Art Opening Layout

“Detour” is underway. I plan to complete all of the hand-drawn scenes by the end of the 2011-12 school year.
One of the weird things about laying out this film is that I am using 4:3 paper for a 16:9 film. Old supplies, waste not want not. However, conversion is really tricky. Thank goodness for Photoshop.
1920x1080p is 26.667×15 in inches. The paper I have is not that long. In fact it isn’t even made. Animation artist create their films digitally now. yet, I just love paper, and I have it, so I am using it. Call me old fashioned. So, what I’ve done is reduced the ratio by half (13.333×7.5) and tweak everything else in Photoshop.
I came across a few snags in After Effects though. The characters are not hooking up with the BG very well, which sucks after all the time I spent on scale and perspective. I don’t believe the time is wasted, though, because foot placement is nailed thanks to those funny little lines that race towards their respective vanishing points.
There are other problems with the BG as well, but it’s an easy fixed, which had already been fixed. This BG is a combination of two galleries: The Diego Rivera and the Walter McBean galleries on the campus of the SFAI. The camera is going to run into the wall as it weaves through the crowd, so I am knocking down that wall that leads to the L-shape annex. No, it does not exist in reality, but filmmakers are allowed poetic license.

More about the installation at the end of the week when I layout the crowd.

Using Reference

I am referencing the cinematography from Yankee Doodle Dandy for the opening of Detour thru your Mind. I was on the fence about doing this for quite sometome until the following three occurrences:

1. My director at Storytime Pictures telling me that referencing staging is alright so long and all novice filmmakers do so, for that how you learn cinematography
2.  Disney Feature’s use of film reference for Beauty and Beast, Aladdin and the Hunchback of Notre Dame in various shots
3.  Recruiters who constantly tell me that my boards need to be more cinematic.

Therefore, I am swallowing my pride and doing as the Romans do.

I think the result is a much stronger opening. I even included my characters from HipChick Comics. I think Tuner Classic Movies had an animated station ID similar to this set up, so I am not alone in referencing this cinematographer. Perhaps this very cinematographer referenced someone else? Who knows. I just hope the end result justifies the means.

It’s a mess now, and yes I am aware that the shot is a continuous camera movement and not a series of cuts as shown in the board. I should be able to sort everything out in layout. We’ll see. This is my project for the semester as I teach my students. I find that I am more sympathetic to their pain when I am working projects of my own. Detour Through Your Mind has 3 scenes completed thanks to the company of my students. Love you guys.
Let the fall 20111 semester begin!

Industry Drawings

On a lighter note, one of the great perks about working in the animation industry are all the great drawings you get from artists you admire. Here’s the teenager from the Incredibles drawn for me by one of the character designers who swung by Storytime Pictures for a visit.

Thank you, Mr. Faboo character designer who name I forgot. I hang my ungrateful head in shame to you.

Proof That I Am Not Worthless

This recession is pretty scary. So scary that I will conquer my greatest intellectual fear and try to become a math teacher. No one fires the math teacher. Math and I finally came to an understanding in college and we’re pretty good friends now in the CGI realm. However, I felt pretty darn worthless as a teenager bringing home the only “C” or “D” on my report card in algebra.
I’ve overcome a number of hurdles in life but always used art as a crutch which isn’t working anymore. Art still makes me happy, but it can no longer be used to keep a roof over my head. So, off I go to take the CBEST and become a math teacher, hopefully at an arts based high school, hopefully at my alma mater SOTA San Francisco. With that said, I hope the following documentation and endorsements will impress the hiring staff. Most of all, I hope they’ll remind how much I am worth as I enudure my darkest hours.

Happy 53rd, Madonna!

Happy 53rd Madonna.
To continue the tradition I started last year, I have uploaded a daily of Dear Jesse. This film is almost done! I get better ideas as the years go by with this experimental piece. Corny warned that this was an epic and it is taking me about as long as it him to finish his own final film to complete. Sometimes it takes a bit of life experience to think up suitable bits for the shots. There is a sticky bit with Soleil at the end of the pan that I am going to animate a revision for. I’ll just animate it and if it doesn’t work well, call it a nice little out-take. At the start of the film I will change the title card to an animated one with Jesse changing into different characters of the stories he tells and have it hook up with the establishing shot.
That should complete the film nicely. If not, well, perhaps I should just let Dear Jesse go and move on. I need to get serious about Detour Thru Your Mind. The band is getting on in age and I would like for the B52’s to see themselves in Fleischer-De Carlo glory before they bounce off the satellites to other realms.

Corny Cole 1930-2011

I lost one of the greatest mentors of my college life and career this morning. Corny Cole was the eccentric, quintessential artist of a teacher at CalArts who entertained us with mock senility and his affection for mochas. Corny was also a well-spring of knowledge who despite working on the infamous Road Runner cartoons, kept a love of fine art alive and integrated the discipline into animation filmmaking. Corny started out as an inbetweener for Chuck Jones on the Road Runner cartoons and reached his peak in the 70’s as a production designer. He designed some of the Pink Panther and Ant and the Aardvark shorts. Corny’s style was easily distinguishable from his contemporary Gary Lund. Corny style was rougher and possessed a DaVinci influence in his characters. Corny was Da Vinci in motion on the screen.

His backgrounds reflected te intellectual painter, Cezanne. You can see Corny channel Cezanne in the Pink Panther cartoon where he was a lumber jack (?) The palette of the forest is organized to give the scene a sense of depth in light of the simple staging and the line quality added texture. Some artists including myself have tried to mimic the style and end up with a bird’s nest of undisciplined chaos for we failed the analyze the methodology that lies underneath Corny’s compositions.
Why do I know of Cezanne so well? Well, it’s not from my many college art history classes. I actually know of Cezanne from my first art history lesson depicted in an animated feature Corny was embarrassed to be part of: Gay Puree.

Gay Puree was Corny’s first feature as a production designer and he was greatly ashamed and felt he cannibalized the works of the great French Impressionists to tell the “Portrait of Mewsette” at the film’s midpoint.

I disagree. Corny, Chuck and Dorothy Jones introduced a lot kids who may never have been to art museum to those pieces and for those who have, provided a narrative for the pieces that a 4th grader can comprehend. I remember first seeing Gay Purree as a late afternoon TV matinee that aired just before the Muppet Show. Both productions were huge influences on me as an artist.

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Corny taught many classes at CalArts, He was a fun life drawing workshop teacher, a less than competent layout teacher, and a marvelous animation history lecturer. However, what I felt Corny excelled at was one on one directed study and an as adviser. What I appreciate most from Corny is his advice on how to navigate through the industry. Corny said that we will work on many projects we won’t like, but the experiences will be valuable. Yet, we don’t have to stay in that rut. There will animation work you do for money and animation projects you’ll like so so much that you’ll work for free. Success is not worth the sale of your soul. I acted on this advice and worked on some B projects that paid me well and then practically starved for a summer in New York working near pro bono on a project I loved, The New Electric Company. I earned my first Emmy nomination working for the Sesame Workshop and I’ll do it again.

I think Corny knew that I would have a spotty career for we shared the same spirit. We work best in certain genres.Much like my struggles with the content of the animation industry today, Corny’s career waned in the late 80’s when the princess genre came into vogue. I personally like the princess genre, but I can appreciate how Corny felt like a fish out of water waiting for the tide of his specialty genre to return. Which never did. Bug Bunny and his talking animal trickster genre enjoyed a last gasp in television animation via Ren and Stimpy and finally faded away. My favorite genre of girl’s cartoons: Jem and the Holograms, Beverly Hills Teens and Galaxy High School and the like will never return either. It’s a new millennium with different people in power. The creators and producers who helm Hollywood today were mainly raised on Star Wars and were friendless nerds in high school. Animation tells their stories now.

Fortunately like Corny, I have found another path.

Corny spent the last 15 years of his life as teacher at CalArts. In fact my class was his first or second year at the institution. We watched him struggle, make mistakes and grow as a teacher. Having not quite reached his potential as an instructor, we saw Corny as a mascot who was full information despite his professional shortcomings and held him in our hearts.

It is never easy living without your mentors. There no one to turn to for advice and the empty space they leave behind gives a air of instability, but in all Hero’s Journey’s, the protagonist must lose his guide and fight his battle on his own. This way he can return with the elixir and live on and take his mentors place. Then again, I find that pattern too much to bear. There is more than one principle of story and I prefer Mark Twain’s structure where the hero works for the benefit of his mentor who survives and lives on to prosper. Pity, the former in more common in reality. It’s not fair. There are some people in this world who are too wonderful to die.

As I move on with my novice teaching career, I hope to be able to fill the shoes of my departed mentors and aid the development of the next generation of artists. I am 39 years old today, so it is time. When I give lectures and find myself in doubt when I am challenged by a student, I hope I can draw strength from Marsha Pannone and Corny Cole and stand firm. That student may be right, but I have the experience. One day that little heckler will be sent back to his or her desk in tears from a vicious upbraiding by a director and remember the real world advice that was given to him/her from me passed down from Corny Cole, Jules Engel and Marsha Pannone and say “Hey, there is more than one way to do something”. I’ll try another technique and see if that pleases my director. A technique is just a mutable tool, but the methodology is the constant.

Pleasant Journey, Cornelius Cole III. Thank you for sharing yourself with the world.

Why I Failed the Dora Test

I am still trying to figure it out. Perhaps in a year, I will see the mistakes as I do with my failed Nihao Kai Lan test, but right now, I just can’t see where I went wrong.
I size comped and laid the set out in maya to assure that there would be no guess work in regards to perspective and size comps in the board, but I still got it wrong. Was I inconsistent? Did I place the horizon line smack dab in the middle of the composition? I don’t know. Discuss it amongst yourselves. One thing is for sure, I’ll warn my students to never be thrown off by a simple show. They too have their hidden obstacles.

Comments ( I hope it’s ok to post these. The seem innocent enough)
“Some of the director’s comments were: “Cute drawings. Shows a sweetness to the drawings. Have a youthfulness & playfulness which is great! Too concerned about clean up. Need to work on volume. Size comp. & perspective is off. To help better yourself for the future, study the show & practice the style of the show & practice drawing Dora.”

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Here is a response from two friends of mine. The most vocal of the two is a director.

Greg: First off, it’s off model…it’s drawn/acted “Ashanti style”, not Dora style (not that I’m defending Dora style..but it is what it is). Dora’s a pretty flat show…you’re forcing perspective shots in a show that doesn’t need them….on top of that, they’re not good perspective shots. Santa doesn’t look like he’s in the foreground….he just looks really small. Generally strange compositions. You missed the “Dora talking to the kids in the audience” thing…not sure if the script makes it clear when that’s happening, but you’ve got that amazingly long pan & wide comp at the start when you don’t need it at all.
Remember – TV storyboards ARE what ends up on TV…you won’t have layout or animation to re-interpret the boards to put it in the show’s style….your boards don’t look/feel like Dora, so they didn’t feel comfortable throwing you into it. Hey, at least you got some compliments w/ the rejection.
Wow, just saw the 3D model….while that is impressive – it was absolutely unnecessary….I imagine that took a lot of time. That’s time you should have spent on the show’s character style and visual storytelling style.
Oh, sorry…you did do the “Where’s Santa” talk to the camera thing….eh, I’m up in the middle of the night for some reason. 🙂 …but, there’s still a lot of complicated business going on. Needed to be way simpler.

2nd Commentor: These tests are unethical…they ask you to do a ton of work and then throw them out. If you actually see the productions boards they are basically chicken scratches that are pushed through the cycle. Seeing your boards you could easily be directed as a board artist. I think they are fully staffed and are just hiring from within word of mouth. Usually they rehire people they know first and then search for new talent. Keep plugging away at the Maya and FX…Dora isn’t necessarily a premiere creative job.

Greg: David – you are so, so, so wrong. Board tests are essential…there are many fantastic artists out there with wonderful portfolios…but they often don’t have an instinct for a show’s style or context, shot composition and flow. Sometimes they just don’t have a sense of visual storytelling at all. A test is an audition. No artist is entitled to a job. Almost every job I was hired for was due to a test. Now I’m in a job where I often look at tests….and believe me, I don’t hire from word of mouth…I’m looking for more than chicken scratches…and I see TONS of legitimately bad tests. I’d like to think I’m objective…I won’t dismiss a test for lack of perfection. I understand that it IS “just a test”…but I have to see that a person “gets it”. We recently hired someone based on their test and my feedback on it….and she’s done great. NO ONE KNEW HER. She got hired due to her test! Ask her if it was a waste of time. 🙂

Dave This is from your perspective and I respect that, but I have boarded for the cartoon network, Klasky and other studios and from my perspective it’s unfair of the applicants to produce a lot of work. These tests do weed out people, but they are no means should be the end all be all. My problem with them is they ask people to do a TON of work for nothing. Cut down on the amount asked to board. I know from direct experiences that they ask far more from applicants than they do from actual production which has crazy deadlines and perfection is not the goal. Knowing Ashanti, she could easily succeed working for Dora, but knowing Nick, they have a ton of people to pick right in L.A. We would rather hire someone who could start today rather than someone living in another state…even if they had talent. Word of mouth comes from colleagues who have worked together on other shows. As for beginners, sure test them, just don’t ask people to spend days on end to produce a mountain of boards when you can determine with just a few pages whether or not they have aptitude.

Greg: David – I agree that tests shouldn’t be huge. This Dora tests looks like it couldn’t have been more than 1/2 a script page. Ashanti ended up overworking it….that’s not the studio’s fault. And, while it’s true that Ashanti could probably learn and figure it out….lets say they have a pile of tests that show that people instinctively “get it” right off the bat…well, who would you hire?

Ashanti – There is overseas layout. What I mean is – it doesn’t function like features. If you board something with wonky perspective or in a non-functioning way, an in-house layout department & animators would fix that. Overseas studios don’t do that. The board has to be on the nose in terms of what it’s going to be.

Greg: In terms of model…people DEFINITELY shouldn’t trace. I’ve seen many tests where people literally cut ‘n paste the model sheets and augment the limbs. Those are an instant “NO”. However – sizes, proprortions, expressions and poses are EXTREMELY important. Your Dora doesn’t have the right eyes or mouth….she’s too tall…..the monkey is really stringy and lanky. “Loose” means “don’t do feature quality inked cleanups” ….however, it should still “look” and “feel” like the show.

As far as training is concerned…I think you need to DE-TRAIN yourself….understanding these shows you’re testing for isn’t about training, it’s about instinct for context and adaptability.

Ashanti – How do the Koreans adapt to styles when they don’t even know what the fuck the characters are talking about? 😉 You still think like a feature animator….that’s not how you approach storyboarding…especially TV storyboarding.

Yup, TV boarding is a job where one has to wear a lot of hats….you pretty much have to imagine the finished film in your head, and board it as though you are the storyteller, layout artist, animator, and editor. There isn’t time as in features to pitch, experiment, rework, repitch, etc…it’s just a different beast.

Actually Steph – I’d submit that feature boards are LESS about acting….because you have animators who are going to call all the creative shots w/ the acting.

I guess I like TV boards cuz I like having the control and seeing as much of “me” on the screen when it’s finished. I guess it’s more responsibility up front, but the end result is satisfying. I should try feature boards one of these days….

Maybe I’ll start some kind of blog over my hiatus and post some of my old tests.

I took a lot of those tests that David hates…lol…but hey, it worked out. 🙂

If your job consists of being yelled at and crying, you’re not in the right job. Find something that makes you happy.

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Now the advice given is very good advice for working on a show like Dora or Family Guy, HOWEVER, if you have been working on 2D/3D hybrids like I have been been doing over the past several years, then my methods are justified. My habit of building sets is common in a CG process called pre-vis. A very good friend of mine from the top VFX house in the country confirmed it. So, take critiques with a grain of salt. Moreover, the essence of Greg’s advice is to board in the style of the show you are trying to work for. My sophomore year baording style that was used for Soleil Rocketship would’ve been fine. There was no need to impress the director of Dora the Explorer with fancy live-action 3D staging. Greg could’ve been more specific and less myopic about the application my storytelling abilities in different genres, but that’s the nature of the animation industry; the director is not teacher who’s job it to expand your mind introduce you to different avenues. He has to concentrate on his own project and the philosophy of the studio her works and so do you. It is up to the artist to interpret direction and styles accurately. Judging from my failure of this test that’s easier said than done.
My advice, find a director ( or several) you work well with, that means; someone who’s direction you can follow accurately without fail, and stick to them like glue throughout your professional career!

-A

La Ong Fong: After Effects Fabucuteness!

This is the kind of stuff I wanna work on. I also wanna work on a Julie Taymor project, of course!

Animatress’ New Home

I’ve moved Animatress to WordPress! I know Blogger is the animation industries blog of choice, but I was sick of having my blog look like everyone else’s.

 

Enjoy the first post!

I can see right now that this Electric Company Characters needs as edgeblend, a shadow and possibly a reflection map to marry her into the maya environment.