Happy 9000 viewers!

What a way to end 2015 as this blog has just hit 9000 views! 

Did this really happen or are these views merely generated by silent robots that collect information about animation production? Hopefully, the humans who like this blog will leave a comment as proof there are lifeforms reading this blog after all. If too shy to type, perhaps clicking on an ad to the right will give us a little support now and then.

Again, I really appreciate the views and hope to bring some the articles in the new year. If you have anything animated to share, please let me know! Happy 2016 to all!

Thanks the everyone this week in US, Israel, Canada, France, Colombia, Philippines, UK, Russia, Czech Republic and Indonesia!

Happy Holidays from Animateducated!

Hey Everybody,

Hope you enjoy this blog and I hope to bring you some new things in the new year of 2016! Until then, here's a holiday card I made to promote an animated project I am working on called, "WatchCat". Its a 2D project which is in need of a crew, since its taking me forever to finish it by myself. To learn more, visit: watchcatfiles.blogspot.com

Enjoy your Holiday!

 

Study Buster Keaton films!

Each year at this time, this commercial plays and I am reminded of my time as an animator at Will Vinton studios. Unfortunately, as animators we do not get any residuals when our animation plays in a commercial, but I'm glad I can proudly say, I animated the Yellow M&M.

M&M's Santa "They do exist!" from Daniel L Smith on Vimeo.

I tell beginning animation students to study silent films to see how to tell a story without dialogue. Buster Keaton is a great filmmaker/actor to study and all his gags are unbelievable to watch. Here's a very good film series called "Every Frame a Painting" which explores the visual comedy of Buster Keaton.

From: Buster Keaton with Charles Samuels. My Wonderful World of Slapstick (Kindle Locations 188-192). New York : Doubleday.
 

Pop and Harry Houdini, who was also just making his start in show business, became partners in their own medicine show. Pop did his dances and flip-flaps, Mom played her saxophone solos, and Houdini did a few card tricks and astonished the customers by getting out of the local sheriff's handcuffs with the greatest of ease. In her memoirs, Mrs. Houdini years later told how indignant Pop became when the magician laughed uproariously at his antics, spoiling the joke, while they were on the stage together. 

Harry Houdini and Joe Keaton were business partners and it was Houdini who gave Buster his nickname...

When I was six months old, I fell downstairs and burst into tears. Houdini, who was nearby, picked me up, and said, "My, what a Busterr." 

Pop there and then decided I should be called that and as far as I have been able to learn, I was the first man given that nickname. Even Buster Brown, the character in R. F. Outcault's comic strip, was born a few years after I came into the world. Everybody, including each of my three wives, always called me Buster. 

There are some amazing and funny scenes in the clip below from "The Goat" to learn how to set up and pull off a gag. 

At the table, notice how Buster is slowly moving downward during this scene. This helps establishes that he is the victim and also shows how big the other guy is.

 

GoatClip from Toondini on Vimeo.

The big guy now braces himself on the table, which allows Buster to make his brilliant and unexpected escape! When the big guy finally gets out the door, we are fooled again as Buster ducks down in the phone booth, the big guy and (we the audience) mistake this as another elevator before the big guy goes running downstairs.

This is followed by a classic cartoon moment when Buster turns the real elevator's arrow to bring the elevator up to his floor. 

Watch "The Goat" and other Buster Keaton classics on Youtube or download it and other classic silent films here.
_________

I had the rare opportunity to interview animation director Sergio Pablos. Here is a project he is currently working on right now!

Klaus teaser ©2015 Sergio Pablos Animation Studios, S.L. & ANTENA 3 FILMS, S.L.U. All rights reserved from The SPA Studios on Vimeo.

Sometimes I feel like Horton, send me a comment below, a hello, a shout out or a "how do you do?", but don't be as quiet as a who.

Lip Sync Animation Projects

Here's a collection of Lip Sync animation projects from my recent Sophomore Studio class. Which one is your favorite? 
Please leave a comment below and let the students know what you think of their work.

Anim203_LipSync2015 from Toondini on Vimeo.

If you learned something new, click on the ad to the right and the ad below this article, let us know you appreciate animation , Thank You!

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Shameless Advertising

To help keep drawing animation alive and well in the hearts and minds of mortal men and women, we have added ad space and hope you will click on them everytime you visit Animateducated. Just one click let's us know that you like this blog and want to help support not only drawing animation, but all forms of animation. 

Clicking on the ad on the far right, does not put you on any lists or sends you anything you don't want, but it will send us some support and will let us know you do like us!

Did you that before Dr Suess wrote children stories, he was an advertising cartoonist.

Click on the ad above to see more advertising from decades ago... 

 As a kid, I grew up on watching lots of TV commercials and like you, advertising theme songs and jingles have stuck in my head. Today, I hardly ever watch TV, but those advertising slogans are still in there. Youtube is the new TV and I see more new and old things on it with commercials you can skip when they allow it. And speaking of commercials.

One thing I don't miss were the TV ads for cigarettes. I'm not sure when they stopped, but here are a few I recently rediscovered...

 

I'm glad I didn't see my favorite cartoon show doing this...

Most commericals use to be one minute in length and over the years they shrank down to 30 seconds or 15 seconds as the audience attention spans decreased as well. The next modern commercial will be know as " vines". Youtube offspring of hyper fast humor set up and payoffs in 7 seconds. My kids watch them endlessly and I have a feeling the future advertisers are either already looking at this format or soon will be. 

Which brings us to subliminal advertising which is a deceptive business practice by the Federal Trade Commission. It has been used in filmmaking to enhance the storytelling as well as to be used in effects and animation. Here's a better article on the subject. And I have feeling we might be seeing more subliminal advertising in "Vines" or other shorten formats on the net or maybe we won't know.

And clickspeaking of click ad subliminal advertising click ad, be sure to click click it on the click ad on the right. My apologies click ad if its an clickad for cigarettes.

Thank you to the person in Brunei, who clicked on the ad and gave me 0.12 cents!

 

 Click it if you learned something new or leave a comment below     .

Thanks,

Jimr

  

Animatics 101

An animatic is a rough animated preview of your storyboard to see the timing and how your animated scenes will cut together. Before you can put together an animatic, you need to have a storyboard that tells your story visually in a correct cinematic format.

Animatics can be used to test commercials before they are made into live action or animation to see if a test audience responses to it or not. They can be used in Feature films in the form of Pre-Vis sequences allowing a Director to pre-plan his shots to see if a sequence will cut together before shooting the real thing. And especially for animation students, to help them figure out the timing of their storyboards and figure out if the scenes will work or need to be revised.

Animatics don't have to be fancy. They just have to be used to make sure each scene has enough time to be shown to keep the story flowing along. If the pacing is off, either too fast or too slow, those panels must be re-timed and a new animatic must be re-edited.

The animatics below had several revisions in the beginning, so don't think by simply making an animatic of your storyboard that it will turn out perfect on the first try. Most of the time you are trying to figure out not only the timing of each panel, but the pacing of the scenes. Do they begin to get faster? This is a way to create tension in a scene, especially with an action scene. Or do they slow down the pace, by showing a scene longer, followed by another one.

Here are two versions of the same animatic where you can see a revision was made to help present the story more clearly. (Please let me know if you can view the previews below or if you see nothing.)

arcillaanimatic1.0 from Toondini on Vimeo.

  

Andrew Arcilla's project shows a ghost attempting to scare a sleeping child who wakes up mad at the ghost, not scared. The ghost is now scared of the child and tries to escape as the child is seen about to throw a pillow. As the ghost is fleeing to a door that is stuck shut, we cut back to the kid with the pillow, then back to the ghost's struggle with the door.

arcillaanimatic2.0 from Toondini on Vimeo.

In this version, the cutaway to the kid with the pillow has been removed, to keep the focus on the ghost's frantic struggle to get through the door. By removing this cutaway, the pillow becomes a surprise when we see it from the ghost's point of view.

Here's another animatic by Yongkang Wu. which has a few things in it which can be revised, but all in all it works pretty good so far... Its a work in progress. Do you understand what is happening in this animatic?

Yongkang_ Final Animatic from Toondini on Vimeo.

Please let me know if you can't view this and I will fix the problem before I continue.

8007 views and counting!

That's about 707 views in a month, which I think is pretty good. Although
you are a pretty quiet group, I want to thank you all for stopping by and checking out this blog. I'd like to thank the following countries; US, Russia, Germany, UK, France, Australia, Canada, Spain, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Indonesia, Kenya and the lovely Loraine in Ukraine. 

More animated educated thing to see soon! 
Thanks for stopping by.

Here's some animated inspiration...

Occupation: Animatorfrom Bruna Berford
Posted by Let's Animate on Tuesday, August 25, 2015

24 Hours Animation Contest Winners 2015

 
The Winners of the 2015 24 Hours Animation Contest are...


5th Place: God
Cartoonista, Academy of Art University in San Francisco





4th Place: Historical Fails of Human Technology
 SquadSixtyNine, Ringling College of Art and Design





Third Place: Mona Freeza
Trinket Films, Sheridan College, Canada

 


Second Place: Fishtopia
Oxozone Children, Sheridan College, Canada




First Place: Caveman Channel
Team Potty Squad
California State University Fullerton

 
Which Animation did you like the best?
Leave a comment below. 

And there you have it. 

How did Woodbury do?

BeatHoven by Ctrl+Z  was the 5th runner up,

Something Epic was the 11th runner up...

and the Night Owls were 17th out of 100 films entered.

 That's pretty good numbers. Until next year... 

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thank you...

24 Hours has begun again!

Yes, it's true, the 24 Hours Animation Contest has begun! This is the 3rd year, Woodbury University will be competing in this event with 5 teams ready and willing to animate a 30 second short in 24 hours or less.Here's a link to last year's entries and winners!

The Woodbury Animation teams are as follows;

 Drew's Clues

Nicki Williams, Emily Fletcher, Andrew Arcilla, Ashley White and Jada Kurian

 
Fire Breathing Rubber Duckies 

Top: Kane Boyer, Rafik Vardanyan

Bottom: Denise Caro, Hannah Garcia, Lindsey Uslan

 Something Epic

Brandon Swofford, Jackie Godin ,Waverly Alonso, Haley Weed and Catherine Broyles

 The Night Owls

(Seth) Yongkang Wu, Angellica Cress, Alfredo Verjan, Thomas Reddick, and Hector Almendares

Ctrl+Z

 

Anna Sher, Swan Oh, Dota Sata, Cynthia Nava and Jane Remizova 

The event began at 4pm on Friday, Oct 2nd with Aubry Mintz of CSULB welcoming all the 106 teams (530 students) from 22 schools in California,South Dakota, Texas, Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Massachusetts, and my home state of Florida; as well as two countries, Canada and Australia in this year's contest.

He also thanked all the sponsors which include: CTN Animation Expo, DigiCel Flipbook, Focal Press, CSU's Summer Arts, Stuart Ng Books and Wacom. As well as ASIFA Hollywood and Animation Studios; Blue Sky, Dreamworks, Film Roman and Laika!

And then, the Theme to this year's 24Hours Animation Contest was announced!

Imagine if technology was introduced at the dawn of human kind.

30 second films can be in Past, present, future. 

Questions to consider:
What is the technology people found? How did people react to the technology? How did people evolve with this technology? What would today would look like?

Once the teams understood the theme, they began to brainstorm ideas to come up with a 30 second animation based on that theme.

And soon those ideas were formed into a rough storyboard timed out to fit into the 30 second format. Some teams were doing this process with their Cintiqs, while others used pencils,paper, scanners to input their drawings into the computer.

After a Pizza gathering at 9pm, the teams quickly returned to their projects ready for a long and productive night. 

This year, Drew's Clues and Fire Breathing Rubber Duckies were the freshmen teams who are both working tradigitally by animating on paper, scanning the drawings and finish animating in the computer. 

This was the first year a Stop Motion production was created and as the hours went from PM to early AM, the teams kept working. Some took turns sleeping as their team mates kept working. Some students stayed up all night without a break and soon wished they had when the sun began to rise. 

And as the morning grew brighter, several dozen donuts arrived for breakfast which were quickly consumed by the sleepless animation zombies. And as soon as they ate, back they went to their computer monitors to continue the work the had begun yesterday.

Occasionally after 3pm, you could hear a loud cheer as projects had been completed and downloaded to their youtube channel. The Night Owls were a mixture of 2 Freshman, 1 Sophomore and 2 Seniors, and the first to finish and submit their project.

Ctrl+Z is our Senior Team who were the second team to submit their entry...

Something Epic from our Sophomore team...

Drew's Clues got their submission in at the last possible second, unfortunately they submitted without their soundtrack, but here it is with sound.

The Fire Breathing Rubber Ducks were the only team not able to finish their production before the deadline. Although, they did learn a lot from this experience, I hope to post their project soon.

All in all, everyone had a great time and did a lot of work in a short amount of time. I am proud of everyone who stepped up and made it happen. If you have any comments or suggestions for any of the teams, please let a comment below. 

Get a good night's sleep...

NEXT: 24 Hours Animation Contest Winners for 2015!

Bouncing Balls and Weight

The Bouncing Ball exercise uses the animation principles known as:

• Arcs 
• Ease Ins and Outs
• Squash and Stretch

 

Here is a link about setting up an animation scene. 

For the bouncing ball exercise, we need a path of motion and the Key poses of your Ball. Keep in mind, the smaller the ball size, the more balls you will be drawing. Keep the ball the same size throughout  the scene.

Layout the Scene: Define the Field of view, say a 10 Field.

1) Start with a 10 field size and determine the horizon line. Figure out the Arcs on the Ball's motion path. The Ball will follow the Line of Action.

 Horizon Line is your Background layer or BG. on separate paper.

Put your Line of Action on a separate paper (Layer 1)

Make sure the Line of Action does not have the ball landing on the Horizon line. Keep Ball landing below it to help create dimension.

Add Key Poses of the Ball to your the Path of Action! (Layer 1) 

Breakdowns are the half way drawings between your Key Poses.

As you are setting up these Key drawings, you want the ball to fall and pop up faster by using less drawings and more spacing between those drawings.

When the Ball Arcs upward and the down, the Ball should slow down, more overlapping drawings or less spacing between those drawings.

After the Breakdowns are in place, you can add the inbetweens. Here you can see the animation Spacing and Ease In and Outs in one drawing. To save your sanity for later, Trace your Key Poses and Breakdowns on separate sheets of paper and then

add your inbetweens one piece of paper at a time.

You can then add those Squash and Stretch drawings when the Ball is about to hit the ground (Stretch), hits the ground (Squash) and then Recoils upward (Stretch).

Noticed that the Squash position is the most extreme on the first hit, the Ball looses energy and on the second Arcs up less then the first Arc. Students always Squash the Ball the same throughout the scene, which looks odd because the Arcs are getting smaller, but the Squash poses are all the same.

This occurs with the Stretch poses as well, notice above how the first Stretch pose is more extreme than the other Stretch poses. The Ball is loosing energy and speed, and so less Stretch is needed.

Squash and Stretch are used to exaggerate a drawing to speed up or slow down motion or how an object in motion reacts when it hits something. In real life, Squash and Stretch happens very quickly and can be seen with high speed photography. 

Watch the Tennis and Golf ball below to see the squash and stretch.

Even a hard surfaced Golf ball squashes and stretches.

Squash and Stretch helps the audience understand what the ball is made of. The more squash and stretch, the more rubbery the ball will appear.

Be sure to keep your Squash and Stretch poses with the same volume as the original Ball. If the SS poses are too small or big, it will look odd.  

Here's the Bouncing Ball... 

Wait! Wait!!  What about Weight?

Can you draw two Ball drawings of the same size, but show the audience they have different weight?

By using spacing and timing as well as Squash/Stretch,  you can show the differences in a lightweight ball and a Heavy ball bounce side by side. The Lite weight ball is more bouncy with more squash and stretch, while the Heavy ball falls faster and has less bounce, with no squash/stretch. Even a heavy bowling ball will have a slight bounce and vibrate to an abrupt stop.

Always test, revise your drawings and reshoot your work. Use your exposure sheet to write down the final timing for the final animation.