The Art of Toon

Farewell to Blogger

2006-06-21T23:39:00.000-06:00

Well, I did this a little while ago but haven't had the time to even let anyone know. About fifteen people have stumbled across it by accident, but here is my new and improved site. Right now it's pretty much a direct import from Blogger. I'll get around to finishing up all the catagorizing and whatnot. We just finished up our latest video. Ryan has a post on it, but I'm still a little out of sorts. We don't move into our new place until the first of July. Try being pregnant and homeless and then talk to me about my lack of posts. Anyway, the official address is simply:

http://www.drewblom.wordpress.com

I still have a lot to do on it and I'll keep my blogger account, but please point any live bookmarks to this site. Take care and you'll be hearing more from me soon.

-Drew

Thinking about a Switch...

2006-05-23T21:55:00.000-06:00

Hey, still on hiatus, but I'm thinking about switching to Wordpress for my blog. I've been using it for another blog and really like some of the features. Anyone have any opinions? I've found blogger to just be a little tedious in comparison. As an aside, work is going well and I'm finally starting to get the hang of Lightwave even tho I'm not yet a believer.

-Drew

Posting Hiatus

2006-04-25T09:11:00.000-06:00

Due to moving, changing jobs, and having a baby in the next months, I most likely will be a little light on the posting. I'll pick it up again when things settle down a bit. Thanks and stay tooned...

-Drew

Got a Job!

2006-04-18T10:56:00.000-06:00

Image copyright 20th Century Fox

So blessings come in all shapes and sizes. One of ours, namely our first child, will be arriving at the end of July. Another is the fact that I will be starting at Wet Cement Productions at the beginning of May. I'll be working on the Roach Approach series as well as other various projects. We're very excited and looking forward to moving back to Minnesota and back to family.

-Drew

Nekkid!

2006-04-06T15:34:00.000-06:00

Just messing around.

-Drew

Gaaahh!!!

2006-04-04T10:58:00.000-06:00

As many of you know, I'm graduating from college in three weeks. As much as I would have liked, I will not be showing a finished film at the grad show. That was largely the reason that I wanted to put the project on hold. I didn't want to rush it. At the same time, I'm not abandoning it at all. To give a more realistic timeline on the project, I hope to have it finished over the summer. In fact, I'm currently making some improvements on the character that I really think will make it a better film. Here's a quick peek at what's changing.

There is also another reason I wanted to wait on the film for the time being. I have spent a huge amount of effort in trying to learn character animation in my time at school. This pursuit has largely been self-motivated and self-sustained. I've scraped thru my dynamics and video production classes by shear luck, carving out as much time in them to really hammer on learning character. I've relied on other resources like people I've met in the industry, Keith's VTS and the profound generosity and critiques of one Kevan Shorey. Not to say that I'm an expert at all, but I think I'm starting to understand it a little. Call it spite, but I feel that allowing the school to take credit for the film being accomplished during my time there is a little dishonest. While I've been greatful for the time that school has given me to pursue this film, I'm still a little annoyed that there hasn't been more instruction on how to make a film, how to work out a story, how to define a character, how to make things move convincingly etc... You know, animaiton stuff. I don't know if this is clear at all, but since this was such a personal endeavor, releasing it after I'm out of school seems to be the only honest way to do so.

-Drew

Shelved...

2006-03-21T20:32:00.000-07:00

I've given this much thought and as for where I am in my film (simultaneously where I am in my understanding of animation) I am officially shelving Buzz'd for the time being. I realized in listening to Carlos talk about animation and filmmaking that I really have a long way to go. Given that there are still some basic principles of animation in general that I have yet to address, I cannot justify throwing together a half-baked idea just for the sake of my grad-show. I feel the work that I have put into the project, as primitive as it may look, deserves the time to finish it properly.

This is not to say that I am giving up on the film. In fact, I've just recently been re-working the main character to have a more readable face and have made significant changes to the overall story for the sake of clarity. But I just don't feel that I have the story or the animation where I want them to be in order to call it done. I am for-going finishing this project for the sake of doing more animation tests as well as finishing up some dialogue pieces that I started a long time ago. These will be focused learning exercises and should prove to be better pieces for a final demo reel than a work-in-progress student film. Quite frankly, after my experience here at school, I don't want to call this a "student film." Not from this school anyway.
I appreciate all of the help and input I've gotten from various people over the past few months. Everyone has been encouraging and supportive. This has been a definite learning experience and I don't at all want to discount that. I've learned about rigging, file management and more than I ever cared to about shaders;) I finally feel like I have the ability to make a second run at this thing in the future and have something that will be more successful than if I were to push the current underdeveloped project out of the nest.

-Drew

Carlos Baena in Denver!

2006-03-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

Animator in Action

Well this was a really great weekend. Where do I start? First off, I just want to say "thank you" to everyone who made this weekend possible: VA at RMCAD, Colorado ASIFA, and of course Carlos and the folks over at AM. It was a really great time for everyone involved. The talks were really great. I''ll probably post some of the notes I took in the next few weeks, but I'm still processing a lot of the info.

Carlos and Shabaaz

Todd, Aaron, Sara, Me and Carlos

Friday, Carlos talked to the school covering everything from anticipation to camera choices when making a short film. It was an intense crash course on everything animation in about 3 hours. Incidentally, he was only scheduled to talk for two hours, but the stuff kept coming. I know it was really helpful to a lot of folks, myself included. That same evening, he talked at the ASIFA meeting. More pros and students from both AIC and UCD at this one. I also got to meet four AM students that I didn't even know were in the area. So here's to Shabaaz, Aaron, Sara and Todd. Really great boarding with you guys as well. So that was Saturday and after that, Carlos and I met with Sam Fleming and Evert Brown for dinner in Boulder. Didn't get to see the Mork and Mindy house, maybe next time to send pictures to Jason. I even grabbed a Boulder map for you, man, but I forgot to send it with.

Sunday was probably the best day for me. We got to the airport about an hour and a half early and settled ourselves at a little place in the food court at DIA. Carlos went thru my reel and wow... Just the insight that he brought was awesome. What an eye. A little unnerving at times, too. It was sort of like when you're at the dentist and he asks you, "Have you been flossing?" You know that you can't lie because he's staring at the evidence right there. But you pull yourself together anyway and say, "Uh hunh" as drool runs down onto your neck. Anyway, Sam told him to be rough on me and he certainly pulled no punches. It was one of the most helpful crits I've gotten. Almost made the poor guy late for his plane, though. Sorry man.

So that was it. That was the nutshell version of this past weekend. Stay tuned because, like I said, it was a crazy weekend and I really haven't had time to process all the details yet. Quite amazing and really helpful to get me focused back on animation and less on having "a finished film for graduation." Films are great and I still want to finish it because I am liking where the story is going, but I really should be concentrating on acting tests and locomotion. Plus there are some things about the character design that could use some work. When Carlos pointed out that the nose sometimes looked like a bottom lip, it got me thinking about rebuilding... AGAIN! Needless to say, I've got some flossing to do. And not in the gangsta' rap kinda way.

-Drew

Workflow Anxiety and Animator's Block Part 1

2006-02-28T19:22:00.000-07:00

Verbose, yes but it's a tutorial of sorts. So let's get into it.

Background

When you've looked at a scene (or in my case, a sequence of scenes) so many times that looking at it one more time will make you want to puke. Trying to clear your mind, you dig deep and hope that what comes out of your excavation is pure gold. Not really what usually happens, but I do have some workflow techniques that have a tendancy to eliminate this "Animator's Block."

One of the first articles that I read about 3D animation workflow was Keith Lango's Pose-to-Pose tutorial. Really good stuff. Great foundation for developing a technique. But after a while, I started to get the feeling that I was going thru a formula to try to get a result. This was not any fault of the tutorial, let me be blatantly clear about that. I owe a lot of the way I currently work to what I've learned from Keith. My problem is that when something works one time, I like it to work all of the time. When it doesn't I get frustrated. I heard once that the definition of ignorance is attempting the same thing over and over again, each time expecting a different result. I find myself following the steps of the p-t-p method very closely. When I first started, I'd have the page bookmarked and would literally go thru and decide whether or not I was ready to "change things from stepped to linear." I actually would get anxious about stuff like that and would get choked up artistically. (btw I get the same way when I'm learning anything new. You should have seen me when I took the test to get my license! Not pretty.) This leads us to the simple question of "what now?" Well there has to be some way to make it your own. There has to be a personal element the the equation of a+b+c=good performance and animation. This is, in part, an accumulation of what I've learned in studying animation. It's an evolving technique and one that has come as an amalgam of reading. It's pretty hard to cite where everything came from, but you can get a pretty good idea of that by looking at my "links" section. It is also not by any means something to be taken as "the right way." This is what I do and it seems to work for me. Maybe it will help others out.

Planning

I usually like to sit and think a lot about a scene or sequence that I'm working on. I ride the bus here in Denver and it's about a 45 minute ride one way. So having time to think about what I want to do is really not a problem. If I get stuck or really don't know what a move should look like, I'll shooot some reference to get the ball rolling. I lay out most of my scenes with Jason Schleifer's Grease Pencil and my little Graphire. It works really well for getting a quick and dirty idea (minds out of the gutter, people) of what you want to do in the scene. If there is any kind of major action, I'll scribble out some poses and get things going. For more subtle stuff, I'll forgo this step and jump right into Maya. I'll still think about the scene, but if the poses are really similar, I prefer to do my "sketching" with gimbals. It's sort of like sculpting. You just sort of move things around and get a feel for where things are rotating. This also gives you an edge on the dreaded gimbal lock. When you get your hands dirty and move the joints around right off the bat, you get a sense for where they should go next instead of blindly posing the character. Think of it as playing with G I Joes. You can't plan out what they're going to do for too long, or playing will be boring.

Posing

The next thing I like to do is something Bobby Beck said that he does when he starts a scene. Take the character and put him or her into some poses that reflect the point of the scene and the attitude that fits. Just do some experimenting and set keys sequentially so that you can scrub thru them to view them in context of one another. This is the equivilant of traditional "flipping" or "rolling" pages. I prefer this method to thumbnailing for a couple of reasons. The first is that it allows the animator to see the poses with some kind of motion instead of looking at them in tiles on a page and guessing whether or not they work together. Most of the traditional guys reading this will probably cringe because most of the ones that I've met have a really good eye for this stuff anyway and could tell right off the bat whether or not something is going to work. I'm not smart enough to see that. I really haven't developed an eye for being able make that kind of call. The other reason I like to do this is because you eliminate having to translate drawings from a page into data points on the compy. It's all done in one step.

Just Jumping In

I know that TONS of people say that you're supposed to plan out as much as you can before you even get into the scene. That is true in a lot of people's workflow, but I like Maya. Once I have the character in that 50% grey background, I feel like I have control. I feel like it's just a matter of time before I can find what I was looking for. I start deciding whether or not the poses I've made are communicative enough. If they have a sufficient line of action. I'll cover what I mean by sufficient later. The problem with a lot of animation does break down into problems with pose and timing. I hope Mr. Lango doesn't have a patent on that phrase... But truly, I think that having an idea of what the final action will look like is key. Not nailing the poses right off the bat. Afterall, Animation is performance and action. If you can establish those early on, you can clean up the poses later.

Time Doesn't Exist... Or Does It?

Once I have the poses pretty well established and in sequential order, I'll start messing around with timing. Now I'm not going to go into detail about timing and phrasing and all that. It would be really dull and I'd probably confuse you (and myself) into a tizzy. Suffice to say that I will make sure my splines are set to "clamped" in Maya. This keeps the feet where they are supposed to be for one, while also giving you a relative idea of what the computer thinks of the keys you've set. I'll shuffle around my keys establishing my holds and also the overall feel of the scene.

Refining the Poses

Once I get the flow for a scene and how the general timing will work, every time I will go back and revisit the poses. This is what I meant earlier by sufficient. I like to get an idea of how the character is going to move around in space before I spend a lot of time on the final poses that I will use. They are usually pretty close, but pushed to be more extreme and with a cleaner line. This may be a little backwards from most, but it gives me a fresh eye for what is going on and allows me to be a little more objective. You can ask other people for their opinion, but ultimately, it's your eye that is going to get the idea of a scene across. One of the keys to being able to do all this "shuffling around" is organizing your keys. For more info on that, see Keith's site. He's absolutely spot on.

In Closing

Well, it's late and I should be animating right now, but I hope that this helps a little bit. I like to think of it as a hybrid of methods. I would not call this "straight ahead" because I still use p-t-p methodology, but it isn't the same formula of steps as p-t-p. This is not to say that my way of working will work for anyone else or that it is in any way better than any other method, but it is what I have found to work pretty well for getting a good idea of where the scene is going in a sort of, shoot from the hip pose-to-pose method. A bit of a contradiction, but that's sort of my personality coming thru. I'll go more into what I do once things are established in the near future, but until then, any comments or thoughts are welcome on the subject.

-Drew

Lango-ed!

2006-02-28T10:37:00.001-07:00

Well this is cool. Just poking around as usual on Keith's site and much to my suprise, a link! Thanks Keith. And consequently, the "rockin beat" is German oompah music. The update looks nice there, sir.

-Drew

With a Little Help from My Friends Part 2

2006-02-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

Like I've said before, I don't do shaders. Not well anyway. I don't have an understanding of that. I don't have an interest in them at all. I like animation. But also as an artist, I don't like things to look like whipped dog turds in a blender. So part of completing a project successfully is to realize what your strengths are and to realize the strengths of those around you. My friend Vern has a pretty good understanding of how shaders work and with some help from him, he completely tore apart my scene, rebuilt it and... voila! I'm posting both versions side by side to showcase the difference in our approach. I know that this is supposed to be an animation blog with helpful tips on stuff. But knowing that you don't have to do it all to be successful is a valuable piece of info.

Mine...
Vern's...
Incidentally, I do know a little about shaders and was able to make some changes when he was done. Enjoy.

-Drew

Thru the Eyes of a Child...

2006-02-14T18:08:00.000-07:00

There are many times when animators get frustrated. When the technical crap gets in the way, when you can't figure out which curve is causing that awful pop in the elbow, when you've painted the weights just right in one area just to realize that you created a bigger problem somewhere else. There are other times when you doubt your ability to tell a story. When you have to rely on an untrained sense of story because entertainment isn't something you can get training in. Then there are times when things work. When you finish a scene and it is everything you hoped for. The arcs are there and the timing is just right. All of the terms that you have laboriously tried to memorize like spacing or overlap don't matter because the scene just works.

I just today experienced such inspiration. One of my instructors brought four of his five kids into class for a couple minutes. He lovingly pointed out "the Jimmy Neutron Baby" and the others as well. They promptly ask for candy from mom and wander about the classroom looking eagerly over everyone's shoulders. The oldest girl, Sarah who is six, sits down next to me as I play the scene that I had just finished up. The first thing she says is, "You're a good designer." Aww, that's cute. Thanks little girl. Kids, huh? The next thing that she says blew me away. She views the scene thoughtfully a few more times as it loops in Quicktime. "The bee stings him because there is a beehive right there. And he has a flower. Bees like flowers." Wow!!! She gets it. She understood the story and the reason for the conflict. I was absolutely blown away. Up until this point I've been hoping that the concept will get across. Hoping that I didn't put all this effort into something that is animated servicibly, but is weak in the story department. With no preconceptions about what "good animation" is, little Sarah with three sentences summed up what is happening. (Well actually, two sentences and a sentence fragment. You can't start a sentence with a conjunction, but hey, she's six and she liked my film, so I'll let it slide.)

Kids don't respond to pleasing arcs or realistic fur. They don't respond to sub-surface scattering or Global Illumination. Kids and grown up type people respond to story-telling. They respond to something that they can either relate to or that they recognize as truth. Bees like flowers. Whether Sarah discovered this from Discovery Kids or from looking at flowers in her mom's garden as bees swarmed around them doesn't really matter. What matters is being able to relate on a simple level. That is where story-telling comes from. That is why films become classics. Because they give the audience something that is familiar.

Thank you, Sarah.

-Drew

Finally, A Full-Color Render!!!!

2006-02-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

While some would argue that I should be working on the actual animation of this film, there is also something to be said for having a product that is not laboriously tedious to watch. Hopefully the work I've done in the last couple of weeks has been worth it. No more Maya gray. The trained eye will notice that all I am using to light the scene is the default Final Gather setting in Mental Ray. I'll have to wait for another boring day in one of my superfluous classes to do the final lighting and get into the UV editor to work out those pesky problems with the bump map on the tree.

I've also spent the time working out some issues with the rig and finishing a scene. I am posting a playblast of that scene as well right here. It is a little out of context, but I think it's one of the more successful scenes so far. It is the moment of confrontation. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

-Drew

Ajay's Hilarious!

2006-02-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

But seriously, you need to check this out.

-Drew

Carlos Baena and a New Demo

2006-01-27T13:53:00.000-07:00

Well thanks to Kevan, Brett and Sam, I've gotten some fixes done on my reel so I'm posting it again. The film is getting closer to being done. The story is finished, but I'm not going to tell you how it ends, 'cuz I'm sneaky like that. Again, it's a big file, because I'm not so good at figuring out compression , so it's probably best to right click on the image and "save as."In other news, Carlos Baena from Animation Mentor and Pixar Animation Studios will be coming to the school here in Colorado this March. Pretty exciting. I just finished up the poster and am posting that here as well. Keep in mind, I am an animator and I haven't the slightest idea what kerning is so for all you Graphic Design guys out there, you have my humble apology. Take care and tell me what you think.

-Drew

What!? Now I'm a Flasher!?

2006-01-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

Well, one of the required classes here at school is a Flash class. Now I don't think I'd really have a problem with this if I wasn't three months away from graduation and still wanting to just animate. But what I really want to do is animate. I don't want to get bogged down with technical crap. So instead of learning an entirely new interface and workflow for setting keys and whatnot, I decided to give the good ol' Vector renderer a shot. So all I had to do was concentrate on animation and then tweaking a couple of settings in the render globals menu. Now as you can see, I kept it simple and used a very simple setup. The ball is even from someone else. Check out this site for more info about cool rigs and setups.

Anyway, the point that I rapidly digress from is this: Don't let software get in the way of learning animation. I'm not that technically savvy (blanket understatement of the year) but I know what I want to do as a career and I work very hard not to let anything get in the way of that.

ps. This quick little exercise was inspired by Keith's last VTS. Just want to give credit where it's due.

-drew

I'm Such a Tool!

2006-01-17T13:46:00.000-07:00

Well, the drawings the marketing department here at school asked for are being included in the new promotional material for their Pre-College Art Academy. Here's a scan of what is being used. This is from when I was still exploring attitudes for my character, Dudley. I just did the drawings, not the page layout and design. I wish some of those classes were offered as part of the regular curriculum... ahh, sigh! Oh well.

-drew

Template Change

2006-01-17T12:53:00.000-07:00

Well I really got sick of looking at the original template I used to start this blog. So I picked a different one. I like it because it's not as common and it's not as busy with all the dots. Same info, though.

-drew

Well this was Unexpected...

2006-01-12T08:18:00.000-07:00

Well, good news. This isn't animation related, but I hope you all will allow me a little time to beam with pride. I know I've let some of you know already, but here's the official announcement. My lovely wife is pregnant. We should be welcoming a wriggling little kid (not sure what kind yet) into the world in late July. The thing that scares me is that I didn't have to pass a test or anything. I never got a license or a certificate or anything. We're just pregnant, that's all.

We're super excited, she's sick and I'm worried about a job (as usual) but we're trusting that all is going to work out.

Proud father-to-be,
-drew

Second Pass at the Dialogue

2006-01-10T17:03:00.000-07:00

Here is a cleaned up version of the dialogue I'm working with. It's also the whole quote. I won't go to extremes with explanation of what is going on here. Let me know if you think it works or not.

Second Pass on Dustin Hoffman Line

-drew

Demo Reel Questions Answered by Kevan

2006-01-10T10:41:00.000-07:00

Take a look at Kevan's website. He answered some questions I sent him about demo reels. Pretty insightful answers. And also pretty cool that he took the time to post them. Thanks Kevan!

-drew

Updates to the "Links" Section

2006-01-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

Hey, no new animation this time, but I've updated my Links. Just a little cleaner and there's some new stuff there. Definitely check it out. Oh, and here's a little cartoon my friend Ajay sent me. I don't know where he got it, but it made me laugh.

-drew

Dialogue Test and a Render. Oooo!

2006-01-04T09:50:00.000-07:00

I've had some time off from school and so I've been able to work on my film a lot more. Also thanks to Kevan Shorey for some great input on the film. You've given me more to go on than a lot of my classes at school have, man.

I also am working on a couple of acting tests at the moment. One is just about ready to get out of linear (yes Keith, I'm still calling it animation and I'm not "just blocking," but that's the phase of animation I'm in.) Until then, here's a quick preview. Crits are more than welcome and I appreciate any input for that matter. I love Dustin Hoffman and his attitude in this clip is so cocky that I couldn't resist.

Yes, that is a Waffle House sign in the background and yes, it does have two letters burnt out. I don't think I've ever seen one that wasn't like that. If you've never been there, imagine a Denny's entirely peopled with extras from Deliverence.

Stay tuned for updates and progress on the film.

Dustin Hoffman Line

-drew

Video Links

2005-12-13T17:38:00.000-07:00

I'm having some issues right now with the links to my videos. The files are pretty large and take a while to load. The best way right now to view them is to right click and download them. This still may take a while, but I am working on the problem and will be over the Christmas break. I know a couple of people have had issues with the putfile.com files and I'm trying to fix those problems. It's just sort of a round-robin of issues, but all of the links work, the files are just kinda big for the time being.

Happy Holidays everyone and thanks to everyone who has given their comments and critiques on the new stuff. I'm hoping to get a job from the end product, so I'm taking all comments very seriously.

-d

Animation Mentor Invades Colorado

2005-12-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

Well, not exactly, but check this article out of the Boulder Daily Camera. Not that that is a very cool name for a newspaper, but the article is good. I never expected to see this in my local paper. The only thing Boulder is really known for is Mork and Mindy and really really really really bad football. It's really bad. But check out the article. It's a pretty good overview of the program.

-d