The infantilization of America seeps into our very junk food (or does it start there).
Twinkie the Kid is more like Twinkie the Baby.
I hope they're playing off the Slim Pickins "Dr. Strangelove" pose in a complex irony which swings back to Twinkie's legendary apocalypse survival skills.
No more lassoing up youngsters. No more lines at all, for that matter,
Who knows what sad fate has taken the Fruit Pie Magician or King Ding Dong.
And what of Captain Cupcake? Once he proudly sailed the high seas, Master and Commander.
Reduced to a "cute" chocolate blob.
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
The demo DVD is one part of your "marketing identity" as an artist. It should be a complement to a website and a portfolio.
Ten years ago, sample reels were a delicate thing.
That's when they went out on tape. 3/4 inch UMatic for studios and long time professionals, VHS for (in today's lingo) n00bs. I can only imagine the nightmare and expense of 16mm reels from earlier generations.
Today's sample reel is a DVD. Previous formats were linear. The demo had one or two minutes to convince the producer to watch the next three or four minutes. While it's still important to front load your reel with the best work, that's less crucial than it once was.
Let's start with the externals, the packaging. Sandpaper packaging, star shaped glittery boxes, candy covers, oversized or undersized containers all can make for a striking presentation -and we are in a visual, creative field. While I always appreciate the effort and eye behind an unusual design -these are always the first things to get tossed in trash during a cleaning binge. They stick out and can't be stored with the rest of the samples. Larger companies may have the space to store shelves upon shelves of unsolicited work, but real estate is premium in a studio and if it's not being used it'll get cast aside.
Take the standard DVD package as a constraint and design into it. Evident on the package should be your name and contact information (both telephone and email). Include what you "are": animator, flash artist, Maya generalist, etc. Also include a return address -sometimes we'll return them although usually we won't. After that, it's an open for design. I prefer when the packaging gives an inkling of what the contents will be.
Also, CD jewelboxes will be reused when the studio runs out of boxes. Your DVD will then be homeless, until tossed into the trash.
I also like when the artist sees their reel/website/portfolio as a package and designs them all with a theme. Sure, most of the time won't see this. Think of how a unified presentation makes you think of your own work.
Still on the outside: a table of contents. What's on the reel. It can be complicated, as long as it starts simple. List what's on there. Make the design work with the rest of the package, don't just type it on 8 1/2 x 11 and fold in there.
Now for the contents.
If you are Technical Director, do not include work that you did the rigging for. If you only did the rigging, be forthright and acknowledge the animators and TD. People neglect to this sort of thing regularly. For the most part, I think its honest oversight -having what you did clearly spelled out gives the producer a better way to evaluate your abilities.
The common way to advancement in this field is the "bump up". An assistant will be given a shot to animate, an animator a chance to direct. The "bump up" does not happen on your sample reel. If you modeled and rigged a character don't claim you can be the TD. The producer will make that decision based on the work.
In the DVD world, you have the opportunity to tailor the presentation of your work that the VHS reel didn't offer. Few people take advantage of this.
Take a cue from commercial DVDs. They have an intro, a main menu, a feature presentation, sub menus with extras. The artist's demo can have all of these.
I'd suggest making the intro short. Ten to fifteen seconds is plenty.
A main menu which contains at the very least your "short reel", contact information, and if you have them -full length versions of your work. Other contents can include illustration montages (not a good idea), work process like pencil tests, animatics or shot breakdowns or biographic information.
Full length works should be accessed through a sub menu and be screenable as a "play all" or individually. You want a menu which lets you direct someone by simply saying "Look at this Volkswagon spot if you want to see some liquid I animated".
The most important part of the DVD is the "short reel". Again, in the old days this was a different matter. It would typically consist of three to five minutes worth of full pieces or substantial excerpts. With the DVD it can be a shorter run through many clips from your work. It's a highlight reel which leads the producer to screen work from the full length menu.
The construction of the "short reel" is fairly straightforward. Find all of your best pieces, put the best of the best up front and edit them to a track which gives insight into you as an artist.
It's acceptable to show only your part of the process -a pencil test or leica reel for an animator, the bones of a model for a rigger. If you do that, it's also recommended that you reveal the final version at some point to see how your work contributes to the process.
Here's the introduction to "Troubles the Cat", I stumbled across it on YouTube earlier this week.
We produced this at The Ink Tank for Childrens Television Workshop. Santiago Cohen designed the series. His work is what makes it so special. Maciek Albrecht and Suzan Pitt were the directors.
The animation was done in Poland, except for this opening which John Schnall animated.
Jump: Push yourself away from ground
The higher more effort
[illustration of spacing]
[illustration of cricket jump]
Take: use only with reason
emphasize something
take must have at least 4 frames.
Same bounce on twos and 3's and the bounce on 1's (fast) a great deal of difference.
[illustration of double take]
Force going against another
Hat flattens before flying off
Make more drawings, you can always eliminate
Poses indicate or (map out) your stick figures for poses and action of scene.
Good poses strengthen your animation. Be wild in your poses stretch your imagination. A good pose will give you action.
Analise your action in your mind. Don't act it out physically. Animation is always exaggerated compared to live action. It is a caricature of live action.
Animation must have a snap.
Character: is defined by the voice. How this voice will act. Behave. Thus the personality of your character will develop.
One of the difficulties of design is that sometimes there's only one right answer, but usually there are dozens.
Concepts can get worked over endlessly in a quixotic quest to make it "perfect", thinking that this is that time when there's just a single solution.
We did some graphics for a documentary Gail Levin produced a few years ago. The working title was "A is for...", the final title was "Two Worlds One Planet". I'm reminded of as she's editing a new film at our place and we were just discussing the graphics.
It was a case of trying a bunch of things and seeing what worked best.
I've probably shared this story before, but it's a good one so I'll share again.
Tissa David tells how she came to New York from Hungary via Paris with no other dream than to animate for UPA.
She went up to their offices at 666 Fifth Avenue with a portfolio. "We may have work in the trace and paint department." "No, I'm an animator." That was kind of shocking, since women were not considered to be animators in 1958. But her foreignness somehow outweighed her femininity and she was told that Grim Natwick just fired another assistant and he might need another. So she was introduced to Grim, and said he'd work with her -falsely claiming they both spoke a little German to make up for her lack of English and his non-existent Magyar -if she could answer one question:
"What is animation?"
"Animation," she stuttered, "is animation."
Taken aback, "I've been asking people that question for 30 years and that's the best answer I've gotten yet."
Grim Natwick, one of the principle architects of this field, was searching for the meaning -the spirit- of his craft.
I'm nowhere near Grim on the talent meter, but I could probably out-talk him in any language neither of us knew. So I've talked it through some, and in light of James Cameron's assertion that his film "Avatar" is not animation thought I'd come to his defense.
Let's look at the world of being made of two things: nouns and verbs. (forget all those pesky adverbs and prepositions)
Nouns and verbs. Form and process.
Painting is form. Watercolor is process.
Travel is form. Running is process.
To define animation, you can look at what distinguishes from other processes of the form. The most obvious one is live action -in which thousands of images are captured in camera, altered through lab processes and projected in a new state.
If capturing the image is paramount to the form -and in film it is -the manner in which that image is captured will define subsets of process.
Here's where history comes into play. At an early point, it was discovered that imaged can be recorded onto film through a temporarily stopped camera. This is a clear break in process. In order for this process to meet the requirement of form, images must be manipulated one frame at a time.
It's clear, "animation" is the frame by frame manipulation of images for the film form.
What about puppets? Seems like a live action process.
How about clay? Seems like animation.
How about this swooshing logo? Wait a second...
Swooshing logo. Like this:
There's a different animal. Some images were created/captured single frame, but most were developed through trickery. Not exactly animation, not exactly live action.
This is a middle way: motion graphics
It can be created using crafted elements such as the logos above, or live action elements:
The process of animation has always been riddled with shortcuts -cycles, pan and scans, reused art, and rotoscoping. All of those are components of the process. As Richard Williams says "Animation is an extension of drawing", with that in mind drawing develops with tracing and with model study.
Rotoscoping is still a single frame process, therefore animation.
Along comes this technology. Motion capture. Is this something new? Neither fish nor fowl? It may be.
It's not animation, that's for sure. It's not a single frame process of creation -no matter how much re-rigging needs to be done. In that regard it's similar to flying logos, it's akin to motion graphics. Information is used and technology (whether its an optical bench, motorized camera, video generator, or computer) creates a picture from the inputs by interpreting the missing information.
At the moment, motion capture seems an awful lot like motion graphics. But let's look at the original definition of live action: "thousands of images are captured in camera, altered through lab processes and projected in a new state." Couldn't this just as accurately define "motion capture".
I've been re-watching Satoshi Kon films lately. From one picture to the next he make remarkable jumps -not just as an animation director, but as an artist and writer.
On Sunday at the Dancing for Disney screening at Lincoln Center's Dance on Camera festival I dutifully screened "golden age" Disney shorts, impressed by the technical execution but thoroughly bored by the films themselves.
The worst thing something can be is boring.
Why is "Millennium Actress" compelling when a Goofy "How to..." short is a chore? For all the flair and craft within the Disney product it lacks a fundamental attribute: the ability to surprise.
For all the crappy animation in "Perfect Blue" it's engaging. If being boring is the worst thing possible, one of the best feelings watching a movie is when you think "I didn't see that coming" but remain wholly with the piece.
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