2007 Animation Mentor Showcase

Check out the latest highlights of the work being done by students at AnimationMentor.com. I'm teaching there again this semester and I'm always amazed at the talent they attract.

WALL-E International Teaser Debut

"Yahoo will launch the international teaser/logo gag across their network on Monday 10/1. The trailer will be featured in the homepage 'Entertainment' tab where the video will play in-screen. Yahoo is the only portal that offers this video capability, maximizing views on the site’s most trafficked entry point. In addition to homepage placement, the teaser will be the debut video on Yahoo’s new 'Premieres' page that launches on Monday."

yahoo.com

3 Speeds

Something I heard back when I was first learning animation that still really helps me to this day: always try to get three speeds in your shot. Put in slow moves, medium moves, and fast moves. This will help give your shot texture, interest, and emphasis. If you can have different parts of the body moving at different speeds, even better! Take a look at this clip from 101 Dalmatians. This animation is beautiful in many ways, all of which I wont go into here, but pay particular attention to the timing of the actions. Pongo is sleepy, so naturally there are lots of slow movements. But there are also faster moves for emphasis, such as the ear scratch, the collapse at the end where he lets gravity take over, or the high frequency shaking during the stretch. Not only are there three different speeds of animation, but some of these speeds are happening simultaneously. Another example would be to have a character shaking his head as he raises his arms up slowly in anticipation of a gesture. The more variation you can add to your timing, the better. I see a lot of student work where the characters are always moving in a "snappy" fashion. This is fun to watch for a while, but soon the timing becomes boring because there is no contrast. So don't forget to shift gears!

Interviews with Hayao Miyazaki

Here are some interviews from 1999, coinciding with the release of Princess Mononoke. Miyazaki-san has some interesting perspectives on animation, children, and the world.

Part 1:

Part2:

The 11 Second Club

Remember the 10 Second Club? It was a great site where animators competed every month by animating to the same 10 second audio clip. Unfortunately this site is no more, but it's spirit has been resurrected in the form of the 11 Second Club. This site is generously maintained by 3 people, including two former AnimationMentor students. Swing by and cast your vote on the latest entries! Better yet, why not compete?

Exaggeration

Exaggeration is a very important principle in animation - after all, we're trying to caricature and distill life to it's clearest essence, not reproduce it verbatim. But many students often misunderstand the meaning of exaggeration; they think it always means "bigger" or "faster" or "broader". Not so! It can also mean "smaller", "slower" or "subtler". The key is the "-er": figure out the adjectives that describe the attitudes and actions in your shot, then try to make them "more" like that by adding "er" to the end of the adjectives.

If every pose and action in a performance is extreme then none of them are - the texture becomes even and the audience gets bored. It's important to have big moves AND small moves, fast ones AND slow ones. By varying these elements you give variety to your scene and place emphasis where it needs to be. If you've got three big changes and one small change, the small one will stand out.

The late Chuck Jones was a master of exaggeration. He could achieve more impact with a single eyebrow raise than a lot of animators could with a full-body take. Just look at his work on How The Grinch Stole Christmas and his later Warner Brothers shorts. He knew that less could be much more. He could exaggerate the stillness of a character's pose, so that a change would be isolated to a single small part of the character; perhaps a single muscle. He made a trademark of having a character hold a pose and just glance at the camera with his eyes, as if to say, "what the...?"


So the next time your planning and animating a character, think of ways to make it "er"!

Comic-Con 2007

Last week 30,000 people attended the 2007 San Diego Comic Convention. I was there in my home town on Friday and a little bit on Saturday, and it was pretty overwhelming. I've been going since 1993, and it has at least tripled in size since then. I barely had an opportunity to visit all my favorite vendors, and I only made it to one panel: the WALL-E panel, of course!

There, 7,000 lucky guests were treated to glimpses of preproduction art, animation tests and a synopsis of the film by director Andrew Stanton. They also got to see a sound demo by Star Wars veteran Ben Burtt, and about 7 minutes of footage from the film! Here are some reviews of the event:

Audio Interview with Andrew:
http://www.comingsoon.net/audio/stantonwalle.mp3
"I think that dog is happy to see me" / "I don't care what the math says, it's not doing what it's supposed to" / "I've been watching a lot of BSG"

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=22911
"It certainly looks like another imaginative, fun film from Disney and Pixar. It also looks like Ben Burtt's going to win another Academy Award for sound design."

http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/07/28/comic-con-indepth-wall-e-details-revealed/
"The footage that was shown was unlike anything that has been ever done by Disney before. I’d call it an anti-Disney movie."

http://www.cinematical.com/2007/07/29/comic-con-prince-caspian-and-wall-e-the-disney-pixar-pre/
"If you're reading a story about Comic-Con on a film site I probably don't need to tell you how much Ben Burtt rocks and how much of a contribution he makes to any film he works on."
"In short, the clip was great and I can't wait for the film."

http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2007/07/comic-con-toon-.html
"Going in to Comic-Con, we published a list of the 10 most anticipated movies being presented in San Diego. Coming out of the convention, the two films I can't wait to see in their entirety were nowhere to be found on our original list (that's the beauty of Comic-Con, really).
First, there's Pixar's next toon, "Wall-E," from "Finding Nemo" director Andrew Stanton."

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2574379
Same thing here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33497
"we got an awesome 10 minute clip from the beginning of the movie. Andrew Stanton stressed that it was unfinished. Still, it looks loving amazing"

http://www.reelzchannel.com/outtakes/blog.aspx?blogentryid=409
"Where as Fox's Robots took the standard approach to robot animated characters we've seen a million times before, Pixar's creativity shines through in a very original way."

And here are my photos from the 'Con.

Visualizing Taste

Michel Gagné has posted an article on his web site about how he created the 2D visuals for the tasting sequences in Ratatouille. It's not often that you get to see this sort of abstract animation in a feature film, and trying to visualize flavor must have been especially challenging.

"Lifted" on iTunes Store

The lastest Pixar short film, "Lifted" is now available for purchase on the iTunes Store. Hopefully you've already seen it in front of Ratatouille...

Walking...

Is it animation or performance art? Or is it just weird? From poster "notblu":

2 loops from walking animated wall painting.
the video is stretched horizontally. It was filmed with a camera in vertical position but youtube doesn't accept that format.

The Latest Short Films From Gobelins

The French animation school Gobelins, has just posted their latest student clips created for the Annecy festival. These guys consistently produce great work, and really push the medium. My favorites are La Grande Arche and Chronos 1.0. Enjoy!

Sisyphus

Marcell Jankovics - Sisyphus (1974)

Here's a nice piece of hand-drawn animation from 1974. Great use of line and a sense of weight, and also note the amount of variation in what would otherwise be a repetitive action. My advice for enjoying this clip: turn off the sound!

For the record...

There are some early reviews of Ratatouille on Ain'tItCoolNews right now, including one where a viewer compares the Pixar short film "Lifted" unfavorably to my own "Alien Song". To quote:

Another thing that bugged me was the Lifted short, the main alien reminded me to much of the “I Will Survive” animation that was everywhere online about five years ago where the alien was singing “I Will Survive” and then at the end a disco ball falls on it and flattens it. There were some funny parts in the short, but not great.

First of all, don't believe this guy. Lifted is hilarious! But beyond that I don't see much similarity between it and my film, other than that there are green aliens involved, and some violence. I don't even think director Gary Rydstrom had seen my film before he started to develop Lifted. The alien designs are a lot more interesting than mine, and they have TWO eyes! Take that! This reminds me of some similar conjecture years back when people were saying that Mike Wizowski of "Monsters, Inc." was a rip-off of my alien as well. Well, maybe there's a hair of truth to that...

Football Vs. Rabbit

This is a really cool example of using CG to emulate claymation. Nice squishy-stretchy feel!

WALL-E Teaser...

Tune in to Entertainment Tonight at 7:30pm PDT for a first look at the teaser trailer for Pixar's 2008 feature, "WALL-E". It's on KRON Channel 4 in the Bay Area. Check your local listings. You'll get a little taste of what I've been working on for the past year or so. Sorry for the late notice, I just found out about this myself!

UPDATE: the teaser in now online, in HD, even! Thanks to Alexiss for the tip.

Some thoughts on "Ratatouille"

A couple weekends ago (June 2) I had the pleasure of seeing Ratatouille with my fellow Pixarians at its wrap party. Now, we had all had a few drinks, and the crew was pretty exhausted, so we weren't the most objective audience, but I think it turned out fantastic. I'll admit, the premise of a rat who wants to be a chef never excited me that much, but when the story is in the hands of Brad Bird, you know you're in for something special. The story was funny and entertaining, the characters memorable, and the production values are off the charts. This is by far the best looking film Pixar has ever done, and probably the best looking animated film to date. The lighting is sumptuous, and the detail in the sets and characters is downright compulsive. Then there's the animation... There is acting in this film the likes of which has never been seen before in animation (at least not since the Golden Age of Disney), and the performances are more consistent throughout the film than ever before. This is partly because the Pixar animatosrs are at the top of their game, and partly because Brad Bird has written scenes that demand great animation. This film has definitely raised the bar on all levels, from story to cinematography to animation to shading to effects. It's such a dense and layered film, too, so I look forward to seeing it again (with a REAL audience) to pick up more of the details.

I only contributed one shot to this film, so I have the more distance from it than previous films, which makes it even more special to me. I don't know if this film will make a lot of money. How do you market cooking to kids and dads, and rats to moms? I just know that if people get to the theater, they will enjoy it. I expect this movie will be very well-reviewed, and hopefully that buzz will translate into some good revenues. Not that Pixar is in danger of extinction, or that if we don't break opening day records there will be layoffs or famine in the crew. But a movie with so much love and craftsmanship doesn't come along very often, and it deserves to be enjoyed by the masses. These movies we make are gifts to the world, so help us share the gift.

If you're reading this blog then you're probably already an animation fan and were likely going to see this movie anyway. But if you like it, see if you can't drag along someone else to see it who maybe isn't a fan. Tell your mom or the guy in the Starbuck's line. I bet they'll thank you later. And so will I.

Cool overlap tutorial

Courtesy of the blog "Flip". This a simple, structured way to think about drag and overlap in your animation, and it fits nicely with the spline workflows that I outline in my tutorials.

Cool Cake Animation

Some great squashy-stretchy claymation in here, set to the music of "La Traviata". Probably doesn't taste as good as it looks!

Computer Animation and Drawing

There's a cool article over on the Spline Doctor's blog about the importance of drawing for ALL animators, not just 2D animators. I get asked about this a lot, and I think Dr. Stephen Gregory does a good job of laying it down. Here's the article.

9 Minutes of Animation Bliss

I know I've been using this site to shill for Pixar movies a lot, and they don't really need the help. But I'm really excited about Ratatouille, and particularly about the 9 minutes of animation they just released! If you're like me then you prefer to wait and see it on the big screen and be surprised. But if you're not excited about Pixar's next feature, I suspect you will be after viewing this. Everything about this movie, from the story to the animation to the effects, camera, lighting, etc., raises the bar for the medium. I only animated one shot on this film, but I'm proud to have been a part of it. Enjoy!