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Curse you, Naked Curtain Man!

All of the books i’ve read have pointed to one singular fact about my abilities: if i don’t learn how to draw properly, going on to make animated anything (even if it’s 3D) is going to suck for me. So i’m going to upskill my drawing for a bit.

Two useful links i’ve found:

One of the things mentioned in that thread is that the animators commentary on The Incredibles is awesome. I checked it out tonight. It is quite awesome. So much stuff in there it’s hard to summarise – best experienced for yourself.

A certain long shot of Mr Incredible running down a hillside, alas, is not. It’s sobering to see that kind of thing in a Pixar film and think “even the masters of CG animation don’t nail it in every shot. And i noticed other stuff like weird hair and mesh intersections. Still, if i wasn’t actually scrutinising what i was watching, i reckon i’d have missed it. And the bar’s been raised way higher now.

I’m tossing up whether to start making an animated short just to see where my strengths and weaknesses lie. There’s nothing quite like "learn as you go”, after all…

BTW, Naked Curtain Man is one of the models on that Figure and Gesture Drawing site. He’s naked. He drapes a curtain over himself. If you’ve used the site before, you’ll know him along with his fellow models Naked Redhead Lady and Oversized Axe Dude.

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Last week’s reading list

So this is what i’ve been reading since i couldn’t get a dude to sit down…

Drawn to Life (volumes 1 and 2) by Walt Stanchfield

Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer van Sijll*

The Filmmaker’s Eye: Learning (and Breaking) the Rules of Cinematic Composition by Gustavo Mercado*

Action Analysis for Animators by Chris Webster

Directing the Story by Francis Glebas*

Timing for Animation (1981 edition) by Harold Whitaker and John Halas

The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation by Frank & Ollie (this one took two days)

I read “Illusion of Life” after all. If you ever want to know how Walt Disney Studios made the movies they made in their Golden Age (from Snow White to at least The Jungle Book), down to actual organisational structure and workflow, that’s the book to read. There’s a damn good reason it’s so big.

I was right to be worried about the lingering effects of reading it. Fortunately i watched Pinocchio after i finished reading it and that made me feel a hell of a lot better – because i don’t want to make stuff like Pinocchio. I don’t really like Pinocchio that much as a movie. After reading about how amazing it was in Illusion of Life, it felt pretty underwhelming to actually sit down and watch it.

Kind of cool how dark it is, though. Dude nearly turned into a donkey.

I guess watching The Thief and The Cobbler (Recobbled) before Pinocchio set it up to be disappointing. For all its flaws, horrors with pacing and patchworkiness (the version i saw was a ‘fan edit’), Cobbler was farking stunning. Well worth tracking down.

I watched Mutant Aliens (the Bill Plympton film) yesterday. That’s still fun. Still extremely weird but still fun. 🙂

So anyway. I feel like i should get drawing. Sketching, gesture drawing, whatever.. it just feels like a glaring deficiency right now. If i don’t get better at drawing, it makes everything else further down the track (action analysis, storyboarding, character design, etc) much harder, even if i am ultimately animating in CG and not using cel or stop-motion.

I’ve still got a few more books to get through at my discretion. But i should start drawing as soon as i can, whether or not i’m back in front of Blender tomorrow evening. I don’t know how much of this stuff has sunk in but i suspect i’m going to have a similar hiccup to when i was writing music and i learnt about jazz one day. It was confusing at first but once i assimilated everything by working through it and discovering the truth in what i’d read, it clicked.

So i wouldn’t say i was learning from reading all those books; i only learn once i discover the truth (or otherwise) in what i’ve read, and that only happens by doing things for myself.

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Saw a great walk today…

I saw a great walk today. It was a guy about to cross the street. He was all shoulders back and forth, bordering on camp. Why do people walk like that, from the shoulders? I don’t know.

Over the last few days i’ve been immersing myself in books about action analysis, storyboarding, visual storytelling, cinematography, editing and more. This is partly to load up for the next round of animation practice, and partly as penance for buying all these damn books in the first place then not sitting down to actually read them. I’d guess between Monday and Wednesday i read easily over a thousand pages of stuff between dead tree versions and electronic books. It’s all rattling around in here somewhere.

I guess the point is not so much to absorb what’s in the books in detail, just to read them and know what’s in them. That way i can go back and re-find the useful bits if i have to.

I’ve got The Illusion of Life here in the bookshelf too but from having skimmed it before i don’t feel like i want to tackle something too circumspect yet. It’s on a heap of “must read” lists for animators and no doubt there’s a lot of wisdom in there. Maybe i’ll even give it another bash this weekend.

I’m going to see if i can knock over both volumes of Drawn To Life over this long weekend. I should probably get going on that – 750 pages of small type and handwriting with diagrams is no walk in the park.

I’m not sure when i’ll get back to doing actual animating. Maybe next week. Maybe i’ll keep working away from the computer since we’re just coming up to the traditional season of bunuru (February + March). It’s the hottest part of the year and the worst possible time to be stuck in front of a big heat-spewing box adjusting the angles of bones back and forth.

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Study break!

I’ll be off the computer for a bit while i hit the books and load up on action analysis, anatomy and whatever else i don’t feel like i know enough about. Back soon!

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Blender Stuff I made

Some things are harder than others. Some things are made harder by bad foundations. Case in point: my sense of anatomy really sucks and this is starting to hurt. Also my attention span for this is sucking too. It’s tricky to tune out all the distractions in order to summon up the attention it takes to be properly meticulous, and to be brutally honest i’m losing sight of the bigger picture of why i wanted to do this in the first place.

It’s one of these things where once i get myself started, it’s usually not that much trouble to keep going. Lately though, getting started is a bitch and my mind is kind of wandering. Worse still, my lack of artistic foundations is showing too.

Today i decided i’d concentrate on sitting down in a chair and standing up. There are a truckload of ways someone can put their arse into a chair and take it out again. Even just doing video reference i found a heap. I’m starting to become more conscious of weight and force, starting to look for where in the body the weight is being shifted to.

When i was drawing skeletons under my video reference i realised how sucky my knowledge of anatomy is. Today was the first time it really frustrated me. It’s making me want to take a week or two off animating to grind through some intensive anatomy studies and figure drawing, so at least when i do my sketch-overs of the body i know i’m getting the structures right and can pull enough information out of the real world images to be useful.

So i’m kind of at blocking (unanimated poses) with this one. I’ll get it moving properly over the next day or two. It would be good to spend more time with this to polish it rather than declaring out of time! good enough! next! again.