Animation Infographic

Here is a cute info graphic about animation from www.elearninginforgraphics.com


Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics

LIAF Best of the Festival

Storm Hits Jacket by Paul Cabon (France) was chosen as the best of the LIAF festival last year (2014). I love the style and obviously the judges loved it! There comments were that: 

'This film used a combination of highly imaginative scenarios, absurdity, deadpan humour and a deceptively naive but subtle animation style to keep us riveted throughout a film which really made no sense at all. For its genuine silliness, sophisticated structure, pacing and memorable images the award for Best Film of the London International Animation Festival 2014 goes to Storm Hits Jacket by Paul Cabon'.

Here is a little snippet from the animation:


Tempête sur anorak _ ANIMATION SNIPPET from Paul Cabon on Vimeo.

New animations I am looking forward to seeing

Animation Magazine listed new animations coming out this year in their article, The Animated Movie Dossier & this is my pick from the list (www.animatedmagazine.net/features/the-animated-movie-dossier)

When Marnie Was There
Studio Ghibli | July 19 (Japan)
Director: Hiromasa Yonebayashi
Writers: Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Keiko Niwa, Masashi Ando
Story: Set on the Norfolk, England, seaside, this ethereal tale centers on friendless Anna, whose life changes when she meets a mysterious girl named Marnie among the sand dunes. When Marnie vanishes and a new family moves into her house, Anna learns that her friend was not all that she seemed.

The Boxtrolls

The Boxtrolls
LAIKA, Focus Features | Sept. 26
Directors: Graham Annable, Anthony Stacchi
Writer: Irena Brignull, based on Here Be Monsters, by Alan Snow
Cast: Isaac Hempstead Wright, Elle Fanning, Ben Kingsley, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade, Tracy Morgan, Jared Harris, Toni Collette
Story: Set in a Victorian-inspired world where social status and wealth revolve around the stinkiest of cheeses, a young orphaned boy is raised by underground trash collectors known as Boxtrolls who are feared by the citizens of the upper world. When a social-climbing villain sets out to exterminate the monsters, the boy risks everything to save his misunderstood friends.

The Book of Life

The Book of Life
Reel FX, Fox | Oct. 17
Director: Jorge Gutierrez
Writer: Jorge Gutierrez
Cast: Channing Tatum, Zoe Saldana, Diego Luna, Christina Applegate
Story: Manolo, a young man torn between his family’s expectations and his heart’s desires, embarks on an incredible journey through three fantastical worlds to face his greatest fears before deciding on his life’s path. Additional voices provided by Ice Cube, Ron Perlman, Cheech Marin, Placido Domingo, Danny Trejo and more.

Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
EuropaCorp, France 3, Ile de France, Canal+, CineCinema, Walking the Dog, Ufilm | 2014
Directors: Mathias Malzieu, Stephane Berla
Writer: Mathias Malzieu, based on the graphic novel and album by Dionysus
Cast: Orlando Seale, Stephane Cornicard, Sophia Ellis, Samantha Barks
Story: Jack’s story begins when he is born in Scotland in 1874, on the coldest day of the year. When his young heart stops beating, a clever midwife replaces it with a mechanical one allowing him to live. However, Jack must avoid strong emotion, which might disrupt his heart’s delicate machinery.

Song of the Sea

Song of the Sea
Cartoon Saloon | 2014 (Ireland)
Director: Tomm Moore
Writer: Will Collins
Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Fionnula Flanagan, David Rawle
Story: Inspired by Irish folk legend, the film centers on the last of the Seal-Children, Saoirse and her brother Ben who embark on a fantastic journey across a fading world of ancient legend and magic in an attempt to return to their home by the sea. GKIDS has acquired U.S. release rights.

Animate Projects - Apocalypse Rhyme

I just love this typographical animation. I saw it at the Bradford Animation Festival in November and I was blown away.

LIAF

How lucky was I to have half term coincide with the London International Film Festival! I did work half of the week, but I went straight from work on Tuesday evening (29th October) to watch the International Programme (3). I booked tickets for the 'Horse Hospital', which turned out to be a quirky little venue! I thought we had gone into the wrong door initially, as I stumbled down a sloping corridor into a very small screening room. I had rushed from work (because I left later than I should have... usual scenario), and was running to each train link because I did not want to be late... as soon as we arrived, and had a glass of wine, I quickly wound down in the calming atmosphere.

I enjoyed quite  few of the animations screened. It is difficult to choose a favourite from Paula, Moirai and Coffee - they were so good, but there were also some others that caught my attention.

This is Paula by Etienne Simard (2011), one of my favourites from the screening that I viewed on the evening at the Horse Hospital.

Animate Projects presents: 2012 (associated with Lupus Films and Channel 4)

I was sent a link to Animate Projects, from Twitter as a suggestion to follow them. I took a look at them and decided that this would be a pretty good idea. They incorporate an online exhibition space for animation within their website and you can explore the 'Animate Collection', which features artists' animation, interviews and writing. It is the only arts charity in the UK dedicated to championing experiments in animation.

'Animate has consistently facilitated cutting edge animation in the UK, making the UK an international focal point for animated filmmaking,' David Shrigley, artist.

One of the projects that Animate Projects are presenting on their site, are five new commissions in association with Lupus Films, for Channel 4’s Random Acts - the project title is 2012.

The five films were broadcast on Channel 4 and had their online premiere on randomacts.channel4.com in April 2012. The films will be viewable on animateprojects.org from May 2012. Below is an example of one of the films, titled: Ylem.

Ylem from Lupus Films on Vimeo.

Late night Club - Indie animators

I have just viewed this trailer (from the collective of Indie animators calling themselves the 'Late Night Club') on the 'It's Nice That' site. This is their mission statement from the Late Night Club site:

Late Night Work Club is a loose, rotating collective of indie animators.

That is, animators who do independent, non-commercial work. It’s an excuse to bring a whole bunch of us together and make something great, and also to promote the work of the artists involved. Some of the best, most personal, experimental and vital animation going right now is happening on the internet. It’s being made late at night when other people have gone to sleep and on weekends when everyone else is out. It’s being made by students, freelancers, full-timers and folks with unrelated day jobs. It means something to us. It’s our scene.

Here is a link to their website, it is well worth a look!: www.latenightworkclub.com/

Animation in Google trends

Here are some stats that I got from Google trends and I am surprised at the downward trend towards animation, particularly as there are so many excellent animated films being produced, and that it used so much in advertising now.

Here is a link to the page as it is interactive and has more info: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=animation&cmpt=geo

It does have embed links, but annoyingly none of them would show in the blog?! So I had to resort to a screenshot.

The Illusionist (2010) Directed by Sylvain Chomet

I was lucky enough to have been given 'The Illusionist' (2010) as a Christmas present and must say it was excellent - the animation, the background scenery and the narrative - nothing was a let down for me - I absolutely loved watching it. 

Above are some still shots from the animation, where you can see the beautifully drawn and atmospheric scenes.

The animation is based on a script by Jacques Tati. Director Sylvain Chomet gained permission to adapt it into The Illusionist from Tati's family and Chomet based the main character Monsieur Tatischeff on Jacques Tati himself.

'The result is utterly distinctive and beguiling, with its own language and grammar of innocence: gentle, affectionate, whimsical, but deeply felt and with an arrowhead of emotional pain.' (Bradshaw 2010).

I agree with the above quote entirely - I could not have put it any better myself! I borrowed this quote from a blog that I came across and where I viewed a really good review - Lavey's Blog.

Bill Plympton is working towards resurrecting Winsor McCays Flying House animation

Social Media and fixing web glitches

I took a look at my website today as I've had a day off from work and although I've got loads to do in preparation for next weeks classes and for OFSTED (I've also been updating my skills in using Div tags and css in Dreamweaver), I was making a real hash of the handouts I was trying to create, (on the aforementioned topic), so I took a break from the slog and decided to check out my website gallery to see if a fresh pair of eyes could work out why it wasn't scrolling or showing all of the images.... I ploughed through the script in the Flash file, then went into the xml file in Dreamweaver and I saw straight away that I had duplicated words in the xml - I didn't dream that this would be the solution.... seemed too easy for once.... but hey - it now works! That made me happy :). I then thought I would add a link to this blog, seeing as the site is about the animation for my final module and this blog is all about the journey getting there - they should have been linked all along!

I must admit that I recently purchased Inbound Marketing a book by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah - and this got me sidetracked into researching how to get rss onto my website and consequently on to fixing the gallery glitch that I previously could not fix. I have been trying to dip my toe into the book at the end of very long days - but finding it hard to focus - but it is interesting to try to read up on aspects of Social Media. 


Over Christmas I searched long and hard to find some kind of help to create a social network for the animation students at my College. I came across Social Go and took time to set it up for myself and the students. We now have our own animation social network and so far the students have joined and uploaded some of their work and have been communicating effectively with it. I'm glad it was worth the effort, just need to take the time to keep it up to date :).

Caffe Latte, by Maria Avramova, 2007

I love this animation, it is quirky :)

Watch more cool animation and creative cartoons at Aniboom

The National Gallery's collaboration with Central St Martins College of Art

'Transcriptions Animation' is an innovative project which involves postgraduate animation students producing short films inspired by the Gallery's collection. I went to the screening of these animations and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I really enjoyed Mark Abbots 2D Animation called 'Bubblegum Splash'. I spoke to him after the show and he told me that it was created in Flash. I asked if he would come into College and talk to my students and he was a little shy, but I'm hoping he will come in as a guest speaker :).


Bubblegum Splash by Mark Abbot

This piece was said to be inspired by Claude, Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca 1648.

Subtle additions to animations

I have been trying to upload the updated version of the non linear animation since last night (was up until early hours of the morning trying to be patient, but now I have spent too much time again this afternoon and it will not upload).... I hate to submit to defeat, but currently I cannot put the updated version on here. The original version is on a previous post. I think I will continue to develop it as although it is now submitted I have ideas of adding short, repetitive looped walks moving around as if they are in another dimension completely and I could also add more animation within it. It will continue to evolve :)

Jarah woodland creatures

As mentioned in the previous post, this animation was primarily used to develop masking techniques with 2D and real footage. I have added some hands for the smoke blowing character to hang on with, so very subtle changes made here.

2D animation developments

Finally started the summer break (well sort of - still loads of prep work to do for the new academic year..), whinge, whinge :D. It has given me a few days to focus on the non-linear time & space animation though. I cut the footage down a lot from the original, but in doing so, I lost some funny moments that occured during filming that I could have played around with - but I made a choice with what I cut out and stuck with it and also learnt a few techniques within Premiere along the way (putting in keyframes, speeding up & slowing down sections). The footage is still too long - but I really didn't feel that I could cut much more from it.

The Ten Bells

I did some research on the 'Ten Bells' pub (where I shot the footage) & was surprised to find out the history behind it. It was once called 'Jack the Ripper'. Apparently Mary Kelly (the final victim of the notorious 'Jack the Ripper'), was last seen in the pub before she was murdered. I got slightly side tracked by the whole Jack the Ripper story and went on the Met History web pages regarding the facts and fiction behind the murders; this has culminated on many a conversation regarding the theories around the murders; but back to the animation....


I learned a lot of lessons from the previous filming. Number one was to USE A TRIPOD! Stupid mistake on the other filming that ended up a huge problem when trying to mask & everything is moving around. It made everything ten times longer to do - this was not something I was going to repeat! Also, it is so important to edit the footage, rather than just take the film, then plonk it in Flash to use - not good either, it just doesn't provide much impact. I would have liked to play around in Premiere more to create more blends & overlays, but time is of essence as always & I needed to crack on, so once I cut the film up & manipulated its speed I took it into Flash. I have now run out of time, but I will go back to this animation to add a lot more & tweak what I have already done, because although I wanted this to be disjointed, it could flow better & needs more time given to it.  I have added a few little things that are more subtle & that may only be noticed on a second viewing. There are numerous sequences that I worked on that I scrapped as they didn't work well, and as I've mentioned, I would like to work on it a quite a bit more, and hope to do so before returning to work as there are gaps where more animation is needed.

It's been so long!

I was shocked to see the last time I had posted an entry! It has been crazily manic at work since Christmas & the time has flown, but still, that's a shockingly long gap!


I'm still ploughing through the MA. Currently I'm working on an animation based on: Non linear time & space. I went to Spitalfields on Sunday (a few weeks ago) for a recce and took some time lapse photography with a lovely camera that one of my students lent me (Panasonic HDC-HS700) - it was on a beautiful, sunny & hot day but was a nightmare travelling on the train... I got some footage, but it was only 3 seconds long even though I took the photos continuously for around 40 minutes (by then the battery ran out). I went to Spitalfields again last Sunday (another hot one), and on the suggestion of a fellow tutor I took an hour of film with a College camera, so that I could speed it up & slow it down in Premiere or Final Cut.


During my venture to Spitalfields, I stumbled across an excellent artist/illustrator, his name is Tom Lewis, I asked him if he had ever thought about animating his characters & he told me that a studio was currently interested in doing that, so I will keep a look out on his website for the animation (www.tomlewis.co.uk). I also thought he would be a great person to come in & talk to the students about character design. See a couple of examples of his illustrations below:

........Back to the filming - I had found a pub on a corner (the previous Sunday), that had real character, but I took it from a different angle this time and got a bit closer to aim more at the passers by in more detail. I had a bit of trouble with Premiere, as I have not used it before. I couldn't work out how to capture the footage as I am so used to using digital rather than mini dv tape. I spoke to Suzanne from Media, at work and she explained how to capture the footage and I finally got somewhere. I did a search on the Internet for how to speed up & slow down the footage & found a good video tutorial: http://layersmagazine.com/time-remap-in-premiere-pro.html  - after viewing the tutorial, it was straightforward to speed up and slow down sections of footage. [I will put the footage up here at some point, so that the before and after can be viewed]. I am now working on the characters that I want to place into the animation. I was pretty lucky with the footage as there are quite a few appropriate moments that I can get the animated characters to interact with the passers by. This makes a refreshing change as prior to this I was working on a mixed media animation that just would not go right.....


I had a digital video camera bought for me for Christmas (with a hard drive), so I ventured out just after the snow cleared to take some footage - while I was filming, I slipped and hurt my dodgy arm - then I had sooooo much trouble getting the footage from the camera, I spent most of the Christmas hols trying to sort it out, then when I did get the footage, the quality was awful :( I then took it into After Effects...... another new venture for me...... and I tried to enhance it as much as I could and tried to keep going with making this animation. In the meantime I took the offending video camera back because I was not impressed - but kept persevering with creating some characters and experimenting with the masking techniques in Flash to incorporate the 2D with the live footage. I had such a mare with that as well. I was making movie clip animations and could not work out why the masking wasn't working????? It took so many hours of wasted time to realise that I had to turn the movie clips into graphic symbols as for some reason masking will not work with those movie clips!!! Aaaaaagh.... so much time wasted on that! Another thing I found out from working with this animation is that Flash couldn't cope if I put the footage into a movie clip. It went comotose and kept spinning the little circle for eternity - I had wanted to zoom into the film within Flash - but Flash Said NO!! Anyway, suffice to say that even after so much time and effort the animation was as flat as a pancake - so I am now relieved to leave it behind and move on with something new! The only salvation is that some of the masking is good and it has helped me to develop the use of masking, so I'll be brave and put the animation here, even though it is dire - it shows the techniques I was working on.

Here are some ideas that I had for this; from my sketchbook:

 

 

Publish Post

Lev Manovich discusses the icons of memesis

In an article entitled: 'Reality' effects in computer animation, Lev Manovich discusses what he calls, the icons of memesis.

To suggest the idea of progress of computer graphics towards realism, researchers privilege particular subjects that culturally connote the mastery of mimetic representation.

Historically, the idea of mimesis has been connected with the success in illusionistic representation of certain subjects. The original episode in the history of Western painting is the story of the competition of Zeuxis and Parrhasiuss. The grapes painted by Zeuxis symbolise his skill to create living nature out of inanimate matter of paint. Further examples in the history of art include the celebration of the mimetic skill of those painters who were able to simulate another symbol of living nature - the human flesh.

While the painting tradition had its own iconography of subjects connoting mimesis, moving image media relies on a different set of subjects. Steven Neale (1985) describes how early film demonstrated its authenticity by representing moving nature:

"What was lacking [in photographs] was the wind, the very index of real, natural movement. Hence the obsessive contemporary fascination, not just with movement, not just with scale, but also with waves and sea spray, with smoke and spray".

Computer graphics researchers resort to similar subjects to signify the realism of animation.

This search for realism is associated more with 3D animation than 2D animation; as there seems to be a quest for more and more realism within 3D, whereas within 2D there is more of a blend of traditional and digital skills. This perpetual pursuit for realism within 3D, doesn't always work with the viewer as they can feel unnerved by this ultra realism within animation, edging towards the perverse feeling within the 'uncanny valley'. Beowulf (2007) has been attributed with this phenomenon, as the prominent actors, such as Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie and Ray Winstone have been emulated through 3D animations with the use of Motion Capture. There is a debate as to whether some animators consider Motion Capture as 'animation', and a big debate as to whether this animation is ultra realistic or not. Half of a group of students who went to see this film at imax, thought it was absolutely amazing and half thought it was awful. Some thought that although the CGI was realistic, it was also soulless. There was confusion with the realism and the awkwardness of the 'acting'. As the characters were so realistic, more was expected of the 'acting', and this was why they interpreted the characters as impassive and wooden - because their expectations were higher due to the animation being closer to reality than they are accustomed to. Ultimately, this led to an element of disorientation when viewing the animation.

I do not agree with the concept that Motion Capture is not animation, because the animators work tremendously hard on animating into the captured footage in order to achieve the final product, but I have to agree that the characters do come across as soulless. The human attribute that is so elusive...... the spirit of the individual will continue to be problematic for the animators to capture, whilst attempting to create this sought after hyper realism.

COFFEE....

Came across this animation while looking at some creative blogs. I drink far too much coffee at work and when researching or studying at home and this amused me. I will have to see if I can find anything about Emilie Tarascou and Stephanie Marguerite, the animators.