Cinetropic

Haven't posted in a while but couldn't help but throw this up here, even as a 'quickie':

The Bellows March (2009) from Eric Dyer on Vimeo.

One of my favorites from the Ottawa Animation Festival from TWO YEARS AGO - that's how much I liked it - has finally been posted online (or at least, I just found it online).

It's a film of technical genius and yet wonderfully simple. Here's a 'how-he-done-it' video to boot:

The Bellows March production/cinetrope slideshow from Eric Dyer on Vimeo.

Enjoy and I promise to post more in the future!

Old Dog

A friend and former co-worker linked to this page yesterday. Many of you may not know this, but I'm a bit of a dog nerd. I spent a fair amount of time in my youth reading through stacks and stacks of books covering Afghan Hounds to Westies.

Clicking through the site, I came across some great photos.



I love how owners can so resemble their canine companion and visa-versa.

It reminded me of my original plan for my Senior Thesis. A short film along the lines of 'Creature Comforts' using interviews with performance artists, beauty pageant contestants, etc. paired off against animated dogs backstage at a show.


Sifting through stacks and stacks of backup CDs, I managed to find some old character designs -


- and even my example still.

I'm not crazy about the designs. I feel like they're close, but not quite there yet. Maybe that's why the film never made it past this stage. At some point (when I actually have some free time, hah!) I think I'll give the audio a listen and take another crack at it.

*And since there's been some surprise over this, the Pomeranian is clay-on-glass, not digitally painted in Photoshop.

To the Dogs...

Every so often you experience something that can only be described as a triumph.

About two years ago I heard the song 'To the Dogs or Whoever' by Josh Ritter for the first time. The instruments, vocals, lyrics, all make you want to throw your fist in the air, celebrating the pure triumphant joy the music shares.


Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox is no different.


The stop-motion is refreshing and charming. The characters, well-designed, directed and cast, are easy to love and identify with even after only a few quick scenes. The shots and framing are pure genius, artful and emotional.

And as with every Wes Anderson film, the music is a treat. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the theater who got the tender reference to another animated film starring two enamored foxes. If it hadn't of won me over by then, the strains of Bruns and Huddleston's Academy Award nominated "Love" certainly would have had me pumping my fist in the air in triumphant joy.

Simply put, see it.

Day-Tripper Part II

Instead of going into why I haven't been keeping up with my blog or promising endlessly to never let it happen again, let's just jump right back in to it, okay?

So two weeks ago I posted a image heavy blog about my trip down to Philadelphia. I seem to recall promising a 'Part II' so, without further adieu...


Two days after my trip down south, I hopped a quick and rather pleasant flight to Boston. Richard at Asterisk had called me up the week before, starting the conversation with the unexpected question "Can you fly to Boston for a stop-motion shoot next Thursday?" The answer was an obvious 'Yes'.


He may not know this, but I've been eager to work with Asterisk for a while now. I like the type of work they do, the caliber at which it's produced and Richard and Brian know how run a fun while efficient studio.


Not to mention the fact that I was being flown. To Boston. To shoot stop-motion.

And while it did fall in the middle (the Thursday shoot turned into a Wednesday shoot) of a rather tumultuous week, it was wonderful being hired to do the kind of animation I love to do, the type of animation that made me want to take on this whole tiring profession in the first place.

To see the finished (but still rough) animation, head on over to Asterisk's blog.

Deboning...

The Handsome Family video has been progressing, or, if you prefer Darwin to Baron d'Holbach, evolving nicely.


Thanks to Asterisk, I got to scan and color in the final group of character designs last night (I've been without a scanner since almost February now).

With that out of the way, it's time to move onto the fun part (at least for me). While Chris starts sketching out boards, I'll be launching into the actual puppet construction. So, as I use to say to my Elementary School students, ikimashou!

I begin by making the armature. It seems like a no-brainer, really but I figured it was a good thing to mention. If you don't start with the armature as a base, you're going to have a hard time fitting it to your mold later.


Usually, I would draw the character with the armature's outline to scale on a sheet of paper. In this case, I'm going with a realistic size and shape so a simple Google search will do for the image, with on outline sketched over top.


Then I bend the wire to match the lines.

Because lots of things can conspire to go wrong during a shoot, I always make multiple casts of the same puppets (especially when they're the main character). So, it's a good idea to make all the duplicate armatures now to ensure they'll all match. Usually I do this by taping a new piece of unshaped wire to the shaped one and then bending it to match the other's curves exactly.


Next, tie-downs! Groups of matching screws, nuts and wing nuts are great for these.


Our main character, the mackerel, doesn't have to move (in fact, he can't) so the tie-downs are simply to secure him to the set while we shoot. I've decided to use two tie-downs: one near the gills and one at the tail.


And for anyone who's wondering, that gray stuff is plumbers epoxy. Apparently, few people have ever heard of the stuff (at least that's what I can gather from the number of times I've mentioned it and gotten blank stares). It's toxic, smells and is disgusting to work with but it's an armature necessity.

That's it for now. Next time? Clay and tin foil!

Red fish, blue fish...

As promised, here's the most recent update in my 'How to Make a Music Video (for the Handsome Family)' Series. This past weekend, I accomplished two things.

One - ran around Manhattan scouting fish markets and taking reference shots. I popped into the Essex Street Market but mostly wondered about Chinatown.




The Essex Street Market is nice and suitable for our needs, but I can't help but feel there's a better, more perfect location out there somewhere.


Chinatown is just scary. Amazing fish, but still scary.






Trust me, I've had some fun times out in Chinatown, poking around shops, getting ice cream and hearing horror stories involving chickens and electronic tic-tac-toe games. The environment, while being really wonderful for a documentary style shoot, would probably just end up as a headache-inducing nightmare for anyone trying to actually set up staged shots. Plus, 3 out of the 4 markets were mean to me.


These guys weren't though!




He let me take all the pictures I wanted and even posed for me! Not really useful, but fun none-the-less.


They even had mackerel, the star of our show. Which brings me to Two - character and some rough armature sketches.


Drew these up Friday, scanned and colored them in Saturday. We're trying to keep the fish semi-realistic without it actually being mistakable for a real fish. The heads will most likely be replacement, with the gills hiding the 'match-line'.


Vegetables with obvious Muppet influences. No eyes, though. Once again, as close to realistic as possible.

Deep blue like the evening sky...

Seems I'm simply swimming in music videos these days, only one of which, I have the liberty of documenting as I go along. I've mentioned previously how we're (myself and animator Chris Farinella) hard at work on a short film set to the Handsome Family's '#1 Country Song'.


Today, I got my hands on the dress. 'The dress' being the dress that the song specifically references in the opening verse.

photo courtesy of Douglas VonPewpenstein

My model had the day off. It's a little big on me which is fine; I'm not the one wearing it. The film will involve an actor co-starring with a few foam-latex puppets of various... well, maybe I'll save that for the next post. Don't want to give it all away at once.

Not seen, but heard...

Here it is! The post you’ve (all three of you) been waiting for! The audio collected for What is Animation?

The idea for What is Animation? came from a class exercise in which we had to interview someone and animate to the audio, producing something like a Richard Linklater short.

We were only really suppose to record one person but I got a little carried away. I got an answer out of almost everyone in the animation department and several students and faculty from the illustration, sculpture, film, dance and theater departments, as well as school security guards, random people on the street and almost every person who worked in the cafeteria across the street at the Bellvue Hotel. Oh… and a bunch of people at Barnes and Nobles down by Rittenhouse.

The results were obviously varied. Some people were kinda close to what might be a 'right' answer (at least in the technical terms).



Some people were really off.



And some people were just spouting off philosophical nonsense.







The most popular answer was 'cartoons' which, while funny, isn't a great answer for any number of reasons...







A few folks (notably the perplexing Karl Staven) opted for the 'what it's not' definition.





Arguably the best answer came from my then instructor Chris Magee. His answer formed the glue that held the film together.



There's a ton of other audio but I'll save those for another day. For now, against my better judgment, I'll close this posting with probably one of the only clips from the film I'm actually kinda proud of (congratulations, Kyle!)...

It's not live action...

In the massive moving process, I came across several sealed postal boxes. Luckily, my past self was intelligent enough to label them otherwise they might have been ignored or, even worse, trashed. Inside were all of the clay characters I had built for my senior thesis at UARTs: What is Animation?

I’ll be the first to say it: What is Animation? is a flawed film. The editing is terrible and the sound is even worse. What I like about the film are the components: I’m happy with the character designs, most of the animation, the concept and the audio I collected. It’s just how all the components came together; that’s where it gets sloppy.

Fortunately, the film’s flaws didn’t stop it from being screened as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival. The flaws do, however, stop me from posting it here so, what I will post are some of the bits I do like. First off, the characters:


As you might be able to tell, the designs were heavily inspired by Aardman’s Rex the Runt and the short-lived cartoon Mission Hill with perhaps a dash of Picasso thrown in there (but maybe that’s just me being hopeful).


All the characters were made of clay. If the shot called for a bit of squash and stretch or some motion in the hair, those elements were left soft. All other parts were baked and, unless you like your characters ‘well-done’, always for about ten minutes less then the packaging instructs.


The mouths and eye blinks were done with a set of replacements for each character. Vaseline was applied to the white of the eyes to give it a ‘wet’ look as well as hold the pupils (cut from black construction paper) in place from shot to shot.


Each character was shot on a hand-made glass mount against the appropriate color for keying. All images were than dropped into Photoshop for clean up and then brought into After Effects for compositing with the video backgrounds and any further animation. Sadly, some great looking characters never made it to the final cut.


I’ve actually thought about going back someday and re-doing the whole film, adding extra characters, re-doing certain scenes and fixing the horrifying audio. In fact, I heard a great story a few weeks back from Richard about Tissa David that just about convinced me.

Next post, ‘the horrifying audio‘!

Busy, busy, busy...

Haven't written anything here for far too long. To be completely honest, though, I'm terrible at keeping up with blogs. But this time I actually have a decent excuse. I got a job! Yay! I'm currently employed as a freelance animator for an animation studio that is, surprisingly, a short drive from home! We've been pretty busy over the last three weeks working on a traditionally animated, but digitally colored and composited short. Fun, if tidious stuff!

In other more personal news, I'm getting started on a new short stop-motion film. I might be biting off a bit more than I can chew with this one, but we'll find out. It's in the early stages right now. I've been sketching character designs and doing some research on the... umm... costumes. Once I have a bit more done, I'll explain, but basically, the costumes kind of are the characters. I'm definitely excited... and possibly a bit nervous that this whole thing will unravel and fall apart before it can even get started. If it does, then at least I have a few back-up films in mind...