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Monday, August 1st, 2022

REFPACK046: Animation From Around The World, Early Cartooning and MORE!

LAST CALL! A new RefPack will be posted this weekend and RefPack046 will be removed from the server. If you want to save any of this to refer to, NOW IS THE TIME!

Every other month, Animation Resources shares a new Reference Pack with its members. They consist of e-books packed with high resolution scans video downloads of rare animated films set up for still frame study, as well as podcasts and documentaries— all designed to help you become a better artist. Make sure you download this Reference Pack before it’s updated. When it’s gone, it’s gone!

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The latest Animation Resources Reference Pack has been uploaded to the server. Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll find when you log in to the members only page…

Puck was a seminal magazine in the field of American satire. Designed along the lines of European caricature journals, it was one of the first publications to take advantage of the development of four-color stone lithography and zinc plate printing. In RefPack046, we share a run of issues leading up to "The Tattooed Man", a political cartoon that changed the direction of a presidential election!

Next up is a pair of short films by the pioneering puppet animator, Ladislas Starevich. Starevich created the first puppet animation film in 1912 and continued to work in the medium for half a century. You’ll be amazed at the way he achieved fluid motion and imbued his characters with personality and emotion.

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In our International section, we share the second in a series of three posts featuring Fyodor Khitruk’s adaptation of Winnie The Pooh. This series was produced at roughly the same time as the Disney films, but they couldn’t be more different. On a trip to California, Khitruk paid a visit to the Disney Studios where he met Woolie Reitherman, the director who had won an Oscar for Disney’s version of “Winnie The Pooh”. Reitherman admitted to Khitruk that he liked Khitruk’s films better than his own.

In the years immediately following the end of WWII, Russian animation progressed rapidly. By the mid 1950s, the quality level had caught up with the peak standards in the West. One of the most popular films produced by Soyuzmultfilm during this period was "An Unusual Match". In the past two Reference Packs we shared "Goal! Goal" and "A Match Revenge" which dealt with ice hockey. This film involves toys coming to life and competing in a soccer match.

During the 1950s, Soyuzmultfilm produced dozens of films based on Russian fables and folk tales featuring forest animals. Designed to teach morals to children, they began to define a sense of cultural uniqueness for Russian animation. Even though the style of the films resembled American cartoons, the content was distinctly Russian. This film, "A Brave Hare" is one of the best.

A couple of years ago, we shared a film called "A Little Western" by Witold Giersz. It’s time to share another film by this one-of-a-kind Polish animator. Giersz admired impressionist painters, and Vincent Van Gogh in particular. He animated by applying oil paint on glass with a palette knife. This allowed him to build up impasto and scrape off paint to make an image move. You won’t believe your eyes when you watch this film!

Studio Miniatur Filmowych in Krakow, Poland was established in 1958, and since then it has produced nearly 1,500 animated films. This series, titled The Strange Adventures of Koziolek Matolek was produced between 1969 and 1971 and 26 episodes were made. The current episode is titled "Rally". We will be sharing more of these in upcoming Reference Packs.

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Animation Resources’ Board Member, JoJo Baptista shares two episodes from a seminal Japanese TV series from the 1960s. Wonder 3 was unique among early Anime TV programs. Although it did appear serially as Manga, it was conceived and designed from the first as a television show. Created by Osamu Tezuka, it was the first show produced by his studio, Mushi Productions. Tezuka’s designs are brimming with appeal. The Wonder 3 in particular are a trio of wonderful contrasting shapes. Lots of entertainment value with so few drawings!

We often think of slapstick and pantomime comedy to be something from the era of silent films. But there are modern examples as well. Today we are sharing one of the most beautiful and unique films of the 1960s, Pierre Etaix’s Yo-Yo. Etaix was multi-talented. He was a cartoonist, a film director, an actor and a renowned circus clown. All of these interests came together in Yo-Yo. It’s a loving tribute to Etaix’s cinematic hero, Buster Keaton. No words are spoken in the first half hour of the film, and sprinkled throughout are visual gags that wouldn’t be out of place in an animated cartoon. There are more brilliant ideas in a single minute of this film than in a dozen ordinary ones.

Animation Resources Board Member, David Eisman analyzes another batch of breakdown clips, this time focusing on The Wave Principle. It’s a system of curves that describes the path of motion for a wave. Specifically, the wave principle demonstrates how an initial S-curve or C-curve is transformed into a curve of the opposite direction. A thorough understanding of the wave principle is imperative for the animator’s toolbox as it is required for multitudes of different actions that require fluidity and momentum.

Die Muskete

The Annual Member Bonus Archive continues to feature RefPack017 with an e-book on the Viennese caricature journal, Die Muskete; a fantastic documentary on classic slapstick comedy; and a pair of silent Felix The Cat shorts. Only General and Student members have access to this. If you are a quarterly member, you will want to consider upgrading to an annual membership to get access. The page will be updated next month with a new RefPack, so make sure to download this one while you still can.

The Podcasts section has a new entry, an interview with animator Craig Bartlett. Craig is the creator and producer of the TV shows Hey Arnold!, Dinosaur Train, and Ready Jet Go! Throughout his 40 year tenure in the animation industry, Craig has worked in nearly every style from stop-motion to hand-drawn to CG. He’s successfully adapted to many technological changes in the industry and his career shows no signs of stopping. Find out what inspires Craig and his secrets to career longevity in this episode of Animated Discussions.

Our Podcasts section always contains the five most recent entries in our Animated Discussions series hosted by Davey Jarrell, with the balance of the episodes archived on the Annual Member Bonus Archive page.

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Whew! That is an amazing collection of treasures! At Animation Resources, our Advisory Board includes great artists and animators like Ralph Bakshi, Will Finn, J.J. Sedelmaier and Sherm Cohen. They’ve let us know the things that they use in their own self study so we can share them with you. That’s experience you just can’t find anywhere else. The most important information isn’t what you already know… It’s the information you should know about, but don’t know yet. We bring that to you every other month.

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Animation Resources is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing self study material to the worldwide animation community. If you are a creative person working in animation, cartooning or illustration, you owe it to yourself to be a member of Animation Resources.

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Animation Resources is asking our membership to consider donating to help us establish a video podcasting studio to be able to present seminars, interviews and informal updates live streamed on YouTube and Facebook. Our goal is for 25 of our members and supporters to donate $100. If you donate $100, we will provide you with a coupon code for a free membership to give as a gift to a friend or peer, or we can credit your donation to sponsor two students for a one year student membership.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on REFPACK046: Animation From Around The World, Early Cartooning and MORE!

Friday, July 29th, 2022

Instruction: Animation Reference

Muybridge – Horse Gallop

Today I’m going to be showing everyone my planning process for using photographic reference to plan and execute a naturalistic horse run cycle. This process has been used by generations of artists to help analyse and capture the motion patterns of real-world objects and creatures. This type of study is invaluable for building an internal “motion library” in your mind, so that when you have to make guesses about how something impossible might move, those guesses can be as educated as possible. For the beginning animator, doing motion analysis can also help give a stronger sense of what motion details matter, and which are best to remove to get an optimal stylistic motion.

First up, here is the finished animation: Horse_gallop

In a complex cycle like a horse gallop, there are many things to understand, and without experience animating similar creatures it would be difficult to plan ahead for this animation considering that we have so much to keep track of.

Get Video Reference

If you can film your own reference, then that’s a great first step, but if you can’t, the first place I search is the BBC Motion Library at Getty Images. This collection has thousands of real-time and slow-motion shots of sports, nature, vehicles, and much more. It’s free to view and download, which is ideal as we will need to carefully go through our shot frame by frame in order to analyse it.

Here is the shot I used for reference. As stated above, it’s free to download (non-commercial use of course) by right clicking the clip and choosing Save as.

A few notes about the shot:

It is playing in real-time, not slow motion, so we can use it for timing information
The shot isn’t stabilized, so we can’t use it to track body parts necessarily
The whole body is visible, including the feet as they touch the ground
The speed of the run is relatively stable for a few seconds, ideal for a cycle

Use A Frame by Frame Video Software

Next we need to be able to see each frame of the video one at a time. You can do this by importing the footage into any video editing software if you have it. I prefer to use a much simpler method by opening it in QuickTime.

QuickTime interface

To my knowledge, QuickTime is the only freely available video software which allows you to step through a video one frame at a time (using the left and right arrow keys). Many others allow you to skip several frames, but none that I’ve found allow this level of precision. Another benefit of this software shown above, is the ability to switch the timecode to frames, so we can easily count and locate keyframes in our action.

Before using the shot for any timing information, you’ll need to know the frame rate of the video. I figure this out by going to 1 second in the timecode, the switching to frames to see how many have elapsed. This shot is in a standard 25fps for european PAL broadcast. This will effect our conversion to our frame rate. In my case, I’ll be animating at 24fps (see the conversion math later on at the bottom of my Xsheet).

Get Additional Reference

Although we could use a single source of reference, it’s better to have several similar sources to draw from, and the plates from Edward Muybridge’s animal studies have been a source of inspiration to animators for a century. We have an extensive library of Muybridge here. These images (shown at top) are invaluable because they show a flat sideways perspective of a horse galloping with extracted frames to display the entire cycle of motion. The only problem with this is that we don’t know how fast it should be moving, a problem we’ve already addressed with our video reference.

Here is a playback of the muybridge_horse set to a realistic 40fps.

By comparing the frames to our video, I determined that the approximate speed of the original Muybridge shot was a brisk 40fps. I also adjusted the frames to stabilize the ground, put vertical and horizontal lines in to help track key parts of the body, and finally tracked each hoof with a colored ball. All of this information provides almost everything we need to put together our plan.

Horse Gaits

The last bit of information we need is an understanding of the pattern we hope to find and reproduce. This information I found easily on an equestrian website, along with footfall patterns of all the primary horse locomotion speeds.

Path of feet shown in color code through cycle duration.

Record Observations and Refine

Finally we are ready to utilize all of this information into a formal plan for animating our horse. By stepping through the video and referring to the Muybridge plates, I record all of the pertinent information I can onto an Xsheet.

Modified Xsheet for planning CG animation

By examining the sheet above, you can see that I’ve sought out the most important aspects of the motion and spaced them out in time so that they flow fluidly. Here is a list of the things you should look for before continuing:

Key Frames – These should be the most informational single images for the action, without which, none of the remaining actions can possibly hope to illustrate the action properly. In my case, I chose the Squashed mid-air position, and the Stretched leaping position of the horse.
Extremes -The foot contacts must all be present, as well as the maximum and minimum vertical positions of the chest and flank.
Breakdowns – Wherever necessary, plan for the passing or half-way positions of body parts and poses, so you do not miss the nuance of the motion pattern.
Small patterns– Note the path and notes about the head, these patterns are important and shouldn’t be missed. Make notes of any details you might easily forget later.

For one reason or another, the use of Xsheets has never fully translated over to computer animation, which I think is a major loss. Although these sheets were originally used to plan for the exposure of cell levels in traditional animation, they can find a valuable second life in helping to plan body part motions and musical timing.

Execute Plan

With all of this preparatory work, the only thing left to do is to use this roadmap to complete your animation. By this point, you should have such a solid idea of what your animation is going to look like, that the actual work of animation is almost an afterthought. In The Illusion of Life, as well as The Animator’s Survival Kit, the authors tell stories of their lengthy and strenuous planning procedures, and how once planned out, an animation scene was practically complete before pencil ever touched page. This method allows you to keep a solid focus on your scene even between work sessions, and frees you to focus on the details without becoming lost in the larger patterns of motion.

Taber Dunipace
Director of Membership
tdunipace@animationresources.org

Posted in academic, education, instruction, muybridge, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Instruction: Animation Reference

Friday, July 15th, 2022

RefPack046: A Peek At The Early Anime Section

People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be posting what each section of our current RefPack looks like, starting today with the Featured section. If you are a member of Animation Resources, click on this post to go to the Members Only page. If you aren’t a member yet, today is the perfect time to join! Our current Reference Pack is one of our best yet, and General and Student Members get access to a special Bonus Archive with even more material from past Reference Packs.

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SD VIDEO:

Wonder 3

Curated by JoJo Baptista

Ep.01 Three Beings From Outer Space (1965) / Ep.43 Mice From The Universe (1966)
Download this article

Wonder 3 was unique among early Anime TV programs. Although it did appear serially as Manga, it was conceived and designed from the first as a television show. Created by Osamu Tezuka, it was the first show produced by his studio, Mushi Productions. In this program, Tezuka cast his animators as characters, the way Disney Studios did it, This allowed the animators to create and refine specific walks and gestures for the characters. 52 episodes were broadcast between June 6th, 1965 ad June 27th, 1966.

The plot of the first episode establishes the characters and situation. The Galactic League sends three investigators to Earth to determine if recent nuclear testing poses a threat to the universe. The investigators are named Bokko, Bukko and Nokko, and they are authorized to destroy Earth if they feel it is necessary. They disguise themselves as a rabbit, a horse and a duck and land on Earth to investigate. They become trapped in a mountain fire and are rescued by a kind-hearted boy name Shinichi. They travel in a large vehicle called a Big Wheel, which is capable of traveling at very high speeds.

Tezuka’s designs are brimming with appeal. The Wonder 3 in particular are a trio of wonderful contrasting shapes. Also, not to be ignored is Koichi, the older brother of Shinichi, who sports a black suit, which really highlights the angular, graphic poses he strikes. This series is produced quite economically, with very limited animation, held drawings and even jump cuts to keep the story going. I would argue that it’s the charm of Tezuka’s style that really holds my interest throughout each episode as opposed to the production values. Tezuka is really masterful at employing a simplistic vocabulary of graphic shapes to make everything read clearly.

REFPACK046: Wonder 3 ep01

MP4 Video File / SD / 27:28 / 237 MB Download

The second episode I’m sharing comes much later in the series. The story is very simple. Strange space aliens arrive at Earth intending to conquer it for their planet. They disguise themselves as mice, and enlist the help of the Earth mice to attack humans. The Wonder 3 defend the Earth against the attack, and the battle is won when Rokko takes the form of a cat.

There’s some scenes with runaway space aliens conversing with each other through the window of their space ship, as their leader devises a plan to blend in on earth. The drawings of the silhouetted aliens are really fun. Nokko goes up against the leader at 18:47 and quickly scrambles to create inventions to foil the leader. The leader strikes some great cartoony poses as each of his attempts are thwarted. Lots of entertainment value with so few drawings!

I’ll have more early Japanese TV series to share with you in our next Reference Pack.

REFPACK046: Wonder 3 ep43

MP4 Video File / SD / 26:17 / 262 MB Download

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