Snowflake Phenakistoscopes

A phenakistoscope is an animation toy from the 1830s that takes flat artwork and turns it into a short animated movie.

You spin the disks and look through the slots, which act as a shutter. In a modern variation, the slots are on the artwork disk. You mount the disk on a pivot and spin the disk while looking through the slots into a mirror.

Here's a 12 frame phenakistoscope that I designed:


Right click on the image to download a 1600x1600 black and white version suitable for printing out.

Here's what the happy face looks like in motion, at 12 frames per second:

Each frame in the 12 frame phenakistoscope is rotated 30 degrees from the previous frame. It struck me that a snowflake makes very pretty flat artwork, with very nice hexagonal symmetry. That makes for a 6 frame phenakistoscope, with each frame rotated 60 degrees from the previous frame.

You can turn a snowflake into a phenakistoscope in your paint software. First, cut the snowflake out from its background, so that any color gradient won't rotate in the background. Then, duplicate the snowflake layer 5 times for a total of 6 layers. Rotate 5 of the layers to 60, 120, 180, 240, and 300 degrees from the original orientation. (You may have to use -120 and -60 degrees for the last two in programs like Photoshop that only allow rotations between -180 and 180 degrees.) Line up the snowflakes so that some feature(s) on all of them are in line - it might be the center point, or an inner hexagon, or one of the dendrites. Create a background and merge it with each of the six snowflake layers. Then output the image to a GIF animation and your snowflake will spin!

Details on the snowflakes seem to pulsate (animators call it "boiling") because snowflakes are never perfectly symmetrical. Here's a "furry" snowflake that shows this boiling even better:

I posted a movie of mine that features my phenakistocopes. Here it is:

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The snowflake images in this post are from SnowCrystals.com. SnowCrystals.com and Dr. Kenneth G. Libbrecht, the photographer and copyright holder, are in no way connected with what I've done here. His very generous copyright policy allows noncommercial use and posting of his images. Many thanks to Dr. Libbrecht!

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"Dance of the Dolls"

"Dance of the Dolls" is a thoroughly mixed production format movie made with the aid of my program StopMotion Station.

The producers, Johnson Imagineering, have kindly let me embed the movie here. They show us what can be done with a vision, imagination, and a liberal dose of digital technology. Shall we dance?

If you have a movie you've made with the help of any of my software, I'd love to see it. Just email me at StopMotion-Software.com.

Directing the Story by Francis Glebas

The subtitle of this book is "Professional Storytelling and Storyboarding Techniques for Live Action and Animation" - which almost sums it up. I'd go further and add "Essential" to that subtitle. Click on the image, or on the following link, to read a substantial excerpt from Directing the Story on Google Books.

If you've opened up the book preview (it'll open in a new tab or new window), look at the table of contents. (I really love it when publishers make important excerpts from the books available - I don't have to waste space here and we all get to see the real thing.) He starts by asking "Why do we watch (movies)?" and the theme of asking fundamental questions continues throughout the book.

And he answers the questions, too - using insights from modern neuropsychology and scientific understanding of our senses, brains and minds. I admire him for this, as well - I feel that understanding what makes us tick is important for understanding stories, storytelling, characters in stories, and our audiences.

He focuses on cinematically told stories - in which the sequenced images that make up a movie are a language that the director uses to direct the audience's attention and guide them through the movie's story.

The whole book is constructed using storytelling techniques and includes storyboard examples that illuminate the concepts he's discussing. It's not a textbook on storytelling, but there is enough here to go on. It's also not a textbook on drawing, but there's enough drawing instruction and advice in here to improve any storyboard artist's work.

I love this book and everyone who tells stories in any of the movie media needs it. He provides a complete bibliography, so you can find out more about any of the topics he covers. This book is the keystone of an animator's library.



The best place I found for more about Mr. Glebas is his portfolio website. He tells great stories from his career in the book, too.

Stop Motion Magazine

I've just found out about a new online magazine devoted specifically to stop motion animation in all its many guises. Stop Motion Magazine will be published monthly and is free to view or download. The August 2009 issue is available now!



The 48 pages include interviews with Stephen Chiodo, Ron Cole, Justin and Shel Rasch, and Misha Klein. (I admit that I have to read the interviews to find out who these people are! :-[ ) A Toon Boom 5 product review and two articles, Simple Wire Rig Construction and Wire Rig Removal (that's removing flying rigs, actually, not the wire rigs in your characters) round out the issue. The writing style is clear, and I think every stop motion animator will find something valuable in the magazine. Check it out!

Tony White's "Endangered Species"

Tony White is an animator and teacher who is passionate about classic drawn animation - created one frame at a time. Every animator should see his ode to classic animation: Endangered Species.




I wasn't able to find an online biography of Tony White, but this excerpt from his book, Animation From Pencils to Pixels, will tell you a little about him:

"Along my career path, I have studied with some of the greatest names in animation: the late Ken Harris (master “Bugs Bunny” and “Roadrunner” animator from the Warner Brothers studio) and Art Babbitt (animator on films such as “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia” during the golden age of Disney). I served (and survived) as Richard Williams’ (three-time Academy Award winner and author of the exceptional “Animator’s Survival Kit”) own personal assistant for two years. This wonderful exposure to the very best talents the industry can offer enabled me to absorb the finer secrets of all the great traditions at a very early age."

As I write this, I haven't finished reading the book, but I can tell that it's an essential part of any animator (professional or amateur) or animation student's library. It's a book that I wish I had written - or, more accurately, that I wish I could have written.

Check out this very substantial excerpt on Google Books:

Animation From Pencils to Pixels:
Classical Techniques for Digital Animation


And you can buy the book at Amazon.com:


Animation From Pencils to Pixels


I particularly like Tony's Dedication:

This book is dedicated to
all those selfless pencils
who sacrificed everything
in the pursuit of the
animated dream!

There's definitely a movie - or two - in that tale of heroic sacrifice, desire, partnership and conflict, betrayal and redemption, in pursuit of animated dreams.

Classic Animation Equipmen Projects from Instructables

When you think classic animation, you think cartoons. To do classic cartoon animation you really need a way of holding your drawings in alignment ("registration") and seeing what you've already drawn while you're making the next drawing.

The simplest registration system is "corner registration" - you just line up the corners of your stack of paper. Don't laugh at it - two time Academy Award nominee animator (Blackfly (1991), Nibbles (2003)) Chris Hinton uses corner registration for at least some of his work, including "Nibbles". But the usual way is to punch holes in your animation paper and use a "peg bar" to keep the pages lined up.

The industry standard Acme peg bars aren't in every stationer's; to use them you need an expensive punch or pre-punched paper - also a specialty item. Standard 3 hole punches will work - and here's a project from Instructables.com that shows you how to make the peg bar you need. It also shows how to make the light box or tracing table that you'll want for tracing your drawings.

Cheap Animation Table

Here's another light box, this time built into an old briefcase for compact storage and easy portability.

Cheap Light Box

These are great ideas - and Instructables.com is full of ideas for everything you want to do. Explore, enjoy, and contribute your own projects!

"Sleepyhead"

And now the result of the lockdown: here's the movie. The audience enjoyed it at the party, laughed at the right places, and gave it a good round of applause.



I like what I did; the virtual cutout animation lets me use squash, stretch, motion blur, and transparency with cutouts. The "electric arc" that the pencil uses to open my head is "virtual progressive" animation - I was drawing it on a separate layer and partially erasing each previous drawing so the successive arcs fade away. Enjoy my movie!

Monday at the Lockdown

It's Monday May 18, 12:20 as I write this and all files are due on Quickdraw's server so the animations can be compiled to DVD. I'm glad to say I completed a soundtrack this morning - it's only mostly snores, not all snores. "Sleepyhead" is now 1 minute 30 seconds.

Everybody's packing up and the tone of the place is tired but happy. I even managed a few brief blog posts, as promised. I've also made a little video about how I've been working; as I write this, I've uploaded it to YouTube and am waiting for it to finish processing. But it's time to pack up and leave - I have to rest up before the party.

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Here's the video showing how I do the "virtual cutout animation" in Photoshop 7 using my programs StopMotion FrameCollector and StopMotion FlipView. I make two mistakes in the video - can you spot them? I guess I'm tired.

Sunday at the Lockdown

It's 12:45 pm as I write this... I only stayed until 9 pm yesterday though the lockdown went until 11 pm. I look forward to the screening - if only because it'll be finished then!

So far today I've done two shots, and I've scaled back (of course) on my ambitions - making a complete movie comes first, so I need to make sure I have an ending before I get fancy with what's in between. Here's a frame from the second shot this morning.



The pencil is busy stirring the inside of my head and we'll see what bubbles out. A metaphor for the lockdown itself...

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It's 3 pm. Warner Brothers cartoons are playing in the classroom and Nightmare Before Christmas is on in the large project room next door. I've shot the last shot - not so much that I've done everything I wanted but because it's time to move on to fine tuning the editing. Here's a frame from the final zoom:



After the premiere tomorrow I'll write more about it. Meanwhile, editing awaits!

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It's now 4:10 pm and I'm rendering an assembly of "Sleepyhead" on Norman, the Windows 98 machine I'm using for editing. (I name my computers for people I think are noteworthy - which Norman do you think I'm thinking of? My notebook is Lumiere - for the Lumiere brothers who first projected movies about 1896. It's where all us moviemakers come from.)

With about 15 seconds of titles added, the running time is close on 1 minute 25 seconds. I'm thinking that the soundtrack will consist of snoring - obvious, but if it'll work and be reasonably easy to do, why not.

If you've been checking my sample frames, you'll have noticed that they're 1280x960 pixels. I decided on the size because it gives more control over motion and scaling the images smaller reduces artifacts. For the screening, Quickdraw needs a DV/DVD compatible file; scaling down to 720x480 works well. At least in my experience.

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It's now 7:45 pm; I came back to add the mouth positions for the snores... and tonight (as you may well expect) is busy. Here's a view of animators completing their movies in the large project room.



I've reviewed the snore mouths; they'll do. Sound tomorrow morning and a complete movie by noon! And then in front of an audience tomorrow night: I can already hear the applause. :-).

Saturday at the Lockdown

Following my resolve: it's just 12:45 mountain daylight time and here's a post. Writing a bit about what I'm doing should be a nice break from the work - although it would be very easy to forget.

Here's me in the QAS classroom, set up so my notebook feels more like a desktop machine. Animators are everywhere today! (Photo by Alan Ferguson)



And here's a screenshot of what I'm doing - I've set up my first shot (this camera angle will appear several times in the movie) and done a trial capture; it's showing in FlipView. The rig is working - and now to animate.

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It's now 6:20 pm and I'm making some progress; I have an assembly totalling 32 seconds so far. All of us animators are concentrating and it's actually quiet in here... Here's an image from what I've done. A pencil tapping on my head...

Lockdown Preparation

The first part of the Quickdraw Animation Lockdown starts in two hours; I'm excited! I've been preparing - some preparation is permitted by the rules; see the first Lockdown post. Some preparation is technical and some (for want of a better word) artistic.

Technical - I've made sure that the computers I'm using will play together politely. I'm animating with Photoshop and my programs Stopmotion FrameCollector and StopMotion FlipView. I'm animating on my modern notebook computer for speed and convenience; it's running Windows Vista. I'll be assembling the movie on a much older machine running Windows 98 because it will run the editing and compositing software that I'm proficient with. And being proficient is what the lockdown needs - it's not a time to be learning new software. I also tested quick ways of getting a video onto YouTube - if time permits, I'll get a video or two into this blog.

Artistic - I'm going to be using my face as the main character, with a supporting cast of common artistic items. I've shot some more images of my face and prepped a pencil and some brushes I imaged using a scanner. The style is mainly cutout animation, like the animated GIFs I talked about earlier; here's a refresher:



What I'm doing must be "virtual cutout animation" - I'm not working with real cutouts, after all. The movie is narrative rather than abstract; I have it outlined in my head. We'll see if I've got the chops to do what I intend. Of course, after it's done, I'll say it's just what I intended all along!

And by the way - the movie I edited from animations done during Quickdraw's Zanymation animation events, Zanymation Magic, leads off the Lockdown and QAS 25th Anniversary party screenings on Monday May 18. Here's the movie - also in higher resolution. Enjoy!

Air and Lockdown

Alan Ferguson (Quickdraw Animation Society's Digital Production Coordinator) and I made Air in 2007. Alan had been working on a CG eye for a project with a sculptor and I had been playing with Photoshop filter treatments of time lapse clouds. He suggested we combine the two ideas and see where the comibination would take us.

Air is the result; it plays back on a miniature screen in the sculpture's eye, and was screened in Quickdraw's 2007 GIRAF Animation Festival. We didn't enter it in other festivals, though we should have. I have to get into the habit of exploiting the things I do for all they're worth...

And speaking of which - I've been accepted into the QAS lockdown. I'm "Team Head", one of 13 teams and 26 people participating. The exploitation: I want to blow people away with what I do using the helper programs I wrote, to get them excited and start buying my software. The team list is:

-TOUCHING STRANGERS
-TROUBLE AND THE LONELY ONES
-LAMP
-Team SASHKO
-Helen+Talsa+Maria
-YELLOW RABBIT
-TRANNIS
-SHYRA DE SOUZA
-TEAM AHEAD
-Jordan+Paris
-MEGS, BENNY & JUNE
-JOHN LENNON IN SPACE
-SQUARE FRAME RULE

Alan and Dave Ratzlaff (QAS's Film Production Coordinator) say that the lockdown is going to pretty much max out Quickdraw's production spaces. It'll be a great weekend - busy, crowded, maybe noisy. I'll be animating Photoshop style and using some of what I've learned about Photoshop filters in the animation. I'll post my movie here after the premiere at the post-lockdown party!

The Animation Tips and Tricks Blog

I've set up a Google Alert for the phrase "make your own animation" and every day I get links to new pages on websites and new posts in blogs. Some of the links only use part of the phrase - like "your own" or "make your" - but there's always some interesting stuff. (You should definitely set up a Google Alert for anything that interests you!)

Once in a while, great stuff shows up that might have been hard to find in a more normal search. Like a blog that just turned up:

The Animation Tips and Tricks Blog

I've only browsed a few of the posts so far but what I've seen is great. The animators are working with CG primarily but what they say applies to all animation. One that particularly caught my eye was

How Important Is an Art Background for an Animator Who Is Starting Out?

You'll have to read his answer to that question yourself - I'm not going to give it away. Suffice it to say that it reassured me in my quest to create cool animation.

If you're just getting started in animation, some of it might seem too deep or less than comprehensible. But keep animating, keep reading, and find animators to hang around with and it will all start to make sense.

My animation: texTTure and QAS lockdown

I've finally uploaded a "higher quality" video to YouTube - and I like the results. The upload is my abstract animation texTTure (2008) which was screened at Quickdraw Animation Society's GIRAF 4 animation festival.





I made this movie by saving sequential frames from Photoshop 4 and Photoshop 7, then processing images with Photoshop filters and compositing elements together. I animated the wipes that make the transitions between the "looks" by hand as well.

Saving sequential frames and naming them manually would be a real drag and very slow - if I hadn't written a helper program, StopMotion FrameCollector. I set up a Photoshop action to save a copy of my image and assigned the action to a function key. c watches a target folder, and every time one of the Photoshop saves shows up, FrameCollector renames it as a six digit sequential number. Animating in Photoshop (or any paint program, for that matter) becomes just like clicking the shutter button on a single frame movie camera. Quick!

And speaking of quick - Quickdraw Animation Society is holding an Animation Lockdown - a 48 hour animation challenge on May 15 to 18, 2009. I've submitted my entry as an individual and plan to animate using my FrameCollector method. It'll be a challenge - especially since I intend to post small reports on what I'm doing to this blog during the Lockdown.

A History of (Human) Violence

Some animations (and, for that matter, movies generally) have been criticized for their violence. Some violence is funny - slapstick, and other kinds of physical comedy. Some is gruesomely fascinating. But the deeper question is, why is it? What makes it so? Is it part of our human equipment or is it learned?

CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks took the question on in their April 25, 2009 broadcast with a feature documentary "A History of Violence". I found it fascinating. Here's a direct link to an mp3 file of the documentary:

A History of Violence
These ideas are going to inform my animated storytelling. I can never know too much about what we are discovering about ourselves through the brain sciences.

A New Kind of Classic Animation?

Or maybe it's just a new class of animation software. Since I last posted, I've been working on new programs for the Mac and Windows, another web site, and animating using my new programs.

The animated GIF above (which links to my new site, How-To-Make-Your-Own-Animation) is an example of this new type of animation. I don't have a good phrase that sums up what's going on, but it's all about creating the animation frames in paint software - any paint software (and some other programs).

That's always been possible - if you saved the image repeatedly with a new, sequential file name every time you save it. I've done that for a few very short animations and naming each file correctly, manually, completely breaks my artistic concentration. (Richard Williams: "Animation is concentration.")

So I wrote a helper program: StopMotion FrameCollector. Click on the animation below to find out more.



These GIFS were created by saving frames sequentially in Photoshop 7 - which has no built-in animation features, unlike Photoshop CS3 and CS4. You can see the power of Photoshop for animation - I've got drop shadows and layers going on, as well as squash and stretch and motion blur in the top animation. The second animation is nothing fancy, but here's another one showing layers. The technique can be used for any movie format - these animations just happen to be GIFs.