Animateducated channel gaining!

The Animateducated YouTube channel is actually getting some viewers and audience participation! It actually looks like it might even obtain more than 1000 subscribers before 2022 ends. Here are a few things I have been posting lately that you may have missed...

An animation student of mine at CSUF recently completed her student film and we talked about the process.

You can see "Fester" by clicking this link...

That is one of the benefits of teaching, to see a student's work when it first started, how it evolves and is finally finished. Not every student can get to the completion stage, because its a lot of work and commitment.

Here are a collection of Animation Production projects where students had to come up with in my Animation Pre-Production class. Each student came up with an idea for a short animated film with a story, character(s), storyboard and animatic. The next semester, they had 16 weeks to make their animatic into a finished film.

16 weeks to make a 1 or 2 minute animated film can be done, but only if you have a figured out a solid work schedule and enough time to do it. Many students have take a lot more studio classes with other class projects which take more time and energy to do.

During Covid, students were under stress even more with the new way of life or stay at home, avoiding social situations and then having to use their own equipment to make their film. Most could not return to Campus, away from the Wacom Cintiqs and other software.

After taking the Animation Production class, sometimes that rough animatic turns into a colorful animatic instead of a completed film. I have been trying to figure out a solution to avoid this situation. I think if the student can manage to get the beginning or perhaps some sequence of their film into a final state of production, it would show an audience what the final product will look like when it is completed. Having this final production is a rough film, might even help the student continue to finish what they started after the class is over.

The worse case is when I see a student who has really great idea, but only wants to do enough work to get an "A". 

Grades are only a temporary carrot dangling for a limited time in front of a near sighted horse. 

Making a film is not about getting a good grade! Its about coming up with something you want to see, work on  and learn from the experience. And when its done, people can see it and appreciate. Enter it into film festivals, on YouTube, put it on your website. People who see it might hire you or introduce you to others and hopefully you will continue the process. It might take years, but you made something that nobody else did, something you cared about to create. And when you hear an audience reacting to your film or if someone has seen your work, that's very satisfying.  

And the 2017 24 Hours begins...

In past month, students have been preparing for this year's 24 Hours Animation Contest and have formed into teams. Each team has 5 students, some team members have been through the process before, while others are doing this for the first. Everyone is up for the challenge.

Each year this contest increases in size due to its popularity. Last year's contest in 2016 there were 27 schools participating and 124 teams or 620 students in competition. This year, there are 44 schools schools participating with 183 Teams completing or 915 students all working to complete a :30 second animated film based on the theme in 24 hours.

 

The 2017 Woodbury University 24 Hours animation teams gathered in the Design Center's D105 at 3pm. Great hordes of excited Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors gathered as timid,but curious Freshman stayed to watch. The live streaming announcement came from Aubry Mintz in his top secret classroom, hidden somewhere in Long Beach, CA.

The goal of the 24 hours contest is to create a 30 second animation piece from a theme which is announced at the beginning by 24 Hours. Aubry Mintz, Associate Professor at CSULB welcomes all the school's participating, thanks the sponsors who have donated prizes to the final top five winners and finally announces the theme of this year's 24 Hours contest.

This year's theme was announced by Mintz on Friday, Oct 6th at 3:30pm PST and is as follows.

The 24 HOURS 2017 THEME:

Is based on the Sesame Street song, " One of these things is not like the others."

Let the Brain Storming begin! 
And off they go in a wild giggle of animation students to find an area to work. Some are on Macs, others are on PCs and a few have taken over the Stop Motion studio. Snacks appear along with laptops, pencils and pens. Dry erase boards are suddenly filling up with thumbnail sketches, words, images and ideas are starting to be born.

 

 

 

The Creative process is alive tonight and everyone is working on turning this year's theme into their own unique vision. There are a variety of animation projects being produced from Traditional, to Digital and even stop motion.

Team Deception from Toondini on Vimeo.

But with great brain power comes food for thought. At around 9pm, Several pizzas were delivered. 

 

All the students took a quick dinner break and returned to a long night of animation ahead.

And into the night they work.

Next Post: The final WU films

For your consideration, Watchcat Episode 2

As I write this, I can't believe we have finally come to the end of this project. What started off as a webseries to introduce Watchcat in episode 1, only hinted at what this cat could do. A Batman in cat form, a mysterious protector of the neighborhood on the watch for crime and criminals alike. 

Could we tell a story about a crime fighting cat in animation, with editing and original music? A mini motion picture of a cat hero that people would want to follow in every episode? Would we find an audience, get millions of hits and maybe even fund more episodes using a crowd funding situation? All these questions take time and effort to answer, but hopefully we will find out what you, our audience thinks about all of this.

We made Episode 2 to continue to follow the characters we introduced and and how our cat would deal with them. Both parts equal a whole and if people like it enough, we will do more. Maybe not 3 minutes an episode, but shorter situations could add to this cat's tale. 

And so, for your consideration, please enjoy Watchcat Episode 2.

Click on our facebook page, like the page and share this with friends, family and other Watchcat owners!

Kubo and the Two Strings

"Kubo and the Two Strings" is the latest animated feature from Liaka and is a very interesting story with amazing animated imagery and character design. This is stop motion at its best that blends together to tell an amazing story of Kubo and his journey. I don't want to spoil anything, because I saw it without seeing all the trailers and promotional material.

I will say, if you want to be amazed and taken on an exciting journey, this is the film for you. If that's not your thing, then maybe "Sausage Party" is for you.
 

Here are some of the animated armatures from the film. To call them puppets is almost an insult, since they are so alive on the big screen. I would also recommend watching this in 3D to get the full effect.

And without spoiling any of the story, here is a few scene set ups from the film featuring Kubo, Beetle and Monkey.

 Photos above by Kevin MacLean

Here's a quiz for you: Travis Knight told me that The Moon King's facial design was inspired by two very famous movie villians. Can you guess who they are?  

Send in your guess to the comments section below...

If you live in the Los Angeles area, you can see a free exhibit, “The Artistry of Kubo: A Magical LAIKA Experience” at the Japanese American National Museum to coincide with the start of Nisei Week, the annual festival celebrating Japanese American culture and history in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles.

Visitors will get a behind-the-scenes interactive peek at Kubo and the Two Strings through puppets, sets, props, monsters, origami, and costumes from the production presented in JANM’s George & Sakaye Aratani Central Hall from Saturday, Aug. 13 to Tuesday, Aug. 30.

15000 Views!

Thank You for the 15,000 all time views!

Animateducated has just hit its 15,000 views and we want to thank everyone for taking the time to visit this blog. We are still in the process of improving the content and welcome other animators or educators to add their animation articles of interest. 

To celebrate this occasion, we'd like to hear from you, the viewer. What do you like about this blog? Anything you would like to see in future blog posts? Any comments are welcomed below.

Future Interviews in the works 

Back in February, we did a post on Caroline Leaf, http://animateducated.blogspot.com/2016/02/animation-on-glass.html and recently she contacted us to let us know what she is doing to these days.

Back in May, I contacted Andreas Deja, http://animateducated.blogspot.com/2016/05/your-questions-to-andreas-deja.html who is working on his film "Mushka" and has his own blog, Deja View. I have collected only about 4831 questions so far, just a few more to go before we can do the interview.

Do you have any animation interviews or animation people you would like to learn more about. Perhaps we can organize an animation safari and track down an exclusive interview together? Send us your comments, suggestions, thoughts, anything is welcomed and appreciated.

Thank you to the 100 viewers from Japan who visited recently!

Thanks for the 15000, see you at 20,000!
J.Richardson
heyjimr@gmail.com  

Happy Father's Day!

 

 

Organizing your Animation work: Part 2

When you have an idea which grows into a 2D animated short, each step of production adds more and more information which you need to keep organized. For traditional animators, this means going from idea to thumbnail drawings to storyboard drawings, with more and more drawings generated along the way. And when you finally have a final storyboard worked out, now begins the task of making layout drawings, then rough Key poses which will then add inbetweens and finally all end up as Clean up drawings. 

Scene Folders

To keep track of all the paper being added during this process, you will need to keep folders for each scene. Here is a label which you can put on each scene folder to keep track of what stage of production the scene is in as well as other useful information.

The Production Manager's job is to keep track of these folder as well as to track the production schedule and keeping it up to date. Below is an example of a production schedule which you can use to keep track of your project.

This is a timing breakdown chart for frames under 1 foot and how to calculate footage.

                                                             Frames    =    Footage

This is a formula still used by some timing directors to time their storyboard scenes. These timing numbers can be converted to frames when creating an animatic. Here's how it works...

1 foot = 16 frames, so if the timing was 3oo , this means the scene would be 3 x 16 or 48 frames, which equals 2 seconds exactly.

Once you have the storyboard, you must time out each scene in seconds and convert them into frames in order to know how much time or frames are needed to show the action. The best thing is to actually act out the scene yourself and either timing out your action or shoot reference footage of it. This timing info is usually written under the storyboard panel's shot description. 

After the timing for each scene has been determined, an exposure sheet is created for each scene and a folder is created for each scene. A scene is what you would call a shot in live action film-making. 

The exposure sheet is used in the beginning to plan out your scene and to keep track of the drawings, allowing for camera movement and breaking down the dialogue frame by frame. Animators need to use these sheets for every scene they create or are given to work on. Many beginning students don't understand their importance or know how to use them.

Your storyboard panels will soon grow from layout drawings, to rough key poses, to Keys and rough drawings, then inbetweens and finally Clean Up drawings. Each step of production will be added to the exposure sheet to establish what frame has which drawings. And if you have separate levels, you have to use an exposure sheet to keep track of all this information. It also comes in handy if you are scanning in your drawings into a 2D software such as ToonBoom's Animate Pro. Once scanned in, you will have to reassemble the drawings to the correct layers and frames. How can you do this without an exposure sheet?

 The Exposure Sheet

The Exposure Sheet or X sheet is your friend!

When beginning a 2D animation project,  you begin creating more and more artwork, creating key poses, you need an exposure sheet, X sheet or Dope sheet to list what frame they will be shown on. This long sheet contains a bunch of horizontal lines, sometimes labelled. Each line represents a frame or exposure of film. Back when animation cameramen roared the earth, they used this sheet as a guide to shoot the folder of animation drawings given to them. The name "Dope sheet" meant, that all the instructions for shooting this scene were on the X sheet, so that any dope (stupid person) could shoot it.

Each space between the lines on an X sheet represents a frame of film. There are 16 frames in one foot of 35mm film, the space between the darker lines lines equals 16 frames. Some animation studios would pay Animators by the footage of a scene length, however today, CG animators deal with frames and seconds instead of film footage and are usually paid by the hour or by the project.

Exposure Sheet Info. 

Prod: Title of Production

Seq:    Sequence #

Scene: Scene #
Sheet:  Sheet number. Many Scenes require more than one X sheet.

There are several column headings that are for different things in the scene. 

Action:  The Director's or Animator's notes of the action happening in the scene as a frame by frame breakdown.

Dial:  Dialogue info is added here either as Narration or Broken down dialogue for lip sync animation.

Extra:  An extra level if needed. 

Numbered Levels 1 thru 4:  Levels for animation to make up the scene.

BG:  Background Level is the first level with all the other levels of animation on top.

Camera Instructions:  Field Info, Camera movement such as a Zoom, Pan or rotation as well as camera effects like fades, wipes or dissolves.

Now you have to imitate an old man as you read this... "Back when we had cel animation, you could only have 3 or 4 levels, anymore and the artwork color on the bottom level would become darker the more levels of acetate placed on top of it." Ok, now you can stop.

Actually with 2D animation software, you don't have to worry about levels of animation or waiting for your cel paint to dry, because this part of traditional animation has happily bit the dust. You are so lucky you didn't have to paint cels, Hooray for Digital paint!

Organizing your Animation work: Part 3
 
If you learned something new, click on the ad on the right and the ad below this article, let us know you appreciate animation, Thanks!