Animated Future?

When President Obama visited DreamWorks recently, he was given a tour of the studio and shown how they are using mo-cap technology. Here is a clip showing how this process works, notice the actors are lip syncing the dialogue to get into the performance.

When I first saw this, I thought I would have to start working out more to fit into one of those tight mo-cap suits, in order to become an Animator of the Future! Or as an Animator, my future tasks would be cleaning up motion capture data and animating key frames with a graph editor, while the mo-cap actors would get to create the performance.

Most videogame studios would choose this route, because it is faster than an Animator can come up with an animated performance without using mo-cap. However DreamWorks is using this process as a first-stage of blocking out a scene in order to figure out character placement, camera movement or basic staging for acting. Animators could use this information as they would a reference video or animatic, a tool for performance, but not replacing their animating ability completely.

Kids growing up with animation are seeing more 3D animated films than 2D ones. Which artform do you enjoy watching more?

Traditional Animation: 2D or not 2D?

First of all, I noticed that this site is getting a lot of viewers from all over the world, 415 in fact. So a big animated hello to 7 people in Hungary(halo), 5 people in Poland, 4 people in India and 2 people in Russia(Здравствуйте), just to name a few.  I'm excited to hear from any or all of you, but so far everyone has been very shy and quiet. I'm hoping to learn from the audience as well because I want to keep 2D animation alive and believe in educating others who love this art form as much as I do. But like any Artist, I need feedback to see if others like this, would like to learn more about this type of animation or perhaps share their animation experiences as well.

2D animation presents an individual artist's style which can be seen in every drawing or frame. You can make a film as a group or do it all by yourself, however both take time and sometimes money. Drawing animation does take time and practice, to get better you can come up with short ideas or scenes featuring a simple storyline or experiment on a technique. The word to practice is keeping your project short. So many people jump into wanting to make an animated feature film, but its better to think smaller.

One day, British animator Simon Tofield bought a Wacom tablet and wanted to make a short by teaching himself to animate using 2D software. He came up with a funny house cat character based on his cat, who bugs his owner to pay attention to him and hopefully feed him in the process. One short, lead to another and when release to the internet, we now have "Simon's Cat".

Many decades ago, I was working at an advertising agency and had time to work on a project. I came up with an idea about promoting recycling and I thought I could donate the finished PSA to an organization that could use the animation to promote the recycling cause. So I had bought about 500 sheets of recycled paper to use in the making of this project and made this which I shot on 35mm film on an old Oxberry animation stand. I told you it was many decades ago...

I donated the finish product to an organization in Chicago that was promoting Earth Day at the time. I met a guy at this organization who was able to put sound to my animation, the one thing I didn't know how to do. It was kind of a backward situation; I made an animated short promoting recycling which was transfer to 3/4 video, needed a sound track and had to be converted from 35mm to video. See how easy it is today...

In the end, they had a free PSA and I had a nice animation sample with sound for my reel and to send to film festivals. It won 3rd in the ASIFA-EAST animation festival and this decade, it was shown at the Green Living series conference in New York.

I believe Animators must be paid for their work and in those days, I needed to get more samples on my reel to get more work down the road. A reel is an Animator's portfolio. It prove that you can animate and showcases your style of work. So don't work for free unless you see there is a benefit to you other than money.

If there is something you would like me to go over or have any other suggestions, comments or questions, please let me know!

The McGurk Effect

This is a very interesting effect...

When you are breaking down a dialogue soundtrack into frames, you learn right away that you don't have to put every mouth position for every frame of sound. What happens is similar to the effect above, you see the mouth switching into different positions almost too quickly especially if each frame is a different mouth. Its ok to have each mouth on two frames instead of one, because you will see the mouth before you hear the sound. Too delayed or shown too soon and the mouth will look out of sync with the sound.

I took the above soundtrack to see if switching a B mouth between a F mouth would have the same effect in animation.Watch the clip below and let me know how many Bahs you see compared to Fahs.

McGurk effect from Toondini on Vimeo.

Here's another example of the McGurk effect...