World (Sand) Animation Day

That’s right, October 28th is World Animation Day! Time to celebrate the art of animation in all its variations. If you are in the Denver area. ASIFA-Colorado is putting on some great events. But the one I want to highlight (since shameless self-promotion is all the rage) is ME!

I am the featured speaker for Friday’s events and I’ll be giving a LIVE demonstration of sand animation. I will also show some sand animation films, talk about our recently successful Kickstarter campaign for A Tangled Tale, and, I’ll have demonstration station set up so you can try making your own sand animation. This is an unprecedented chance to try this very unusual technique, so be sure to mark your calendars and Celebrate Animation with the World!

When: Friday, Oct. 28 @ 7pm
Where: the Bolt Factory, 209 Kalamath, Unit 7
(round back)

$5 general admission
$3 for ASIFA members

Summer Animation at the Wyly

I am pleased to announce that this summer I will be teaching 3 animation classes at the Wyly Center for the Arts in Basalt. Now you have a chance to bring objects and drawings to life. We will try out different types of animation to create a series of short films you can share with your friends and family. Classes are for all age groups so please tell anyone you think might be interested! It's coming up in less than a month, so don't wait to register!

Here are the dates and links:

June 6-10, 10am -12:30 Elementary
June 6-10, 1:30 – 4pm Middle School
June 11 -12, 10am – 4pm Weekend Animation Workshop (for high school and the young at heart)

Registration is now open and space is very limited so sign up early and bring a friend. I look forward to animating with you!

Basalt Blizzard

A very merry Yuletide from the Roaring Fork Community! This weekend was the annual YuleFest, an art and food fair benefitting Basalt High School, here in our new home. To join in the fun, I set up an Animation Station – a booth where anyone could stop by and spend a few minutes creating stopmotion. It was a great hit. Over the course of the day, about 50 people contributed to one continuous film and we ended up with over 2 minutes of animation! It was a fantastic way to pull people out of shopping mode and allow them to contribute to a project bigger than any one person. Now that’s true Yuletide spirit!

Our wintery theme was the Basalt Blizzard. The process was simple: visitors could either create their own snowflake to add to the blizzard or use one of the ones I had made.

Most of the adults were a little intimidated by the crafts and opted to use the provided materials, but the kids loved cutting and decorating their own snowflakes!  

Once the snowflakes were ready, we moved them over to the animation station and made them dance! I captured the frames on my computer so everyone could see their handiwork immediately. A few people were a little skeptical about their ability, but once they started moving the snowflakes around under the camera and saw how easy animation can be, I had no trouble convincing them to continue. In fact I think some of the adults were having more fun animating than the kids! Though the snowflakes were the stars of the show, I had a few other holiday props to add to the animation: m&m’s candy canes, Hershey’s kisses, ribbons and bows. Of course, by the end of the day all the kisses and m&m’s had mysteriously disappeared! I certainly saw some creative flashes of brilliance in the process. I hope to find some venues to host some animation workshops in the near future. There certainly were some promising students in the crowd.

All the donations from the project went directly to the Basalt H.S. Leadership fund which sponsors clubs and activities at the school. Thanks to everyone who stopped by and I hope to see you again!

Yule Fest 2010 -The Animation Station

There's a blizzard brewing in Basalt!

Come to the Yule Fest on Saturday, Dec. 4 between 9am-5pm at Basalt High School and help us make an animated film. I'll be hosting the Animation Station where you can try your hand at stopmotion and be a part of a community holiday greeting. Participation is free but donations towards the leadership fund are gratefully accepted! Here's a taste of the fun we'll be having:

There will be tons of art, food, music and other fun at the YuleFest and proceeds go to support the school's clubs and activities!

Upcoming Photography Lecture!

If you are in Wanaka, take note! I’ll be presenting some of my work to the Wanaka Photography Club this Monday, August 9 at 7:30pm.     My background as an animator has a huge influence on my photography. I strive to create images that keep your mind in motion. I’ll be explaining some of the in-camera and post-processing techniques I use to create these images. Browse through some of my recent work on my website. If your curiosity is piqued, come by St. John’s rooms on Link Way at 7:30 pm this Monday!

 

Notes from the Animation Workshop at NZMFF

Animation is creating movement frame by frame. The thing that makes animation easy these days is you can take any sequence of frames (drawings, photographs etc) recorded with a digital camera or frame capture program and import it into just about any editing program (iMovie, Windows MovieMaker, Adobe Premier, Final Cut) and cut it into your live action footage.

To shoot your own animation, you'll need a basic animation set-up. This can be as simple as a digital camera on a tripod pointed at a flat surface with two lights on either side. You can get fancier from there by building your own camera stand, using special lighting techniques, frame capture programs and more. You will want to make sure your camera doesn't wiggle when you take frames so be sure to use a remote or cable.

So now that you're set-up, let's make some animation!

If you are artistically inclined, you can animate up a storm on paper. I won't start on the principles of hand-drawn animation here. There are dozens of sites on the web and books in the bookstore that will teach you the principles of character animation. Good drawing skills don't make up for poor character and story development. You can move an audience to tears with a stick figure, but a fancy, moving drawing that doesn't have heart and life behind it will only get you brief admiration.

Once you have your stack of drawings, all you need to do is put each one under the camera and click, click, click. Then either download the frames from your camera or animation program and import it into your editing program and you are good to go. Here's a great example of hand drawn animation in the introduction to The Fine Line.

Paper Shredders from Rocky Mountain Sherpas on Vimeo.

But not everyone is the next Glen Keane. Never fear, for the drawing impaired there are other forms of animation. Stopmotion is taking an inanimate object and giving it life through animation. You can use anything from paper cut outs, household objects, lollies, or anything you can get your hands on including people!

Now comes the part where you want to be at the workshop. I will demonstrate some animation basics of stopmotion, including how to control the speed and fluidity of your animation, using replacement animation, cycles and morphing.

The best way to learn about animation (apart from doing it yourself) is to watch other animation and figure out how it's done. Watch some of this great stopmotion animation by Pes and see if you can pick out some of the techniques we talked about in the workshop.

Between drawing and stopmotion, you pretty much have all forms of animation covered. These principles extend into all techniques, claymation, puppet animation, even 3-d animation. It just takes a little experimenting to find the technique that's right for your production!

Where to from here?

Want to learn more about animation?

Here's a list of books to get you started.

Animation Arena has a lot of articles about creating good animation.

Animation Tips and Tricks is a blog for aspiring animators.

Curious about more styles of animation? Here are some of my favorites on Youtube.

Thanks for coming and making the workshop a success! Happy animating!

Animation Secrets revealed at NZMFF

I am the world's biggest fan of creative use of animation and thrilled to see it permeating every film, documentary, music video and commercial that rolls out into the mainstream theses days. Thank you digital media for making it easy (well, easier) to animate!

This Sunday, I'll be hosting a workshop at the New Zealand Mountain Film Festival in Wanaka. If you happen to be in town, come to the Lake Wanaka Centre at 10am on Sunday morning. If not, or if you come and don't want to take notes, check back on the blog. I'll be posting an outline and some links after the workshop. Don't think you can skip the workshop though. I'll do some live demonstrations and show some handy tricks that I can't post in the blog!

By way of introduction, check out the festival's 2007 winner of the Best Film on Mountain Culture and Environment, "Conversing with Aotearoa/New Zealand". What does animation bring to a film production anyway? Why should we even bother with it?

Watch more free documentaries

From there we'll talk about how to animate drawings, paper cut outs, inanimate objects, or anything you can get your hands on including people! Just for fun, here's an awesome music video by Oren Lavie and Yurval and Merav Nathan.

Looking forward to seeing you at the festival!

FAST Conference Talk: Animation in the Media

This past weekend I presented a short talk titled Using Animation to Address Difficult and Complex Subject Matter at the Fulbright Academy of Science and Technology's annual conference. The theme this year was sustainability and the particular panel I was on dealt with using media as a collaborative tool for promoting and communicating the science, technology and business sides of sustainability. Below is a slightly expanded version of the talk with links to the films I highlighted. Many of the films below grapple with social justice issues very effectively. And the same principles translate very well into environmental issues as well.

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Anyone who has sat down in front of the TV, movie theater or internet recently cannot fail to notice the prevalence of animation. Animation is coming into its own; there is hardly a TV commercial that doesn’t incorporate some sort of animation. Digital technology had made animation easier and inexpensive to create – anyone with a digital camera and a basic move making program on their computer cans move things around and take some pictures (or frames as we call them) and string them together into animation.

Because of this, filmmakers and especially documentary filmmakers are realizing just how important it is to include the visual feast that is animation into their productions, or create entire productions with animation. This goes beyond the typical scientific and informational visualization (animated graphs, medical and chemical illustrations, textbook images that move) with which we are all familiar and are very straightforward in their presentation of information. Below are several animated films that use the technique to drive home a theme or message that would be very difficult to do with live action.

Creating an emotional atmosphere

His Mother’s Voice
by Dennis Tupicoff

This film uses a radio interview of a mother recounting the loss of her son and animates two very haunting takes. The first is high contrast, bold, colorful images and a reenactment as the mother tells the story. The second take, set to the same soundtrack, does not reenact the story but simple moves throughout the house, the yard – wholly in the present. The animation is rendered with light pencil lines very little color. The sense of drama in the first take juxtaposed with the quiet grief of the second fully encompasses the many facets of this death.

Illustrating an emotional or mental state
Ryan
by Chris Landreth

An interview with Ryan Larkin, a promising young animator who destroyed his career through alcohol and drug abuse To visualize the effect of heroin eating away at a creative mind, Landreth creates a character whose face is disintegrating as he speaks, and yet there are sparks of brilliance still hanging by a thread. If you were to look at Ryan in live action, he would seem a sloppy, drug addict who can barely put together a sentence. But in visualizing him this way, the dignity of who is was in the past comes through the shell of the man he is now.

Using Humor to capture an audiece
The Meatrix

Leo, Chickity and Moopheous discover the true reality behind what we eat. Free range studios and Grace Studios ride the wave of the popular Matrix films to convey the unethical and unhealthy aspect f the commercial meat industry. A clever spoof, a well written script and a highly accessible web distribution plan created a buzz around this film reaching an audience far more extensive than the typical festival goers.

Animating the past
Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi

An autobiographical coming-of-age story of a precocious and outspoken young Iranian girl that begins during the Islamic Revolution. The memory of the past is brought to life with character and humor and the comic book graphics not only provide a visual feast, but are able to put us in the experience of the child as she becomes a woman.

Dealing with graphic subject matter

Waltz with Bashir
by Ari Folman

After a conversation with an old friend, Ari Folman realizes that he can’t remember his experiences on an Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early eighties. As Ari delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, his memory begins to creep up in surreal images …

Again, dealing with memory, but trying to present the graphic horror of war without turning the audience away. Graphic images are more palatable (and more emotional) when they are drawn rather than live action. At the end of the film there is about 3 minutes of newsreel footage that shows the carnage of the Lebanon massacre and honestly it turns your stomach. It brings the audience into reality right at the end for an overwhelming impact.

Dealing with shy subjects and overcoming audience stereotypes
Survivors
by Sheila Sofian

With powerfully understated empathy, Sofian combines voice-over interviews with battered women, and a counselor who works with "recovering" male batterers, with elegant animation to explore the experience of domestic violence from all sides.

Many of the women in this film did not want to be videotaped because they feared for their safety. However, they were willing to have their voice recorded. Unless you are a trained actor, it is impossible to ignore a camera in you face, but a microphone and a conversation can bypass that shyness and subjects are more likely to open up quickly. Additionally, having only the voice as information about a person allows the audience to put themselves in the subject’s place. When we are looking at video of another person, immediately we are judging them on their appearance. With no image to feed our stereotypes, we are forces to listen to the word spoken.

These are just a few examples of animation used in documentary and memoir. Animation is quickly developing into a distinct visual dialect and filmmakers will do well to verse themselves gain some level of fluency in this powerful medium.

Sugar Pine Point State Park

It has been a long time since the last post, but not an unproductive time! Amongst other things, I recently spent a day at Sugar Pine Point introducing the masses to the wonders of plein air animation. It was part of the Living History Day at the park, an annual event that introduces visitors to the unique history of the lakeside mansions and Tahoe basin. As a local artist, I was invited to share my talents with the visitors. Click on the pine cone to see the results of our 6 hours of collaboration.