The Manufactured Image: A Microcosm

For a primer, read my previous post.

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

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

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

And this says something else…

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

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

The Manufactured Image: Henry Ford would be proud

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

OK, let’s have a look at this….

(click to enlarge)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do Me A Favor… Now in Dutch!!

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

Voorbeeld.

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

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

Happy Birthday, Mike!

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

Animation Workshop in Sao Paulo

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

VTS20 is…. coming!

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

A World Away…

Check this out…

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

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

Do Me A Favor… (new animation tutorial!)

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

Power Centers Tutorial: Now In French!

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

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

Kiwi!

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

Must Read Material: Design for Animation

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

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

Now this is cool!

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

Thunderstorms = Power Outage

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

Mmm. Tasty Pork Flesh!

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

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

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

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

Psycho Pig Theater.

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

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

Arc D’ Triumph Tutorial: Agora Em Portugues!

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

Butter!

Excuse me while I beat this drum a little more…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I dare you to watch this and not smile.

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

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

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

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

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

New Free Web Tutorial: Breakdowns Can Be Such a Drag

Hey Kids,

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

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

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

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

VTS19 coming later today…

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

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

Principles for Lipsync Animation: Ahora en Español!

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

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

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