No. 83, Locked Out of Linked In Groups

LINKED OUT

Update: as of the new year, 2016, this issue has been resolved (or my period of exile ran out) and I am now able to post to my groups once again.

When you run a blog like this one, you want as many people to see it as possible.  And you don't want just anyone to see it; you want everyone with an interest in the subject matter to see it. Naturally, the greater readership you have, the more responsibility you feel to do a good job, and also the more satisfaction there is in blogging. So, you look for the best ways to get people (in my case, mostly animators) to notice it and take a look and, it is hoped, become a Follower.  Up until now, my best path for that has been the various Linked In groups for which animation is the focus.

Each time I posted to my blog, I would run a notice about it on relevant group sites, and typically I would get a surge in page views.  In this way, I have been gradually building up my readership.

Suddenly, however, I find that I am blocked from free access to those groups.

With a little checking, I found that just one complaint of impropriety, spamming or self-promotion, whether or not it was justified, was enough to get you blocked from a group. But in Linked In, this now pulls a trigger that blocks you from all your groups for an unknown amount of time.  This has now happened to me.  In some cases, my postings to the groups do show up on the group web page, but not in the periodic emails promoting activity in the group. On the internet, discussions of this problem by others who have felt unfairly blocked have revealed no good solutions or effective avenues of appeal.  One person suggested appealing to the group moderators, but many groups now do not list their moderators and their contact information, and anyway this would not clear the other blockages that have been automatically triggered. And Linked In has no editors or supervisors to whom to appeal for a review of one's situation.

As to the nature of my postings, are they inappropriate? Certainly not; they are targeted to the very narrow-interest groups most likely to want to see them, and their content is as free of socially questionable material as I can make them.  And also they are most definitely not spam, unlike the recruiting and job help postings that have been clogging group emails since I began my blog.

And what about self-promotion? Well, of course it is self-promotion, but no more so than a post by a young animator who wants people to look at his or her demo reel or animated sequence.  In fact it is less so, because my blog is informational and instructional; it is possible sometimes to learn something from it that may help a less experienced animator to improve his skills or to avoid some mistake in approach or execution.

 There may be another avenue open, such as Google Communities, or perhaps I will get reinstated sometime. For now, I am flummoxed.

No. 80, Why I Sometimes Don't Post Regularly

Writer's Blog

Whenever I fail to post to this blog over a period of weeks or months, you can be sure there is a good reason for it.  It will not be because I am bored with it, or that I am burnt out or have run out of material and ideas to blog about, or that I don't care.  I recognize the value in posting regularly, and I try to do that as much as possible.  Failing to post can result in lost followers and other readers.

If I don't post new material, it will be due to a serious cause, like ill health or death. Or, best of all from my point of view, because I am working. The period between May and November of 2015 was just such a case, where animation and design that I was doing for a game went into crunch mode and I was putting in more than 40 hours a week on it.

My blog is not only commentary.  It often involves adaptation or creation of visual images specially for the blog, which takes time. A lot of thought and preparation go into each posting, because I want to be lucid and engaging and often instructive all at the same time.

If I have full-time work with deadlines, that takes away both from my blogging time and also from the energy needed to do justice to my blog.

So whenever I fail to post for a while, please don't give up on me.  I'll return and probably pick up where I left off.

Thank you for your loyalty.  I will continue to try to give you something new to think about each week or so.

--Jim Bradrick

No. 68, The Animator's Thought Process

What I try to do here in this blog, in part, is to set down some of the thinking and decisions that an animator makes which are not usually recorded at all.

These consist of the more fleeting and detailed things that pass through an animator's mind as she or he works.  Ask an animator a year after a scene is animated about that animation and what he was thinking when he did it, and it is likely that he will not be able to say.  It might be possible to say, "Oh, that walk cycle--well, it has a nice rhythm, don't you think?" But the steps of planning, of paths considered and discarded, of things tried that did not work because they were too subtle or too over-the-top for the problem at hand--these things are most likely forgotten unless noted down or  unless committed to long-term memory by a discussion or some other event that forces the thinking to be articulated or recorded.

Thoughts of an animator.

But my belief is that these thoughts can be useful,  just as seeing the crumpled false starts from the waste basket or dustbin of a writer or illustrator can be useful, because they show to the aspiring animator that the path to a satisfying result is often not straight and smooth; that it is okay not to get it right the first time, and that a hard working and self-critical method of procedure can lead to success just as surely as the inspired stroke of genius of some Michelangelo of animation who seems to always get it right the first tiime.  If there really is such a thing.  Milt Kahl may have been a genius animator, but it is known that he would shut himself in his office alone for days or weeks at a time as he worked out his scenes.  It is fair to assume that he was testing and discardiing, homing in on his solutions more or less as the rest of us do.

And so the message of my step-by-step blog posts is: if something you animate is not working right, it can probably be fixed, and here are some of the many ways that can be used  1)to figure out what is wrong, and 2) to fix it so that it is working right.  Moreover, having established these critical habits in yourself, you may find that you do get to the right solution more directly and quickly in the future.

Let's hope so.  As for myself, I feel that I am still learning more every day and improving as an animator.

How about you?

No. 63, New Project: The Two Washingtons

I have decided to start a new animated project, to be worked on in parallel with my present project, The Crossing, but on a faster track. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that The Crossing is turning out to be so elaborate in its present vision that it will be years before it can be finished.  This has been my fault for succumbing to what is called feature creep--allowing the inclusion of ever more ambitious ideas until the scope of the project becomes much bigger than the original concept, perhaps outrageously so.  I still get great satisfaction from working on The Crossing, but the distant date of completion sometimes frustrates me. This new film is to be short and manageable, and it will satisfy my desire to finish something once in a while.  I hope to turn out a series of these briefer, simpler little videos.

The other reason is for the benefit of this blog, Acme Punched!.  At times, my work on The Crossing does not provide me with usable material for blog posts, and I recognize the importance of doing regular posts in a blog's success.  So now I will be able to draw on my work on both projects to provide me with relevant topics on a regular basis.

The New Project

Working title: The Two Washingtons

The substance of this production is a brief and humorous encounter between two strangers who are both waiting for flights at an airport departure gate.

In the interest of the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) I have determined that it will be in black-and-white and that it will be under 2 minutes long.

Here are the two main characters:

Before these two meet, there will be a wide establishing shot followed by a sequence in which one of these men, looking for a vacant seat, walks past an assortment of seated travelers, each of whom is passing the time in some way as he or she waits for a flight.

This is a rough of the establishing shot:

Next: Design of Incidental Characters

No. 55, Setting the Color Palette

As I worked on this project of mine, I have tried a number of variations on character colors.  Now that I am ready to commit some scenes to digital ink and paint, the time has come to determine my final colors. 

At the same time, I have worked out the rendering style for my backgrounds.  Here is the result:

When choosing character colors, it is necessary to think not only of color but of value, getting good value contrast between adjacent color areas as much as possible.  Thus, the blue of the man's overalls and that of his shirt are not only different in hue but in value.  All of this makes the images read more clearly, just as good poses and silhouettes make things easier to read.

Here is a black and white rendering of the same shot:

This is a good way to prove out the readability of a chosen palette.  You will notice that in the lower left foreground, the grass stems are very close in value to that of the path, but the area is not a critical one and creates no confusion to the viewer.

Detail of the background.

The background style I have kept simple and graphic, with simple gradients or flat color as fills, no silhouette outlines on objects, and linear detail used sparingly and only inside objects, as shown here in the bits of grass and in the roof and wall textures on the house.

For some scenes I will need a night-time palette, but that will be worked out later.

No. 33, Problem Six: Fox Bites Nose (Part 1)

Well, it has happened again.  My Director (me) has just come by and dropped onto my desk all the drawings from the end of this scene with the fox.  All he said was, "You can do better than this."

At first I was angry.  All that work for nothing!  But the animator (me again) calmed down and took a look at the pencil test.  This is part of the whole sequence where the man pulls off his hat, revealing the fox underneath, then lifts the fox down for his wife to see.  All that has been the subject of the Problems 2, 3 and 5.

Now the wife leans in to see the fox.  As she tickles his chin, he suddenly seizes her by the nose.  Instinctively she jerks away, but not too hard, for she doesn't want to lose her nose.  Holding the fox, the man also reacts, yet he cannot just pull the fox away.

I had animated everything described above, and it was clear what was going on.  Yet as Animator, I had to admit: it just did not work.

Here is the pencil test:

I have to say, I am embarrassed now to even display this video on my blog, it is so bad.  Yet as I have stated, part of the idea of the blog is to show you my mistakes and how I am correcting them.  This is one of those times when I am taking a chance, because as I write this, I have not yet fixed the problem, so I cannot be sure what I will create to replace the mess I have made.  (But yes, I have already roughed in a new set of key drawings, so I do have some idea of what direction I will go.)

First, let's try to analyze what I did, and why it is so wrong.

Here is what happens in the scene:

1-The wife moves in.  She tickles the fox.

2-The fox bites her nose.

3-She jumps.

4-The man does a "take", reacting in surprise.

5-The woman moves into a pleading attitude, hoping that the fox will let her go.

 And so it goes, 1-2-3-4-5.  The result?  It is boring.

The Failure To Visualize

My first mistake was the biggest mistake you can make as an animator: failing to envision what the scene should look like, or what it should feel like.  In any animation, but particularly in a pantomime like this, it is all important to have a good idea where you are going before you try to go there.  Even with something quite complex, a good animator should be able to close his or her eyes and "see" the action, at least to the extent of its timing and power.  I had not really done this.  I had analyzed the scene intellectually, and I had broken it down into five separate components and then had animated each one, separately.  In cases where the characters are not closely engaged, this can work.  But in the present instance, the three characters are not only closely engaged, they are actually physically connected!

Once the fox takes hold of the woman's nose, the three characters have become one moving mass.  In the language of computer graphics, they have become grouped.  It therefore no longer makes sense to try to animate them separately; they must now be animated as a group.

Also, I had a mistaken notion that the fox's head should not move after he takes hold of the nose.  I thought it would be funnier if the others moved all around the fox, and he didn't.  Well, I tried that, and it obviously did not work.

The New Vision

This kind of group movement is well known to veteran animators, and once you get the idea, it provides an avenue to good results in scenes where two or more characters are locked together in combat, for example, or where a group of characters all react to something, where the reaction moves through them like a wave or surge.  Many of the dwarfs' scenes in Disney's Snow White make use of this approach to great effect.

Group movement is also discussed in some detail on pages 364 and 365 of Illusion of Life, the Disney animation bible by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

Next: My New Approach

No. 11, When Good Enough Isn't Good Enough: Pursuing Excellence

The fox on the man's head.

If you have read my previous posts, you will see that I have shown some examples of improving my own work.  In the animation business, as in many others, one cannot always do that.  There are many good reasons for this.  Sometimes the budget is too tight, or the screen time allowed for some bit of action is too short, often dictated by the timing of a script that is already locked down.  Very often,  a short deadline does not permit the careful planning that might make for better animation and storytelling.

Perhaps these are excuses rather than reasons.  In any event, I have spent most of my career doing work that was good enough.  It was good enough for my clients and good enough to give me a career doing animation in TV commercials, video games, and now for the internet.  I have done work where there was no time for pencil tests or for doing anything over, and it has been good enough.  And--don't get me wrong!--much of it has turned out very well.

And yet, I have done some animation I cannot bear to watch anymore and which you will never see on my demo reel.  (I think most serious creative people have work that they personally do not like to look at, even though others may admire that work.)

Also, in television commercials and other short work that I have done, there has never been time to develop character or to have very much character interaction.  There was seldom more than one character on screen at a time.  Therefore I never professionally had a chance to develop my character animation skills to their highest level.

When I began work on my current personal film The Crossing, my attitude at first was as usual:  to make it "good enough."  So I have completed the pencil animation on a good portion of it at that level.  At some point, though, I asked myself why I was doing that.  Why was I only making it good enough, when I now had the time to make it as good as it could possibly be?  I decided I wanted it to be excellent, even if that meant doing some work over again.

Thus, we have the basis for this blog:  a series of examples of "good enough" animation being improved; being made as good as I can make it.  I hope you will stay with me and perhaps benefit from the process of re-thinking all of these little scenes along with me.

Next: Problem 3: The Fox On the Man's Head

No. 1, Acme punched...what's it mean??

The name Acme Punched? Yes, it really is a joke for insiders. In fact, I feel that if you have to ask what it means, you probably won't be very interested in the blog. But I could be wrong, so... 

Animation on paper is done on dozens or hundreds or thousands of SEPARATE sheets of paper, separate because the process requires that they constantly be re-stacked in various hierarchies, sheets sometimes added, sometimes removed. Animators who work on paper therefore have to have some kind of registration system--that is, a way of always keeping the papers aligned with one another, perfectly, every time, so that the images on the papers will also align with one another the same way every time. 

Early on, a couple of different methods were tried, like tracing registration crosses from one page to the next, or aligning the papers' corners in some kind of frame or jig. Soon, before 1920, a New York animation producer named Raoul Barré  tried mounting on the drawing boards two round pegs that fit snugly into holes punched into the animation paper. This worked well but was imperfect because repeated pegging of the paper caused the holes to wear until there was too much "slop" in the alignment. 

Eventually someone (Marvin Acme?) invented a three-peg system, with a slot-shaped hole on either side of a round hole. The slot holes were somewhat wider than the pegs they fit on yet snug at top and bottom. The papers could be removed and replaced on the pegs repeatedly with very little wear. 

Perfect? Not quite, because there developed no fewer than four variations of this design, with slightly different centers and measurements, that were simultaneously in use in the United States alone. They were: Acme, Signal Corps, Oxberry and Disney. By the time I began animating with professional equipment in the 1970's, the field had narrowed to two still in common use: Acme and Oxberry. In both, the peg centers were four inches apart, but the Oxberry pegs were narrower and thicker than the Acme. Also, while Oxberry was typically popular in East Coast studios, the West Coast tended to prefer Acme. Thus, and at last I get to the point, when ordering a ream of paper from an animation supply house such as Cartoon Colour Company, one had to specify "Oxberry punched" or--you guessed it--"Acme punched." 

In casting about for a name for this blog, "Acme Punched!" appealed to me immediately as just the right thing, not only for its arcane meaning described above and for the better-known cartoon world meaning of "Acme" as supplier to the roadrunner-hunting coyotes of the world, but because I wanted to express a certain fanatacism for animating on paper:  if you are Acme Punched, you are fatally smitten by this laborious yet fascinating art, from which no amount of CGI cleverness can pry you away. 

For a more exhaustive account of the evolution of the peg system, see this article by animator and instructor Tom Arndt, who coincidentally, was my associate and employer when I first jumped into commercial animation in the late 70's.

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