Maybe a blog post can help me procrastinate from doing my syllabus :)
I haven't been posting because so much has been going on. I've been preparing for my trip to Costa Rica which I leave for in 2 days!! Also I just completed animation on Disney's current film BIG HERO 6 and that comes out in theaters NOVEMBER 7th!
I can't wait for everyone to see all the hard work that has gone into it. People are going to fall in love with Baymax just like how many did with Olaf. Maybe theres something to be said about them both being similar white talking marshmallows... hmm
Some more big news is that I start teaching at CalArts in September!
I am teaching 2nd year 2D animation and to be honest I'm pretty damn excited. I had never been to CalArts before my interview and don't know much about it. I do know that Walt Disney created and founded the school in the early 1960's. I am surprised and happy to say that quite a few other Disney Animators are teaching at CalArts as well. You might recognize a few:
-Eric Goldberg who has worked on many memorable characters, including the Genie from Aladdin, is teaching 4th year students.
-Dale Baer is another amazing 2D Disney Artist will also be there.
-Jorge Ruiz and Wayne Unten are teaching 3D first year!
-Jen hager who is supervising on Disney's next film Zootopia is teaching 3rd year students.
Many more amazing teachers work there but these are the ones from the Disney Animation Department. You can expect a few updates about my teaching experience at CalArts as the year goes on :D I remember being in college since it wasn't too long ago that I was in college myself. Maybe thats a bad thing or maybe thats a good thing I don't know. But whatever I bring to the table, I can guarantee its not going to be like the rest.
NEW names on the right hand side! check them out if you haven't already, they are friends such as Alex Alvarado, Jeffrey Engel, Andrew Chesworth and more.
Staying organized Mentally while working on something is hard for some people. Sometimes things can distracting and take you away from your work: such as friends, internet or even yourself! There are times I feel that I have been working on the same part of my assignment for 3 hours and have gotten NO WHERE...
This is a bad thing, and the solution (my solution) to avoiding such a situation is keeping your mind organized and being aware ON WHAT YOU NEED TO DO NEXT.
-NOTE TAKING-
Everybody takes notes differently, but the bottom line is that everybody SHOULD be taking notes when their teachers, mentors, or even some friends are critiquing their work. At work we have dailies every week (When the animators and us get together to look at everyones work they have done during the week.) When it's my turn for my work to be reviewed everybody, they just start shouting things out or go into a very detailed explanations one after another. Before you know it, someone else jumps in with an EVEN better note... If you could imagine, it can go pretty quick and nobody will wait for you to finish taking a note.
So my strategy is to write EVERYTHING I hear down really fast and messy. By the time every one has commented on my shot, my 2 pages of notes look similar to what a nasty, one legged, charcoal footed chicken would look like tap dancing on my sketchbook... But as soon as I get back to my desk I reread my notes and rewrite them. If I don't do that right away I will not know what these notes mean later.
The page thats cut off, thats my regular handwriting, the big writing would be my messy handwriting :P
I do not know about you but I get excited after I get some really good notes, there's an energy to knowing you just got information to make your work even better. Some animators use this energy to dive right back into their work and others bask in it and take a break to clear their mind to start fresh later.
-THE CHECK LIST-
When I rewrite my notes I make a list of things I have to do so that I have something to check off. Not that doing this is necessary but it's a way to keep track of your progress and it feels good to cross off a note with a big fat marker and feel like a boss bc your TO-DO list is shrinking.
(organizing the priorities on the check list: you are not going to fix your finger arca before you fix that major major hitch in your hips. So aim for the things that stick out like a sore thumb and is killing your shot.)
-THE CIRCLE- This is how I stay mentally focused.. everybody needs their strategy bc we all could get stuck noodling the same nose arc for 3 hours.. The Circle is something I came up with that visually breaks down what I need to do and what I have done (while showing me the time I have spent doing each task)
-How does it work DANNY???? ok here is a step by step of how I do this: You draw a clock, and you plan your day on this clock with general words.
Then as time goes by you shade in the appropriate section on the clock when ever you can.
Then when you actually finish a task that you aimed for you mark how long it ACTUALLY took you to finish that task.
Then you continue and adjust the rest of your schedule accordingly (like cancel those movie plans you made that night!!)
With the circle I can easily see what is taking the most time to accomplish and where my time is going. I like the circle visually much more than a linear system like a bullet pointed list. This is how I get my work done when I am in crunch mode. I do not do this all the time. Here are some of the circles from my sketchbook so you could see how they really look (unlike the fake one I used to demonstrate above)
That's all I got for today. hopefully it helps out who ever needed the help and If you didn't need the help, I hope you enjoyed the insight. Happy NewYears! Oh and one more thing...
PS: REMEMBER to not compare how fast you do your work with how fast your peers do theirs. Some peers might be insanely faster than you naturally but like wise do not take comfort if some peers are a little bit slower than you. Do not think that means to slow down and start to take comfort that you are a little ahead. work hard ALL THE TIME.
-All I have to say is that... big things are on the horizon...
Disney has some crazy cool things in store in the next few years and it is a VERY VERY exciting time to be here. Riding on the heels of Tangled are some very emotional filled movies that I can't wait for all of you to see. Disney Animation Studios is packed with talent in every hall way and over every desk and with the over sight of Lasseter and Ed, the studio has many bright days in front of it. I can't speak of most of it but just take my word for it since im behind the scenes. :)
Being here at Disney is very rewarding because they give you opportunities to draw and grow as an artist. I have been oil painting and life drawing more than I have in a while. Here are some things I've done..
Figure Drawing.. quick 2 minuts stuff
Oil Painting, one hour
So what I want to touch upon today is something very simple but very hard to control: STOP TALKING
-Ever have a hard time with an assignment? Know whats wrong with it but just need time? When people take a look do you feel the need to jump in there and point out the flaws so they know you're not a dumbass and can see the mistakes you have made?
Then how about you DON'T show people!!!!! Get your work to the point where the excuses stop and your work can speak on its own. Bc THEN, when people grade that, their notes touch upon much more valuable information. This recently happened to me. I wasn't raised on MAYA because where I was at, they used house made software and it was very well good. Now I have to use maya and I have to learn it while I try to do my best on my shots that are given to me. In the beginning I used to show early and often, like how one is suppose to, but I noticed some of the notes I was getting from my peers and mentors were notes coming from my inexperience with Maya.. but I didn't say anything because no one likes excuses :) So I started staying late and only showing my work when it was the furthest I could push my animation in the time given and where it wasn't evident that my inexperience with MAYA was a factor. Then I started getting notes that mattered and they really helped me out.
Theres a Beast.. and it's called MAYA
So thats a little example of something im going through right now. None the less I am having a blast. I know I know I've been getting emails of people asking me the same question so I'll answer. You can not really compare PIXAR and DISNEY's animation houses. they are two different machines. One house in my opinion, is more Spline conscious and the other is more Pose Conscious. What do I mean? Well one studio focuses a lot more on the graph editor while the other one is heavily heavily influence by 2D style of animation :) and both of them are very very powerful. It's like trying to compare super powers, you can't! Each house has it's own strengths.
So that's it for now, I have to cut it short this time (no epicly long Post this time, but I will try to post again soon!!!) keep on animating and see you at CTN because it's right down the street :)
Here is a quick post about a community that holds an animation contest every month.
They are called the '11 second club' and they provide a sound bite that is roughly 11 seconds
in length at the beginning of the month. And tons of animators from all around and from all different levels make animations in 2D or 3D! If you are ever out of exercises or things to do, the 11 second club is always a good place to go to motivate yourself or test yourself if you are an animator.
-Franz Kafka had unfinished writings published after his death,
-Mark Twain made THREE versions of the mysterious stranger..
never finished one of them..
-If John von Neumann never would of wrote that incomplete "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" ---Computers would not exist as we know them to be today.
-Geoffrey Chaucer never completed "The Canterbury Tales to the extensive length that he originally intended..
-Michelangelo left a lot of sculptures and paintings only partially finished to inspire others!
-JR Tolkien made 12 volumes of the History of Middle Earth, huge parts unfinished and in draft
-Edmund Spencer wanted to make 'Faerie Queene' 12 books long. He only made it to 6, and it's the longest epic poem in the English language.
Un-finished work is no less better than most finished work.
If you started a walk cycle, worked on it for two weeks, stopped, let 5 months go by.. do you go back and finish it? Would your time be better used if you would just start a NEW walk cycle instead of trying to fix the problems of the old? Wouldn't it be better to take what you learned from the experience of that un-finished walk cycle and pu tit towards a whole new assignment? Here is some work I did waaaay back in sophomore year of college. I cringe when I see it, but I find it healthy having this anthology of files that show a lot of finished and unfinished work. You end up seeing your progress. So if you are asking me, DO NOT go back and touch up every old piece of animation...
So here I'm sharing one of MY old unfinished piece I did in a span of 2 weeks. Hope you can make sense of it :)
Do not feel like you are wasting time by leaving your work unfinished, you ARE STILL LEARNING as long as you are animating. But FINISH your work when it counts. Nobody likes a quitter.
To further prove my point. Here is some unfinished work by John Lennon released in 1996, even recorded with a hand held mic, it still is a wonderful timeless piece.
So I'm back from Europe. I was busy soaking up the sights, people and parties, BUT, I did manage to squeeze in some drawing time. Mostly I drew at airports and train stations and along at a few parks. The subject: people
Drawing people is a bit tricky, bc once they find out you are drawing them, they stiffen up, or try to get in a better "artificial pose". Or they.. (my favorite) they grab their shit and leave. There's an art to pretending you are not drawing some one. It on par with training to become a ninja...
Here are a few drawings from my sketch book. Nothing grand, just figure drawings from europe. As you might observe, people on the the other side of the globe sit and wait just like we do in America.. fascinating...
At the Airport, Flights are DELAYED... I used a blue animation drafting pencil.. WHY? because it just happened to be the one my hand grabbed from my pocket. I don't think when sketching.. I just sketch.
On a Subway tram, I knew that SHE knew I was drawing her..
I wonder what people did at the Airport before the Iphone was invented...
So here is an example when I ADD a little ME to the drawing. The guy with his dog moved around way too much while he was reading his book, and you would think an old lady would hold still for more than 2 seconds! So I said FML and gave up drawing people for a minute. I let my mind wander and I ended up drawing some weird Hippie Space Age stuff on the top of the page. (FYI the 'special' brownies in Amsterdam are called 'SPACE AGE BROWNIES' lol) And for the lady, I drew her looking through a door with some fire on the other side.. Reflective of my feelings? Perhaps.. ..Sue me.
I like draw 'till the whole page is filled. They tend to come out like this, with no up or down orientation. Very annoying to who ever looks through my sketch books. I like to fill the whole page bc I am forced to vary the size of my figures.
When I see an interesting face I try to capture it fast instead of wasting time on the body or clothes.
It's ok to be messy when you sketch. As long as you capture the pose and the person, that is what counts.
I like this small section because I have a very detailed face next to a very simplified drawing. both show a type of personality and are clearly different people. Like I mentioned earlier, it doesn't matter HOW you draw you figures, as long as you get the specifics of WHAT MAKES THEM UNIQUE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb80qq4JUpE ...LOL sorry but I had to..
Pencil over Blue Drafting Pencil.. not as fancy as it sounds...
On thing I like doing is drawing the environments I am in and then Filling them with people. People you can find ANYWHERE. but places.. there can be only place for every place. You can not have two places of the same place.. (if that even makes sense..) This is another airport.
Another collage of drawings. The background is the street map of berlin. The page looked dull with a white background so I spiced it up a bit. There was nothing interesting on the train I was on, so I took the map out of my pocket and made some magic.
This would be the city of Ghent. I didn't get a chance to draw, my brother wanted to keep moving. But this drawing captured the edge of a canal. I think drawing places is worth your time bc it makes you work on perspective and proportions.
people dancing..
This one.. When we missed our train. (that's why I wrote, "I hate fuk'n trains.." in the bottom right corner) So at 3 A.M. I drew this train station. No matter how complicated your view is before your eyes, always try to capture as much as you can on the page. Draw every pipe, every line, every bench, no matter how far or irrelevant it is. I didn't get to finish bc our train came. So after one painstaking hour this is all I could sketch down. There were tons of beams and wires in this station but I tried any way. Don't always go for the easy landscapes and the easy environments, CHALLENGE YOURSELF!!!
I sat in a park and drew a Museum...
More people posing and climbing a statue. The lady in the bottom right is on a bicycle taking a picture..,just in case you were wondering.
At another park in Europe... or outside my apartment in California.. hmm. now I got you wondering... goes to show that people no matter how different we perceive ourselves to be from one another, we are more a like than we would like to admit.
Looking outside my Hostel window out onto an Amsterdam street. Yes that a canal in there too, hence the boat.
A lot of live music over there in Germany, and what did they play? BOB MARLEY :)
He gave an hour long show for some coins, turned out he plays at the local bar and just decides to play in the plaza once in a while.
So sorry for not being around to post something in so long, but I'm back now, so expect some awesomeness on this blog soon. Remember to draw draw draw. You don't need to put aside 3 hours to draw. All you need is 30 seconds. Just do it.
HANDS: Second only to the eye's, they mirror a person's emotion the clearest. A bad hand pose in Drawing or Animation can silently KILL your art. This is a huge overlooked concept. This info was passed on to me and now I shall do the same. Big thanks to Pixar for their education.
THE HAND:
The hand is very specific and has thousands of ways to be drawn and posed. It a very hard part of the body to master, that's why you see a lot of artist draw hands over and over again in their sketch book. (and if you don't draw hands like a manic.. well START DRAWING HANDS) When hands are overlooked they look like this...
Horrendous.. I know.. So before I get you to some juicy knowledge I'm going to try to give you a VERY BRIEF 101 on hands.
-These are the natural paths of fingers. They radiate and curve in relation to each other.
-CG hands look like bricks and rakes when you first load them.. you must pose them into organic believable shapes.
-Simple and Complex hand shapes-
A simple hand shape has an easy silhouette to trace with your eye and have a simple over all shape such as a square or a triangle. Complex shapes have busy outlines and take too much time for the eye to take in the information the hand is trying to convey. Always go for simpler hand shapes so that the viewer can spend more time on the focal point of your work (which should be the face)
-Hands ALWAYS DO SOMETHING..
They must ALWAYS reflect how the character feels or suggest the prop they are using. It can interact with itself, some one else, or with a prop. Live action never has bad hand poses.. So we have no excuses for choosing bad hand acting. That's why Animation is a bit harder than acting, you have to get GOOD ACTING and convince the viewer they are watching a real HUMAN with real habits and poses..
-Hands can interact with themselves and your body- hand to hair, relaxed, fingers crossed with each other, etc
-Hands can interact with props- and show their purpose. He's not holding a basball bat.. He's holding a gun.. The hands make nice silhouette with the gun that if darkened in, would seem as an extension of his body
-With in the hand pose individual fingers must have a purpose. thumb supporting lower bottle, index finger is gripping the lower bottle as well as supporting the top bottle and the remaining three are gripping the top bottle.
-With small props you grip them a certain way and
with in that grip you can still show personality.
-How you approach interacting with a prop can also reveal a lot about the thought process.
Bad Hands-
Bad hands come in drawings and Computer Animation. I tend to always talk crap about football games while I play them. If they would only focus on the little details they can become that much more believable. 10 years of edition after edition of Madden and they cannot seem to get the physics right. And if you look at the photo below you can see that the same hand pose generally used on every hand. The fingers look like rakes and in real life it would take WAAAy to much energy to constantly keep your hands in that pose than to be expressive with them. The hand does not naturally want to keep the fingers apart, the fingers always want to rest on each other, especially when griping something. I learned that when drawing a hand, to check if I can see the purpose of the hand, is it moulding to the form of the object, does it look like the thumb and the wrist are connecting and flowing into the hand at a believable angle..
ACTING-
The hands should support the emotion and the cues the face or character is giving. The hands should never steal the show unless it's on purpose. Do not always move them around with each pose. (Meet the Robinson's: when the black hair kid is first seen is a good example of over acting) watch that movie and you will see what I mean. Do not over use the hands. but use them responsibly and with specificity.
-PERSONALITY is all about the hands. Here are Cool hands
-Here are hands that intend force and dominance
-Sadness through hands
-multi tasking hands to show busyness...
-Here is some acting with the hands... over acted for my tastes but VERY VERY WELL ANIMATED..
There is hardly any OVER acting or bad posing with the hands in most Live Action film. So when looking for an answer on what to do with your hands, Watch people and watch films. Draw hands as much as you can, there are two perfect modelled hands in front of you! You never have an excuse of not having NE thing to draw... DRAW YOUR OWN HANDS,
Hope this helps a little. There is so much more on hands that one can speak about with hands. Whether you are drawing them or animating them, think about the hand pose you are choosing and what does it say.. you should be able to tell the mood of your character just by looking at their hand.
