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AN-I-MA-TOR

1. One that provides or imparts life, interest, spirit, or vitality.
2. One, such as an artist or technician, who designs, develops, or produces an animated cartoon.
3. One who has a keen eye for details, a fertile imagination, a borderline obsessive-compulsive desire to recreate motion, the ego of an actor but with a withering case of stage-fright, a truckload of toys and knick-knacks on their desk (often still in the box), Xeroxes from Illusion of Life tacked up on the walls and a copy of Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation at close hand, a severe case of eyestrain, a propensity for looking at themselves in the mirror constantly, saying it’s for lipsync and not narcissim; a love for cartoons that did not end with the onset of puberty, the notion that no animated scene is ever finished, only abandoned; the opinion that motion capture is a tool of the devil, often films themselves flopping around like a fool and calls it “reference”, uses “research” and “supporting the industry” as excuses for seeing even the worst animated films, the ability to listen to the same voice track over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over without going completely insane, and the occasional moment where they wonder how they managed to get paid for doing something they really enjoy.

Lots of follow through and squashy-stretchy bits still missing—like when the hand passes in front of the chest so it doesn’t look like he’s shooting jellyfish out of his gloves. Still, not a bad start for one Sunday morning’s worth of drawing.

click to enlarge

I created this illustration over the course of this past week—took about 16 hours in all—as a gift for our IT Director who is leaving the company for another job. He’s been head of the department for many years and always referred to us as the “IT family”. As the department grew, we each acquired our IT family designation—some were accurate and some were just amusing. The department has shrunk considerably in the last few months, but we’re still quite a tight-knit group and, with our collective boss leaving, I felt it was important to have some memento to commemorate our time together.

The process for creating this was a bit different than my last digital painting, the WarCraft webcomic. With that one, I completed the entire sketch, scanned it and then got to work in Photoshop with the inking and colouring. Because I felt it was highly unlikely that I could get everyone’s cartoon persona right in one pass, I drew each of the characters separately or, where there was some interaction, as a pair. I then scanned all of the pieces in and comped them together in Photoshop. What surprised me about doing it this way was that it allowed me to further tweak the sketches to better balance the whole group. For instance, IT Guy was too short compared to his companion. To fix this I decapitated him, stretched his body and then re-positioned the head.  Because these were still just pieces in the sketch phase that I knew I’d be tracing over, it gave me a lot more freedom to play than I was expecting when I started.

Click to see the assembled sketch just prior to inking

I had a good time creating this little cartoon and I’ve already had another department in the organization approach me asking if they could commission their own team photo.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the chicken that IT Boy is holding… well, let’s just say that an inside joke that would take too long to explain…

The IT Family (plus mascots) - taken at the annual staff meeting in 2008

Gizmo at the park

This is Gizmo. While most people peg him as a lab puppy, we think he’s actually terrier/whippet mix based on his personality and his ground-eating sprinting abilities. Giz is a little over four years old and a dainty 22lbs, which puts him as being big enough to rough-house with in the park, but small enough to fit next to you on the couch. His favourite things are hunting squirrels, playing with his toys and finding some spot to curl up beside you when he’s all tuckered out.

And, perhaps strangest of all, Gizmo was adopted by my sister via the Petfinder.com website from a pet rescue organization many miles away from Vancouver.

In January 2006, my sister decided that she wanted to get a dog. At the time, she was working on her Bachelors degree and living in my parents’ basement suite, so her schedule was flexible enough to accomodate raising a young dog.

Despite the fact that there are plenty of pet shops and dog breeders in the area, there was never really any question in our minds that the dog we’d be getting would be a rescue dog. I’m a firm believer in mutts as opposed to purebreds when it comes to ensuring dogs with healthy bodies and healthy minds. Plus we’d adopted our last dog, Jeep, from the Coquitlam SPCA when I was a teenager. Jeep passed away from cancer in 2000.

The problem for us was that Greater Vancouver is not a huge city and, while there are certainly dogs in the local city shelters, they tended to be much larger dogs than what we were hoping to find. To get the kind of dog we were looking for, we needed to head further afield.

Petfinder is essentially an online database that allows organizations like city pounds or smaller not-for-profit rescues to post information about dogs that are available for adoption. So, rather than jumping in your car and driving down to the local pound to see the ten dogs that they have for adoption, you can search this massive database of dogs, cats and other animals being listed from all over North America. You punch in your postal code, some stats like the age of the dog you’re looking for and relative size, then simply submit your search. Moments later, a whole selection of dogs will fill your screen. While the photos are always cute, it is their write-ups that can be the most revealing. Many of the the rescue organizations spend considerable effort describing these dogs–everything from the basics like weight, shots and housetraining, to more complex issues such as how the dog is with cats, children and if there are any behaviour issues that will need to be worked through.

Gizmo's original Petfinder ad from January 2006

Gizmo was 4 months old when his Petfinder ad was posted by Yakima Valley Pet Rescue. He was everything we were looking for–young, but housetrained… smart with a desire to learn and a willingness to please… not to mention some pretty darn cute puppy photos. Thus, after my sister submitted her application and had gotten approval from the rescue to adopt Gizmo, she and my parents piled into the car one snowy January day for the eight hour drive to eastern Washinton. They returned with the little furry bundle of fun that we cannot imagine life without.

Now, I will grant you, it did take some work on our part to raise the pleasant, mellow companion that we have today. He did eventually go through a chewing phase in which at one point he ate my father’s hearing aids. Gizmo also once ate a whole stick of butter off the counter which made his coat very shiny and later slightly rancid smelling as well. But really, these are just the typical antics of a dog and nothing above and beyond what any owner should expect. Like all dogs should, Giz went through obediance training starting almost immediately after we got him and we’ve been pretty consistent with his boundaries as he’s grown up.

The result… a happy rescued mutt who is a delight to every person he meets.

My sister and her pup

If you aren’t able to adopt a pet but would still like to support Petfinder in its efforts, be sure to check out Be the Change: 10 simple ways bloggers can help pets every day for ideas and online widgets like the one currently running on my homepage that help pets find homes.

click to watch 11 Second club animatic - only first half completed

I admit that for a gal of the digital age, I can be stubbornly “old school” at times. I’ve grown up with pencils and paper and the first time I felt like a real animator was when I sat down at an animation desk. There was something about the glow of the light table and the slipping of paper over those pegs that made me feel connected to countless animators down through the decades. I was working as animators had back in the days of “Snow White” and Bugs Bunny.

Yet finding the space in an apartment for a full-sized animation desk is problematic and even the coffee table alternative I cobbled together last summer has its problems. While one is busily romanticizing about ye good old days of animation, one tends to forget about rough sketches awash in pencil smudges and eraser bits all over the floor.

This past weekend I took a stab at the newly posted dialog clip from 11 SecondClub.com.  For those unfamiliar with it, 11 Second Club is a monthly contest where the website provides an 11 second sound clip and animators try to come up with a scene based on what they hear. At the end of the month, the users vote to see who has animated the best interpretation.

Although I intended on trying to animate my attempt in Maya, I wanted to do an animatic on paper first. So, after setting up my makeshift animation desk, I gave it a whirl. It didn’t take long between having to scrub the audio repeatedly on my iTouch and laboriously scanning and assembling my drawings in Adobe Premiere for me to wonder if there wasn’t a better way of doing this.

While I was browsing the other entries on 11 Second club I noticed that some of them referenced 2D animation software or that they were done using a “paperless animation” process. Intrigued, a couple Google searches later I had two software trials downloaded — DigiCel Flipbook and Toom Boom Studio.

I tried DigiCel first. The online tutorial was quite straightforward. I was actually a bit amused by the company’s use of video testimonials from industry veterans like Eric Goldberg and Don Bluth who both praised the software’s easy learning curve and intuitiveness.

I found the software to be so simplistic that I wanted to attempt something a little more exciting than a straight bouncing ball animation–which is probably the animation equivalent to a programmer’s “hello world”. So, I found some reference for a horse run cycle and settled in. The results were… well, not what I would call spectacular.

(watermarked by DigiCel because it's trial software)

In part, my drawing skills still feel a bit rusty and I’m not quite used to free-handing on a tablet yet. Add to that however that the drawing tools felt underdeveloped–things like increasing the eraser nib size or even sketching in some other colour than black. The other thing that bothered me was when I looked at the package prices, one of the main differences between the $78 package and the $300 one was the number of layers that DigiCel would allow you to work on–2 layers versus 6 layers. Two layers just isn’t enough if you want to rough and clean-up, but even six layers seems a bit skimpy if you’re used to programs like Photoshop or Flash with no limit placed on the number of layers… or at least, if there is one, I’ve never found it.

It also crashed at least twice over the course of the evening when I was messing around with it. Again, not winning any brownie points with me

I can see this as being a good, cost-effective alternative for someone who is starting out and only wants to practice their animation, but it just didn’t feel like enough for me.

Thus, on to Toom Boom Studio. Opening Toon Boom you’re given a layout that feels considerably better developed–more like an Adobe level piece of software. Since I’d already become accustomed to the paperless animation process with DigiCel, it didn’t take me long to discover all the equivalent features within Toon Boom. In about 15 minutes I knocked through my ‘hello world’ ball animation.

Okay, so clearly not the world’s best ball animation, but Toon Boom did demonstrate it had all the bits it needed as well as a few more that I had been looking for in DigiCel–like better controls for pen/eraser nib size. I also liked that the onion skinning gives you different colours for the next and previous frame. I found with DigiCel and that horse it was often difficult to see the difference between where I was going versus where I was coming from.

I still have some more playing around with Toon Boom I need to do before I make my final decision on which software package I want to go with. I figure whatever I choose will probably end up replacing my coffee table animation desk… at least until I can find some space in my apartment for my real animation desk… although maybe after working paperless for awhile I won’t be quite such an old school sentimentalist.

Click for more photos from my Paralympic torch run

If you’re a resident of Vancouver, the Olympic phenomenon has likely been on the tip of your tongue for the past year or more. There’s been the construction, the endless street closures and newspaper headlines about everything from beefed-up security to budget overruns. For myself, as an employee for the past three years of a not-for-profit associated with the 2010 Winter Games, it’s been my focus for even longer.

All of this hoopla and angst finally culminated this past February and March in Vancouver’s Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. By the end of it all, the reviews were largely positive. Vancouver residents had had a great time. There had been this coast-to-coast outpouring of red and white patriotism. Oh, and most important of all to Canadians, our boys walked away with hockey gold.

While this was all fabulous, for me the Olympics touched a more personal chord and inspired something that had nothing to do with sport and everything to do with getting my life back on track.

For the duration of the Olympics, the organization that I work for had lent me out to the Four Host First Nations as their Web Coordinator. As I also had a pretty bad cold during this time, I spent my days at home doing updates to the Four Host website and watching live coverage on CTV’s website. Talk about a fabulous use of online technology! A website that allowed thousands—if not millions—of people to hunker down in front of a computer, at home or at work, and catch everything from hockey to curling and so much more.

Listening to the sport commentators covering these events, I couldn’t help but marvel at these athletes. Not only their strength, skill and speed, but their willingness to fight their way back from some terrible fall or catastrophic injury. I’ve had my share of injuries so I know exactly the amount of effort and pain it takes to rehab oneself back to functionality. Yet these athletes were driving themselves far beyond a mere functional recovery over and over again, just so that they could ski for that gold medal one more time.

I realized then that it isn’t the number of times that you get taken to the mat, but how you’re able to recover from it. It is that trait that makes these people truly extraordinary.

As creative types, we get taken down all the time. Rejection is often the name of the game. The painting that doesn’t work out as planned. The book that doesn’t get published. The animation that gets torn apart by your director. When the last episode of Joss Whedon’s TV series Dollhouse aired, I couldn’t help but think that, for all that man’s brilliance as a creator of great television, perhaps his true gift is his ability to bounce back. To pick himself up off the mat after having Angel’s series run cut short and then again after seeing only 11 episodes of Firefly air. That’s the kind of creative stubbornness that separates the weak from those who somehow get stronger with each pummeling they take.

I got taken down by early failures in my career as a 3D artist and animator. I put that dream on the shelf and told myself over and over and over again that I was better off without it. The problem is when you shelve a big dream you leave a vacancy that can become a big regret.

It was a regret that I had thought I’d put behind me long ago, but in the last few years I’ve been surprised at the number of times it would catch me unawares. I remember watching the tiny, unexpected piece of 2D animation at the start of Carrie Underwood’s “Ever After” music video and feeling like someone had reached through the TV and crushed my heart inside my chest. It was just so beautiful and felt that old longing to be able to create performances like that. I knew then that I hadn’t put that dream behind me at all.

Thus, as I watched skiers with knees that had been reconstructed a half dozen times fly down the slopes of Whistler, I began to think… if they could do it… if they could come back from all their tumbles… then maybe I could too.

After the Olympics wrapped up at the end of February, I still had one more olympic-related duty left to perform. My organization had been offered both an Olympic torch relay slot as well as a Paralympic one. Our receptionist had had the honour of running in mid-February, and I was nominated by my co-workers to be the organization’s Paralympic torch relay representative.  It was definitely one of the most surreal moments of my life; this feeling of incredible history weighing down upon you as you carry this symbol of the hopes and dreams of thousands of Paralympic athletes.

In that extraordinary moment I promised myself that I would break off a little piece of that Olympic spirit and use it to do whatever it took to make another run at my dream.

It would be hard. There would undoubtedly be moments when I would get scared or discouraged. I was flipping through my new Maya 2010 animation book the other night and felt my spirits sink at the pages and pages of spline curve diagrams. But I’m going to try and this blog is about to become filled with the evidence of my creative rehab and endurance training.

Let the games begin.

What is a fan video?

Obvious first question, but important to get out of the way nonetheless. These videos are created by fans of a particular movie or TV series by taking clips and editing them to a piece of music.  The work is meant to be an expression of tribute to the movie or TV series that can be enjoyed by other fans.

Isn’t that copyright infringement? Absolutely. Let’s not kid ourselves about that one and always appreciate the fact that it is neither your video clips nor your music that is the creation here. The only thing you as a fan vidder are bringing to the party is your skills as an editor.

Some tricks of the trade

Not to sound like an 80 year old film professor, but video editors today seriously don’t have any idea how easy they have it. With the software that’s available now, you can shave off a single frame or shift a clip a fraction of a second so that it aligns precisely with a beat of the music. This power is at your finger tips so do not be afraid to use it.

Be mindful of how your clips are tailing out. If a clip is too short for the spot you’re throwing it into then you’re likely going to get the first few frames of the next clip. This will appear as a blip that’s too fast the viewer to really register what’s going on and can be jarring. A great trick is to use speed controls on the clip to slow it down just slightly. If all you’re looking for is a half second or so, the fact that you’ve changed the speed won’t be noticeable within the clip, but it will provide you with the extra frames needed to fill out that slot. Also, watch for clips tailing out during long cross dissolves. Having the clip cut to something else during the middle of a transition always looks odd and can interrupt the flow of an otherwise smooth dissolve.

For an example of this, I refer you to a section of my own fan video, Oh My God. If you look at this first series of quick cross dissolves and compare it to the second, the first doesn’t seem quite as clean and crisp. You can sort of see what I’m trying to do but the result is just a bit sloppier. This tailing out can usually be fixed by applying the same speed trick that I described earlier, but in the case of my own video I wasn’t ever able to resolve it quite to my satisfaction.

Don’t cut too quickly! I’ve seen this many times with people cutting to fast music. They’ll try to slot a completely different clip in for every beat change and the result goes by so quickly that you can’t actually see what’s going on. Give your audience the chance to really appreciate what they’re seeing. I’m a big proponent of trying to group clips from the same scene in order to give the audience a chance to see something happen over the span of a few clips as opposed to just a bunch of smiling headshots flashing by.

A fantastic example of this is done right Corn_Child’s Firefly/Serenity fan video, Must Be Dreaming, where clips from the same shot are intercut at a rapid pace. This allows Corn_Child to nail the beat with each cut, but gives the viewer time to see the clip in full.

Don’t be afraid to look for beats within the clips themselves. Most editors know how to place cuts on the beats of the song, but the really keen ones know how to find the beat in the middle of the a clip. They’ll take that beat then throw it against a clap of the hands, a kick, a kiss or a gunshot. Remember, you’ve got the power of precision with digital video editing so use it. You can use clip speed control here as well to increase the speed of a clip in order for it to better match the pace of the music or have that visual beat land exactly where you want it to.

No video, in my humble opinion, does this better than Rache & Sandy’s Stargate: Atlantis video, Stress, which makes a point of highlighting all of McKay’s hyperactive little twitches and gestures and keying the music to them as often as it does to the cuts themselves.

Have something to say or a story to tell. If all you plan to do is take your favourite song and combine it with all your favourite shots from your favourite show, that’s well and good, but really all you’re doing is creating the video equivalent to elevator music. Remember, the clips belong to the show and the music belongs to the artist, but this edit belongs to you, so why not make it something extraordinary. Take some time to select just the right song and then listen to it on repeat with your eyes closed until you start to feel the sorts of places the music takes you and the images that it brings up. Think about what it is you want to communicate about a particular character or a particular relationship and then start to build a narrative that gets that message across.

When it comes to shaping a really sharp narrative using clips and music, I think there is no better example than Dallascaper’s Farscape fan video, Scorpy Went Down to Georgia. In a brilliant bit of casting, Dallascaper puts Scorpius in the role of the devil and our hero, John Crichton, as the brilliant fiddler that takes him down. Easily one of the most classic Farscape fan videos ever made.

(for the best quality version of this video visit Farscape Fantasy)

 
So there you have it. Hopefully I’ve been able to inject some inspiration into all those eager vidders out there. If you know if other great fan videos, please feel free to leave them in the comments below. To find the fan videos that I’ve made, visit the Video Editing section of this website. I personally don’t think I’m in the same league as these guys, but it’s still fun to push those skills when I can.

While I knocked off that first video in less than two days, this one I’ve struggled with for several weeks. The idea to do a video came to me almost immediately after hearing Daughtry’s song, Life After You, for the first time. The lyrics of the chorus are ‘All that I’m after is a life full of laughter / As long as I’m laughing with you’ which I thought was a perfect way to describe Castle’s outlook on life and his affection for Beckett. That was actually something I realized fairly early on in the editing process–if Oh My God had been from Beckett’s point of view then Life After You was definitely Castle’s take on the relationship. I also felt that the melancholy turn the song takes between the upbeat choruses fit well with some of the darker things that have been going on this season. Castle’s investigation of the murder of Beckett’s mother and the emotional fallout from that are a major thread in the series this year and one that feels very different from the lighthearted goofiness of a typical Castle episode.

And that’s where I really began to run aground with this video.

Unlike Oh my God which basically had one thread, with Life After You I felt like I was trying to balance two very different threads.

I started by editing in my typical swiss-cheese style and nailing down all the big emotional beats in the song and snagging the appropriately climactic clips. In this case it was placing Beckett firing her gun and the moment she breaks into sobs and aligning those two clips with the most dramatic part of the song. I then began building the narrative out forward and backward in time around those two clips. That part came together fairly quickly.

After that narrative chunk was fairly well formed, I edited the ending of the video so that I knew where I was ultimately trying to go mood-wise. A lot of the ending is built around Castle walking Beckett out of the precinct on his arm interspersed with clips that show the growing depth of their relationship. The walk is platonic, but the undertone is just a little deeper as is the case with most of Castle and Beckett’s interactions. Again, fairly easy.

But after that it just got very mucky. The bridges I had a heck of a time with as I was trying to find clips that could dial down the mood from slightly-fluffy to broody in only a few shots.

Ultimately, I don’t know if it’s the most successful video I’ve edited. With not even two seasons worth of episodes to pull from, I found myself really having to struggle to find the clips that I felt I needed and I can’t say I’m totally satisfied with all of them. I think perhaps someday, maybe in a season or two, I might come back to this video and see what more I can do with it.

In the meantime, enjoy…

Notoriety is really the only reward for this particular contest, but I’m very happy regardless. I have such respect for the Blizzard artists and to simply have something of mine sitting on that website is fantastic.

click to enlarge

Just a quick note to say that I finally finished that Warcraft comic that I first started working on back in… err, September?! Yeesh.

Well, it’s done. Yay!

And even better, I’m feeling pretty comfortable with my tablet now. I got lots of practice doing a variety of different techniques which helped steady my wobbly hand. I don’t know that I’m quite at the stage that I would want to freehand sketch the initial drawing on the tablet as opposed to on paper, but I can now ink and shade with confidence.