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At 4/14/14 08:47 PM, dylan wrote:

At 4/14/14 08:29 PM, Celshaded wrote: I never understand the phenomenon of people not drawing but wanting to be animators, like wanting to play basketball but never learning how to dribble the ball

Being something is fun and easy, becoming something is boring and hard.

But becoming great at anything is going to be hard, yeah?

Boring, though, that's a mindset. I used to find drawing boring, but that's because I sucked at it so much. Now I really enjoy it, because I can see the improvement. I think you have to get over that hump. Once you're on the other side, it's really very fun. (Still pretty hard, though.)

In the end, you're right. It's a matter of them wanting it to be easy and fast, and animation is really neither of those things... That's when you have to evaluate your priorities and decide if it's worth pursuing that dream or you want to change course.

Nicely done! Catchy animation and music, and looks like a fun little game. The beginning was a little slow, it probably would have lost me before the main part started if I was just watching it randomly instead of watching it for the animation. :)

EDIT for above: Gah, I meant "a problem I have too." Sorry about that. Drives me crazy when I accidentally spell too with just one o. :)

Nice start there!

One thing I noticed while watching the clips go by is that you seem to have a nice grasp and loose, flowing feel when you work rough, but it loses a LOT when you start cleaning things up and work in "Final lines." This is a problem I have to, and what I've discovered is it's a result of my lack of confidence while drawing. When I'm doing things roughly, I don't tense up and things really have a nice feel. As soon as I try to do "nice" lines, though, it really falls apart much of the time. For me what's helped is making a conscious effort to stay loose even while doing the final drawing pass, and just general practice so I'm more comfortable and feel like "I can do this."

Anyway, maybe that will help some. Hope so! Good luck with it. :)

At 4/13/14 02:55 PM, Otto wrote:
Wow man, I had no idea you posted here! I have been reading Animator Island for a long time, and it is one of the best places I know to read quality content on the subject.

Thanks, I'm glad it's been helpful! :)

I try to stop by here every few weeks at least and join in the animation chit chat, see if I can be of any help. Of course, I often forget and then suddenly a year has gone by since I last visited, ha ha. Oh well! Do you ever do the 11 Second Club? I'm on those boards a lot as well, and it's a nice change of pace because there are a bunch of really experienced animators hanging around that post some amazing stuff. Each place has its benefits. :)

At 4/13/14 02:55 PM, dylan wrote: And hey, guess what. Richard Williams is far more a reliable source than you.

Richard Williams also believes everything (EVERYTHING) should be done on 1s. At ALL times. And his films reflect that.

The truth is, every animator has their own views on the subject, and while I would never discount how amazing Animator's Survival Kit is (and the DVD version, which totally changed the way I look at animation!) Richard Williams also is very opinionated and sticks to his guns 100%.

The best option is probably to go to the source, which would be The Illusion of Life. I'll try to dig out my copy later and see if it has anything in particular to say about that time period (written by two guys who were there and lived it).

Link: http://tombancroft1.tumblr.com/post/82688288246/artistic-pet-peeve-03-of-312-this-one-is-very-high

Now, I answer with a question: “Do you draw everyday?” 99.9% of the time, sadly, the answer is NO. A couple times a week? ”Not usually,” they say. At this point, I tell them my Olympic swimmer analogy. If my DREAM was to make it to the Olympics and win a GOLD MEDAL don’t you think I’d have to get into the pool everyday to get there?

Awesome advice from a great Disney animator, and something we all need to hear now and then. (And again, and again, and again...)

Have a good day!

At 4/13/14 09:54 AM, Kixen wrote:
Love the article, and I guess thats something I do quite often, I guess its just a part of my style when it comes to people, definitely something I could work on though, thanks!

And thanks for calling it smooth man!

Yeah, it's something that sneaks into every animator's work. Somehow it just comes naturally! Plus it's easier because you don't have to time each part separately. And in some motions, twinning is needed. But the majority of the time the action will be more interesting (and we're entertainers, after all!) if you offset something, even slightly.

Yo dude I like your short animation.

Yeah, overall it works. It's simple, it's to the point, it's a bit random, and it works. I'm not sure you need to do anything to it at this point. If you wanted to get a bit more interest in there, you could possibly take out the twinning going on (example: http://www.animatorisland.com/twinning-102-change-it-up/ ) because there's not a lot to really change minus that.

Fun little clip.

At 4/12/14 08:08 PM, TicTackLock wrote: I just got it and I would like to know a suitable framerate for beginners and a quick tutorial on frame by frame animation

Generally you want to work at either 24fps or 30fps, and if you're doing frame by frame then you work on 2s (generally, some people work on 1s or -ahem- 4s ;) ) which means you draw one image every two frames. I'm not sure of a quick tutorial on it, that's kind of "How to animate" which would never be a quick anything. It's going to be a lot of work. Fun, though, so enjoy the experience! Good luck with it.

(Sorry for the double post, wish there was an edit button!)

Essentially I guess what I'm suggesting is to redo your geometric version but with your hand, not computer generated straight lines and circles. By doing that you'll imbue it with the life of the human touch, but still have the reference of the geometry and "correct, if not robotic" version. It will technically be "less correct" that way, but it is that imperfection that makes 2D animation a joy to watch. You can really see the hand of the animator on screen. Hope that clarifies some. :)

At 4/12/14 01:39 AM, KhanhCPham wrote: You are right though, this method i am using is making thing too linear and a bit robotic. I am plan on being less depended on the "squares guide" in the next project. It was a good practice for me though because I think I can now animate camera moves without resorting to those post-production zoom shot that makes it look like a cut out.

Always good to get some of that kind of practice in here and there, it's great you recognize the downsides to it and are learning the benefits it has. :)

One thing that helped me in a similar way was after doing a very structured pass, use that as a REFERENCE and then do the rough (very rough) next to it instead of overtop. I'm not sure if you did the rough overtop or not, but it feels bound to the geometric version to me. Also when you're working on the very first rough pass (non structured) it may help you to limited all the detail you have. While the lines are scribbled, it doesn't feel like you're animating the forms so much. You may be jumping to "get it on model" a bit too quickly. You can always go back over and get it on model, but that first pass is all about getting pleasing shapes and the movement just right. If you look at the image below, you see you have much less to think about if it's this loose and rough. That allows you to get the movement spot on. Then you add hair, eyes, forms, etc. on top and it takes a big burden off the brain. At least, that's helped me!

Looking forward to seeing how it progresses!

At 4/12/14 10:32 AM, Rational-Delirium wrote:

4s might be for average anime, but I'm not even sure about that.

Probably depends on the anime. I know a lot of the older stuff was actually done pretty darn well, and while still a bit limited overall, the moving bits were animated traditionally just in the anime style. Anime is a really interesting sub-sect of animation that has a lot to learn from. They do a great job keeping things alive without actually moving a ton (and their ability to re-use animation over and over is pretty amazing!).

At 4/12/14 10:56 AM, Rational-Delirium wrote: I saw this on YouTube a few days ago, it was really funny. I didn't even think it was fake until about half way through. Satire definately suits your channel.

Thanks! It's been a while since I had the chance to write any parody/satire, and I miss it. Used to be my favorite thing to do. All that crazy life stuff keeps getting in the way. :)

We've got a few more ideas scripted, so keep an eye out for them in the coming months. It's amazing how much you can parody in the industry when you sit down and think about it. We sure are a weird bunch, artists and animators! Ha ha, good stuff.

At 4/11/14 07:50 PM, Rational-Delirium wrote:

:Things to consider are who you are, who you're making it for, and what's your goal.

Variables for who you are:
- Aspiring animator
- Hobbyist

Variables for who you're making it for:
- Potential employers
- Yourself, and no one but yourself

Variables for what's your goal:
- To impress Walt Disney, to win an oscar
- To make a fan animation to stay interested

Those are awesome questions, I totally agree. :)

You're probably going to want to make several different reels depending on where you're sending it and for what position, too. Some places will put more emphasis on one area, while others look more at another. Lots to consider!

At 4/11/14 05:01 PM, dylan wrote:
It's all part of the art, one and the same.

I politely disagree. I think you can judge the parts of a whole separately. Which is exactly what I'm talking about here. One can have beautiful animation and terrible artwork. One can have beautiful artwork, and mediocre animation (as is much more often the case). You can also, of course, judge it as a whole. It doesn't ONLY have to be the whole, though. My opinion on it, feel free to disagree.

My point is that threes and up are completely valid in the proper circumstances, and if you’re agreeing to that, then this conversation is over. You may disagree with me on how often they may be used, but my point was simply that they have their place.

My opinion is it isn't "valid" if the option to do it on 2s and make it look better is available. (Which is kind of incorrect, because who am I to say what is "valid?" I'm not saying don't do it, I'm saying it could be technically better.) That opinion is based on the evidence I've seen that no animation looks better on 4s than properly timed on 2s. I just haven't seen anything that supports that argument. "But some people still do it" isn't any proof to me. Ernest and Celestine looks fantastic from an artistic standpoint, and they did a bang up job. It would have looked even better on 2s throughout with a blend of 1s where necessary. If you want to believe that's my opinion, cool beans. It is my opinion because I see no evidence otherwise.

And with that, I shall stop trying to argue otherwise! I'm happy to be proven wrong, though, if I come across something that is better on 4's than on 2's. I look forward to seeing if that ever happens, and if it does I'll be sure to come back to this thread and be like "Wow! It was true all along, I was wrong." :) In the meantime, have a good day and I hope to talk to you more in other threads about other awesome animation stuff. Like how nice the run cycles of your Pine game that you have on your tumblr are. Really great job there. Cheers!

At 4/11/14 04:17 PM, ArtificialFlower wrote:
Thank you for pointing it out! I didn't think of that.
It's a little hard to wrap my mind around but I'm going to try to fix it. :)

I hear that! It's such a pain to try and alter 3D shapes in the mind, at least for me. One thing that helps I've found is to do a top-down view first. Then you'll see where things should line up. So for example, below. Then you can slowly merge that with a straight ahead view, and at least then it will give you an idea of where the edges should be. Hope that helps some!

At 10/12/13 04:24 PM, ReNaeNae wrote: Question to everyone... out of curiosity... how have you learned what you know about animation? Did you go to school? Are you in school now? If so, which one? Is it strictly an animation course, or full art-type program? ...Or are you self taught/learning on your own? If so, what has been the most helpful resource for you? (books, sites, other animators, etc.)

I went to school right out of high school for animation, but didn't have the drive needed to pass the strict and difficult classes. So I stopped and taught myself. But I only taught myself the cheats, really, so years later I discovered I couldn't do the extremely high quality work I wanted to do (like the Disney classics). I took several classes since then, the best of which is from Studio Technique. It's brilliant. http://www.studio-technique.com/schedule.html

Now I'm essentially starting over, but with more than a decade of limited experience and general study. It's exciting! Once I got over the fact that I was so far behind where I wanted to be and accepted where I was, I was able to really buckle down and focus. And the years on my own taught me a LOT about what not to do. :)

Best resource for me has been nothing but practice and watching great animation frame by frame to see how it's crafted. Second best by far is the Studio Technique class.

At 4/10/14 12:53 PM, verycoolguy wrote:

At 4/10/14 11:23 AM, Sentio wrote: There is still 6-8 months of reveals before the game will be released.

The 3DS version will be released this summer and the character rosters will be the same, so that will be at most four months of reveals.

Not every character will be revealed before release, though, if past games are any indication.

At 4/10/14 05:45 PM, ArtificialFlower wrote: http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/0194fbc4e9891f371f8bfe516218c004
Crystal spinning and 'glowing'.
Or at least my attempt at glowing.

Looks nice! One thing that ran through my head. I am the first to admit that 3D shape animation is NOT my area of expertise, but I believe if that shape was rotating the outside edges would not remain constant, right? For example, a cube rotating looks like this: http://www.fredthemonkey.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/cubespin6.mov If you watch the edges, they don't stay in the exact same place as it rotates.

Anyway, just something to consider. It looks good otherwise, though!

At 4/10/14 02:09 PM, dylan wrote:
You're opinion may be that 3s and up are unprofessional, but, when the entire professional world disagrees with you so much as to place these works on a universally lauded pedestal, your opinion is simply wrong.

I'm not really voicing an opinion here. (And if I were, "what is popular" hardly counts as proof of an opinion being wrong. By that token South Park has great animation.) My entire point has been, and continues to be, that 2s look better. Not because of style, but because the human eye requires a certain speed to put together moving pictures. I'm thrilled those films created beautiful artwork at a lesser framerate. Kudos to them. Wish they hadn't been commercial failures, but that's the audiences of today for you. I stand by my statement of the superiority of 2s to 4s, and I do so not because of my personal opinion, but because it is technically superior. If you like 4s more, bravo, more power to you. No harm in liking something that is technically inferior, THAT is where opinion comes into play. I enjoyed Great Mouse Detective way more than Pocahontas, despite Pocahontas being the better crafted film. As I said above, that's pretty much that. (By the by, Ernest and Celestine is a mix of 1s - 4s, with the vast majority of scenes being done on 2s. And I stand by the fact that it looks no where near as good as the likes of Pinocchio, Aladdin, Lion King, Iron Giant, take your pick, from a strictly animation standpoint, art aside. I'm not talking about art here, I'm talking about movement. AND the films above lost to a film that was done on 1s to boot.)

In the end KhanhCPham makes the best point, which is that contrast is really the key. That's why the best animations ever created use a mix of 1's and 2's, with holds (and moving holds) that take things outside of just constantly moving 1's and 2's.

At 4/10/14 02:52 AM, dylan wrote:
Of course, there’s also the argument that 48fps just doesn’t look good, though. Plenty of people just hate the way it looks with a passion. But, wait, that would mean that, all else being equal, more frames is not inherently equivalent to higher quality. Which means that twos are simply a stylistic choice of yours, rather than something that is “objectively better.” In the end, it again comes down to a stylistic choice when you’re working at anything other than the highest framerate that a projector can display, which was exactly my case for fours, a stylistic choice on how to depict life.

That's a great example. So, you have the Hobbit which is shot at 48fps and the version at 24fps. You can compare the two next to each other. Some people like the 48fps version, and some like the 24.

On the flip side, I've never seen or heard of anyone, or any argument, in any studio outside of the "anything goes" world of the internet, that has someone do an animation on 2's and had anyone, anywhere, say "That would look a lot better on 4's." Ever. That's not to say someone might consider something on 2's improperly TIMED, of course. Just a few posts above someone mentioned that. On 2's the timing didn't work, but on 4's it did. That's a totally different thing. That's a shortcut to change planning instead of going back and making the motion work on 2's. That isn't that 4s are a better choice, that is that 4s fix the timing issue of it on 2s. The timing PROBLEM.

I have come across plenty of people who, like the Peter Jackson thing, feel 1's make things too "creamy" for lack of a better word. I've seen that discussion between 1's and 2's happen all the time. Never, ever ever, have I seen any animator say to put something on 4's instead of 2's. And never, ever ever, have I seen an animation in the real world that would not be improved by being on 2s instead of the choppy framerate it was at.

I like your Picasso comparison, but I don't think it's the same thing at all. You're talking artistic style in line quality and emotion vs. physiological reaction of the human eye. One is subjective, based on what we LIKE, and the other is objective, based on human anatomy and the way the brain functions when viewing still images played in succession.

It's a fun discussion, but I'm afraid we'll just have to disagree. You're not convincing me any differently with examples of 24fps vs. 48fps, and I don't have any examples of 2s vs 4s to convince you. I think the videos you posted earlier would look vastly superior if they were timed out on 2s and you don't. That's what it boils down to.

Good talk anyway!

At 4/9/14 09:25 PM, francisyfl wrote: Also on film festivals and on feature films ...

My apologies, I don't know the feature films that have been shot on 4s. Which ones?

Cool, I have never heard of this. I hope I'll remember when the end of May rolls around! Would be fun to produce an actual piece of animation again, instead of just the myriad of tests that I've been doing for what seems like forever now.

Thanks for the heads up!

Do want to say, though, it's refreshing to chat with an animator who clearly knows their stuff. Usually that sort of discussion is regulated to higher end animation forums, like the 11 Second Club (in places) or just personal contacts within the industry. So thanks for being both civil and enlightening. It's appreciated. :)

Lotta Crawford on your list. When someone hires Crawford, they aren't hiring him for his ability to hand-boil lines when the movement slows like he's done in the 11 second club piece and the Subway one, they’re hiring him for his ability to put emotion into drawings. That emotion comes through at the most raw movement of the characters. Emotion, that's what directors want, and any good director will hire the guy who captures that emotion over the guy who's pointlessly inbetweening just because that’s “the highest standard.”

Sure, Andreas Deja's work looks great on twos, but that's not why he's hired. Deja gets work because the emotion of Scar reads during the 1:33-1:41 segment, not because he inbetweens nicely with the 1:43-1:48 segment. If you can’t do great work on fours, your twos won’t look any better, and if your work on fours is reading nicely, it’s a safe bet for a director to make that you can work in twos as well.

Totally fair. What I'm saying is what you mentioned in the last sentence there. If your work reads on 4s, the director can probably assume you can work on 2s as well. And WILL, because 2s are going to give you a better end result than 4s, every single time. Every time. Now, a case can (and often is) made that 1s will give you a better result than 2's, but I think that's a whole different story than 2s vs. 4s.

Can you achieve emotion on 4s? Yes. Can you achieve emotion on 78s? Sure, probably. I'm not denying that 4s can't WORK, I'm saying why stop there when 2s are just a better end product. You can regard it as a style choice, and that's fine. But objectively an animation on 2s looks better than the same animation on 4s. And in my opinion life is too short to cut corners and put things on 4s, especially if you are going for quality work.

(By the way, just as an aside, I had two pieces by B.J. because while he IS one of my favorite animators of today, more than that quality 2D just isn't being done much anymore, so I went to where I knew it existed. Sadly more and more animators are producing inferior work that people accept because quality levels have plummeted so severely in the past few decades. I don't think we should sit back and accept that, though. I feel striving to do better is the way to go.)

Smash Run looks like a blast, and what a cool unique twist on the classic Smash Brothers multiplayer. Really adds a whole new level to it.

I hope Jigglypuff returns, if only for her singing. Love that song.

If the 3DS gets something as awesome as Smash Run, I can only IMAGINE what they have planned for the Wii U one. Something awesome is coming this Christmas, to be sure! And I for one am glad the 3DS one will be out before the Wii U version. I wouldn't have gotten the 3DS version otherwise, most likely, but now it's a must-own.

At 4/8/14 08:43 PM, Atlas wrote: Zombies Ate My Neighbors is one of the most underrated games of all time.

Loved that game!

I'll probably start cleaning when we're ready to move, but that won't be until summer most likely. So no spring cleaning for me.

We all have bad days. Nothing beats a good apology, either. Just sayin'.

I used to hate them, but now I love them, especially at night. Laying there listening to the rumbling... So nice.

I don't much care for them when there's a baseball game to be played, but otherwise, good stuff.