Animaly Appraisal: Hercules Part I

Animation, Disney, Review /

Sooooo, having just finished watching Disney’s Hercules, here are some initial thoughts that will be concluded tomorrow. Released in 1997, Hercules continues the Disney tradition of releasing a “classic” film every year/couple of years which in the preceding years had borne witness to Beauty & The Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and Pochahontas. Many people will agree that things began sliding downhill with the departure of Jeffrey Katzenburg for greener pastures prior to Pochahontas. I tend to agree but I would say that the slide was more the result of weak leadership rather than problems in the creative department. That debate is for another time. Today, I’m focusing on the plot, the songs and the background design. Tomorrow it’ll be animation, characters and character design.

Starting with the plot, the basic set-up is that Hades, the brother of Zeus hatches a plan to take over the world but first he must eliminate Zeus’ son Hercules. Through his incompetent minions who fail to finish the task, Hercules doesn’t die but instead turns mortal. We then get a short scene where we discover how he does not fit in with those around him. Once Hercules meets his father Zeus, he goes to find Phil, his trainer. After some training, Hercules is not a striking young lad with enormous strength.

Before he can become a true hero ad return to Mount Olympus, he must first prove himself. Enter Meg, whom he saves from a monster. As it turns out, she’s in the pocket of Hades because of some deal she did with him back in the day and must obey his every whim if she’s ever going to get her soul back. So, to wrap up the entire thing, the planets align and Hades begins his assault on Mounts Olympus. Hercules fights him and saves the day, only for Meg to die along the way and descend into Hell (or whatever the Greeks called it). Hercules offers to swap himself for Meg and in the process regains his immortality and becomes a god. In the end, he decides to stay on earth with Meg after falling in love with her. The End.

As far as the story goes, it’s pretty straightforward. There are no intricate twists save for Meg’s relationship with Hades. As far as being accurate goes, you’d bet better off watching that Chuck Jones Tom & Jerry cartoon. Of course there is no need for it to be accurate, it’s just a story. If we are willing to believe that a guy can lift a house, we can surely believe that Zeus put Hades down below instead of them casting lots for it.

One things that I absolutely loved about the story was the use of the Muses as sometime narrators and, well, muses! Although they make the film seem more like a play (which really changes the pitch of the film) they add some spice to what could have been just another movie.

Interestingly enough, this was the first Disney movie to be based on mythology rather than the usual fairytale. This choice of source material makes a great change from the many films that went before. No princesses in this movie! it is a shame that they haven’t really returned to it since as Greek plays have been a source of entertainment and creativity for millennia.

With that, onto the songs! I’ll just say it straight out, Aladdin is my all-time favourite when it comes to songs. With that in mind, I rate every film against it and while I try to remember that different films require different musical styles, I have yet to fins one that comes close. The songs in Hercules try to convey the many conflicting emotions being felt by the characters. Be it Hercules wanting to fit in, Phil debating whether to train another hero, the Muses montage in the middle, or Meg’s song where it becomes clear she’s fallen in love.

The key thing to all these songs is the singalongability™, which I would rate as OK. Granted the songs match the overall serious tone of the film, but you don’t hear people singing those songs for a reason.

Which lead me on to the score itself. Leaving aside the usual orchestral score that does its job in the dramatic parts, it was great to hear some stuff that could have come straight out of the 1950s. If you know your Ren & Stimpy, you’ll know that John K. resurrected a lot of similar music for his show. Which makes it all the more surprising to hear similar music in a film like this. Be it the clarinet solos, the blares of trumpets or the quick tap of a xylophone. They add enormous emphasis to the lighter parts of the film that could otherwise have been so easily accomplished with an orchestra the same as the rest of the film. This music serves to divide the film into two parts: the fun part and the serious part and makes an excellent, if somewhat sub-conscious contrast between the two.

Personally, I think we need to see much more of this type of music in animated films. The Incredibles score makes some fantastic use of 60s brass and percussion that equals the best that James Bond put out.

Tomorrow, the more interesting stuff. Like backgrounds! Characters! Character designs! (try and guess my favourite).

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Adventure Time’s Connections With Its Fans

2 Comments / Animation, Cartoon Network, TV /
Adventure Time Promo art

By now you should be familiar with Adventure Time, heck, I’ve mentioned it more than a few times here and even write a post about it. If you don’t know what Adventure Time is (and what rock were you living under by the way), it’s the brainchild of Pendelton Ward that was in limbo, well, YouTube actually, for a couple of years after appearing on Random! Cartoons on Nickelodeon before getting picked up by the Cartoon Network.

The show already has an extremely devoted fanbase which was in place even before the show premiered. Was this an accident? Absolutely not! Despite the fact the the original pilot ran up views on YouTube well into the millions, the show itself is a masterpiece onto itself. Pen’s whimsical designs, very strong characters (yeah, I like Princess Bubblegum, so what?) and absurd plots are quite unique among TV shows today, even cartoons!

The shows creators have excelled in a few areas that I would not consider traditional marketing techniques, indeed, they have managed to create a dedicated community around the show, starting with ye olde blog. The good folks over at Frederator have been running their blogs for what seems like forever and have built up a solid reputation for being some of the best in the animation business when it comes to blogging. The show has a dedicated blog that during the production process featured countless backgrounds, character models, colour models, storyboards, scripts, animatics, you name it! This was (and still is) a fantastic insight into the production of an animated show that has been unmatched by any other, save for Fanboy & ChumChum (another Frederator production, naturally). The blog has been a tremendous source for info on the show and has been the source of many answers to questions that fans have had. It is a fantastic interactive portal between the studio and its customers.

On a related note to the blog has been the Tumblelog, hosted on Tumblr (where I also have a tumblelog). In the beginning it was merely a repository for the artwork posted on the main blog, but since the shows debut, it has become a steady (and prolific) stream of fanart. The quality does vary quite a bit, but that is unimportant. What is important is that the number of fans who’ve made artwork is phenomenal. In fact, even the fanart has taken on a lofe of its own. The latest craze is to take album covers and remodel them using Adventure Time characters. So far I’ve got a great kick out of seeing some fantastic takes on both great albums and the shows characters.

Perhaps the most striking development of the shows popularity has been the Finn Hats. These are indeed the hat worn by Finn the Human in the show. Things kicked off when a few promotional hats were made by Cartoon Network. Not long after, instructions were posted on how to make your own Finn hat. Since then the internet has exploded with self-portraits of fans in their very own hats. A few have even gone the whole hog and dressed up for the conventions.

Last but not least has been the usual social networking stalwarts such as facebook and twitter. Pen has his own twitter feed where he tweets just about everything, from late nights in the studio to how things are going at Comic-Con. He gives fans a direct link to the creator of their favourite show and has wll over 4,000 followers at present.

Of course, all of this may not have come to pass if the original post hadn’t appeared on YouTube, where it went viral in the first place and racked up so many views.

Adventure Time could have stood on its merits as a cartoon even without all the above effort, but with all the above effort, the show is even more popular than it could have been. The important thing to note is that the efforts were mostly by the fans, with a little help from the production team. There is nothing I hate more than some marketing department trying to hype up a show by creating an artificial “community” that is so sterile it almost turns me off the show in question. With Adventure Time, it was a case of planting the seeds and watching the community grow naturally as word of mouth and anticipation took hold.

Any show should be similar, after all, it is the fans that support it and make it a worthwhile endevour for the studio and network. At the same time, if all shows were as good as Adventure Time, this wouldn’t require too much effort. Here’s to a bright future in the land of Oooo. 🙂

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My Aims and Objectives for the Animation Anomaly Blog

Animation, Me /

Have you ever written a dissertation? Besides all the hard work and countless nights spent in the library when it seemed that just about every other student in the entire college was out at the pub, there was a great sense of satisfaction once the whole thing is done and dusted.

At the beginning of the year, one of the things we had to submit was our aims and objectives for the dissertation. These basically listed out what we were to achieve by our completion of the dissertation. Long story short, I realized that while I’ve been posting on the blog here for the last couple of weeks almost every day (and I’m pretty proud of that by the way, considering how lax I was at updating it before), I’ve never set out what I hop to achieve with it. So here, for your reading pleasure, is my somewhat inner monologue for what I hope you gain by reading my blog.

First off, I want to post about stuff I like, which for me means animation. I follow a fair amount of blogs, news sites, etc. and although I don’t intend to merely replicate the news here, there may be days when I will put my own spin on the topic of discussion. Why would I do that? Well, for a start, I’m not in the animation industry. Of course that has its advantages and disadvantages. I don’t have any experience and can easily make a false statement or politically incorrect statement. At the same time, I can see things from a perspective that I would not perhaps have if I was in the industry.

I must admit, creative writing was never a strong point of mine at school. Having last studied it over 7 years years ago, things have become a bit rusty since then. Nevertheless, I will endeavour to improve that over the next couple of months.

I also intend to post plenty of reviews of films I’ve seen (the next one will be Disney’s Hercules), festivals, discussion panels and general social events too. Unfortunately with school, these posts will be a bit farther spaced than I would like. The movie review posts will improve. Maybe I should split them into two or three parts so I can go into more detail about the different parts of the movie. This is more of a time thing than anything else. In order to write a proper review post, I would need about 2 hours, something I can’t seem to scrape together in one day, so spreading it out over a few days will lighten the load.

The Anomaly Approved posts will continue with gusto. I follow literally hundreds of blogs so they will take a long time to go through. The reason I post about them is that I enjoy them immensely, that’s why I follow them after all. I hope that by posting about them and explaining why I like them, hopefully you will like them too!

Industry commentary is perhaps my pet area. There are plenty of snarky blogs out there already and I’ve already said I do not under any circumstances want this site to become a gripe blog. So for anything industry-related, i.e. Pixar’s release schedule, who got promoted at Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network’s latest live-action series, etc. I will try and keep the posts as positive as possible. Positive criticism I guess is the term.

I do intend to keep posting daily. I’ve found it therapeutic in a way to kind of spill my thoughts out in cyberspace. Of course there are some days when I can’t post (like St. Patrick’s Day) and I’ll try to get a post in reserve for those days so at least something new goes up.

Again, feel free to comment on anything I post. Reader feedback is the best tool available to me for refining the content of what I post. Besides, its fun to see fellow bloggers and so far, I’ve discovered a few, quite nice blogs simply because their authors commented on mine.

Do I want to become the greatest blogger in the world? Nah. Do I want to become the eminent source for animation information? Nah. Do I want to make this a highly personal blog that only I enjoy? Of course not. I might as well write a diary if that was the case. Do i want this to become a blog where my thoughts are somewhat inspirational and promote debate and discussion among my readers? YES! Absolutely.

So there you go. That’s why I’m writing this blog. I hope that provides a bit of an idea of the rationale behind it. Of course I’m writing about animation because I love animation and I’d hope that you’re reading this blog because you love animation too! I’m not after madly high hit figures, or a cult-like following. I just hope that the thoughts I write here resonate with at least some of you out there.

Thanks for reading.

Charles

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Animation in Other Countries

1 Comment / Animation /

I recently received my first issue of ASIFA Magazine, the quarterly publication of ASIFA International. I served as a great reminder that there is much more to animation than what comes out of the west coast of America.

Around the world there are plenty of indiginous animation industries that are happily supplying local needs without having to export to “the promised land”. Even with my limited experience, I can safely say that the best stuff need not necessarily come out of Burbank.

Perhaps the most well known is France, which is not that surprising given the potency of the French culture. They have also had a few success with films such as Asterix and with TV shows like Totally Spies! produced by Marathon.

Throughout the rest of Europe, there are plenty of small studios workjing on local content. Besides that, there are tons of independent animators, quietly putting out short films (and indeed a few long ones too). Some of these films really do puch the boundaries of animation in terms of their raw design but also in character development and story.

Apart from Europe stands Britain. Despite the dwindling size of the industry there, the number of series that have come out of Britain over the years is perhaps testament to the popularity of the artform there. This is perhaps because of the many, many shows that have been commissioned by the BBC as part of childrens programming and in its youth, Channel 4, whose most memorable production was the adaption of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman. Seeing as British shows are made in English (duh), it has helped them find other markets around the world, including America (such as Bob the Builder).

Apart from Britain stands Ireland, whose breakout studio (Cartoon Saloon) was behind the feature film, The Secret of Kells which has managed to crack the US market and garner a well-deserved Academy Award nomination. Along with the lads in Kilkenny, there is also Boulder Media and Brown Bag Films both based in Dublin, both of which have found success either as a production house (the former) or a consistent creative force on the international front (the latter).

In the last 5 years or so, we have seen the rise of studios from the likes of China, India and of course South Korea, who even managed to get a home-produced TV show on US screens in the form of a show I can’t remember the name of and Google is currently failing me in. Of course the strong cultures in some Asian countries may have difficulty gaining a foothold in the US market, much the same as anime faced for many years before become widely popular.

The best place to suss out some international animation, is at an animation festival! It is not necessarily true that the biggest are always the best, but they do normally have the widest selection that cater to almost any taste. Example include Ottowa, the just finished Annecy, Hiroshima among many others.

I know I have yet to make it to one, but I am confident that when I do, I will see some fantastic animation that can’t be found anywhere else.

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Sport in Cartoons

Animation /

Yes, today marks the start of one of the biggest sporting events of the decade. Sadly, Ireland are not in it thank to Thierry Henry and his dirty tricks.

So it got me thinking about sport in cartoons and how it is represented. Since there are so many different types of cartoons and indeed countries from which they come, I figured there would be a wide variety to be had.

In cartoons, you can spot the opinion of the creator towards sport. For instance, Butch Hartman is known to have a disliking for jocks. Therefore, sport plays a mostly negative role in his cartoons. Similar opinions can be attributed to creators who I guess would be called geeks not much removed from myself (although I do play Gaelic football and love it).

Leaving out all the shows that don’t really feature sports, the ones that do are heavily influenced by their country of origin. For instance, American cartoons rely heavily on the likes of baseball (Peanuts) or American football (King of the Hill). Jacob Two Two, notable for being made based in Canada naturally has an episode centered around ice-hockey.

The same can be said for European cartoons. Those that do, use soccer as their main sport. Seeing as it is universally popular around the continent, this does not come as a surprise.

I guess the main exception to the rule is (surprise, surprise) Japan. Although sport can play a central part in some anime series (mainly through their school setting), there are plenty of quirky shows out there where the “sport” is all too often something completely different from what we would normally expect.

All that being said, cartoons that are centred around sport are not nearly as popular as you would expect. This is perhaps the result of design by committee.

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I Have Arrived as a Blogger Thanks to Despicable Me

Animation, Film /

"Nonsense" you say, "surely you’re already a blogger, you’re blogging right now!" This is true, however today I received my first unsolicited e-mail chock full of promotional stuff for an upcoming film. Which film you ask? Why Despicable Me of course.

This post is not necessarily about the film however, we all know I’m looking forward to that, even if the teaser and trailer don’t explain all that much about the film. Nonetheless I will use this opportunity to dissect the e-mail in question and comment on the ideas presented within.

There is little doubt that it was sent to not only inform me of the new film, but also to get me to blog about it. Fair enough, although I was going to blog about it anyway, just not today.

First up is "Gru-gle", which is basically Google (geddit?) custom search with some fancy themes (hey, it’s even got Cinco de Mayo). It’s fun for about 2 seconds then you’re left wondering. Surely a custom iGoogle theme or something of that nature would have been more appropriate. Trying to divert people to a custom webage is a lot harder than simply persuading them to switch themes on their homepage.

Next up is "Grugle Earth" (geddit), which seems to be tied in with some marketing project where Gru’s "minions" will be scattered all over the country and you use Grugle Earth to spot them. Seeing as it uses Google Earth which isn’t on my computer, I can only vouch for the concept. Again it’s fun but it must be something for the kids. I’m certainly not too excited about it. The only thing is that it seems quite complicated for kids, especially younger ones. Maybe it’s just me and kids these days know how to upload photos to the web and such, but methinks adult help will be necessary for this one.

Last but not least, we have the obligatory web-based game, "GruTube" (geddit?) and the actual webpage of the film itself in addition to the now-mandatory facebook and twitter links.

How to rate all of this? Without going into too much detail, it alls seems to be the fairly standard movie-promotion stuff and seeing as this is the first film I’ve actually received something like this for, I can’t say for certain how it stacks up against the competition. That said, it was a pleasant surprise and it did encourage me to look into the film and its promotional baggage a bit more thoroughly than I normally would. Another pleasant surprise was a load of stills from the movie. From past experience, it can be tricky to come by really decent "official" images, so this will be great when it comes time to write about the film (hey, I’m doing that right now and guess where I got the pictures from)!

The only thing I would change, and I guess this is a bit more to do with this being a one-man operation, is that there was nothing in the e-mail explaining why I should blog about these tie-ins. I mean, I already knew the film was coming out, and I already presumed that there would be tie-ins, but there was no reason given that I should write about them, besides the suggestion that I should "check them out". The only thing that comes close to a reason given is that I can use Grugle Earth to find out where the "Min-vasion" will hit.

I’m not rounding on whoever actually wrote this, if anything, it did its intended purpose which was to get me to write about it, which I did, and it would have done an even better job it had plenty of reasons why I should have written about it. Perhaps it is just assumed that people will write about something, I don’t know, I’m not in that line of business. I’m just saying it would be nice to see something along the lines of something like this:

Hey, Charles (I would expect a formal salutation, mail-merge has been around for decades, there’s no reason for not using it if you have my e-mail address), we know you like to blog about animation an seeing as Despicable Me is coming out really soon, we thought we would send you some information in advance of the movie so you’ll know as much as you need ahead of time.

First off, we’ve decided to create "Gru-gle" (geddit) as a pun on everyones favourite search engine. Why not give it a go? There’s more to it than meets the eye.

Next up we have "Grugle Earth". As you probably already know, Gru uses his Minions for everything. Seeing as they’re aliens, we thought it would be cool to have a "Min-vasion" here on Earth! We plan to have them pop up in places around the country and use "Grugle Earth" to allow fans to spot them. You can find all the details on the "Grugle Earth" website.

Lastly, we also have a web-based flash game which we hope you enjoy as much as we did, as well as the actual website itself, which we’ve attempted to make much more enjoyable for kids to navigate while still giving parents and adult fans like yourself the information you need.

In addition, we also have the usual facebook and twitter pages that will enable you and your readers to keep up to date with the latest news in the run-up to the film’s release.

As a bonus, we have also included some promotional images that you can use in advance of the films release because there is no reason why you should have to go and find them yourself.

We hope you find this information useful and if you have any questions just let use know.

Sincerely,

Etc, etc.

A letter like that would be much, much more likely to encourage me to blog favourably about the movie. I’m pleased though, I never thought I would get something like this, at least not for a long, long time. 🙂

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Posting a TV show online: When Should It Be Done?

Opinion, TV /

Today, I was going to post a review of the new TBS (or is that tbs) show Neighbors from Hell, which debuted there last Monday. Well, clearly this post isn’t about that because, without beating around the buch too much, it isn’t online in legal form, well, not exactly. Apparently it is on iTunes, but being the true geek that I appear to be, I run Linux, which iTunes doesn’t support and probably never will.

So with no premiere episode to watch (yet), here are some thoughts on when TV shows should be put online for folks to watch.

The folks over at the MPAA and RIAA would have you believe that putting anything online, hell, even not putting it online is an invitation for anyone and everyone to “pirate” it for their own nefarious purposes. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If I wan’t to watch a TV show online it’s because I want to watch it whenever I damned well please. Why should I have to schedule my time around the whims of the network? I shouldn’t, and for the most part, I don’t.

Anyway, networks are discovering (through the handicapped genius that is Hulu and the absolute genius that is Netflix) that allowing consumers to view your stuff online is actually a good thing. Not only does it do wonders for older stuff, but even new stuff as well as people are much more likely to watch a show they missed online rather than wait for a rerun. The Economist recently did a special report on the current and future state of television that is well worth a read.

Enough reasons though. When is a good time to put a show online. Let’s start by assuming it’s a new show. In that case, the obvious answer is straight away! As stupid an idea as it sounds, the +1 channels found on Sky in Europe are one of the best things ever. Sure all they’re doing is shifting the entire channel back by an hour, but how many TV shows have you come across that you just missed? It may be just beginning on the +1 channel!

Seeing as +1 channels are rare here in the States, the next best thing is putting the show on-demand or online. Putting it up straight away will pretty much thwart any reason a so-called “pirate” has for putting it up instead. Besides that, you can make some advertising revenue from your own site (or on another if your prefer).

If putting a new TV show online straight away is the best time, what about older series? The obvious answer is also, straight away! As you’re probably aware, you can pretty much find any TV show online if you do a bit of searching. Sadly TV-Links.co.uk [Wikipedia.org] is no-more after getting busted on sham charges and just like a game of Whack-A-Mole, about a dozen clones popped up to replace it. For legal purposes I probably shouldn’t encourage or condone you to seek out these means, and I’m not, I’m simply explaining the current situation.

With older shows, the arguments are exactly the same as the new ones. Why force consumers to seek out their favourite stuff by “illegal” means. Give them what they want! The customer is always right after all!

As for animation, Hulu has a rather good selection. It’s not ideal, with a lot of anime both popular and otherwise, like Ikki Tausen, seriously? The kids networks are also fairly decent. I have more experience with Cartoon Network, but Nickelodeon and Disney also seem to be fairly up to speed on getting their shows online ASAP.

The explosive growth in video-on-demand in recent years will hopefully mean that all TV shows will be online soon after they are broadcast. The notion that online viewing pulls viewers away from broadcast or cable viewing is nonsense and the sooner the networks get over it, the better.

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How I Would Spot Great Upcoming Animators

Animation /

I noticed it the other day but figured it wasn’t worth commenting on until Amid posted a concise rounding on the list the other day over at Cartoon Brew. For one, I agree with him on the choices, they are all established animators. Heck, Pendleton Ward has his own TV show that’s already in production on its second season!

In fairness, I hate lists. I tend to disagree with all of them unless their made by myself, and even then I tend to change my mind fairly quickly. Variety’s list is not credited to any one person in particular, which is a shame as one person may have put in some effort seeing as its their name at the bottom. Nonetheless, I will give the people who did write it the benefit of the doubt. At least it isn’t near as bad a list as the one published by Time a while back on the 10 Most Controversial Cartoons.

So how can you determine who is and who isn’t an up and coming animator? Unless you can read the thoughts of development executives out there, spotting the next Chuck Jones is nigh on impossible. The following is based on my own thoughts so please, if you have anything to add, please do so in the comments below.

Firstly, what does it mean to be “up and coming”? It’s a bit of a pointless phrase at the end of the day. Is it when you enter the fringes of the animation community, or when your video goes viral? What if you’ve toiled away as an independent filmmmaker for years before one of your creations enters the wider public’s eye? As far as I’m concerned, it’s when you have established a name for yourself within the animation community. They are the people who are going to watch your work and come out and support you or even come to you for support when necessary.

So what do up and coming animators have in common? The first thing is that they work and work bloody hard too. You never seen an aspiring animator sitting on their laurels. If they are not actively working by day and creating by night, they face an uphill battle to become known. Plenty of established animators, illustrators and background artists have a paying job during the day while at night they work away on their personal stuff. Just some examples include Chris Reccardi, Lou Romano, Steve Lambe, Mike Maihack, the list could go on forever. The point is, they have a deep passion for what they do and they use every (or almost every) waking hour devoted to it. They know that using their spare time to promote themselves is the most productive thing they can do.

After these same folks have created their films or whatever, they get them out there. Elliot Cowan applies for as many festivals as he can find. As a result, he could now be considered world-renowned! YouTube and other video streaming websites have also helped the up and coming animator get their stuff out there with little to no additional cost involved.

Aspiring animators also actively updated a blog or website and can often be seen attending community events. Look at Mr. Warburton, he’s a very well established animator but he always attends events or functions where colleagues and other animators will be present.

Those are my thoughts, now, how can you spot the next crop of animators? They will most likely be attending school of some sort. Besides the obvious skills they will be taught, it also provides them with a ready-made network of friends once they are finished. They will also be studiously developing their student films. The crop on show at this year’s ASIFA-East festival was outstanding. I’ve heard stories of students never completing their film, or rushing to get things done at the last minute. If they can’t get their act together in college, what hope do they have at a studio or as a freelancer?

They will also be active within the community, either attending events on a regular basis or being a member of the executive committee. They will be building contacts and networks at these events and will regularly meet people outside of said events.

Lastly, they will be good animators, with a knack for visual design as well as storytelling. They don’t necessary have to be a jack-of-all-trades, but they will excel in one particular area and they will use it to their advantage.

These are just a few quick musing on what I would be looking for if I was trying to spot the next great animator to emerge. Like I said above, it’s nearly impossible to spot the next great talent until they have already arrived. If you are in the animation industry, you have no excuses for not having advance warning.

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TV Cartoons in 3-D: It Would Be Awesome.

Animation, TV /

I’ve made my thoughts known on 3-D before, but that is in relation to movies, not TV. I’ve come to relize that three is a huge difference between the two. Whereas one is a waste of money, the other can be a tru benefit to audiences.

To begin with, 3-D in the movies is something that has been traditionally wheeled out to give people a reason to go to the cinema rather than stay at home on the couch. With the growth of HD TVs and home theatre setups that, when done right, can give a proper cinema a serious run for the money, Hollywood needed something that TV couldn’t offer. That was 3-D, a gimmick introduced in the 1950s that didn’t particularly work then and it doesn’t work now.

The reason? Higher ticket prices for one. Does the extra couple of bucks on top of a regular ticket price done justice by the added dimension? Not really, in my opinion, the market is still very much in the growth stage. That means we will continue to see growth in the market for the forseeable future but it will eventually level out. Don’t expect every screen in a cinema to be 3-D for at least 5 more years, and maybe longer.

So if 3-D doesn’t really work for cinema, why can it work for TV, specifically cartoons?

TV is the archetypical model for entertainment consumption. It’s 24 hours, 500+ channels (if you aren’t a tightwad like myself) and more hours of entertainment in a day than you could handle in a year. Since people watch so much TV, it makes much more sense from an economic standpoint to introduce 3-D technology in order to boost demand.

However, much the same as HD, it will take a long time for the technology to become widespread. Firstly, people who just dumped $1,000+ for a HD set are not about to go and buy a 3-D one soon. With about ~60% market penetration in the US, that’s a lot of people who probably aren’t in the market for a new TV in the next 5 years or so. Besides that, it has taken 13 years for HD to get to this point, so, at the dawn of 3-D, expect a similar timeline.

Enough beating about the bush, why could cartoons benefit the most? My one and only experience with 3-D cartoons (not CGI movies, BTW) was a 10 minute Spongebob Squarepants experience at Kings Dominion in Virginia a couple of years ago. It was fun and obviously geared up to throw as much 3-D at the audience as possible but it was tolerable for the most part.

Animation, and TV cartoons in particular, with their relatively simple lines would be ideal for 3-D. The technology is already there. I’m pretty sure ToonBoom can tweak their software to allow for dual camera positions of something like that. Seeing as their software already creates a virtual 3-D environment, this wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

The best part? Imagine an anvil or something like that shooting our of the screen at you. Squash and stretch will never be the same again! Again, the nature of animation lends itself perfectly to 3-D compared to live-action. Personally, live-action faces an uphill struggle if only because to make things truly stand out, there is a reliance on SFX and the like.

The future is bright for cartoons at the dawn of the 3-D TV age. Only two things can upset the apple cart. Firstly, the fact that everything produced until this point is in 2-D and thus renders the new TVs useless. Secondly, people have a dislike for wearing the glasses. There are two camps, those that never wear glasses and hate wearing them and those of use that do use glasses and have a hard time putting 3-D glasses over out regular ones. Perhaps someday someone will come up with a solution, until then, cartoons will have to remain in 2-D.

TV Cartoons in 3-D: It Would Be Awesome. Read More »

Animation and Special Effects: One and the Same?

Animation /

When I first started subscribing to Animation Magazine, I was quite surprised to find a couple of pages devoted to special effects. Surely, that was an entire seperate area of the entertainment industry, no? Well, as it turns out, it isn’t.

Once upon a time, visual special effects in movie mainly involved tricking the viewer into assuming something actually happenned when in fact it hadn’t. Sure there were the usual tricks like a knife through the head, or, in the case of Back to Future Part II, where Michael J. Fox had to play three different characters on screen at the same time. Over the last 20-25 years however, we have seen, since the release of Star Wars, the phenomonal growth in the SFX industry.

Today, it is possible to create an entire film without even shooting one scene in a studio. So far, Robert Zemeckis has been the driving force behind the use of using motion-capture technology to create films that would otherwise cost vast amounts to make. The prime example is Beowulf, a film that was ultimately a wee bit ahead of its time.

So in today’s Hollywood, just what differentiates a (CGI) animator from an SFX person? Not that much. Both create images that could not realistically be produced by normal means and both must use creativity in the course of their work. In fact, Richard Baneham, who won a visual effects Oscar for his work on Avatar, began his career as an animator!

While it is beneficial to see the overlap between the two professions, there is relatively little joint events where both parties are in attendance. Just this year (2010) bore witness to the first joint event between ASIFA-East and representatives from the top FX houses in New York City.

Such events are very much welcome as with all things human-related, we tend to stick to our own familiar territory. People on the west coast don’t really speak to those on the east who don’t really know what the folks in Vancouver are up to and so forth. With the massive leaps in visual effects technology, animation could stand to benefit from some of them. Indeed, many of the more advanced software is used by both parties for similar uses.

In due course, we will see even more films and Tv shows that rely on SFX for even the simplest things and while this may be best left to those with the expertise, certainly longer shots or entire episodes or films could be best served by having an animator on board whose perpective may bring about a much more balanced product.

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Employment in the Animation Industry

Animation /

This afternoon, while out trying to find my brother a summer job (we’re in the northern Baltimore suburbs and he has retail experience, e-mails with tips to the usual address please), I began to think about employment in the animation industry.

First of all, I’m not gainfully employed in any aspect of the animation industry (yet) so this post may be somewhat speculative. Feel free to comment if I get something wrong. First of all, the coast you are on is a big factor. Typically, the East coast scene tends to be on a more individual level. Sure there are studios, but chances are you will get a position through word of mouth more than anything else.

The west coast side of things is an entirely different animal. Being the nexus of animation in the US, Burbank studios tend to be much larger, so it is more unlikely that you will get a job based solely on word of mouth or personal recommendations.

What struck me about being a job seeker is that you are much more likely to land a job if you know someone, or someone knows you. Would you rather give a job to someone you know or a name on a piece of paper? The answer is pretty clear.

In terms of the animation industry, the nomadic nature of work means that a sizeable number of people are looking or work. More so in the current recession, but that’s the same for everyone unfortunately.

The industry is one that also has trade union representation in the form of the Animation Guild. Their blog is an excellent view from one side of a coin and while I do not necessarily agree with many (or indeed any) of the points made, it is always a good thing to keep up to date with others’ thoughts, especially those of the union guys. (For a take from the not-quite-other side of the coin, I highly recommend The Business of Animation: A Commentary, a blog that dispenses the author’s thoughts with refreshing directness.)

Ideally, you should be hired on your merits. In other words, can you draw, stick to deadlines, have artistic skill and follow instructions. Realistically, filling in an application form for a job is like someone repeatedly smacking you in the face just because you decided to apply for the job. Why make things so complicated? Sure the new employee is going to cost you money, but if you treat him or her right, they’ll generate you much more. Why beat them over the head before they’ve barely walked in the door.

The important lesson from all of this is to network extensively and maintain a wide circle of contacts who you can rely on should things go pear-shaped. In return, you’ll meet wonderful people who will eventually turn to you for advice and recommendations. Sadly, too many people don’t do this and end up feeling bitter about their whole experience.

My advice, God helps those who help themselves, get out there and get to know as many people as you can and be genuinely passionate about your place in animation, no matter what it is.

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