Perma-nation?

So its time for this blogger to stop beating around the bush and get to the point that's been gnawing away at my mind since kicking this blog back into life a few months ago.

The bottom line is, I'm not happy with the statuesque in the world of animation. I've spent about 20 years coming at it from every angle and the sad truth is it has never really turned out great. There have been some good times for sure, but ultimately studios of all kinds play the short term game, use up 'talent' like it is an endless resource and consistently put the all mighty dollar ahead of the very thing they need to survive. Creativity

I've also tried the indie path, making my own TV show and working on several indie games, but the market had become virtually impenetrable for anyone unwilling to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

I'm not going to dwell too much on the negatives, but they are the starting point. I feel the potential creativity within most artist ends up being stunted by the systems they are forced to exist within so they can pay the rent etc. I'm sure we could argue the finer points of how the industry treats people till the cows come home, but there isn't much point. What I'm saying is that I think we could aim for something better and I bet I'm not alone.

So this idea has been kicking around in my head for a while, but I've been unable to pin it down. The vocabulary I needed ended up coming from an unlikely source, I hope to be moving to the country soon and doing a lot of gardening, and my research into gardening led me to Permaculture. I found this to be a fascinating movement, and immediately began to see connections between it and what I was trying to put together in my mind about animation.

What is Permaculture? Its essentially about designing sustainable environments with the focus being on how to provide for our needs in a way that works with nature’s processes and ecology, it can apply to almost any other part of your life, the garden, the house you live in, the way you get to work, the products you buy, etc. It is about working towards a system that creates more energy than it uses (just like nature does), now think back to animation, doesn't that sound like the kind of animation studio, school, club or community you would like to be a part of? Can you imagine a creative workplace where people leave at the end of the day feeling more inspired and invigorated than they did where they arrived? Is that even possible? It seems so far removed from the studios I have worked in where everyone leaves exhausted and zombiefied at the end of the day (or night). It seems like a pipe dream, but could it be that usually its just something people never think to try, something dismissed because of financial concerns.

What feeds the creative spirit? We know its not money, no-one was paid to do ancient cave paintings but they still happened. We know its not fame, most animators I know are shy when out in the "real world".

Taking a broad perspective I believe it is two main things that make an animator tick.

• A connection between something from us and those who see our work.
• The opportunity to learn about the nature of that connection and explore its potential.

What if ensuring this happened was the first priority of a creative community every day, the first priority of a school, even the first priority of a business?

Could one design a system that achieved this? An ecologically inspired design for a creative environment, this has become my new fascination ( along with Permaculture itself, but that doesn't belong on this blog :P ) and will I think become the focus of my animation related blogging for the foreseeable future. I hope you'll come along for the ride and give me some feedback too :)

Overcoming hurdles for teaching and learning Spacing - Part2

The other thing that makes it hard to teach spacing, is that when animating you have to think about what you intend to do with the spacing at a different time to when you apply it.

Why?

Because the spacing (or what you intend to do with the spacing when you get around to it) will potentially have an impact on what you can do with the posing and timing. This creates a chicken and egg scenario, the timing and posing needs to be done before the spacing, but the spacing is needed to inform the decisions you will make about posing and timing.

Experienced animators who have seen their spacing in action many times over form a mental image of what their spacing will be for a scene (not always how it turns out in the end, but an educated guess to use as a starting point) and then often without even realising it they will factor that into the poses they create. But for a student who has not yet seen much of the spacing they have produced in action this can pose a problem, I find that the uncertainty of how spacing will effect the animation can lead to a reluctance to embrace and practice it.

So an example.

Here (above) I have created two poses to start my scene. Its not all of the keys, its the two main storytelling poses, there needs to be anticipation and overshoot keys added in there yet, but before I can make them I really need to think about the spacing a bit. Its set to stepped tangents so you can't see any inbetweens.

So next (above) I have made a piece of animation you would probably never make, just so I can make my point I have applied some spacing to the basic poses. If this wasn't being done just to illustrate a point it would be a complete waste of time, because all the work I did on the pacing here will need to be re done when I add more keys. The animation here is something like what an experienced animator would imagine before adding more key poses.

But you can see I have decided to make him accelerate up into the final pose, there are going to be lots of inbetweens around the start of the scene and not many at all towards the end. In fact at the end of the movement he moves really fast, not because of the timing, but because the inbetweens are spaced out so that he covers the whole second half of the movement between two frames. As it is here we have heaps of time to absorb the movement around the first pose because there are lots of inbetweens close together there, but the end of the movement seems to pop because there are so few inbetweens that we can hardly take in the movement at all.

OK so now we can delete all that spacing (back to stepped tangents for a bit) and get back to the real process, I am happy with the main keys (well maybe not, but its just an example and time is a factor :P) and I have taken some time to imagine the spacing to the best of my ability. You can see I have added and anticipation key where he bends his knees and and overshoot key where he stretches out and then settles back into the final position.

I know there will be lots of time to take in the anticipation pose because it is where he is moving lowly, so the pose probably needs to be towards the believable end of the range I'm shooting for in this movement. Anything strange will stick out because the viewer will have time to study this moment. The overshoot pose on the other hand will be quite different, the spacing will make the movement will be very fast at this point, this is where I can be a little more adventurous, viewers may not be able to study the pose, but I still want it to have impact.

On this still of the overshoot frame you can see that I have stretched out his body and arms a lot (obviously 'a lot' of stretch depends on the style of animation you are doing). Looked at as a still it is a very unusual pose, but when seen in motion you wont be able to see this, because I know what the spacing will be doing at this point in the scene I know this key is more about creating something that you feel than something you see. Knowing what I will do with the spacing informs what I do with the key. it provides a great place to play and be creative, you still have to test your work a lot, I'm not talking about anything so extreme that it breaks the continuity of the animation, but in some cases you would be amazed what you can do.

With some spacing added you can't really see the stretch at all, but hopefully you can feel the impact of the overshoot. If I had more time, I'd refine it further (and go on to add overlap etc etc), what I would be aiming for is the most impact I can get out of the poses without it seeming to pop (loose its continuity).

I remember seeing a key frame of Rafiki in Lion King 2 where he is spinning around with his arms out as he sings and for one frame his hand almost completely fills the shot. Not only is the hand completely blocking the view of the characters face, but the hand is all stretched out. I was a newb inbetweener at the time and remember thinking that it must be a mistake, but when I saw the scene playing later I realised you couldn't even see the frame because the spacing dictated that it was moving very quickly at that point, but you did get a distinct feeling of the hand swooshing past the camera. Its about 2:03 into this video, see if you can spot it :P

There are some really fun examples on this site http://animationsmears.tumblr.com/, BUT don't get the wrong impression. These are extreme cases, its not a chance to go crazy every time you have some fast movement, hopefully you can see from my example above that you can be quite subtle about how you use this too. As with everything in art and animation, its about choosing your moment, creating contrast and being selective. I do think though that when it comes to exercising these kinds of tools, student animators generally tend towards the conservative and I'd love to see students pushing things a bit more, while you are a student is the perfect time to push things and see what you can get away with. Chances to play around can rare once you are in the industry.

Spacing is a key factor in how you block and time out your animation. Its hard to taking into account when you are first learning because you can't necessarily see how it will help. The solution is to produce, but keep an open mind, be adventurous about how you uses spacing. Explore the extremes, find that point where a scene breaks and then come back a bit from there. How much can you push the inbetweens around between two keys and what impact will that have on the keys themselves. I think a good animator knows where the edge is, and isn't afraid to step over it every now and then to see what happens.

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.

Thank yourself for not growing old

Animation. The pursuit of improvement is in the doing.

The most difficult part of jumping off a bridge with a large elastic band around the ankles is to jump.

Getting into an animation project, opening the software to start or continue work is sometimes a great hurdle for some. That is why it is good to form some basic habits in the studio.

Arriving at your work area open the software you will be animating with and open the project that is being worked on. Do it. Do it as a habit. Every work day for at least 6 weeks, that is, do it 30 times before even thinking about what you are doing. Do it before opening any emails or social networking pages. If you haven't done it yet, do it now.

It all boils down to the old animation adage, "Getting started is all about getting started".

A wise animator also said, "Jump in, don't over think it, just jump in [and animate]. Do that for awhile, then look at what you've got. That's when to start thinking. When you have something to think about." It's an interesting approach. Best not applied in some North Queensland rivers as the something worth thinking about may have hold of your leg.

Another wise animator used to espouse, "Beware of paralysis of analysis." Whereas marriage may be a thinking person's game, it would appear that animation is about releasing a subconscious flow of creativity, releasing the animation animal within, before caging it up with too much thinking.

Which brings us to thanking yourself.

There are a few things that an animator can do in the present. The first is mentioned above. The second is actually unplugging the modem from the computer, thus unplugging the Internet dopamine drip from receptors in the brain. Freezing winter farmyard fowl, going cold turkey. Some animators are now choosing to work at computers that have no Internet connection capability.

The third is to sketch or write down your goal for the animation in the next hour or three. Then repeat the process after each coffee sucked Tim Tam to form a habit. A good one.

The future you, who is the current you, will thank you, when the future you becomes the current you in a few hours time. Knowing that the goals have moved from the brain to page, and having made a contract, of sorts, with one of ourselves, is a great way to take personal responsibility to animate and get the job done.



As we all have found, once in 'the zone', surfing the alpha waves, a creative artist steps outside of time. While all those in the 'real world' are aging, animators remain young, youthful and timeless in the zone. You have yourself to thank for putting you there.

Work on your good habits. Happy animating.

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.

Traditional Animation With Photoshop

Lately I have been having a bit of fun with some old school traditional animation in Photoshop. I've talked to a few students about it and they seemed interested in how I do it, so I thought I'd make a video. I also cover how you can use the same system for rotoscoping.

We're BACK!

Hi! Well after quite a long stint away we are kicking the ARC back to life, As you can see we have a new name. 

The resource links are still here, there is a link over in the top right hand corner of the page.

As a general rule we are not going to post links to films here any more, instead we will do such things on our new Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gorilla-Animators/161818573884546

This page will be more for our own content. Stay tuned :)

Le Noeud Cravate - Jean-François Lévesque

Le Noeud Cravate (The Necktie) by Jean-François Lévesque is a National Film Board of Canada work that has an appealing mix of animation styles. It has many award wreaths.