After much travail I finally got my demo reel together. Unfortunately it doesn’t include any of the stuff from my last job (they won’t let me post anything online) but it still shows my recent work by including clips from Don’t Fear the Sitter.
Here it is:
I turned in Don’t Fear the Sitter a few weeks ago, finishing off the last step toward getting my Master of Fine Arts degree in animation. I was working really hard the last few months to get it done, leaving my fiancée lonely and bored as I worked into the night perfecting all the little details. We were both very happy when the deadline came, I turned in my finished product, and I could finally relax.
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.
I keep on plugging away on Don’t Fear the Sitter. It’s slow work. On average, since I last reset my accounting in April, I’ve gotten through about one character-second of animation per three days. That is, if there’s one second of footage in which two characters are moving the whole time, that represents two character seconds. Keep in mind, though, that I probably only average between half an hour and an hour of work per day.
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:
I just burned through about five character-seconds of animation in about five days. That feels really good. It’s significantly faster than my general rate that I’ve been keeping up ever since I resumed keeping track in April. When I finish a scene I get to mark it off in the spreadsheet I created for the task, which always feels great. It’s all set up with color-changing fields that give me pleasant feedback when I finish a scene. They say, “Hey David, you’re doing a great job! Look how much you’ve done in the last five days!”
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.
Last night I did a bunch of work on Don’t Fear the Sitter. The thing is that the work I did didn’t really register on my tracking system. Let me esplain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
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.
Today was a good day. Let me list a few of the reasons:
Continue reading For the folks who aren’t Flash animators but would like to see a little bit of my process when animating, skip down and watch the movie that I link to below. Starting at around 4 minutes in you can see an example of how I animate one of my characters in a simple motion.
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.
I’m not generally big on new year’s resolutions but this year I kinda made one. Well, I don’t really think of it as a resolution – more of a goal. I set the goal for myself to do at least fifteen minutes of animation every day. It’s a really short period of time, but I figured that if I could get myself to do that much, even if I’m busy, I’d at least be doing something. And then once I’m actually sitting in front of the computer, I might as well work longer, right? At least, that’s how it works out more often than not.
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:
There’s a lot of animation out there on the internet and, honestly, most of it is terrible. Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, though, so I don’t begrudge people their learning process. I just hope that it is, in fact, a learning process. If you really enjoy making animation then you should make an effort to get better at it. Animation (and art in general) is one of the most demanding fields in terms of how much you have to learn and practice in order to break into it professionally. Most people will spend many years practicing their drawing and learning the principles of animation before they’ll be able to do it well enough for someone to pay them.
So, in my fantasy that you, the reader, are an aspiring animator, I’d like to give you something to consider: Secondary animation.
I’ve been working for the last few days on the Mom model and tonight I finished the front view. Mostly. I realized right at the end that I really should add in some jewelry — particularly some dangly diamond earrings. She’s supposed to be a classy trophy wife on her way to the opera or some other high-class function, so of course she’d have some diamonds. Now the next trick is to figure out how to make a diamond sparkle in Flash. I’ve got some ideas. We’ll see if they work.
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.