jblinxanimation-blog

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2 Lists

People I’d like to work for in the future:

Cartoon Network (Adult Swim particularly)

Nickelodeon

Pixar

Nintendo

Rooster Teeth

Hideo Kojima

Myself

Any Game Studio (As long as we’re making something good

People I want to impress

Myself

My Mum

My Girlfriend

My Tutors

Arin Hanson (Egoraptor)

The Internet in general

The plan, generally speaking, for me to end up working at one of the places from my list, is to continually develop my skills, and work independently for a while, producing work that I can include in an animation reel, promoting myself. From there, I’d send the reel off to various studios, and apply for jobs. I don’t know how likely it is that I’ll be able to land a place at big names like Cartoon Network or Nintendo, fresh out of university, but I certainly don’t mind getting there in steps. Some of the smaller goals though, like Rooster Teeth and any old Game Studio would be significantly more realistic as a first job (Rooster Teeth’s Animation Department routinely hires fans from their community, if they show talent.) That time working independently will also give me a chance to develop my style, and lead into my plan for impressing people. For a lot of these studios, I’d probably have to move abroad eventually. That’s not possible right now, because of my ties to university, but in the future, I’d defiunitely be open to it. My plan to impress the people on my list, is to try and do something that hasn’t been done before, or to really refine a unique style, that has a flow, and a dynamism to it. Something that is easily recognisable as my own work, in the way that you can instantly identify a piece of Yoji Shinkawa artwork (Pictured below)

I think that this would be the best way to impress myself, and I hope that once I am able to impress myself with how much I’ve improved, then hopefully other people will be impressed too.

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Talk in 10 years

As I walk out on to the stage, I look out over the crowd. It’s the biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken in front of, but not particularly daunting. I can spot a couple of people in cosplay as my characters. I decided to wear every day clothes: Red plaid shirt, dark jeans, a pair of classic red converse. It’s the kind of thing I usually wear to work, and I doubt that this audience would be impressed by a suit and tie anyway. It’s more of a casual setting. It’s a convention, not a meeting with the heads of programming.

As I reach centre stage, I give a casual “Hi!” to signal the beginning of the talk. The slide displayed on the screen behind me is titled “Independent Animation is dying.” I talk about how the changes in YouTube’s algorithms to pay ad money based on amount of time watched, instead of amount of views, which was made to stem the flow of cash to so-called ‘Reply Girl’ videos, which would amass ridiculous amounts of views (and therefore money) by posting a ‘reply’ video, containing basically nothing of substance, to an already popular one, with a thumbnail of a provocatively dressed woman, in order to draw people into clicking the video. These changes are preventing independent animators from going full time, and being able to afford to support themselves purely on income from their animations, unless they are able to secure commissions. In the past, animators were able to put weeks of work into a 2 or 3 minute long video, and were able to make a decent living wage off of it, but now, the watch-time algorithm favours longer, more frequently released videos, which has caused most online animators to try and find better ways of making cash and sustaining themselves, which in turn, often means that their animation work is neglected. Either YouTube needs to somehow change their algorithm to once again support amateur and independent animation, or animators need to find a new online home, where they can make their living and work on their passion projects, and produce works at the highest quality that they can muster. Obviously, as an amateur animator myself, this is very concerning to me. Though there are other popular online revenue sources, such as Patreon, and Twitch, and other video hosting services like Vimeo and DailyMotion (Though neither site has anywhere close to the amount of watch time that YouTube boasts; according to engadget.com, over 1 billion hours of YouTube videos are watched in a single day.) Hopefully sometime soon, YouTube will launch a change to their systems which allows Animators to once again start paying their bills, without the platform being opened up to the flood of low effort, clickbait videos which originally caused the change from views to watch-time, or a new platform will arise to properly accommodate animation. There’s also the constant problem of people stealing online content, and rehosting it for their own gain, often on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. None of these platforms have any real way of protecting the content creator from having their work (And revenue) stolen, unless said content creator happens to be a multi-million dollar corporation with a massive legal team. Independent animators really don’t stand a chance, especially when their films are so easily condensed into .GIF format to be shared over and over through every communication channel on the web. I certainly don’t have the solutions to these problems, but the more people know about it, the more likely the solution will show up, and I welcome that day with open arms. At the end of my talk, I take some questions from the crowd about my own work for a while, and afterwards, I’d probably do some quick merchandise signing or have a chat with some of the bigger fans.

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“Animation Olympics”

I’m going to narrow this down to just Animators, since that’s obviously my field of “expertise”.

Bronze Medal: Tom Fulp

Tom Fulp is the creator of newgrounds.com. A website originally started as a fanbase for the ill-fated video game console, the SNK Neo Geo, but which eventually evolved into the single most popular, and iconic online hub for Flash animations and games, fostering a global community of amateur animators and game designers, and giving them somewhere where they could host their creations for free (Something which seems trivial now, but in the 90s, no such place existed.). These creators interacted, and collaborated amongst themselves, and the community flowered. A new wave of amateur animation icons were born. Egoraptor, OneyNG, MrWeebl, Harry Partridge and so on. Tom Fulp produced his own games and toons as well, but it was the addition of ‘The Portal’ to the site, making Newgrounds.com the first website to automate content submission, which I believe was one of the most important moments for animation as a medium in the 21st century. These films and games were more often than not, crude both in tone and execution, but those were the earliest attempts, and the simplicity of these films and games inspired people to take up their stylus much moreso than a grand production such as The Lion King or Toy Story, because these simple flash cartoons seemed infinitely more achievable for one kid in his bedroom. Many of these big names from the early to mid 2000s are now still big names in the online animation game. Though many of these stars have since packed their bags, and moved their online presence to YouTube and Patreon, they are still known to those who have been around long enough to remember as “Newgrounds animators”, and they are still inspiring yet more animators to take up pencil and stylus, and just start learning. Myself being one of these youngsters.

Silver Medal: Max Fleischer

While Fleischer was by all accounts, a fantastic animator, responsible for the creation of multiple mid-century pop culture icons, such as Popeye, Betty Boop, and also creator of the first ever on-screen appearance of Superman, these feats are not what earned him his place on my list. It is, in fact, his engineering and invention skills which are, to me, the most important. Max Fleischer is the man who invented the Rotoscope. A device which combines an easel and a film projector, allowing an artist to trace over live action footage, directly onto celluloid film. This is used for transposing the movements of a real human or animal onto an animated character, as well as for adding visual effects to live action films, before the dawn of digital effects (For example, all of the lasers and lightsabers seen in the original Star Wars trilogy were rotoscoped into the flim.)

The invention of the rotoscope suddenly made it possible for animated characters to move in a convincing, realistic way, without spending dozens or hundreds of hours of the animator’s time to carefully draw it from scratch. The Rotoscope was used in just about all of Disney’s “golden age” feature films. Films such as ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, or the iconic music Video for A-ha’s ‘Take on Me’ would simply not exist, if not for this invention. Possibly the most important and influential piece of animation technology since the invention of the pencil.

Gold Medal: Genndy Tartakovski Tartakovsky is famed for his skill in directing action scenes, particularly in pacing. His action scenes constantly play with the speed of movements, the frequency of camera cuts and angle changes (And often using multi-panel comic book-esque shots), and the flow of time within the scene. For example, scenes will often jump backwards in time by a few seconds, to repeat an action for emphasis, or hang on a particular moment in order to emphasise the tension even further.

His mastery of sound design pushes the quality of his work even further still. Tartakovsky conducts a careful balancing act between Effects and Music, sometimes completely forgoing one in favour of the other. For scenes of elevated tension, often the music will completely disappear, allowing the soundscape to be dominated by rhythmic sound effects, almost acting as a drum beat, as the main character of the scene anticipates an attack. Drops of water, the footsteps of an enemy, the protagonist’s breath, etc. Tartakovsky is a personal idol of mine. I seriously aspire to his ability to direct action sequences. As I’ve said many times on this blog, I feel that is the most important thing that I want to learn, and I feel like the works of Genndy Tartakovsky would be the best place to start looking if I wanted to learn.

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This game will be sold pretty much entirely on it’s art style. It’s so cool to see a modern game emulating old-school rubber hose animation, with all the characters and environments ‘mickey-mousing’ around (bouncing in time with the music.) It’s something that, as far as I know, has never been done (And has certainly never been rendered this faithfully) I just hope that the actual game holds up to how cool the visuals are.

Cuphead is finally coming to a console near you on September 29 this year!

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I had a look around W.H.Smith’s this week, trying to find some reading material about Animation, and it was honestly harder than expected to find any periodicals or magazines dedicated to the medium of animation. I did, however, manage to find a magazine called ‘ImagineFX’, which, luckily for me, has recently run an issue titled ‘animation artist’, featuring some excellent interviews with members of the teams who worked on Disney’s ‘Moana’, Dreamworks’ ‘Trolls’, Laika’s ‘Kubo and the two strings’, and Pixar’s ‘The Good Dinosaur’ as well as a bunch of really interesting and helpful ‘workshop’ articles, which go through a step by step process of some technical aspect of the animation process, for example, character design, cinematic lighting, and the use of visual contrast. It also included a URL, where I could download all knids of helpful resources, such as custom photoshop brushes from professional artists, and example projects to look at and work from. The one that particularly caught my eye, was the workshop article, detailing the character design process of Indonesian artist, David Adinarya Lojaya, as he creates the concept for a Jazz Musician character. Starting off with some very basic shapes, based on Musical Instruments, Lojaya anthropomorphises the shapes, with wildly exaggerated proportions, then the process of finding characteristic and interesting poses, and finally turning the design into a fully rendered image which can be presented to a client, or used as a style guide. Character design is actually something that I find myself struggling with at times, and, feeling particularly emboldened by this article, I decided to have quick, rough go at it myself, following Lojaya’s steps. Above, you can see my process. Since Lojaya was drawing a jazz musician, I decided to try a musician as well, but something a bit heavier. I came up with the idea of a Punk hero, since I feel like most of the time, Punks are usually the bad guys of whatever story they appear in, and it didn’t seem fair. The pointed, angular guitar that I started with seemed like a natural fit for a Punk. From there, I used the shape of the guitar’s body as the general torso shape, with the larger points being parts of a stylish leather coat. The rest is fairly self explanatory. The guitar’s neck became the punk’s legs, then just add a couple of arms and a head, and you’ve got a human. Next, I had to fiddle around with the proportions of the character to get him looking a bit more appealing and making a bit more sense. I began filling in the details of his coat, and his face. Trying to come up with a facial expression which looked cheeky and anti-authoritarian, without looking ‘villainous’ was a bit of a challenge. I originally had him scowling more, but it didn’t quite fit the character I had envisioned, so I softened up his eyes a little bit to make him look a bit friendlier. I also moved his head and neck to be coming forwards from his torso, and put his hands behind his back, because I think this is a bit more interesting of a posture, and more fitting for the character, as if he’s leaning in to you, after asking a question you don’t want to give the answer to. He’s cheeky like that. Once I was happy with the line work, it was just a matter of laying down some colour, and topping it off with shading. Shading the leather turned out to be a huge pain. I just couldn’t figure out how light interacted with leather. After using a bunch of different brushes, and references, I finally managed to figure out a nice texture. Not photorealistic, by any means, but I think you can tell what it’s supposed to be. Once I had the actual design down, the article suggested putting him in some different poses, to display his character. For now, I’ve only given one, with him shouting out to an unseen audience from a stage, but I’d definitely like to continue drawing this character. I’ve included some photos of the magazine and the article I used as well, just for your reference.  I really enjoyed this exercise, and I’m super happy with the outcome. As I said, coming up with unique design elements for my characters was something that I have been struggling with, and I think this method is a fantastic way to find inspiration. I’ll definitely be using it in my future work. ‘Computer Arts Magazine’ also captured my attention, since my work is almost exclusively in digital media, so I’d like to pick that up at some point. There’s also ‘Comic Heroes’, which focuses on the art and stories of Comic books. I think that reading over comic books could be very helpful for me in a few ways. Mostly in helping with my storyboarding skills (Since a storyboard is essentially kind of a graphic novel.), but also in general visual story-telling, and pose drawing. Other issues of ImagineFX’ would definitely be valuable reading as well, to help me learn general digital art / painting skills.

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End of Module reflection

Now that we’re at the end of the semester, and the end of my Professional Practice module, I thought it would be a good idea to look back on it, and figure out what I’ve learned. I think that this blog ended up actually being a very useful tool for me, to kind of talk my ideas and thoughts over with myself. Putting things into words has really made me think more carefully about them, and that has led me to new ideas, and revelations. I’m actually really looking forwards to doing some unguided work over the Summer, with the knowledge that I’ve gained, and the ideas that I’ve had during these modules behind me, and see what I can do now, as compared to what I was capable of at the start of the module, or even compared to the work I produced for Directed Projects. I’m going to focus a lot, on trying to create a new, looser, less representational aesthetic for my animations. Not necessarily totally abstract, but trying to embrace a little bit more of what animation is really meant to be for: representing things that we can’t see in the real world.

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My Style

I talked a lot, in the end of module review for Directed Projects, about how I don’t really like my own art style anymore. To me, it feels like the actual image-making doesn’t really add anything to the story of my films. It’s too generic, and flat. I’d really like to try and develop my style into something new, which has more visual appeal, and more flexibility. Something a bit looser, with more interestingly designed characters. I want to practice breaking out of the habit of drawing all characters as basically the same model with a different wig and clothes applied, and start to develop more of a Craig McCracken-esque approach to my character designs, where each character has can have totally different proportions and shapes to the next. In general, I’d like to be able to break away from the habit of being too representational with my work. My most recent film in particular, could really have been filmed live action, as opposed to animated, and aside from one particular visual gag, I don’t think the piece would really lose anything, because there’s nothing about those characters and situations, which strays so far outside the realm of possibility that it needs to be animated. That’s something that I want to aim for.

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Room for Improvement

Over the course of this semester, and working on my Directed Project Briefs, I’ve really started to notice my weaknesses when it comes to creating an entire animated piece by myself. I think the biggest issue in terms of the quality of my films right now, is that the actual writing is awful. I’m able to come up with certain scenes and spots that I want to include fairly easily, but stringing them all together is actually very difficult for me. Especially when working from a very vague brief. It seems to me that all of my best work is based on a pre-existing piece of text or audio, which dictates the story and flow of the film, as opposed to the films which start off as nothing more than a topic sentence and a couple of quick sketches. This is definitely something I’d like to work on over Summer; I feel like the quality of the story in a film directly affects how enthusiastic I am about a project, and how likely I am to actually put in the effort to make it a quality piece of work, so getting better at it will be both a big step forward for my personal work, and my coursework.

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Networking

Everyone always say that “It’s not what you know. It’s Who you know”, and I’ve already started seeing this for myself. All of the commission work that I’ve done so far has been for people that I already personally knew, and there was even an opportunity presented to me, to work as an animator in an indie game team, which came to me through a friend of a class-mate. And once I had become involved in the project, I even recommended two friends of mine from my part time job, who were post-graduates in music, to be brought onto the project as well. If that doesn’t perfectly exemplify the power and spread of networking, I don’t know what would. The project unfortunately fell through before I ever got to participate in any real sense. Not really got a clue what actually happened; it seemed like the project lead just sort of took his ball and went home, but now that I’ve helped those two guys out in finding that project, I’m sure that they’d be willing to recommend me for any positions that they come across, just as I’d be more than willing to recommend the classmate who brought me on board as well. If Networking can be this powerful of a tool when it happens basically totally by chance, then if you were actually trying, who knows what you could do?

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Getting myself out there

As we approach the summer break, I’m about to have a lot of spare time, and with that spare time, I’d like to start earning a little bit of extra cash on the side, and if I’m EXTREMELY lucky, maybe be able to ditch my part time job, to give me more time to focus on my uni work. And to this end, I’m really looking into getting some commission work, but I’m not even really sure where to start. I suppose the best course of action would just be to start doing stuff just because I want to, and start putting it out there for people with delicious expendable income to wander across. Another Avenue which I think may not have been considered much by a lot of people, is twitch.tv. Twitch is a live-streaming service, which used to be exclusively for streaming video games, but since 2015, they’ve started to allow Artists to broadcast themselves working, doodling, or doing whatever. Once a Twitch Streamer becomes popular enough, they can even start getting paid just for the actual act of streaming. It’s been out for about a year and a half now, so I’m definitely not the first person to consider it, but I think that this could be an exciting “new” line of work for animators, and other artists.

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How much should Animation cost?

I’ve been looking into it, and trying to figure out how much I should theoretically be charging for any commissioned work, or indeed, if in the future, I were to be pitching my own show.  It talks a lot about things like Intellectual property rights, and the technical costs relating to not only the actual production of the show, but also the costs of backing the data up, and storing copies for the future. How will it be rendered? Do you need any kind of license? Does the client already have a storyboard, or will I have to create one? How long will the film / series take to create? These are all very important questions that would need to be resolved before a price would even be discussed. Even just talking about a small, freelance commission job, a lot of these things need to be taken into account.

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Writing my CV

I always have a problem with writing CVs, where I can never tell what is too much, or too little, when it comes to talking myself up. Should I be making myself sound like the most valuable person in the entire world, at the risk of seeming like an egotistical freak, or should I be totally humble, at the risk of not actually presenting any reasons for someone to hire me. My previous CV was definitely too much on the bragging side, I think. My new one though, seems to be a much nicer middle ground. I think it might be a little bit short, but I was trying to keep it to a single page, since, just in my opinion, that makes it easier to present nicely, and makes it just a bit easier to read. (And Honestly, I feel like you could fit all the necessary info on to a single page.) Also, I think the bright orange colour scheme works pretty well. I just picked it because Orange is my favourite colour, but it really stands out, and the decorative bars give the page a nice balance. I think with a little bit more refinement, i would actually be happy to use this as my legit CV, and I think, in combination with a good portfolio and demo reel, It’d give quite a nice impression of me.

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An example of my commissioned Motion Graphic work, based on the logo which was given to me as a flat image. 

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A couple of examples from my portfolio, of the commission work I’ve done for Walkabout

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My Curriculum Vitae (with all my contact details removed) Also required for the submission.

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A few quick ideas about possible branding for myself. I really like the monogram in the top left. It’s just a shame that I don’t think it really meshes well with my overall style and aesthetic. I prefer a more grungy vibe, like the images in the centre, and bottom-right. I might be able to find a happy middle ground though. I called this a ‘shotgun sheet’, because I was basically just firing in a scatter pattern and hoping that I hit something good. (and because I couldn’t remember the already existing term)