Here it is:

It screened at the UCLA film school’s end-of-year show.  I think it was fairly well-received, but some people had a different reaction to part of it than I had expected.  I’m not going to say what exactly, because I don’t really want to give out spoilers.

Actually, though, it’s not quite done.  There are still a few more details that I want to work out as a final polishing step.  There are some things that I’d like to do but I might decide not to, as well.  At some point you just have to call it done.

I’m aiming to get this thing into festivals, though.  I want to make it really good.  That’s been my goal pretty much since I graduated the film from being my second-year film to being my thesis.  I wanted to make something that would make people at festivals take notice.  Something, dare I dream, that would get me into Annecy (the most important festival in the animation world).  If I really stick to that goal then there are a number of things left to do – the biggest being set dressing.

I’ve always been pretty bad at making a background look lived in.  At the moment the house in which the story takes place looks kinda sparse – like a model home that no one actually lives in.

I want to get it done so I can move on to the next project, whatever that may be.  I have a big list of possibilities.  I have time now to do all those things I wanted to do over the last seven years but never did because my film was hanging over me.  For the time being, it probably won’t be animation, though I reserve the right to do something animation-related: a web comic, develop a TV pitch, write a script or storyboard, etc.

Just some thoughts.

According to the spreadsheet I keep for tracking my progress I’m set to finish all the animation in DFtS at the end of January.  It’s a little weird to have that goal actually approaching after all this time.  I first started working on this thing in the Summer of 2005, so I’ve been at it for more than five years.  It’ll be almost six by the time I actually finish (assuming I finish when I’m planning to).  It brings up the question in my mind: What Next?

I suppose first I’d like to take a little break from having a project that I’m always working on.  It’s a little wearying to always have to come back to the same tasks every night, working with the same assets.  It helps, in a way, that I have several characters in my film.  Switching between them keeps things fresh.  That would suck if I was only animating a single character the whole time.

I really like Falling Lizard, though — the yearly party at UCLA where everyone makes a complete (though admittedly minimal) film in a single weekend.  It’s a weekend when I know I’m going to be able to work on something a little different for a change, despite whatever other big project I might be working on in the rest of my free time.

As an example of something I might do at Falling Lizard, I present to you the film I made at Falling Lizard ‘09.  It’s a little snippet of an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while for a TV series, movie, or graphic novel:

But back to that question: What Next?  It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that I’m going to start a new personal project after I’m done with DFtS.  The question is, what?  Here are some of the possibilities:

1. Start a new animated short.  Nice and simple, going down a path I’ve been down several times before.  This option doesn’t require much risk on my part.  Right now this option doesn’t seem that appealing to me, either.  I mean, yes, it’s satisfying to create stuff, and it’s awesome seeing/hearing the audience reaction to a freshly finished film, but it takes so freakin’ long!  It’s a little distressing to have to wait five years to see the fruit of my creative effort come to completion and finally be shown to the outside world.
2. Create a graphic novel or web comic.  This one is a little more appealing.  There’s potential for getting an actual audience going if I were able to either get a publisher or draw a web audience.  That said, I’ve never done this sort of thing.  I’m sure it’s fraught with its own perils that I would find out about along the way.  It also has potential, though, assuming I could draw an audience and craft a good story with strong characters, of leading to TV development or maybe even a movie (witness: Scott Pilgrim, perhaps my favorite movie so far this year).
3. Write a screenplay.  This would probably be in the NaNoWriMo vein, sitting down and hammering out 120 pages of something – doesn’t really matter what.  It’s that whole thing about getting through it being the important first step – worry about whether it’s any good later.  It’s hard to imagine that writing a screenplay would take me where I want to go, though, which is really toward more of a creative leadership role in narrative animation.  It’s also a path that I’d be breaking new ground in for myself, so I would be putting myself at a high risk of no one ever seeing the result of my efforts.
4. Try to develop a TV series.  This one is probably the one I’m leaning toward most right now.  I really like the idea of creating a whole new setting and being able to follow my own vision of how a show should be developed.  I have a couple ideas I’ve been toying with for several years, never taking the time to really develop them.  Whenever I think about working on them some more I say to myself “No, David, if you’re going to work on something then you should work on Don’t Fear the Sitter.”  Yeah.  Tell it, self.  But anyway, TV is also what I’d like to get back to eventually, so this would be a definite trying-to-move-forward-in-my-chosen-career maneuver.

Part of what let me get through these two scenes so quickly was that I was able to re-use some stuff.  For the first scene the framing was very similar to an earlier one, so setup was fast (pretty much just copy the previous scene’s file and the new scene is set up).  For the second it was even better.  I was able to use a side-view walk cycle that I created a long time ago for another scene, with only slight modifications.

One of the great advantages of Flash animation is the ability to adapt old animation for new scenes.  That’s a major reason why it’s a good medium for television animation.  When I worked on Foster’s we tried our hardest to find reuse for as many scenes as we could.  We had libraries of walk cycles, character poses, hands, arms, legs, and endless gobs of uncategorized old scenes that the animation director was able to help us find if we needed them.  The thing that’s great about it is that it’s not carved in stone.  It’s pretty easy to make little tweaks to old animation in Flash.  Need that old walk cycle but with the head looking to the side?  No problem.  Different lip sync?  Easy.

Unfortunately reuse hasn’t been as helpful on Don’t Fear the Sitter, since it’s just this one episode.  If I could stretch it out into a series that would be great, since I wouldn’t have to build the character models again, and I would have a bunch of reusable animation from the first one.  I may some day try and figure out a way to adapt it into a series, particularly if the short ends up doing well on the festival circuit.  If it comes to that, I’ll definitely be glad I made this thing in Flash.

A long time ago I created a spreadsheet to track my progress on my thesis project (the aforementioned Don’t Fear The Sitter). I made estimates of how much animation I would need to do to finish each scene in the film, added cells where I could write how much I had competed so far, then created a bunch of cells to calculate statistics about my work rate, estimated completion date, and so on. It’s very pretty and helpful but unfortunately it only tracks animation. It doesn’t take into account any of the other aspects of the process.

Last night I was working on integrating retakes that I recorded last fall with my voice actress, the lovely and talented Ms. Tara Ricasa. After I got the new recordings in place I framed the next shot in Google schetchup, where I had previously built a model of the house in which the film takes place. Then I set up the Flash file for the scene, and by that time it was way past my bedtime. Number of seconds of animation completed: Zero.

1. Kung Fu Panda World went live.  I’ve been working on this virtual world since January of Last year and it’s very satisfying to see it “ship”.  This is also the first game I’ve shipped as an animator.  Long ago I was a software engineer and I shipped one game while I worked at Treyarch Studios.  Maybe you haven’t heard of it?
2. I got a number of positive responses regarding the autotweener, including several people who seemed to be suggesting that I could make money with that kind of thing.  Hmmm, it’s an interesting thought.
3. I and two other animators, in the course of a few days, were thinking about the same “if only Flash had this feature” idea.  The two other people brought it up with me and it got me thinking: why couldn’t I program something that does that?  So I’m doing it.  Coming soon to a blog near you: an animation-disc-esque rotatable stage in Flash.  Well, sort of.  It’ll be a bit of a workaround but it should work very similarly to the rotatable canvasses in Toon Boom Studio and TV Paint.  Under normal usage you’ll probably have to remember to run a “reset” command at the end to make sure everything goes back to normal, unless you’re using a virtual camera, in which case you won’t even have to do that.  Speaking of which: Coming soon to a blog near you: my personal take on the virtual camera, which will flawlessly save your movie (including actionscript) as a PNG sequence that you can use in any video editing program.
4. Since we “finished” KFPW my workload has been much lighter and deadlines much looser.  When I told my animation director that I could make a tool that would rotate the stage he gave me the go-ahead to do it.  Making tools for Flash is really fun for me, so it made me happy to be able to do a little programming for a change.
5. Tomorrow’s payday (cha-ching).
6. I’m seriously considering getting a smartphone.  I bristle at the thought of having to pay $30 per month for data but I think maybe the idea is starting to win me over.  That, or buy an unlocked phone (Nexus One!) and don’t have any data plan at all.  I’m with AT&T, and it seems that even when the phone is unsubsidized I have no choice but to get the $30 data plan if I want any mobile internet at all

Finally, I just want to comment on something that struck me as I did some animation on Don’t Fear the Sitter tonight.  Keyframes are hard.  Breakdowns are easier.  Tweens are easy.  These may seem obvious, but it really amazes me sometimes how I can spend a long time doing key poses for a character and then the rest of it just zips by.  In no time I go from just-a-suggestion-of-motion to damn-that-character’s-a-movin’.

I love it.

Anyone who’s followed my blog so far and read the entries on Flash commands (not sure if there’s anyone like that yet – I have an admittedly small audience) will have seen me mention the Autotweener.  Well, today’s the day – I’m going to tell you all about it and post it for download.

The autotweener is a tool that does many of the same things as Flash’s built-in motion and shape tween functions, but it works in a fundamentally different way.  It’s incredibly useful, simplifying tasks that used to be difficult or impossible.  For my own animation process it was revolutionary – it totally changed how I do things.  I now rarely use motion tweens and even more rarely shape tweens – the autotweener has taken over almost all the tasks I used to use those for.

A Little History

When I worked at Supernews we did the animation for the show in a very particular way.  We would typically have the head on one layer and all the other body parts for the character on another layer.  As such it was impossible to use motion tweens, at least on the body layer.  So all our in-betweens had to be done manually, eyeballing all the positioning and rotation (we didn’t often use skews).  It would take three or four minutes to do that for each movement.

Of course, there are advantages to doing things that way.  With such close attention by the animator the motion can be customized to look just right, with nice arcs and all that nice stuff.  It’s slow, though (as I said, it took several minutes to do what was largely a mechanical process) and frankly it was a pain in the butt.  Over and over, moving body parts to the exact in-between point – definitely aggravating.

In some of my free time I started to toy with an idea I had had for a while: automating that in-betweening process.  At first I thought about trying to do it with the help of Flash’s built-in tweens but that didn’t really work out in practice.  Finally, I gave in and decided to do it the hard way, calculating out all the matrix math and all that stuff.  After a few weeks of tinkering with it in my free time I rolled out version 1.0.

The autotweener was a hit in the Supernews office.  It made this repetitive, tedious task much faster and almost completely automated.  Now we just had to run the autotweener, adjust a few joints so they connected properly, and it was done.  Super easy.

I soon realized I could make the autotweener more versatile by setting up different keyboard shortcuts for different percentage moves.  I set up 10%-90% on the ctrl-shift-number keys as well as 1/3rd and 2/3rds on alt-shift-1 and 2.  Then I realized I could go a step even further, setting up shortcuts for anticipation (-50% through –10%) and overshoot (110% through 150%).

Finally, after happily using the autotweener for about two years I figured out how, in a limited way, I could extend it to work on raw shapes as well.  After getting that feature to work I was finally able, for the most part, to leave behind Flash’s unreliable shape tweens.

What Makes It Special

There are several things that make the autotweener better than Flash’s built-in tweens:

• It can operate on more than one item on the same layer
• It creates smooth transitions even if you’ve moved the pivot point of your symbol instance from one frame to the next
• It can automate anticipation and overshooting
• It gives you frame-by-frame control of easing
• It can give you unambiguous, foolproof shape tweens with easing, overshooting and anticipating (as long as you obey some basic rules)
• It can tween two of the same symbol on the same layer, as long as one of them is reflected and the other is not

What it can’t do

While it has a lot to be said for it, there are some things it’s not good at or just it can’t do:

• Tween more than one symbol on the same layer when those symbols have the same reflection
• Use motion paths
• Tween between raw shapes with a different number of vertices
• Tween more than one raw shape on a single layer
• Do long, smooth tweens (this is technically possible, but Flash’s built-in motion tweens are much better at it).

How To Use It

There are some guidelines I have to tell you about before you can use the autotweener.  It’s a wonderful tool but it has some unavoidable idiosyncrasies.  The best way to illustrate how to use it and what it’s good at is with this video:

Keyboard Shortcuts

The autotweener works best if you set up keyboard shortcuts for using it.  At my old job at Supernews some of the animators only cared about the 50% autotween, since that’s mostly what we used there.  That way they only needed one keyboard shortcut.  For my animation process, though, I like having shortcuts for all the percentages from 10% to 90%, as well as overshooting and anticipating.

I have all the basic tween percentages bound to ctrl-shift-number.  It’s easy to remember, for instance, that ctrl-shift-3 is 30%.  For overshooting 110% to 150% I use ctrl-alt-shift 1 through 5.  For anticipation –50% through –10% I use ctrl-alt-shift 6 through 0.

I created a few other autotween commands: “Auto tween one third”, which I bound to alt-shift-1, and “auto tween two thirds” which is bound to alt-shift-2.  Finally, I created one called “Auto tween match next keyframe”, which I bound to ctrl-shift-0 (that is, tween 100%).  That one just makes the selected items match their corresponding items in the next keyframe.

If you try to set up the same key combinations as mine you might wonder how I set up those “one third” and “two thirds” shortcuts, since Flash claims to not allow number shortcuts without the ctrl modifier.  Well, it turns out you can make non-ctrl shortcuts if you directly edit the file where the shortcuts are stored.  I’ll talk further about how to do that in a subsequent post.  In the mean time if you want to quickly set up shortcuts for these you can simply add the following lines to your shortcuts file:

  <shortcut name="anticipate 10%" flags="29" scope="1" key="48" />
  <shortcut name="anticipate 20%" flags="29" scope="1" key="57" />
  <shortcut name="anticipate 30%" flags="29" scope="1" key="56" />
  <shortcut name="anticipate 40%" flags="29" scope="1" key="55" />
  <shortcut name="anticipate 50%" flags="29" scope="1" key="54" />
  <shortcut name="overshoot 10%" flags="29" scope="1" key="49" />
  <shortcut name="overshoot 20%" flags="29" scope="1" key="50" />
  <shortcut name="overshoot 30%" flags="29" scope="1" key="51" />
  <shortcut name="overshoot 40%" flags="29" scope="1" key="52" />
  <shortcut name="overshoot 50%" flags="29" scope="1" key="53" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween 10%" flags="13" scope="1" key="49" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween 20%" flags="13" scope="1" key="50" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween 30%" flags="13" scope="1" key="51" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween 40%" flags="13" scope="1" key="52" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween 50%" flags="13" scope="1" key="53" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween 60%" flags="13" scope="1" key="54" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween 70%" flags="13" scope="1" key="55" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween 80%" flags="13" scope="1" key="56" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween 90%" flags="13" scope="1" key="57" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween one third" flags="21" scope="1" key="49" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween two thirds" flags="21" scope="1" key="50" />
  <shortcut name="auto tween match next frame" flags="13" scope="1" key="48" />

The directory where your keyboard shortcuts file is located depends on your operating system:

• Windows Vista & Windows 7:

  boot drive\Users\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash CS4\language\Configuration\Keyboard Shortcuts\

• Windows XP:

  boot drive\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash CS4\language\Configuration\Keyboard Shortcuts\

• Mac OS X:

  Macintosh HD/Users/username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash CS4/language/Configuration/Keyboard Shortcuts\

Download It

You can get the full set of autotween commands by downloading and opening the file below.  It should open automatically in the Adobe Extension Manager.

autotween.mxp

In Closing

I hope the autotweener is as interesting to you as it is to me.  It revolutionized how I animate in Flash and I’d like others to have the opportunity to use it.  I hope the length of this blog post isn’t too intimidating to potential users.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask, either in the comments or via email.

I haven’t been totally successful in my goal but I think it’s fulfilled its purpose so far.  For the most part, I sit down and work on Don’t Fear the Sitter every evening.  I usually try to do more than fifteen minutes, because that seems like such a limited period.  I can’t actually get much done in that amount of time.

And so, after kind of stagnating for most of last year, I’m working on my thesis again.  Now I think I’m back on track to finish the film by the summer of 2011, making it about a six-year project.  Yikes.  But it feels good to be chipping away at it again.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I’m accomplishing.  I finished animating this scene a few days ago:

So, in my fantasy that you, the reader, are an aspiring animator, I’d like to give you something to consider: Secondary animation.

Secondary animation is one of Frank and Ollie’s Twelve Principles of Animation as presented in their book The Illusion of Life.  Basically, Secondary animation is all the action that comes from the main movements of a character.  For example, if a character’s hair is long enough it’ll tend to move in response to the motion of the head.  Similarly, if a person is waving a flag, the flagpole would have the primary animation and the motion of the flag would be entirely secondary.

Secondary animation is super important.  It brings life to an otherwise mechanical movement.  In my own animation for Don’t Fear the Sitter (my perpetually-in-production MFA thesis) I usually do the primary animation first and then do a second pass to hair, dangling earrings, etc.  Before I do that second pass I often feel disappointed with my animation, thinking it seems kinda rigid.  The hair brings it right to life, though, restoring fluidity to the motion.

Here’s my point concerning animation I see on the internet: most of it has no secondary at all.  When I happen upon one that does, it stands out like a beacon.  I strongly encourage all the aspiring animators out there to try and get some secondary into their animation – it’ll help your motion to no end.

Finally, as an illustration of what I’m talking about, take a look at the bounce of Sarah’s hair and the heft of the binoculars.  Both are conveyed mostly through secondary animation.  Notice how the bangs and ribbon are anchored to her head but they trail it in everything they do.  When head isn’t moving any more and they bangs have no choice but to settle (with a few final oscillations thrown in to tie it all up nicely).

I discovered recently that the fine folks at Macromedia introduced a rather annoying bug into Flash 8. When copying from Flash 8 to (apparently) any other vector-based drawing program some or all of the control points are lost. The practical upshot is that copying from Flash into Illustrator is impossible. This is a major problem, since one of the tricks I use when animating in Flash is to copy an object into Illustrator and then apply an art brush to give it a nice variable-thickness line. If you watch Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends closely you’ll see that we do that all the time. Virtually all the lines on the characters were done with art brushes. We also do it a little more overtly sometimes, even using a charater’s whole boy as a brush so we can really control them. You can see an example of this on the episode “Frankie My Dear,” which has a whole sequence where a tall pillar-like character is wobbling all over the place.

So what am I to do? I was kicking myself for having made the move to Flash 8 without fully testing my process in the new software. Then, on a whim, I looked at the “save as” dialog box. Oh! It turns out I can save my Flash 8 files back to Flash MX 2004 (the previous version) as long as I didn’t use any of the new features (which I didn’t on my turnarounds, the most important files when it comes to creating new scenes). So I’ve officially downgraded back to Flash MX 2004. That’s what we use at work anyway, so maybe this’ll provide more of a consistent experience for me.