www.strike.tv Teaser from StrikeTV on Vimeo Remember the writer’s strike? During the strike, and then continuing on after it was resolved, I helped out with a thing called Strike TV. Strike TV is a collection of projects, written by WGA writers, and performed, acted, animated, and filmed by mostly volunteers, myself included. I was a part of three projects for Strike TV: “The Academy” by Michael Tabb, “Sketchtoons” by Charles Horn, and “The Write Environment” by Jeffrey Berman. The projects were a lot of fun, and I got to work with many great people, all the while expanding contacts in and around Hollywood. It was a great experience, and hopefully people tune in and enjoy the programs.Strike TV had its soft launch today, and will fully launch later this month. Keep watching for great programs featuring people from your favorite movies and shows.-Floyd Bishop
Many times when you’re an animator, you’ll get a script or some notes with a very vague description of the action you need to create. In the above clip (which wasn’t scripted), you can see lots of great little moments that could help you out on a shot or scene later on. Observation is very important in animation, so let’s look at this clip a bit to see why it is entertaining.
The description of the clip could have been something like: “Two brothers, one older and one younger, are sitting in a chair. The younger brother bites the older brother.” Many times, it’s up to the animator to make that entertaining.
Watch how the older brother offers his finger to Charlie. Surely he cannot be hurt by his baby brother.
As Charlie (the baby) starts to bite, watch the older brother’s face as he starts to realize that putting his finger in [Read more…]
When I was a kid, one of my earliest animation related memories was of the Disney cartoon “Lonesome Ghosts”. Our family doctor had a toy called the Fisher Price Cartoon Viewer, a toy which had interchangeable cartridges which were sections of cartoons. One of my favorites was “Lonesome Ghosts”.
I used to watch the section with Mickey in the flood and Goofy with the dresser over and over again, forward and backward. It was a great way to see the overlapping action of how things moved and followed the main movement of the characters. I didn’t know this at the time. I was just watching a cartoon.
You might remember the Frederator Studios production tag we’re making for Fred. The first version was done before we got any input from Fred. After talking it through and watching it over and over, it’s clear that the robot doesn’t read as well as it could (it’s tiny in the large frame), and the big green “F” on the robot’s chest is hard to read at best.
For inspiration as to how you could handle such a task, we had to look no further than the 1950’s:
The production tag is much shorter than this intro piece, so we’ll have to have a lot happening fast. Keep watching to see what we come up with.
We’ve finished the first version of the Frederator Studios production tag. We render everything in passes to allow us more control over the final image, so I’ll break down what goes into a piece like this.
We’ve got the animation pretty much nailed down here. The Fredbot flies in and comes in for a landing and stands on the text. We swapped the text to read “Frederator Studios” instead of “Frederator Incorporated”, as per Fred’s notes.
The effect of the flight trail is in here as well. There are two emitters: one which lays out the trail, and then another “burn out” emitter that gives the puff when the trail stops (right before the Fredbot lands). The effects will be rendered in a separate pass to allow for more control during the composite.
So after listening to the audio track a bunch of times, I started to think about the amount of text, readability, and what the heck I was going to do with that rivet sound.
In the text only tag that is being used now, you can’t read anything until the piece is half over. There are no words on the screen at all. I wanted to get the text on sooner, as well as incorporate the robot somehow. I also wanted to give a feeling of depth.
In our first blocking pass, we’ve got the text appearing with the rivet sounds. This gets the text on much sooner, allowing you to read “Frederator” almost a full second sooner than before. We also have the Fredbot in there, swooping in from the distance.
The background is going to be a space type environment. I was thinking “What would look good in CG, at a [Read more…]
