AnimationResources.org - Serving the Online Animation Community AnimationResources.org

August 2nd, 2022

Aviation Illustrators: The Unsung Heros of Commercial Art

Harper Goff

Last week, I posted an article about Harper Goff, the designer of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus in Walt Disney’s “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”. A couple of days later, I was going through a stack of aviation prints to see if I could find an idea for a post, and I and stumbled across these amazing WWII era pantings by Goff. It made me think about the changing role of the commercial artist in society.

Back in the postwar era, the major aircraft builders employed illustrators to conceptualize how complex engineering would transform blueprints and raw materials into real-life massive flying machines. These talented illustrators would create fine art prints for the aerospace companies to give away as gifts to their clients and suppliers. Southern California swap meets are well stocked with these prints, and I’ve picked up a nice sized pile of them myself over the years.

Today, Photoshop and computer modeling has replaced these great technical artists, and a lot of the magic of flight has been replaced by dull literalism. On first glance, these images might seem super-realistic, but a closer look reveals the amazing technique and creative virtuosity involved in making watercolors evoke speed and power. Here’s a facet of illustration history that I would like to know more about. If you have any information on these artists, please post to the comments at the end of this article.

Two more by Harper Goff…

CHARLES H. HUBBELL

Charles Hubbell had a lifelong love of aviation and art. As a child, his hobby was model airplane building, and by the time he was in High School, he had built himself a full scale glider. He attended the Cleveland School of Art in the early 1920s, and sold his paintings to pay for flying lessons. He became a licensed pilot and successful commercial artist. In the late 1930s, Hubbell was approached to combine his interests to illustrate a calendar depicting the winners of an annual air race. For the next three decades, Hubbell painted airplane calendars with terrific authenticity and attention to detail. In the course of his career he painted over 1000 images, which together comprise a fairly complete history of aviation.

JACK LEYNNWOOD

If the art of Jack Leynnwood looks familiar, you are probably a baby boomer who had an interest in model kits growing up. Leynnwood’s distinctive paintings on the Revell model kit box covers featured antique biplanes, WWII fighters, helicopters, modern jets and even space rockets. Leynnwood’s images jumped off the shelf with their dramatic colors and lighting and dynamic momentum and motion blur. The wings of his airplanes would overlap the corners of the box, making it look like they were ready to fly away. He taught at Art Center College of Design, and passed away in 1999.

MORE AVIATION ARTISTS

George Akimoto

C.F. Coppock

Crundall?

MR?

Alexander Leydenfrost

Let me know in the comments if you have any information on these great artists, or if you’d like to see more aviation illustration.

Stephen Worth
Director
Animation Resources

This posting is part of a series of articles comprising an online exhibit spotlighting Illustration.

Labeled: harper goff, illustration, war |

Share on Tumblr

Posted by admin @ 1:53 pm

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!

MEMBERS LOGIN To Download

JOIN TODAY To Access Members Only Content

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.

MEMBERS LOGIN To Download

JOIN TODAY To Access Members Only Content

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.

MEMBERS LOGIN To Download

JOIN TODAY To Access Members Only Content

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.

MEMBERS LOGIN To Download

JOIN TODAY To Access Members Only Content

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.

Haven’t Joined Yet?

Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD A Sample RefPack!

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.

MEMBERS LOGIN To Download

JOIN TODAY To Access Members Only Content

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.

By helping others, you help yourself.

Please consider donating using the PayPal Donate Button below. For more information on our Video Podcasting Fundraiser, see the article Animation Resources Needs Your Help.

Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to donate $100 or join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal. Every little bit helps.

Or you can donate on Facebook, here…
FACEBOOK LIVESTREAM FUNDRAISER

After you have donated, drop us an email at sworth@animationresources.org and let us know if you would like a discount code for a free membership, or if you would like us to sponsor students with your donation.

Raising the bar with our live streaming initiative will make things better for the whole art form. Don’t stay on the sidelines. Be a part of Animation Resources and join our team to build the foundation for the future of animation.

Labeled: Uncategorized |

Share on Tumblr

Posted by Stephen Worth @ 11:45 am

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