Timing and Spacing

I just saw "The Illusionist" tonight and really liked it. It wasn't perfect, and I have a few questions about what the directors intent was with one of the plot elements (sorry for being vague, but I hate it when someone ruins a movie for me and I don't want to do it for anybody else), but I really enjoyed it.

Jenny Lerew wrote a much better review than I ever could, plus she added some great stuff about Joe Ranft. After you finish here, go read her review.

My one additional comment is that I saw a trailer for a new animated movie "Renaissance". It looks like a beautiful film. It has a black and white (and I mean black and white, that's it) graphic novel look to it. I hope the story and the rest of it lives up the the look. Check out the trailer.

I'm pretty excited about this one.

Posted by David at 01:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some of my drawings from today. First, are some five minute warmups. Afterwards, I look at these and wonder where the five minutes went. I look at how few lines I've drawn and realize how slowly I draw. I had to bump up the contrast on all these to make them more visible. They were all done in an HB or an F pencil and they're pretty light. Also, I had to chop some of them off at the feet when I scanned them; they were done on a 14" by 20" pad and are a little large for my scanner.

Now we have a fifteen minute drawing.

And finally a twenty minute.

I really try and adhere to a three stage drawing process. First, draw the gesture. You can make out some of my gesture lines inside the "final" drawing. Second, draw the shapes. Finally, draw the features i.e. the muscles. I must admit, I tend to blend these last two stages much more than I should.

I should focus some of my time on just getting the shapes and orientations in place. I'll work on this and then post some of those. As an aside, I was thinking that when I sketch on the tablet, I can use a separate layer in Painter for each of the stages. It'll be interesting to try that and see how it works. Maybe it will force me to separate the stages a little better. More likely I'll just end up with muscles drawn in the shapes layer...

Posted by David at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I'm sorting through all the stuff I picked up at Siggraph and I ended up with two of the Pixar Flaming Windup Teapot toys. These are mint condition, only opened for the pictures. They have never been wound up or taken out of the boxes.

Hmm, just noticed my e-mail address isn't anywhere to be found on this blog. I probably should correct that, but you can e-mail me at my gmail account. The usename is 'wdavidlewis'. Hopefully that's obfuscated enough to prevent me from getting (even more) spam, but not so obfuscated you can't figure it out. If you can't, leave me a comment and we'll work it out.

Posted by David at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[As a meta-note, this is the first time I've tried a trackback. Not sure I'm using it properly, either technically or from a societal norms perspective. And it didn't seem to work. Maybe next time.]

This blog post has gotten me thinking about how the economics of the movie industry may be changing.

For the last thirty years or so, Hollywood has increasingly focused on the blockbuster and courted a young demographic (the 16-25 year olds, or some similar range). This has led to some non-intuitive behavior on the part of the studios. They can actually have less risk by spending more money. By paying Tom Cruise an exorbitant salary and giving him backend participation, a movie like "War of the Worlds" with a 132 million dollar budget (and probably at least half that again in marketing budget) is considered less of a financial risk than "Little Miss Sunshine" with a budget of 8 million dollars.

Now, I think that there are (at least) two interesting changes going on with the demographic that the movie studios are targeting. First, there's a lot more things to do: video games, and all things Internet (MySpace, YouTube, iTunes, bitTorrent downloads) to occupy their time. And this audience is fickle. They follow the latest new, hot thing (which is one of the things that makes them such a bonanza when you get them). The other change is that teens are spending less time out in world and more time under the watchful eye of the parents. Now, I have no direct data to support this, but people like danah boyd study this and believe it to be true.

Both of these changes in the marketplace seem to be likely factors in declining numbers for that target demographic (I think there are other reasons for declines in other demographics).

What does this all mean? Well, I hope it means that big budget, big name extravaganzas targetted at teens will start to be riskier, and there will be more of a market for movies like "Little Miss Sunshine", though maybe that's wishful thinking on my part. Of course, there's a whole lot going on in this area with the Long Tail and changes in the distribution channels. I can't say I've got my head around the problem at all.

Posted by David at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I somehow missed this in the runup to Siggraph.

This article (which appears to be a section from a forthcoming book) is primarily about effects animation, but almost everything he says can be applied to character animation as well. His focus on doing your research and not just knowing how your subject moves, but internalizing it, so it's part of your subconscious is extremely important. Once it's in your subconscious, you can let go of it consciously and still have it translate into your animation. I particularly like this quote:

Remember that no matter how well you master your drawing technique, if you can’t feel the effects you are trying to animate, they will not sing with life.

If you watch Glenn Vilppu talk about drawing, he's constantly emphasizing how you need to "feel" the curve of the model, or "feel" the tension of the model's body in your hand as you draw the figure. When I can actually do this, my sketches come out so much better and look like they have life (or at least more life than the others).

I'm really looking forward to this book coming out.

Posted by David at 06:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've done a lot more figure drawing over the last few weeks than I've done in the last two years. I used to maintain a list of all the drop-in figure studio sessions that I knew about here in Seattle. I've updated the list, and put it up into Google calendar. If you want to see what sessions are running, check here.

I've got both the Summer and Fall quarters at SAFA/Gage Academy entered in. I've got contact information for all of them. I'll try and keep the info up to date, but if you plan on going for the first time (or after long hiatus), call the organizer first and verify the session is still on.

Let me know if you know of others or there needs to be a correction made.

Posted by David at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I'm back from Siggraph.

I went to five courses, three sketches, a panel and spent more time than usual on the exhibition floor. Along the way, I picked up two Pixar flaming teapots, two "Cars" posters, and two t-shirts for free. I also bought a copy of Z-Brush, a license for Corel Painter to upgrade the tablet from the trial version and an anatomical model.

The Z-Brush demos looked awesome, and convinced me that I might even be able to model someday. We'll see if the reality is as good as the demo. I have such a difficult time with blendshapes in Maya, I wonder if I can get a workflow setup where I do my blendshapes in Z-Brush and bring them into Maya?

I also found out that there's a free learning edition of Houdini (called "Houdini Apprentice") that you can download from SideFx software.

The demos for Massive were pretty cool, though really just incrementally better than what I've seen before. When I first saw Stephen Regelous talk about Massive at Siggraph 2004, I was just totally blown away. Massive is doing a lot to make it easier and faster to create brains. They have a fairly extensive library of brains you can reuse. It's a pity a license is way out of reach for me. Coming from a programming background, I'd love to play with it.

I did some figure drawing at the Sony Booth. They had Karl Gnass giving short drawing lessons and you got to draw on a t-shirt. It was great to hear him talk about drawing. His book is just awesome. One excellent tip he gave was talking about the scapula and clavicle. I've always considered them part of the upper torso, and draw them that way. He said the upper torso is really just the rib cage; the scapula and clavicle are really parts of the arm. It seems like it's helped in my figure drawing.

I was a bit underwhelmed with the Electronic Theater. I was underwhelmed last year, and like this year even less than I did last year. I like "One Rat Short" but it wasn't as good as I expected given the large amount of hype about it. I attended an art sketch about it, and the line to get in stretched down the hall quite a ways and I barely got in.

All in all, it was a good trip. Next year, it's back in San Diego, which is the venue I like the best. Maybe I'll see you there.

Posted by David at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)