#I even considered TVPaint and such softwares before

[dicenete]

I'm so excited about Procreate Dreams, I already got it pre-purchased and now I'm just waiting it to be released. But one thing kinda bugs me a bit... Yes, it is very inexpensive software. $20 or so. (23€ in Finland for reasons) and it is one time purchase. THAT'S GREAT! But... it is only on ipad. Only on iOS. And that you get a ipad that runs it smoothly and you have enough storage space... that's gonna be a device that costs over 500 dollars/euros, more closer to 900 if you want something with a decent storage space and specs. And then you have to get the apple pencil that is another 100 dollars/euros on top of that. So if you only buy it for the Dreams, then the total amount would be around 1020 [insert your currency]. That's not cheap. Of course, it is an investment and you can do lot of things on ipad. But still.

I have older ipad pro (I got it like... 3-4 years ago) and really hope it works on it, I know that I have the correct iOS version so it will most likely work. I really would hate it if I had to get a new ipad just for one software to work. Especially when it seems like a huge game changer. I appreciate Savage and how they do things, and concentrating on only one operating system really helps to optimize the software for that system and it is great! But owning an Apple product is already a status symbol on its own because those are expensive af. Especially if you want to get something that doesn't drop from Apple's update radar next year.

[canmom]

Animation Night 48 - Independent Web Animators... 2!

It's hard to believe we're approaching the big 50... and in a few weeks I'll have managed a full year of Animation Nights every Thursday.

This week, I'm returning to one of my earliest themes: the independent web animation scenes we first visited in Animation Night #10. Last time, we went on a bit of a historical survey of the classics: the Newgrounds flash scene of Xiao Xiao and Bitey, the charm of SamBakZa's There She Is!, the wonderful body horror fractals of Cyriak, and the most recent stylish generation of indie animators on youtube like Felix Colgrave and Vewn. Check that post for the full list!

Well what's happened since then? Many of these animators have dropped new videos, and I've been introduced to a few more. So I have some pretty sick stuff to show... we'll get to that in a minute!

At the same time, the sword of Damocles has fallen: Flash player is now officially killed off - with lossy, high bandwidth raster video apparently considered preferable to building a secure, backwards-compatible swf player, as far as the powers that be are concerned! Sure, the actual software, now called Adobe Animate, still exists (competing with others like Toonboom as general purpose vector animation software), but while before just about anyone could get their hands on a pirated copy of Flash, the present version is locked into Adobe's subscription ecosystem...

(for more, see Nathalie Lawhead's v good writeup on the death of the Flash website)

Is this going to prove “good” or “bad” for web animation? Who the fuck even knows lol. It's definitely a very different scene these days: Flash has given way to genuinely free tools like Blender Grease Pencil, Krita and OpenToonz, and for those who can afford them, pro tools like TVPaint and ToonBoom. These tend to enable much more sophisticated animation workflows, but you also face a steep learning curve.

The economics has also changed a lot: nowadays people can devote themselves to it full time if they can attract some kind of Patreon audience. The way that shakes out is that a lot of today's web animators are doing much more “technically impressive” stuff than anyone could do in Flash back then, both technically and often narratively (NG's 5MB limit was a pretty harsh creative restriction)...

But something was still lost, I feel? Precisely because the technical standard was not especially high, the old Flash scene was a kind of supportive ecosystem where people could experiment without (much) judgement. Money was not involved, which meant that essentially everyone there was in it for fun - and that's a barrier for entry, admittedly. Still, that world meant someone like Felix Colgrave could get started with shorts like the one above, and find an appreciative audience, long before the days of ‘Double King’. Today, it feels like the pressure is heavier: everything has to be oriented towards self-promotion on the wheel of Content, to build that same Patreon or Youtube audience.

Of course, there's no point wishing for a more innocent internet... or pretending that, without nostalgia goggles, the majority of stuff on NG back then wasn't kinda shit lmao.

Luckily, there are efforts to preserve the old Flash videos! The Internet Archive has a clever WebAssembly-based flash player alternative, and an impressive (if hard to navigate) collection of Flash videos. Another substantial archive is maintained, using the original Flash Player in a special sandboxed browser, as BlueMaxima's “Flashpoint”. Meanwhile, Newgrounds have batch converted their entire database to raster video, and still seems to have a healthy community producing original animation for their weirdly gamified rating system - some of it, like Gooseworx below, is indeed really good. This won't save the stuff that's not part of these big archives, the swfs on obscure self-hosted websites, but it's not all gone!

Anyway, that's my little soapbox over! There are many ways things are much better for indie animators who can't afford to go to animation school. For one, there's so many more good, free resources now than ever before - to name a few who've helped me, check out *deep breath* [Toniko Pantoja] [Striving For Animation] [Dong Chang] [Studio Bulldog] [Howard Wimshurst] [Aaron Blaise] [Ian Hubert]... and there's an abundance of less centralised ways for people to get a start like Multi Animator Projects and animation memes. Not to mention the influence of the sakuga fandom giving people lofty inspiration... it's still an exciting time!

And who knows, maybe one day the Grease Pencil user community will be as vibrant as the old Flash one.

So who are we watching today then? Let's reel em off!

the returning stars...

the ppl we saw last time have not stopped animating...

Felix Colgrave, the extremely talented Australian behind Double King, dropped a new video called Throat Notes full of his usual surreal, psychedelic imagery! This one's about bugs.

Gooseworx is the person who got me to look back at Newgrounds, by making some really perfectly timed videos with a great sense of weird comedy and squishy, bouncy movement. Her Little Runmo we saw last time, but now she's dropped a much longer sequel to Elain the Bounty Hunter in Elain Gets Adopted! Can our triangle girl get out of being a human(...ish?) pet?

Jonni Phillips is hard at work on her feature-length film Barber Westchester (which may stretch the definition of 'indie' since she's now leading an outsourced animation team lol), but for now we can watch all of her wonderfully disconcerting lead-in series Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners! She has a really distinctive style, leaning way into extreme exaggeration and the 'boiling' lines effect (where every drawing is drawn twice and rapidly alternates between frames). Totally slept on her last time, I want to give her a proper showing this time around!

Vewn (Victoria Vincent) made a little short about a monkey since last we saw her - but I also want to show a few more of her previous stuff we didn't cover last time! She remains one of my favourite web animators, with a brilliant ability to ratchet up a sense of alienation and tension and an amazing way of using distorted perspective.

the newcomers...

and meanwhile I got familiar with some more animators...

Worthikids is one of the people who’s really flying with the possibilities of Blender grease pencil to combine 2D and 3D animation - and he's just a plain good character animator, especially for expressions, with a great sense of humour. We’ll check out his Bigtop Burger series about a travelling food truck run by clowns, and his recent short Wire in which a different group of clowns battle vampires. Clowns seem to be a thing for him.

Joel Guerra also recently made big waves with his ENA series, with a wonderful aesthetic taking after early CGI and clipart as a context for surrealism. Most of these videos feature ENA wandering around talking to various characters while we soak in the ~vibes~...

Howard Wimshurst is the host of a discord server for indie animators I've taken to hanging out in, but of course he caught my eye in the first place for tremendously impressive full-figure animation, along with really strong storyboarding and textured brushwork like Encounter.

Toniko Pantoja meanwhile is a CalArts grad whose educational videos are some of the most useful out there (if sometimes a little meandering!) He mostly works in the mainstream industry but occasionally releases very cool original projects like this!

Studio Bulldog are a tiny four-person indie anime studio, who appeared on the scene recently with some cute short films and very informative videos on the anime production process in English.

DawnOfNSSD, aka @bionicie on here, is out pioneering the genre of Bionicle stop motion erotic/fight animation. Their work is fascinating, and does some very clever little technical things (most stop motion animators have little interest in martial arts, sadly, since there's clearly a lot of potential!) - and honestly like, the absolute vision of it! Titty bionicles!

Shingo Tamagawa is an skillful key animator with credits ranging from Gundam Thunderbolt to 3-Gatsu no Lion, but he made an enormous splash in animation circles last year with his beautifully coloured short film Puparia. This film exhibited a level of drawing precision that would be hard to match for big studios with entire cleanup departments, and incredibly beautiful, moody atmosphere shaped by precise, manga-like drawings and a richly saturated colour palette. No wonder it made waves!

The old school...

We covered most of the main hits last time, but we gotta include at least some NG stuff right? Last time we covered the main ones - Bitey of Brackenwood, Animator vs Animation, Xiao Xiao, There She Is! - but we haven't quite covered all the good stuff yet...

Madness Combat by Krinkels is technically not in the 'stick figure fight' subgenre, since the guys are like little raymans or something, but really who cares about the difference hehe. It's a sprawling series on one very straightforward premise: a little guy kills a lot of other little guys, then probably dies. Well, these things became wildly popular because Krinkels had a decent sense of fight choreography and timing out the fights to the beat, which made his stuff stand out among all the stick videos. It's all about rhythm! I'm not gonna show too much of this because they are basically 10+ years of the same video getting gradually more elaborate, but we gotta give it a nod!

Nathalie Lawhead is best known as a game developer, but early on she was part of the Flash scene, with projects like the Rotfront Sovietoblaster music video and Alien Invasion. It's so wonderfully energetic and such a perfect encapsulation of its era that I gotta show some.

The Older School

Now, this playlist might not go very far. I haven't timed it out, I'm running late as it is. If it turns out these are so short we're done in a couple hours, I have a plan B: we'll check out some of MTV's Liquid Television block, which (alongside other similar festival-type presentations like Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation) is where you'd take your work before there was a Newgrounds: a collection of original, boundary-pushing short films. For me, it's most notable for incubating Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, which started this whole thing! You might say that Animation Night owes its existence to Liquid Television. Unfortunately, it remains available only in VHSrip form, but hey, that just adds to the flavour.

Animation Night 48 will start very soon indeed, like more or less right now at twitch.tv/canmom. Hope to see you there for an Animation Night the way we used to do it! There's so much different stuff I'm sure I'll find something you're into :D

[titmasjack]

Mystery Box Briefing

For the second half of BA1b, and as our brief overlap just before our first submission due on the 26th of February, today I was introduced to the ‘Mystery Box Project’. Our largest element of animation that will be produced in the first year, this project gives us the opportunity to focus on and explore the medium of our choice as an introduction to not only choosing a specialism but interpreting, designing and creating an outcome in a much more industry-led process.  

With the opportunity to explore either CG or Stop-Motion our brief introduction to either medium over the previous three weeks gave us our first initial insight to the programs, processes and techniques I am expected to incorporate throughout either path I decide to pursue. Whilst I don’t have to initially decide today, my first instinct was to pursue CG not only for my keen interest in the medium itself but its inherent dominance in today's animation market. And with the capability of spending additional time in one area of animation, I believe it would best suit me to pursue and explore the medium that I could most incorporate within an animation career down the line. 

Although I have particularly enjoyed stop-motion more over the past few weeks, I believe I would be able to create a more refined and better-animated outcome through the use of CG. Using a pre-determined rig provided by the ‘11 Second Animation’ Club, I think that my approach to animation would best suit CG’s process of iteration and editorial capabilities in comparison to Stop-Motion’s very much straight ahead approach to animation. 

Having to consider how I can best incorporate the principles of animation into my work, I believe that through CG’s inherent ability to reiterate and add additional animation through the use of passes I would be able to create a much more ‘refined’ and ‘animated’ character that uses and exaggerates more prominent principles such as exaggeration and secondary action in comparison to the same rigged character using stop-motion. 

Brief Expectations

With four weeks to create a short animated sequence using a pre-defined 3D rig or stop-motion armature, we’ll be exploring an industry influenced process in which I establish the journey between the beginning to the final outcome of my main animated piece for the second half of BA1b. To create an 10-15 second animated sequence, I will have to establish a character entering on screen, interacting and looking into a ‘Mystery Box’ followed through by reacting to its content. 

Whilst the action must take place within a fixed shot, I have the flexibility to explore the use of angles and dynamics of the character as well. Considering who the character is through their use of action can I determine a character through their use of posture and gesture alone. Even though we’ll all be working with a pre-defined character and rig, how can I ensure that my character is unique through the way they act? What's in the box, even though I’m not allowed to show the contents of the box to the audience, will I allow what's in the box to determine how my character reacts, how will this establish the characters fear or intrigue to the box in the first place? 

These are all things I can consider and will have to build upon throughout the first weeks of my project. Not only expected to create an animated outcome, but I will also have to deliver an established variety of storyboards that showcase my original ideas. A detailed animatic that shows a moving image sequence detailing the intended actions of my characters, and my up to date blog that highlights not only my progression, reflection and thoughts on the weeks that go by but the array of research I have gathered to support the development of my project. 

We’ll be breaking down these tasks into the upcoming weeks, establishing how one acts upon another, if all goes to plan, I should be able to a clear progression in how my work has developed in the hopes of a final animated outcome. Introduced to a new task each week I understand that it’s my responsibility to keep up to date and on top of any work we are given by working additionally outside of NUA hours to get my work to the standard I hope to achieve. 

Week 9: Setting a Foundation

Introducing the brief, this week establishes how we can pursue the briefs outcomes through either specialist pathway. Through introducing us to the importance and continuation of reference footage we have our second lesson with Sarah Perry in a performance workshop that will establish how we can use ourselves and peers as an influence to build a character. This lesson will re-establish the values and lessons we learnt in BA1a as a refresher to the importance of acting in animation. 

Alongside this we will be introduced to Helen Schroeder, a storyboard artist for films such as Aardman’s ‘Arthur Christmas’ we’ll reflect and criticise our initial storyboards to develop, suggest and evolve our ideas to how we can establish a better and sense of clarity to our final objectives of the brief. 

This will give us the chance to reflect on our initial ideas and take what we’ve learnt before establishing a more refined rendition of our first thoughts and processes surrounding the mystery box project as we begin to develop our ideas.

Week 10: Developing my Ideas

Branching off the ideas we established in week 9, Helen Schroeder will showcase how we can translate our storyboards to a much more organic and industry-led, animatic. To showcase a more in-depth rendition of our ideas, this will help re-iterate the key poses, gestures and actions we want to establish throughout our scene.

Our first chance of animation in this project, this will establish how I can use the process of blocking in a much more loose and organic style to represent the motions of the character. Although I have chosen to pursue CG, this will hopefully give me the opportunity to once again introduce TVPaint in my work, as I have found so far that this is easily been the most prominent program I have relied on and gone back to, to establish and develop my ideas to a standard that I can understand. 

Week 11: Transitioning to Animation

With an established idea for my project, Week 11 would initiate the starting point for our animated outcomes. Using a new program such as Maya, I want to ensure that I have enough time to not only get to grips with the software once again but consider any overlap for the previous week's work that I may have to catch up on. 

Although having a plan of the work I intend to produce is great, this week of overlap will allow me to catch up on any work that on the off chance I don’t get around to completing. Although I’m fairly enthusiastic to kick start this project, this is something I must always consider as I will have to produce a blog alongside my work, finding time to reflect on each week work as well as handing in previous projects that have already been established and will be handed in during this week. 

Week 12: Refining my Outcome

Solely focusing on producing my animation, I will spend the majority of this week in the Media Lab, animating, refining and creating loads of iterations and passes on my animation in the hopes of showcasing how my ideas have not only developed but incorporated the animation principles throughout my work, justifying my reason for originally picking CG animation.

Although not set in stone, I will discuss my reasoning for picking CG and my first initial animator influences based on research of existing artists and processes that are used in the industry today. I'm excited to get a head start on this project and to establish a strong foundation as I make my way through the four weeks of this project. Unlike previous projects, I aim to once again start to get my blog back on track in completing each blog post the day or within 24 hours in which we learnt about the subject. I believe that once I’m able to get this upcoming deadline out of the way I’ll have the time and resources to solely focus on this ‘Mystery Box’ Project to produce the best outcome possible.

To summarise;

I established what I’ll be completing over the course of the next four weeks and how they will be used to produce my intended outcome.

Consider how I can begin to create and establish a range of ideas using external influences and storyboards.

Begin to research existing animators and influencers that may widen my knowledge on the industry-led process or how a character has been used outside of the animation industry.

Discuss which specialism I hope to pursue and why I have made this decision.

Sources;

‘Mystery Box Animation Reel’ Youtube Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsYlrbdcLpc

‘emmakniemis’ Instagram Link https://www.instagram.com/emmakniemis/

[loganimation]

Conference notes

The uni held a conference for animation, and we got some pretty in-depth talks about the industry. Here are my notes for that. 

Speaker: Robin Fuller - Mammon He doesn’t consider what he’s been through as a career, just simply a series of questionable decisions.  He was commissioned by a film festival to do his piece, and it was done very quickly.  He’s also worked with larger companies, which tend to have a more segregated pipeline.  When it comes to music videos, there are many different avenues. I have personal experience with this, as only a couple years ago, I regularly worked with someone who gave me video after video. The first thing we discussed each time around was how we wanted to go about it. Was there a story? A message? How quickly did we want the cuts to be? Of course, this extends far past simple editing, but it’s a very bare bones way of seeing it. In regards to freelancing, he kept the relations with people who gave him the smaller jobs that paid Over time, he was pushed more as a director, and eventually had a moment where he needed to get out of his situation because he was doing stuff he never wanted to. Of course, this is what I’m hoping to avoid every time I go to class, or research something. However, he used that money to fund his own studio space.  His main message that he wanted to get across was:  Define your own terms of success.  This is what I’m trying to do with this semester, so that my own goals 10 years from now are much clearer. In addition, it’s best to know when you don’t know things and to ask for help when those are recognized.  Speaker 2: Katie Gascoyne - Blue Zoo Blue Zoo Work with Nickelodeon One of the best places in the industry to work in Process - Pitch and script - Anyone can pitch, even interns. This has happened in the past. - Concept art - Turnaround and model sheets - Rough, but accurate to character - Boarding - Animatic - Always in 2D, even with 3D projects - Modeling and texturing - Rigging - All through Python code to spot mistakes earlier - Animation - Special Effects - Tested first - Lighting (Three-point) - Compositing - Sound Industry Employability - Luck is the meeting place of skill and opportunity - Try to find the balance between these things Skills  - Software changes and evolves - Follow forums and articles - Toon Boom Harmony has people willing to train from TVPaint - Learn Unreal Know what your city does. Chicago has more jobs asking for Cinema4D over Maya because it’s an advertising hub.  - SPecialize for bigger studios - Generalists are better for smaller studios - Curate the showreel! - These are mentioned because it helps to have a reel for generalist work, and a reel for specialist work. Your resume is your statement. Your showreel is the evidence. - Attend festivals! These are where the big wigs meet, this is how solid connections get made. Attend as many as possible. A quick side note, I know someone who wants to take me to Animex, which is one of the bigger festivals. I’ll be taking his offer. - Wait about a month after applying before emailing, and attach the portfolio. If it doesn’t work at first, then try again another time. This is where you’re seen more as someone serious. Do put yourself out there, even if nothing will happen. Showreel - 1.5 minutes max - Don’t just put something in there because it took a million years to do it. If it doesn’t work and it’s not that great, don’t include it. - Bring something personal to the reel. Include something you really like.  There are also different kinds of showreels. Application showreels are different than client ones. Lastly, Remember again, that the master has failed more times than the student has tried. 

[titmasjack]

Metamorphosis Secondary Action

To further establish the impact of my metamorphosis I wanted to identify a cause and effect through various functions of the morph to bring a great sense of life. Exploring the use of secondary action it gives me the opportunity to heighten interest by adding a realistic complexity to my animations. With the challenge to emphasise the primary action, I have found that from my experimentation I have had to overcome the difficulty and worry of producing a motion that would potentially be more interesting or dominates over the primary action within the scene.

Finding this fine line and a balance was brought about when I tried incorporating elements that detracted the audience from the primary action of the props within the frame.  

After having completed my ‘rough’ pre-visualisation, I took the time to reflect amongst peers to how I could incorporate a series of secondary animations to help further convey or emphasise the elements within my loopable narrative. Although I originally wanted to incorporate an additional action for each prop within the morph, I came to the conclusion that my secondary actions should help clarify the action or emphasis of the movement and not add unnecessary animation that could distract audiences from the original intention of the brief. 

I came to the conclusion that to bring a great sense of clarity, I would use secondary action to emphasise the third act of my animation to exaggerate the cause and effect of the fast-paced drum beats and use chattering to create a series of text and line illustrations to help showcase the bars and notes of the music sheet. 

In this case, I decided that throughout the week, I would take the time to develop my ideas by showcasing the process of both my initial drawings and digitally animated outcomes, which was my first opportunity to translate my hand rendered animation to a digital medium. Acting as both experimentations for secondary animation and using digital software, this gave me my first opportunity to explore the stylisation of my designs and how they would effectively translate to a more vector based graphics. 

Initial Responses

Much of my initial response came from a vast array of repetition, as I wanted to include a hand-rendered element to my work in an otherwise digitally comprised outcome. This incorporation of both mediums and techniques will showcase how I can use one another to coincide their strengths creating a singular thematic presence on screen. I decided that to get enough differentiation between the chattering of my line work and lettering I would use a brush pen as I would not only get a varying array of line thickness but differing levels of opacity.

This was where I was able to establish the foundations of my ideas as I progressed to scan them in and edit them digitally. As I had done so before, to experiment with the timing and pacing of my drum beat secondary actions, I made my way back to TVPaint to experiment with the form of secondary motion I wanted to create. Incorporating another element of the film it was suggested to me how I could look at the use of blood splatter to allude that the drums are hitting a physical surface. Creating a puddle and various spatters as the drum reaches its peak velocity in the animation. 

Developing Outcomes

As I began to refine my ideas I realised that keeping to a minimalised approach to my designs allowed me to produce more content and frames in a shorter time span. Although our deadline has been extended my ambitious approach to this project should be kept within an achievable goal as I want to make sure that I produce a ‘finalised’ outcome. If I’ve learnt anything from these initial digitalisation tests, its that I should try my best to stick to geometric shapes as they help clearly define the objects and props within the frame. 

Sticking to a grey monochromatic colour scheme, this allowed me to focus on and establish the weight of my lines and shapes. Giving emphasis on the animation itself rather than relying on the colour and texture of my animations. 

Although this is something I have looked into before, I wanted to expand upon this element by taking an opportunity to address the use of colour and texture throughout my work. Even though the scale of this secondary animation in relation to the metamorphosis at large is considerably small, I experimented with the use of a small colour palette adding elements of a stippled texture to bring an added layer of depth to the composition. 

Having combined the individual components to make up both the chattering text of ‘Whiplash’ and the music bars that I expect to place on the music sheet metamorphosis. I experimented with both the timing and spacing of each chatter to get a constant state of organic motion influenced by ‘MailChimps’ promotional video.  

Experiment Reflection

Having the opportunity to reflect on my process allows me to dictate the benefits of working through my outcomes in a formal manner. I believe what I found most beneficial to my process was being able to identify how I want to address my work through first using a sketchbook to gather a range of ideas and notes on how I want to explore my ideas.

Without this context, I would have gone through a process of development without that widened context, leading me down a linear path without consideration for an alternative of ideas. Without this process, I don’t believe I would have considered the use of incorporating texture and colour that I had previously explored in a different blog post. 

I'm happy that I’ve had the opportunity to break down my secondary actions as a separate task. With the extended deadline, this has given me the opportunity to address how I can incorporate secondary elements to further emphasise the actions of my animation.

To summarise;

I have shown a clear process on the development of my work through various stages. 

I began to translate my traditional animation to its digital counterparts, using Photoshop and Illustrator. 

Created a series of animated outcomes that support the primary actions of my metamorphosis. 

I could consider how I can implement more traditional techniques into my digitally animated outcomes.