Andy's Animation

Yawn

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:22:00 +0000

As I haven’t posted anything in a while, here’s a random doodle to keep the old blog going!

Plot-Lines

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:46:00 +0000

Happy New Year! For anyone interested, I have started a new blog. I’m not going to say too much about it here.

plot-lines.tumblr.com

It’s not going to be a replacement for this blog of course, so please stick around!

I have also started to guest-post on OnAnimation.com, so why not stop by there?

Here’s to 2012!

Lessons from the Bathroom

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 23:24:00 +0000

You never know where your next lesson is going to come from. A recent one of mine came from a hand dryer.

At Traveller’s Tales last week we got some new dryers in the toilets. Besides being powerful enough to show more bone than an X-ray, they have the curious property of shining a bright blue shaft of light on your hands while you’re drying them.

After posing a query as to the purpose of this light to a colleague, he asked me, with wisdom perhaps beyond his years, “would you rather the light was not there?”

And the strange truth is that while I know the light does not impact on the function or performance of the machine, I really wouldn’t want it to not be there!

Sometimes things are just right or wrong, regardless of the presence or absence of logic. In writing my short film I have wrestled again and again with the inclusion of a particular secondary character. All I really needed to ask myself was, “would I rather the character was not there?” The answer, it turns out, is no.

Frame by Frame

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 19:29:00 +0000

I don’t know how many of you follow the ‘Frame by Frame’ blog, but it’s fantastic and today’s addition really stood out to me. It illustrates something that I find fascinating in animation – an invisible focus, for want of a better term. All the elements in the scene lead your eye in a lovely sweeping curve, first to the left, and then curling around back to the right, leaving you looking at the piece of cheese Remy is holding. It does this so well that it feels very much like you’re watching an invisible object traversing through the scene.

Brilliant!

Animation Showreel 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:45:00 +0000

With the release of Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 in the shops, I can finally unlock my 2011 showreel that I put together a couple of months ago. So if you’re interested, please have a look :)

Pencil Full of Lead? Paulo Nutini, I Am Not!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:57:00 +0000

I thought I’d just mark the fact that I have drawn the first pass of all the extreme drawings in the first scene of my mime film……and this is how much of my pencil is left after all the furious scribbling!

Film Study 1: Guns at Batasi

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:26:00 +0000

Last week I happened to catch a few minutes of a film on TV that I had never heard of, Guns at Batasi, starring Richard Attenborough. I didn’t see enough to be able to judge the story, but I thought the compositions in the scene I saw were really quite striking, in part owed to the dance-like choreography of the actors. Have a look at this scene from the film:

I’m going to concentrate on the first two shots.

Look at how in the first shot the men are arranged in a sweep that ends on the bug on the bar. That bug is really quite small on-screen and not particularly high in contrast, and yet it’s unmistakable what the focus of the scene is at this point.

In the second shot where the men turn around to see Attenborough’s character enter, they arrange themselves to frame him and direct our attention to nowhere other than him.

Then as he walks over, the camera moves in and the officers subtly arrange themselves again to not only direct attention to Attenborough, but to also create a pleasing diagonal sweep across the screen.

The next bit is particularly interesting as the man second from screen-right moves around the group, and the others all rearrange themselves accordingly to never allow an unpleasant composition to be seen.

Then notice the man on the far left:

As the camera pulls right to reveal Attenborough, the man on the left moves himself over to add to the oppressive feel of the composition.

Study the rest of the clip, there’s load more lovely choreography like this. I really need to watch the rest of the film!

The Man Who Planted Trees

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 12:00:00 +0000

On Friday I saw an animated film that came recommended in Hayao Miyazaki’s book Starting Point, that is probably the best piece of animated film-making I have seen in a long time. So good in fact that I thought I’d share it here. It’s on YouTube in two parts, so here they are!

By the way, the book is really quite excellent too, I recommend it highly!

Life in a Day

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 20:09:00 +0000

In case you haven’t seen it I thought I’d share the “Life in a Day” film. This was on TV recently and I only just saw it this evening. Few films have I found to be as moving and thought-provoking. There’s not much I can say about it because I don’t think I have the mental capacity to comprehend it all, so just watch for yourself!

Thoughts on ‘The Looney Tunes Show’

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:02:00 +0000

I don’t know how long the new version of the Looney Tunes show has been on TV now, but I only saw an episode of it today for the first time. There has been quite a lot of controversy surrounding the show, which you’ll probably be very aware of if you read Cartoon Brew. I have to say that despite trying my hardest to watch with an open mind these new versions of some of my favourite characters, I didn’t enjoy what I saw. However I’d like to write down something fair about why I didn’t like it rather than just criticising without qualification. The aim is to learn something here after all!

Character Design

The most noticeable change has been the appearance, sound and behaviour of the characters. The creators have gone for a look that I’d describe, probably with some cynicism, as “fashionable”. I’m not actually against giving the characters a bit of an update, but the update they have received amounts, in my view at least, to forcing an unsuitable graphic style upon them simply for the sake of trying to be different. And “different” in true 21st Century form means “the same as everything else”.

In terms of the behaviour of the characters, altering this is very dangerous I think. The likes of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, as developed over time by Tex Avery, Bob McKimson, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and whoever else, are some of the most complex and interesting characters ever to have been put on the screen. What started out as very simplistic slapstick performers ended up as fully rounded, totally believable and lovable characters. Evolving the characters further is likely an impossible task, and unsurprisingly the new versions are mere shadows of their former selves.

The pose on Bugs in the image above is worthy of mention here actually as it’s something that came up a lot in the episode I watched. Bugs has long been a laid back unshakable character, but he comes across in this show as being a “hip” student. What might be termed by John K as “tude” poses are constantly being hit by all characters.

Occasionally a pose is formed which is very reminiscent of the old cartoons – a despondent look to camera for example – but where these are used, they reek of being merely copied from an old model sheet rather than having been derived through proper thought into how the character would express themselves facially.

A much smaller point are the voices. While noone can ever replace Mel Blanc, I’m sure better attempts at the voicework could have been made. The fact that the voices reflected no more life than the drawings suggested and all-round lack of knowledge of the characters.

Timing

Something that particularly stood out to me was the timing of everything going on in the show. Comedy, whether physical or verbal, needs good timing to work. The old Looney Tunes cartoons were timed to perfection. I think actually something like Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner shorts are simply the absolute pinnacle of good timing. The new TV show however seems to be devoid of any kind of awareness of timing. In some scenes there is too much going on at the same time, making things confusing. In other scenes everything is paced too quickly, not leaving enough time for things to read, or not giving the required time before resolving a joke. It gives the impression to me that the creators felt they had to cram a load of stuff into too short a time. They would have done better, I think, simplifying everything, which leads me onto the next point…...

Story

There’s simply too much of it. The episode I watched seemed like an attempt to make The DaVinci Code with animals. There was even a big section in the middle where we go back to the Second World War for a lengthy, and totally serious, flashback sequence. The same episode had characters being auctioned off for a charity event, Bugs travelling to Paris and Daffy playing detective. And all within the first few minutes. Compare this with the old Looney Tunes shorts, where we usually had just two characters trying to outwit each other in a very simple scenario.

And while I can’t really qualify this last bit of story criticism with anything, I cannot understand why it has been chosen that the characters should all live together as seeming best mates!

Humour

This is another way in which the show has deviated too far from what the Looney Tunes used to be. In the old shorts the humour was as much physical as verbal, and in many cases it was completely physical. As with so many of today’s cartoons, particularly those on TV, the humour has become totally verbal. Perhaps this is in some part due to silly restrictions on cartoon violence imposed by the powers that be, but I imagine it to also be in part a time/labour/money saving choice as has been the case on so many other shows. If the verbal jokes were as witty as they once might have been then I might have been able to forgive it, but sadly they are not. I don’t think there’s a magic formula for writing funny material, but I truly believe that the best place to look for inspiration is within the characters themselves. However when the characters have not been properly understood by their creators, how funny can they possibly be?

In conclusion, despite the title of the show, these are not the Looney Tunes. They are a fan-art interpretation, and a strong lesson of the most important thing in creating good work – a deep understanding of the characters you’re working with, even if the characters are ones you have created yourself.

Animation Begins

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:03:00 +0000

After about a year and a half of on/off preparation, on Wednesday 9th September I finally got around to starting the process of animating my short film about a mime. I’m animating in chronological order from the first scene to the last, and as such have started with one of the simplest and yet most troublesome scenes in the film – troublesome because of the leading character being face-on to the camera, which is rather difficult to draw.

I really went traditional with the scene and planned everything out with X-sheets, but realised upon scanning my roughs that the plan wasn’t working. After a few revisions, the scene I’ve got so far is totally different from what I had planned. For such a simple scene, it’s not easy to get right!

Help Save British Animation!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:29:00 +0000

Got a spare 30 seconds? Why not sign this petition to try to help out the poor old British animation industry?

https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/21834

Why should you help us? Here is a small handful of reasons:

Perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 23:47:00 +0000

This is perhaps the most boring post that will feature on this blog so you can probably stop reading here!

I just thought I’d document for my own records the fact that I’ve been learning about elements of perspective that have long been a mystery to me. In particular I’ve been learning how to deal with cases in one, two and three-point linear perspective where objects are at different angles from one another. This level of technical working-out I guess isn’t practical when animating, but I want to learn it from the point of view of creating layouts and backgrounds.

Next on my list when I get time: curvilinear perspective! I can sense your excitement!

Thoughts on Composing a Picture

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:45:00 +0000

I’m wrestling with a decision with regards to my mime film and it has reminded me of when I was reading Don Graham’s book, Composing Pictures.

Throughout my animation studies, the vast majority of sources have spoken about drawing in such a way as to give a feeling of dimension – to fool the audience into thinking that the two-dimensional image they are looking at has a third dimension. The current trend of 3D movies is perhaps the most extreme example of film-makers treating the screen as literally a window to the imagined world beyond.

In Graham’s book, much emphasis is given to doing the exact opposite – reminding the viewer that they are observing a flat surface. It’s an idea that I couldn’t quite get my head around when I read it, and in the time since I still haven’t quite grasped. Why would you want to go out of your way to make the audience aware that what they are looking at is nothing but a depiction of a reality?

I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I tonight found myself doing just that. I was looking at the image that I uploaded in my last post, thinking that I hadn’t quite managed to tie the mime character into his surroundings. He looked to me like he was part of a separate image (well he was exactly that, just superimposed onto that background, but I was trying to avoid it looking like that). I decided to have a go at rectifying this by fiddling with the layers in Photoshop. However, while I found that I was able to tie him into the background simply by allowing the underlying paper texture to show through him a little, and muting the white of his face, hands and trousers, the result was less pleasing to me.

I decided to play around with doing the exact opposite. I lifted him away from the background with a simple drop-shadow and put a white edge around him, with the intention of making him look like a paper cutout placed over the background image. I liked the effect, shown in the accompanying image (click it for a clearer view), but what would it look like if he were to walk away from the ‘camera’ and into the background? He’d follow the rules of perspective, getting smaller as he moves into the distance of course, but he’d remain a very obvious cutout on top of the background image.

This has flagged up a question in my head – is this weird or not? It sounds like it should be wrong, and yet I find it quite an appealing concept – this conflict of creating an illusion of three dimensions, without allowing the viewer to forget that it’s only 2D.

A Little More Background Design

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:55:00 +0000

Well I thought I was finished working out the general look of the backgrounds in my film, but I decided a little more tweaking was required. One addition that required far more work than was necessary given it’s small feature in the final image is the Eiffel Tower. Other than that I just fiddled around with the levels of things and gave the ground plane a deeper colour than the sky. I also discarded yesterday’s decision to go black and white.

Since it took the vast majority of my time, I figured I should exhibit the raw artwork for the tower too, done in gouache and ink:

I have to say that I’m not happy about my over-reliance on digital manipulation. I’ve talked before about my disliking of that, so I won’t go into it again. However I’m having to compensate for my lack of painting skills!

Short Film Update

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 22:19:00 +0000

I’m still going…..just about! The last few weeks have been exceedingly busy at work, but I’ve got two weeks off now in which I hope to accomplish something on the mime project before I go back to the madness. I’m still in the process of working out what to do background-wise but tonight I managed to get somewhere. I’ve come up with a technique for painting the backgrounds that I’m happy with. Here’s the result, with the mime composited over the top for comparison (just ignore the mime’s deformed arm, it’s an old drawing!):

And here’s the painting pre-Photoshop:

The next plan is to draw up a layout for a shot from the film and make a specific background from that. If that goes well then animation can begin AT LAST!! This project has been going for year and a half since it’s initial conception, and it’s been a year since I finished writing the story. A whole year of design work!

This Week’s Heading

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:35:00 +0000

Here are a few rather lifeless drawings I did tonight, just to keep the blog alive….yes the irony is not lost on me! Blogging has taken a back seat recently due to lots going on at work (there are a lot of interesting topics that that has thrown up that I really wish I could talk about here, but alas I cannot).

My drawing ability constantly lets down my animation so I’m going to spend the next week just focussing on drawing practice. Heads I’m not too bad with, but the rest of the body gives me trouble, so that’s what I’ll be concentrating on from tomorrow onwards.

Dan Kuenster's Animation Bootcamp Lesson 1, Exercise 1

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:52:00 +0000

A colleague of mine recommended a new DVD tutorial series to me, Dan Kuenster's Animation Bootcamp, so I thought I’d get the first disk and work through the exercises to see what I can learn. The first lesson goes right back to basics; a bouncing ball with a floppy knot and a face. The lesson video involved Dan working through the task and encouraged viewers to try the exercises themselves. So here’s my attempt at exercise number 1:

And here’s my X-sheet, which was really just copied from the suggested plan on the DVD. Although I was following Dan’s plan, I tried to add a little something of my own, including more of a curved path back to the top of the bounce and a spin too.

The Lion King 3D

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 17:53:00 +0000

I went to see The Lion King in 3D yesterday. I have yet to see a feature film that actually benefits from being 3D, so my expectations weren’t great for this one. However I wanted to see what the effect of turning hand-drawn animation 3D was before I judged it.

I’m afraid to say that I wasn’t impressed. While in other films I have found 3D to be of no benefit, in this particular case I found it to actually take away from the experience. So why should that be? Well I have pondered this and have decided that it defeats everything that a drawing tries to achieve.

A drawing is by nature totally flat. The skill of a good draughtsman is in creating a flat picture that sparks a sense of dimension in the viewer. If the picture is made 3D, then it feels like it walks all over this illusion.

Now in every single other 3D film I’ve seen, I found that after ten minutes or so I forget that I’m watching a 3D film. With The Lion King I found that I was constantly aware of the 3D effect, distracting me from paying attention to the story. I found that in many scenes the characters looked CG, just with a renderer that put a sketchy edge on things; something that removed a lot of the hand-drawn charm for me.

I do wish that Disney would just re-release these films in their original form. I’m sure tons of people would still go and see them without any added gimmick. More 3D re-releases are coming our way over the next couple of years, but I shall be attending the 2D presentations as with the live-action and CG movies.

[Scar drawing by Andreas Deja]

X-Sheets Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Continuing my exposure sheet theme, I decided to create my own on account of there being loads of boxes on standard ones that I just don’t require for working on my own. So if you’re an animator working on your own stuff, maybe you’ll find this of use. It’s a PDF file and is formatted for A3 paper, just click the image below to get it.

[EDIT 2: I have removed the frame numbers from the X-sheet for manual numbering if multiple sheets are used.]

[EDIT: I have updated the X-sheet to include dotted lines to signify seconds. Before there had only been divisions for feet of film.]

X-Sheets

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 10:44:00 +0000

Given my interest in doing hand-drawn animation, I’m finally getting to grips with exposure sheets (AKA X-Sheets or dope sheets). Yesterday I watched a great set of Eric Goldberg videos on YouTube showing him explain a bit about his work process. One such video showed a Disney X-sheet which had the audio waveform printed on it. I thought this was an excellent idea and pondered how to achieve it myself. I scouted around on the internet to try to find some software for making X-sheets with such a waveform display, but could come up with one – a program called Magpie Pro. However it’s not cheap, and I felt it to be too expensive for what it is.

So I set about trying to find my own solution. And I found one, so I thought it might be a good idea to share it here in case anyone else wants to do the same thing.

First of all I downloaded an X-sheet template from Animation Meat. Secondly I opened up a piece of audio in an audio editing program (any that will display a waveform will do). I then made marks for the exact frames where the audio starts and ends. I took a screenshot of the waveform and then opened up the X-sheet template in Photoshop, pasting the screenshot onto a new layer. After rotating the waveform to be vertical, I used the marks I had made to scale it to match the corresponding frames on the X-sheet. I then simply scaled the waveform horizontally to fit within one of the columns.

Hey Presto, an X-sheet with waveform!

My plan is to simply scrub through the audio in the audio software to locate the words so I can write them on the appropriate frame of the X-sheet.

Block and Blob in ‘The Trouble With Corners’

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:41:00 +0000

Here is a short film I just finished tonight. I made it in about 15 hours.

I've been feeling a lot of frustration at work lately and I needed an escape. For a long time I've wanted to learn a bit more about using Flash, and have long been inspired by my friend Jay Tammemagi and the great TV shows he makes using it. I've also been wanting to force myself to work more simply for once, so I asked myself what the simplest short film I could make would look like. This is the result.

And now for……

THE ART OF BLOCK AND BLOB

I know, I know, you’re excited, so here’s some concept art!

And the storyboard for the film…..

It puts Pixar to shame eh! :P

Coming Tomorrow……

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:48:00 +0000

A short film created in a few evenings.

All Thumbs

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 21:30:00 +0000

I spent two and a half hours drawing thumbs tonight. Just thumbs! My plan was to tackle hands in general, but the thumb proved such a problem area for me that I ended up concentrating on it alone. It took me many, many failed efforts before I realised the key to achieving a decent drawing.

Bleeding obvious really.

Macro Macro Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Andy J. Latham) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 22:04:00 +0000

It’s taking me a long time to get through Don Graham’s book, Composing Pictures, however there’s so much stuff in it that I don’t want to speed through it and end up missing something. And boy did I find a gem last night.

It happened to be talking about the age-old thing of avoiding copying exactly what’s in front of you when you’re drawing, a lesson I have come across over and over again. But this time an extra element was thrown into the mix.

I’m sure most people are familiar with the fact that the further into the distance an object is, the more it appears to flatten out due to the limitations of our binocular vision. When, for example, an artist draws from a life model, he is looking at a person that may be some distance from his easel. If that artist was to draw exactly what he sees, then he would end up with a somewhat uninteresting picture as it would be flattened out to some extent (as seen in figure 355-A from Don’s book below).

The solution to this, as illustrated by figure 355-B, is to imagine yourself as being much closer to the model, drawing what you might see from that vantage point. The dimensions of the model are much more apparent close-up, and the volumes that the different parts occupy are a lot clearer. In photographic terms, you’d effectively be using a smaller focal length (wider lens).

This hit me like a sledgehammer. Though I try not to, I do end up copying what I draw sometimes. My efforts to avoid doing so have been more to do with gesture than anything else. I have often been disappointed with the apparent flatness of my drawings though, and now I know the reason why. It’s so obvious! How didn’t I work this out before?

Don also talks about combining this with using multiple station-points, something I won’t attempt to go into here. I really can’t recommend this book enough. It’s not an easy read, but it has taught me so much about pictures that I just had no clue whatsoever about before.