Merry Christmas!

Some cards from Christmas Past...

Back in 1989, I photocopied this line drawing onto card stock and hand-watercolored 25 copies. That's my kitty, Gus (R.I.P.)

Later on (circa 1997), my printing capabilities got better and I had this illustration of my kids, and Gus, printed onto several hundred cards (I still have a boxfull in my attic).
Our lawn man was under the impression that we were Jewish, and when he got his card, he thought I had drawn a picture of Jesus running away with the Easter Bunny. A funny notion, but we were happy to straighten him out.

This was the inside illustration in the card. (See? I can be a sweet fellow).

All this is to say may the God of Peace bless your Christmas with grace for you and your family.

Peace on Earth.

Essay: "Please Draw your Attention To..."

This post is inspired by Keith Lango's blog about Saccadic Eye Movement. You know, the quick little darts our eyes do as they check out the view. Keith's take was how to incorporate these into your animation performance. I am looking at the other side of it... that is our audience's eye movements, and how we can control where they look on the screen.

I am building on a subject I touched on in the previous post: How an actor hands off the scene with the eyes. Remember when I mentioned how News Anchors do that? They finish a story and look toward their co-anchor to take it away. The same thing applies in acting. The audience will look where an onscreen character looks, if they hold still and the “looked at” character or object moves (or gets in the spotlight). It’s a way to hand off a scene. It’s an exercise I do (about the only exercise I do) – to watch the actor in a scene who isn’t the focus of the shot, to learn better how not to step on the “star’s” performance.

Remember this scene in “Back to the Future”? It’s when Doc Brown and Marty are getting ready to document the first attempt at time travel:
© Universal Pictures

It’s one of my favorite little scenes in the movie and I use this clip whenever I have lectured on staging. Go rent this and watch this shot frame by frame. It is brilliant and I wonder how many takes they made to get it right. It’s right before the DeLorean time machine takes off. Doc is poised to start the car. The Marty slowly inches out of the impending trajectory path, taking our attention over to him. Suddenly Doc looks over to him, his head movement draws our attention back. Marty stops in his tracks. Doc looks at Marty’s feet, with a slight head move, then back up to Marty. Marty doesn’t move much more than his eye that isn’t behind the camcorder, then he starts to inch back.
Brilliant acting, all in pantomime. Every emotion is clear, even though it is done with the slightest of body language. The timing is impeccable!! Just a frame or two off and we would have missed very important (and not to mention, funny) story beats. It was as good or better than anything Chaplain ever did. (Yes, you should watch Chaplain and Keaton, too. Brilliant timing and staging. They had to be with the technical limitations of their medium – silent black and white, extremely grainy film that was rarely projected at a constant speed!)

The lesson to be learned in all of this is how to anticipate and control the audience’s eye to tell your story. Neither actor moves until he needs to. The director (Zemekis) knew exactly how to set up this gag and how to make it play. Nobody upstaged anybody. It was like a perfectly timed tennis match with each volley raising the tension and becoming funnier than the last. And it’s all one shot!!

Do your scenes have this much control? Do you attempt one thought at a time? Do you allow the audience to see each important action? Or is your acting muddled and all on top of itself? I read a great quote once from Ollie Johnston: “If your scene isn’t quite working, throw out something. Usually it doesn’t matter what.” I have found this to be so true. When something I am working on gets unclear, it’s usually because I’m trying to accomplish to many things at once. I have found this to be true in animating, storyboarding, drawing a simple pose and screenwriting.
(Kind of a life lesson in there, too, eh? Schedule too full? Delete something from your day planner. It probably doesn’t matter what.)

Another great scene to study is the conversation between Shere Khan and Kaa in “The Jungle Book”. There’s lot’s of action going on, but none of it overlaps too far and your attention is always drawn right where it needs to be, to see an expression or to read a gag. Pay particular attention to the moment when Shere Khan picks Kaa’s nose. Everything else in the shot stops briefly so we can see that gag. In fact the previous actions make sure our eye is lured down step by step to that spot low on the screen, just in time to catch that bit of communal hygiene.

Still from Milt’s incredible animation. ©1967 Disney

A great recent example is this shot in King Kong (Mild spoiler, but you saw it in the trailer). It doesn't use glances to follow action, but huge gigantic movements!:
©2005 Universal Pictures.

Four big actions happen one right after the other, each topping the last in tension:
The fall.
The catch.
The roll.
The snap!
It looks like one smooth movement, but four big climactic beats happen here. You can count them off. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Each one points to the next visually. Notice when Anne falls (her lovely pale figure silhouetted against the dark tree so we can see her clearly), how the V-Rex subdues his motion whilst Kong catches Anne so as not to distract the audience’s attention from the primary focus of the shot. He is a professional actor who knows his moment is but a few frames away, when he is cued to leap into the camera.
He teaches a lesson we all could learn.

Animation Essay - Clarity in Staging

Some replies in my previous Animation Essay brought me to another subject. The astute observer will already know that I am about to talk about “clarity in staging”, with an additional foray into “clarity of action”.

Take a good look at King Kong (man! I loved that movie!). During all those incredible fight scenes on Skull Island and the bedlam in NYC, the audience’s eye was always where Peter Jackson wanted it to be. Every action and story point was clear.

When drawing storyboards, I was trained that my drawings should be readable from across the room. That is, the viewer should be able to stand 15 – 20 feet away (3 or 4 metres for my metric friends) and still be able to tell what’s going on. All action and attitude must be clear. Detail won’t help you save a poorly staged drawing. In a story reel (or Leica reel, as some say) the audience will have on average one second to see a drawing. If they don’t know where to look, the effort is lost, and so is the audience. How do you control the audience’s eye, you ask? Here. Allow me to illuminate you: Contrast. The human eye is attracted to the point of greatest contrast in an image. In the human face, it is the eye – the dark pupil against the whites. (But I’m getting ahead of myself). There are 6 main properties, or tools, in cinema to direct the audience’s eye. They are:
- Action
- Lighting/color.
- Shape – the level of complexity of a character, prop, set, etc.
- Camera movement.
- Cutting
- Sound
Now, sound can’t really be counted on to direct an audience attention in a film. Too few theatres have a decent enough system to do that consistently, so I will stick to the first five.

Action obviously refers to a moving character or object. In a still composition, your eye is drawn to the one thing that is moving. Or in a crowded stadium, you will find it easy to pick out the one fellow standing still. If a character turns his eyes to look somewhere else, your glance will follow. Notice the evening news sometime – watch the anchor who isn’t speaking, how he or she keeps actions to a minimum and usually looks to their co-anchor until their time to speak. Same thing applies in acting. If one character is talking, all other characters should allow them to have the screen. Watch a well-acted scene between two characters. They will hand off the shot to each other during the conversation (unless they are a ham and want to steal the scene.) The opposite is true, of course, if the director wants the audience to watch the reactions more than the actions or if he wants you to see the burglar breaking into the jewelry store instead of the cop in the foreground talking about his tight grip on security. This is my biggest point, mostly because we work in motion pictures. MOTION pictures. (Sorry, I’m not shouting, Blogspot won’t let me italicize.)

(The dying character in the forground holds up the flower. The movement of his hand attracts your attention.)

Lighting and color is pretty obvious. Keep the focal point of your composition either the most brightly lit or in silhouette. Contrast, remember? It can be subtle, but it should be there. Keep characters either more or less saturated than the environment, or in a contrasting color palette (e.g. warm vs. cool). Of course, you can let a character blend in to the background and just let their movement be what brings them out.

(The Samurai's lit face contrasts with the shadow of his hat. It's like a target - a white spot in a black circle.)

Shape is a little more difficult to grasp for most folks. I could write a whole chapter on this, there are so many levels. Shortly, a character will stand out from other characters if he is shaped significantly different. Think of all the background characters in “The Incredibles” compared to the main characters. Also, your character will read better if he is significantly more or less complex than your background. (And a character design side note: Don’t make a costume so intricate that it distracts from your character’s face.) You can also use perspective to lead the eye like the drawing below - the bridge railings help point to the far samurai.

(The size and shape contrast here lead your eye to the far character first, along with the perspective lines - also he is black against white for greater contrast. In the final shot, the close samurai steps into frame, so your attention is transferred to him and his movement.)

Camera movement – obviously a moving camera easily directs your eye, you look exactly where you are supposed to. The clearest example of this would be a zoom. There is no question where you want the audience to look. During a long pan (like pointed out a car window), everything zips by, but the barn in the distance that remains still will become a focal point.

Cutting is one of my favorites. You can lead the audience to look at a certain part of the screen, then cut and make them look directly at something in that same spot (often used for shock). Or you can intentionally keep the feeling of the scene frenetic by drastically changing the focal point of the screen. If you make these contrasting focal point during a cut, you will need to give your audience 5 or 6 frames to reorient themselves and find your new focal point. And naturally, better, clearer composition will make this easier for them.

I’m not going to touch sound. I don’t understand it well enough to describe in print. That’s why I rely on my audio engineers during post production.

(Not sure what principle this is, but I liked the drawing. It's clear, yeah?)

Remember, as an animator or filmmaker, you are like a magician, directing (or misdirecting) the audience’s attention to get them to follow your story and to influence (and possibly control) their emotions. In the same way that if a magician’s audience looks to the wrong hand, or under the table, the trick is lost.

Three Watercolor Pigs

My friend Rob Corley just posted a great watercolor illustration on his blog (robsquirrely.blogsot.com). So I figured I'd display these three I did a couple of months ago. I posted a pencil version of them last month, if you wanna check out the archives.

Short Story #4

The following story was found in an old cigar box, under a cinder block beside an abandoned barn behind my house, written on the back of an empty manilla envelope:

Once upon a time there was a baby buzzard named Jules. He enjoyed his life in Death Valley, keeping the desert clean. You see, he suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and everything in his life had to be just so. Anything that appeared to be out of place had to go. Every day he would ride the thermals looking for something that wasn't there the day before. And this day was like no other. There between the big rock that looked like a ranger hat and the lone cactus was a jack rabbit. Or should I say, the day before, it had been a jack rabbit. Today, it was just a lump of fur and decaying flesh. Or, as Jules like to call it, carrion. (He had just learned the word, and enjoyed saying it over and over.)
So, true to his nature, Jules couldn't just swoop down to get his breakfast. No, he had to circle. But the circle had to be just right. He would circle and circle and circle, ever lower and ever more perfect. Some days, this took him half an hour or more. But that was okay with Jules, because he felt obsessively, compulsively satisfied in a job well done. And beside, it gave his breakfast a good chance to warm up in the morning sun.
But today, something different happened. When he lit on the rock that looked like a ranger hat, there was a sound that gave his heart a stir.....

Here, the manuscript breaks off and the original page is torn and waterlogged...
The story picks up here, in progress...

So with that, Jules turned to his new friend and said, "Well that pretty much explains everything!"
"Yup!" said Walter with his slow drawl, spitting for emphasis. "You can never trust a jack rabbit any farther than you can throw him!"
Then without warning a scent wafted through Jules' keen nostrils. It was a new scent, but with the familiar tang that told him dinner would come early.

The End.

I don't know what to make of the story, I hope one day, I run across the middle section.

Animation Essay: "2D vs 3D"

Last Spring a couple of us at work were watching the online trailer for Tim Burton’s, “The Corpse Bride”. Needless to say, my coworkers and I were and were stoked about this movie. But anyway, as we were framing though the quicktime, someone (whom we’ll call “Greg”) came up and said, “Wow! Is that 3D?”. And someone else (We’ll call him “Brian”) answered, “No, it’s puppet animation.”

Now what “Greg” was was really asking was, “Is that computer animation?”, and that’s the question that “Brian” had answered. But I had to step in. You see, this whole “3D” label kinda bugs me sometimes. I said, “No, this is 3D. In fact it’s more 3D than computer animation. These models really exist and you can touch them.” To save on some quotation marks, I’ll continue my tirade in lecture form.

You see, what we have come to casually call “3D” is not really three dimensional. It appears on a flat screen. Height. Width. That’s all. No depth. If I turn my monitor to the side, I don’t see the characters from a different angle. I see the same flattened perspective that I would if “The Jungle Book” were on the screen. Computer animation is no more 3D than a live action movie. They are both projected on a flat plane. (Right about now, I’m hoping that I’ve gotten your dander up enough that you will fail to notice that I just negated my original thesis that puppet animation is 3D. After all, the finished product is no more 3D than live action, either.)

What I call 3D is stereoscopic. That is, binaural images that give the effect of depth. I’m a big fan of 3D movies and stereo photography, but that’s a hobby I won’t get into for this article.

The point I am finally getting around to making is that traditional animation should not have been demoted to “2D” with the advent of computer graphics. There were no D’s at all for seventy years! It was just called animation, or cel animation... up until Buzz and Woody debuted. (Before that computer animation was called CG. I guess that was too cryptic for the masses.) Just because you can rotate the characters with a computer doesn’t mean that the image has any more or less depth than a drawing does. You see, an artist can also turn a character to any angle. If he’s worth his salt, he can anyway. The computer naturally just does it faster. An artist with a pencil sees his or her character with just as much depth as a CPU does. Can you honestly look at a shot of King Louie and think that Milt Kahl was animating a flat image?

(A very dimensional drawing by Tom Bancroft ©Disney)


If we’re going to talk about 2D animation, let’s save that moniker for the stylized likes of Underdog, Samurai Jack, Fairly Odd Parents and Yogi Bear. Those characters are designed to be flat, and they are all the more beautiful for it. Are you listening Greg and Brian?

Don’t get me wrong. I love computer animation (except for the days that one of my animators tells me that ropes are too hard or that a character isn’t rigged to move a certain way!) Computers have opened many doors that traditional animators never even thought about. But I still believe that traditional animation has a couple of advantages that CG has yet to bridge.

Before lighting and texturing entered our animation lexicon, animators had to rely on a simple line to convey a multitude of surfaces. Anything is possible with the power of the line ... uh, except for plaid clothing. Adding shadows to characters doesn’t denote depth, solid drawing does. Beast’s furry mane and Belle’s porcelain skin are both drawn with the same line. But they feel different. They audience knows they are different. Traditional animation involves the audience’s imagination in a different way than the reality of computer renderings do. Like an impressionistic painting, drawings pull you in and make your mind’s eye fill in the gaps. It’s a totally different sensory experience. Even puppet and clay animation has a different feel than CG. Maybe the lack of motion blur gives it that otherworldly feel, and no one has yet been able to truly escape the miniature look. But I think that miniature feel connects with our psyche somehow. It makes us feel miniature, too.

The idea that 3D animation is better is ludicrous (yeah, I said “3D”. I got tired of typing ‘computer animation’, okay?). It’s just as ludicrous as holding onto the idea that cell animation is a truer art. Drawn animation is just as beautiful and moving as the fantastic computer images that fill our screens nowadays. Unfortunately, over the last few years, audiences have come to associate most traditional feature animation with mediocre story lines. And that’s an obstacle that is the art form’s biggest hurdle.

I love traditional animation. I hope it hasn’t gone away for good. After all, the invention of the camera didn’t put an end to painting, people still use candles when light bulbs just won’t create the right mood, and lovers still ride horse drawn carriages through Central Park....

... yeah, right. And I bet some troglodyte is still holding out that cave painting will come back into style.

Zoot

This my friend Todd Bright. I took this after our office Halloween party at Disney back in 1998. Todd and a bunch of other people from the studio dressed up as swing dancers and performed at the party. After all the celebrating, we went out into the Disney/MGM park and snapped some photos on Sunset Boulevard. Love the Caddy, eh?
Todd now has a studio called Living Stone Arts. Check it out at www.livingstonearts.com. He's quite a talented fellow.
Here's another photo of the whole group:

Left to Right: Phil Allora, Seung Kim, Janelle Bell-Martin, Caroline Clifford (seated), Jacque Shepherd, Bryan Sommer, Rachel Bibb and Todd Bright. They were all clean-up artists on some of your favorite animated films, like "Mulan", "Lilo & Stitch" and "Tarzan". I have lost touch with most of these people. But I am sure they are all still doing great art work somewhere. I heard Bryan works for Disney Imagineering (a natural fit). If you know how to contact them, send them this link so they can ... I don't know... look at this and... um... see themselves wearing old clothes.

Dream Part 2

Really wish I had finished more of this so far. I want to get the whole thing down before I forget it. Besides, I've had lots of other fun dreams (and a lot more lighthearted ones) since then.
Anyway, here's the next installement.

For Andy Youssi

I did a finished version of this in ink, and changed the caption a little. But I think this rough sketch is better, and funnier.


By the way, I'm still drawing my dream. I'll post another installment over the weekend.... hopefully.