Star Wars by Saul Bass

Just saw this on the BoingBoing.



Very nice.

You Call This a Crime Scene?

By this point, you may have noticed that pretty much everything is lacking outlines. This was a decision I made before I started animating, which grew out of a test to see if I could animate characters without drawing and inking and coloring. Instead, I'm animating layers of colored shapes that make up the characters, if that makes sense.

I decided to do it this way for two reasons. First, it can be a time-saver. Not having outlines means eliminating a cleanup/inking stage, and sort of eliminates a coloring stage as well.

Secondly, I'm not crazy about Flash's brushes, so getting decent lines means going back and forth to Illustrator, which isn't worth the hassle, especially since cut and paste between Flash and Illo has been broken since 2004.

But I'm kind of missing having outlines. I still have them as a first step, drawing stuff out in Illustrator:



I'll use that one Illustrator drawing as a starting point for when I get into Flash, so there is a little cleanup, but usually just once per scene, not for every extreme or key pose. Here's what this guy looks like all Flashified:



I can live with no outlines this time around. But having no inlines means I have to find some other way to define where the character overlaps itself. I thought I might avoid overlap all together by forcing myself to have strong silhouettes for every pose, but it's a lot harder to not overlap once stuff starts moving. My solution is to separate overlaps with gradients. It looks okay in still images, but in motion, it looks like everyone has dirty forearms.

So, back to animating by building up layers of shapes. It's really not any different than what you would do by roughing things out on paper. I still do the big masses first and layer on top until I get to the secondary action passes. Here's a wireframe version of a grappling sequence. Click on the thumbnail to see the animated GIF:


Each colored outline is a separate layer. Almost everything is shape-tweened, except for the hands and heads, which are symbols. The luchador's face appears to hang off his head because it's masked off except for the top corner of his brow. It looks correct when it's rendered.

Smoke & Pixels

So I want the exhaust trails for the vehicles in this film to be scribble lines that expand or "bloom" the longer they hang in the air. I figured I'd try to implement Maya's Paint Effects for this.

In order to be truly lazy, I found a way to have the paint strokes derived from curves that trace through particles affected by a dynamic field. Geez, did I really just write that?

It is a bigger pain than it sounds like, but now that all the work on the front end is done, I have a way to generate a variety of scribble styles and and shapes with relatively little effort.


Firstly, make lots of dots.


Then, connect them.



Add texture, and call it done.
Also handy for endorsing checks.


Big Thanks to the indestructible Brian Coffee for his Melscripting help!

Animation Nearing Completion

So I'm plugging away to get this film wrapped up in the next couple months. The animation for the shots is nearly complete, and then it's moving on to effects and BGs. Oh, the BGs.

Anyways, here's a pre-grappling showdown between our lucahdor protagonist and a hot rod UFO-flying goon, complete with amped-up metronome track.

And yeah, it's on 3's. Is that a problem?

Specflix

Back when Crimenals was making the rounds, a new boutique agency recruited me to spec out some spots for Netflix, in the same style as my film. I banged 'em out pretty quickly, each one in about a week, so they're not too polished, but what de heck. I haven't seen them in a while and figured they're worth a chuckle.


Monsters


Screwball


Blaxploitation

Because that's what I do.

Dear readers, USC has outed me as an "emerging talent". Consequently, this thursday, November 1st, I will be part of a panel discussion called Redefining Animation, which is part of the Animation: From Avant-Garde to Popular Culture symposium happening in Los Angeles and San Diego.

I will be showing clips from my runaway blockbuster absurdist noir mashup Crimenals , and talking about how and why I made the film.

There will be some bona-fide animation lumenaries on the panel as well, and it's free! So if you're handy to Los Angeles, come on by.

Recommendation: BUY!!!

Look! I can practically double your money in just one week!

Suck that, Dow Jones.

With Apologies to Jim Flora

I'm contributing these two pieces to a group art show called Copyright Infringement at Cartoon Network Studios.

They're my take on what record covers would look like in the alternate universe where Jim Flora was commissioned to do the art for Sabbath and The Stooges. Or something like that.

They're hand-pulled screen prints. The show will be up for about a month or so.

It opens this coming Tuesday, the 10th at 5:30. If you are handy to Burbank, come by and see these and some other good stuff.

Layout Drawings

Here are a few old layout and pose drawings from when I was still using pencil and paper. They're so streaky and gray because I was using a nearly broken large-format scanner to capture the 11x17 sheets.


hot-rodded halftracks parked in a cave


antagonists' briefing room


heroes' special handshake


worm's eye view: luchador & ape hangers


pondering some hatchets

The Opposite of Prolific

I'm back. Searching for and then moving to a new place with a five month-old infant in tow is not something I recommend.

Anyways, while I'm getting back up to speed, I'll post some not so recent stuff. Here's a luchador walk cycle:

Scene in Progress

Here's a scene in various stages of completion, featuring a luchador, a piñata, and some starving children. I do things in several passes working from very crude to the final details. For some reason this particular scene has elements of all stages, so you can get an idea of how I'm fleshing it all out. I could go into more detail on the process, but if you're already familiar with Flash, it's pretty obvious just by looking. If you're not familiar with Flash, I would just bore you.

On top are three of my chickenscratch storyboard thumbnails. Down below is the corresponding animation. You can hear the click track and the temp music in this shot as well.

My Laziness Quotient

When I was a kid, Mad Magazine defined the Laziness Quotient as something like "the amount of work you do to avoid having to do work." This little clip reminds me of that definition.

One of my characters is a piñata. He gets yanked around a lot and the candy inside him needs to jiggle around. Rather than actually animate all of the little bits of candy, I tried to figure out a way to automate all the secondary action. My solution was to use Maya's jiggle deformers to get the candy to bounce around. I still have to animate the containing mass to follow the body, but it's less work than animating each little candy separately. At least I think it is.

If any Flash experts out there are reading this, and know of a way to make collision detection work within a boundary shape, and also how to make actionscript results renderable, please drop me a line. If I can keep this all within Flash, I'd be much less lazy.

Note how the character animation is pencil line. This test was done early on, about three years ago, when I was still drawing everything on paper.

Thumb-O-Matic

Once I got all the little thumbnails sketched out, I strung them together with a temporary soundtrack to get a rough idea of shot durations and timing. The soundtrack consists of music that I chose to suit the mood of each scene, ranging from Wagner to Henri Mancini to Slayer. I brought the volume way down and added another audio track of metronome clicks derived from each piece of music, so I have a really prominent click track playing over top muted musical tracks. I cut the thumbnail sequence to this click track. Then I rendered each scene out as a quicktime movie to be used as a template in Flash. More on that in another post.

Where I'm Calling From

Rumor has it that Jeffrey Katzenberg reads The Illusion of Life every year. I can relate; as an animator, I make it a point to curl up with Robert Appleby's Modern Business Administration every Christmas.

Seriously though, I kind of wish Mr. Katzenberg and his peers would read John Culshaw's The Virtues of Flatness instead. A mere five pages, it's shorter than the even the index of Frank and Ollie's book, but it masterfully articulates how engaging animation can be if it weren't so hung up on apeing realism. Published in The Fortnightly in 1953, it's uncannily prescient in its discussion of the "Third Dimension," a term Mr. Culshaw used to describe the extent of Disney's rendering quality at the time. In the context of today's animation, it's pretty easy to apply that term to another, more current technique. Does this fifty year old argument still hold up? Take a look:

Boards

Since I'm the only one working on this film, the boards are pretty loose. Put another way, they're illegible to anyone but me. Below are some spreads from a Moleskine notebook, so you get an idea of how tiny the drawings are. When I'm boarding, I usually think for a good long time before I draw anything. Then when I'm ready I will run through sequences in my mind and make tiny thumbnails in the panels as I go. When finished, I end up with little visual bookmarks for the sequence that's knocking about in my head. There's room to flesh things out more when I do the blocking and keying passes later on. But for a first step, I get the broadest of the broad strokes down in these little thumbnails.

2 Pop...

Great. Just what everyone needs. Another animation production blog. Turn back now if you want. But if you stick around, you'll probably end up seeing some pictues and some line tests and probably some final scenes for my MFA Thesis Film, peppered with some random thoughts that I can unload here to clear my head once in a while. You'll get to see how I work. And you can virtually point and laugh at me. So here goes:

A brief recap:
I was/am a student in the MFA Animation program at USC. I was in the midst of production on my Thesis film when I took a full-time job at Cartoon Network. I practically stopped working on my own film for over a year. Now I'm re-assembling all the pieces and filling in the gaps to get it completed. In addition to seeing current progress charted here, you'll get to see how the process has evolved over time, from fully hand-drawn to a paperless digital approach.