...I drew a heck of a lot...

So, I was in Victoria last week Monday -> Wednesday... purpose #1, catch the last 4 koi in the pond, purpose #2, go through the last of my stuff (mostly sports equipment), and purpose #3, visit two friends who are both *expecting* within two weeks of each other, but they don't know each other.

I was successful on all counts, although the trip was emotionally draining. It was really hard being back at the house (the witch's hut) where I spend 2 years re-landscaping, to find all the gardens choked with waist-high weeds, and the lawns covered in that awful 4' tall grass.

I was especially happy to catch the fish, since one of them was the goshiki koi, the one I bought as a living memorial for my grandmother who died a year and a half ago. After releasing them in my parent's pond, it gave me a sort of closure, which can only be a good thing.

At my parent's house, I went through my old animation stuff, which my mom had diligently boxed up and saved. It was a lot of fun going through everything, and I took a few pictures with my phone:

 I completed three programs for animation. The first program was combined 2d (classical/hand drawn) and 3d (digital/computer modelled) animation. It was a prerequisite for either the classical animation masters program, OR the digital animation masters program. I finished the first class, then went on to finish the classical masters, and then the digital masters.

For each program, you had to make a short animation (aprox. 2 minutes) for your final grade. When I first started planning for my classical masters program short, I was going to make a crocodile-hunter-styled mockumentary of a guy *hunting* suburban women, so, like, soccer moms, cougars, etc. I ended up halting planning and switching to something else, but that first picture is the preliminary sketches of the 'host'.

 With drawing, and with writing, I don't think anything is ever wasted. While I never developed the mockumentary beyond storyboarding (more on this later), I modified parts of the design I liked for a character design class where we had to design a villain & a hero or heroine. This character became a shut-in-type computer nerd who wanted to take over the world, starting with his high-school computer lab...

 This was his nemesis, a skater chick who unwittingly foils him every time... I later re-made her for a very short animation of her snowboarding, which is one of my favourite pieces that I produced. It's one of the few pieces I actually still have a digital composite of. These sketches bug me 'cause she's off-model...

 Hands are really hard to draw... so I drew them a lot, just to prove I could do it. I was experimenting with line thickness to give a little more dimension, but I was using the wrong kind of pen, so it ended up looking sloppy :p ...and yes, that's a Palm Pilot -> the fore-runner of the smart phone.

 I have... pages upon pages of sketches... just odd little characters I doodled in class. Looking at these, especially, is what prompted me to write the FFF 3.2 piece, because even though I tend to gravitate towards dark writing, my natural drawing style (yes, I CAN mimic many styles...) is full of round shapes and soft, organic lines. The short piece I wrote for FFF 3.2 was something I wanted to draw... 'cause aren't naked-chicken-dragons both hilarious and cute at the same time?

 More sketches. The girl's pose is kindof wonky, eh? She looks way too stiff.

 We had to do a lot of short animations (like, 5-10 seconds) as practice. This koi was for a 'take' shot, which is when a character sees something, and has a big reaction to it. I took it further by having a small fish escape by swimming out of the koi's mouth, simply because it made me laugh.

Another character from a practice piece, a head turn. Specifically, when someone turns their head, they normally blink while they are moving, so again, this is one small, natural movement that we practiced recognizing, and animating because every small thing is intentional. For all these exercises, you designed/used all your own characters. I just like drawing critters/beasties better than humans :p

This is an example of storyboarding. We were given a list of characters with basic descriptions/backgrounds, and a script. We had to design characters, then storyboard the script. The plot was a post-apocalyptic setting, and the two characters shown here are Odd (male) and Even (female), a set of twins who were the only child characters. The rest of the cast consisted of adults and robots. For our final demo reels (including the required short animations), we had to do all this kind of prep work, following the exact rules of the industry, because you use different coloured lines to note camera moves, FX, background/foreground layers, etc.

 For my classical animation masters program short, instead of the mockumentary, I expanded upon a class project, which was to animate 20 seconds, timed to a piece of music. I enjoyed it so much (I used the diva's song from 'The Fifth Element'), that I ended up animating a 1.5 minute short of a siamese kitten playing with a catnip mouse.

Now, to give you a brief breakdown of the work involved in a 1.5 minute animation... there are 30 frames per second. At an absolute minimum, you would draw a new pose every 3 frames, but for fast movements, you would draw every frame. So, the absolute minimum starts at 1,800 drawings. Then, you have to consider that one pose may be drawn on multiple layers, like, if the body of the kitten is still, but the paw and tail are moving, those are three different layers, so you can easily double that absolute minimum number of drawings to 3,600 drawings.

Plus, there are background/foreground layers, FX layers, and I had a second character (the catnip mouse)... so you can see why it takes a couple months for one person to make a 1.5 minute animation... AND, we haven't even gotten into timing, or lip syncing (more on this later), or all the design/prep/planning/storyboarding/etc.

 Here's one of my timing sheets... see all those numbers? Those are breakdowns of individual scenes that happen at specific frame numbers. Every time a scene is re-cut, all the timing has to be recalculated.

Another timing sheet that I was doodling cat designs on. At this point, the design wasn't finalized.

 One more, with other doodles. I had about a dozen of these, just for the single animation.

 At the end of my demo reel, I made a short animation I titled, "Lobotomy Liz Goes Boom" (long story). More exercises we had to do were FX animations, like, smoke, fire, explosions, water, wind (like a flag flapping or something), etc. Instead of making boring shorts (like a flag -ugh- flapping), I made this short animation of me getting angry and Lobotomy Liz exploding, and leaving the chair on fire & smoking. The first panel of this sketch are me & Liz, the rest are doodles of me & classmates. It was a big hit...

Here's a classic example of my *thrifty-Scottish/Irish-roots*. On one half of the paper, I roughed up one scene, and used the other half of the paper to draw the cleaned up/final version of another scene. When I scanned in the sheets, I could easily just digitally delete the roughed-up drawings and leave the clean ones. That way, I used up 1/2 as much paper, since it's special paper, hard to find, and quite expensive.

Here's the stack of papers I threw away. Hard to tell in a photo, but it's about 20-22" tall. Every folder is a separate animation, or a separate scene. I think in my cat animation (the one I used for my classical short) had 14 or 15 scenes.

Yes, I threw them all away. The thing is, animation paper is such a weird size that you need a specialized oversized scanner to scan them into a computer, so I know I will never spend the money to track one down just for the purpose of re-scanning in ameteur work I did while in school. If I ever do get back into animating (for fun), I would buy a Wacom tablet or something.

The paper (and light table) are still great fun to draw/design with though :)

 Each folder in that stack looks like this. When a stage is complete, I scribbled in the appropriate box. The first box is the same as what the first storyboard image looks like, so it's easy to glance at the folder and know which scene is which.

Okay, the BANE of classical animation is lip syncing. For my first, prerequisite course, we had to do a short lip sync piece. I chose a scene from the Parker Posey movie, "Party Girl", which is sort of a cult classic. There's this great scene where she's chewing out her ex-boyfriend in front of a club (he's the bouncer), for pissing in her shower when he was drunk. I animated a turtle and goldfish in a fishbowl to the dialogue, which I thought (at the time) was pretty funny. Anyways, you have to take the sound recording, and you scroll through it over and over again so you can actually time to see how many frames each sound takes... it's freaking tedious!

Because I hated lip syncing so much, that's why I decided against the mockumentary piece for my final demo reel short... since the siamese kitten still required meticulous timing, but I didn't have to draw individual mouth movements as well, which would have added another entire layer, approximately doubling the number of drawings. Since time was an issue, I was smart about it, since doing the mockumentary meant I would have to write  script, record it, and do all the folly (sound effects)/etc, which was unnecessary for the assignment.

Fluid & beautiful

I'm sure many of you follow Janet Reid's blog, so if you've seen this already, good for you.

...I really can't put into words how much I want to pull my light table out of storage and start drawing/animating after viewing that short.

There's a magic and beauty in classical (hand drawn) animation that you just can't find in any other medium.

The short is about longing... and that's certainly what I'm feeling.

A word on dragons and sequels

A couple days ago, Michael Offutt posted about the tv series based off the move, 'How To Train Your Dragon'.

...sorry this is going to get a little nerdy...

But you guys know I used to work in animation, right?

Let me start by saying, I enjoyed watching the first two episodes of the new tv series.

Sequels, almost as a rule, suck. And I am talking primarily about animated movies.

Almost always they're capitalizing off the success of the first one, and they never really get there. Often they're downright disappointing. In animation, sequels to hit movies (like Disney) are never made by the same studio as the original. They are farmed out to small studios. Interestingly enough, Canada used to be the cheap place where 'Return of Jafar' and all such hastily made sequels were pumped out, along with the pc games (based on the movies) that were stuffed as prizes into kids cereal boxes. In the last ten to fifteen years, big companies like Disney realized Korean animators work for even less than Canadians.

It's too bad 'cause most of the small studios in Vancouver were already shut down before I finished my animation program... (hence the sideways move into the video game industry), but until that point, fresh-outta-school-animation students got to test out their skills (and be employed!) over 16 hour work days + minimum wage. Oh yeah, it was the dream. Even if all you were doing was digital ink work...

So, sequels... most often rushed through on the coat-tails of the successful first movie, worked on by incredibly green students...

Taking that into account, I was actually pretty impressed with the tv series. Sure, the models were highly simplified, the sizes tweaked, facial expressions are minimal at best, but the animation is clean, there are no obvious weighting problems, popping limbs, mushy walking cycles... all in all, it was pretty good.

But I swear, whoever did the lighting should be fired, or had better QA.

The thing with 3-d animation is that lighting is a major pain when you're not all that familiar with it. Like a tax accountant, big studios have specialists who only do that, but in smaller studios, everyone kind of pitches in.

There's always this big temptation to make sure all the texture is visible, 'cause you've worked so darn hard on the wrap, the luminosity & bump maps, you want people to really see it...

...so you overlight it...

...which makes everything look bleached out, which ruins the entire point of this medium... too much light flattens the image, which means there's less depth, which means there's really no freaking point in making it 3-d with all the pretty textures and animation if it ends up looking like 'Southpark'.

The only scenes that looked somewhat decent were the indoor/night scenes, and even some of those were pretty cringe-worthy... like where Hiccup is holding the torch outside Gobber's house in the second episode... I mean, really? It's supposed to be lit by a small fire, not a lightbulb. And Toothless' eyes should not look like spotlights! Reflected light is your friend, creating a separate/independent light source to fully illuminate the eyes is the enemy. Bad lighting-techy, bad!


As an unpublished writer, the notion of writing a sequel is purely a hypothetical mind-game, but from following writers online, it seems just as hard as I imagine it to be.

Sometimes I wonder if, not even writing a sequel, if I am falling prey to the trip-falls normally associated with sequels.

When you have success, even just a taste of it, it boosts your confidence. It makes you want to repeat the experience, to speed up your process, to get it written in six months instead of eight, to edit it in a single pass, instead of four.

Having confidence is good, being excited is good, wanting to succeed is good... but don't go too fast. Don't send out a project that really should have had another run through QA, another close check on that lip syncing, a careful analysis to make sure the joints aren't popping and the weighting is correct.

And above all... don't overlight it.

...and by that, I'm talking about overwriting, where you just want to reader to see how clever you are, your skillful use of wrapping words into a shiny, deeply-textured sentence. Or maybe that long passage of text explaining some nuance in your incredibly-well-thought-out world.

I know how tempting it is, but remember... it will really stands out, and not in a good way, to anyone who knows what a professional product should look like.

I've been tempted many times with 'Brake Fluid' to use more description, 'cause I love writing it, I love reading it... but in this story, it would certainly stand out as a bad thing.

I want readers to forget they're reading a story, just like an animator wants viewers to suspend their disbelief and believe in their hand-drawn or computer modelled characters.

Lighting is the last thing that's done before rendering. The goal of proper lighting is to showcase depth and realism. So, when I'm editing, or re-thinking parts to cut-rewrite, those are the thoughts I focus on. Do I necessarily need a spotlight on this line, or is it better, within the scope of the story, to let it drift mid-distance?

Sorry I'm such an over thinking nerd ;)



...and damn, talking about this really makes me miss 3-d modelling... and, just in case there are any questions about it, I'm still going to watch the tv series :)

Words which reveal

I'm both proud of my words, and horribly embarrassed.

While I can happily spend hours upon hours analyzing my own words (or those of others) with the members of my writing group and online CP's, I balk at talking about writing to anyone else.

If someone else brings it up, I'll change the subject, flip it off with a joke or a sarcastic comment.

I can count on one hand the number of people (in real life, not online) who know I write.

It's not something I'm comfortable discussing.

And that's 'cause I'm both proud, and embarrassed by my own words.

Oddly enough, the two are inseparable. It's because I'm proud that I'm embarrassed. Because I'm embarrassed, I work harder so I can be proud.

It's a vicious cycle :)

A while back, someone asked me in the comments why I write YA and whether I thought it was limiting my prospects and, I admit, I've been thinking about the question ever since.

One reason I want to write YA is because it's harder.

...which is why my cycle of pride/embarrassment is relevant.

Let me take this from another angle. In animation, or even just in figure drawing, the difficulty level is night-and-day different between drawing male and female characters. Males are super easy 'cause they're made up of hard geometrical shapes and straight lines. Drawing females is murder. They have so many soft curves/round shapes that they're incredibly difficult. Even harder is animating them and keeping them *on-model* because, literally, a deviation of a line's breadth can make a female character look overweight or anorexic.

...you get three guesses as to which gender of characters I primarily focused on while in animation school.

So why is YA harder? Well, for one, that's like comparing a 10 second commercial to a full length film. In a commercial, you have an extremely limited timeframe to sell an idea whereas in a full length film, you've got 90 minutes.

Writing YA is like shooting a commercial. The audience won't put up with filler, obvious preaching/lesson-teaching, over-written descriptions/etc. Older readers will give you the benefit of the doubt/patience and read work that younger readers will not. YA has to be clean, sleek, and efficient as possible and teens can smell BS from three miles away.

So that's one reason I write YA.

Another reason is because I like the themes of YA, specifically the struggle for self-identity.

Again, because I struggled so much with my learning disability growing up, and still do even today, self-identity/confidence is very much still relevant to my own life, and I think to almost every person out there who isn't a sociopath. I also think that (some) YA is so popular with adults is because it reminds them of their weaker self who was struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong.

In a way, I think it's an important theme that bridges the gap between age-groups.

Lastly, and most importantly, I just write what I what to write, and oddly enough, that just happens to be YA. Again, I think it's because of the themes that interest me... things like trust/betrayal/confidence/responsibility/etc, many of these just work better, and is more relevant, with younger characters, and appeals to younger readers as they are stepping out from under their parents' protection and gaining awareness of the larger world around them.

The themes, the age group of the characters, and the voice all dictate how a book is positioned in regards to categorization/audience.

Personally, I don't think a lot about categorization. I just write the book I want to write and figure it out from there.

As for the notion of limiting my prospects... well, that doesn't bother me. I've never had much of an interest in competing with other people because I spent so much time competing with myself. If I can write something I'm happy with, and others like it as well, I'd be 100% content.

I hope that answered your question, icyHighs :) If it hasn't, feel free to ask in the comment box, and if anyone else wants to chime in, you are perfectly welcome to do so :)

I'd love to hear about why you all write in the genres you do.

Procrastination? Just a little...

While resting my poor, weary brain from the overly-complex-'Brake Fluid'-timeline, I found this:

An author who writes about Ancient Egypt! Go check out her contest (and my hideous attempt at poetry about Pliny the elder...)

...and, since I'm an incredible nerd in some ways, I've got... probably more books on ancient Egypt than is healthy...

So here's another demonstration of my nerdishness:

In one university class, as a small, fun project, we had to research/translate just our first name (phonetically) into hieroglyphs.

...and y'know, since I'm a tiny bit of an overachiever... and I'll use any excuse to draw cartoons...

...this is what I turned in:

(click for full size)

...which, as you can see, my over-achieving-ways ensured I didn't get to actually finish it. I really wanted to fully decorate the walls with more hieroglyphs and stack more dead-goods in the room, but yeah, I ran out of time :)

Curious what it says?

The first mummy says:

"Who then is it?"

The second mummy says:

"It is the sarcophagus of Thoth's scribe <myname>"

The coffin says (with correct female designations, in the traditional style of what was put on coffins):

"<myname>, the scribe of Thoth said: I am the keeper of the book of that which is, and of that which shall be."*

Above the door are two phrases from the Egyptian Book of the Dead**:

"Give thou to me my mouth [that] I may speak with it"

"May I follow my heart at its season of fire and night."

*Technically, the sentence says: "Saith Thoth, scribe <myname>: I am the keeper of the book of that which is, and of that which shall be." I used four different sentences from different books, took them apart and mashed them together again, always trying to keep the original/correct syntax/composition/etc.


**Yes I own this book 'cause I'm strange. What's stranger is I bought it when I was about 13 or 14. About the same time I was buying books like, 'In Search of Schrodinger's Cat', by John Gribbon, and 'Fermat's Enigma', by Simon Singh

Hint + extras?

Well, since I did a bit of work Wednesday on my new *secret* project, I thought I'd post a couple pictures:

Here are some of my work tools:

(click for full size)

 A clear ruler is a must. Also, the pencil (lowest cylindrical item on the right side -> blue & silver) is awesome. It's an architect's pencil, which is sort of like a mechanical pencil, except they work a little differently and these leads are about 1/8" thick and can be purchased in all different kinds of hardness (from B to B6, but I normally use B 'cause it's harder so you can get clear, sharp lines). You have to buy a special sharpener for them, which you can kind of see the top of (black thing against the water glass). I also work in a sketchbook (that's what's open), but when I want to create a clean image, I use the blade (centre, black handle, small triangular blade) with the ruler to slice pages directly from the book, then put them under a clean piece of animation paper on my light-table and re-draw the image. Those are black Micron pens at the very top. I use .005, .02 & .08 for different line thicknesses. I have calligraphy pens as well (that you dip in a pot of black India ink), but I don't use them for stuff like this. The narrow blue cylinders (there are 2 in this photo) hold the extra lead for my pencil. Oh yeah, and the incredibly dirty eraser on the sketchbook. It's just a normal white eraser, but I also have one that's kind of like sticky-tack. I use it on nearly-final drawings 'cause you just press it onto the lines and it removes the top layer without disturbing the other lines.

I tend to storyboard in my sketchbook instead of on separate paper. The left page of the open sketchbook is actually two storyboard panels. I have a strange habit of working backwards, so the top image is #1, the bottom image is #2, then if you flip the page backwards (or forwards, if you're Japanese), you'd see the next two panels. There's also a simplified breakdown of the scooter on the right page. So far, I've got about eight storyboard panels done, some initial concept art for four characters, but only a true character sheet breakdown for the main character (the hippo). Ah, that means all the details are measured/decided/set, sort of like how I broke down/simplified the scooter with everything labeled.

Essentially, the better you can take it apart, the better you can draw it from all different angles. So it's worth doing the work ahead of time and creating reference images.

(click for full size)

 Here's a top shot of my light-table. Animation paper is a non-standard size, instead of 8 1/2" x 11", it's 10 1/2" x 14 1/2". It also has 3 holes in it, a circular one in the middle and two long ones on either side for the pegs, which are about 1/2" high. This way, you can swivel the light table disc upside-down and the paper will never fall off. This is a shot of 2 layers of paper without the light on. Notice how you really can't see the background.

The light table is pretty big. It sits on a normal table and stands 14" tall at the tallest point and the drawing surface is 24" x 24". The opaque disc is about 19" in diameter.

The scooter is going to be light blue with white flowers. I haven't decided the colours for the character's body/clothes yet. I love her fat little arms, legs and feet. The lines just flowed really nice/naturally, so I feel good about them. Ah, I love her long ears, too. So far my favourite character (not shown here) is an orange tabby cat named Solomon Cat. He's freaking adorable :)

(click for full size)

Same two layers, but with the light on. Notice how you can clearly see the background? Yup, you really can layer up to a dozen sheets of paper and see all the drawings. Oh yeah, I spent like 5 seconds on the background. Simply a matter of deciding on a vanishing point, then using a ruler to draw the road, then I free-handed a sketchy tree and a horizon. Oh, that hole at the bottom is where you stick your finger to rotate the opaque plastic disc. It's about an inch in diameter, maybe a little bigger.

Ah, I really missed this... I just love drawing/animating so much.

I so wish there were classical animation jobs still available in North America... sigh. Nowadays, they're all farmed out to South Korea. Funny thing is, even the Japanese Anime stuff is farmed out to Korea!

I swear, I was born 10 years too late :(

Ah well, as long as I'm having fun, right?

A new project

Since my brain is currently befuddled, I will not be working on any of my stories in the near future...

BUT, that doesn't mean I'm dead to the world.

Today I'm giddy with excitement because I'm setting up my light-table for the first time in ages so I can work on a new project.

Light-table? Yup, it's the thing animators use to draw on.

It's a hinged tabletop where you can adjust the angle. Instead of a flat surface, there is a opaque plastic disc, which can be swivelled, again to get better angles. The second purpose of the disc is because light shines through it. In the table there is a mounted light, and when you turn it on, it shines through the disc and through the drawings.

Essentially, you layer paper one on top on another and you can see up to (around) 10 drawings at the same time. A (traditional/classical) animator can't really work without a light-table.

Light-tables are awesome :)

So what is my new secret project?

Well, here's a hint. I'm doing 1/2 of the work, my technologically-savvy husband is doing the other 1/2.

...not enough of a hint?

Okay, fine :)

Second hint: it involves a hippo with a straw hat ;)

Architecture and Scale

I'm now back from my holiday and, while catching up on my reading, I found this post not only interesting, but considering I posted a week's work of drawing related stuff, kinda fitting.

I've mentioned before I'm a pantser. I write to find the story. If I knew the ending before I started, well, then I wouldn't have to write it, would I?

Is that strange?

Well, in all my animation classwork, I was the same way. Guidelines were always pretty loose as long as you fulfilled the criteria, and often I would get so involved with a tiny, insignificant project, I'd end up running full-steam ahead (like usual) and tripping myself up with deadlines... like turning a 5 second squash & stretch (to show weight) assignment into a 20 second clip... thereby quadrupling the amount of work I had to do in the same short amount of time. Don't you think a pair of underwear dancing across a bedroom floor is way more interesting then a sack of flour simply walking across the screen?

But scale is important. Understanding the scope of the world, the story and the characters is as important as understanding which word is *appropriate* to use in a line of dialogue or description. A ten-year-old kid isn't going to be thinking works like 'effervescence' while watching a chemical (or magic?) reaction in a flask, even if that is the *correct* word to describe what's going on.

The problem with my dancing underwear animation was that I didn't understand scale at the time. Sure, my animation was like four or five times longer than my classmates, it was original and it made everyone laugh, but because I overextended myself, the overall quality was low. Some movements were too slow, some too fast, and in animation, even though every movement is exaggerated, it still has to look real or you won't get that suspension of disbelief. In a story, it's the same thing. If a line of dialogue or action seems unrealistic, the reader is going to notice it's just words on a page, just like badly timed movements will ultimately reduce a g-string doing the tango with a pair of boxer shorts to a blur of clumsy pencil lines.

That's what happens when you lose perspective and concentrate too much on one aspect... you sacrifice other parts and you end up with a lower quality piece in the end. Every writer naturally has things that come easy and things that come hard. All of us are imbalanced, and our stories reflect this.

Go read that article and think about your own story. Have you skimmed over things like setting 'cause you like writing dialogue? Do all your character's voices sound the same? Are they using appropriate words when they speak? How is your timeline, do things happen realistically slow/fast depending on the action or situation? Are there 50 references in the first ten pages describing what your two main characters look like, but do they inhabit a *white-room* world? If you can't dig into your story and find your own weaknesses, find a beta-reader who will.

Something a little different 3

Okay, this last post is going to be a bit of a hodge-podge, and by the time it goes up, I should be home from my little vacation.

By the way, if you double-click any of these (or the previous posted ones) you can see them full size. If you do that, you can totally tell which ones I kept the original pencil lines and which ones I re-drew in Photoshop (if you're interested in that kind of nerdy thing).

Since I use the black cat as my profile picture , here's a *visual interpretation* of what I look like. My hair is naturally blonde and every two-three years I get it hacked off until it's only about an inch long at the back. I do this 'cause I donate my hair to the Wigs for Kids program, and they need a minimum of 10-12" to make a wig. Right now it's nearly long enough to cut. I'll probably do it in the fall sometime before the static-y winter weather causes my hair to devour my head.

 To graduate from the Classical Animation Masters Program, each student had to complete a 1.5 minute short animation. These are some sketches from when I was working out the main character in my short. The final product looked a little different, but these are from when I was getting close. Instead of telling a story, I animated the siamese kitten playing with a catnip mouse, and the whole thing was timed to the *diva* song from The Fifth Element.

 One of the many assignments... this was from a Character Design class where we had to design a villain. Now, I'm not much for the evil-dark-lord wanting to take over the universe, so mine was a computer nerd named Kraig who would use his evil knowledge of technology to try to take over the school. I had fun. I still love his buggy fish eyes and his weird jowls. And the fact that when he stands, it looks like he's got a stick up his butt. Oh, his nemesis was a skater-chick who had similarly strange hair. I did a short animation (like, 10 seconds long) of her snowboarding, not for an assignment, just 'cause I wanted to.

Another class assignment, this time for the Digital Animation Program. This is a ship I built in SoftImage XSI, then exported it into Maya 3d to texture/animate. When you work with 3d models, you usually keep the poly count down while working on it (which is why it looks sharp/boxy) otherwise it uses too much RAM and the program can crash. You increase the poly-count just before you render, which essentially smoothes/rounds everything out. Probably this isn't a big deal now-a-days, but back when I made this, it was a major problem. My favourite part is the crazy multi-level wings.

Now this is something I made quite recently... like, last year sometime. Y'know how some books have images at each chapter break? Well, this is the chapter break image I created for Project #1.

It's based on a ribbon eel. Google it. They are awesome. And don't ever ask me about salt water fish or koi, 'cause I'll keep talking 'till your ears bleed.

'cause I'm
O.B.S.E.S.S.I.V.E.
(seriously)

This is also one of the few things I've done where I love every line, every shape, every speck of negative space. Okay, there's one thing I would change... the spot where the back leg touches the body/wing is slightly too pointy.

One benefit from classical animation training is you get used to drawing the same thing over and over and over and over again, 'cause you're drawing an image for every frame, and there's 24 or 30 frames per second. Then add on all the extra layers for background/foreground, other characters, things the characters interact with... and so on, and so forth...

...see why I have no problem working hard on edits/re-writes? I know some people can't stand the refining process, but I think my favourite part of drawing is also my favourite part of writing... cleaning up the lines.

sorry, that was a bad joke ;)

Something a little different 2

So, last time I showed my fall-back drawing style for fast, fun pictures. I've also done logos for people, usually friends who want to start a company or a band that never quite got off the ground... in fact, my profile picture of the black cat is part of a band logo where the members broke up before I finished it. Basically, the logo was a repeat of the same cat but done in different colours, black, red, green and blue. I use the red cat picture on another site with another moniker (not 1000th.monkey).

I won't post anything from my marketing days, nor will I post the only independent logo that *made it* out into the wide world, because it's actually on the letterhead of a local university's Student Business Association... which I made for free as a favour to someone, and never got credit for. Also, I was like 17 when I made it, it was the first logo-type art I had done, and in retrospect, I think it's kind of crappy.

Anyways, here's a few of those that ended up as unfinished/abandoned products. You might notice I'm kind of obsessed with shapes and how they fit together, whether complimenting or contrasting.

This was for someone who wanted to start a skateboard/snowboard clothing company.

I think this was for someone looking into franchising one of those water gas stations they have in California, or something like that. Water energy? I don't know, this so old I really can't remember.

This says MASEO (they wanted this kind of mirror-look) for some kind of non-profit company that never got off the ground.

This one's pretty self explanatory. I think it's my favourite out of these, I love how the 'oga' turned out... I really spent time on that, but was never happy with the shape of the 'y'.

By the way, for all of these, I started out with a pencil sketch, scanned it into Photoshop, then worked from there. I was only using a mouse, not a tablet. Also, I design them completely in black and white (so I'm only looking at shape) before I think about colours.

Something a little different 1

Since I'm on holidays, I wanted to do something a little different. Usually I talk about writing, or something that somehow relates back to writing.

Last week I posted about reading, so this week, I'm going to talk about drawing.

I've mentioned in the past the reason I got interested in animation. When I quit university and joined a technical school for animation, I did a classical animation program (this means everything is hand-drawn) and a digital animation program (everything is created in the computer with models). I truly only loved doing classical animation, but due to the scarcity of jobs, I took the second program. I didn't love it. Well, I loved creating the models and animating them, but I hated texturing and lighting.

While I was unpacking stuff at the witch's hut, I found a hard-drive with all my old animation files. Maybe at some point I'll throw a couple of the short animations online and post links, but not today :)

In the last few years, I regret that I have not drawn as much as I would like. Writing has taken over as my major outlet, but that doesn't mean I've completely stopped. I've done a ton of quick sketches that I give a 10-minute clean-up/colour job in Photoshop (one really crappy one I posted for Dead Monkey Day). I don't spend a whole lot of time on them, so there are always lines I hate, shapes that just a little *off*, but they're just for fun, so I don't stress over it. Most of them look something like this:

Roan from Project #1 getting advice from a character in a CP's story. I was playing with softer shadows/shading, but I didn't like the final result. I prefer the sharp/strong contrasting shadows of the following ones:

Someone wanted a cute picture for their MSN profile. My favourite part is the two antenna. The hands are pretty cute too.

someone I know online posted a picture of themselves with an evil, plotting smirk... 

...and I just had to draw it... though I was scolded 'cause I originally coloured the eyes wrong, so I had to go back and change them from blue to green.

All this kind of stuff is my fast, fall-back drawing style, well, the oval shaped noses, the simple eyes, the hard shadows and exaggerated proportion of head to body. I think I spent the most time on the middle one, making the planet-pillow look cool.

Subtly in silence or in-action

This is something I always think about when writing.

...I'm not claiming to achieve it as skillfully as the author highlighted here, but it is something I am actively aware of.

Again, this tendency (awareness?) may partially be a product of my earlier training/work in animation. Body language fascinates me. How far apart people stand when they talk, where they look, what their hands do, preoccupation with personal space in elevators, on public transit or in movie theaters... I'm interested in all this kind of stuff and I often try to incorporate it into scenes.

Here are a couple snippets (in chronological order) from Project #2 where (hopefully) what's important comes across. One of my critique pals says my writing is too subtle, but the other one gets it.

 Feel free to add comments/make suggestions.

Sisters and Brothers

"Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten."

If that quote is unrecognizable, I'm watching Disney's "Lilo & Stitch" for like the millionth time.

There's a lot of reasons I love this movie (even though it bothers me that Jumba keeps going off-model, especially in the last 1/3). I love the humor, the animation style, there are no *Disney songs*, no evil villain, it takes place in Hawaii, the fact that it's Chris Sander's brain-child (and he does the voice of Stitch!)... but my favorite parts of the movie are the interactions between the sisters Nani and Lilo.

In the movie, you meet Lilo (the younger sister) first. She's adorably strange, yet there are dark threads that you can see under her freakouts, like when she professes that Pudge the fish controls the weather. Something about this little girl is off. There is a hunger in her, a need for control, understanding and stability. When you meet Nani, she is desperately searching for Lilo because the social worker is on the way to their house.

Let's just skip over the social worker, whose visit does not go well...

As soon as the door closes, Nani runs after Lilo, who is shrieking her head off. After Nani catches her, there's this great scene between them. Nani grabs her arm and asks if she understands, if Lilo wants to be taken away, and Lilo keeps yelling, 'No!' and it's not entirely clear what she's responding to. There is an obvious difference in the way they view the reality of their situation and Nani clearly protects Lilo, not only by fighting to keep them together, but by occasionally lying to her... like when Nani loses her job because of Stitch.

Even while they're screaming at each other, you can see the close ties between them. I love the timing of the scene where they are both smothering their screams in separate pillows, in separate rooms, but in the exact same way. There is desperation and love. There is a theme of loss in this movie, of being lost.

Later in the movie, the social worker says this:

"I know you're trying, Nani, but you need to think about what's best for Lilo. Even if it means removing you from the picture."

It's the opposite idea from *ohana*. At what point do you give up on the idea of family?

Until I watched this movie again, I didn't realize what a big influence this was on Project #2. The themes are very similar: the importance of family, loss and the question of when to give up. When to stop fighting to stay together. My favorite parts of Project #2 are the interactions between the two brothers, especially when Simon is trying to protect Hector... even when his methods are not entirely logical or ethical.

"This is my family... It's little and broken, but still good. Still good."

"I lie"

I was asked what my favourite quote was last weekend and it didn't even take me 2 seconds to think before I was blurting it out.

I'm going to ad lib it, since I'm not sure if I have the words exactly right:

'When a man says "I lie" does he lie, or does he speak the truth? If he speaks the truth, he lies, and if he lies, he speaks the truth.'
Mark Twain

In a former post, I mentioned that I generally don't write in first person. One reason is because I don't like being so 'intimate' with my characters (since usually they are quite dark) but the other primary reason I don't write in first person goes back to my somewhat *obsessive* nature.

I have a detached writing style (let's call it my *voice* since it's something I've worked at intentionally) and when I do jump into character's heads, it's usually because they are observing someone/something other than themselves.

Perhaps having a background in animation is a part of this, but I love the challenge of showing how/why a character is reacting a certain way only through their dialogue and body language, yet always filtering this information through the mindset of another character. I do this because I think we lie to ourselves more than we realize and often those closest to us have a better understanding of how we truly are through observing our actions and reactions.

We are usually unaware of our own hypocrisies... so the only way a writer can show such complex things is through the eyes of another character.

When a character says, 'I lie', often that character is unclear whether he is actually telling the truth or telling a lie. This subtlety is something I think would be quite impossible to convey to a reader in first person.

What do you think? Are there types of stories you've started, then had to re-write when you discover the limits of that particular POV?

Tangled & Comedic Timing

So, on a cold, wet, overcast west-coast afternoon, I'm watching Disney's 'Tangled' and thinking about comedic timing.

I love animation, even more than I love movies/tv with real people... the main reason is that I love to over-think and analyze and animation has something special that regular film does not. Every visual jerk, twitch, pause and hesitation is intentional. Every moment of movement has been planned out, not only of arm and legs, but the wideness of the eyes, to the length of time the lashes are closed during a single blink. And every one of these tiny, intentional movements has to look natural.

...and I haven't even touched on framing, use of colour, shape, size and when to pare or overemphasize ratio and movement... all tools and tricks an animator can play with to better tell their story.

Animation is truly an orgy for the over-thinker.

When I was a kid, 'The Little Mermaid' came out in theatres. I can clearly remember staring at the screen with intense concentration... while not following the plot at all. What I was watching was how different Arial looked in each scene, essentially, when she would go 'off model'. After that movie, my dream job was to be a cleanup-artist in animation... that's the person who goes over every single hand-drawn frame and makes sure each character stays on model.

Boring, eh? Well, there's a point to this, I swear.

As an actor, having good comedic timing is something you either have, or you don't have. An animator has the ability to tinker with a character's actions to the microsecond. This attention to detail is something that can be trained into you, but I do think it's a real skill. Whether you're born with it or learn it later, some people have an almost perfect instinct for timing.

The visual information of characters in regular film (or animated films) is a large part of how we know what they are all about. Their body language is important, their ticks and twitches, the turn of their heads, the lift of their jaws, all of this can fill out a character in a few seconds without an info dump about their history, preferences and unique characteristics.

So what about when you read about a character in a book? What about when you are writing a character, a character you can see so clearly in your mind that you could act out their scenes with every single one of their micro expressions and muscle contractions?

Description is a dirty word for many readers/writers. For the reader, seeing one of those dauntingly enormous paragraphs that takes up an entire page where you know, you just know, you're going to be wasting several minutes walking through a character's dreamscape when all you really want is for the character to wake up and get on with the story!

So where is the happy medium? To build a world, to build characters that live and breathe in that world, you can't have a white room with white cardboard characters... but then no one wants to do a Jane Eyre either and fill an entire chapter with the description of a swamp.

Comedic timing might be something one is born with, but it can also be learned. Playing the balancing act between giving too much and too little information about your characters... I think some writers are born with that skill, but there's no reason why it can't also be learned.

To learn timing in acting or in animation, you act (or draw) out a scene without using words.

So when you're writing a scene, how much information can you cram in without using *words* (as in dialogue or narrator/descriptive info-dumps)?

If you've got time, throw on 'Tangled' and watch Pascal the chameleon and Maximus the horse... they are both fully rounded characters who doesn't have a single line of dialogue. Can you do that?