wrong is irrelevant. Make an infinite supply of something, its value drops to zero. Scarcity is what creates value. Any efforts to impose scarcity on digital content in today's world is a Quixotic quest, doomed to only increase the sales of Maalox to those who tip at these infinite windmills. Kids, the genie's out of the bottle and we cannot put it back in. Reality dictates we learn to function in this new paradigm. (for a much more thorough dissertation on the impact of infinite supply on the economic value of a work of content, read this excellent TechDirt post. Read the linked posts that preceded it as well. For some this will be old hat, but many of us are still arriving at this dinner party.)

Commenter Ian asked a good question on my previous post: Is this depressing or liberating? (and by "this" he means the understanding that digital content is without inherent direct economic value)

The answer, I suppose, lies in how you see the world. I've been in both camps- depressed and liberated. For the last 4+ years I've been fortunate enough to be able to make a living as an independent content creator with my VTS animation tutorial videos. There have been good times, but for the last 2 years or so there's been a steady erosion as unauthorized copies of my videos have become more available on the internet. I won't lie:  unauthorized file sharing has put a sizable dent in my business, forcing me to consider alternative ways to feed la familia. However this is NOT a post whining about how people are stealing from my kids, etc. etc. etc. I knew 4 years ago when I started the VTS that file sharing would ultimately result. It's why I never bothered with copy protection or any of that stuff from the very start. I knew it was a waste of my most precious & limited resource- my time.  While I'd certainly prefer that people pay for the valuable (I think) info on how to be a better animator contained in my VTS videos, I won't waste energy complaining about those who don't. Nor will I waste energy trying to stop them, either. Instead I'd rather focus my energy on adapting and moving forward.

In the spirit of embracing things as they are and not as I wish them to be, I've begun to make some new animation tutorial videos and putting them up on my YouTube channel for free. (some direct links here, here, here and here). A few folks have stumbled across them, but I haven't promoted or mentioned them here on my blog yet. I figured this is a good time to introduce them. I think they offer some good info- and they're free. Share 'em as you see fit. I hope they help folks out. I'm still producing new VTS videos each month for those who want something more (we're currently working on a very complex James Brown inspired dance sequence utilizing video reference). And you can still purchase over four years' worth of back issue VTS videos for even more in depth info on being a better animator. But I'm going to mix in more of these free videos, too. I'll make more as I get the time- but my time is going to become even more scarce in the coming days and weeks.

More on that in a bit.

What is content and what is its value?

Friend and colleague Thom Falter (see his site here) sent me this article lately and I've been mulling it over. It's written by a software developer turned venture capitalist named Paul Graham. It's on the nature of publishing, content and physical delivery media. It's really a great read and his logical assessment of the history of publishing and content strikes a true note to me. A few excerpts...

In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

People will pay for information they think they can make money from. That's why they paid for those stock tip newsletters, and why companies pay now for Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence Unit reports. But will people pay for information otherwise? History offers little encouragement.

What about iTunes? Doesn't that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. Apple controls the default path onto the iPod. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don't make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that's pretty easy with digital content.

Those are just a few highlights. Go read the whole post- it's an extremely lucid read. My take away from this is pretty clear- content has little to no inherent monetary value. The monetary value is in any delivery mechanism that allows people to distract themselves in a manner that fits their personal experiential tastes and preferences. What they actually distract themselves with is, as the author puts it, "undifferentiated slurry".

"I've got a real knack..."

I dunno, wouldn't you pay to see that? ;)

Odosketch is going to swallow my free time

Just saw this on the Drawn blog. Odosketch is a free online sketching tool that's fast, fun and pretty capable. I whipped this up...



Why bother with something like this when I have Painter- a far more capable program which I spent hundreds f dollars on? Well, it's the light, limited and online nature of it that I like. When I have to do anything by hand I tend to freeze up. It's too daunting. Art becomes serious and I get timid. But Odosketch is inviting. It's online. You do it in your browser. It's the ultimate in throw away ethereal media. You can't take seriously anything you draw online in a web browser for free. You just can't. That's very freeing. For me at least. The interface is butt-simple, too.

Squiggles!

An old trick in the world of limited budget 2d animation is to cycle through two to four drawings for a hold. This way you can chew up the scene footage with as few drawings as possible. The result is animation that kinda squiggles as it holds, maintaining the illusion of life more by an expression of energy than literal movement. This is very cost effective and the image stays alive due to the cycling. Since the animation stays so rough the audience accepts it for what it is- as well as whatever other limitations of the animation that come along for the ride. It's surprising what an audience will take in and filter through once they perceive the internal rules of an animated universe- a task that takes perhaps all of two seconds of viewing. Certainly I think this attitude of getting by with the least possible effort can be way overdone, but in the right balance I think there's real potential for cost savings without surrendering richness. The richness just comes in a different form, that's all. Nina Paley used this technique in Flash while making her solo feature film Sita Sings the Blues. You can see what I mean in the very first scenes in the following segment of the film....

It's rough as heck, but it totally works. In fact, it more than works. It thrives on a level that is completely different than if it were tied down tight, tightly polished and had the holds all animated in like a typical big budget Disney 2d film. The rough look has a kind of vibrancy to it that actually adds to the film. I don't have a fancy explanation for how it works- I just know it does.

Since I have these little stories I want to make, but I don't have a huge budget (natch: I don't have any budget) to hire an expensive team of animators and CG technicians, I keep looking for creative ways to leverage lessons and tricks from other mediums of animation into my little CG toolbox. I've lost years of effort trying to be a one man band making short films employing the big-studio CG film style. Those were lessons learned the hard way. So I've been messing with this squiggly thing for a few years now (off and on). It's taken that long to find something that works. Due to the rigidity of the meshes and well established visual norms CG just doesn't like to do this sort of thing. And nothing looks worse in CG than a cycle- of any kind. So I'd try something, but it'd look like crud- like some kind of mechanical or technical error rather than a purposeful artistic style. So I'd leave it for a while and then come back and try something different after thinking of something in the shower. More failures each time, each coming closer to what I wanted but couldn't see in my head because it just wasn't being done anywhere else. CG is so picky when it comes to the imagery it makes. There's so little margin for error it seems. It's too demanding, too rigid an artform at times. But like Edison and his silly light bulb, I kept at it. I finally feel like I got it. Here's my version (watch it in HD for a better look. Or best yet- here's a link to a full res QT)....



This is really fast to animate because I'm using flat out 'dead holds' on the controls and letting the squiggly part keep the scene alive. I hit a pose and that's it. I hold it. No 'moving holds' or overdone overlapping business. This 4 second scene took maybe 15 or 20 minutes to animate (compare that to 4 sec. per week doing it the "right" way in feature films). In fact I over-animated it at first out of habit, so I had to go back and rip out the moving holds I had started to build in. I tell you, the hardest part is de-programming myself from doing CG the "right" way. It's not as easy as it sounds to embrace simplicity and then trust it. Anyhow, here's a screen grab of my f-curves to show the dead holds on the major controllers... (click to see it larger).

This is what it looks like without the squigglies....



You can see that it's super dry and just goes dead without the squiggles. The squiggling really keeps it feeling vibrant. So yeah. I'm really, really happy with where I've ended up with this.

Laika no longer a CG feature film studio

This is an interesting twist.

Last December Laika whacked about half of its CG film studio staff as their second animated feature hit development issues. Now 10 months later they decided that CG isn't their cup-o-tea at all. So they gutted the rest of their CG film crew, only keeping a few CG folks around for FX and for their commercials division. For better or worse, Laika decided that they didn't want to be a CG feature film studio, focusing on stop-motion instead.

From a business standpoint I can see the logic. The CG film side of things is a pretty crowded racket. You have the big boys in Pixar/Disney, Blue Sky, Dreamworks, Sony-- and you have a bevy of independent efforts released under various monikers like WB, Universal, Focus, etc. Laika faced an uphill battle establishing a brand for themselves as another one of the third wave CG studios releasing films like Tale of Despereaux, 9, Planet 51, etc. In my view I'm sure that the leadership at Laika views brand recognition as a key goal. These are the same people who brought you one of the most successful global brands in Nike. They know the power of brand and they know how a strong brand buys you a good bit of wiggle room. (see: Cars. ahem). With the success of Coraline Laika was positioned in an interesting place. In business when your brand is not the leader of the pack you have two choices. You can work like a mule and with deep pockets, persistence and some luck find your place among the best in your field (a track that Sony Pictures Animation is hoping to find traction with on their 4th film). Or you go find something you do that is a bit different, but you do it better than anybody else and focus on making a go of it with that. It's hard to imagine Laika "out-Pixar-ing" Pixar, but it's completely reasonable to see them carving out a viable, successful place in stop-motion- which is their heritage. But even better- it's hard to imagine a place like Pixar "out-Laika-ing" Laika. That's nothing to sneeze at.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a cultural aspect, too. In speaking with some folks who worked at Laika before the lay offs it appears there was a less than subtle rivalry between the stop-motion crew and the CG crew. This isn't surprising, many "old media" artists and techs look down on CG. Not all of them, but it's not a rarity that's for sure. We all know there's no shortage of 2d animators who will bend your ear for hours over a coffee (or fill blogs) about the inherent limitations/failings of CG. Some of the complaints are valid, some are misguided efforts to make a square peg serve in a round hole and some are merely the jealous grumblings of those threatened or displaced by the popularity of CG films. It's a culture war that simmers barely under the surface of the animation film business and it will for decades to come. At its soul Laika is a stop-mo shop since it came from the Will Vinton studio. It's not too surprising to see the leadership there decide to embrace that going forward once they found they didn't need to fall back on the popularity of CG to make a viable go of it as a feature film studio. With the benefit of hindsight I get the sense that perhaps Laika looked at developing their CG film slate almost as a hedge against their stop-motion titles not doing so well. It's reasonable to think that the success of Coraline emboldened them enough to drop that hedge and go full press for stop-motion. So now we can add Laika to the short list of Aardman that is a proven feature film stop-motion studio. Certainly a less crowded arena in which to stand.

Then there's the human side of it all. It's a bummer for the folks who got laid off. I had a good number of friends affected by the first Laika whack-job and I know of others who probably got the axe this time, too. Getting laid off in a one-horse animation town like Portland is rough. There's not much else for you to do there, so you gotta sell the house, move the family and shamble on down the road to the next gig- provided you can find it. If these folks bought homes in Portland in mid/late 2006 (when Laika did a bit of ramping up in CG staff), then they're double trapped because home prices in the Portland area have taken a pretty big hit. The animated film biz is very, very transient and being on "permanent staff" is no guarantee of stability. Big Idea, DNA, Blue Sky, Laika, Disney- they've all either gone out of business or had major, major staff reductions of permanent full time workers who thought they were above the rough and tumble world of ramped up/down contract hires. I find it ironic that at the time when there are more animation jobs in film, fewer and fewer of them are attractive to the aging CG workforce. In the end this skews the workforce to younger, more mobile people with less experience and a willingness to work lots of hours- much of it unpaid OT. As people age, grow families and desire stability the experience is getting squeezed out of the labor pool. In the end this only hurts the studios and the films as well. The medium doesn't have a chance to capitalize on past experiences and lessons learned- technically, productively or creatively. So the same ground gets re-hashed and the same mistakes get made year after year, just the faces change. It's a cruel business and here's hoping folks can find a place to land that works well for them not only creatively, but for their families as well.

Cartoon CG fun

 

A former APT student of mine, Sunny Kharbanda, has really been diving into the whole 'cartoons in CG' experimenting. It's a lot of fun seeing him find new things. Since we're both tinkering in this area we communicate a lot, sharing what we find works, what doesn't, etc. Sunny just posted on his blog about his process for developing the backgrounds to work with his animation tests (you can see those here and here). Cool stuff. Check it out.

"9" = not a bad little money maker

Shane Acker's "9" had its brief stand as the only animated feature in theaters last week. This week Sony's Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs lands at your local cine-plex. "9" opened on an odd day (a Wednesday), but take away the few extra days and it's first weekend did a tidy little $10mil. So the film will probably yield in the $35-40mil range domestically, probably another $30-40 over seas. Add in home video and such and I think the producers have a nice little return on investment brewing. It's not an empire making block buster like Shrek or Ice Age, but it'll be a decent little money maker. Which is not a bad thing. "9" is not your typical animated film. Whether you like the film or not (and it has had some mixed reviews) the fact that it hasn't been an absolute bomb like Delgo or Battle for Terra is a good thing. Like those other films, "9" veers from some pretty well established patterns for success in animated fare. This will hopefully embolden other producers to be willing to green light projects that stretch the boundaries of the animated feature film market. The world will always make room for the big boys' stuff (well, until they don't), but I think as time goes by the broad viability of the feature marketplace will rest more and more with the second and third tier offerings.

Facebook is.... profitable??!

This is actually kinda big news. It's been the very (very) rare online social networking site that has actually made money from it's core business (as opposed to getting bought out by a larger firm). Maybe YouTube won't be far behind? I wouldn't hold my breath- the capital infrastructure costs for serving up all that video is orders of magnitude larger than FB's bandwidth needs. Still, if the independent content creator is to have any shot at making a serious go of it they'll need these online communities to actually make money-- for themselves first, then share the love with the content creators.
Baby steps.

New APT Session for October 2009

It's time for a new Animation Personal Trainer session.

This next APT will start the week of October 12th and run through November 13th. I am accepting student registration now on my Animation Clinic online store. As always spaces are limited and students are taken first come-first served. Registration will close on Friday October 2nd.

Important Note: This will be the last APT for quite a while.  At this time I don't plan on having any APT sessions before the summer of 2010 due to my work schedule. So if you've been wanting to get in on an APT session, then this next class starting in October will be your last chance for perhaps a year. 

I have a dandy FAQ if you are filled with questions about the APT. If after reading the FAQ you still have questions regarding the APT, then you can always feel free to email me.

Another painted CG short

This one is a little more cohesive than the previous one I posted.



There's some neat use of projections that I think is very clever. The end result is the geometry is free to move, but the painter's control over what part of the whole image has which color, tone, value, etc remains. For an example of what I'm talking about, watch the top of the merry go round as it spins in that first shot. The geometry is passing through the painting as the top spins, but the painting is not stuck to the geometry. If you watch carefully you'll see this technique is the very foundation for this style of look through out the short- even on the characters. This is a great way of getting a consistent sense of the painting being alive without it feeling like it's just a painting plastered onto a puppet. The normal 'rule' in CG is to avoid having geometry swim through a texture, but for this kind of stuff it's a great trick.

Schmitty Walk cycle

Watch it in HD if you like. It's extra tasty at full rez.
This is just a generic walk for Schmitty. Walks are like chicken broth. You don't ever eat plain chicken broth, but it's the basis for a lot of tasty recipes. Walks should be adjusted for moment, character, emotion, physical limitations, etc.
On a technical note I'm exploring some new techniques for mixing up the shading texture as well as distressing the mesh silhouette in order to make a more "hand crafted" feel. I'm working on some other tests that will show that better which I hope to share soon.

More painterly CG

Another Gobelins effort. I like the shading, especially the active line within the objects defining light and shadow on the form. The clouds & FX are cool. The backgrounds are handled very well, but in the darker moments the characters get lost against them- something typically avoided when one employs an emotional palette as opposed to a literal one. The stark shadows work well. I think the animation, while good at points, could have benefitted from being dialed back into limited frame rates and not full on 1's the whole way through. It's that same bugaboo that has plagued NPR CG for the last decade. Looks like a nice painting until it moves. It's that visual harmony/cohesion thing again.

Monetizing online media

There's a good read over on the CinemaTech blog if you're geeky about how the business will remain viable in 20 years. A snippet observation....

Picking up the theme of targeting, Miller suggested that advertisers will pay more for online ads as behavioral targeting increases (targeting ads based on what you do online and interests you express), though he admitted that online ads may never achieve the same prices that network television commands.

Miller touched on the idea that the costs of content creation may need to go down in this new world, if advertisers aren't paying the prices they once did. (That's a point we discuss pretty frequently here at CinemaTech.)

Mind you TV ad revenues have been dropping steadily in recent years. This budget squeeze on content creation has been one of the big driving factors behind the rise of the reality show. They're cheap to make. Aside from privacy concerns, the notion that even targeted ad revenues online won't fetch the same bid that TV spots go for should be troubling for mid-sized (or smaller) content creators. TV animation has seen production budgets for 22 minute shows drop to less than half what they were 10 years ago. If the online world won't even pay that much for ad space, then the reality is that as a whole (with some notable giant exceptions) this industry is going to have to learn how to make stuff for a lot less money than they currently spend. I'll let the intellectually intrepid among you deduce what that means for the hoi polloi in the trenches/cubicles.

Cartoon games

I love where games are headed with these more toony looking projects.

Video Games | Mini Ninjas | E3 09: Story Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

This game play trailer made me smile....

Video Games | Mini Ninjas | Stealth Morphing Gameplay

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Replace the animator? I agree. 100%

Another storm brews among animators.

In a fluff piece promoting James Cameron's new film Avatar, the director and producer make predictably outlandish statements about the importance of their film, the height of its artistry and the momentousness of their accomplishments. So far, par for the course.
Of course there's the usual noise about performance capture and yadda-yadda. But the line that seems to be getting animator's undies in a bind is this....

Landau says. "Our goal on this movie was not to replace the actor, it was to replace the animator. If you think about it, what a great actor does and what a great animator does are antithetical to one another.
"A great actor withholds information. Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men can sit there and do nothing. No animator would ever allow that, they would put in a twitch. So our objective was to preserve Sam Worthington's performance and have that be what you see in those characters."

The general reaction from animators? A predictable call to arms and an overriding sense of indignation. "Insult" is a word I've been reading a lot. But why? Here's where I think the real truth lies in this...

"We pitched to people that we were preserving their performances," Landau says.
"We said, 'Look, what we're doing is the 21st-century version of prosthetics. No longer will you have to sit for hours and hours in make-up for you to give the performance of the Grinch or the Godfather. We're going to do it with CGI (computer-generated imagery) but it's going to be you, it's not going to be somebody's interpretation of you."' 

Actors, like animators, care about their craft. They have professional pride and they're (usually) very good at what they do. They don't like the idea of people messing with their performances, as if somehow their performance weren't enough. Having 'animators' tweak their performance is insulting to the actor. Really. How do animators feel when they see somebody (usually in another department like finishing or FX) took their shot- without their knowledge- and changed it for some reason? Here's a hint. WE FREAKING HATE IT! So what allows us to think we have the right, nay the responsibility, to do the same to the actor? Just because it's rendered? If I'm an actor I hate that some guy gets to torque my performances around.  In films like Avatar motion captured CG effects are not really about animation and it's not about animators. It's about what Landau says- it's 21st century prosthetics. It's the new age version of foam ears that Leonard Nemoy wore to play Spock. Avatar is not an animated film. It's live action.

I eagerly await the day when mo-cap technology gets so good that animators won't be stuck wiping the poo from the data or twiddling the performance because the director can't keep his hands off it and trust his actors. I say get the tech good enough to let the live actors do their job. It'll be a good day for actors and it'll be a great day for animators because then we'll finally be left with only one option- do what animation alone is great at doing. The impossible, the fantastic, the wonderful, the exaggerated, the un-mocapable. When mo-cap tech gets so good that you don't need to shoot video reference of yourself and then copy it to get a scene, but the directors can just get the actors to act (which is often what they'd prefer if given the choice), then we'll finally be done with this nonsense that says that the final arbiter of good animation is how closely the motion can hew to live action. Will there be fewer jobs for 'animators' once the tech gets that transparent and good? Yeah, probably. Will the jobs that exist for animators be more interesting and rewarding? I like to think they will be. Because then we'll be animating and doing the impossible and not cleaning up after somebody else's performance. No sane person would ever attempt to use mocap to do anything like this....

Bugs bunny - Rabbit Seasoning
Uploaded by gorotred - See more comedy videos.

Meanwhile, we spend so much time in animation trying to re-create this...

As Good As It Gets
Uploaded by MovieTrailerJunkie. -

They're both great, but in completely different, practically incompatible ways. The actors' performances in the second make it amazing. No animation could top them. Ever. The animation in the first makes it amazing. No live action or mo-cap could top that. Ever. I personally can't wait until we can just accept each kind of greatness for what it is. But I'm weird that way.

Sipermann's Herr Selig

Look at this and tell me it doesn't just ooze charm...

I love Harald Siepermann's blog. He doesn't write much- most of his posts are just images of his character design efforts. That's more than enough. His stuff is masterful and I look forward to his posts. I found his little Herr Selig character work to be so tasty I almost blogged about it the first time. But now he's added another post with some earlier sketches in the development of the character.

Yummy! It's an example of a style of character that I just really, really enjoy looking at. So simple, so expressive and fun. And before anybody asks- no, Otto is not based on this character. I had already settled on Otto before I ever saw these. It's just a kind of synchronicity thing.

We were about due for one of these

Heh. About once every 7 or 8 months there erupts in the animated blog-o-sphere some tempest in a teapot. We seem to need the occasional controversy over what is good or bad animation, blah, blah, blah. It's like some kind of collective bowel movement of the id or something.

What's the latest hubbub that I've been watching bubble up over the last few days in my Feedreader? A poster for an animation festival. Some people like it. Others don't. Then they argue with each other. How fun!

What do I think of said poster? I dunno. It's OK I guess- if you're into that sort of thing. Not my cup 'o tea, really. But that's OK. I don't need to explain why any more than I need to explain why I don't like mangoes  (which I don't). And it's OK if others like it. They don't need to explain why, either. People like what they like. Why? I don't know. God made us all unique with different tastes. It's all a wonderful part of the tapestry of life. But that's the problem with arbitrary taste. It's, well... arbitrary.

If nothing else this will help divvy up teams if we ever have an animation community dodge-ball game. 

Take THAT, vile box!

I love stuff like this.
Think far enough outside the box and you forget there was even a box to begin with. This is an excellent example of using what's available to you in an innovative and imaginative way to get something visually unique. There's more than one way to render a CG cat.



Saw this over on Lucas Martell's Pigeon Impossible blog. Congrats to Lucas on a recent festival win, too.

Bill Plympton stuff

A hat tip to Tim Hodge on sending me this nifty write up on a recent Bill Plympton master class in Toronto. He found it on Nancy Beiman's groovy blog. If you don't know who Bill Plympton is, then you need to go find out at his Plymptoons site. This guy is the ultimate indy animator. He has his own style, he is prolific and he makes a decent living doing what he loves. Friends, you just can't beat that with a stick.
An excerpt from Nancy's post...

Here is PLYMPTON’S DOGMA, three points for successful short film productions:

• SHORT. The film should be five minutes long at the maximum. It’s harder to sell a 15 or 20 minute film.
• CHEAP. Digital production and Flash make production costs reasonable. My average is $1000.00 per minute; HOT DOG cost $5,000.00 per minute.”
• FUNNY. Audiences want a laugh. It’s easier to sell.

This guy is a short film making machine. By his own account he gets up at 6am, and draws until 6pm. He cranks out about 100 drawings a day to get his films made. He makes a feature film every three years pretty much by himself. (note to self: never accept what somebody else defines as 'impossible'). I found it fascinating that he doesn't throw drawings out, but that he just keeps working them until they're better. All the smudges and erasure marks add life. While Plympton's subject matter isn't for every taste, and some find his style a bit rough around the edges (which I think makes it great) you just gotta admire his ability to get the stuff done and dictate his animation on his own terms.

Machinarium-- very cool looking video game

This looks more than cool. The design and imagination are a treat for the eyes.



You can see it humongo sized at the home page for the game. They've got a pre-order offer, too. I think I'm gonna buy it, not for the game play probably as much as the chance to just get lost in this little world of theirs.
Here's a short pre-view of the game, it's due for an October release.

one APT spot remains

A spot has just opened up in the next APT class due to a student needing to back out for personal reasons. If you're interested in taking part in the next APT class (it starts next Monday and runs through Spetember 11) then send me an email and let's see what we can work out.

Somebody else is on the visual harmony train...

David O' Reilly (whose stuff I just wrote about earlier this week) has an article on the Illustrative-berlin blog. In his article he expounds on his thoughts on the vital necessity of creating an animated world that is cohesive- that obeys its own rules where every element fits together into what he calls "aesthetic harmony". An excerpt...

My central belief is that the key to aesthetics is coherence. In 3d we essentially create artificial models of worlds, I contend that what makes these worlds believable is simply how coherent they are; how all the elements tie together under a set of rules which govern them consistently. This coherence spreads to all areas of a film; dialogue, design, sound, music, movement etc. Together they create a feedback-loop which reaffirms that what we are looking at is true. The human eye wants this aesthetic harmony.

It felt like I was reading my own thoughts played back to me. Earlier this year I wrote about the necessity of Visual Harmony, and how this visual harmony is the primary (sole?) determinant of the audience's perception of 'quality' in animated works. Here's what I had to say back then...

Basically, visuals and motion and shapes and forms all desire to be in harmony. When they are not then a discernable (if not defineable) dischord occurs. ....

Once you ramp up one area of the visuals into a higher order of complexity (say, lighting or texturing) then all other areas need to rise accordingly to maintain that harmony. ...

Drop the level of complexity in any area and you create a sort of "off-key" feel to the animated film. General audiences understand this. When the visual harmony is well done they immediately perceive the animated film as having 'quality'.... There is such a thing as animation that lacks complexity or realism or literalism but yet still has a high degree of quality, simply because all the pieces 'fit'. So complexity or literalism is not the equivalent of quality- visual harmony is.

It's very rewarding to see somebody else "getting it". Read O'Relly's article. You'll find quite a bit of neat stuff in there.

A very quick Otto test animation

I whipped together this quick junky little test today between meetings, tasks and errands....



For some reason YouTube cut off the last second or so. I'll need to re-upload it. Meanwhile here's a larger Quicktime version you can right click and Save As if you want to frame through it.

I do apologize that it's so short. Like I said, it's just a test- there's no story or really any character here. The goal was to just try and see how far I could push the smearing, do some Tex Avery eye popping, try out some different background styles and work out ideas on how I can use simple motion graphics to plus the emotional element in a subtle way. Scrap paper stuff, really.

The actual animation took me maybe an hour or so, the backgrounds took longer because I tried like, oh, I dunno-- 43 different varieties of styles? I probably spent 3 hours on the motion graphics stuff alone, much of that was just learning how to use After Effects' particle systems again and then trying a hundred different combinations to see what I liked. It's been years since I've touched that stuff. The audio editing was pretty quick, a half hour or less. Anyhow, just thought I'd post it in case anybody was interested. There'll be more to come, hopefully with more of a story & character to it.

The online video biz...

Just read this insightful post over on the TAG blog (TAG stands for The Animation Guild- which is the California union for animation artists).
In the post we read some thoughts from Jay Roth, the leader of the Director's Guild of America (the union that reps all the big film directors in Hollywood). He has some really interesting things to say about the business of content and the online trends. Some excerpts interspersed with my comments...

The DGA wasn't convinced, based on its research, that there were big profits coming from the internet. At the time of our study ('05-'06) most thought that the iTunes model was going to dominate. But since '05, Hulu has decimated iTunes. People are downloading 1/4 the content from iTunes that they were purchasing four years ago. Most individuals would rather watch content for free on Hulu than buy it on iTunes ...

I found this bit of data to be fascinating. When it comes to movies or video, iTunes has become basically irrelevant. It still dominates the online delivery of music in many ways, but for films? Pfft. Big media companies actually like this development. Why? Because they own Hulu and they always chaffed at the dominance that Apple held over iTunes. Roth again...

74% of the revenue earned from theatrical features comes after the features end their run in theaters. 50% of the money from television product happens after the initial plays on t.v.

This is another piece of data that I'd always suspected was true, but never had numbers for. Think about that 74% number for films. If you've ever wondered why studios keep making seemingly failed animated films after such disasters as Valiant, Space Chimps, etc. now you know why. If you spend $20million to make a low budget animated film and it pulls only $11million in theaters, it still a long term money maker because that $11million only represents 26% of the ultimate money the film will make. DVD, overseas markets, TV showings and other licensing deals make up that big 74% number. So that $20million 'flop' that only pulled in $11mil in theaters may have made upwards of $40million when it's all said and done a few years down the road. Really, really interesting info. Roth continues...

More television is being watched today than ever before, and it's being watched on televisions and computers. Yet even now, two weeks of viewing on Hulu equals one hour of viewing on network television of American Idol.

One hour of a single show on just one network has more viewer hours than a full week of an entire online channel, Hulu. Extrapolate those numbers across all channels, nations, networks and online sites and you'll see that the internet is still far behind TV when it comes to pulling concentrated audiences. This explains the cost structures of TV ads versus online ads. If you want to make a big splash (ie: recoup your significant investment costs for making professional content) then film and TV are still the ways to go. But the gatekeepers aren't out of the woods. Here's what Roth thinks will be the mortal wound to content creators...

Finally, the biggest issue out there as I see it is internet piracy. This is the biggest threat to the industry, Legal recourse is costly, time-consuming and ineffecitve, but if means aren't found to counter piracy, where content can be stolen with the push of a button, then it will mean economic meltdown for out industry, for digital theft destroys downstream markets (where most of the money is now made.) There are companies like Google who have an interest in keeping free access the way it is, but it threatens creators' rights and creators' product. We'll need to balance internet rights with on-line protections. This will have to be done legislatively, administratively, and through public opinion ...

Roth is absolutely on the money. This is one reason I think that online video as it currently is structured (YouTube, etc.) is unsustainable. The only question is when the tipping point comes. Professional content is the food that feeds the beast of free online video, but if piracy and free content continues on its logical path into the future then free online video will mindlessly cut off its own food supply. The blood and guts of YouTube- the real revenue generating videos- are professional content clips. Even so, five years after YouTube started that's still not a profitable business model (YouTube has never made a single penny of profit- ever). Add in piracy and eventually you suck all the oxygen out of the system. Information is free, but delivering it to a lot of people at once costs money. It's been this way since scribes wrote out papyrus scrolls. Scribes gotta eat. If everybody demands professional content for free, then making professional content, with decent production values and professional level execution in every area, becomes practically impossible. Yes, the technology for making professional level content is cheaper than ever. Doesn't mean much, really. Pens & paper have been low cost for centuries and by now we've clearly learned that low cost inputs are no guarantee of worthwhile outputs. The low cost of inputs merely means the barriers are lowered to allow the occasional diamond in the rough to emerge, but by and large your trained, skilled professionals who have a lifetime career invested in mastering their craft are going to make the best stuff. Even the odd diamond like Nina Paley's film Sita Sings the Blues is what it is due to her career where she worked as a paid professional on bigger budget projects. For all the hype and hope of a new paradigm of production and distribution, Sita is the work of a professional animation artist, whose career and skill development was subsidized by "old media". It's not the random result of a thousand monkeys with Flash. Professional level content is the stuff that people actually want to steal or watch for free. It's just reality. What happens when the world of content is reduced to a giant collection of videos of people lighting their farts on fire or lipsyncing into a webcam? What will the world think of the free film and video utopia then?


The old adage still applies-- you get what you pay for.

Minimalism win, complexity fail

Saw this on the Drawn blog today.



There's something valuable here. Let it sink in.

David O Reilly, U2 video and other stuff...

It's been blogged a bit by others around the internets, but this recent U2 video from David O Reilly (he of Please Say Something fame) is a really interesting bit of work.


U2 - I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight from David OReilly on Vimeo.

I think the partnership with designer Jon Klassen really helped bring O Reilly's style back into orbit around earth. It's a pretty cool collaboration and a fine win for O Reilly, whose work can be a bit tough on the eyes at times (not ugly so much as purposefully forceful). I like the softer result in the U2 video. The first time I saw his first episode of Please, Say Something I thought to myself -this is very different, but pretty cool. I like how he's exploring using CG in ways that are unapologetically CG. The orthographic style is an old illustration stand by, but it comes off well in notion. In the U2 video there's a neat sense of graphic layering with the semi-transparent squares floating over the imagery. Ever since being blown away by the The Secret of Kells clips I've been intrigued by the use of motion graphics in animation to add layers of emotional and narrative texture without necessarily trying to be "on the nose" about it. I don't know why it resonates with me, but I like how motion graphics are subtly being pulled into these narratives to add a little something more.

O Reilly's an interesting case study in the power of a good idea, lots of work (he's constantly making new stuff), successful self promotion and strategic partnerships. His story can be anybody's story, really.

Martians!!

I learned from Tom Sito's wonderful blog on animation and history that today is Marvin the Martian's birthday. Here's the cartoon that introduced him to the world...



Man, this thing is just filled to the gills with great stuff. The stuff of Bugs going bonkers during and after the launch/landing is just gut busting funny. I mean, really. I've seen this cartoon dozens of times and I still laugh at that. The late 40's were an absolutely amazing time for cartoons. Imagine being a kid back then, going to the theater every Saturday morning to catch the latest WB short. They just don't make stuff like this anymore. We don't even think like this anymore.

spots available for a new APT class in August 2009

OK, with my short break behind me, I'm back.

I will be having another Animation Personal Trainer session from August 10th to September 11th of 2009. The good news is that I have some spots available for the class. So if you've been interested in taking the APT class and having a highly personalized animation training experience, email me and I'll let you know how to register. I don't do reel reviews or anything like that- I'm comfortable teaching anybody on how to improve their animation where ever they're at in the journey. It doesn't matter whether you are brand new to animation or have feature film credits under your belt.

For some previous APT success stories be sure to check out these posts.
Gary Macarevich
Anthony Bennett
Sunny Kharbanda
Anand Kumar

In & Out...

I'm going to be in and out of contact this week for a variety of reasons. So if anybody emails me and I'm not able to get right back to you, don't take it personally. In rather short order I'll get back to business, but for now other cool non-animation things are where I'll be focusing for a little bit this week.

Blip

Friend of the blog, Irish animator Ben Harper, recently put his 3rd year animation studies short film online.


Blip from Sean Mullen on Vimeo.
Two aliens try to take over the same planet.

Ben & Sean did a really great job of making simple things work. They didn't get bogged down in a lot of minutae, but instead focused on clean design, a fun animation style and crystal clear storytelling. I love simple things done really well and this little short just oozes a kind of whimsy that I like to see. Ben recently graduated from the Irish School of Animation. He's still working on finalizing his graduation thesis film titled "Mischief", an interesting little 2d effort. He's also quite active in trying to further develop the Irish animation scene with his involvement in a local animator's networking event called the Pegbar. You Irish animator types oughta check it out. My wife and I had the pleasure of enjoying a nice dinner with Ben on a blisteringly cold night when we were in Dublin this past January. We ate a Polish restaurant, ordering from menus we could not read. Overall a dandy time!

One more bit of Irish housekeeping here on the blog of Lango... Brown Bag Films has recently put up their own studio blog and it's a dandy little number. Check it out!

thumb-boards

While working at Big Idea I had the opportunity to work with Tod Carter- an amazingly bright and talented story artist. When he was working out a sequence for a video title Tod often used simple little thumbnail sketches. He'd cram 10 or more shots onto a single piece of paper, no formal board templates or anything. While these were intended as first pass rough sketches, more than a few times the thumb boards were so clear and functional they just scanned those, blew them up and cut them into the edit- no full clean up board needed. I'm sure it helped story development to move faster (saving money & time- two very important things in the world of lower budgets), but whether I was animating, supervising or directing I never felt like we were getting short-changed in the process. The thumbs were clear and they gave us plenty to work with.

That made a big impact on me because I'm always intimidated by the act of drawing. I can draw all day long (and even do OK at it), but the moment the drawing becomes "serious" or needs to be on par with some arbitrary skill level I just shut down. So thumb-boards work perfectly for me. I've boarded a number of films and projects the same way over the years. Quick, rough and simple. Like everything else about this project, immediacy, speed and simplicity are the goals.

As you can see, the drawing is utterly lacking professional skill. But they don't need to be fancy or amazing. I'm not out to impress anybody. The drawings just need to be clear. 

  

  

 

I've been trying to keep my Twitter account updated with things as I move along.

Schmitty

 

  

Otto's roommate, Schmitty, and his most prized worldly possession-- his 1974 vintage arm chair.

Tweet!

Well, seeing as I do stuff online I feel somewhat compelled to have a Twitter account. So on the sidebar you'll see my Twitter updates, and you can follow me there. I'm gonna try to keep it updated with progress notes on my various up and coming projects. Other people have production blogs for their projects (plogs), so this will be my production twitter. Pwitter? Kinda has a ring to it.

Anyhow, I'm currently working on making another short animation using Otto, along with a new character. It's not musical, but will have dialog and such. It's more of a real look at the characters' personalities. The plan (for now, at least) is to make several short-shorts of 1 minute or less rather than one long short. Longer shorts (4+ minutes) have a kind of intimidating heaviness to them. They take a long time to complete and often need to justify their length by being a bit more complex to hold one's attention. So the inner unspoken fear is that it will be a year or three of my life wasted if the short isn't absolutely perfect. The result is paralysis by analysis (aka.: The Lango Secret Joys of Myopia Syndrome) So I've written up a bunch of short shorts instead. They seem less important that way. I've read that some artists have a similar fear of their expensive fancy Moleskine sketchbooks. The books are so nice and cool that they are intimidated by them, so they avoid sketching in them and prefer to sketch on notepads or other cheap media. I can definitely relate with that. I once had a really nice sketchbook. I did one page in it, very badly drawn and terrible all around. Never touched it again. My doodles are still mostly on the back of church bulletins, Post It Notes or random pieces of paper lying around. So these shorter shorts are gonna aim for that 'back of the envelope' spirit. All part of the unpolished immediacy vibe I've been striving to grab lately. In many ways Twitter updates are like this, too. Short, fast, less drawn out ordeals. Good for quick stuff.

I'm sensing a trend here.

All the same, follow me if you dare. Or care. :)

Funky -- rigging details

Thanks to everybody for their great feedback on the funkiest man alive clip. It's cool to see that it resonates with people. The great fedback has emboldened me to continue with plans to do more stuff along this line.

OK, as promised here are some details about how I created the funky animation. First up I want to explain the rigging. It will help put the animation process in context. None of this stuff is really revolutionary. It's just using various old techniques in a way that suits the particular style of design and motion I am aiming for. I doubt this exact combination of techniques would work on more "normal" CG characters or styles. The demands of those styles necessitate a different approach. Ultimately any good rigger understands that the end defines the means. For me the driving principle is shape control. The second priority is ease and speed of animation. I want to have fun while doing this, not die of torture. Both the style of animation, and the manner in which I create the animation, allow me more freedom in "breaking the rig" because I never really have to worry about showing it breaking or coming back together to the "correct" form in a literal manner. It can be broken for a frame or two, then be 'normal' again and the audience doesn't ever see the transformation. Without that nasty business exposed the audience just accepts the image for what it is.

The Body
At first I tried to rig the character using a hybrid veggietales approach. With the VeggieTales characters we used lattices with the various lattice point rows clustered together. You can see the basic idea in this image...

Properly networked with dozens of math nodes under the hood (aka: "magic") for automatic counter adjustment the basic control can be boiled down to a few controllers. For Veggies you could literally do 75% of your primary acting animation with one controller for the head...

There are no bones in a VT rig. I figured since Otto (and previous incarnations of him) had a simple gumdrop shaped body, perhaps this would be a good way to rig up the main body. The attractive part was the nice squish-able volume and simplicity of using one control to get a lot done. Well, that and I hate, hate , HATE defining skin weights for joints. So if I could do it with a lattice, all the better. Sounds great in theory. Not so much in practice. I wanted to do things with these characters that they never dreamt of doing with Veggies. The primary downfall was that it was hard to get good isolation of control over a specific region of the torso without it affecting neighboring portions too much. Say I wanted to push the belly out to the left while leaving most everything else where it was and having a good flow of the mesh as it deformed along. The deforms just didn't work right. I tried about 6 or 7 different variations (each more complicated and automatedly counter-forced than the one preceding it) before I scrapped the idea completely and just went with simple joints. The key to this was a GREAT plug-in by Kickstand Labs called Stretch Mesh. It's amazing. Stunning. Life altering. Magnanimous. Scrumptious. Punctual. I cannot use enough superlatives to describe how awesome this plug-in is. Go check it out at their website and see the examples. It made bones a simple pain free solution. They have my undying love.

OK, beside me having a serious man-crush on the Kickstand dudes, I ended up with joints for the body. There aren't many joints in the body, but each one has a control for it. The control can adjust position, rotation and scale. So the body is pretty much totally "breakable" at any point along the way- something that ended up being easier to pull off using bones instead of a lattice. All the better to get finer control over silhouettes and shapes.

The Limbs
The "hybrid" part of my original hybrid-Veggie approach were of course the limbs. I rigged those pretty much straight up. I attached them to the body using a MEL script called djRivet. It uses the hair system in Maya to stick things to a mesh. So the arms & legs are stuck on the body like they're plugged into a hair follicle in the skin. Weird, but you riggers know what that means. That part works like a charm. Always did. There were some arrangement & parenting issues so that stuff would have the proper following properties, but nothing major. A simple IK switch between chest space and world space is enough.
Speaking of IK/FK-- I have evolved to the point where all I use is IK arms and legs no matter what. I'm just comfortable that way. It's much easier & faster to adjust the arc or path of a hand in motion when all you have to worry about is one control object- the hand IK control. Adjust it to clean up the arc, done. To fix a hand arc or whatever in FK you need to find the right combination of adjustments from the hips, thru the chest, down the arm- in a rig like Otto that can be 5 or 6 controllers. So I skip the FK and stick with IK. I've worked this way for years now. Life is good.

The arms and legs follow with the body, but the shoulders & hips behave like they have their own IK and can be pulled off. This allows them to be positioned as needed to maintain the proper shapes in motion.

The bendy deforms on the arms and legs are pretty simple. I originally wanted to see if I could live without them (less controllers = faster animation), but I needed the shape control, so I added them in. As per standard practice I break the rigging into two distinct functions: Control and deformation. Control is your garden variety IK system on a joint chain- it's how you articulate the character. But this joint chain is not what deforms the mesh. Deformation is bound to a completely different set of joints. These deformer joints are then constrained to follow along with the control joints. So when I move the IK controls, the skinned joints pull the mesh along. Again, pretty standard stuff. This allows the skin to be deformed in a macro sense (with the hand or foot IK control), and on a micro level with extra controls that pull the skin joints out and away from the control ones. Not cutting edge, but it works.

 

 

The hands and feet have some extra bend deformers on them that let me kinda shape them more elegantly with a cleaner line than the joints system alone. They're nice simple attributes on the hand or foot control. This really comes in handy for the fingers. For simple hand stuff it's easier to adjust a few attributes on the hand IK control than the shape the fingers joint by joint.

The Face
The face bits are modular- they're not modeled into the body mesh, or even into a single head mesh. The eyes are separate, the nose is seperate and the mustahce is seperate. As are the teeth and tongue and ears. They're stuck on the body using the same rivet/hair follicle approach as the arms and legs. They're all able to be pulled off the body or re-arranged on the mesh to suit the shape needed. Again, this isn't rocket science so much as it's an attempt to make the design fit the end goal animation and visual style. I pretty much stole a page right out of Jim Henson's playbook.

As for the under the hood stuff for the face, it's really simple. The controls drive the position of clusters on a seperate copy of the body mesh. These clusters are simple because, once again, the Stretch Mesh plug in makes them blend so smooth and easy that I don't need to set up some complicated system of sub clusters that are blended between various master clusters, blah, blah, blah. Stretch Mesh. Have I told you how awesome it is? Anyhow, the result of this "off to the side" face is then applied back onto the main body via a blendShape morph. The reason to keep the clusters and face deform stuff seperate is to keep things stable. Clusters are infamous for double transforms, for having pole alignment problems when their parent or contrainers are rotated, etc. Better to leave them parked off in a hidden group where they stay nice and still while the results are piped back onto the main body.

The facial controls can either ride on the face, or with the flip of a switch be pulled off the face into a more typical face control panel. For close up shots the on-the-face method is great cuz it's like sculpting the expression. For shots further away the panel version is easier to work with.

 

 

The Triggers
OK, the last little bit of rigging fun for today was my trigger set up. Many folks are familiar with Hamish McKenzie's zooTools suit of MEL scripts. Hamish is an insanely bright guy- and a real cool one, too. He's currently performing signs and wonders for Valve. His trigger tool is really spiffy for turning objects into buttons which can perform a variety of functions quickly. So I created a series of buttons for each character that set keys, hide visibility of controls, select or reset various controller groups (body, mouth, eyes, all). I have a quick little script that hooks these to the frame mask of my own home made camera tool. This way I can quickly click on a button to perform various functions quickly and it stay out of the way, but always right where I can get it. Even if the camera moves these buttons stay stuck to it.

OK, that's it. Like I said, nothing here is ground breaking or mind blowing. I'm just using whatever technique best fits the desired end result.
More on the animation process later.