Rats in the Kitchen

Ratatouille:

Before I go too deeply into my love of this film, and I did love it I was subjected to bouts of outright prolonged laughter Theodore, let me state that I made my living as a Chef for 9 of my 11 years in college. That experience made some of the scenes of rats in the kitchen unsettling, even jarring to me.

I definitely need to see Ratatouille a few more times before I can objectively speak about the animation or the production design. The story grabbed me and dragged me through the movie so that I did not have time to analyze. And that is the way it should be.

I do know that the movement and the environment never intruded by being too good or too bad. In Monsters Inc the animation of snow during the downhill Tibetan toboggan ride was so amazing that it pulled me out of the movie.

There have been a lot of rodents in cartoons going back to the very first funny animals. But the rats of Ratatouille are not the character designs of Oswald and Mickey. The rats of Ratatouille, other than the lead rat, always move like rats. Only Remy, with his finely developed sense of taste and smell, walks on his hind legs because he does not want to taste what he walks on.

There is a fine line here in character design, it`s edgy and in some cases downright creepy. When the lights come on and the kitchen is covered in rats I feel the instinctive hatred of man for the food stealer and bringer of decease. Brad walks a fine line here and sometimes steps over it on purpose. He never plays it safe. We know from Mickey that a rodent can be made lovable and cuddly.

Like I said, I am going to have to see Ratatouille again and I will on the 5th at the ASIFA screening. Until then . . . Bon Appetit

Lost in the Stacks:

Yesterday I re-re-discovered Karel Zeman during my continued adventures in cataloging my animation collection. I first discovered Karel Zeman because of the Marshal Plan and Fred Ladd`s serialization of his Journey to the Beginning of Time. (thank you Fred, you made my childhood) I use to run home from the bus stop in order to get to the TV in time to see your next episode.

I re-discovered Zeman one magic Saturday afternoon when I was about 17 years old, and my local station played The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. It blew me away. And it still does all these years later.



If you have never seen this masterpiece of visual storytelling you have missed a real treat. The entire film looks like an engraving come to life. Sets and props were created with etching lines as part of their surface and the film was processed through lined filters to give everything a turn-of-the-century steal plate engraved look. Zeman makes Jules Verne come alive as if his stories jump right off the pages of a first edition.

It saddens me that almost nobody today knows about Karel Zeman. I make sure I always show his films to my Animation History classes. He did stop motion, crane and wire work, cut out animation, hand puppets, multicolor hand tinted black and white film, anything that would tell the story.

Amazon lists the following Zeman selections as available :

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne
On the Comet
Original Fabulous Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Karel Zeman

and

Journey to the Beginning of Time
Journey to the Beginning of Time

I have all of these films in my collection and I have a sneaking suspicion that the same is true for Terry Gilliam. He might lean a little more toward Munchausen but Fabulous World of Jules Verne is always my favorite,

ASIFA Comic Con Schedule

Just got the final ASIFA program scheduled.

PIXAR STORY: TO INFINITY AND BEYOND
THURSDAY, JULY 26
10:15-12:00pm
ROOM 6CDEF

This is a documentary from Academy Award Nominated director Leslie Iwerks. She has been working on it for the past several years. Talking to all the people involved in the creation of this powerhouse studio that has changed the face of animation.

As a guy with a deep interest in animation history this is a god-sent. Most of the history of animation is written years after the fact through the mist of time and strikes and heaven knows what other distorting factors. So there are always lots of question marks about what really happened.

I have just updated all of the ASIFA Comic Con pages http://www.asifa-hollywood.org/blog/con2007/combinedschedule07.pdf . We still are missing animators to kick off the Animation Jam of Thursday morning. http://www.asifa-hollywood.org/blog/con2007/table.html . So if you want to get in on this gig and you are going to be at the Con on Thursday here is your chance.

Grab Bag

Been working on last minute Comic Con details today. Still looking for volunteers for the booth for Thursday and still have open time slots for the Animaiton Jam. Here is a link to the ASIFA Comic Con Site. (have not had time to up dated the jam list this week) Animation Jam http://www.asifa-hollywood.org/blog/con2007/index.html

Will the Real Creator Please Stand Up:

I had yet another hero destroyed yesterday, dashed to shreds by cruel truth. It is the fault of Anthony Tollin and Will Murray, the guys putting out those killer Shadow facsimiles, who have pin pointed the issue of the Shadow that Bill Finger ripped off to create Batman number 1. That`s right, Bill Finger, Bob Kane didn`t even write issue 1. chemical-syndicate The great Bob Kane didn`t even do his own Shadow rip off.

I have known for years that Bob Kane signed his name to other artist`s work. I knew that he lived off one really good contract that gave him credit and profit sharing for all things Batman.

I knew that Kane made his fortune on the backs of hundreds of other talented creators but I thought that at least he had done his own stealing. That he had fashioned that first story. Another hero living off lies. This explains a lot about Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse.

I have had a lot of my heroes shown up as first class rip off artists starting with 1977 when my teacher Dick Ayers told me just how little Stan Lee really had to do with all those books he got writing credit on. classroom-truth-vs-corporate-truth

So what does this have to do with animation, other than the very bad Courageous Cat? A whole, lot because there are tons of cases of rip offs taking the credit for other animator`s creations. The business has always been this way.

This in part explains why Charles Mintz and Pat Powers made their big mistake. They thought that Walt Disney was just another businessman taking credit for the work of real artists. That is why they thought that if they hired away all his artists they could reproduce his creativity.

Don’t get me wrong Walt took credit for lots of artist, but unlike so many artist rip offs he brought something to the game. He was and still is the best producer and storyman who ever worked in animation.

A lot of people take shots at Walt Disney once they discover that he has feet of clay and they find it hard to forgive him for being human and not the lovable Uncle Walt they watched on TV every Sunday night.

He did good things and he did bad things. He kept paying Al Zinnen even when he was sick and dying Zinnen . And he turned over his strikers to HUAC and the draft board. The truth is that the classic Disney animations (pre 1945) happened only because Walt made them happen.

Say what you want about Walt; he made a major contribution to the creations that bore his name. And that is a whole lot more that a lot of those other greats (sic).

The Feature Animation Pipeline is Hemorrhaging Dollars

I had such high hopes for the Lilo & Stitch filmmaking model when it first came out. Low budget, compared to the typical $100,000,000 plus feature animation price tag, creator driven, small personal films with a solid story worked out in pre-production looked like the wave of the future.



Yesterday I talked about an animation feature that brought in only $34 million in its first 2 days as a sad box-office failure. It wouldn`t be a failure if the production price tag was around $25 million.

Ghost in the Shell 2 came in for about that. Not easy to tell by looking at it, because it looks rich and beautiful just like all those $150 million features. Or how about Gen 13 by my old Kubert School schoolmate Kevin Altieri, a good solid feature done for $1.5 million in 1999. A feature animation for $1.5 million.

What is the difference between films like Ghost in the Shell 2, Lilo & Stitch or Gen 13 and the normal monster budget animated films that cost 10 or 20 times as much?

Story planning is happening in pre-production where it belongs. These films had their story created in pre-production and then were animated during production. What a concept?

The difference in cost rarely making it to the screen because the big ticket movies are being animated 3 or 4 times over. Just look at the deleted scenes.

Animated films today are rewritten and reanimated right up to their opening with changes coming out of test screenings and everybody second-guessing everybody to death. And people left on payroll when there is no work to do because of yet another rewrite.

John Ford use to film just enough scenes to make his movie his way. Hitchcock had the film all made in his head and on his storyboards before the first day of shooting. In fact shooting the film was just a boring task that had to be done so that he could plan the next one in his head.

But today`s creators refuse to trust themselves (or the studio refuses to let them trust themselves) and indecision costs.

The Feature Animation Pipeline is hemorrhaging dollars in pursuit of blockbuster status. Once your production costs top $100 million then you have got to have that blockbuster or you are dead. Nobody is making B pictures anymore and nobody ever makes an animation B picture (even if they are making The Bee Picture).

Low production costs, that is the answer. Then not every animated feature would have to top $50 million in the first weekend to make its money back. Proper planning could free up the animation pipeline by closing up those costly reanimation holes.



Kevin Altieri, Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois, and Mamoru Oshii have proved it can be done and done well. The only difference between Oshii-san`s animatic and his finished film was that he flipped 2 scenes. Pre-plan twice animate once.

Futile Times:

Surf`s Up but only to $34,625,490 in it`s second weak/week. And it is a shame because it is a better movie than Happy Feet. I missed the ASIFA screening of Surf because Hell, I`m not going to drive into L.A. for another damn penguin movie. The motion capture Happy Feet was the last pebble for me in the flood of penguin animations.

And I just wasn`t going to go for another penguin movie, no way. No how! Maybe watch it on DVD.

Yesterday I went out and saw saw the Surfing Birds at the mall because Jerry Beck said it was a great movie. And it is a good solid film. Very lush CGI, innovative hand held camera, water spots on the lens, inventive documentary plot, water animation to rival Nemo, well worth seeing. But still, another penguin movie!

It is certainly great to have Sony ImageWorks putting out quality feature animation. I would love them to stay in the market and I sure hope they continue to produce quality feature animation for a long time to come. Unfortunately, corporate bean counters hold the purse strings and they only look at numbers not the playing field. So it does not bode well. Sad!

Thursday ASIFA Programming at Comic Con

ASIFA-Hollywood, us, (and in some ways me, since I put together the ASIFA programming) have a lot of cool stuff coming down at San Diego Comic Con on Thursday, July 26th.

NEWS FLASH: Not all of Comic Con happens on Saturday. I know that Saturday is the big day but there is some powerful stuff scheduled on the other days.

Since Hollywood has discover San Diego (it happened a number of years ago as part of a drunken scavenger hunt) the pressure is to up scale all of Comic Con programming to blockbuster levels. Sadly, all the funky little special interest presentations I use to so dearly love are gone, gone, way of the Dodo gone and the spill over on Thursday is getting higher profile every year.

ANIMATION ON A SHOESTRING - 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM ROOM 30 CDE: I kick off the ASIFA-Hollywood Comic Con programming with my Animation on a $hoe$ring (tm) presentation. This is the 6th year I have brought my how to create a low cost animation studio presentation to San Diego. Last year I bought a DVD by an animator who used my book in the process of creating his animaiton.



MAVERICKS, MAGIC AND MAGOO - 6:00 PM to7:00 PM ROOM 3, Fred Crippen, famous UPA animator and creator of Roger Ramjet, joins Tee Bosustow, the son of legendary UPA founder Stephen Bosutow, and moderator Larry Loc for a lively look at the lasting legacy (like the aliteration?) of UPA with screenings of rare UPA films and commercials and footage from Tee`s upcoming UPA documentary.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST:

THE PIXAR STORY -TO INFINITY AND BEYOND: [some time around 10 PM room to be announced] A look at Pixar, the studio that has revolutionized animation by Oscar nominated documentary director Leslie Iwerks. This one is going to be giant and in a 2,000 seat theatre. It is also going to be the U.S. premiere of this killer documentary by the very talented granddaughter of animation legend and pioneer, Ub Iwerks. Leslie will be on hand but they won`t be time for Q & A during the presentation.

There it is. Thursday has never really been a throw-away day at Comic Con, it is even less so now. And here is a secret, sometimes you can even see the floor in the dealer`s room on Thursdays, if you look real quickly and you are lucky. Try that on Saturday.

The Drawings They are a Changin`:

Yesterday I went into a big old snit about simple animation techniques that animation students are not getting taught. Okay it was more than a snit it was a full bore fit about the Rule of 3s not being taught to some of my students before they get to my class. I even went so far as to say that if a teacher couldn`t teach this simple concept then they should not be teaching animation. (See Below)

Today I am continuing the theme of simple animation techniques that are not getting taught, but I will try not to get so hot under the collar. We will look at one of the oldest animation techniques, morph. Emile Cohl uses morph in his 1908 Fantasmagorie. What I like to call the first true animation. (Blackton used animation techniques as early as 1906 but they were tricks used in trick films that were all about the artist not about the characters in the animation.)

Speaking of first animations. My son`s first animation Once Up On a Time, which he start when he was 9 and filmed when he was 11 years old, is filled with the most marvelous morphs. Morph is an easy process that he was able to pick up on his own without any outside training. It is even easier if you know this simple mechanical process.

You start with 2 drawings, your first pose and your last pose. Peg them on a light-box. Put a sheet over the 2 drawings.

Draw lines between all of the target points on the 2 drawings that are going to morph (EXAMPLE: nose of the man to nose of the werewolf he is going to cahnge into or tip of the ear of the man to the tip of the ear of the werewolf) The reference line should start from the target point on the first drawing and end at the same target point on the last drawing.

Divide the reference line into the number of inbetween drawing that you want. (The more divisions the more inbetweens the smoother the morph) You can even number each division point with the drawing number. Then just connect the dots. It is that easy. Film it and play it back. You can slow in or slow out the drawings even stager the drawing during filming to have even more fun with your morph.

Here is an example of a morph between a table and a dinosaur: table dino morph

Picking Up the Slack

(RANT)I get real tired of getting students from beginning animation class that have not been taught some of the simplest things about animation. I find these lacking students at the beginning of semesters and the end of semesters. (the beginning of semesters when they become my students and the end of semesters when they come into my classroom to use the equipment to finish their assignments for other teachers).

One of the things that really smokes my shorts is when they have never even heard of the Rule of 3s. It is one of the simplest techniques in the animators bag of tricks and any beginning student should know about it by that or any number of other names. (I am using Ken Southworth`s name for the concept).

Basically it is that the eye is lazy and will preserve movement across the shorter of 2 distances. Which is why the wheels on the stagecoach seem to travel backwards at a certain speeds in film. The 24 FPS look we are taking at the spokes of the wheel shows a shorter distance going backwards and the wheel seems to go that way.

The wheel is the easiest way to look at the Rule of 3s example (it is called the Rule of 3s because 3 images will give you a complete cycle) other uses of this concept are rain and even walk cycles.

I have seen Rule of 3s violations that have characters moon walking when the animator didn`t want them to. In fact, I saw one such case just last week with a panning run cycle. I asked the student and they never were introduced to the concept under any name. That is not the student`s fault, that is the fault of the teacher (sic).

Animation schools, I do not care how many degrees someone has, if they don`t animate then they have no business teaching animation. It is not a skill you can learn out of books without protecting the skills over and over. Those upper level degrees may look nice at accreditation time, but come on. It they don`t animate then they have no business teaching animation. You are getting paid to teach animation to your students then you better be able to do it yourself. And not just one student film 6 years ago to get that piece of paper either.(/RANT)

Big Your Piano, Be a Real Man!

(Okay, the title of this post is from a recurring spam and I just had to try and use it. Let`s see if the kid can make it somehow fit the topic?)

Those of you that have been following my blog from before the move know that I have been working my way through my cartoon collection and logging everything into a data-base.

I have a lot of one-of-a-kind animations from my students in my collection. I don`t put everything my students do automatically into my stacks. No, they have to earn it by making a great animation. And a number of them do. Today I came upon a sad case of a great animation that can`t be shown.

Unexpected by Jesus Montero is a great animation, I wrote about it here and you can see a clip here .

(Here is the part of the post where he tries real hard to make the title fit the subject. Which him carefully. It is all done with mirrors.)

As great a piece of animation at this is, and it is killer, it is flawed. You could watch it 20 times and never see the flaw because the flaw is not in the animation itself. Jesus didn`t get rights to the music.

I am known around the schools I teach as the copyright guy. The person that you go to if you have any question on copyright or trademark. And it is not just the students that ask, the teachers and administers ask. But the students are the ones that often ask too late.

Jesus ask too late. He came to me after he had finished his animation, timing everything to an upbeat remix of Alexander Nevsky Battle on the Ice. It`s in public you know free to use, right? Because it is so old?

You have no idea how many times I have had this discussion with my students. The core copyright on classical music, or any other music for that mater, will be in public domain if it was created before 1923 but the performance of the music is protected under copyright law. Sorry!

(Here we go, can he pull the title out of the fire?)

I`m sorry you can not show your animation, that you work 6 months on, in film festivals until you secure rights to the music. (Big your Piano, Be a Real Man) Get rights to the music before you animate.

UPA Photo Book:

I found out about this exciting book project in the process of working with Tee Bosustow on the upcoming UPA panel for Comic Con. Amid Amidi, with his recent track record of Cartoon Modern, is the perfect guy to tackle the flagship of modern animation studios UPA.

This book of rare UPA photos is a limited edition of 1,000 with the first 50 copies signed by surviving UPA veterans. Signed copies are $150 and the unsigned copies are available at a pre-order price of $35.

Since it is my own server space I am working with here I do not have room to post other people`s flyers. And I am sure that Amid will post it on Cartoon Brew once it gets back from Platform Festival, but if you drop me a comment I will send you the flyer.

Animation on the Fly:

This year is the second year that we have held an animation jam at the ASIFA-Hollywood Comic Con booth (5434). By we, I mean ASIFA- Hollywood. Last year we had Eric Goldberg and Dave Burgess among other working on DreamWorks proprietary software package, Drawtools. This year we are using Flipbook kindly loaned to us by Kent Braun, founder of DigiCel, who will be in the booth for the whole convention.

Kent and I go back a long ways. I use to put interns into AXA over in Yorba Linda when Kent ran their animation software division.

In fact I gave the first public demo of Kent`s new animation package, FlipBook, back at Comic Con 2000. (Kent was called away to work on changes for a Don Bluth project and I had about a half-hour to learn the package before showing it) The joys of a user-friendly interface created by people who listen to animators was made very clear to me when I was easily able to carry off the demo at such short notice.

As for animators for this year`s jam, we already have Tom Sito signed up. Flipbook, one of my former student`s who animated last year has jumped on board, and I`m going to animate again. The rest of the schedule is wide open with a number of interested people who have not comitted to a time slot.

I like traditional 2-D animation a lot but I don`t get to do it much, a little bit while teaching. I love smear inbetweens. There is an energy and joy to the whole board animation form. But then there is a real joy to all the forms of animation. Each animation style has its own strengths.

The plan is to create a DVD after this year`s jam, working title ASIFA Jams, using the 3 ani jams that we have held over the year, the Comic Con 2006, the Stop Mo Expo and this upcoming Comic Con 2007 jam. This is your chance to be part of this project.

Here is a link to the Animation Jam page: http://asifa-hollywood.org/blog/con2007/table.html there are easy steps on the page showing how to pick a time slot and sign up to be part of this event.

Father`s Day ACE

So here it is Father`s Day. It is next to impossible to get breakfast in bed without having Stan Freeberg reading his Baby Bear poem My Pa! in the back of my head, thanks Chuck.

My son got me some very cool Ace Double-Backs knowing my fondness for the format. The cover art is killer. These are the older, smaller 4 ¼ by 6 3/8 format.

Andre Norton, bless her, is one of my all time favorite authors. Damon Knight is right up there. But I am really looking forward to reading G. McDonald Wallis who I may or may not of read before. The name has all the earmarks of a pseudonym and the author bio is suspect. I’m thinking John D. McDonald. It will be fun finding out.






On the ASIFA-Hollywood front, I am putting the finishing touches on the ASIFA Comic Con presentation. It looks like Leslie Iwerks` Pixar Story, To infinity and Beyond is going to be scheduled for late Thursday night in a 2,000 seat hall.

I started wanting Leslie to show her Documentary about her grandfather The Ub Iwerks Story, the Hand behind the Mouse but she offered her Pixar Documentary and Comic Con jumped at having the U.S. Premiere.

Still looking for animators for the Second Annual Animation Jam. http://asifa-hollywood.org/blog/con2007/table.html Sign up and animate. I am working of putting together a DVD on the ASIFA Ani Jams, the 2006 and 2007 Comic Con Jams and the Stop Mo Expo jam. You could be part of it.

From the Email Bag:

This question is stop motion related and not of interest to all but as Yogi said, bear with me. (reprint from my ASIFA Blog)

Hello,

I read your blog at ASIFA, and I was wondering about your preference for 10 gauge copper wire with insulation over 1/16 aluminum wire. Does it bend easily? What scale is good for that gauge of wire? Does it break as often as lead or tin? (I use solder with a replaceable parts armature design)

Thanks,

Don Carlson
stopmotion animator
Pram Maven Films

Wire armatures, used primarily for clay animation, are short lived by nature. Because the are cheap and quick they have a real appeal. The trick is to build them to last long enough for the duration of the shoot. The weak points of any armature are upper arm and elbow. Which is why I often build wire armatures with replaceable arms and some times with replaceable hands so that only the arm is replaced.

Aluminum is stronger than cooper, no question about that. But strength in not the answer, durability is. Aluminum is strange stuff. When you drill it aluminum comes out of the drill hole in long raiser ribbons. When you bend it repeatedly it gives in one area and develops a memory and then continues to bend in that area alone until is cracks across the bend. It short, it is brittle.

Cooper is a softer material but it has real durability. It tends to bend over a wider area spreading the stress. By leaving the insulation on the wire you increase this trend. And if worse comes to worse and the wire parts the insulation will hold the limb to the body even if it will no longer hold the pose. You can even open up the arm and push a couple of straight pins long way through the insulation to build a kind of internal splint. (The trick is to bend the head of the pin at a 90 degree angle and then use a pare of needle nose pliers holding the head of the pins to insert the pins through the insulation)

As for size, 9 inches is the best height. Larger than that and you start running into the inverse square law. (things that double in size are squared in mass) Smaller than that and the wire skeleton is too heavy for the body. Here are a few images from my ebook, Animation on a ShoeString (tm) to give you an idea of what I am talking about.

Misinformation:

One of the things that bugs me is sloppy research in animation. An Animation History text, that I had to teach from and shall go unnamed here, listed Snow White as being first released in 1939 when in fact it premiered on December 21st 1937. The author also dismissed Emile Cohl is one sentence.

Harry Palmer`s Prof. Bonehead (1916) is credited to Emile Cohl (1908) not just on web sites but on a title card on a commercially produced VHS tape in my collection. Cohl also gets credit for Louis Feuillade`s Great Pumpkin Race 1907.

Fantastic Dinosaurs of the Movies lists Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) as the first animation ever. As important as Winsor McCay`s work is he did not invent animation and Gertie was not even his first animation.

Why is shoddy research like this so typical of Animation History (sic) tapes and DVDs and even some books? I don`t think they (the people putting out this crappy reportage) take it seriously. Hell, it`s just cartoons! Lighten up already. Yes, and so are Dumbo and Grave of the Fireflies. People bleed their souls into some of these films but we can`t get no respect. How are you to fight against stuff like this?

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