Crop Circles Spiral Cycles - Difficult Years

I know it is pretty safe to make a post. This part of the The Animation Garden has been fallow for a few seasons.

In another animation garden, where we attempt to grow animators in an industrialised system, an unexpected pressure created a test bed that has borne some productivity. Where I teach required greater efficiency. To a bean counter that means; create more in less time. That way we have the same or greater output for a lesser input. They, the disconnected, cut hours.

The ultimate product in contemporary teaching is that a student leaves the place with a qualification. In the wrenching and re-arranging to create greater efficiencies with education regarded as a commodity (something that can be bought and sold), an observation can be made that the re-branded "education" has become dislocated from learning, and a qualification has become dislocated from knowledge and practical skills. Knowledge has become superficial knowing that knowledge practice will gain a student skills, rather than the development of a practical skills based knowledge from practising a craft. It's like gardening by watching gardening shows online or on TV, or cooking by purchasing cookbooks - the screens and pages become a barrier rather than a portal.

An essential element in any creative endeavour is time. More specifically time allocated to practice. For enlightened practitioners that also means time to play. Best to use the terms "research" or, "experiment" if discussing the ideas in a business planning environment. I would contend that one can be busy at play. But futile attempts at convincing a spreadsheet enveloped soul sucking abacus clicker* detracts from essential play time. (*They thrive in the industrialised education system).

Back to the test bed. The above-mentioned system will be closing the productive experiment down soon. It was built in a place that may not meet the suitability of the corporate controllers. So I'll bring the ideas out into the sun in The Animation Garden.

This is a series of posts accumulated on 'self-directed learning' for second year animation students. The most recent first:

At the end of this year the animators around you would have been practising and studying for "2" years. If it's only in class time then that would be about 1152 hours (if you came to work in every class); about a quarter of a two year apprenticeship. An apprentice working at a craft for 8 hours per day 5 to 6 days per week would usually clock up about 4000 to 4800 hours of practice over 2 years. Good on those animators who have been practising the additional hours. Even without the full amount of time applied to learning animation, look at the amazing amount of learning and animation production you have achieved.

This is a two part video essay on creativity that is meant to be inspiring:

The Art of Animation Business... and Freedom

Value?

What was that worth? The animated film you just watched.

Value for money.

Value and money. Do they mix?

Thinking and feeling are often erased by dollars and nonsense.

Beancounters, shareholders, alleged 'creative' teams, investors, committees and risk managers; all assigned to tuck the expression of creativity neatly under the bulge of the bell curve. The combination of aversions and blinkers grinds deep furrows, ruts, for artists to stumble toward the mediocre.

Nelson Boles.

How did you do?

What did you invest? "flash and AE and love"

Then to present such a beautiful creation for free on the Internet.

How will you live?

Free...

Ahh, you're a student. Your work markets the animator, not the other way round.

There is a wonderfilled freedom in being an animation student that is sometimes only noticed in the rearview mirror.

A return to study for skilled animators can yield a lost sense of freedom satisfaction that money can't buy.

It is personally why I think the Gobelins "student" films are so good and why many of us will always be animation students. Even if it's for free using the Internet.

Animation (a) Compulsion

Play the clip and ramble through the animation bramble with a song in your head.

The words were writ while listening to the music. So in attempt at communication amplification, if the mood set for writing is matched to the mood set for reading, hopefully the communication achieves a greater clarity.

While many animators are spending time worrying, some are animating. They need to.

Each morning they wake dreams driven by what they wish to animate.

In the moments before the (grand) opening of an animator's eyelids the scraping and plonking of life's hurdles penetrate the deep creativity of dream sleep to needle the animator into the day.

Fuelled with creativity and hastily scribbled thumbnail sketches the animator is ready to leap, side-step or barge through the everyday to get nestled in the timeless alpha zone and start (or continue) animating.

Animation is a compulsion in a rare few creative people rather than a career choice.

They take it into their grasp and hold it like a malleable hot chocolate hug mug. Either the animation forms around the animator, or the animator forms around the animation. In some cases they blend so that the creator is indistinguishable from the creativity. Animation is no longer the illusion of life; it becomes life.

A life spent in a timeless state is to touch upon eternity.

I have spoken to a few recent graduates of the animation course recently. They have tried other things. They have found work and scrape together crumbs. Now, with real-life jobs and tasks pressing sticky fingers, and looping coils like a crushing python upon them, find themselves back to exploring the magic of creating animation.

Overcoming hurdles for teaching and learning Spacing - Part1

Spacing is one of the hardest issues I encounter as a teacher. Its so vague and hard to pin down compared to its cousins Timing and Posing. Students can display a reluctance to sit down and break bread with spacing, instead opting for the more familiar and easier to understand rellies at the other end of the table. Spacing is a beautiful nuance, a powerful subtext, but in an age where capital letters and more exclamation marks are the standard fall back for extra emphasis it can be hard to communicate its importance.

If you are not aware what spacing is yet, then you can check out our resource page HERE

I think one problem is that it can be quite hard to find a good example of spacing..... Ok Ok, calm down. I know there are some amazing animators out there executing spacing with breathtaking precision and examples of their work all over YouTube. But the problem is that its hard to find an isolated example of spacing that is truly powerful on its own while I can easily find specific examples of great posing and the impact of timing is so clear (relatively speaking).

So examples of good spacing tend to fall into two categories in my experience.

The First is to take an abstract example, the bouncing ball is the classic. Everyone who has ever studied animation and taught it has been through the bouncing ball thing, and with good reason. Every animation teacher is in furious agreement that the bouncing ball is a great example in that it clearly demonstrates the two extreme applications of spacing, easing in and easing out (Here is the kind of thing), I certainly have no intention of trying to remove it from the course I teach in.

There are other good abstract examples too, I love this piece by Michel Gagné as an example spacing used to great effect.

But what I have observed is the creation of a disconnect in the mind of some students, a notion that there are specific contexts for considering spacing, and that when it comes time to animate a character acting it is put aside. Sometimes I would even say students get the impression that spacing is all about weight and gravity, when in my animation I find it to be an integral part of portraying emotion too. Now just to be clear, none of that diminishes the importance of the lessons to be learned by animation bouncing balls and exploring the use of spacing in abstract contexts. I just wonder at the wisdom of so many teachers sticking to the one kind of example, it potentially creates the impression that it is about the bouncing ball its self, instead of the tools used to create it. A student of mine found this great quote from Kevin Koch.....

"Slow-ins and slow-out are important, but they’re a specific spacing solution to the problem of making something decelerate to a stop, or accelerate out of a stop, in a pleasing way. They’re a subtopic of the subject of spacing."

So I guess I'm saying that while abstract examples are a good starting point, there is still a longer conversation to be had. That conversation doesn't fit into a web tutorial, blog post, or promo video for an online school very well. I for one am hungry for a deaper conversation.

The second kind of example is to find a an excellent scene from a movie or something, where the spacing has been used to great effect.

But this represents a problem from the students point of view as well. As I said at the start, the student is pre disposed to looking at and understanding the power of posing and timing ahead of spacing. This scene is firing on all cylinders, not only is the spacing great, but so is the posing and timing. When I try to break down a complete scene and discus the effect of the spacing with a student I am often greeted with a blank stair or discordant statement that leaves me inclined to deduce that they are actually giving the credit for the impact of spacing to the timing or posing. So I suspect that some students have trouble seeing what the spacing achieves when it is presented within a complete context.

So I thought I would try to create an example of my own. The goal is not for these videos to show how to do spacing, but to provide a clear and relevant example of how spacing is going to be important in your animation. Its tricky, I want it simple enough for it to be clear what effect the spacing is having, but complex enough to try and open some doors in the mind of a student. I also want it to be clear that spacing is related to attitude as well as weight. I've decided to try a walk, but have put my ego aside and kept its simple and unpolished. So you will see there are some off balance frames and IK pops in the legs etc, but that's ok because I want the focus on spacing alone (plus time is a factor :P)
An important note, I'm taking a risk here by breaking one rule to demonstrate another, in your own work I think you should always nail your posing and timing before moving on to spacing.

Its quite confronting for me to post work on the net that is structured this way, it could easily be taken out of context and used against me, maybe that's why I haven't seen much like this around anywhere else :P

There are only 4 key frames, extremes (where the feet are furthest apart) and passing points (where one foot is passing the other). The timing and posing for these keys is exactly the same one each walk. All I have changed is the spacing between the keys.

Hopefully you can see that the feel of the walk can be completely changed through the power of spacing alone. In the angry walk I have as a general rule made things accelerate towards the extreme poses and slow down when approaching the passing points. The Strutty one is the opposite. slowing down as it approaches the extremes and speeding up as it approaches the passing point. Just as with the bouncing ball, these are two extreme solutions, there are limitless variations between them. Remember that the time taken for each step is exactly the same in each walk.

I think it helps also to look at some parts of the walk in isolation and focus on one thing at a time to get a feel for its impact.

With some points the difference in the feel of the movement it's so dramatic that it is hard to believe the timing is the same. For example look at how hight the foot coming forward seems to be coming up off the ground in the middle walk and now focus on the same thing on the feet on the right. The key frame where the foot is up off the ground is exactly the same on each example I promise, and yet the character on the right seems to be shuffling his feet along closer to the ground, all because of the spacing.

Now I'm hoping you can fill in the blanks, imagine if you combined this impact with your own specific poses and timing. Just imagine how much more powerful your animation could be.

Blaming Software

At the moment in my teaching I am introducing a class to a whole bunch of new stuff to do in Maya, and like clockwork I have noticed the little comments starting to creep in about the program preventing the students from getting the work they want.

This kind of thing makes me wish we could lock students away from all computers for the first few years of their animation life. Not because I want to save them from the frustrations of using software, but because I want them to realise that their short comings have nothing to do with software and everything to do with experience.

My first animation job was at a completely digital free studio, everything drawn by hand, photocopied onto cel, painted with real paint and shot on film. Even the line testers used video editing stations.

Just as I am introducing my students to new things, those teaching me at Disney were pushing me way out of my comfort zone. And just as my students are discovering, I often found that my work lacked the polish, precision or appeal that I hoped it would. But because I and all my peers and teachers were only using paper and pencils I had no one to blame but myself. Its pretty hard to blame your lightbox for a bad drawing.

Its normal for your work to be sub par when you are trying things for the first time (or even 10th time), its been that way since long before computers were around. If you can see your work could be better that is a good thing, it means your eyes are being opened to the potential in a situation, that you will be aware of ways you can do something better the next time. That is of course as long as you accept the responsibility instead of blaming some external factor.

Make no bones about it, every time you blame a program for poor factors in your animation it is a lost opportunity to learn. Every time you blame something else you give yourself permission to blunder on the same way a bit longer, instead of asking how you might improve your approach or frame of mind next time. When you sidestep the responsibility  you also sidestep the changes that have to happen within yourself if you are going to grow and develop as a creative individual.