Merry Christmas!

Well this will be my last post of 2008! Erm...yippeeee??

I've had the last couple of days off work, which has been nice, but I've shocked even myself with just how remarkably little I have done with my time. The plan was to do loads of designing for my little short and hopefully get onto storyboarding. Well that was never really going to happen was it?!

Well actually I did get a bit of design work done. I have wrestled with my two characters again and again, and have come to realise that I need to do yet more wrestling! After many attempts, I have finally come up with a facial design I'm happy with for the good guy in the short, called Louis.
You may notice he looks rather like the old design I had in mind for Père Fouettard. I thought I had a clear-ish idea of where I was going with Fouettard, but with every design he changes into something else. This is the last incarnation, which I'm not particularly happy with:
I don't know whether to go for something completely different or whether to just try manipulating this design.

So that's all for this year, I hope everyone has a fantastic Christmas and a very happy New Year!

To See or Not To See

Has anyone else been having an overdose of the word zeitgeist lately? I seem to have gone my whole life without ever hearing the word up until about four weeks ago, but now I don't think I have gone a single day without someone speaking it. It's BIZARRE....it's RANDOM!

I hope someone gets that joke.

Anyway, here is a quick drawing I did:
It wasn't meant to be anyone in particular, but I decided it might fit some of my ideas for Père Fouettard. The only things is that I hadn't drawn a beard, so I added a fake one. That made me wonder whether to have the actual character have a fake one. That's another question to add to the pile!

The main question I'm asking myself at the moment is how to structure my little film. My original plan was to have the evil Santa mostly hidden, just seeing quick glimpses of him through keyholes or in silhouette. However there are two problems with this. Firstly, there is a good chance my audience wouldn't know who the character is, but more importantly I wouldn't be animating very much, which defeats the whole object of the exercise. On the other hand, keeping him hidden would be more atmospheric.

I think ultimately I will try to keep a balance between the two extremes. I'd like to get some humour into it, so will probably do that in the shots where we see Père Fouettard, but I'd like to keep some of the creepy atmosphere too.

Bogeymen of the World Unite!

Well it seems the history of the legend of Santa Claus is just full of fantastic things to weave a story from. As I described in a previous post, Père Fouettard is regarded by some French people as a sort of nasty version of Father Christmas. Well thanks to "Dwestburg's" comment, I now know the story of him. To cut the story short, he was originally a butcher who took three children and attempted to cook them in a pot. St Nicholas came and saved the kids, casting the butcher into a life of shame, forced to follow him around and be hated by everyone.

Of course that is just in France. Other countries have their own versions of the character, but most describe him as being forced to follow the saintly bringer of gifts. He is consistently described as carrying sticks to beat children with, but is often said to be chained and so unable to harm them (although in some traditions he is said to dole out beatings to naughty children). Some other names include Krampus, The Devil, Ruprecht, Zwarte Piet and Schmutzli, all of which can be read about in more detail here. Less consistent is his skin colour. In some traditions, he is of African origin and so has black skin, but in others his face is covered in soot from climbing down chimneys.

The point here is that I'm going to have to filter through all this and pick certain attributes for my character. We can be fairly sure that no butchery will occur in my animation!

I have started doing some character design for my project. I have had to make a few choices to narrow things down a bit. There will be two characters in my film, both of black origin to suit both the song and the general concensus of these religious stories. Here is a rough sketch I did for the Père Fouettard character:
And here's his head:He might be a bit too scary looking for this film. I hope to aim for something of a similar creepiness as The Grinch or Oogie Boogie from Nightmare Before Christmas. So basically not really scary, but kids get the idea that he's supposed to be. I'm going to try taking this design and making it more of a cartoon. I've also been thinking of a character that looks more like Santa as we know him these days, but with a mean looking face or something.

The other character I require is more difficult. I can't decide what age to make him, what personality to give him, or what general look to give him. It'll take some more thinking!

Overthinking

This is not a phenomenon that is new to me, but it is one that I keep on forgetting.

Often when I begin drawing, I am frustrated by lack of ability, rattling out rubbish drawing after rubbish drawing. It seems that the only time I manage to do something that pleases me is when I just stop caring. I was sitting in a coffee shop on Saturday, struggling to produce any quick sketches that resembled the poses in front of me. In the end I just thought "sod it, I'm not going to be able to do anything better today". Immediately I saw an improvement.
I simply let the pen go where it wanted to on my page, without thinking about it. The result is a bit more messy than normal, but what eventually emerges from the scribbles is something far closer to what my eyes see.

Could the secret to drawing be an issue of trusting oneself? Deep down I know I can draw when it comes to it, but maybe I should just believe that I can draw well without trying so damn hard to prove it.

Zat You....erm....Whoever You Are?

My "tradigital" (traditional-digital) setup is now complete with the addition of a new draftsman's chair.
And lucky that it is too, because inspiration struck this week after listening to the Christmas song "Zat You Santa Claus?" by Louis Armstrong. I've decided to make a traditional animated short with this song as the soundtrack. Considering my lack of experience with 2D stuff, this might be a bit of an ambitious project, but I have allocated myself exactly one year in which to complete it, so it should hopefully be ready for Christmas 2009.

The song is quite a creepy number compared with other Christmas song, which is why it always stands out to me. It reminds me a little of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" by Dr Seuss. My idea of following this creepy route was encouraged by a Swiss colleague of mine telling me about some European traditions that I had not heard of. It seems that in some countries, there was not only a Father Christmas who rewarded children with good behaviour, but also one who punished the bad. In French, Father Christmas is known as Père Noël, but there is (or was) also a Père Fouettard. It literally means "Father Whip". I have tried hunting round with Google to find out more, but it's difficult as I don't understand French well enough to be able to find what I want. If anyone else has any information about this character, I'd be very grateful to hear it! One of the few references to it I have found is this quote from Les Miserables:

"Jean Valjean smiled knowingly, and said solemnly, “Father Christmas has a companion, dark, terrible and cruel, named Father Whip, who accompanies Father Christmas every year on this journey. It is he who gives the naughty children what they deserve!” "

I also found this on a page about international traditions:

"In some parts of Germany at Christmas you get gifts from a girl called Christkind. She wears a crown of candles and carries a basket full of gifts to the children. A dreadful demon called Hans Trapp goes with Christkind to deliver the gifts. Before Christkind gives any gifts, Hans Trapp waves a stick to threaten the naughty children."

Is Hans Trapp the same as Père Fouettard? Is one a derivation of the other in the same way that Santa Claus is associated with St Nicholas? Interestingly, a quick online translation of Hans Trapp results in "Bogyman". This is of course a character that many American children fear.

Finally on Wikipedia, I found this:

"Saint Nicolas is celebrated in the eastern part France (Alsace, Lorraine regions) and less strongly in the northern part of the country (Nord département). He is accompanied by "Père Fouettard", carrying a bunch of sticks with which naughty children are beaten."

So in references of both Père Fouettard and Hans Trapp, sticks are mentioned, which suggests they are very similar.
Anyway, whatever the name, my short will be about his visit to someone preparing for Chistmas. My ideas are pretty sketchy at the moment, but I hope to pin them down a bit more over the coming month and will share them on here in the hope than noone steals them! I'll also show every stage of the production of the short

Stiff Stuff

I seem to be having a bit of trouble at work with my animations lately. On our current project, I am currently animating my second cutscene, and on both this one and the previous one I have been struggling to get the right level of exaggeration.

It's not a problem I had on Lego Batman for some reason, but this time around I seem to be pushing things quite a lot further than I should be with these simple plastic characters. I have a feeling it's because of all the theory I have been reading and watching over the few months between projects. In almost all literature on the subject of animation, it is stressed that an animator should push a movement to make it more interesting - in essense, caricaturing it. However, my superiors don't seem to be going along with my ideas.

The point they rightly raise is that the characters are made of plastic, and should behave as such, being restricted in movement to a certain extent. They should also pretty much always obey the laws of physics.
I'd love to go into this further, but alas I am not allowed to show anything of any project I work on, which is a shame as I think it would be really useful for other people to learn from my mistakes.

The curious thing is that I was not being told about this on Lego Batman. Now either they are being more strict about how we do things this time, or I am animating differently. To answer this, I spent a little time on Friday looking back through my Batman scenes. To my surprise, the difference between what I was doing then compared with now is pretty significant. I was much more stiff on Batman, with limited follow-through animation and things just generally more reserved.

So can't I just go back to animating like that? Well it's going to be difficult, because I now look back on those scenes and I can see that my work suffered greatly from my lack of experience. My stiffening-up back then was not out of choice. To me, I was being loose at the time. I just didn't realise how stiff my stuff was.

So the big question is how do I portray stiff plastic toys, whilst still keeping things interesting? Maybe I need to watch Toy Story again!

Taking Sides

An animator's Christmas meal last night served as a bit of a revelation as to why computer animation is so different from other media.

Any traditional or stop-motion animators out there will know the feeling of really getting absorbed in your work, with hours just slipping by and background distractions somehow getting blotted out. That doesn't seem to happen with computer animation. While I enjoy doing it, I don't get sucked into it and can be easily distracted.

I thought it might be because you have to use a computer interface, which is a less direct route to your animation than a humble pencil. However I came to realise last night that that isn't the case.
It's a left side of the brain versus right side thing. Once warmed up, a traditional animator can get into a "zone" where he is accessing mainly his creative right-side, with his logical left-side pushed into the background. This is a lot more difficult with computer animation because a lot of number crunching and logical thinking is required. You have to be aware of degrees of rotation, for example, and deal with things like constraints, which all require logical thinking. This brings the left-side of the brain forward, which is easy to do as it seems to be the more dominant in most people, with the right-side being ignored. The result is a less enjoyable animation experience, with a less interesting result.

So how can this be overcome? Well in short, it can't. But the problem can be reduced. On of my colleagues pointed out that the best thing to do is to get as much technical stuff out of the way before you begin animating. I don't know how it works in the movie industry, but in games, we end up starting our animations before we have all the required assets. Later down the line, things get added like pieces of scenery, props and all sorts. It would be beneficial to get all this stuff in place in a scene before making any characters move. If you have to use constraints for fixing things to other things, set them up beforehand if you can. Preparation is the key.

So once everything is there for you to use, you can concetrate solely on moving your characters. This still requires some logical thinking of course, but it is much less than before.

An even better thing to do is to thumbnail out your animation with pencil and paper before you touch the computer mouse. You can get yourself in the right-brain "zone" relatively easily that way and stay in it until you have got your poses planned out.

Cable Guy

I'm the worst DIYer in the world, and so have been nervous all day about coming home and drilling through my precious animation desk in order to digitalize it. But I took a deep breath and went for it anyway. Thankfully all seems well, although I have a cabling situation I hadn't bargained for!
I need to cut a hole in the animation disk for the Cintiq cable to pass through, to free up the rotation a bit more. I could also do with somehow hiding the monitor cable coming out of the right-hand side of the notebook PC. I was surprised to discover that my desk is actually made of wood, coated in some kind of plastic. I really thought it was fiberglass or something similar. It just seemed a bit odd when sawdust came pouring out of the holes!

So I'm just waiting on my new chair now and I can finally get animating. I've been watching more of the Richard Williams DVDs. They are addictive! I've got to the point where I really need to sit down and practice what he is teaching. In particular, I want to have a bash at doing four-legged animals which I have never done before, mainly through feeling daunted. I will do it though, just as soon as this chair comes!

In terms of Lego, speculation is starting to appear on the internet of what the project is we are doing at work. Hopefully it will be announced soon so I can finally talk about it!