Animated stationery

The Croods - Official Trailer (HD)

2012-12-06T03:13:00.002-08:00

The Croods is a prehistoric comedy adventure that follows the world's first family as they embark on a journey of a lifetime when the cave that has always shielded them from danger is destroyed. Traveling across a spectacular landscape, the Croods discover an incredible new world filled with fantastic creatures -- and their outlook is changed forever. Director: Chris Sanders, Kirk DeMicco Cast: Nicolas Cage, Ryan Reynolds, Emma Stone, Catherine Keener, Clark Duke, Cloris Leachman In theaters:

March 22nd, 2013 Copyright © 2013 DreamWorks

Storyline

It's here! The 'Funny' trailer'! The 'Introduction To Guy' trailer! The trailer that will push this film to the top of every cartoon-watching kid's mental to-do list, while simultaneously reassuring their parents that this will be an exciting and enjoyable hour and a half for them, too.

Where the first trailer teased us with a tone of awe and wonder, this one features the funny. It also delves deeper into Eep's desire to live outside her father's rigid rules, introduces a potential love interest, and frames the film as a family road-trip!

This trailer also serves as a definitive smack to the back of the head of all of those ill-informed and unimaginative folks who assumed that Eep's wild red hair meant that The Croods would be a shot-for-shot rip-off of Brave. Heck, this looks more like National Lampoon's Vacation dipped in lysergic acid and screened at the Natural History Museum.

Moments of Shine:

Gran: "Still alive." Grug: "It's still early."

"Try hiding from it in the tall, dry grass."

Guy's pet sloth, Belt. That he wears as a belt.

Watching the effects of an earthquake...through the clouds.

The sight of the red, pirana-looking parrots scattering before Guy's torch.

The landscapes. So vivid, so varied, so serene and surreal. Screensavers, all!

The faces. Bending, squishing, snarling and smiling, they do as much to convey the characters' personalities as the dialog and the animal-inspired body language.

Eep. The more we see of her, the better she gets. This isn't a girl with one simple, singable dream. This is a gal with contradictory emotions and impulses, a gal who is only beginning to understand the world, her family and herself. This is a dreamer, an adventurer and a romantic. Who doesn't love one of those?

What is a sprite sheet? - The Movie

2012-11-19T08:51:00.002-08:00

SpriteSheets - TheMovie - Part 1 by Code'n'Web

Principles of Animation – Anticipation

2012-11-01T00:55:00.004-07:00

“Anticipation is a preliminary action that sets up a primary action. It cues or prepares the audience for what is about to happen.”

Over the past few years I have been saving and collecting references and good examples of the principles of animations. Today I’d like to share this one about Anticipation. The first video is a great example of exaggeration and anticipation. It’s interesting to see that without the anticipation, the animation doesn’t work at all.

With anticipation

Without anticipation:

And another brilliant example, that we can take advantage of this principle on illustrations as well:

Sons of Ram (2012)

2012-11-01T00:27:00.003-07:00

Sons of Ram (2012)

Surayavanshi Ram of Ayodhya, the greatest warrior king that ever lived, was forced to send his beloved wife Sita into exile, thus leading him and his kingdom to despair and towards an empty future. Unknown to Ram, far away in sage Valmiki's hermitage, Sita lives as Vandevi, raising their twin sons, Luv & Kush. Though not aware of their lineage, the twins imbibe wisdom, compassion & combat skills that would put any royal prince to shame. Sita teaches Luv -Kush to always work as a team, secretly hoping that her estranged family would find a way to come together one day. The twins must conquer their inner demons before they can achieve their destinies. Accompanied by a steadfast gang of lovable friends, Luv-Kush's journey takes them from enchanted forests with mythical creatures to the revered land of Ayodhya, the home of their fabled heroes

Performance And Acting For Animators

2012-10-31T23:25:00.002-07:00

by Judy Lieff

"Animators should focus on the acting...make the characters think and act...start with the body first, next focus on the eyes, and last focus on the mouth. When reviewing reels we look at the acting first." -- John Lasseter, November 4, 1996 during a lecture at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Courtesy of ArtToday.

The actor and the animator may approach creating the life of a character in a similar fashion, but while actors transform themselves into their characters, animators have an additional challenge of maintaining a subjective, as well as an objective, approach to characterization. Therein lies the challenge of finding a form of acting training that will be particularly useful for the animator.

For actors, and particularly for animators, it is useful to develop a keen kinesthetic sense and a thorough understanding of music and rhythm. Frank Gladstone, Director of Training at DreamWorks SKG, feels the animator is responsible for creating characters who not only fit their own voices, but ones who can perform without vocal cues as well. The more keenly developed a kinesthetic sense an actor, dancer, or animator has, the more capacity that artist has to portray various characters and exhibit organic nuances and gestures appropriate to that character.

Researching a number of animation curriculums from academia to commercial studios, and conducting interviews on the subject of acting and performance, as it relates to the professional animator, has shown unanimous agreement on the importance of acting classes for successful animation training. However, there has yet to be any course of study for investigating acting and performance that specifically relates to the expanding requirements of animation. Not only do animators have to understand the process of acting in order to create a character, but they also have to be able to direct and communicate with actors for projects involving live actors for reference or motion-capture.

"Animation is the kind of medium that is such a combination of other mediums that the more you know about music, art, film, choreography, literature, or current events, the better you are going to be. You name it, and it is only going to make you a better animator or better storyteller for animation." -- Craig Kellman, Character Design, Disney Feature Animation

What follows is a series of excerpts from some of the interviews I conducted addressing acting and performance as it relates to the professional animator and his training. From historians to television and feature film to motion-capture and voice actors, I have gathered a number of viewpoints on this critical issue.

source from: http://www.awn.com

The Future of Game Cinematics

2012-10-31T23:17:00.003-07:00

Cut scenes are on my mind because of a recent New York Times article about the escalating migration of games away from consoles toward mobile devices. The largest studios are set up to create big games for big budgets, and those big games work best on a big screen. If the migration continues, what happens to cinematics? They won't look as good or have the same punch on a hand-held screen. I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that game cinematics are endangered altogether. Think about it: Cut scenes have always been an imperfect device for delivering story points and character development. Most cut scenes give the player aesthetic whiplash because he can empathize with characters during the mini-movie, but he cannot empathize with them during game play. Let me explain.

Just about everybody in the industry today will acknowledge that a game is not a movie. You play a game and you watch a movie, apples and oranges. Cinematics were originally intended to be tiny game/movie hybrids. There used to be a lot of lunch break discussion about whether or not a game could "make you cry". As an acting teacher, I can tell you that, yes, it is possible for a game to make you cry, but probably not with cinematics. The thing that makes you cry is empathy, identifying with the emotions of an on-screen character. A baseline requirement for empathy is physical distance. You cannot empathize with yourself, and a player cannot empathize with his own avatar. In order for a game to pull the player into an emotional/empathetic transaction, most of the job being done today with cut scenes must be achieved through game play. In an ideal game, there would be no cinematics at all. And in order for that to happen, game designers -- especially Level Designers -- must have a working understanding of empathy in humans.

Fumito Ueda brilliantly blazed the trail to empathetic game play with Ico ten years ago, but that game was not financially successful enough to spawn imitators. Now would be a good time to take a fresh look at what Mr. Ueda accomplished. The secret ingredient in Ico is that Ico (the player) is the only character that can actually do things. The queen's daughter, Yorda, is sort of an emotional train wreck, hesitant and afraid. She won't take the kind of risks that Ico wants her to take, and so he must assist her in order to save her. The player empathizes with Yorda through the POV of Ico precisely because the player cannot fully control Yorda's behavior.

I usually tell a personal story about empathy in my masterclass. It concerns a young friend who was playing one of the Sims games a few years back and put a female character in a room with no windows or doors. "I figured she would starve to death in there," he explained to me in an e-mail. "But then she surprised me and started crying! And she wouldn't stop!" My friend finally figured out that his only option was to take the girl out of the room altogether. "I had to find some other way to kill her," he said. Whoever came up with the idea of the crying girl was on the right track for empathy. The set-up is similar to the one in Ico. If my friend had been able to flip a switch labeled "Cry/STOP Cry", empathy would have been impossible.

With all of this in mind, I have a few suggestions for developers that want to be the first to cross the finish line when cinematics go away:

1) There is, in many game studios, a systemic division between programmers/writers/designers and animators. In the future, that wall must come down. The technical side of the studio - let's call it the left-brainers - must have a better understanding of human behavior - the right-brain part. It is a mistake to assume that animators alone control character performance. This is the reason that, whenever I teach at a game company, I practically plead to have the designers and writers attend the class along with the animators. The fix for the cut scene problem begins with game design, character analysis and scripts. Therefore, the launch team must take actual for-real human behavior, including the ability to empathize, into account from Day One.

2) Scripts for most games today are woefully, if understandably, dialogue-heavy and frequently banal. This is particularly true in cinematics because they are the device used to convey story points and exposition. The fact is that acting has almost nothing to do with words. That is something else that Fumito Ueda understood with Ico. Eliminate all dialogue that is not absolutely essential. Animators are like stage actors to the extent that they can only work with the script they are given. Even Anthony Hopkins cannot save some of the scripts out there.

3) Level Designers are going to have to carry more of the load. It is essential that Level Designers in the future know as much about story and acting as the animators and scriptwriters do.

4) Mocap has a lot of room for improvement. It is getting better, but mocap directors need to learn better how to communicate with actual actors in terms that actual actors understand. A big part of Gollum's success was that Peter Jackson is a live-action director, and he cast Andy Serkis, a well-trained classical actor, in the role. They knew how to talk to one another in a common language, and that delivered to the animators rich data to work with.

5) Finally, include your animators in these studio adjustments. Just as the design side needs to learn and incorporate more of the performance side, so too should the animator have a better understand of the design side. Nobody has to get fired in this transition. Each member of the studio team needs to expand his knowledge base and become more like a generalist instead of a specialist . This will take a while, so be patient. You can't be brilliant in a hurry.

Until next month...
Be safe!

Amazing Mechanical "werewolf" Claws & Stilts

2012-10-27T00:30:00.003-07:00

More behind the scenes detail of hand and leg extensions for Farscape alien character "Namtar" for episode "DNA mad Scientist".

This was work I did working with Dave and Lou Elsey for Jim Henson's creature shop in Sydney in the 1990s. The character was performed by mold and foam specialist Adrian Getly. I made the body extensions and worked with long time colleague Matt Ward on the head. We made a counter-current flow cool suit for Adrian to wear to keep him cool under all that gear, based on system I developed on the never filmed Smiths "Gobbledok".

This is the never before publicly seen M.E.G. Gobbledok head mechanised by myself and Matt Ward, with skin and sculpt by Paul Katte and Nick Nicolau from M.E.G. It was an all new update based an earlier Gobbledok design by Warren Beaton, so we had to keep the same sort of look but make it slightly more realistic. Even the addition of he teeth was agonised over by the Ad agency. It was never intended to speak but I tried some dialogue just for fun. Take a look at my later Starwars lipsynch on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID2Fkse1bmg for comparison. Comissioned for a Smith's potato chips ad campaign the Chararcter was finished exactly at the time Smiths changed advertising agencies and not even the original advertising agency saw the final results. The character was to be worn by a short stature suit performer and was fitted with a countercurrent heat exchange refrigerating cool-suit to keep Julie comfortable. The head was fitted with video lcd goggles for Julie with a lipstick camera hidden in the forehead to feed video of where she is facing so she could see without external viewports. The expressions were mixed by computer system and able to be recorded and edited for playback. Greg designed the control system, based on a "mediamation system", later evolving into the mobile "gilderfluke" based editing/playback system used for Star Wars Ep III

The Raptors in Jurassic Park Were So Big Because They Were Humans

2012-10-26T21:59:00.002-07:00

The Velociraptor (or, you know, the raptor) is one of the most famous dinosaurs ever, largely because of how they were used to such brilliantly scary effect in the Jurassic Park books and movies. (JP even gets a shoutout just three paragraphs in to the Velociraptor Wiki page.) But as any paleontologist worth his or her salt has likely lamented countless times, the massive, deadly raptors portrayed in the movies are totally wrong. In reality, Velociraptorwas only a few feet tall and had feathers. It was basically a larger, predatory chicken. While they might have been effective predators, they certainly weren’t the size of LeBron James.

Via Stan Winston

But how’s this for wild idea: What if the raptors in Jurassic Park were oversized because they needed to be able to fit a human inside? At the very least, we know that humans did fit inside the JP raptors thanks to the above video from the Stan Winston School of Character Arts, which designed the raptor puppets for the first movie.

Via Stan Winston

Jurassic Park is noted for its excellent use of CGI — as awkward as digital effects can look today, they still blow puppets out of the water for realism when movement is concerned, as a couple Redditors pointed out. Not every shot could work with CGI, so full and half puppets were used. But when all else failed, apparently the man suit came out. According to Stan Winston’s epic post on the suits’ construction, the JP kitchen scene used all three techniques
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Box Guy

2012-10-26T21:54:00.000-07:00

Look For Big Shapes

2012-10-26T21:51:00.004-07:00

Drawing Hands

2012-10-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

Hands 101

Hands 102

Hands 103 Coming Soon!

A Short History (part I)

2012-10-26T21:41:00.002-07:00

ROOTS

The word 'animation' is derived from anima, the Latin word for soul or spirit. The verb 'to animate' literally means 'to give life to'.From his earliest artworks, hunting scenes sketched in ochre on a cave wall, to highly refined Greek sculptures, mankind has always attempted to imbue his art with expressions of life by depicting his subjects as if caught in a frozen moment in time suggestive of broader preceding and following actions.

Egotistical man placed himself at the centre of the universe. He has always believed in the possibility of creating life - of playing god. Man has used his technology as an agent to help realise this desire in order to become ruler of all nature.

AUTOMATA

History is rich with descriptions of attempts to imitate life by mechanical means in the form of hydraulic, pneumatic, or clockwork operated biological automata. Automata (or automatons - a machine which is relatively self-operating and capable of performing multiple complex movements on its own without the need for human control) had its greatest period of development following the rise of mechanicism with the revival of Greek culture during the Renaissance. There were, for example, isolated descriptions of talking heads claimed to have been constructed by Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Gerbert, and Robert Grosseteste. Perhaps of greater significance was the mechanical lion of da Vinci and the two automata created by Johannes Muller, called Regiomontanus (1436-1476). One of these was the fabled eagle which was claimed to have escorted the Emperor Maximilian to the city gates of Nuremberg.

The first android, a completely mechanical figure which simulated a living human or animal, operating with apparently responsive action, is believed to have been constructed by Hans Bullmann of Nuremberg (?-1535). Bullmann reportedly produced a number of extremely ingenious figures of men and women that moved and played musical instruments.

These early automata were mechanical devices that seemed to demonstrate lifelike behaviour. They took advantage not only of gears, but also of gravity, hydraulics, pulleys and sunlight - the effect could be dazzling, as with the extraordinary clock of Berne created in 1530. This massive timepiece hourly disgorged a dazzling pageantry of automata figures.
One of the most famous waterworks of the seventeenth century was that constructed at the chateau at Heilbrunn in about 1646. It featured various animated hydromechanical devices. A mechanical theatre was installed here in 1725 by Lorenz Rosenegge, a craftsman of Nuremberg. It featured 256 figures, 119 of which were animated by means of a single water turbine. A horizontal axis operating a series of cams regulated the movements of the figures by means of copper wires. The wheelwork consists of wooden wheels with iron teeth and pinions. A powerful hydraulic organ provides background music and covers the noise of the mechanism.

Just as the waterworks and grottoes of the Renaissance gardens were tangible revivals of the hydraulic and pneumatic devices of the ancient Greek culture, some of the same influence filtered into the field of clockmaking. The first conversion from the hydraulic and pneumatic to the purely mechanical automata, occurred in Europe with the advent of the clockmaker who made public and astronomical clocks with moving figurines.

It was a short step to a combination of the pinned cylinder and the spring-driven clockwork to provide the sound of living things and of musical instruments in automata. This combination made possible a great variety of developments in the late seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries. The most notable of these were the androids constructed in the mid-eighteenth century by Jacques Vaucanson (1709-1782), who brought the production of automata to its highest point of development. Vaucanson is unquestionably the most import inventor in the history of automata, as well as one of the most important figures in the history of machine technology. Although he was responsible for pioneering in the development of machine tools and later inspired the work of Sir Henry Maudslay and others, it was, ironically enough, his automata -- which occupied the briefest interlude in his life -- which brought him permanent fame and fortune.

Born in 1709 in Grenoble, France, Vaucanson exhibited great mechanical ability at a very early age. After having attended the oratory college at Juilly he studied with the Jesuits at Grenoble, and in 1725 joined the order of Minims of Lyon. During his training period, however, Vaucanson indulged his mechanical interests by creating automatically flying angels. This impelled the provincial of the order to destroy his makeshift workshop, and Vaucanson used the incident as an excuse to to be relieved of his clerical vows.

Vaucanson moved to Paris and, in direct contrast with his recent religious life, gave himself up to a life of debauchery while he undertook the studies of mechanics, music, and anatomy. He developed an interest in the study of medicine and attempted to construct a "moving anatomy" which reproduced the principal organic functions. Debts, illness, and eventually boredom caused him to abandon the project. He went on to the construct his famous androids, which made him wealthy and famous throughout Europe.

In 1735 Vaucanson began to formulate plans for the construction of the first android, which was to be a life-sized figure of a musician, dressed in a rustic fashion and playing eleven melodies on its flute, moving the levers realistically by its fingers and blowing into the instrument with its mouth. In October 1737 the automaton was completed and exhibited first at the fair of Saint-Germain and later at Longueville. All Paris flocked to see the mechanical masterpiece with the human spirit; the press was extremely favorable, and Vaucanson was launched upon his career.

Vaucanson's third and most famous automaton was "an artificial duck of gilt brass which drinks, eats, flounders in water, digests and excretes like a live duck" (see figure top right). It was Vaucanson's intention to create in this duck the "moving anatomy" that he had visualized once before. Accordingly, the figure of the duck was produced full size of gilt brass in a simplified form, the body pierced with openings to permit the public to observe the process of digestion. The complexity of this duck was enormous - there were over four hundred moving pieces in a single wing.

Just as spring-wound clockwork made possible mechanical music for automata, it also made possible the reproduction of the sound of words by mechanical means. In the seventeenth century Kircher had affirmed that it was possible to produce a head which moved the eyes, lips, and tongue, and, by means of the sounds which it emitted, appeared to be alive. A similar project was attempted in 1705 by Valentin Merbitz, rector of the Kreuzschule of Dresden, who devoted five years to it. The next major advance in this field was made in about 1770 by Friedrich von Knauss of Vienna, who constructed four speaking heads. That his project was not completely successful is attested to by the fact that in 1779 the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg used the production of a successful speaking head as the theme for a contest for mechanicians and organ manufacturers, specifying that the machine be capable of speaking the five vowels. - The Turing Test of its day for clocksmiths and mechanical engineers?

The most spectacular of all automata that have survived until the present day are The Writer, The Artist, and The Musician produced by Pierre Jacquet-Droz (1771-1790) and his son Henry-Louis (1753-1791) of Geneva. Father and son combined all the technical developments known in their time in an effort to produce a machine that faithfully imitated a human being, and their efforts were as successful as any have ever been. The Writer, a life-size and lifelike figure of a boy seated as a desk, is capable of writing any message of up to 40 letters in length (above right).
"On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends" - Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1895.

Boilerplate Man and Steam Man - Amazing Robots of the Victorian Era - fact or fiction? You decide:http://www.bigredhair.com/robots/index.html

With a public fascination for the newly discovered force of electricity, fictional writing suggested that pieces of dead flesh sewn together could be 'animated' into life just as severed frog legs could be kicked into a reflex action by a crude battery in a science laboratory demonstration.

Having discarded the earlier technologies of hydraulics, pneumatics, clockwork, which where thought to hold the key, man continues his quest to create life through robotics and electronics, and with more abstract notions of life using computers to create artificial life (AI), autonomous systems, Celluar Automata and nanotechnology. Man now plays directly with the building blocks of life itself via genetic engineering

AIBO - Sony's Artificial Intelligence roBOt. AIBO means 'love' or 'attachment' in Japanese. Many AIBO owners enjoyed teaching their pets new behaviors by reprogramming them in Sony's 'R-CODE' language. However, in October 2001, Sony sent a cease-and-desist notice to the webmaster of of a programming hack site demanding that he stop distributing code that bypassed the copy prevention mechanisms of the robot. Whose life is it anyway? Read the protest: <click here> The AIBO was killed off by Sony in 2006.

Nowhere is this obsession to play god and create worlds and to populate them with artificial autonomous life forms more in evidence than in computer games such as "World of War Craft" and "Second Life".

Animators are also engaged in this same elusive quest.

What is Animation?

2012-10-26T21:38:00.001-07:00

Animation precedes the invention of photography and the cine camera by several decades. It is an art form in which a world of dynamic image and sound may be synthesised completely out of nothing but a thought (see Peter Greenaway quote, right).

Animation is 100% artifice, and as such, the synthesis of movement through the sequential use of small fragments of time, which gives rise to this wondrous illusion, is open to manipulation in extraordinary ways.

Animation is the most nimble of mediums. It has survived the mechanical 'persistence of vision' toys popular in the 19th century; found expression as an art form in cinema; it was the means by which to experiment with time-based art and cinematic forms to present new visual vocabularies; it was brilliantly positioned to pioneer the use of computers to create moving images from numbers; it has demystified complex processes; visualised scientific phenomena and provided simulation models to help us understand the world; it has become an essential ingredient in multimedia content; it is imbedded in the control interface display of multi-million dollar jet fighter planes, it is integral to the computer games industry; it increasingly underpins all special effects in motion picture production; and it has provided content in an ideal form to distribute across a bandwidth poor networked environment.

Animation is an art form which can come from anywhere and which can go to anywhere - from a large production team working in a highly specialised studio or a lone individual working out of a bedroom, to an Imax Cinema screen several metres wide or a mobile phone screen a few centimetres across.

Animation can be as intimate and personal as a stick figure doodle jiggling in the corner of a dog-eared school exercise book cum flip book, or as expansive and public as animated laser lights splashed upon a cityscape (see Hong Kong's Harbour 'Symphony Of Lights' project - Lloyd Weir, Art Director, Laservision NSW and AIM graduate 1996).

Laservision's Hong Kong Harbour 'Symphony Of Lights' project. Art Director, AIM 1996 graduate, Lloyd Weir.

Animation has the capacity to: entertain, exaggerate, simplify, abstract, reveal complex processes, clarify difficult-to-understand concepts, visualise data, be a vehicle for humorous writing, sell product, be an art form, create slapstick sight gags, be a vehicle for insightful social comment, portray the human condition, and tackle difficult and uncomfortable subject manner.

'Hello' - a multi award winning animated film by 2003 AIM graduate, Jonathan Nix.

ANIMATION IS...

The amplification of an idea through simplification and abstraction; a sight gag timed to perfection; a visual poem; a moving painting; extraordinary sublime moments in the orchestration of moving image and sound; throw-away sick slapstick humour designed for the moment; stories that remain with you forever; time-based imagery that can be fantastically surreal because of its unique process of realisation; a journey through the human body and other datascapes; the invisible made visible; informative dynamic graphics that monitor critical processes; an animated neon sign. At its best, animation is an exquisite character performance synthesised at the end of a pencil, or increasingly through the sweep and click of a computer mouse, that would otherwise win an award for best acting.

Little else compares with the thrill of breathing life into characters that might never have existed but for your imagination, or to move a large audience of strangers to laugh out loud at their antics, or to keep a person interactively engaged with them and the worlds you have invented, for hours on end.Almost anything can be brought to life and be imbued with personality, twigs, clay, drawings, objects, computer meshes, and, of course, anything becomes possible in the world of animation. It can entertain, explain and fascinate. In all its wondrous forms from the traditional 'bonk 'em on the head' cartoon styles, to TV commercials, sophisticated narrative works and simulations, to experimental, digitally composited, special effects driven and art films, animation is a powerful vehicle for ideas.


Annemarie Szeleczky used sticks of macaroni and torn paper (left) and the Aussie breakfast spread, 'Vegiemite' for the experimental animation in her research project - "The Development of Experimental Animation Techniques Using Mixed Media, Spatial Layering and Gestural Artwork."

Whether expressed in linear, interactive or real-time forms, the Centre for Animation and Interactive Media embraces the broadest of definition of animation. Animation is timeless, nimble and future proof - and is currently, very 'hot'.

'Symbiosis' by AIM research candidate, Mark Guglielmetti. An immersive stereoscopic virtual space. Co-recipient of the ATOM award for "Outstanding Virtual Experience" 2002 for the immersive digital art installation.

Posing in Animation

2012-10-26T20:25:00.002-07:00

Today I'd like to talk a bit about posing. I recently was given a great lecture on posing. I know for me, when it came to my learning process in animation, not enough emphasis was placed on posing. I mean, really drawing and figuring out your poses before even getting into the computer. Also really pushing your poses. I always get feedback saying push those poses further.

I always seem to contain my posing. It seems that the best way is to push too much...because then you can always dial it back some more.In my experience it is to push the pose, step back, look again,then push more. It's like when they say, "It's always better to be overdressed than under-dressed". Never go with your 1st pose, ask yourself, "Can I push it further?" In the lecture I received he discussed 3 Main Principles of Posing.

1. Staging of the Shot
2. Line of Action
3. Pose Design

As animators we are exposed to staging all the time. Before we were animators it was planned out for you to see in all of the films that you watch. If you stop on a frame of animation, you can really study the staging in a shot. Where the characters are placed in the scene also in relation to the objects or even other characters. Most things in a shot as you might notice in many great photos do not lie perfectly center but are slightly offset. Take a look at this still frame from Foghorn, you can see the staging set up clearly and direct. All of the action and staging leads the audience directly where they want you to look.

This is discussed in John K's Blog as he takes this shot and breaks it down frame by frame. John's Blog is a great resource for this as he seems to do this type of stuff alot. He examines different shots of classic animation all the time and breaks them down. Check it out.

Now the Line of Action in a character is one of the most important aspects of posing. How you pose the character I believe will determine how much smoother your animation will flow from one extreme to the next. I never realized it early on but having really strong poses can actually make your animation easier when you go from your blocking to splining. It will also help your animation read clearly. You can convey just about every emotion with your posing. It also ties in with your framing of the shot in that many elements of the shot will follow your line of action. Think...if your character was just a line...Would it be clear?

These are a few poses of Louie from the Jungle Book drawn by Milt Kahl. I saw this post on Michael Sporn's Splog. There are many frames from this animation, so check it out cause they are amazing examples of how you can get good weight and character through Line of Action. Next time that you see a great piece of animation I encourage you to pause it on a single frame that best describes it. Then frame by frame it from pose to pose and see how clear the animation really is. This is all made possible by these types of poses.

There are a few elements within Pose Design that were covered in the lecture I received that I would like to bring up. Simple vs Complex and Straight vs Curve. They run hand and hand but you will see it. It is mainly all about balance in the pose when you are constructing it. Ask yourself what it is that you are trying to say. What emotion are you try to sell? Then you can start with your line of action and in that line of action will fall your attitude. Here are a couple of examples...one from animation and one from real life.

The 1st example is a Glenn Keane drawing for the prince of Rapunzel.

If you look at the left side of the Prince then you see Simple and Curved. The right side is Complex and more Straight up and down. Same with the pic of the the kick boxer his left side is Complex and the other side is Simple. In any good pose you can find these. Please check out Glen's site The Art of Glen Keane. There is always great examples of posing on there.

There are so many examples of great posing out there so do your research. I have put together a few more resources for everybody. So really take the time and think about your posing it will make a world of difference in your animation.

The ones above are from a great site called The Animation Art of Bobby Pontillas that has plenty of great examples.

This one comes from a Pose Tutorial I found on Deviant Art pretty sweet. Deviant Art is also a great resource for good posing.

“Cars 2″ teaser trailer

2010-11-19T07:59:00.000-08:00

Trailer for Disney Cars 2 to be released June 24, 2011
Included some pics at the end of the video!

Awsome cool video

2010-11-19T07:38:00.000-08:00

The paint is Cel-Vinyl from Cartoon Color and the board is Crescent Illustration Board No. 310 (cold press). I use an HP-C Iwata airbrush (mostly to wet the board), a flat brush for washes such as a Grumbacher Aquarelle 1", a Grumbacher "Badger Blender" and a good sable brush size 4 or 5. The drawing is transfered to the board with Saral Transfer Paper (usually blue).

Hand Poses in Animation

2010-11-19T07:25:00.000-08:00

I recently ran into this post on Spungella on Hand Reference. This brings up and great point about hand poses in animation. Lots of us don't spend as much time on the hand poses as we should while we animate. I know as a student, there really was no emphasis on hand posing. So we would tend to leave them in pretty generic poses and of course deadlines looming had no real time at the end to add polish to them. Now working in feature films there is a real emphasis on hand posing and polishing your hands. It makes a real difference to take the time up front and while in blocking to really find good and appealing poses for your hands. You could even begin to think about what the hands are doing in your thumbnails. This will really save you time at the back end as well and help speed up things while polishing.

So I just wanted to post some links that I found and point you to the post on Spungella.
.

Rad How To Blog

Drawn in Black

Sequentialism

Nick Bruno's Blog

Ramblings Blog

Melmade

There u go check out some hands and enjoy!

Oscar’s Animation Race Just Got ‘Tangled’

2010-11-19T05:06:00.001-08:00

here is an awesome Write up from a writer who got a sneak peek of the film.

Oscar’s Animation Race Just Got ‘Tangled’.

“I know everyone (including my new Deadline colleague Mike Fleming who will be reporting on the ground there for us) is winging their way to Toronto right now to see a bunch of Oscar hopefuls that I already saw in Cannes, Telluride or oh-so-cool private L.A. screenings (more on THOSE flicks as the fest unveils them). But I am also focused on checking out some contenders NOT on display in Canada. That’s exactly what I did yesterday in the not-as-exciting clime of Burbank. I came away feeling I’d found another strong entry in what is becoming a very strong awards season race for ‘toons.

That’s right. Wednesday Disney did something studios never do unless they know they have the goods. They flew in several members of the press–mostly those who cover animation for outlets with long lead times–to see the first ever screening of the big Thanksgiving holiday release Tangled. The musical weaves a new take on the Rapunzel fairy tale, in what represents Disney’s milestone 50th animated feature since Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs in 1937. John Lasseter told the gathered press, “You can feel the pride people in this studio have in Tangled. We just couldn’t wait for people to see it.”

It’s looking like there will again be five nominees for Best Animated Feature this year. Based the deservedly enthusiastic press response to the work-in-progress print shown yesterday, Tangled could easily be among them. As will Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3, which remains the 800 pound gorilla in the race. Dreamworks is already aggressively campaigning for How To Train Your Dragon.

Tangled had to be shown in very rough form since only about 60% of the animation has been completed. The 3D isn’t ready, and composer Alan Menken’s score isn’t in place yet although the songs are. Producer Roy Conli said they expect to have the finished print in a couple of months. It was an all day event. Several artists explained different aspects of the production, extensive tours of the Disney animation building , and a large lobby transformed into an elaborate forest setting where press were encouraged to join in the “forest fun” with a turkey leg toss, frying pan ping pong and photo opportunities, among other things. Ya gotta love Disney, right?

Rapunzel is an idea that has been floating around apparently since the days of Walt but due to its hair raising nature has never been really possible to crack until sophisticated CGI technology made it easier to place those 100,000 pieces of follicles atop this latest Disney princesses’ head. The movie itself is also an attempt to revive the 80’s and 90’s heyday of big Disney animated musicals like Beauty And The Beast, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas, with scores and songs from Alan Menken who won a whopping 8 Academy Awards for that quartet and performs similar duties here with his collaborator Glenn Slater. Tangled’s directing duo Nathan Greno and Byron Howard (Bolt) actually look at it a little differently than those hits. “This is not a big Broadway kind of musical. We look at it as more in touch with classic Disney films of the 50’s where music is a key element in the storytelling,” Greno told me when I sat down with the talented team late in the marathon day. “It has that classic 40’s and 50’s Disney kind of feel but at the same time we’re making these movies for a contemporary audience. It’s great to acknowledge our roots while being non-traditional but not cynical,” Howard added.

For his part, Menken doesn’t mind the comparison to his earlier works at the studio that brought him all that Oscar gold but notes it differs because it really is the first CGI-3D animated musical. Last holiday season Disney tried a more traditionally animated 2D musical ‘toon written by Randy Newman. “As good as it was, The Princess And The Frog underperformed, so the jury’s out. My hope is that Tangled will go through the roof, not just selfishly for me but for the form,” Menken told me.

Menken says he tried to put a medieval flavor to the new songs mixing in influences like Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens and 60’s folk rock although Donna Murphy who voices the evil Mother Gothel has a flat-out standout Broadway-style number called “Mother Knows Best”. Mandy Moore is the voice of Rapunzel. Eventually there will also be an added end title rock-style song , a “sore point” for Menken who didn’t write it. Menken feels the song with the best shot for another Oscar nomination is “I See The Light” which highlights the remarkable lantern sequence in the movie. “I was nominated for three songs on Enchanted (2007) which is probably why we didn’t win (Melissa Etheridge’s ‘ An Inconvenient Truth’ was the victor). I would be happy to just have one,” he says.

Actually, it’s obvious Menken’s winning ways were responsible for rule changes from the Academy’s music branch that make ineligible the kind of musical scores for which the composer regularly won Oscars. Only Alfred Newman’s 9 statuettes surpasses Menken, and a Tangled win this year would tie him. But his fellow musicians are not making it as easy as it once was. “Now they have made it so a score from an animated musical cannot be validated as best score in any way, not even underscore. I understand that songs do make a score jump out at you in a way underscores can’t compete, but I don’t agree with that. If there were more musicals we could have a Best Musical category but there just aren’t enough,” he says.

The Academy also tweaked the rules after Dreamgirls and Enchanted each scored three song nominations in successive years. Now it allows only two to be named from a given movie. Last year, they didn’t even perform the nominated tunes on the show. What’s an 8- time Oscar winner to do with all this meddling? “For me the Oscars are a little strange because it’s really about actors anyway, those familiar faces,” he says. “ All that attention is really about big glamour. But I’m just happy to be part of the evening and walk away with my Oscar or two.”

Oscar’s Animation Race Just Got ‘Tangled’

2010-11-19T05:06:00.000-08:00

here is an awesome Write up from a writer who got a sneak peek of the film.

Oscar’s Animation Race Just Got ‘Tangled’.

“

I know everyone (including my new Deadline colleague Mike Fleming who will be reporting on the ground there for us) is winging their way to Toronto right now to see a bunch of Oscar hopefuls that I already saw in Cannes, Telluride or oh-so-cool private L.A. screenings (more on THOSE flicks as the fest unveils them). But I am also focused on checking out some contenders NOT on display in Canada. That’s exactly what I did yesterday in the not-as-exciting clime of Burbank. I came away feeling I’d found another strong entry in what is becoming a very strong awards season race for ‘toons.

That’s right. Wednesday Disney did something studios never do unless they know they have the goods. They flew in several members of the press–mostly those who cover animation for outlets with long lead times–to see the first ever screening of the big Thanksgiving holiday release Tangled. The musical weaves a new take on the Rapunzel fairy tale, in what represents Disney’s milestone 50th animated feature since Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs in 1937. John Lasseter told the gathered press, “You can feel the pride people in this studio have in Tangled. We just couldn’t wait for people to see it.”

It’s looking like there will again be five nominees for Best Animated Feature this year. Based the deservedly enthusiastic press response to the work-in-progress print shown yesterday, Tangled could easily be among them. As will Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3, which remains the 800 pound gorilla in the race. Dreamworks is already aggressively campaigning for How To Train Your Dragon.

Tangled had to be shown in very rough form since only about 60% of the animation has been completed. The 3D isn’t ready, and composer Alan Menken’s score isn’t in place yet although the songs are. Producer Roy Conli said they expect to have the finished print in a couple of months. It was an all day event. Several artists explained different aspects of the production, extensive tours of the Disney animation building , and a large lobby transformed into an elaborate forest setting where press were encouraged to join in the “forest fun” with a turkey leg toss, frying pan ping pong and photo opportunities, among other things. Ya gotta love Disney, right?

Rapunzel is an idea that has been floating around apparently since the days of Walt but due to its hair raising nature has never been really possible to crack until sophisticated CGI technology made it easier to place those 100,000 pieces of follicles atop this latest Disney princesses’ head. The movie itself is also an attempt to revive the 80’s and 90’s heyday of big Disney animated musicals like Beauty And The Beast, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas, with scores and songs from Alan Menken who won a whopping 8 Academy Awards for that quartet and performs similar duties here with his collaborator Glenn Slater. Tangled’s directing duo Nathan Greno and Byron Howard (Bolt) actually look at it a little differently than those hits. “This is not a big Broadway kind of musical. We look at it as more in touch with classic Disney films of the 50’s where music is a key element in the storytelling,” Greno told me when I sat down with the talented team late in the marathon day. “It has that classic 40’s and 50’s Disney kind of feel but at the same time we’re making these movies for a contemporary audience. It’s great to acknowledge our roots while being non-traditional but not cynical,” Howard added.

For his part, Menken doesn’t mind the comparison to his earlier works at the studio that brought him all that Oscar gold but notes it differs because it really is the first CGI-3D animated musical. Last holiday season Disney tried a more traditionally animated 2D musical ‘toon written by Randy Newman. “As good as it was, The Princess And The Frog underperformed, so the jury’s out. My hope is that Tangled will go through the roof, not just selfishly for me but for the form,” Menken told me.

Menken says he tried to put a medieval flavor to the new songs mixing in influences like Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens and 60’s folk rock although Donna Murphy who voices the evil Mother Gothel has a flat-out standout Broadway-style number called “Mother Knows Best”. Mandy Moore is the voice of Rapunzel. Eventually there will also be an added end title rock-style song , a “sore point” for Menken who didn’t write it. Menken feels the song with the best shot for another Oscar nomination is “I See The Light” which highlights the remarkable lantern sequence in the movie. “I was nominated for three songs on Enchanted (2007) which is probably why we didn’t win (Melissa Etheridge’s ‘ An Inconvenient Truth’ was the victor). I would be happy to just have one,” he says.

Actually, it’s obvious Menken’s winning ways were responsible for rule changes from the Academy’s music branch that make ineligible the kind of musical scores for which the composer regularly won Oscars. Only Alfred Newman’s 9 statuettes surpasses Menken, and a Tangled win this year would tie him. But his fellow musicians are not making it as easy as it once was. “Now they have made it so a score from an animated musical cannot be validated as best score in any way, not even underscore. I understand that songs do make a score jump out at you in a way underscores can’t compete, but I don’t agree with that. If there were more musicals we could have a Best Musical category but there just aren’t enough,” he says.

The Academy also tweaked the rules after Dreamgirls and Enchanted each scored three song nominations in successive years. Now it allows only two to be named from a given movie. Last year, they didn’t even perform the nominated tunes on the show. What’s an 8- time Oscar winner to do with all this meddling? “For me the Oscars are a little strange because it’s really about actors anyway, those familiar faces,” he says. “ All that attention is really about big glamour. But I’m just happy to be part of the evening and walk away with my Oscar or two.”

Disney Tangled New Official Trailer

2010-11-19T04:45:00.001-08:00

Visit the website: http://www.disney.co.uk/tangled

The new trailer for Disney's upcoming feature animation comedy Tangled. Starring the voices of Mandy Moore as Rapunzel, Zachary Levi as Flynn Rider, Donna Murphy as Mother Gothel, Ron Perlman, Jeffrey Tambor and Brad Garrett. Disney's Tangled is a classic story with a twist, and lots of hair.

Walt Disney Pictures presents Tangled, one of the most hilarious, hair-raising tales ever told.

When the kingdom's most wanted -- and most charming -- bandit, Flynn Rider (voice of Zachary Levi), hides out in a mysterious tower, he's taken hostage by Rapunzel (voice of Mandy Moore), a beautiful and feisty tower-bound teen with 70 feet of magical, golden hair. Flynn's curious captor, who's looking for her ticket out of the tower where she's been locked away for years, strikes a deal with the handsome thief and the unlikely duo set off on an action-packed escapade, complete with a super-cop horse, an over-protective chameleon and a gruff gang of pub thugs. Disney's Tangled is a story of adventure, heart, humour and hair -- lots of hair.

Tangled opens in UK cinemas 28 January 2011 in Disney Digital 3D™.

Dreams Come True: A Celebration of Disney Animation

2010-11-19T04:30:00.000-08:00

- Part 1 of 6

Part 2 of 6

Part 3 of 6

Part 4 of 6

Part 5 of 6

2010-11-19T04:27:00.001-08:00

Tangled at the Parks!

2010-11-19T04:25:00.000-08:00

Figure drawing: Basic Pose and Construction

2010-11-18T08:10:00.000-08:00

1. Introduction

This method is a tool to help you draw the human form. It is by no means the best way or even a fast way. Instead, this method is aimed at thinking and setting up the human form in a threedimensional space.

Classical animation (most notably Disney) uses a similar way of working out their characters. In these kind of animations a good understanding of the character in a threedimensional space is important to achieve a convincing motion in time.

Using this method will help you form your thoughts on the human body posing on paper rather than in your mind. It will also help you avoid that frustrating 'running out of paper phenomenon'.

2. Pose

Basic anatomy

stickfigures
Wait, don't go away yet! Stickfigures may seem simple...but when was the last time you made a good one, eh? ;)
Don't underestimate the power of stickfigures and what they can do for you. So how can stickfigures be useful, you ask?
First of all, they represent a very important basic element of any subject you draw: length proportions. Anyone knows proportions define almost everything in a drawing. A leg too short or a nose too big can ruin any grand piece of art. So, have some respect for the stickfigures! ;)

Let's take a look at stickfigures. They vary in detail, usually depending on how accurate you want to compose the body. We'll get to posing later. First we look at proportions of a standing figure.

	Stickfigure 1 This is the basic stickfigure. You can see the head, torso, arms and legs. You can't do much with this one, except practising the proportions of these body parts.
	Stickfigure 2 With this version you can do something more. You get to decide the proportions of the arm- and leg-parts.
	Stickfigure 3 Now this must be the most advanced stickfigure there is: I bet you never saw any kid draw it this way! Added are the width of shoulders and pelvis. In the next paragraph the importance of mastering this stickfigure will show.

Lesson
Try to draw these standing stickfigures and see if you master their proportions. This is a fast and easy way to see how your knowledge of the basic human proportion is. You can judge the results yourself quite well without being distracted by 'cool' armour, hair, etc.
Using stickfigures is also a very fast way to determine how big you may draw your humans on your paper. So you need not to be afraid to run out of paper anymore, because now you can see beforehand where that foot or hand will end up.

Body language

Stickfigures, again
Now that you know how important it is to master proportions through simple stick figures, we go to the next use of stickfigures: 'the pose'. Or simpler said: what is your character doing?
With stickfigures you can easily try out many, many positions before you commit to one for the real drawing. Using this as a preparation to your drawing also helps you see beforehand if you can pull off the pose, if you need reference material for it, if you will run out of paper while drawing, etc. Yes, the lowly stickfigure does help you plan your next masterpiece.

Stickfigures in action
Here are a few examples how you can use a stickfigure to determine a pose. You will also see quickly enough if it is a natural or comfortable pose. Otherwise you could try to mimick the pose yourself and find out ;)

	Throwing a spear.
	I think this one is dancing or something...
	The running man Here you see the use of some foreshortening in the pelvis and the shoulders because we are looking from his side.
	The gladiator Again some foreshortening in the lower arm with the 'sword'. Also note the twist in the torso: a very natural stance, especially when turning to see something.
	Sadness or looking for his contact lense...
	The lounger Here is another example of a twisted torso. Shoulders and hips are turned at an angle.
	Weirdo Either impossible or very uncomfortable. At any rate it looks silly ;)

Lesson
Try drawing stickfigures in action. Pay keen attention to the proportions. You will gain some insight to dynamics and motion of the human body.

Balance

When you set up a pose, you will need to take into account its center of gravity. This center is typically located in the underbelly of a human, just above the crotch. The weight of your legs make up for almost half of your total body weight.

The position of it in regard to the "resting points" of the body say something about the balance of the body. The following examples demonstrate this.

red circle = centre of gravity
red arrow = direction of gravity
green arrow = resting point

	Standard walk As you can see, the centre of gravity lies between the two resting points. This results in a balanced stance.
	Fall Here the center of gravity lies next to the resting point. This is inbalance, causing the body to move sideways to the left.
	Balancing act Well, what it says. This is possible because the body is 'spread' fairly symmetrically. Compare with the next one...
	Here the body leans to the right, causing inbalance. You will notice that the center of gravity shifts a bit to the right as well.
	Run stickfigure, run! When running the centre of gravity lies in front of the resting point. As you can see (or feel), this is an unbalanced pose resulting in a falling motion of the figure. He won't fall of course, because he is running at speed and will put a foot in front of the other preventing him from hitting the ground. (Physically you want to propel the mass - referenced by the centre of gravity - forward, thus having the propelling force - from the feet - at the rear.)
	Leaning The figure is at rest because the centre of gravity lies between the two resting points: one foot and a shoulder. The foot of the crossed does not contribute to standing (it's at rest, hanging).
	Crouching tiger, hidden dragon Eh.. i mean a high kick. Because the centre of gravity is to the right of the resting point the body will 'fall' towards the right, giving it a kicking momentum towards the right. Btw, this is a wrong way to kick, people say.

Of course you do NOT have to make the pose a balanced one. An unbalanced pose conveys dynamics, action and motion, while a balanced pose results in a calm and tranquil image.
The above is just an aspect you should consider when you set up a pose. It can enhance your drawing greatly in a natural looking way.

Motion and action

The body is a supple and agile system, influenced by gravity. It has no natural rigid position.

First image shows a exaggerated walking gait. Notice how the hipjoints move because of gravity. The motion of the shoulders usually move in reverse to the hipjoints.
The second image shows a sideways lying person, resting on 1 arm. This causes the rest of the body (ribcage) to hang on the resting shoulder.
Also, the spine column is somewhat flexible, it can be bent a little.

3. Construction

To construct something you must understand it. So when you want to draw a human body you should at least know a little bit how it is made up.

The skeleton

At the basis of the body is the skeleton of course. In the stickfigure system we already saw something of it. Now we go more into detail. The human body consists of the following characteristic parts:

	Front view head (black) ribcage (blue) spine (blue) pelvis (blue) joints (red) arms (green) hands (green) legs (green) feet (green)
	Side view Note the curve of the spine (the arms are left out, since the focus here is on the spine).

We can use a simplified form of the skeleton when we want to setup a human figure:

This body setup gives a bit more insight now.

Body building

With the above about the skeletal parts of the body in mind we now proceed to the 'outer stuff': the muscle or fat, if you like. For a analytical approach we can use solid masses to represent these parts, such as ellipsoids, cylinders and other forms.
Basically you choose the form that most closely resembles the part you want to draw.

Can't we just proceed with drawing the actual body now?
Of course you can do that. But the argument before was to use stickfigures - and now simplified forms - to setup a body without the distraction by details, so you can focus on correct proportions, balance and pose.
With this extra step you have overview of the volumetric proportions.

A volumetric representation of the body parts.
The red lines are connection lines.
Now you see the body parts in an analytical way, basically to avoid 'weirdness' in the setup.

Solid masses setup in practice

You can now use this method to fully describe the pose and volume of the body in any pose. Look at the examples.
Left is the first draft with stickfigures. To the right are the volumetric expansions on the stickfigures.
You will note that you do not need to draw the cylinders like actual cylinders. Instead, you can just 'connect the joints'.
As you can see these sketches resemble the well-known mannikins - wooden puppets made from cylinders and ellipsoids.
If you can find one, use it. But knowing to draw these setups from your mind without a puppet in front of you, will give you an added advantage.

Details
This method is also quite useful for analytical setups of details of the body, for example everybody's all time favourites: hands and feet ;)

4. Variations

Of course you do not have to abide by the standard human body proportions. You can exaggerate volumes to suit your own needs.

1. Humans	.
	Humans come in many variations. Here you see some examples: a muscle man a standard woman a fat man a child Note that i used an 'all-in-one' (ribcage + muscles) upper torso for the muscle man. Sometimes it is easier to draw the whole volume without first drawing a ribcage. For all the others i first drew the ribcage. It's up to you what you need.
2. Other creatures	.
	This method is useful for many other creatures that have a skeletal build similar to ours. To be precise: for all creatures that descend from the dinosaurs (this includes all mammals and birds). Examples: a gorilla (well, more like an ape-man) a dog a lizard Again, for the muscular ape-man i drew the ribcage+muscles as one. Usually for muscular bodies it is not necessary to setup the ribcage. The same logic goes for the arms and legs: you don't need to draw the lines first. You can draw the joints and draw the lines for the arms and legs in between.
3. Cartoons	.
	Yes, cartoons - especially the animated ones from the forties and fifties - make use of solid masses, which makes them easily definable. As you can see, you can freely interpret the volumes of the body. You don't need to define a ribcage or pelvic area if you don't need it. And joints are hardly necessary for cartoons, they flex like rubber all the time anyway ;) If it fits your purpose, it is good.

That's all folks!

This is the end of this tutorial. The underlying message is that you need a correct basis for your drawings. To achieve this it is best to see your subjects in a simplified view. Stickfigures and solid masses can help you do this.

The biggest benefit of this technique is that you'll be able to quickly try out numerous poses easily, before you commit to that one pose. This method can also avoid that 'running out of drawing space syndrome'. It can save you time and certainly a lot of frustration later. In the end you will have a better composed and thought out image.

I'll end with this last demonstration :)

A Short History (part II)

2010-11-18T06:09:00.000-08:00

THE SYNTHESES OF MOTION Animation - as we might understand it as a technical process of synthesising motion from a series of static images - precedes the invention of the cinematograph by several decades. It has its roots in the numerous parlour-game toys popular in the early 1800s which experimented with persistence of vision effect known as the Phi phenomenon.

One device of the times which demonstrated this effect was the Thaumatrope accredited to three different people, Dr Fitton of London, Peter Roget and/or London physicist John Ayrton Paris. However it is known that Paris used his device to show the Phi phenomenon to the Royal College of Physicians in 1824. Its consisted of a disc with an image painted on each side. When the disc was spun by pulling on a twisted pair of strings, the images seemed to be combined - a bird on one side of the disc would appear in the empty cage on the other side. 'Trope' comes from the Greek word for 'things that turn'. 'Thauma' means wondrous, therefore a thaumatrope is a 'turning marvel' or 'wonder turner'.

OPTICAL TOYS

Two important novelties of the day which harnessed the persistence of vision effect were invented simultaneously and independently during 1832. Joseph Plateau (Ghent, Belgium) who coined his toy the Phenakistiscope (Greek for 'deceptive view'), while Professor Simon Ritter von Stampfer of the Polytechnical Institute (Vienna, Austria) called his invention the Stroboscope ('apparition-box-viewer'). These devices were also known under other names such as: Fantascope, Phantamascope, Magic Disc or Kaleidorama.

These toys had a disc carrying a sequence of images set in a ring around the circumference. When the disc was spun, the drawings were viewed through small slits cut into the disc which provided the visual interruptions needed for the eye to meld the images together thus creating the impression of motion.

The Phenakistiscope disc is mounted on a spindle and viewed through the slots with the images facing a mirror. A person looking through the slits from the back of the disc would see a moving image reflected in the mirror. The Stroboscope (not illustrated here) had a separate counter spinning disc for the viewing slots and it was possible to see the movement without the use of a mirror. The discs of the day were either abstract patterns or performers such as jugglers or acrobats.

An actual Phenakistiscope disc circa 1833. Roll over the above image to active this digital version which has far more visual clarity than could be obtained by viewing the images through the slits of the actual apparatus.

The Zoetrope was invented by William George Horner in 1834. He named his device Daedalum or 'wheel of the devil'. This optical toy was forgotten for about 30 years until it was discovered and almost simultaneously patented in 1867 by William F. Lincoln, USA and in England by Milton Bradley. It was from Lincoln that the device received its new name Zoetrope, meaning 'wheel of life' from the Greek word 'zoo' for animal life and 'trope' for 'things that turn'.

Horner's Zoetrope was an adaptation of the principles of the Phenakistoscope. However it was more convenient than Plateau's invention in that it eliminated the need for a mirror and allowed several people to view the motion at one time. It was constructed of an open-top drum into which was placed a hand drawn sequence of pictures on a strip of paper facing inwards. The outside of the drum had slits cut into the cylindrical surface. When the drum was spun on a central axis, the images could be viewed through the slits giving rise to the illusion of movement. To see a newspaper advertisement of the day

For the work of comtemporay artists working with modern Zoetrope,

Versions of history often tend to be Western centric. It is also reported that an unknown Chinese inventor created a similar device around 180 - if true, that would push the history of synthesised motion back by 17 centuries!

In 1877, Frenchman Charles Émile Reynaud, painter of lantern slides, refined the principle of the Zoetrope to use reflected light creating the Praxinoscope (patented December 1877). This was the first device to overcome the blurred distortion caused by viewing through narrow fast moving slots and it quickly replaced the Zoetrope in popularity. Like the Zoetrope, a paper strip of pictures is placed inside a shallow outer cylinder, so that each picture is reflected by the inner set of mirrors. The number of mirror facets equaled the number of pictures on the paper strip. When the outer cylinder rotates, the quick succession of images reflected in the mirrors gives the illusion of movement. This produced a image that was more brilliant and sharper than with any previous device.

The following year Reynaud added a patent supplement for an improvement - the Praxinoscope Theatre. The mirror drum and cylinder were set in a wooden box with a glass-covered viewing aperture which reflected a card printed with a background. The moving subjects - a juggler, clowns, a steeple-chase - were printed on a black band, and appeared superimposed on a suitable scene. The background artwork could be changed (see below, right)

Reynaud managed to adapt the principle behind his Praxinoscope to project a series of pictures onto a screen at a size suitable for presentation to a large audience. On 28 October 1892 Reynaud premièred 'Pauvre Pierrot' at his 'Theatre Optique' in Paris 1892 - the very first moving pictures shown publicly via projection onto a screen. To see a poster for this event,

The standard Praxinoscope could only accommodate a second or two of animation because of the limited number of pictures contained on the paper strip. Reynaud, a painter of lantern slides, painted images on gelatine squares fastened between leather bands, with holes in metal strips between each picture. These holes engaged in pins on a revolving wheel, so that each picture was aligned with a facet of the mirror drum. This was the first commercial use of sprocket hole perforations that was to be so important for successful cinematography and anticipated other cinematic devices such as the spool of film. A background image from a separate magic lantern slide was projected over the animated figures (right).

Reynaud set up this apparatus behind a translucent screen and gave most of the presentations himself, deftly manipulating the picture bands to and fro to extend the sequences, creating a twelve or fifteen minute performance from the 500 gelatine images. Other titles prepared for his 'Theatre Optique' ran to an astonishing 700 images.

The first public performance to a large audience of moving animated projected images at Reynaud's 'Theatre Optique' in Paris 1892. A practical motion picture recording and projection device arived a few years later making Reynaud's hand made picture bands too uneconomical to produce. His Theatre

MAGIC LANTERNS

Such shows as Charles Reynaud's 'Theatre Optique' draw upon the earlier 17th century invention of the magic lantern. Presentations to a large gathering became an artform and fascinated audiences of the day with illusions of light and movement. The magic lantern or Laterna Magica was the ancestor of the modern slide projector. It was first described in Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, by Athanasius Kircher in 1671. He may have been describing an already existing device rather than announcing a new invention. With an oil lamp and a lens, images painted on glass plates could be projected on to a suitable screen; the ancestor of the modern slide projector.

By the 19th century, there was a thriving trade of itinerant projectionists, who would travel the country with their magic lanterns, and a large number of slides, putting on shows in towns and villages. Some of the slides came with special effects, by means of extra sections that could slide or rotate across the main plate. One of the most famous of these, very popular with children, was the 'rat-swallower', where a series of rats would be seen leaping into a sleeping man's mouth. Such elaborate hand-coloured glass slides had articulated levers which allowed parts of one image to be moved against another or with a twin lens projector, be dissolved together.