French animation: Lisa
Posted by dermot on January 20, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Holy cow. This is amazing! Via lineboil.com:
Even though this uses Flash, there’s clearly a lot of hand drawn animation happening. The amazing thing is the 360 degree camera move - not exactly Flash’s strong suit - yet the whole thing feels solid, even 3D. I’m guessing they used After Effects to create the illusion of a 3D world - but that’s just a guess.
Stuff like this is so good, it makes me want to give up.
nina paley vs. copyright insanity
Posted by dermot on January 6, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Nina Paley was (I believe) the first animator to make a short film using Flash - several years ago. Her latest piece is “Sita Sings the Blues”.
She set the film to music recorded in the 1920s. Although the song recording is in the public domain, it turns out that the song is STILL under copyright. Nina has to raise $50,000 to get limited rights to the recording - a tall sum for a solo artist.
Account Here on boingboing.net.
Note that many of the commentators on that BoingBoing like just don’t get it. There’s a snide tone to many - clearly people devoid of any creative juices - small-minded parasites, essentially.
Anyhow, Nina is working on raising the required funds - and ultimately hopes to release the film under “copyleft” - as opposed to “copyright”:
The main reason why the copyright laws are so gruelling is thanks to our old friend, Walt Disney (or the ghastly creatures who now run his company). Thanks to that corporation’s desire to retain copyright over Mickey Mouse, they have successfully pushed the lifespan of copyright - essentially freezing it forever.
Ironic, as Disney made himself rich by using public domain properties with names like “Snow White”, “Cinderalla” and “Sleeping Beauty”. Good thing for him that the estates of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm didn’t control copyright over those properties.
One law for them, another for the rest of us. And the Commons gets impoverished for everyone.
winsor mccay: the sinking of the lusitania
Posted by dermot on December 19, 2008 at 10:38 am
I must confess to a lack of enthusiasm for the Disney style of animation. It seems utterly conservative - a morass of visual cliches and tricks. Once you’re trained in it, it’s very difficult to escape though. There are animators who worked in the years BW (Before Walt). Surely the greatest is Winsor McCay, who, in 1918, animated “The Sinking of the Lusitania” - the first animated film to use cels.
The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) marks McCays path away from radicalism in many ways. Lusitania was the next film after Gertie, and there weren’t any others in that four year period because William Randolph Hearst at The American was restricting McCay from producing animation, performing on vaudeville, and creating comics. Hearst was focusing McCay on creating editorial cartoons. This greatly depressed McCay, as he was not able to animate or perform, his true love. So when the opportunity to create an animated film arose, he jumped on it. He was commissioned to produce an animated version of the sinking of the ship “The Lusitania”. McCay produced this somber animation using cels for the first time. His drawings were more realistic because of their detail and the use of washes and shading. This created a more documentary feel, which he furthered by using cinematic camera angles, which also enhanced the drama of the animation. This film is much different from his previous work, but in many ways quite similar as well. Lusitania still focuses on an event which no one actually saw (thus making the event “fantastic”) and McCay pushes the boundaries of animation in the film by employing cinematic camera angles, realistic drawings, and cels.
The radical changes McCay presented to animation revolutionized the field to such a great magnitude that McCay himself was not able to handle it. After Lusitania, McCay fell away from the spotlight, producing smaller more conservative animations. At a dinner in his honor McCay addressed fellow animators; he concluded his speech with “Animation should be art. That is how I conceived it. But as I see what you fellows have done with it, is making it into a trade. Not an art, but a trade. Bad Luck!”
exponential growth
Posted by dermot on December 12, 2008 at 11:33 pm
This is a short test piece to illustrate the effects of exponential economic growth:
It’s from my up and coming 30 minute documentary which deals with oil, energy, and growth.
scissors-woman vs. the teacher
Posted by dermot on December 11, 2008 at 1:58 pm
This was originally written in a discussion thread requesting memories about the best teachers from our childhood. The short essay grew a bit, and although it’s slightly off-topic, it is relevant to the animation industry in general…
First, the worst teacher I ever had - for TWO long and awful years. Libel laws prevent her name being used. I was in her class from age 7 through 9 - and the only thing she taught me was how to wet the bed - a lesson I unlearned after being liberated from her classroom.
This odious woman hated children with a passion. If anyone misbehaved, she would physically punish every child in the class. She segregated the kids into three groups based on academic ability (or her perception thereof). The students were assigned into groups A, B and C - so at least she taught us primate dominance hierarchy.
Oh - I was in group “B”.
Years after I escaped from that school, she lost her temper (even by her standards) and threw a pair of scissors across the room. They struck a 7 year old boy in the forehead.
She took a hiatus from ‘education’, but returned a few years later, after things had quietened down (and scar tissue healed). As she walked across the schoolyard, one of the kids yelled out: “SCISSORS WOMAN!!!”
Where is “scissors-woman” now? She’s the principal of that school - a job she acquired through stabbing a sick colleague in the back (metaphorically).
Enough of that moral abortion.
My best teacher was the man who taught us after two years of Scissors-torture. I will name him: Sean Bonner - a real human being, originally from Donegal. He was like a character from the John Ford movie “The Quiet Man”. Mr. Bonner was a man who liked to drink - a LOT - and yet, in spite of this, the year spent in his class taught me more than all the other years in school combined.
He taught without giving the impression of trying. There was no coercion, and no fear.
He had something that Scissors woman didn’t have, and never will have: He had class. And he really did like children, in the best sense.
Irish schoolkids learn the Irish language from the age of 4. It’s not an easy language at the best of times. When asking for a bathroom break, the 4 year olds were told to say “Lig Amach Me”…which we took to mean “Can I go to the toilet”.
Well, when we finally made it to Mr. Bonner’s class, the first kid who wanted to go the to toilet asked:
“Lig Amach Me”.
Sean exploded in laughter, ran into the adjacent classroom, and returned with one of his friends - a Kerryman - also very fluent in Irish.
“Say it again! Say it again!” Bonner said. The poor kid did, and both teachers cackled.
“Sir, what does it mean?” someone asked.
“Let me out” was the answer. As it turned out, the correct expression was “An bhfuil cead agam dul go dti an leathreas?” which our teachers had decided was beyond the powers of 4 year olds. Nobody had seen fit to correct us (certainly not scissors-woman).
During the one year spent in Mr. Bonner’s class, I learnt the mathematical tables - in TWO WEEKS. Later we had art classes, where he knew enough to teach me about basic perspective - at the age of NINE - not bad. On the classroom wall were hung maps of the larger constellations - Orion and Ursa Major. One evening, when walking home with my mother, I saw Orion in the sky - the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Astronomy.
Even at the age of nine, it was well known that he drank too much. Once he was absent from class for a week - the rumours usually involved a particularly heroic binge. During that time, the Headmaster filled in - a pale shade by comparison. It was the longest week of 1978. When he returned the next Monday, the class breathed a sigh of relief!
We all assumed that once we moved on to the next year, we’d be quickly forgotten, as another class of 40 brats would take our place. Two years later we were in the yard at breaktime when Sean walked by. “Hello Dermot, Gerard, Jimmy…” he named us all.
“You remember us?” one of the group asked, astonished.
“I don’t forget my friends.” he replied.
Mr. Bonner died a few years later, from motor Neurone Disease - the same condition that’s afflicted Stephen Hawking. Scissors-woman is still alive though, still inflicting her demonic presense on innocent kids.
Life isn’t fair though. Another lesson.
Years later I entered the animation industry. There, I found studios where the walls dripped with fear. It’s something you feel indirectly, but it’s there, unmistakable. These places were the spiritual cousins of scissors-woman - environments where people were motivated by fear. Fear of making mistakes; fear of failing to match the arbitrary standards set by the bosses, fear of being ridiculed in front of co-workers because a drawing was insufficiently glorious. Finally, after 8 years of toxic work environments, I landed in a studio run by human beings. In spite of this, a person who has known nothing but abuse still expects it, no matter how nice people seem. One day, as I stood behind one of the Directors who was correcting my drawing (and waiting for the usual snarky put-down) a post-it note on his desk caught my eye. It was a list of DOs and DONTs on how to run a successful business. One in particular jumped off the paper:
“REMOVE ALL FEAR.”
The amazing thing is this: my work, which had been stagnant for years, suddenly improved. Within 12 months, I went from being a mediocre animator to directing million dollar interactive games.
Funny how things work… if fear really produced the best results, we’d all be saluting Kim Jong Il, glorious leader of North Korea. He’d have liked scissors woman…and he wouldn’t have liked Sean Bonner one little bit.
The ancient Roman historian Plutarch once wrote that “The mind is not a vessel to be filled - it is a fire to be lit.”
Teachers who fail to understand this axiom should be purged from the system, along with the motley crew of sadists and child-haters who continue to do damage young unformed minds, day after day. As to the directors who run their studios like concentration camps: Put down the copy of “The Illusion of Life”, and stop pretending that you’re the next Walt Disney. One of him was more than enough.
Thanks.
feudal lord seeks animators
Posted by dermot on December 9, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Animators/Artists/Designers will appreciate this risible (but all too REAL) job posting (UNPAID). This was found by members of the coldhardflash forum.
By this Friday afternoon (5/30), we need the following:
1. We start from a shot of a character’s hand with a blue-footed booby on it (we will provide the initial hand shot), and the camera pulls back very slowly away from the earth to reveal galaxies and the universe, all the while following the bird as he flies into infinity. This shot will last approx. 3 minutes.
2. We need a fake time-lapse sequence of this same bird hatching from an egg and growing into adulthood. Would prefer for the background/environment to look like time-lapse, so we’d need the lighting changes of days passing and seasons changing, over the course of a year. Keep in mind that his feathers will have to go from baby chick feathers to adult ones, through several molting stages. Perhaps growing and dying flowers in the foreground, to signify the time passing? I don’t know if there will be time for that.
3. We need a shot of the Transformers fighting, but we will change their faces a bit. Similar style to the movie. Also refer to Narnia as a reference (the robot parts, not the animals).
These shots will have to be photo-real in order to match the rest of our film, which is photographed with a film camera. I still don’t know much about computers or animation, but I assume we need someone with a good familiarity with Photoshop, or maybe Flash or Shockwave Director.
The fact that they would think nothing of posting the job quoted above, for NO PAY, is a perfect illustration of why the animation industry is so loathsome. Having explained my inchoate feelings of rage to a therapist, his advice was to seek solace from Thalia, the Heavenly muse, through the art of Poetry. Thus renewed with vital purpose, I rewrote the job posting, giving it some historical context:
A FEUDAL LORD SEEKETH ANIMATORS.
ARISE, ye students, and work for free,
Accept this honour: to toil for me.
Worthy vassals, good and true -
Here line up, and munch my Pooh.I your Lord, am good and kind,
And seek to guide thy simple mind.
For whilst thy hands are nimble quick,
I do not doubt thy wits be thick.I’ll have ye sketch a hand and boob,
And onwards! though ye be a noob,
Thy labour shall outshine the good,
The greatest ones of Hollywood.SO COME, ye knaves, and tarry nay;
The deadline is three days away.
And tho’ thine hours be full of sweat,
I shall ne’er be in thy debt.There is one gift I can bestow:
Put the work in thine portfolio.”
Whilst this is an extreme example of incompetence, the mindset is all too similar to many animation “producers”:
* No comprehension of the artistic aspects of the medium.
* No comprehension of the tools/technical aspects of the medium.
* No comprehension of the labour involved, or its true value.
* NO respect for the artists…whom they regard as “wrists”.
* An Ayn Randian belief that only executives are truly creative.
The fact that the majority of truly successful animated series (The Simpsons, for example), have been created by cartoonists or artists is beyond them. These shows, however, are the exception. Most people in the industry are cursed to spend their entire careers working on Shr Dreck.
This is one reason why ludicrous buzzwords become so viral in Animation/Design studios amongst the producers (though rarely the artists)…a desperate need to distract people from the fact that THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING. As soon as a fad comes along, they all jump on the bandwagon, shouting the Holy Words like a mantra. “Break the Fourth Wall” was one of the more irksome crazes at Disney Interactive circa 1997. Let’s make sure to “Break the Fourth Wall”. We broke the fourth wall for about six months; then we broke Disney Interactive’s checking account.
It happens over and over - a constant quest for the “magic bullet” - the amazing New Thing that will allow the artists to finish the product for HALF THE PRICE. (Hint: it DOESN’T EXIST). But woe betide you if someone invents a marginal method to improve things slightly (linear, not exponential). We’ll call this thing a FlangeBlaster. Within DAYS every accountant/creative-wannabe will be Flangeblasting you until you’re blue in the face, waving it around like King Arthur with Excalibur.
“Hey, can we Flangeblast it?”"Yeah, just have the wrists Flange the thing. It’ll be done by Friday.”
“Flange Flange Flange Flange Fla Fla Fla Fla Blaster…….”
“FFFLLLAAAANNNGGGGEEEEE BBBLLLLLAASSSTTEEERRRRRR!!!!!!!!”
“Please Kill Me. I yearn for the sweet release of Death.”
Often, artists are in a separate lower caste to these Brahmin producers (and are even lower than writers on the scat-stained totem pole). Needless to say, they are paid accordingly. The artists are also unable to rise to producer status, having no creativity - that being a monopoly of the self-ordained Producers.
We, gentle reader, are poopmunchers. We munch their poop. They tell us it’s chocolate, but nobody believes them - except for the young ones with the bright eyes.
The eyes aren’t bright for long. Soon even they must realise the awful truth: that terrible thing sliding down your gullet isn’t fair-trade low fat chocolate, harvested organically by buxom Guatamalan peasant women. No, it was squeezed from the puckered posterior of your boss, freshly laid that morning. There are still undigested lumps of corn in it.
People wonder why 99.99% of the content of TV shows (live action and animation) is unadulterated drivel. Every second artist/designer has ideas light years ahead of most producers. We all know co-workers who’ve had the contents of their portfolios ransacked by Studios for concepts - which are slightly altered, making them “original”. Hooray for Hollywood!
Bastards.
Artists Unite! No return to Feudalism without a return of the Guilds!
FOOTNOTE: If you’re worrying about the job posting and the studio who asked for it, fear not. A kind-hearted animator came through for them, and did the work ON TIME and ON SPEC. Here it is: