Animation

Disney making some more shorts

And I don’t mean pants.

I hate posting a link like this, since they go out of date so quickly, but it looks Disney is bringing back the shorts.

Perhaps they are following the tradition of Pixar, or perhaps John Lasseter made them, but I’m hoping there’ll be one of these shorts before Tangled and one before… er… is anything else coming out from Disney Feature Animation anytime soon?

Right now, they’ve got clips of a computer animated short called Tick Tock Tale, which looks great, and How to Hook Up Your Home Theater, bringing some nicely animated Goofy to the modern world.

I also noticed on their feature projects page, King of the Elves is no longer listed. Too bad, since that looked like the most interesting one, but then again, they might’ve completely messed up the story. I don’t think they’re cancelling the project, just putting it on hold for now.

(Speaking of shorts, it was also nice to see that Looney Tunes short before Legend of the Guardians. Hopefully the habit will continue! Now they just need to put shorts in front of live action movies as well, bwa ha ha ha! Create more animation jobs so I can have one!)

By S P Hannifin, ago

A few animation blogs…

There are, of course, a ton of animation blogs out there, but here are a few random ones I’ve been visiting recently:

Pencil Test Depot – This has a lot of great pencil tests, as the name might suggest. 2D animation, yes, but the principles of animation don’t change. Lots of great stuff there. I came across this blog some months ago before getting into Animation Mentor, but it came up again last night during my Animation Mentor Q&A and I was reminded of its goodness.

Blue Sky Disney – More of an entertainment business blog, but still lots of interesting animation news there.

The Pixar Blog – What Pixar fan hasn’t come across this blog? Dedicated to Pixar news, with a dash of its parent, Disney.

Good stuff.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Animation Mentor semester 1 reel

Here’s my reel of animation assignments after completing the first semester of Animation Mentor.

It was a tough 12 weeks; you have to get used to the busy workflow (especially if you have a part-time job), and there’s just a lot to learn. I had never done any serious animation before, and even though I had read some books on animation, actually working with the software and applying all the principles take a lot of time to get used to.

Anyway, there’s the reel. There are definitely some things I would change if I could, especially with those walks. But I’m not going to use any of this stuff on my final reel of superb quality, the one I’m going to use to try to get a real job, so better to focus on the current Animation Mentor assignment and nothing else…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Legend of the Guardians

I saw the animated film Legend of the Guardians the other night.  Seeing a movie like that late on a Tuesday night, I had the entire theater to myself!  A reminder of what it’ll be like when I’m rich!

Anyway, visually, the movie is one of the most beautiful animated films ever made; the fantasy world with giant trees and mountains is just so… welcoming.  You just want to fall into it.  They also did an amazing job with the feathers and fur on the creatures.  The character design was also fantastic, and they’ve done something no other animation studio has done (that I can think of); they were able to find this wonderful balance between the stylized and cartoony design, which allow you to read a facial expression on non-human creatures, and realisticity.  These animals (mostly owls) don’t look Disney-ified (or Pixar-ified), which leans to the more cartoony side.  Yet they definitely don’t look like real owls either.  To me, the balance they came up with is just awesome.

And, should you desire to see the movie yourself, I do highly recommend the 3D version.  I know a lot of people don’t like paying extra, but to me it’s worth it, it just looks some much richer, more tangible.  Some say it’s distracting.  Well, you can be just as distracted by any aesthetically beautiful non-story element, so what does that matter?  As long as it’s not distracting because it’s awful… and it’s not!

Oh, some of the action sequences reminded me of the movie 300… which I suppose makes sense, since these movies were directed by the same guy!  Zack Snyder.  He loves those epic action slo-mo closeups.  Really fun style.  According to IMDb, the director is working on a sequel to 300 called Xerxes.  I usually don’t much like the idea of sequels, but I do hope there is a sequel to Legend of the Guardians.  It seems like there is still more story to tell here… unfortunately I’m not sure the film will make enough money to warrant a sequel.  We’ll see…

Finally, I loved the 3D animated Looney Tunes short before the film!  My only complaint is that it was too short!  But I hope they continue the trend, and bring back even more animated shorts before films, even for non-animated films.  Pixar has always done it.  (Except for Toy Story, I guess.  And they sometimes cheated and used shorts they had made in the 80s.)  Anyway, film distributors should bring back the tradition!

owls

By S P Hannifin, ago

Semester’s first Animation Mentor Q&A!

Had my first Animation Mentor Q&A just a little while ago, and it was great; I’m really looking forward to the new semester! Unfortunately our Internet connection seems terrible here at the moment, so the video streaming stalled every now and then… ugh! But it was still good.

Our mentor made a good point about the grades, saying after most universities, potential employers will want to see your grades, but in animation, they don’t care about your grades, they want to see your reel, what you’ve actually done. So you shouldn’t view your grade as: “Ugh! Why didn’t I get an A?” You should view it as a guide to constant improvement. Which is a reason I prefer Animation Mentor to traditional schools. But still, when I mention my “online classes” to other people, what’s one of the first things they ask? “What’s your grade? What grade did you get?” Another thing people ask me is: “Are you still doing it?” As if it’s as tough to stay interested in as traditional school material… it’s animation! It’s the stuff you see in movie theaters! (Of course, most people hear “online classes” and think, oh, meh!)

By the way, it’s just awesome to be able to interact with so many others who are just so passionate about animation and love it so much, since it has a reputation for being “childish” most of the time. Oh, dear fates, please let me work in an animation studio some day!

By S P Hannifin, ago

More boring old novel plotting…

Animation Mentor semester 2 has official begun! So it’s back to having no free time again, but I’m looking forward to it. My new Q&A time is on Wednesday nights, at 10 PM EST, with professional animator Shaun Freeman. I’ll try to upload my progress reel from last semester some time soon, so that y’all can watch it and be jealous of my professional ambitions…

In other news, I’m continuing to plot my novel. I’ve got an outline, detailing what happens in each of the 45 chapters I think I’m going to have. Now, for each chapter, I’m spending an hour or two outlining the chapter itself, making sure I know how it begins and ends, what the characters are feeling and what they want, what the tone is, what the characters might say, etc. It’s like I’m writing notes to some other writer who’s going to write the novel.

I already feel that this will be a great help for when I actually write the novel, as sometimes when I’m outlining a chapter I feel the need to go back and edit my outline for the chapter before it for the sake of continuity, so I think this attempt will be much better than all my other novel writing attempts.

That said, I’ve only outlined 4 of the 45 chapters so far, so this will take a pretty long time… hopefully it will make the writing itself go faster though, as I’ll have a much better idea of what exactly I want to write… I’ll have already figured out a lot details.

My biggest concern, however, is loss of interest. Well, not so much loss of interest as gain of other interest, if that makes sense. I have other novel ideas floating around in my head and they seem like a lot of fun, and it’s tempting to just go work on them instead. So it may be challenging to keep myself focused on this one novel until it’s finished… but I’ll try.

By S P Hannifin, ago

What to do with free time? And stuff…

Animation Mentor progress

It’s week 12 (of 72) and therefore the end of Semester 1!  I’m 1/6th of the way through this!  The weeks have flown by.  Last week was by far the hardest week, not just because the assignment was a challenge, but because I was trying to balance my part-time work with some freelance work, plus a few extra part-time hours, plus a long concert on Friday, plus my Animation Mentor work.  Busiest week of my life, I think.  (Which, I think, shows that I’m ready to be film director!)  But everything turned out OK, save for some major sleep deprivation by the end of it.

So… it’s the final week of semester 1… there actually doesn’t seem to be any homework this week, we just have to put together a reel of all of our work this semester, which I’ll also upload to YouTube so’s that y’all can watch it and whatnot.  So I may have a bit more free time this week to work on some personal projects (though I definitely want to spend some time editing/revising some of my animations) and I’ll definitely have some free time next week, between semesters… what should I work on?

(Vote for up to 3.  Poll closes this Saturday.  No purchase necessary.  Restrictions apply.  Void where prohibited.  Many will enter, none will win.)

Which endeavor would you choose?

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Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King concert at WolfTrap

rotk On Friday my mother and I went up to the WolfTrap performing arts place to see the film Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.  They projected the film in HD on a huge screen and had a live orchestra play the score.  It’s really the best kind of concert there is (or was) and probably the best movie to experience such a concert with.  (They could do it with Star Wars; that has an amazing score, but the movie itself isn’t as good, in my humblest of opinions.  They could do it with Jurassic Park.  Hmmm… I can’t think of many… they just don’t make very many epics like Lord of the Rings.)

I had bought the tickets many months ago, before I knew anything about Animation Mentor, so I did not anticipate seeing the concert during such a busy week, but it was a nice break at least!  Now I need to find some orchestral concert to go to in 2011; I think one should go to at least one orchestral concert a year to keep… uh… the orchestra going or something.  For fun, really.

Anyway, WolfTrap’s Filene Center is a great place for a concert.  It’s built “open-spaced” … that is, it doesn’t really have walls, it just has large columns.  So sitting in it is like being not quite outside, but not quite inside.  It’s kinda cool.  It also allows you to buy cheap “lawn seats”, so you can bring some food and sit on the grass.  Though for this concert I wanted to be able to actually see the orchestra, so I went for the more expensive inside seats.  If I lived closer and had a real job, I’d probably buy a subscription/membership, get really good seats, and go to a bunch of their performances.  But that won’t happen anytime soon.

The concert was great.  Don’t really have much to say that I didn’t say in my reviews of the last two concerts of the trilogy here and here.  It wasn’t flawless; there was a moment when the screen went black for 10 seconds and had me in a panic… oh no!  But it came back quickly.  And there were some flubbed notes hear and there, but they weren’t too bad.  For the film, I’m sure they had time for retakes and audio engineers, mixing engineers, recording professionals, etc, had time to make the mix perfect, which you don’t get at a live performance.  Still, it was quite a glorious sound, especially when the ring hovers over the fires of of Mount Doom and choirs are singing at the top of their lungs.  Oh, so awesome.

It’s also fun to hear the audience applaud at the film’s epic moments and laugh when Gimli says something funny.  (Gimli really gets most of the comedic lines.)

Now I really wish they’d redo all the concerts with the extended editions of the trilogy.  I would definitely pay the $165+ to see them all again.  Meanwhile, these concerts are touring the world.  Not the orchestra, just the rights equipment to do it I guess.  So definitely go to one if you can.

And remember, the book about the music comes out October 5th!  Though I might wait until Christmas to get it, as I’d like to sit down and really spend some time with it; if I get it while I have animation work to do, it might distract me with its awesomeness.

By S P Hannifin, ago

No time for anything… and books

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It’s been a super busy week. I got some more freelance work, which is good for a little extra $$$, but on top of my animation work, leaves no time for anything else really. I’m almost done the freelance work though, just a few hours more worth of work I think. And this Friday, on the 10th, will be great… going to see Lord of the Rings at WolfTrap! Can’t wait! MAN, did the last couple months FLY by… staying very busy does that I guess.

Library visit

Last night I went back to the university library. (I had to, my books were due, and you can only renew so many times online, unlike a public library.) So I turned in my last set of books and got out some more. These aren’t books that I plan to read cover to cover (I’d love to, but I definitely don’t have the time); they’re just books to flip through, read a chapter here and there.

So, those are the books to kind of scan through for the next few weeks…

Life

I’m not up to anything else lately, just my part time job, Animation Mentor, and some freelance work. They’re keeping me busy enough! My projects on the backburner include that novel and that cartoon show. I’ve got two weeks of Animation Mentor Semester 1 left, then I’ll have a week break (just from Animation Mentor, not from my part-time work!) and I’m not sure what I’ll do then. I’d like to get some TV watching and computer game playing in though… heh.

And whenever I graduate from Animation Mentor, I definitely want to take a little vacation to California, go to the graduation ceremony, and just see the California sights…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Comics and virus and animation

Hannifin World – Season 2 begins!

The second season Hannifin World begins today! So be sure to check that site daily for a horrible corny joke… there are 84 comics waiting in line, so the second season will run daily until November 23rd. Woohoo! Should update everyday at 8 AM eastern time…

Virus of doom!

Everything on my computer seemed fine and dandy and then all of the sudden “Security Suite” popped up and said “You have a bunch of viruses!” … though of course I quite suspected this “Security Suite” was the real virus. (According to Wikipedia, “AV Security Suite can infect computers using Adobe flash or other Adobe components found in regular websites, and so does not require voluntary download of software by the user.” How nice.) So I quickly erased my hard drive and destroyed my RAM to ensure safety. OK, actually I turned off the computer and used my other computer to do some research into this nasty virus. Upon logging in, the virus basically starts itself up and locks your computer up so you can’t do anything, like run anti-virus software. It then wants you to pay for “Security Suite” so that it can remove the viruses that it pretends to have detected. It’s like a hostage situation.

So I restarted the computer in “Safe Mode with Networking” which allowed me to update and run my Windows Defender software, doing a full system scan. It found some stuff and deleted it, but unfortunately didn’t get rid of the virus. So I spent some time online looking for free non-scam anti-virus programs (it’s amazing how many are scams), finally found one, did a full system scan, it found some nasty looking stuff, deleted it, and finally everything seems to be OK… for now… hope it stays that way!

(Some people on the Internet reported that they couldn’t even restart in safe mode; thankfully that did not happen to me.)

By the way, the ordeal convinced me that everyone should always have two computers… in fact, it’s about time for me to buy a new desktop… OK, not really. I’d like to build one eventually. Someday. Hm.

Animation Mentor

It’s week 10 of Animation Mentor! Just three more weeks of the first semester left! Then we have a week break before diving into Semester 2!

Here’s my progress from the last three weeks:

The first shot is of “Tailor” … a little squirrel like sphere thing. The point of the exercise was to show the overlapping action of his tail. It’s always a step behind him, and the last segment of the tail is always a step behind the the middle segment of the tail, and so on, so you can sort of see a wave travel through it. There are some things I might change about the animation, the bounces especially seem rough, but watching Tailor die tragically brought me much happi… I mean, it was very sad.

The last two shots are of the “vanilla walk” which is just a plain ordinary average walk. The first phase is “blocking” … planning how each third frame will look. The second phase is, of course, to do all the inbetweens. I found the assignment to be quite difficult, there’s just so much stuff to keep in mind. In the end, I finally got the knees and head to move nice and smoothly, but you can see that I had to sacrafice some of the head’s up-and-down movement, so now the legs look too straight and stiff. When the ball shifts his weight to his forward foot, the leg doesn’t bend, causing the ball sort of lack an illusion of weight. Hopefully I’ll have time to continue to work on this and refine it.

Anyway, this week looks like a lot of fun. It will still be some hard work, but we’ve got to animate a personality walk … that is, a walk with personality, duh! It can be anything. Maybe he’s excited, tired, drunk, arrogant, scared, stupid, etc. Should be some great fun.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Another week of animating and plotting

Animation this week

It’s been kind of a meh week so far. My sleep cycle, which was already all out of whack, has become even more out of whack because I have to wake up at 7 AM to take care of some neighbor’s dogs. Which I don’t mind doing, it just messes up your sleep cycle if you’re going to bed at 3 or 4 AM. So then I have to take a nap later on, and/or get a headache, and/or then stay up even later, or lie in bed not able to sleep, etc… everything just gets messed up. So I haven’t really gotten that much animation work done yet. (I did do some, but it looks awful… I blame fatigue.) So I’m going to try going to bed really early tonight, but I fear I’ll just lie there not able to sleep… worth a try though… doing nothing is always worth a try, and fortunately I have Saturday off this week, so I’ll have that extra 9 hours or so to work on animation.

Book plotting progress

Fortunately book plotting (like blog post writing) I can do at work (when there’s time), so I did get a bit more book plotting done, and I figured out a theme.

I am a strong believer that good stories (at least long-form ones like novels and movies) should have themes, that is, they should say something beyond just the actions of the plot; the plot should mean something. It might be cliche, it might remain unresolved by the story’s end, it might be a bit ambiguous (like “the nature of dreams”), but it should be there. I think I’ve stated this somewhere before on this blog, but the only kind of long-form story that can get away with having no theme at all is the comedy, but even those tend to have little themes (though often cliche; really the comedy itself is the theme).

Ayn Rand, one of my favorite writers, defines what I mean by “theme” here the best: Theme (Literary) in the Ayn Rand Lexicon. Of course, this is by no means a way to objectively judge the art of literature, or a formula… I just agree with it and find it useful.

Anyway, back to the point: I have a theme in mind for The Designers. I’m not yet going to tell you what it is though, ha ha! It’s not a religious theme in and of itself, but it’s sort of philosophically related to religion, so I’m trying to explore different religious and non-religious resources on the matter. I don’t have the entire theme yet; I know I want it to be about X, but I’m not exactly sure what I want to say about X, or what each character will think about X.

So, I consider defining the theme part of plotting, and it’s helping me come up with a really fun ending. Bwa ha ha ha!

Erm… I guess that’s it…

By S P Hannifin, ago