"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. :-).

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!

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.

Learn Claymation with Oscar winner Jimmy Picker

In 1985, Academy award winning animator Jimmy Picker came to Quickdraw Animation Society for an animation workshop. Mr. Picker won his Oscar in 1983 for "A Sundae in New York". Part of the fun of this movie is that the characters are all modeled on real or fictional New Yorkers; the singer on the then Mayor of New York, Ed Koch.

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Jimmy Picker has uploaded more of his animation to his YouTube channel at jimmypicker.

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Calgary Cable TV / FM made a documentary of the workshop. Alan Ferguson rescued the VHS EP copy of the video for Quickdraw by copying it to DVD, and Mr. Picker is letting us share it via the Web. The video runs 20 minutes. Mr. Picker shows how he makes his clay figures - without armatures - and the class create their own characters and animate them on 16mm film.

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This video was part of Calgary Cable TV / FM's Art Through a Cable series. You'll see some of Quickdraw's early history and get claymation tips from Jimmy. His show-and-tell starts at about 3 minutes 40 seconds. If you're into claymation, you'll find a wealth of insight here.

Starting at about 14 minutes in, you'll get some idea of what it was like to shoot animation on 16mm film. After shooting, the film had to be processed - which was usually an overnight operation, at least. Not at all like animating with digital technology. In particular, my program StopMotion Station (a free trial is available at StopMotion-Software.com) lets you see the camera's image all the time, play your animation at any time, delete bad frames, and generally have a lot more control of your shooting than you have with a film camera.

Classic Pixillation and Cutouts - Zanymation Magic

Quickdraw Animation Society held their third Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival (GIRAF) November 2 -3. I try not to let one pass without having an animation in the festival, so I edited a movie out of animations created by the instructors and facilitators at Quickdraw's Zanymation events. The movie (ta-DAA!):

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(Summary) Animation compilation, various artists, sound design and editing by Andrew Jaremko. All animation created using my program StopMotion Station. Please feel free to rate or comment on this video at Zanymation Magic on Google Videos.

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"Zanymation Magic" wasn't in the main festival screenings. Instead, Keith Murray decided to run it as an installation. I made a looping DVD and "Zanymation Magic" ran continuously in the classroom space. I suspect the soundtrack got a little annoying for the people in the classroom doing cameraless 16mm film. I could occasionally hear the track next door in what we call the sunroom, where we were doing pixillation and lightning doodles, live with the attendees.

Photo Gallery of GIRAF 3 courtesy of Cineart Photography.

It was an honor to have Zanymation Magic run continuously for anyone who cared to watch. (I actually caught some people watching it!) I'll have more to say about this movie and about our lightning doodles in later posts. For now, watch and enjoy!

A mini-lockdown Nov. 10

The November 10 Zanymation Workshop on Stopmotion Station at QAS went well and was a lot of fun for the seven people attending. Here's a quick look:

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(Summary) In the first part of the workshop, we animated to a soundtrack. I managed to animate and talk at the same time. We took a break and Alan Ferguson animated his version in about 30 minutes.

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I had thought to have two segments in the workshop: one on animating to a soundtrack and one on copying motion from one movie to another. I hadn't thought to allow time for the group to try things out, but that's what I should have done, and it's what I'll plan for next time. As it is, we did two animations to my track, and could have done more.

In an "animation lockdown" participants spend an "insanely intense" period of time creating a movie. Quickdraw's first Animation Lockdown happened over three days, with 3 teams animating to a 30 second soundtrack. Judging by Alan's performance on Saturday, we could have a StopMotion Station Lockdown that lasted just one day. The 4 hour workshop would have been enough time for a "mini lockdown" with cutouts or plastic shapes or clay or other things that lend themselves to improvisation in front of a camera.

I used a "buddha board" for part of my animation. This is a sheet of paper that darkens when it's wet, with the marks fading as the water dries. I hadn't worked with it before and wanted to try it. It's fun and very immediate.

Trying two distinct techniques in one day was definitely too much. Just like in a movie, it's best to focus on one thing and take it as far as you can. I'll be seeing just how far I can take my ideas...

StopMotion Station workshop synopsis

Here's the 45 second promo video for my Saturday, November 10 2007 workshop at Quickdraw Animation Society.

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(Summary) In the workshop we'll create an animation in sync with a soundtrack and see how to copy motion from one movie to another. I'll answer questions about StopMotion Station and we'll talk about your animation challenges.

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The cutout animation is fresh today. I was (of course) using the Dial feature in StopMotion Station to stay in sync with the soundtrack. I'm still learning how to think about motion while watching the counter to make sure I hit my marks. It's one of the things any actor has to do; in animation, we're doing it in slow motion.

The "gravel dancer" is an example of copying motion from one movie to another. In this case, it's live action copied to aquarium gravel. Working with sand, stones, seeds, beads or other loose material is almost another whole category of classic animation. Wikipedia has a short article on Sand Animation, with links to performance artists and animators.

A minor update to StopMotion Station

I've made a minor change to StopMotion Station based on a workshop that I'll be doing at Quickdraw Animation Society (QAS) on November 10, 2007. One of the things I'll be doing in the workshop is animating in sync with a soundtrack. I animated to a soundtrack during QAS's Animation Lockdown earlier this year, and the sync was perfect; but I've realized I could make working with a soundtrack better and easier.

To animate to a soundtrack you use StopMotion Station's Dial counters. Just press the D key when you're Shooting or Viewing a movie, and the Dial overlay will pop up. Press D again to hide the Dial. The Dial includes two counters: a footage counter that shows you how many frames are in your current folder, and a frame counter that keeps track of how many frames you've shot since the last time you reset it (by pressing Alt-D).

I had set up the footage counter to be a literal footage counter - counting in frames, feet of 35 mm film (16 frames per foot) or 16mm feet (40 frames per foot). This was a throwback to animation stands, where that's how you kept track of your shooting. Working on a little promo video for the November workshop, I realized it would be a lot more useful to show the footage as seconds and frames.

So now (Ta-DAA) the footage counter shows frames or seconds and frames. And you can choose 30 frames per second, for working in NTSC video; 25 frames per second, for PAL video; or 24 frames per second for working film style. The Other options tab of the Setup dialog lets you choose the one you want.

This change lets us break down a soundtrack at the frame rate of the movie we're making and use those time and frame counts directly when we're animating. This also shows an important facet of my programming: I actually use my software in real-life creation and make the changes that I find genuinely helpful.

I'll be resubmitting StopMotion Station for the malware-free certifications. I also plan to shoot video at my QAS workshop, so you'll see me in action animating to a (short) soundtrack. The other technique I'll demonstrate is copying motion from one movie to another, a little like rotoscoping. If you check out my movie "Beginning" at Stopmotion-Software.com you'll see some of this at 1:14, where I copied a dancer's motion in aquarium gravel.

The updated StopMotion Station 1.3 installer is now online at Stopmotion-Software.com. If you've purchased StopMotion Station, the license file I emailed you works with the updated version as well. Just download the new installer, uninstall StopMotion Station, reinstall it from the new download, and unlock it as per the instructions in the email.

Happy animating!