newartofanimation

Two of my favorite programs were recently updated.

Animation:Master and Fusion.  So good together.  🙂

Every once in a great while a work appears on the scene that validates the usefulness of cartooning, whether via comics or animation… or both in this instance.  One of the last true examples of this was Jeff Smith’s ‘Bone’ comic book which upon arrival I found restored my faith in the comic book format for storytelling.

And now there appears this fox, Renard, and the supporting cast of his adventures.

Impressive stuff.

And an interesting parallel between Jeff Smith’s ‘Bone’ and Benjamin Renner’s ‘Le Grand Méchant Renard’ and that is how the imagery so expertly tells the story in pantomime.

In the case of ‘Bone’ the first issue was almost entirely silent… a black and white printed comic masterpiece.  In the case of ‘Le Grand Mechant Renard’ I don’t follow the language so must rely on the imagery (and music) and this works masterfully.

From concept to execution and with great insight into character motivation and staging we are seeing all the various and considerably complex elements of great storytelling distilled into the very essence of performance based simplicity.  The still imagery alone is emotively appealing.  The plot itself compelling.  The internal conflict of the central character continually draws us in and keeps us engaged.   Perhaps best of all, the animation raises the whole experience to a higher level of entertainment.  In a word… perfection.

For more see:

http://folivari.com/en/projet/the-big-bad-fox-and-other-tales/

Imported and quickly colored o damn’s** cat walkcycle.

The first cycle is rendered out with a reframing from 25 Frames Per Second to 135 FPS.  I put the same walk cycle on 2s and it runs at about the correct pace.

**I don’t think I”llnever understand what mother’s are thinking of when they name their kids these days.

Because the previously posted bugs have to have a princess…

A Bug Princess

This is an old document but well worth dusting off…

The Perfect Pan: An Animation Scene-Planning Primer by David Steinberg

Unless I am mistaken, this document was created for Sullivan Bluth Studios in 1987.

Highly recommend Tiddlywiki be used in some capacity by everyone.

It can be used as a production journal, story aid, storyboard and so much more.  Different adaptions have been made that focus on project management and basically anything that can be programmed in javascript.

What is Tiddlywiki?

It’s a self contained document that is also an application.

Because this blog is titled ‘new art of animation’ there is a technological aspect to all of this and Tiddlywiki fits that bill nicely.  A few things I hope exploit in the future include Base 64 imagery and QR codes… oh yeah.  😉

And this post is where I hope to keep a Tiddlywiki named ‘Storyboard.html’ for linking purposes.  That way the link doesn’t get broken.

So, here’s a very non linear multistoryboarding example:

TIDDLYWIKI STORYBOARD LINK

Seth Synder’s Character Max.  Or at least one version of him.

A shot from a dream sequence not in the script.  Just something from a random doodle in a tiny sketchbook.

I thought I’d run through a few of those sketchbook doodles and see if I could still draw the characters.

If gif animation had audio… this stuff would be dangerous.