Hand Drawn Animation Today

First thing I thought this past Saturday when I woke up was; "I want to make a feature length hand drawn animated film." Which is a pretty crazy thing to want to do as an independent. Especially when I already have a 3 minute short film on the go and I'm struggling to find the time to work on that. But I felt that urge and I've felt it before... It was a burst of inspired energy.

I felt this burst of drive in response to the news that broke this past Thursday that Disney had "gutted" it's animation division and laid off many staff including numerous veteran animators. My reaction was basically; "Yeah, they've done that before". When I heard this news it was via an email sent around at work. My co-workers responded to this email with sadness and surprise. The general response of people to the news of the layoffs and discontinuation of hand drawn animation seems to be disappointment that these masters of animation are being let go and that the art form is "dying". People feel that Disney artists spent a lot of time honing this craft and they would then pass on their knowledge to artists who could keep nurturing the system. And then it feels like the whole set of knowledge and expertise was basically dumped. I'm definitely saddened that there aren't more hand drawn features on the big screen but it's my belief that hand drawn animation cannot die. It won't as long as artists continue to create animations of their own. And these days it's easier than it ever has been to produce and distribute animation / shorts independently.

Adam and Dog

It's hard to know what to think of the Disney layoffs. It does suck. I remember feeling sad and fearful when I was still in college during the days of regularly hearing bad news for 2D feature animation. In the early to mid 2000's Disney theatrically released: Fantasia 2000, Dinosaur, The Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Lilo and Stitch, Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range and Chicken Little. In 2003 Disney animators were told that the focus was going to shift to making CG animated films. Please check out this fantastic article that discusses the history and frustration of those times. I graduated college in 2005 so things seemed bleak for the future of hand drawn animation.

From Up On Poppy Hill

I think it's important for hand drawn films to be supported. I suppose that mediocre films aren't going to be blockbusters and they shouldn't be. But if reception is lukewarm, it's just doesn't seem to be enough for the big studios to feel that investing in hand drawn films is worth their time. I think it's important for artists who care about the medium to keep practising and creating in their own time. You just can't wait to see what a studio such as Disney is going to do and hope for the best. We're not always going to be in a golden age. If we let our skills deteriorate, it will be even harder to get hand drawn crews together in the future. And having a knowledge and practise of anatomy and hand drawn animation is very valuable for any animator, including CG, stop motion and cut-out style animators. Critically valuable. I'm not saying that "everyone should be able to draw". There are lots of folks that can't do hand drawn but are great animators. But an understanding of the principals is pertinent and hand drawn animation is great way to practise/learn/refine those skills. Having a copy of Flash or Toonboom to practise digital hand drawn animation is a great idea. You can use the brush tool and draw up a pencil test and be able to watch it back instantly and learn from that.

Black Sunrise

Some animators / studios currently or recently doing 2D hand drawn animation:

*Studio Ghibli - From Up on Poppy Hill is the newest Ghibli offering, directed by Goro Miyazaki. Go see From Up on Poppy Hill in theaters, it won't be in theaters for much longer! It's a damn lovely film.
*Bill Plympton - He recently finished a new Simpsons Couch Gag, a reimagining of Windsor McCay's The Flying House and is soon to release the pencil test and a production blog for his upcoming feature Cheatin'
*Nick Cross He's been hard at work making an entire feature called Black Sunrise. His Tumblr. The trailer for Black Sunrise.
*Minkyu Lee just finished working on the beautiful Adam and Dog which I was fortunate enough to see on the big screen at the Animated Oscar Shorts Screening this year
*Imaginism Studios (with Bobby Chiu ) just successfully wrapped up a kickstarter campaign to make a fully animated comic book called NIKO and the Sword of Light
*Sylvain Chomet - I'm not entirely sure what Chomet is up to these days. According to Wikipedia he wants his next film to be 3D or live action wheras his last 3 were hand drawn

Are you a hand drawn film maker or animator? Please leave you name in the comments and let me know who you are and what you do and put a link to your work!

Visual Post Friday! Cash Rig WIP

I didn't have time to work on Pickled this week, crappily. But I have a good reason; my parents are visiting me from the motherland! So I've been spending time with them. Then any extra spare time has gone towards the animation I need to do at my job. So I share with you today a screen cap of the rig I'm building in Toonboom of Cash, (the husband).

I've been chipping away at this rig (or build) for awhile now. I've been suffering through some technical dificulties so getting work done on this guy has been a struggle. But I've finished the line work of the front view (as you can see). And I've started work on the 3/4 front view.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've decided to do selected scenes from the film with full hand drawn animation. (Like scene 6.) Some scenes I may animate fully with these Toonboom rigs I'm making. And many scenes will be done with a combination of rigs and hand drawn. Getting three minutes of full animation done by yourself in your spare time takes awhile. I really want to get this thing finished one day! So this is my compromise. Here's to completing shortfilms!

Symbols in Flash vs Drawings in Toonboom (Toonboom Tips #1)

Something a little different this week; a tutorial on creating drawings in Toonboom vs creating symbols in Flash! This simple tutorial will be especially useful for anyone just getting into Toonboom whether they have previous experience with Flash or not. Creating a new drawing in the Toonboom library is the equivalent to making a new symbol or instance in Flash.

Here is a screengrab of my Toonboom set up. I've got the drawing named "bi_r_hand" selected and you can see that on the stage by the orange bounding box around the hand, on the timeline as the selected drawing is highlighted and in the library as instance 1_1 is selected of drawing 1_1.

Now if you right click on the drawing in the timeline, a menu will pop up. Go to Drawings and then pick how you want to create a new drawing. You can either create an empty drawing or duplicate the one you've got selected (Alt+Shift+D) which is what I'm going to do this time.

When I selected duplicate drawing, a new drawing instance called 1_2 was created in the library with the same artwork.

Now I'm going to edit the new drawing using the Contour Editor (white arrow) found in the Tools Toolbar. (A sidenote on shortcuts; they are important!!! They save time! My shortcuts are set to Adobe Flash which is useful to me since I go between Toonboom and Flash regularly and switching between shortcut setups can be a real mindfuck. Since these shortcuts mimic the shortcuts in Flash, I don`t have to memorise a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts for the same tools. The shortcut for the Contour Editor in Flash is "A" and when set to Flash style shortcuts in Toonboom, it's Alt+A. The regular Toonboom Animate Shortcut for the Contour Editor is Alt+Q.) Toonboom has a few really amazing contour editing tools that Flash doesn't. For example the Show Contour Editor Controls button in the Tool Properties menu. If you select this tool, you can move it around the stage and rotate or scale selected pivot points. It will appear like a blue bounding box. If you want to create new points on the drawing, hold control while hovering over a contour and then click.

Now I'm done editing the drawing. (I moved the pinky finger out.) The instance in the drawing (1_2) is visible when the library is open.

Now if you want to show drawing 1_1 again, you move to the spot on the timeline you want that drawing to appear and move the slider back on the library.

Let's take a look at the equivalent for this in Flash. In the screen cap below I've got a Flash file open and I'm on frame 93 of an animation. The front paw symbol is selected and you can see in the Properties tab that it's called "paw" and is set to single frame and instance 2.

On frame one the same symbol is on the same layer but instance 1 is used and still set to single frame.

When you click into the symbol called paw, you can see the two instances back to back on the timeline. Of course it's possible to set frames to single frame or play once, or loop, depending on what you need in the scene. I often use play once to embed animation within a symbol and just make sure that the frames on the outside of that symbol have the right instance set. This function is extremely useful, especially for face compositions (comps) or hands.

Let me know if you have any burning Flash or Toonboom (or hand drawn) animation questions! I'd be happy to post more tutorials in the future if people find them helpful. This one was inspired by Jay Edry.

An extra note: Particularly for TV and film productions, it is useful when using Flash to add new symbols to a file by embedding them inside master symbols set graphic and single frame. (For example with hand or face symbols.) Using symbols set to movie clip in a film production is more or less a no-no, however they are often useful for web animations. More often than not though, I use graphics whenever I can in any Flash animation. Keeping the timeline and library clean and easy to navigate are of utmost importance for the efficient animator, especially when sharing files. I currently work at a game studio and I've had to access other animator's Flash files that were animated a couple years ago. When the animators created those files, they did not dream that their files would be opened up again and reauthored or tweaked. But it's best to always assume that your work can and will be opened up by another artist at a later date.

Happy Digital Animating!

Background Painting: The Vanity

Here is a background I recently touched up! It depicts the scene Birdie fantasises about when she goes into her mind after experiencing a surge of emotions at the dinner party. She falls into the scene and struggles to swim through the air towards the vanity. When she reaches it to lean on for support, her reflection in the mirror speaks to her.

The colours I use in my film have meaning. This background is a blast of purplish pink. Pink is Birdie's innocence, personality and inner self, purple (and blue) are truth, and white is... how shall I say... shallow desire? White represents what Birdie hopes to gain in life before she is attune with her own emotions.

Weekly News, GDC and My New Cintiq!

I haven't checked out my list of favourite animation links in awhile and when I shared a list of them with fellow animators at work recently I realised that there's a new podcast up at Splinedoctors that's been there since January 6! It's an interview of Mark Walsh who currently directs and animates at Pixar. I love filling my ears with inspiring and informative animation related podcasts!

This past week GDC rolled into town. I animate at a video game company in San Francisco so there is no way to completely escape the 5 day rapture of lectures, video games and parties. I heard about lots of cool lectures and game related news and products that friends and co-workers experienced. I'll have to wait to experience the Oculus or the Ouya for myself. I met up with a friend from college (Jay Edry!) who was in town for the conference. We talked shop and ended up at the Destructoid (an independent video game focused blog based in San Francisco) party on Friday night at Sip Bar and Lounge. While there I met Dom, a game designer who brought his new card came; Without Question that I had the chance to play.

I did get to borrow an Expo pass for an hour on Wednesday. I jogged off to GDC and beelined right for the Wacom booth to try out the new 13" Cintiq, available in early April. (Price $999.99) It felt great and I was pleased at how much information could compactly fit onto the smallish screen. So I tried that out... then I tried out the 22" Cintiq... then the 13" again. The I handed over my credit card and bought a 22" Cintiq. Which felt crazy and scary, but I figured that if I'm finally going to go ahead and get a Cintiq, I should just go for it. I don't want to have a smaller one at home and in a month regret not having just invested in the larger version. While the 13" Cintiq felt like a fantastic quality product, I don't want to feel claustrophobic while I animate and paint. I've felt such a pressure to "go digital" with my short film that it's directed my path of attack quite strongly of late. I really want to finish my film! And I think that doing a good chunk of the work digitally is going to help me get there faster.

So now I have a cintiq at home! I sure wish that the pressure sensitivity would work in Toonboom though. I've not been able to get that sorted out. Hopefully Toonboom's support team helps me out soon enough.

They call me Yellow Jello

Visual Post Friday!!!

I finished the last background painting from the outdoor dinner party sequence! This past Friday and Saturday I was painting the spectacular yellow fruit jello mold and here it is in all it's tacky glory:

As you can see I painted it beyond the frame edge, that's why there's that green stripe and all the brush strokes beyond that. It's just nice to have a whole jello. Mmm, olives in jello....

Write up and Review of The Croods

Directed by Kirk DeMicco and Chris Sanders.

Voices of Emma Stone, Nicolas Cage, Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener, Clark Duke and Cloris Leachman.

One huge pull for me to see The Croods was the involvement of Chris Sanders of whom I'm a big fan. I'm happy to report that the film is oozing with the Sanders touch. You can feel it in the story, the gags and the look of the film. Kirk DeMicco I was not familiar with before learning about The Croods but he co-directed the film and came up with the original conceit. I'm looking forward to seeing more projects come out of both directors. They have a love for cartoons and story which is exciting. The Croods had a real cartoony style... I think "cartoon" for some comes off as a dirty word, a word that makes grown ups roll their eyes and go back to their "real movies about real people" or whatever. But by cartoony I mean that while the characters are developed and real and the story is solid, falling off a cliff or getting struck by lightning or smacked in the face by a rock doesn't cause serious injury to the characters. There is a lot of laugh out loud slapstick humor and gags. The sort that audiences rarely get to indulge in at the theater these days. And every gag is in service of story or character. DeMicco commented in an interview that he really loves the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons and that he wrote a first pass on a Hong Kong Phooey script. (This was before there was a Kung Fu Panda). DeMicco said that it felt like it was a dream project though the property left his hands before it was completed.

The Croods started in 2004 as a script written by Kirk DeMicco with John Cleese. It was a caveman movie about the fear of change featuring a very inventive guy alongside a luddite to be animated with stop-motion animation by Aardman Studios. In 2007 when Sanders came onto the project the story was then about a village of cavemen led by Grug. DeMicco and Sanders worked on that idea for a year and were struggling to get it to work. Sanders was asked to go work on How to Train Your Dragon (which he co-directed with Dean DeBlois). Soon after, DeMicco called Sanders up with a pitch about one family that goes on a road trip to find a new home when their cave is destroyed. Both directors realised that this new conceit really allowed the theme of change to work.

I read a comment  by a reader at Cartoon Brew on a The Croods talkback post that lamented Eep's lack of an arc. I think this reader is missing the point. The creators of the film didn't set out to write a "bad-ass girl shows the world who wears the pants" story. Eep is independent, strong, motivated and honest. She wants more from life and clashes with her dad Grug on the lifestyle of their family. And the very theme of the movie is to chase tomorrow, to want a better life and not be afraid of change. Eep's curiosity and rebellious nature eventually sets the whole family on a path of change and discovery. And she sticks to her guns throughout the film. The character who really experiences an arc is Grug. He is afraid of change but realises that his family does crave a better tomorrow and that change can mean discovery and betterment. I found it easy to feel for Grug since he is a strong and protective dad and is just so damn earnest. He cares about his family more than anything. While his "never not be afraid" attitude is stagnant and frustrating to his family, it did keep his family alive for a long time.

The Croodaeceous Era is visually stunning and very lush. The trailers feature a lot of dry looking rocks and caves, but there is a whole gorgeous alien world that The Croods enter that is to be enjoyed like candy. The world is populated by many fun and appealling prehistoric animals. Watch out for crocopups, trip gerbils, mousephants and of course adorable and fierce macawnivores; that brightly colored giant headed cat creature you'll see on some of the promo posters.

Personally, I loved seeing this movie. I laughed out loud at many clever gags. The film's conceit and world felt unique and refreshing. I felt that the threat the family was running from was clear and the resolution satisfying, emotional and fun. I was very pleased with each individual character's personality and role in the film. The cartoony nature of the film was so much fun. The family really behaved like a family. Each character acted on impulse which felt real and it was entertaining as hell. I watched the first trailer ages ago and felt like it made the film out to be cheesey and mushy. When I go back and watch the trailers now I don't feel like that anymore but the way that they are cut just doesn't compare to the quality of the film.

Now who doesn't love checking out deleted scenes and storyboards? Or drooling over Chris Sanders drawings? Sanders posted a bunch of deleted boards from the film on his personal blog, check them out! Currently there are 10 entries of deleted boards, just scroll down and drink them in.

Head of character animation on the film was done by James Baxter and you can check out a series of videos released by Dreamworks on youtube of him showing you how to draw characters from the film! Here is the video of Eep!

A couple of the great artists who worked on the film were Steven A. Macleod on storyboards, Shannon Tindle on character design and Nicolas Weis on visual development. But that is only a few of the many great artists who had a hand in making this film. You can check out lots more gorgeous loveliness in The Croods art of book. Here's a great review on that from an excellent unofficial The Croods blog and you can get the book here.

I don't really want to share any clips of the movie here since you will want to be surprised by the clever gags in the theater with an audience and laugh out out with them. (Ok so I watched all the trailers but ended up laughing at the gags when they were on screen anyway.) But really, just go see it in theaters the way it was meant to be seen and enjoyed!

What It Feels Like When I Work On My Film

When I work on my film I feel like I am respecting and showing love to the people that I care for and who care about me in my life. Animation is so dear to me and working on my film brings me joy. So I feel that if I can find satisfaction and contentment while working on it, that I'm showing the people who support my endeavors that I value their respect and love. Maybe even make them proud. I'm able to spend lots of time on it since I have no real deadlines so my perfectionist self can really go to town. I've been so busy the past few months there hasn't been the time to work on it. However I want to carve out a schedule for myself that allows time for working on my film in small bursts throughout the week.

They say that marketing your work is half the gig. Besides, more regular posts will mean keeping in touch with friends around the world. I'm going to attempt to blog more regularly about my progress. I figure that one written update once a week and one visual post (e.g a painting in progress) once a week is ambitious enough for me for now. Tuesdays will be written content, Fridays visual. And with that, I'll get back to painting yellow fruit jello!

I do have the habit of putting up a tweet when I work... I loves me some Twitter. Psst, I'm @andreakhaid on Twitter! (I recently changed from my old Twitter name which was art_candy.)

it's yellow jello time

Backyard Painting Evolution - Blogger is broken so I can't put text in this post :'(

Backgrounds - The Cellar (WIP)

Work in progress! I've been painting and drawing backgrounds. Got a trillion pickle jars left to draw.