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!
"For making animations, you need 8mm-movie-camera and patience. Then you can animating." - Deburuman
Deburuman is an artist and animator who has generously posted many of his works on YouTube. I've chosen Parts 1 and 2 of his "How to Make an Animation" series for this post. The narration is in Japanese but there are English subtitles.
The only thing that has changed since 1989 when Deburuman made the movies is that you now have a lot more ways to shoot animation, using webcams, video cameras, and digital still cameras. (My animation software is at StopMotion-Software.com.) The Single-8 film he used to make these movies is still available (as is Super-8 film) if you want to shoot on film.
How to Make an Animation Part 1
Deburuman starts with the flipbook and shows just how much work it is to do drawn (cartoon) animation. Claymation and object animation are faster.
How to Make an Animation Part 2
In part 2, Deburuman goes into pixillation, special effects animation, and time lapse photography. His food animations are really clever.
Be sure to have a look at Deburuman's other movies. I just have to include another one here. It's particularly exciting to me because he turns a 12 segment phenakistoscope into an animating dodecahedron.
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.
Jimmy Picker has uploaded more of his animation to his YouTube channel at jimmypicker.
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.
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.
Kyler Kelly made this movie, Crit, using my program StopMotion Station for the animation. He's letting me post it here; I think it's inspiring!
To rate or post a comment on this movie, go to Crit on YouTube.
Crit blends live action and animation into a complete story. Kyler says he used Premiere to combine all the elements to make the finished movie. It's a movie "from the heart"; he's a student and it looks like he's been through some pretty rough critiques. The movie also says you shouldn't underrate the characters you create! Kyler can be reached at kylerk@gmail.com.
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!):
(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.
"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.
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!
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:
(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.
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...
(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. 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.
The theme of this blog is classic animation; my purpose is to get you to create classic animation yourself - but what is classic animation? A quick search on "classic animation" (on Google, of course!) turns up 93,800 references as I write this. The number will have grown by the time you're reading it. A search on "classical animation" turns up another 84,600. A spot check of the sites shows that people think "classic animation" means cartoon animation.
Classic Animation Defined
To me, classic (or classical) animation means any animation in which the animator creates each frame individually. Cartoon animation is just one variety of classic animation. There are many more varieties already in existence, and yet more waiting to be invented.
Classic animation can be shot with a movie camera, a digital camera, or can be created using a computer - as long as the artist creates each frame individually, using classic visual arts techniques and media, or their digital equivalents. I exclude things like Flash animations and CG animation in which the computer generates frames algorithmically. Of course, the definition is pretty loose and there are gray areas. And the categories I list here shade into each other as well.
Types of Classic Animation
All animation can be regarded as stop motion animation; the subjects - drawings, clay, sand, puppets, paintings, or people - are all stopped in their motion and photographed one frame at a time. "Stop motion animation", though, conventionally means animation with dimensional models or armatures. While there are many ways of dividing animation into categories, I'm splitting classic animation into these broad types:
In cartoon animation, each frame in the movie is drawn and/or painted separately. I think we all know what cartoon animation is, but just for completeness, here's some cartoon animation on a demo reel from EdSeeman.com. There's a wide range if styles in his work, and combinations of cel animation with live action.
Cartoon animation can be anything from realistic to surreal. The work of animation pioneers is still inspiring. Here's the rather bizarre "Betty Boop, M.D." from the Fleischer Studio that includes four of their trademark characters.
Stop motion animation or model animation is another type of classic animation. The original King Kong (1933) and all of Ray Harryhausen's movies featured stop motion animation. Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride" is a spectacular modern example. Here's an older movie, "The Milky Way", that I came across in some old 16mm films: it's one of a series of movies from Kinex Studios, made in the 1920s.
Modeling clay is another favorite medium for stop motion animation. Animator Jimmy Picker won the Academy Award in 1985 for "A Sundae in New York". Here's another of his movies, "Breakdance".
I think that Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is an authentically great movie, as well as having incredible animation. The "making of" documentary shows that the movie was shot with digital cameras - one frame at a time. Click on the link to order the DVD from Amazon.com.
Direct Animation
In this type of classic animation, the artist draws, paints, or scratches directly onto the film that goes into the projector. This is called "direct", "cameraless", or "scratch" animation. Once again, the artist creates the movie one frame at a time. Here's an example: "Aria", from glorialoyola:
"Aria" isn't strictly a cameraless movie. glorialoyola freezes some of the frames in the movie to accent the music. This is done in the editing, and is easy to do with digital movies.
Some artists add direct animation to images already on the film. Here's "Whiz!", a very creative example from gazzookabazookaz.
No collection of direct animation would be complete without a movie by the National Film Board of Canada'sNorman McLaren. Here's Begone Dull Care (1949). His work speaks for itself, and is one of my inspirations. The video was posted by JoniChe.
Cutout Animation
In still another type of classic animation, the animator moves cutouts or other objects around in front of a camera and shoots the movie one frame at a time. One of my movies in this style is "Face #1":
If the artist turns the cutouts into silhouettes, the animation has the look of shadow puppets. (Shadow puppetry is "one of the oldest art forms in the world" according to ArtsEdge at the Kennedy Center.) Here's an untitled example on YouTube, from Bhavpreet81.
Progressive (Painted) Animation
In progressive animation the artist shoots frames of a piece of artwork as it is being created. A painting paints itself or transforms as the artist changes it. "Darfur" from joefrechette is a very powerful example.
Some artists refuse to tie their art to a canvas or the camera to a tripod. Digital cameras are definitely making animation happen all around us, as in "Fantoche" from notblu.
"Progressive animation" is an older name for this type of animation. If you search for "progressive animation" videos, though, you won't find anything like these. People seem to be calling it "painted animation" now. I prefer "progressive animation" since that's what's happening - the movie records the progress of the artwork.
And the "artwork" can be very ephemeral. There are several kinds of sand animation. In one type, artists create flat images in (typically backlit) sand; in another, artists mold sand into shapes much the way they mold clay. Shoot them one frame at a time and you have animation, as in "EN TIERRA" from cesarlinga.
Pixillation
In "pixillation" the moviemaker shoots actor's performances one frame at a time. Norman McLaren's "Neighbors", done in this technique, is an Academy Award winner. The video was posted by JoniChe.
More modestly (much more modestly), there's a lot of pixillation in Zanymation Magic, which I edited from improvised animations created by the instructors and facilitators at Quickdraw Animation Society's Zanymation animation events. Of course, we're improvising with cutouts and other things as well...
A more recent development is "lightning doodles" - it's sort of "air animation" or "air drawing". You open the shutter on a camera, draw in the air with lights, and close the shutter. Shoot a sequence of frames and you have animation. This movie is from the people who originated the technique:
The common theme in all these styles is that the artist/animator creates each frame as an entity of its own, and determines what's happening and how things are moving, frame by frame. At times (especially when creating textures in scratch animation) the artist takes advantage of patterns that emerge by chance, but it's still created one frame at a time.
When animators began using computers, they were eager to automate parts of the process. The result is now a field of its own - CG animation. But computers can be just as useful in classic animation. Digital technology has made classic animation easier and better, and it's what I'm exploring through my software and my movies. My software is at StopMotion-Software.com and you'll be seeing more of my movies in this blog, on my site, and elsewhere on the Web. I'll be exploring all the classic animation styles in this blog, and showing how you can animate yourself.
Mixing it Up
Here's one more of my movies. See how many classic animation techniques you can find in it!
Norman McLaren is a master of classic animation in all its forms. Norman McLaren: The Masters Edition showcases all of Norman McLaren's work, not all of which is animation. This DVD set includes many documentaries. Some of the documentaries manage to make the principles of animation boring - but will reward close attention. These DVDs will stretch your mind. Click on the link to order them from Amazon.com.
My thanks to all the posters who upload movies and let us view them. Where no other poster is credited, the uploads are mine.
In the summer of 2004 I took the Introduction to Character Animation course at Quickdraw Animation Society. One of the assignments was an animated walk. I (of course) immediately grabbed my copy of Richard Williams's "The Animator's Survival Kit" and started work. My walking robot eventually looked pretty good (I thought), but of course the exercise also made me see how much I didn't know.
I started watching people walking. Williams makes a big point later in his book about the importance of the "whip" action, though he doesn't really define a "whip". I started to think I could see some whip action in walks, specifically when the rear leg swings forward. I thought it was worth checking further, but didn't want to just trust my impressions.
I was working with some of my super-8 movies (a Disneyland trip in 1976) and saw that I had a shot of some people walking at right angles to the camera, with nothing in front of them. I grabbed the frames and made loops that I could look at.
By coincidence, this walk loops on 24 frames - a magic number for animators. It's a real coincidence that it does. My super-8 film is at 18 frames per second, so a normal two step per second walk would be 18 frames. People just stroll at Disneyland, so my subject took 2/3 of a second for a step - 12 frames. A full left-right cycle came out to 24 frames.
One of the first things I saw was that weight isn't transferred from one foot to the other instantly. Williams's "normal" walk drawings imply that it is. He starts with a drawing like this one, showing full weight on the back toes and no weight on the front heel.
I didn't rotoscope my frames, but I see the weight transfer starting with this position
and finishing, about 3 frames later, with this position.
It's very clear in the movie frames.
Alan Ferguson, looking at these frames with me at Quickdraw, pointed out that this is just one example walk and is slightly slower than normal. The weight transfer could take proportionately less time in a normal walk. We could doubtless find out a lot more if we just asked the sports physiology professors at the University of Calgary. Or looked in a technical library.
After that little sidetrack, I got back to looking for the whip action, and confirmed what I thought I was seeing.
While the toes are still planted and the rear heel is coming up, the rear leg is bending and the rear thigh is already moving forward. Once the leg has bent to an angle of about 120 degrees, the toes lift off. The thigh keeps swinging forward, but the knee stays at about 120 degrees until the thigh stops, like this:
The lower leg and foot swing forward and out once the thigh has stopped rotating.
This is the part of the walk that I see as a whip action. The thigh moves before the lower leg and foot, and drags them along. The thigh stops, and the lower leg keeps going until it "snaps" into position. Williams doesn't define what a whip action is but leaves it to our intuition. I think whip actions happen with flexible objects (jointed or rope-like) that are anchored at one end and driven by forces that work from close to the point of attachment. Inertia delays motion in parts of the object further from the attachment. The details of the delays should give more or less feeling of weight.
And also (contrary to Williams) my film doesn't show the leading knee bending after it contacts the ground and starts receiving weight. Legs seem to stay straight all the time they carry weight.
Those last four drawings look suspiciously like a walk cycle. Here they are, in motion:
This was actually a pleasant surprise, since I hadn't planned these four drawings as a step cycle. The walk shows no weight whatsoever - it looks to me like the glide of a geisha.
Williams makes the point that, as animators, we are caricaturing motion and giving characters their own motions. And also that to do this, to show what's different about an individual, we need to know what the ordinary, common motion is. It seemed to me that even Williams's "normal" walk is a caricature. My film, of course, shows a "character-less" walk. It's an ordinary, casual stroll.
I decided to make a chart of the timing of what I could see in the walk. For the weight transfers, the chart looks like this:
A similar chart for Williams's "normal" walk might look like this:
This is a walk on the very edge of becoming a run. In a run, there are intervals when neither foot is in contact with the ground.
The chart for a different walk (say Daffy's as he enters the saloon in "Drip-Along Daffy") might look like this:
Here's the walk itself. This walk was animated on ones (one drawing for every frame, at 24 frames per second) and is a total of 30 frames long. It's definitely an expensive piece of animation. I've slowed it down to 12 frames per second to show the motion more clearly.
In this walk both feet bear weight most of the time. Each leg moves forward for the next step very quickly. This is like the pattern I used for the robot walk I mentioned earlier. Daffy brings his foot forward quicker than my robot does.
This is giving me another way of thinking about animating walks, and might even help me "get my brains in my pencil" (to quote from Williams) once it really sinks in. I could start by putting a grid onto the walk chart. The grid would contain the number of frames I want to draw - say 8, for example.
This grid gives me the four positions I used in the example cycle. Because the leg timing is symmetrical, the leg positions in the second four frames are the same as in the first four. Things are different when I want an odd total number of frames. (Williams doesn't discuss odd total numbers at all.)
In this case, the leg positions in the second half of the walk cycle aren't the same as in the first. I tried drawing this cycle and came up with these leg positions.
And the walk looks like this.
A few comments about this one. I'm still learning where to put the body relative to the legs so it balances properly. I actually had to lean the body a little forward in these drawings to get it to look better. There's a bit of a limp - the body does come down a bit as the right foot lands but not when the left foot does. And with an odd number of frames, there's ambiguity about just where the weight goes in the overall cycle. All of which just reminds me how much more I have to learn.
I charted more than just the weight transfers, hoping it'll help me learn more about animating walks. Click on the link for a PDF file of my walk chart.
I also grabbed some leg bones from the CorelDraw clipart collection and animated them according to what I saw in my film. I think the bone walk turned out pretty well. Doing it helped me understand what goes on in the bones and joints, even though I didn't do anything with motion in the toes.
Click on the link for a PDF file of the 24 frames in this walk.
These videos are three excerpts from the Access Alberta documentary of the same name, produced about 1999. All of the segments are about classic cartoon (cel) animation. Watch all three and you will have a better idea of the cel animation process as it evolved along with digital technology. You'll also see the full range of animation projects - from the one person, completely independent production to the multimillion dollar theatrical feature.
Excerpt 1 - Dreamworks Animation "Road to El Dorado"
Dreamworks Animation should need no introduction. This documentary goes a little deeper into the production process than many other documentaries do; and you get a real feeling for the complexity of feature animation.
Excerpt 2 - Bruce Wilson's "Friday Night Idiot Box"
"You're out of your mind for making movies anyway." - Marv Newland, International Rocketship. Bruce Wilson made a series of three 30 second cel animated cartoons, completely in the classic manner - making and testing his drawings, inking and painting the cels, and shooting on 35mm film. Marv Newland of International Rocketship helped him with it. This documentary goes beyond most animation documentaries and shows some of what happens on an animation stand. Marv has strong opinions about film's superiority over digital movies; I disagree. But hear him out and make up your own mind.
Excerpt 3 - "Mr. Reaper's Really Bad Morning"
Kevin Kurytnik and Carol Beecher of Fifteen Pound Pink Productions started Mr. Reaper's Really Bad Morning as a more or less conventional cartoon. During production they decided to switch to digital ink and paint and worked with Quickdraw Animation Society to set up the system. They finally output the digital files to 35mm film. This documentary shows the grant supported side of independent animation, though Kevin and Carol work like Richard Williams, doing animation for clients to help them make their independent movie.
The British claim the first animated film, made in 1899 by cinema innovator Arthur Melbourne Cooper - and it was both advertising and propaganda. See it in this 2005 BBC documentary and judge for yourself. Watch the documentary to broaden your ideas about animation and what it can do for your audience... and to your audience.
The history of British animation continues through the sixties with new voices, new attitudes, and new ambitions. Art school graduates bring new looks and the themes and concerns become darker.
Animation springs from "the childlike desire to bring the fantasy world to life." Animation became a way to reach children - and then it became the promotion for merchandising. In all of it there's "underlying absurdity" - that finds its full expression in Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit. (For more documentaries on Nick Park, see my Clay Anmation with Oscar Winner Nick Park post.)
I have another site devoted to animation - How-To-Make-Your-Own-Animation.com. It presents making classic animation in a different way - better organized than with a blog.
Start creating your own classic animation!
This 13 minute movie introduces animation fundamentals and shows you how to start animating with your PC and a webcam, video or DV camera using StopMotion Station from StopMotion-Software.com.
A shameless self-promotion movie that shows part of what I have done and what I'm about. Beware! At the end of the movie, I sing my "Moviemaker's Lament" while performing a movie. That's what you see in the screenshot - as I punch keys, I jump around in the movies I have on the system.
The whole purpose of this blog is to get you to create your own classic animation, preferably using my software, which is at StopMotion-Software.com. If you've made a movie you're proud of, using any of my shareware or freeware programs, please let me know and I'd be glad to post it here and help you share it with the world.
I am about as old as the transistor and have been watching movies for about half of their existence. I started playing wih movie cameras and projectors about 1960, and with the early microcomputers about 1978. I love combining knowledge and technology to create tools for moviemaking and especially animation, filling in the gaps I see that prevent me from making full use of hardware, software, and ideas.
is an authentically great movie, as well as having incredible animation. The "making of" documentary shows that the movie was shot with digital cameras - one frame at a time. Click on the link to order the DVD from Amazon.com.
showcases all of Norman McLaren's work, not all of which is animation. This DVD set includes many documentaries. Some of the documentaries manage to make the principles of animation boring - but will reward close attention. These DVDs will stretch your mind. Click on the link to order them from Amazon.com.
is an essential book if you want to do animation in any style. I wouldn't be without it. Click on the link to order it from Amazon.com.
