Pink and Ain't

I worked on some animation a bit last night. I’ve been having a hard time motivating myself to work on DFtS. I guess I’ve been pretty busy lately, but even when I have free time I seem to be more likely to watch a movie than work on animation.

Part of it is that this scene I’m working on seems to be going rather differently than the stuff I do on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. I think the difference is that that show is storyboarded with the medium in mind. That is, they make it so that it will animate well in the 2D Flash world of Foster’s. I boarded my film assuming I would do it traditionally, though, so it has lots of non-orthogonal poses and movement. In fact, there are one or two scenes that I’m going to have to come pretty close to animating traditionally. There’s this one that’s a low-angle shot of some people running and sort of jumping over the camera and I don’t know any way I could do it with stock models. So that’ll be kind of fun to figure out.  (Go to the end of this post to see some pictures with moderate spoilage.)

I discovered something recently by watching this animation. Flash is really good at twitchy movements. You can kind of fake movements if they happen in few enough frames, and they still look really good. Watch that animation and you’ll see what I mean – all the characters move in a very twitch way, extremely pose-to-pose. Again, we run into the problem that I didn’t board DFtS specifically for Flash. My story has many places where slower movements are really the most appropriate. Now, since the scene I’m doing right now is one of those, and it involves a head turn (notoriously difficult in Flash), I’ve had to eschew tweens entirely, doing the whole thing on twos. If I try to do it on ones it’ll just take way too long to make it look smooth, and even then it’ll probably look muddy.

Interesting fact for the day: sometimes animation looks better on twos than it does on ones. Sometimes when I’ve animated something on ones I’ll go in and take out every other keyframe and it ends up looking a lot better. I figure it’s because the human brain can fill in the gaps on viewing better than the animator can on creation. Sometimes it’s better just to trust in Mother Nature and use our built-in tools to make something look good.

Here, look at what I’m talking about (Warning: spoilers! scroll down to see the pictures):

Okay, moving on.

In general, once I feel like the storyboard is at a good place I decide to move on and start making an animatic. In the case of Don’t Fear the Sitter I was actually limited by school – I had to have a finished animatic, using specific required techniques, by the end of Fall term. As a result I moved on to the animatic stage a little sooner than I otherwise would have.

It’s both a boon and a curse to have deadlines. The advantage is that it gets you to actually finish the thing. The disadvantage is that sometimes it makes you turn in a product that isn’t as good as it might have been. In this case it was mostly a good thing. I was planning to finish the project by the end of the school year, so I needed to move on and get to animating the thing as soon as possible.

For anyone who doesn’t know, an animatic is like a cross between a storyboard and a movie. At its most basic level, you create a movie with each storyboard panel displayed in sequence and timed out. You can get more advanced than that, though, actually moving around the characters in crude cut-out-style animation. The more in-depth you get in making the animatic, the better idea you’ll have of the timing of the final animation. Of course, if you go really detailed you’ll start to get diminishing returns and it would be better to just move on and start animating.

The first thing to do when starting an animatic is to scan in all the storyboard pictures. I have probably fifty pages of storyboards, but luckily the UCLA Animation Workshop has a sheet-fed scanner, so I basically just give it my stack, press a few buttons, and come back in a few minutes. Then I have to crop the images to make them easy to use in Premiere, the program I use for putting together animatics.

At school they have certain programs that they teach, and if you want to use different ones you’re on your own. For this class they taught Apple’s Final Cut Pro video editing software, but I wanted to use Adobe Premiere, since that’s what I used at home. It would have to suck to come in to school any time I wanted to work on my project. Most of the other people in the program ended up getting Apple laptops and Wacom tablets and doing most of their stuff on those. I was all proud because I’ve had a Wacom for years, having bought it in 1996 when I first went to the University of Oregon. In fact, it’s so old that when I bought a new computer I had to get a special part just to be able to connect it because the connector it uses is pretty much obsolete.

After I scanned and cropped all my storyboard images I opened up a new project in Premiere. Premiere is a video editing program, but I would be using it mostly to arrange still images in a timeline. After my first draft of the animatic I would actually break up the images a bit, making characters move around and stuff like that. I put a bunch of sound effects in and recorded myself speaking all the lines.

That was actually one annoying thing about the process. I put myself speaking the lines into my animatic, and then when I showed it to the class they all laughed at the absurdity of hearing my voice come out of a 14 year old girl. Yeah, understandable, but it distracted them from critiquing the actual animatic. I wanted them to laugh at the jokes, not at a silly little artifact of the creative process.

Next: casting and recording voice actors.

At some point I have to decide that that script is good enough to move forward. That’s a theme that’ll pop up frequently over the course of the project – having to decide that something’s good enough to go on to the next step. There’s always more tweaking that I can do on whatever it is I’m working on. Sometimes it’s hard to make that decision. My perfectionist nature makes me want to work on it until it’s perfect, but at that rate I’ll never get to the end.

So after several revisions I declare it done. Pretty much. Sort of. Actually, I reached this stage a year ago but I still make the occasional change. The truth of the situation is that I can’t help myself from tweaking right up until I start animating the actual animation. Even now, when I’ve already recorded dialogue, I find things that just don’t seem right and I think would be a lot better. The practical upshot is that I’m going to have to have another recording session at some point to record the changed dialogue.

Anyway, getting on with it. (I want to bring everyone up to date so that I can start talking about what I’m up to now.)

Once I decided the script is pretty good I started making the storyboard. For those of you who don’t know what a storyboard is, it’s sort of like a visual script. I draw pictures of every scene in the film, noting any dialogue and sound effects that are going to happen there. I get down to quite fine detail, having a separate drawing for most of the actions that will happen in the film. This includes character movement, camera moves, facial expressions, etc. Basically, this is where I make my plan for the composition and look of the film.

I do most of my storyboards in pencil on templates that I designed myself. I usually don’t do much shading – most of what I’m planning out is about shapes. I would actually like to do my boards on the computer, but I haven’t found a good program for it. What I really need is something that works kind of like a word processor, except for a series of pictures. The annoying thing about doing it on paper is that if I decide I need to add a scene then I have to use weird numbering for it (the scenes are numbered to help me keep track of them). What’s the number between 16 and 17? 16.5? 16A? And what if I have to insert a new number on either side of that? It would be really useful to have something that automatically kept track of the numbers.

Another problem with doing my boards on paper is that when I move on to the animatic I have to scan them in. If I did it all on the computer from the start then I would be able to skip over that whole step (which would be useful, since I don’t even have a scanner!).

Just like with the script, I showed the storyboard to lots of people.  I took it to the Women in Animation Storyboard Pitch Night twice, I think. SB Pitch Night is a monthly event where people bring boards they’re working on and “pitch” them to the other attendees. Pitching involves pinning the pages up to a cork board and sort of walking everyone through the story – describing the action, acting out the characters’ parts, delivering the jokes, and so on. Part of the point of this event is to get practice pitching for studio development people – many of the people who come to Pitch Night want to work as storyboarders in the industry.

In theory my class at UCLA was also a place to pitch my film, but in practice it’s not nearly as useful as Pitch Night. In class you’ve got fifteen or twenty boards to get through in a total of about six hours (actually, it may have been as little as three… I must be getting senile because I can’t remember now. But let’s assume six just to be conservative). That gives just 18 minutes per person, though with all the fussing about that happens in class as well as the time it takes to hang up boards it ends up being more like 10 minutes. What’s more, my boards tend to be a lot longer than those of my classmates, since I go into so much detail. Finally, since board pitches only happen occasionally at school, I think maybe my classmates were timid about giving feedback. After being on both sides of so many pitches over the years I tend to have lots to say about other people’s boards, and I always hope to get the same when I pitch my own.

Okay, this brings up another thing I’d like to tell you about. When I was at the University of Oregon I had the best class and the best teacher of all my time in college (and as most of you know, I spent a lot of time in college). The class was called… um… Elements of Animation or something like that. It was taught by Joe Maruschak, a former student in the animation program.

Now the thing to know about art school, or at least the one at the University of Oregon, is that they never seem to teach composition. Well, I guess I’m overstating the situation a bit. Many professors talk about composition and make some attempt to cover its principles, but not in a way such that anyone actually ends up understanding it. They tend to talk about Organic/Inorganic shapes, Warm/Cool colors, and stuff like that. They assume you know what they mean with these terms – I guess because it comes so intuitively to them. I would say that some people have that same intuition and pretty much get what the prof is talking about, but I didn’t. They don’t tell you what they mean unless you explicitly ask, but not before giving you a look like you’re touched in the head.

Many would say that this felt (as opposed to calculated) approach is exactly right for teaching art. Well, let me introduce you to Rant #47: not all artists rely on intuition – nor should they. The mark of a good artist is that they understand and follow the principles except when they don’t. Until you understand the rules you can’t know when, where, and why to break them.

So, really, no one learned composition at UO. I know this because I heard it in complaints from Joe Maruschak, my favorite teacher. He was frustrated by the fact that all these fourth-year art students came into his class and he wasn’t able to assume a knowledge of basic composition principles. As a result the class turned largely into Basic Composition As Applied to Storyboards and Film. I can see how this would be frustrating for him, as he had probably hoped to teach a high-level class getting into more subtle aspects of filmmaking. For me, though, it worked out wonderfully. Finally, after years of college art classes, I Learned Composition.

The thing is that there are, as I said, principles. There are Rules to learn. This was a revelation for me. After so many classes with touchy-feely teachers who didn’t understand basic technical stuff like how to REALLY draw an ellipse to represent that circle in perspective I had begun to fear that I would never understand the stuff they were trying to teach me. But no! Joe showed me that there are specific, even algorithmic, things you can do in order to end up with a good product.

I know, I know. Art is supposed to be intuitive, right? It’s SUPPOSED to be. You can’t THINK a great work of art. And you’re right, sort of. Do you think Picasso couldn’t draw realistically-rendered portraits? Of course he could! He was an excellent draftsman. His genius, though, was not in his drawing ability. It was how he went beyond that. He learned the basics – perspective, rendering, composition – and then moved beyond the rules. In learning artistic principles he was able to figure out how, when, and why to break them.

Okay, I’m tangenting a bit. Sorry about that.

Anyway, in Joe’s class I learned the beginnings of the principles of film and storyboarding. I continued learning through critique sessions at the UO animation club (which Joe also hosted). The whole time I was working on Pink & Ain’t I would bring working copies of my animatic and animation to meetings and get feedback. Through many meetings I gradually got a better and better feeling for how the rules worked, until I got to the point I’m at now – where for the most part I don’t even have to think about them. When I storyboard many of the decisions I make come naturally. Only when I analyze them after the fact do I realize that yeah, that was the right thing to do according to the Rules. Sometimes I find something I missed and I’m able to use my own analysis skills to correct it. And sometimes I break a rule on purpose. The rules aren’t there to restrict me to the path – they’re just there so I know where the path is, and then I can decide for myself which way to go.

Okay, I gotta stop now. I’ve been writing for more than an hour and it’s past my bedtime. I guess the animatic and voice recording will have to wait until later

I’ve already come a long way in this project. I first started writing the script in the summer of 2004. I was preparing for my second year in the animation MFA program at UCLA and I had to come up with a good project for school. The general strategy when coming up with a story to make into an animated film is threefold. I present to you Bill Plympton’s three rules for making a successful animated short:

1. Make it short
2. Make it Funny
3. Make it cheap

Those are the things that make a short film do well in festivals, paving the way for actually making some money off it (like, getting it into a touring festival like Spike & Mike or The Animation Show, or even on TV).

It’s actually kind of hard to come up with a good story that’s short. It helps to narrow it down to one event or idea and play off that. I looked through my sketchbook and found two opposing pages, one with a drawing of a teenage girl and the other with a 4 year old girl. So I said to myself: “Self,” I said, “we have here the beginnings of a story. On one side we see the babysitter and on the other the babysat.”

I brainstormed a bunch of ideas for stories involving a babysitter and a little girl, decided on one, and knocked out a first draft of a script. The first thing I did was take it to the Women in Animation Writers Roundtable. This is an event I would strongly recommend to anyone who’s an aspiring animation writer in LA. You bring your script and the other people at the meeting take parts and read it through. Then everyone gives feedback so you can take the script home and work on it some more.

I can’t stress this enough: peer feedback is über important! In my development process I show my script, storyboards, animatics, and animation to as many people as I can find who might be able to give me useful feedback.

While writing my script I also enlisted my friend Cory to help in some of the details. He isn’t so good at the overarching structure but he’s a genius when it comes to jokes, dialogue, and obscure references. He’s been a great help all through my story development process. Even now he continues to help me on some last-minute changes I need to make to the script.

Next: storyboard, animatic and voice recording.

Here begins the production blog for Don’t Fear the Sitter, my current animation project.  Just a warning from the start: this blog will contain spoilers.  I’ll try not to reveal fundamental plot elements, but you are bound to learn something about this cartoon if you read this blog.

Duh.

I just wanted to warn you.  You see, my theory is that you’ll enjoy the end product more if you don’t follow the production process.  I’ve come to realize, though, that it’s a long time to wait for my friends and family before they can see any product from this thing I’m putting so much energy into.  I want to share my life with those I care about, so this is a chance to do that.  Through this blog you’ll be able to read about what I’m up to with my film.  David’s life just got a little more transparent.