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.