The Eyes Have It

I never intended this blog to be a teaching tool or to impart any techniques for animators. But I did come across an interesting article on 'reading' people and thought it might help animators to convey more emotion and thought processing into their characters. These kind of read like party games and are not guaranteed sure fire rules that will deliver 100% results, but they may strengthen your scenes. Try them on your friends and see what happens.
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Eyes Down and Left. If a person looks down-left they are thinking about how something makes them feel. If they are visibly happy then they may be thinking about the happiness that they feel. Ask a person how they feel on their birthday and they should look down-left before they describe it to you.









Eyes Down and Right. A person looking down-right has internal dialog going on in their head. They may be talking to themselves, reciting a conversation, or thinking about what they are going to say. Ask someone how their last conversation went and you will see them looking down-right.









Eyes Straight Downward. A person looking straight downward is showing that they are submissive and uncomfortable. People will often look downward when they are shy and do not wish to have a conversation. Moving the eyes straight downward is often a sign of shame or embarrassment. In some Asian cultures it is customary to look downward and not make eye contact when talking to someone.









Eye contact. Consistent eye contact is a sign that the person is interested in the conversation. Prolonged eye contact can mean that the person is trying to intimidate and/or may not trust you. Brief eye contact indicates that the person is anxious and/or not interested in the conversation. While a total lack of eye contact shows great disinterest in the conversation.










Eyes looking straight up. Rolling the eyes upward is a gesture that often indicates contempt, sarcasm, boredom, or annoyance. If someone is rolling their eyes at you it is not a good sign. Sometimes people look straight upward when they are referring to a god, but in most cases it is meant to be condescending. If their eyes roll back into their head and stay there… heh… make sure they aren’t having a seizure.










Eyes to the Upper Right. Someone who you see looking up-right is visualizing a remembered image. Ask someone to tell you the color of their car or describe what someone looks like and they should look up-right.










Eyes to the Upper Left. When you see someones eyes move quickly up-left they are constructing images in their head. A person looking up-left is using their imagination to put a picture together in their mind. Ask a person to imagine a large blue house filled with marbles and they should look up and to the left.










Eyes to the Right. When someone moves their eyes to the right they are recalling sounds from their memory. Ask someone to remember the melody to a song or to remember the sound of their alarm clock and they will look to their right.









Eyes Left. People construct sounds when they look to the left (1st person right). When someone imagines new sounds like an unheard voice, or puts together a new melody they look to the left. Ask someone to imagine the sound of a car horn underwater and they should look to the left.

Ruby Rocket

My buddy Sam has been running a parallel course with me trying to find a good digital way of doing traditional animation. His blog documents the process and his insights might be helpful to anyone interested in pursuing paperless animation. There are many good programs offered for this type of work which might simplify the process, but Sam is using a hybrid approach using several soft wares. I'm interested in what his final conclusions are. Follow his development here: http://rubyrocketpi.blogspot.com/

Hot Topic

These are some unapproved designs of a character made of fire for a commercial I can't mention. I did these with a digital paint program called ArtRage. It's got some nice features I hope to learn.

Inspiration: Kristen Mccabe

There are sooooo many great artists posting inspiring things. I’ve discovered the works of Kristen Mccabe and just love her stuff. She has a little touch of Mort Drucker to me and a huge sense of humor. Check her stuff out here: http://kristens-sketchblog.blogspot.com/

Midlife Crisis #09

I'm in a rut, yes another one. It's like I want to redefine myself. These quick drawings were an effort to break out and loosen up. Be prepared for some really awful stuff as I try anything and everything, (in art).

Learning Paperless Animation

TV Paint Opening Logo
This posting is about my trying to learn the program TV Paint. TVP originated in France. It’s heavy software with more features than I will ever use and can do effects and compositing like an Avid. It also has 2D capabilities that I wish they would break out and make a separate module. There is a 460 page manual poorly translated and not arranged in any usable manner. The terminology is cryptic and not intuitive, (to me). So I chucked the manual and started pushing buttons. But having said all that, I find I’m beginning to like it.

These tests show color pencils normally used in roughing out things, (in my case very rough). You have erasers for each color so you can be discrete. Also you can turn the whole drawing into a solid color and draw with a different one on top.



The animation didn’t warrant going as far as I did because of sloppy inbetweening and just being bad but no one was paying me to do this and I wanted to learn to paint. So after playing around I found it easy to do a colored line and went for the old school ‘self traced’ line I’ve always loved. I also found ‘toning’ to be very easy too so I threw in shadows with no highlights because I found I could do it and that was all I cared about. I still haven’t tried panning and zooming and I still don’t know how to make an exposure sheet or how you would get other people involved. I think I’ll keep playing with it and it is kind of nice not having all that paper lying around. All those wigglies are driving me nuts, I may have to go in and fix those.

Paperless Comics

In March of 2006 I posted some of my original “Kibble & Bits” comic strip. Well March of 2008 ends with the digitally drawn RETURN OF! Yes, I’m sorry to say I wanted to see how a paperless strip might work. The line quality isn’t quite there yet but the lettering is more legible. Now if only it were funny.

Click on image to enlarge.

Bruce Bickford

Bruce Bickford is a Seattle animator who gained notoriety when Frank Zappa discovered his unique style and commissioned animation for The 1979 music video "Baby Snakes". A compilations of Bickford works was released in 1989 as "The Amazing Mr. Bickford" and a recent 2005 documentary called "Monster Road" is now on DVD.

Mr. Bickford came to the Portland based Will Vinton Studios,home of Claymation, during my time there and considered doing some commercial directing. He later concluded it was too restrictive.

His work has always awed and frightened me. Check out his website here: http://www.brucebickford.com/

Click image to enlarge.

Robots Robots Robots

Here's another segment of "The Mr. Men Show" someone posted on YouTube with more of my animation. I did the sequence up until the orange diagonal wipe, and some other shots toward the end when Lazy returns with the broken robot. My friends Sam Niemann and Ben Burch juiced up my stuff with nice effects like dust and bubbles. I have a feeling CN will have these removed when and if they find out about them so check em out while they last here: http://www.youtube.com/user/dwaskemo

Triangle of Interest

I hate to keep bringing up the same sites again but K. Koch has another great lesson about eye movement in animation. I first noticed Pixar characters eyes scanning as they thought and although the idea was used in traditional animation it seemed to give these plastic c.g. entities immediate humanity. They became thinking beings. Now everyone seems to be using this technique but the reasoning behind doing it is well explained in this lesson found here: http://synchrolux.com/

Thanks Kevin for another great article!

Bolt From The Past

Aint It Cool has a tiny peek at what the Disney film "Bolt" would have looked if it had stayed as Chirs Sanders' "American Dog". Check it out here: http://www.aintitcool.com/images/dog.mov



Thanks AinItCool and Abel Salazar

Mr. Men on YouTube

I don't expect this to last. Someone has posted segments of the new "The Mr. Men Show" and this portion has some of my animation in it. If you like M&M check out more before they are removed here: http://www.youtube.com/user/dwaskemo

James Batxer Podcast

While paroozing Kevin's site I saw this two part interview with James Baxter and felt the second part had some great insights on how this Master of animation works. Find it here: http://animationpodcast.com/archives/2008/03/02/james-baxter-part-two/

Kevin Koch Rides Again

Animator/Mentor Kevin Koch has aother great piece on 'secondary action' using clips from "The Apartment" with Jack Lemmon on his blog that is well worth looking into. These bits of acting analysis are things every animator should keep in mind. There is also a wonderful article on the Daffy vs Donald segment in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" that pin points some bad directorial decisions which made the actions hard to read and understand what was taking place. Both can be found here: http://synchrolux.com/

Dynamic Dinosaurs

I've been meaning to post some of my buddy Tony Merrithew's sculptures, and now I have. He's got some full scale Dinosaurs battling that are pretty impressive. Tony is also a master animator. Check out his other works here: http://www.tonymerrithew.com/index.html

Disney Family Album

Animator Steve Vitale has posted many of the Disney Family Albums which feature some the major animators who defined the look and style of the studio. You can find it here: http://loosetoon.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html

White Nude

This isn't breaking away too much from what I've been doing but it's more graphic. I worked over one of my sketches in Flash and made it bolder. Click on image to enlarge.

Coraline Teaser

Here is the trailer for "Coraline". Try and imagine it stereoscopically. I think it's going to be great.

Intimidated by Beauty

click on images to enlarge


I have friends who are incredible draftsmen and do beautiful designs that are playful and esthetically pleasing. Their nudes are stylized and graphic but still show knowledge of anatomy. I’m trying to break away from the fussy labored attention to detail but I’ve discovered I’m intimidated by beauty. I feel obligated to capture a likeness and record her as accurately as possible. I’m also intrigued by the subtitle flowing lines that curve and flatten. This picture shows my up tightness pretty well. Time I try lightening up and see what happens.

For some reason this image degraded in the transfer. It looks okay when enlarged but here is a detail that I kind of like the composition of better.

Poor Eyes

Time to get new glasses; I can either see the model with them or my paper without, but not both. Bifocals? Good grief!

Kevin Koch Blog

http://www.synchrolux.com/
Here's a link to a good blog by animator and mentor, Kevin Koch. He's done many feature films and has some good articles. Check it out.

ArtRage

This is a digital drawing of mine done with ArtRage, an inexpencive paint program. I haven’t tried painting with it yet but the drawing tools are nice.

Self Conscious

I've got to start drawing again. These of me in a mirror were done in ink at different times of day with different lighting. Scary!

Darthkoon's Videos

Here is a YouTube link to some great animation documentaries. There's a nice piece on Art Babbitt and one about "Persepolis". All great stuff: http://youtube.com/profile_videos?p=r&user=Darthkoon&page=2

Mr. Men Show Premier

I just got word that "The Mr. Men Show" will be on at 9:00am and 1:30pm daily and 6:00am on Saturdays on Cartoon Network, starting Monday, February 4th. Promos are now running on that network like crazy and promo time has also been purchased on Kids WB and Fox.

Working on the first season was great fun and I think it's going to appeal to a broad group of people. It's very well done and very funny.

Here is Tim Whitnall, the voice of Mr. Lazy and a soon to be revealed character.

Here is Jo Wyatt the voice of Little Miss Sunshine, Little Miss Helpful, Little Miss Naughty, & Little Miss Scary.

Here is Rob Rackstraw the voice of Mr. Noisy, Mr. Pernickety, Mr. Messy, and Mr. Tickle.

Here is Teresa Gallagher, the voice of Little Miss Chatterbox, Little Miss Whoops, and a soon to be revealed character.

Dancing James Baxter

I can't remember where I came across this,(it's got the Baxter flipping pages logo so it may be from his site), but a friend wrote thanking me for posting the running horse cycle by James Baxter on YouTube. They said James Baxter was one of their heroes, (mine too), so this is for them.



There is no sound to this.

Sita Sings The Blues

Cartoon Brew has the full account of Nina Paley’s offbeat indie animated feature Sita Sings The Blues. The film, which Paley started production on in 2004, is uniquely personal, tackling the story of breaking up with her husband in India, combined with an unlikely mashup of Indian mythology and 1920s American jazz. Paley made the film entirely on her own, without a producer or studio backing, and still needs $20k to create a 35mm master.
Sita Sings The Blues recently was accepted into the prestigious 58th annual Berlin International Film Festival, where it’ll be having its world premiere next month. But as Paley writes on her website, “The bad news is, she’s programmed in a theater that doesn’t do Digital Cinema. That means unless I have a 35mm print by February, her one and only World Premiere will be on, well…video. I can’t let that happen.”

She is accepting tax-deductible donations through this website. It’s a worthy cause for animation fans who have a few extra bucks to spare.

Secrets from the Barnyard

There was much more music to the Paramount/Nickelodeon’s 2005 feature film, “The Barnyard”. It was decided to remove some songs because the film ran long. Originally Hanna the white hen acted as a Greek chorus and sang about the hero Otis and his situation. Here is an unfinished song sequence without textures or lighting. Notice the red-eye on some of the chicks, (fixed in final render), and the large freaky chick named Boil who falls off the log. There was a song with all the chicks singing “Peaches and Cream” to Otis and an opening sequence before the title that had some great animation of Miles the donkey drumming on crates and cans that began the first song and introduced Hanna. Hanna also had another song in the third act that was cut.

I did all the animation in this sequence except the pigs that were animated by Bart Goldman. Animation Director Dave Andrews, who really is a drummer, took over Miles from me and did a beautiful job which is not shown here.

Chris Sanders Designs

Here are a few more images of what we lost when Chris Sanders left his “American Dog”, now re-titled “Bolt” movie. I would have loved to see how closely they could have realized the lighting in these paintings.

Disappointing Design

Early on I was excited by the atmospheric concept art I was seeing from the Chris Sanders film "American Dog" for Disney. Now I'm saddened by the redesign and renaming. Pixar did a complete rework on "Ratatouille" and it came out wonderfully but with director Sanders no longer with his film we are losing his fun design and beautiful lighting plan. Take a look at the original concept art and the new and final design for the retitled film "Bolt". It feels like we've lost something. Time will tell.

Chris Sanders version

Redesign on "Bolt"

Happy Birthday Snow White

The film premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater in Hollywood on the night of December 21, 1937 and this year celebrates its 70th anniversary. "All the Hollywood brass turned out for my cartoon!" remembered Walt years later, "That was the thing. And it went way back to when I first came out here and I went to my first premiere. I'd never seen one in my life. I saw all these Hollywood celebrities coming in and I just had a funny feeling. I just hoped that some day they'd be going in to a premiere of a cartoon. Because people would depreciate the cartoon. You know, they'd kind of look down." Those celebrities included Marlene Dietrich, Preston Foster, Shirley Temple, Bob "Bazooka" Burns, Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden (Amos and Andy), Joe Penner, Helen Vincent, Fred Perry, George McCall, Charlie Chaplin with Paulette Goddard, Gail Patrick , Ed Sullivan, Clark Gable and Carol Lombard, Norma Shearer, Judy Garland, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Cary Grant and many more.

Great Animation Posts

My buddy Eric has a blog that is a catch-all of things of interest. He has posted some great lessons and tips on animation for animators. His latest on the 'internal silhouette' is well executed. Here is a link to his site and his other animation tips: http://www.sabudesign.com/cattywampus/?cat=7

The pose
The silhouette does not convey the action
The 'internal silhouette' clearly defines the action

Merry Christmas from the Brinkerhoff's

How It's Done

An anonymous person wrote asking how Karel Zeman did his effects. Here is part two of a documentary on Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman's incredible special effects.

Animation Nation

http://www.youtube.com/results?search=related&search_query=British%20UK%20Documentary%20Cartoon%20Animation%20Animator&v=VnrP_t3MBBQ

Above is a link to ‘skewiff1’s’ YouTube account which holds many interesting bits of animation information. One is the BBC Documentary “Animation Nation” about the history of British animation with examples of such studios as Halas and Batchelor, Larkins, Bob Godfrey/Biographic and Aardman. There is also a Documentary called Walt Disney-“Secret Lives” which looks intriguing. I know how I’ll be spending this Saturday morning.

Check out some great design work from episode 1.5 of "Animation Nation"

Pocoyo

I love everything about these guys. It must be great fun to work on. When will they be available in the states? Find out more about this adorable series here: http://pocoyo.blogs.com/pocoyo/

More Karel Zeman

Here are some highlights from “Diabolica Inventions” (1958) , a film Zeman did to look like moving woodcuts. A feature film “Fantastic World of Jules Verne” (1961) employees the same technique.

Inspirace : by Karel Zeman

Karel Zemans amazing short "Inspiration" (Inspirace), made in 1948, is a love-story set inside a single drop of water, which Zeman animated by heating and bending fragile blown-glass figurines.

The films of master Czech animator and director Karel Zeman (1910 - 1989) are a glittering jewelbox filled with wonders spun from ancient myth and modern science: moon men and underwater pirates, pedal-powered airships and diabolical engines of destruction. Born in 1910 in Ostromer, Czechoslovakia, Zeman began his career as a window dresser and poster artist, graduating to filmmaking in the mid-1940's with a series of shorts featuring his animated alter-ego, Mr. Prokouk. Inspired by the pioneering films of magician/director Georges Melies and the fiction of Jules Verne, Zeman began animating, art directing and often writing his own features in the early 1950's, overcoming miniscule budgets and rudimentary equipment to create his elaborate adventures.

Gratz Gone Wild

http://www.oregonlive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2007/11/tv_commercials_joan_gratz_anim.html

Above is a link to an article by Kristi Turnquit about Portland animator Joan Gratz. She pioneered 'claypainting' and won an Oscar for her "Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase,(see earlier post in archives for film). Now she has transitioned over to computers and I bet she is loving the flexibility.

Artist though she is, Gratz doesn't just create personal projects. Her latest work is a commercial, done for the San Luis Obispo-based company the Spice Hunter. Though Gratz has done commercials for such companies as Coca-Cola and Knorr Soup, the Spice Hunter job presented Gratz with a novel challenge. Her palette this time wasn't colored clay, but the spices themselves, which she animated digitally. "I photographed the spices and threw them on my scanner," says Gratz. "I could control the color and how big they are. It was like having a new set of paints."

Reference Material

The studies of Eadweard Muybridge have been helping animators for years. Now modern technology has given us new tools. Check out The Animal Motion Show from Rhino House: http://www.rhinohouse.com/




These are clear, full color studies with common actions done in b/w put against grids to help diagnose spacing. I’ve used these DVD references on many projects and found them indispensable.

Although I didn’t work on this, here’s a lovely horse gallop by James Baxter for the movie Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. It’s a beautiful cycle as you can see from the Flash movie I’ve make of it. I keep it just in case.

Biggie Cheese

I found this on YouTube. Someone posted the Biggie Cheese sequence I worked on with Jamie Dawkins for the movie “Barnyard”. We did Biggie and the band characters in the background. Jamie did the first portion until the fade to black and my shots are after the fade up. I also did the shaggy dog bass player close-up in Jamie’s section. It was great fun.

The Word from Bird

Live action reference for Tinker Bell in Peter Pan










Reference for Lady and the Tramp












Reference for 101 Dalmatians

Brad Bird has added to the debate over Mocap, Rotoscope and Traditional animation. I tried to define the differences between Roto and live action reference in an earlier posting called Rotoscope VS Reference but Brad says it much more clearly.

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Brad says:

Hmn. Gotta say I disagree with a few of you folks. I consider mo-cap and rotoscope very similar in a few important respects; both have a performance foundation that begins with someone other than the animator, and the ultimate success of each is dependent on how skillfully they are altered from that foundation.

The best characters to begin with a mo-cap foundation (Gollum and Kong–both courtesy of Peter Jackson & co.) were re-worked extensively by animators (some of Gollums best scenes were entirely keyframed– the Andy Serkis reference studied and interpreted by eye rather than by computer).

This is true of rotoscope as well. When great animators extensively rework the live action base you get Cruella DeVil, Captain Hook, Smee, Chernabog from Night On Bald Mountain, etc…

But when an animator simply accepts the live action perfomance without strengthening the poses or finessing the timing and lazily traces a hand over a hand, a shoulder over a shoulder, you get the watery, dull, unconvincing Prince in “Snow White”, Gulliver in “Gullivers Travels”, Anastasia in “Anastasia”, and EVERYBODY in Bakshi’s “Lord of the Rings”, “American Pop”, “Fire & Ice”, etc.

I would argue that talented animators did some fantastic reworking of Andy Serkis’ very fine initial interpretation of Gollum. Like most animation, not all scenes are created equal, but the best scenes of Gollum have weight and life behind the eyes and a physicality that is lost in most mo-cap.

I agree that rotoscoping is at the very least touched by human hands holding a pencil, but as someone who was shackled to some truly awful live action footage and tasked with rotoscoping something presentable from it (the director would not allow me to animate the scenes from scratch) in my animating days, I can’t share in any misty-eyed nostalgia for rotoscope.

It was a tedious, joyless, awful process that, when strictly adhered to, nearly always yielded uninspiring results.

The last similarity for me is economic. Movies are made in the real world, and certain characters demand HIGHLY skilled animators to pull them off convincingly. Disney turned to rotoscope for CINDERELLA because he didn’t have the resources (money/time) to experiment with the large number of human characters.

Likewise, although Peter Jackson had a big budget for LOTR, it was barely enough to execute the vast vision he had in mind… and mo-cap was the fastest good way to get Gollum integrated with the live action and consistent performance-wise, with the myriad other elements Jackson had to juggle.

Bottom line for me: Mo-Cap is a tool that can be used well or badly, much like rotoscope, and like rotoscope the most successful examples of mo-cap have been significantly altered by animators on their way to the big screen.

For me personally, I think mo-cap works best as a tool to create convincing digital characters that are intended to share the screen with live actors (ala Peter Jackson).

So far (and while I remain open to any filmmaker willing to prove otherwise), when mo-cap attempts to take center stage– I have yet to see an instance when I don’t find myself wishing to see either pure animation or pure live action.

MoCap VS Animation

Mark Mayerson has posted a great analysis on the differences between Motion Capture and true animation which I've printed a portion of below. Marks' blog:http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/ is always a wealth of information.
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With motion capture, motion exists in the real world. It gets sampled and then applied to a computer character. With animation, the motion does not exist in the real world. It is constructed and only exists when the images are rapidly displayed, creating the illusion of motion. That describes the process. There are several differences philosophically, however. Motion capture seeks to convince an audience through the accumulation of detail. When it falls short -- when it is criticized for looking like a waxworks -- it is due to insufficient detail in the motion. Therefore, the goal of motion capture is to increase detail to the point where it is indistinguishable from live action. By contrast, good animation seeks to eliminate unnecessary detail in order to arrive at the expressive essence of a motion.




Image from the MoCap film Beowulf from director Robert Zemeckis.

Alice in Stop-mo-land

Lou Bunin was a prominent puppeteer, an artist, and pioneer of stop-motion animation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Bunin went on to create a feature length stop-motion animation film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland in 1949, starring Carol Marsh as a live-action Alice. A lawsuit from Walt Disney prevented it from being widely released in the U.S., so that it would not compete with Disney's forthcoming 1951 animated version.

Remember this was way before the frame grabbers of today and all done with surface gauges, (see earlier posting on techniques and innovations)

Color Nudes

I’m trying a different approach to figure drawing and want to be less detail oriented and more form conscious. One way is to work faster and looser in color. I don’t know how successful these are but it’s a start.