justinAnimator's thoughts

Frames Per Beat Calculator

2011-11-17T09:30:00.001-06:00

Shahbaaz Shah is awesome. How awesome? Well, for one thing, he's working in-house as a contract animator at Reel FX. For another thing, he just passed along the link to this nifty little tool by Rich Reel that gives you a frame count (and a bunch of other spiffy figures) as you tap out a beat on the keyboard. If you've got to animate anything that involves rhythm, this could come in pretty handy.

Kudos to Rich for making it, and thanks to Shahbaaz for passing it along!

I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat!

2011-11-14T10:48:00.001-06:00

Entertainment Weekly has posted a sneak peek at I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat, a new CG animated short film featuring Sylvester and Tweety. The short is one of three new theatrical Looney Tunes shorts that Reel FX has produced for Warner Bros, and one of two that feature revived audio of classic cartoon voice talent, Mel Blanc. June Foray, another legend in the world of cartoon character voices, was brought in to voice Granny.

I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat will play in front of Happy Feet Two this coming weekend, while the other two shorts -- one featuring Daffy and Elmer (again with Mel's stellar vocals), the other bringing back Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner for more mayhem -- will appear in front of other WB features in 2012.

Auto-placing Toolbars

2011-11-11T11:08:00.002-06:00

I fiddled around with Maya 2012's toolbar options a bit more today, and learned a few interesting things. The most interesting of all was the discovery of a way to auto-load a custom toolbar when Maya opens, and have it appear in the same position that it was in when you last closed the program. (This is all in Python, by the way; I'm not sure if it would work the exact same way in MEL.)

Saving Toolbar Positions

The first thing I had to figure out was how Maya saved toolbar placement. When I wrote the other day about fixing a co-worker's missing tool settings panel, I mentioned the discovery of Maya's startupMainWindowState settings file. I also found some flags on the windowPrefs command for saving and restoring these settings. Today I learned that when using those flags, the full absolute path to the file should not be passed. Maya only wants the name of the file; it already knows where it lives. So to save, it's as simple as this:

import maya.cmds as mc

mc.windowPref(saveMainWindowState="startupMainWindowState")

Maya also saves the toolbar settings automatically when it closes, and we'll take advantage of this as we move forward.

Restoring the Toolbar
Immediately after you have built your interface and wrapped it up in a toolbar, restoring Maya's window state settings will move the toolbar back into its original position (assuming it had an original position when the settings were last saved). Here's a quick example:

import maya.cmds as mc

window = mc.window("myWindow")

column = mc.columnLayout(p=window)

button = mc.button(p=column, l="Click me!",

c="print('clicked!')")

toolbar = mc.toolbar("myToolbar", content=window, label="Clicker",

area="top")

mc.windowPref(restoreMainWindowState="startupMainWindowState")

Naming the toolbar is important, as this is what will allow you to re-position that toolbar automatically between sessions. If it doesn't have a consistent name, it won't work.

Obviously the last line won't do much the first time that you run it, because there is no saved position for this toolbar. However, move the toolbar to some other position, then close Maya, which will save the toolbar's position. Open Maya, run the same code, and the toolbar should re-spawn in the same place where you moved it.

The next step is to make Maya auto-load your toolbar each time that it starts.

Auto-Loading the Toolbar
Maya looks for -- and executes the contents of -- two files each time that it starts: userSetup.mel and userSetup.py. If used, these files should be placed in Maya's "scripts" folder. In this case, we're going to use the Python startup file to kick off our toolbar.

First, we'll need to wrap our code inside a function, and save it in a file. Copy the following into a new file in your favorite text editor:

import maya.cmds as mc

def main():

window = mc.window("myWindow")

column = mc.columnLayout(p=window)

button = mc.button(p=column, l="Click me!",

c="print('clicked!')")

toolbar = mc.toolbar("myToolbar", content=window,

label="Clicker", area="top")

mc.windowPref(restoreMainWindowState="startupMainWindowState")

Save this file as "myToolbar.py" into Maya's prefs/scripts folder, which is one of the places in the sys.path setting of Maya's embedded Python.

Now start a new text file, and add this to it:

import maya.cmds as mc

import myToolbar

mc.evalDeferred(myToolbar.main)

Save this file as "userSetup.py" into Maya's scripts folder.

The reason we're using "evalDeferred" is because Maya needs to wait to execute the UI code until it has a UI to work with. If you don't defer the execution, Maya will crash before it even opens.

Close Maya and re-open it. Your custom toolbar should automatically appear where you last placed it.

Notes on bird flight

2011-11-10T19:23:00.004-06:00

A few days back, one of the guys at work posted a link to a really great page on Brendan Body's web site that has a LOT of awesome observations about bird flight and how to animate it. Brendan was a lead animator on Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, and "had a large role in developing the style of the bird flight for the film." You can see his application of these flight principles in his showreel from the film (inserted below). According to Brendan:

I'm responsible for all animation apart from a couple of shots where someone else animated the background characters - where Nyra says "Owlet, that one says you're his brother" and also where Ezylryb says "Soren, you did what was right". All cycles used in the flying shots are my own.

Awesome work, Brendan!

Legend of the Guardians Showreel from Brendan Body on Vimeo.

New iPhone App: Coach's Eye

2011-11-08T22:04:00.003-06:00

Earlier today I received an email about an interesting new iPhone app that was just released by the folks at TechSmith. It's called Coach's Eye, and while it's being primarily marketed as a tool for coaches (of various types), I think it has some definite potential in the realm of animation.

In a nutshell, Coach's Eye is a simple video review tool. You can load a video clip (from one of several possible sources), scrub through it, add annotations (or "telestrations" as the TechSmith folks call them), and even record vocal comments. Once you're done, save the whole thing and share it using the app's sharing tools.

So how could Coach's Eye be useful for animators? Here are just a few thoughts...

Record a video critique of a piece of animation sent to you by a friend/colleague/student
Create a series of action analysis clips where you break down animated or live-action footage
Record reference footage for a shot you're animating, and make notes on specific things that you want to make sure to incorporate into your work

Right now they're offering Coach's Eye at a special introductory price of 99 cents. This deal won't be around forever, so swing on over to the App Store if you want to learn more.

And no, I'm not getting a kickback for plugging it. I just think it's cool, and wanted to pass the word.

Fixing Toolbar Issues in Maya 2012

2011-11-08T17:35:00.002-06:00

One of the guys at work came to me with an odd problem: he couldn't get the Tool Settings dialog to appear. Clicking the middle button in the upper-right corner of Maya's main window normally makes this dockable dialog pop into view just to the left of the main viewport. In this case, it just made the viewport edge shift ever-so-slightly from left to right. It didn't create the usual drag bar, so we couldn't force the width using the mouse. Restarting Maya did no good. After digging into the UI elements, I found that the width of the dialog's main formLayout was at 0. However, forcing it to a different value did absolutely nothing.

I was pretty sure that Autodesk had to have created a way of keeping track of all those nifty dockables in Maya 2012, and it took a while to figure out where they put it. While the file where this data is stored is not exactly formatted for human eyeballs, I was able to read a bunch of things like "dockState," "dockControl," "dockWidget," and "toolBar", though, so I was pretty confident that I had the right thing. We closed Maya, renamed the file, opened Maya, and presto! The Tool Settings panel was working again!

If you run into this problem, the file in question is named "startupMainWindowState", and is the lone file stored in Maya's prefs/mainWindowStates folder. As I said above, it's not anything can can be edited manually (at least not easily). However, Autodesk did create a simple way to save and load the settings contained in this file. In the windowPref command, there are a couple flags that do the job: saveMainWindowState and restoreMainWindowState. If you make your own dockable windows or toolbars, those commands should let you save and restore their state so that you don't have to manually re-position them every time you make them. I haven't tested them yet, but I plan on doing so tomorrow, and will update this post with my findings.

Devils, Angels & Dating - Teaser Trailer

2011-07-28T22:45:00.001-05:00

Over a year ago, I made contact with the director of an online collaborative animated film, and was cast as the voice of the two male characters. Later I was asked to record a Wonder Years-esque narration that would be woven throughout the film. The project has been progressing nicely, and a teaser trailer was just released that shows off some of the stellar work that's been done by the team, all of whom are volunteers. Take a minute (literally) and check it out!

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 5

2011-07-20T11:55:00.002-05:00

In part 4 Dorian talked about some of his suggestions for new animators, and in this final part Dorian continues in that vein by answering the question, "Would you recommend that someone pursue a career in animation?"

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 5 (mp3)

tweenMachine Tangent Error

2011-07-19T11:23:00.004-05:00

I recently began receiving reports of a tangent-related error in tweenMachine:

// Error: Unrecognized tangent type. Use spline, clamped, linear, flat or step. //

With the help of one of the guys at work, I determined that this will occur when you're trying to add a tween key outside the range of an attribute's current keyframes; i.e. if you try to add a tween key to an object on frame 105, but the object's first keyframe isn't until frame 110. Because there's no previous key to reference for the tangent type, the tangent type in the script will remain undefined, and Maya will complain when applying the tangent.

I hope to eventually add an elegant solution for this problem. For now, the workaround is just to make sure that all objects that you're trying to tween have keys both before and after the frame where you want the tween key to appear.

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 4

2011-07-18T08:39:00.002-05:00

In part 3 Dorian talked about some of the differences between his first two jobs, and we begin Part 4 with another common question...

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 4 (mp3)

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 3

2011-07-12T08:27:00.003-05:00

In part 2 Dorian talked about some of the work he did on Green Lantern at Sony Imageworks, and we kick off Part 3 with a question that crosses the minds of all new animators as they approach their first job.

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 3 (mp3)

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 2

2011-07-09T20:12:00.002-05:00

In part 1 Dorian talked about his introduction to animation and some of his training, and we begin part 2 talking about his first job...

Jazboo 7: Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 2 (mp3)

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 1

2011-07-07T06:58:00.003-05:00

It's been a while since I've been in here, and I apologize for the lapse in chatter. Frankly, I haven't had many ideas on what to post here, but knowing how I tend to over-edit these things when I finally get around to putting them together, I think I've largely been avoiding it when the ideas have come because I knew that I just didn't have the time.

However, something has come up lately that just may change all that. I recently started recording little vocal bits via the Audioboo service. A lot of it is just talk with friends, but I also plan on talking about various things related to animation, and will toss those up here from time to time. It's a lot easier to babble for five minutes, add some tags, and publish the recording than it is to sit down with the intention of writing a "simple" blog post (which is what this was supposed to be) and not take a half-hour to actually get the thing done. :)

One of the things that I got the bug to do with my Audioboo recordings is interview some of the folks at Reel FX. The first interview that I recorded was with Dorian Soto, who came on board as a contract animator for a couple months. Here's part 1 of that interview. Part 2 should be released shortly.

Jazboo 4 - Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 1 (mp3)

For more of my Audioboo posts, stop by my Audioboo profile page, where you can listen to them directly, and also find RSS and iTunes links for tracking them via other tools.

Change is in the air

2011-03-19T11:21:00.002-05:00

Spring is a wonderful time of renewal and rebirth. It's a glorious...

Yeah, fine...get to the point already!

*ahem*

I just finished my last set of Animation Mentor campus crits...not just for this term, but possibly for good. That's the change to which I mysteriously alluded in my Facebook status earlier this week. I will not be returning as a campus mentor in the spring, and it's possible that I will not do any more mentoring with AM in the future.

My five-and-a-half years as a mentor with AM have been quite an experience. I've learned a ton, met a lot of amazing people, and enjoyed the opportunity to share my meager knowledge of animation and the entertainment industry. It's also been a bit of an emotional roller-coaster, particularly during the past three years after I set aside animation in favor of programming and TD work at Reel FX. The decision to step away from mentoring at AM is partly because of that roller-coaster, and partly because of other things happening in my life right now. While I will miss the regular interaction with AM staff and all the aspiring animators in the program, this change really is for the best.

To everyone at Animation Mentor -- staff, students, and graduates -- I express my deepest thanks for an amazing experience. While I won't be on the school site after the end of next week, or walking in costume across the stage at future graduation ceremonies, I hope to stay in touch with as many of you as possible, and wish you all the best in your animation journey.

Maya/Qt posts delayed indefinitely

2011-03-18T07:56:00.004-05:00

I probably should have posted this some time ago, but the reality of the situation is that I have no idea when I'll get back to the Maya/Qt materials. I haven't done any further work with Qt at Reel FX since I initially wrote about it. Part of that is because our current projects are all using Maya 2010, but the biggest issue is that the majority of the Maya tools that I develop at Reel FX need to work both in-house and for our ever-morphing collection of remote animators.

While the crew at the studio have set up an efficient Maya/Qt workflow for internal use, setting up a home system to get Maya and Qt talking nicely appears to be a bit of a chore (to put it mildly). It's tricky enough troubleshooting the problems that remote animators sometimes encounter while setting up their systems to work with our pipeline and tools. Putting them through Qt setup process on top of that would be asking a bit too much.

Once we have a project that will use Maya 2011 and I dive back into Qt work, I may bring this back up, but the remote situation is the key factor. Without a way to ensure that our remote artists can *easily* get the same Qt UI results that we do, it's not worth the development effort.

Maya caching UI images?

2011-01-20T10:22:00.003-06:00

I'm curious if anyone else doing Maya UI development has noticed that Maya will cache images used in UI elements, and not refresh them if the image data changes. I haven't done a thorough test to see if it's specific to certain image formats, as I'm only using XPM files, but this problem has been there for ages. If you haven't seen it in action, try this:

Make a small image (100 x 100 is good) in your favorite image editing application, and save/export it in XPM format.
Script a simple Maya interface that assigns this image to a control, like the iconTextButton. Open your UI and confirm that the image displays correctly.
Go back to your image editing app, make some obvious change to the image, and save/export it with the same name as before.
In Maya, reload your UI, and you should still see the original image, without the change you just made.
Restart Maya and load your UI again. The changed image should appear this time.

I've tried a number of things in an attempt to work around the problem, but it appears that the only way to force Maya to see the change in the image file is to close it and re-open it. Not exactly the most productive option.

If the test above doesn't operate as described for you, I'd love to hear about it. Post the Maya version and OS that you're using. I'm curious if there's a pattern to this problem. I'd also appreciate hearing if you know of any proven work-arounds.

Maya/Qt posting delays

2010-09-27T09:29:00.002-05:00

Yes, I plan on posting more about the transition from Maya's UI to Qt. A few posts have already been started. Sadly, though, the reality of my busy schedule has once again reared its head (I don't dare say it's ugly...it doesn't like that). Priorities being what they are, those other posts are on the back burner for a while. My apologies for the delay.

Maya to Qt: Preface

2010-08-18T07:07:00.006-05:00

Before digging into the meat of the Maya-to-Qt discussion, I should probably cover some basics first.

Software Versions

Because all of my Maya/Qt work is currently happening at Reel FX (as I still don't have a current version of Maya at home for various reasons), everything I do will be based on the software versions installed at Reel FX. As of this writing, we're using PyQt 4 with Qt 4.4.2. Most of my work at this point is with Maya 2009. While we do have later versions available, and I may make occasional reference to idiosyncrasies in those versions, assume for the most part that this is all happening in Maya 2009.

Installation

One thing that I definitely won't talk about in these posts is how to install either Qt or PyQt, or how to get PyQt conversing with Maya in versions prior to 2011. I'm avoiding that hurdle largely because it was cleared for me by the folks at work, so I don't have any hands-on experience to share in that regard. If you want, head on over to Nathan Horne's blog, where he has kindly shared some packages that he put together to make the PyQt installation process a little easier. I haven't personally used those, though, so I can't offer any comments on their effectiveness.

Code Content

While the code samples that I list will be (ideally) fairly complete, I may only present partial code pieces here and there, partly because I'll be pulling some of these examples from actual stuff I'm doing at work. Those omissions are not only to address code-proprietary-ness issues, but because of some customizations that were done to unify all of our Maya/PyQt development at Reel FX. Just be aware of that in case you copy-paste any code samples that you find here. I'll leave in the essential stuff like imports, naturally, but some other parts won't be there.

I think that about covers it. In the first post (coming soon), we'll take a look at Qt's signals and slots, and then delve into meatier UI topics from there.

More Python/Qt posts pending

2010-08-17T21:46:00.002-05:00

After mulling over the matter of this pesky blog a bit more, I think I finally hit on a topic that will keep me posting semi-regularly, at least for a little while. Seeing that I'm learning all kinds of fun new things as I try to rework various Maya tools at Reel FX to use the Qt framework instead of Maya's own UI framework, I will do my best to share those discoveries here in the interest of helping those who may be traveling a similar path.

In my online searches to figure out this stuff, I've seen plenty of "generic" examples of how to use the various classes available in the Qt framework (and the PyQt module used to interface with it), but haven't stumbled across many that address the specific issues faced by Maya developers. I'd like to remedy that (or at least try to) in this blog.

While Qt offers so much more flexibility than Maya's UI tools, the level of functionality that I find myself trying to achieve in my first full UI conversion (which is about 80% done as of this writing) is that of simply matching Maya's existing capabilities. As inflexible as the default Maya UI tools are compared to Qt (speaking of the original MEL-based tools that have been around for so long), the Maya developers provided fairly easy access to a number of very useful features: popup menus, drag-and-drop, grouped radio buttons, widgets with attached labels, etc. I imagine that many pre-Qt developers who have been coding Maya interfaces for a while -- in either MEL or Python -- are probably at least a little bit like me, and have reached a point where these features are taken for granted to some extent. You may look at that list and say, "What's the big deal? Widgets with labels? Pshaw! That's standard!" Yeah, well it was a bit of an interesting revelation to discover that many of these features don't come auto-attached to most (if any) widgets in the Qt framework. The ability to use these features is all there, but it takes a bit more work on the front end to set them up. Some require very little work, while others require a bit more.

That's the kind of stuff that I'd like to cover here. In short, I want to do my best to answer the "how do I replicate [insert Maya UI feature here] using Qt?" question. That's what's been running through my mind over the past couple days, and I've made some interesting discoveries in my search for the answers. Generally speaking, it's fairly easy to match what Maya can do. However, the real fun begins when you realize how much farther you can go, and I'll try to offer some of those "go farther" tips as well.

As I've said before, I don't have an official programming background -- just a deep passion for problem-solving and tinkering. Most of this stuff is coming to me through trial and error, with a little help from the Qt framework docs and various web searches, so there may be hiccups in some of the stuff I present. If your experience has led you to do things differently, or if I just flat-out get something wrong, feel free to speak up.

By the way...did you know that the official pronunciation of "Qt" is "cute"? Before digging into it, I heard tons of references to "Q-T", but not one talking about it with its real name. Is it because it's a bunch of guys who have this thing with saying "cute" in the context of programming geekiness? Is it ignorance? A bit of both, perhaps? No matter. You can say it however you wish. As for me, it's "cute" all the way. :)

The latest goings-(Pyth)on

2010-08-16T07:02:00.003-05:00

Now that animation has wrapped at Reel FX on both Open Season 3 and the three Wile E / Roadrunner shorts, I'm back to updating the animation tools. While I was able to do a little development during production, it's tough making big changes for various reasons. With things flowing a bit slower now, it's nice to finally have the time to tackle some long-overdue to-do items.

One particular programming puzzle piece that I've been half dreading, half eagerly-anticipating is Qt. For those not in the know, Qt is (in the words of its current developer, Nokia) "a cross-platform application and UI framework." With the popular PyQt module that provides an interface to this framework for Python users, its use in the development of tools and interfaces for CG software has grown immensely, just as Python's use has grown in the same field.

The TD team at Reel FX has been steadily pushing farther into Qt development over the past several months, but production demands pretty much kept me from taking a serious look at it until last week. After just a few days of play, though, I'm already a fan/convert/addict. Just as Python is so much more versatile than MEL, Qt's UI tools are WAY more versatile than the UI tools provided by Maya. My mind is reeling with so many ideas of how we can significantly upgrade our animation tools to take advantage of the versatility provided by the Qt toolkit. While I'm far from an expert at it after only a few days, I've managed to conduct several successful tests of greatly enhanced functionality for our character GUI system, and can't wait to overhaul the whole thing and put the new pieces in place.

The only hitch is that getting Maya set up to use the Qt framework takes a bit of work, at least if you're using Maya 2009 (which we still are for some recent projects). While the folks at work have taken care of that already, and we are already using Qt for a greater number of internal Maya tools, we have several tools that are also used by remote animators who are hired to help us with various projects. By relying only upon the toolset within Maya up until now, we've been able to minimize the setup hassle for remote artists. If we suddenly ask folks to also go through the necessary steps to get Maya and Qt talking, we'll likely run into some problems, and that kind of remote support is something that we're just not prepared to handle.

This means that until production switches to using the later versions of Maya that have built-in Qt support, it's going to be difficult to justify spending much time on the tools that are used by both internal and external animators, which is just a tad frustrating. However, there are plenty of internal-only things that can be upgraded, which will give me time to become more familiar with Qt's idiosyncrasies.

On a somewhat-related note, I've taken on yet another side job. This one's more informal, though, but it also involves Python. One of my friends owns a dent-repair business, and he approached me a few weeks ago asking for help with something that will perform a bunch of calculations and track certain information related to the jobs done by him and his team members. Originally he wanted to do everything in a spreadsheet, and in our initial meeting we came up with something that worked fairly well after a couple hours. However, as my friend came up with additional features that he wanted for this system, it quickly became apparent that while it's certainly possible to do the whole thing via spreadsheets, in the long run it would be too much of a headache. I've been wanting to try my hand at standalone development for a while, and this looked like the perfect opportunity. To keep deployment simple, I plan on using Tkinter for the program interface, and will pack the whole thing up using py2exe. While I've only put a few hours into it so far, my experience with Python development at work is helping immensely. I could not imagine tackling something like this in my early Python programming days.

I hope to put out some more posts in the coming days/weeks with some further Python programming thoughts, but only time will tell if it actually happens.

Looney, you say?

2010-07-22T10:29:00.003-05:00

Jerry over at Cartoon Brew just posted his thoughts about the new 3D CG short films featuring Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, the first of which can be seen in front of Cats and Dogs 2 beginning next week. The article features a few stills plus a 25-second clip from the first short. It's a real cliff-....er.....bridge-hanger. ;)

Anniversaries

2010-07-13T15:13:00.002-05:00

I don't often think about this, but summer is a celebration of two industry anniversaries for me. One in late June marks my entrance into the Reel FX family, while the other in mid-May marks my entrance into the animation industry. This year the counts are:

6 years at Reel FX
9 years overall

What brought this to mind was the realization that next year will bring the overall count into double digits. I realize that there are plenty of people who have been in the biz far longer than that, but consdidering (all together now) "these tough economic times" (*ahem*), I'm pleased as punch that I've managed to last this long. It's been quite an interesting ride, and I'm sure there are plenty of new thrills and spills (hopefully fewer of the latter than the former) on the road/track ahead.

I'll save the big gushy post for next year. For now, I'll just offer a brief but heartfelt thanks to God for allowing this all to happen, and to all those who I've had the pleasure of meeting along the way for making the journey interesting.

Sorry, friends...

2010-05-20T11:36:00.002-05:00

The last post had to be temporarily removed due to certain restrictions of which I was unaware. Kinda sad when lots of people know you did something, but you can't say it yourself. What a crazy world.

FWIW

2010-03-04T12:09:00.006-06:00

If you don't know what "FWIW" means, you're probably not alone. At least one of the animators at Reel FX didn't know what it meant until yesterday. I used that acronym (which, BTW, means "For what it's worth") in a reply to a post he'd sent to the animation crew, and he responded with a puzzled look....well, a puzzled-looking email. After I explained it, one of the other guys chimed in with, "OTWTM IWLT" (later translating it into "Oh that's what that means. I was lost, too"). That, in turn, spawned numerous other comedic replies.

The last reply in the thread used selected letters from the original guy's name as a fake acronym, and that was the spark that led me to create the list below. It contains the name of every animator (and one non-animator) at Reel FX, but the names are all printed "long-form", as if the name were actually an acronym for something else. As you can see, I had way too much fun (and probably took more time than I should have) trying to figure out what that "something else" could be for each one. In most cases, I wasn't aiming for anything specific, though a few passages do contain items relating to actual qualities/traits about the associated individual.

While I figured everyone would get a kick out of the list, I wasn't prepared for the replies from the group. Almost immediately, people started replying in the same pseudo-acronym "code", taking their real message and expanding it out to a bunch of nonsense words and phrases. The exchange was so funny (IMO) that I asked for permission from the group to share their replies here as well. You find them below the main list. The scary thing is that some of them actually make sense outside of their fake acronym-ity.

Enjoy!

---------------------

David almost veered into dedicated luchadors, inflating Steve's big ego.

Kent enjoys new tomatoes, and leaves fifteen rabbits eating dessert.

Randy accidentally nudged Doug, yet handily applied yams evenly spaced.

Joe oversaw every jump, only hitting Nelson six times over nothing.

Justin upset Steve's tray, inverting nine bottles and royally ruining Ernesto's tea time.

Ray acquired yonder cheese? Huzzah! Always so excellent.

Bryan rode yaks, and nearly exceeded Nelson's greatest ride. Almost, man.

Ken's egrets never hike up long inclines near goats.

Ernesto races Nigerian elk, skillfully taking over better opportunities to teach gerbils English. Really!

Doug ousted underpaid garment labelers after sprinting liberally in Texan ostrich skins

Monica owns no ice cream, although avocados sometimes tempt one nibble.

Ben: excellent ninja, jumping all mountains instantly. No, really! Obviously superior athletic limbs easily scale.

Trevor recovers emeralds, vanquishing outrageous rhinos, yammering ocelots, unbelievably nefarious giraffes.

John obviously has nifty beats, excellent rapping rhymes, yo.

Steve takes elephants Venetian eggplant nuggets in chocolate hollow orbs, like so.

Michael intercepts camouflaged hairpieces, and even liberates hidden oranges lurking languidly amid nectarines during evening rituals.

Tim is mysterious, like a nondescript nugget of nougat

Abraham breaks reclusive armchairs, hammering at manifold armoires. "Give up! I like applied radiology!"

Sean, earnestly anticipating new encounters, recently made effervescent yogurt

Eric rips into chocolate deposits ravenously, overtly bypassing internal lemon essence

Dave avoids vicious emus, vivaciously applying liberal linguistics on next email

Tom overcooks meringue dishes and neatly engineers neckties.

Josh? Oh, snap! He creates awesomely rigged eyes. Yeah!

Nelson elevates limp sombreros over nineteen blazing rings on Wednesday nights.

---------------------

Responses

Why are Steve and Nelson listed so frequently?

- Kent

Pure randomness. If someone's name came to mind at a certain point, and it fit the flow of the text, I used it.

- Me

So he understands the underlying problems, knowingly entertaining nobody today

- John

Has anyone had a half a** hamburger accident?
- Joe

Like old Lenny?
- John

Now I can eat
- Joe

Winning eliminates lame losers. People like all your excessive domination!
- David

You offer umbrellas and rain, even jokingly uttering sad thoughts... John empties angry lotus orbs under sweet juice oak humming nests.
- Kent

Is life in Kentuky exciting, capsules ate kewl envelopes
- Ray

pickle grandma rain yelling monkey September ninja brick pee pee whisper happy.
- Joe

Really answering Nelson's doorknock, you see that interesting neighbor Kent's sexiness.
- Kent

On hibiscus nibs, oranges wallow happily after tipsy housewives applied vivid eggplants in domes over next event
- Me

Y’all obviously underestimate all literary levity. How are varied enigmas written, and you’re totally overlooking obvious mastery? Unlike childish happenstance from really elementary efforts, this iteration marks expertise.
- Tim

Tony is missing wonderfully insane nonsensical stuff!
- David

Time I met your old ugly retarded obnoxious codger kid. Jackson unbelieving sucker thought Whitaker had a tight isolated white anger soon. Tenaciously heightening its noodley kind in near grossness.
- Randy

Animate a Face SOLD OUT!

2009-07-13T10:00:00.002-05:00

The last copy of my Animate a Face CD set has been sold! I won't get a chance to update my site until later tonight, so if you know someone who's about to place an order, please pass along the news.

Even though the first-run CDs are gone, I still have a set for my own use, and am still keeping an eye out for alternate avenues of distribution. One distribution firm I was considering apparently doesn't have a system in place to sell multi-disc products. I haven't looked at the contents in a while, but there may be a way to compress it down to a single disc. Electronic distribution is an option that some have suggested, and I'd like to explore that if possible. Leads to appropriate distribution solutions are most welcome!

I'm very grateful to everyone who has taken a chance with my little tutorial product, and hope that it's been helpful in your animation efforts.

Two Webosaurs vignettes online!

2009-06-29T10:39:00.006-05:00

We've been producing a number of short 15-second vignettes for Webosaurs, and the first couple have been released into the wild!

What I love about these pieces (not just these two, but the whole series) is that the animators at Reel FX were given a huge amount of ownership over their work. The team was given the task of creating mini-stories that could tie in with certain parts of the Webosaurs world. The group split into pairs, and each twosome developed a script, boarded and pitched it, directed the voice talent (Justin Harder and myself), animated the shots, and even offered direction on the background designs. It's been a huge collaborative effort, and the end result in each case is something that's part story, part ad, and all fun.

(Edit: word has it the crew here is going to update the clips so the ends don't get truncated by good ol' YouTube. They're a tad short in their current form.)

(Edit edit: fixed links to embedded videos, fixed size)

Kicking off voiceover site

2009-05-13T21:48:00.002-05:00

I'm finally kicking off a separate voiceover web site:

www.justinbvocal.com

Just a temp splash page for now, but the blog portion of the site is alive and kicking. Voiceover-related posts from this blog will gradually move over there. Many thanks to Grant Goodwin for help with the logo design.

Short Story: The Cobweb

2009-04-30T22:57:00.002-05:00

A little over a month ago, I took a day off to just relax and unwind. Somewhere in the middle of the day, the voiceover bug jumped up and bit me, and before I knew it I was perusing the available projects in the Librivox forum in search of something short to record.

It wasn't long before I located a thread for a collaborative production of Beasts and Super-Beasts. I'd been searching for material to use as practice for narrative voiceover work, and one of the unclaimed short stories in this collection caught my attention. After receiving word from the project coordinator that I could claim the requested story, I dove in. An hour later I uploaded the finished piece, which I present for your listening pleasure:

The Cobweb

There are things that I could have done better, but all in all, I'm very happy with how it turned out. I hope you enjoy it!

Twitter me this...

2009-04-06T08:53:00.003-05:00

I've semi-recently become a Twitter semi-junkie. As part of this semi-new-found addiction, I've added a Twitter gadget to the blog sidebar. Happy to hook up with other animators, developers, etc. However, be warned: I do weed my follower list from time to time, blocking users who (for lack of a better phrase) creep me out. If your creep quotient is low, you'll likely stay. :)

Totally awesome!

2009-04-01T10:09:00.000-05:00

ThinkGeek always comes out with the best products. Especially at this time of year. :)

Monsters vs. Aliens vs. Apathy

2009-03-29T20:43:00.003-05:00

There are a only a handful of animated films that I have intentionally avoided for one reason or another. In some cases, the animation style was just too off-putting. In others, it was the apparent quality of the film as a whole that turned me off.

In the case of Monsters vs. Aliens, however, I simply didn't care. Not about the plot, and not about the characters. While I got a few minor chuckles when I watched the early trailers, nothing in them raised my interest to the point where I felt myself saying, "I have to see this!" In fact, the film was so far off my radar that I frequently found myself saying, "Oh yeah...I forgot that was coming out," when friends would ask about it.

And that's another thing: almost nobody in my animation circle was talking about it. It wasn't a hot topic like many past films had been, so those moments were friends would ask about the film were few and far between. Hence the forgetting.

Anyone else feel the same way? Chime in! Anyone see it? If so, what are your thoughts?

tweenMachine 2.03

2009-03-27T10:29:00.003-05:00

tweenMachine 2.03 is published. It fixes a problem that has prevented Maya versions in the 200X series from using the special tick color feature. If you run into any issues, drop a note here (still haven't got the contact page on my site updated yet).

Booleans, ternary operators, and max

2009-03-26T21:43:00.004-05:00

I ran into a situation today that initially stumped me. I needed to take a list of unknown size, check each item in the list to see if it could be found in a line of text, and return a single True or False if any one item in the list matched that check. Oh, and if the list was empty, that had to be addressed appropriately as well. And I wanted to do it in the smallest way possible.

Originally I'd hacked together a short four or five line function that did the job. However, after coming back to the code for some other updates, I noticed that said function was only being called once, so I began looking for ways to nix that function and do the job more directly. Part of the challenge was that this comparison I needed to do was part of an existing if statement, and it had to remain so due to the way the rest of the code worked. In short, the comparison went like this (in pseudo-Python):

thisList = ["list", "of", "unknown", "length"]
if not ":" in line and not anythingInThisList in line:
  do stuff
else:
  do other stuff

The first thing I tried to figure out was a way to get a single True or False out of a list of various Boolean values. On a whim, I tried to use the built-in max function. I'd used max before in standard numeric comparisons, but never with Booleans. Not surprisingly, it worked quite well.

>>> max(True, False)
True
>>> max([False, False, True, False])
True

Getting the necessary Boolean list to pass to max was a no-brainer thanks to Python's list comprehensions. Here's an example that quickly shows if a given word contains any vowels:

>>> vowels = ["a", "e", "i", "o", "u"]
>>> max([v in "sadness" for v in vowels])
True
>>> max([v in "shhhh" for v in vowels])
False

This process alone solved most of my problem. However, I couldn't always be sure that my list of things to look for would contain anything. The variable containing the list was set by an argument in a function definition, and that argument defaulted to None if no other data came through. That meant that I had to somehow force the output of the max comparison to False if the variable was None, or let it do its thing if not.

That got my thoughts going toward ternary operators. For those who don't know, many programming languages offer a condensed one-line shortcut for the standard if-else comparison, called a ternary operator. In short, it turns this:

if statement:
   doThis
else:
   doThat

into this:

statement ? doThis : doThat

Not long ago I dug around to see if Python supported anything like this, and sure enough it does (as of one of the more recent versions, but I forget which one), although it isn't in the standard documentation from what I could see. At any rate, the above example would look like this using Python's approach to the ternary operator:

doThis if statement else doThat

With that applied to my max comparison, the end result looked something like this (and I hope this all ends up on a single line in the blog post):

# "line" is the line of text
# "y" is either None or a list of items to find in "line"

max([x in line for x in y] if y is not None else [False])

The reason that False needs to be encapsulated inside a list is because max needs a list of items through which to iterate, even if that list only contains a single item.

It's also possible to generate the Boolean list using the map function and a lambda, and the code isn't that much longer:

max(map(lambda x:x in line, y) if y is not None else [False])

Sneak peek at upcoming RFX project

2009-03-26T11:21:00.003-05:00

I had the opportunity to work on a cool project at Reel FX last summer. We were awarded a contract to construct a series of sculptures to coincide with the opening of a new light rail station not far from the studio. Part of the prep phase involved posing some 3D models in Maya, with the resulting models to be used as templates for the final sculptures, and I had the honor of creating the needed poses under the watchful eye of Brandon Oldenburg, VP of Creative at Reel FX, who designed the installation.

Work is well underway on construction of the sculptures, although I can't give any more details at this time regarding what they'll be. However, if you happened to pop into Reel FX during the last month or two, you probably would have seen a work-in-progress version of one small portion of one sculpture sitting in our main atrium. If you didn't...I'm so sorry. Other than that, I can only say this: they will be BIG!

For more info, and a sneak peek at some of the smaller components of the installation (not to scale, in case you're wondering), check out the official site for the Deep Ellum Gateway Project. With the opening of the new station slated for September of this year, I imagine more info about the installation will come along any day now.

Yoono

2009-03-20T12:26:00.002-05:00

Just discovered a nifty add-on for Firefox: Yoono. It sits in a thin sidebar in the main window, and lets me hook up to pretty much everything: chat, social sites, RSS feeds, etc. I'm even writing and posting this blog entry from it. Pretty slickaroonie, I must say. :)

All right, enough geekin'. For now, anyway. ;)

Changing styles, changing times

2009-03-18T23:41:00.003-05:00

Imagine if the Merrie Melodies short "One Froggy Evening" were created by today's animation production system. It's very possible that it would turn out very differently, as one blogger speculates via a series of hypothetical notes that might come back from a review session with today's content critics.

What do you think? Do you think that the creation of such a film today is likely to generate that kind of response...that kind of over-analyzation of details that, in the end, really don't matter because it's all fantasy?

At some level, I feel that we are excessively critical with some of the things we create in the name of entertainment. Even in the realm of animation, we don't always allow ourselves to let go and let loose, to just let certain things be nonsensical and come out of left field. Why not?

Think about this: if that film were made as a live-action story (with a CG frog, naturally), matching the appropriate details of the animated version as closely as possible, how would we feel about it? Would we be as willing to accept the presented absurdities and disregard certain glossed-over details like we do with the animated presentation?

I don't know that there are any firm answers, but I've got some thoughts. It's late, though, and I need my beauty sleep (yeah, right....like it's done me much good so far!). More postulating to come later...

Maya and Python lambdas, part 3

2009-02-25T10:27:00.002-06:00

A thought occurred to me this morning before coming into work. I was still thinking that there had to be some way of further improving my use of lambdas in Maya GUI creation. Then it hit me: assign the data from the loop as a default value for one of the lambda's arguments!

import maya.cmds as mc

def showStuff (stuff):
    print "You've given me %s!" % stuff

stuffList = ["an apple", "a pear", "a pickle"]
mc.window("Stuff to Give", w=300, h=200)
cl = columnLayout()
for item in stuffList:
    mc.button(l=item, c=lambda x, i=item:showStuff(i))

Look, ma...no lambda factory! :) Here's my guess as to why this works when it doesn't work to put the variable "inside" the lambda...

By stuffing a variable into the function/method call inside the lambda function, it appears that the value of the variable isn't retrieved until the lambda function is executed. For a variable defined by a loop, this means that the variable value is the same as it was during the last iteration through the loop.

However, by taking a variable and assigning it as the default for one of the lambda's arguments, the value assigned to that variable is retrieved and stored in the lambda function definition. When called by Maya when the appropriate GUI element is used, the lambda function already has that value, and knows to pass it as the default for the appropriate argument. Because no other data is passed to replace it, it can be used reliably inside the function as part of the real function call we want to make.

The only thing to keep in mind when using this technique is the extra data that Maya passes on its own, which is caught (and promptly ignored) in the example above by the x argument.

Clean and simple. Me likey.

More Lambda and GUI fun

2009-02-24T11:46:00.003-06:00

Just tripped over an interesting problem with the lambda stuff I shared in the last post. It's just peachy if you're passing a literal value:

# other code omitted for brevity
mc.button(l="click me", c=lambda x:colorMe("Purple"))

However, if you're creating a collection of controls using a loop, it no worky correctly:

names = ["me", "you", "him"]
for name in names:
    mc.button(l=name, c=lambda x:nameMe(name)

In this example, no matter which button you click, it will pass "him".

I tried a number of ways to get around this, and wasn't successful until I revisited the page that flipped the lambda light switch for me. The second example on that page shows how to create a "lambda factory" of sorts. In the context of the loop situation, the factory serves to isolate the creation of the lambda function from the loop. While the factory function was a standalone item in the example on that page, it would be convenient to nest said factory inside the same function/method that contains the loop. Here's a more fleshed-out example:

import maya.cmds as mc

def addButtons (names):
    # here's the factory function
    def factory (nm):
        return lambda x:showName(nm)

    # and here's our loop
    for name in names:
        mc.button(l=name, c=factory(name))

It's a bit more extra code than I'd hoped for, but it's only needed when using the lambda technique inside a loop, and still allows me to keep the target functions/methods clean by avoiding nesting.

Python Lambdas and Maya GUIs

2009-02-23T14:00:00.006-06:00

I love epiphanies. :)

For some reason, I haven't been able to figure out "lambda" functions in Python. Granted, I've not put a great deal of time into them. It's just that whenever I would see them in someone else's code, I couldn't immediately figure out what they were doing, so I'd just add another mark next to the "Need to research lambdas" entry in my mental to-do list and move along. To make a long story short, I ran across a page today that flipped the light switch on lambdas. But that's not the epiphany of which I speak. The epiphany hit when I began trying to figure out what (if anything) I could do with those lovely little lambdas in my Python programming at work.

Most of my development work involves the creation of tools with some kind of graphical user interface (GUI). When assigning a command to a Maya GUI element in Python, it expects either a string that contains some Python code to execute, or a pointer to a function or method that will be called. In the vast majority of situations, I'll use the latter option. If I don't need to pass any data to the target function, there's no problem, and Maya gets the function pointer as expected:

import maya.cmds as mc

def blah(*args):
    # "*args" is required because even though the
    # command doesn't pass any data, Maya passes
    # some anyway.  Go figure...
    print "You touched me!"

mc.window(w=500, h=500)
mc.columnLayout()
mc.button(l="Touch!", c=blah)
mc.showWindow()

However, in most of the GUIs that I create, some control will need to pass specific data to the function that it calls. The problem is that once you include parentheses to pass data to the function, Maya is no longer getting a function pointer. It's getting the value (if any) returned by the called function, or None if the function doesn't return anything.

Up until now, I've been using nested functions to get around this problem. By defining and returning a "dummy" function inside the main function that is called by the GUI element, Maya will get the function pointer it wants, and I can pass in any data that I please:

import maya.cmds as mc

def blah(value):
    def b(*args):
        # "*args" is still required because this is the
        # function that Maya will ultimately call when
        # the button is pushed
        print "I was given:", value
    return b

mc.window(w=500, h=500)
mc.columnLayout()
mc.button(l="Touch!", c=blah(10))
mc.showWindow()

This process has been working fine, but in the back of my mind, I kept hoping to find a more elegant solution.

Enter my new friend: the lambda!

After some experimentation, I learned two very helpful things about lambdas. The first is that the expression evaluated by a lambda doesn't necessarily have to have any connection to the data it is passed. For example, a "normal" lambda definition might look something like this:

x = lambda y: y * 2

In this case, calling x(5) will return 10 (the 5 gets passed to y, when is then evaluated through the expression y*2 to yield 10, which is then returned). However, the expression can be changed to return something that has nothing to do with the value passed in through y, like so:

x = lambda y: 15

In this case, no matter what value you pass, 15 will always be returned.

Based on this example alone, I can already begin to use lambdas to simplify my example code above. (It's simpler on the function definition side of things because we get rid of the nesting issue, but some might see the syntax of assigning the desired function call to the GUI element a tad more confusing.)

import maya.cmds as mc

def blah(value):
    print "I was given:", value

mc.window(w=500, h=500)
mc.columnLayout()
mc.button(l="Touch!", c=lambda x:blah(10))
mc.showWindow()

What happens is that the mystery-data passed by Maya gets assigned to x in the lambda definition, but we don't need to use it. All we need is to call our function with the desired value.

For some GUI elements, though, the data passed by Maya is actually useful. Take an intSlider, for example:

import maya.cmds as mc

def blah(value):
    print "The slider value is", value

mc.window(w=500, h=500)
mc.columnLayout()
mc.intSlider(dragCommand=lambda x:blah(int(x)))
mc.showWindow()

In this situation, the data passed by Maya when dragging the slider is the slider's value. However, it's passed as a Unicode string, so I just converted it to an integer before passing it to the function. This means I don't have to query the slider, as the data I need has already been passed.

Some GUI operations, like dragging and dropping, pass more than one argument to the target function. No matter...just provide the requisite number of arguments in the lambda definition (i.e. lambda w,x,y,z: ....) and pass them along to the target function as desired. Or, as in one particular case where I wanted to substitute my own data in place of what the drag operation passed, you can take advantage of the other nifty thing I learned through my experiments: a lambda can accept arbitrary argument lists, just like normal functions.

# other GUI code here
mc.button(l="blah, dragCallback=lambda *x:boo(myData))

That's all for now. Happy Python GUI building!

Hardware woes, begone!

2009-02-16T11:06:00.002-06:00

Okay, I think I've finally finished fiddling with this finicky figurer (the only synonym for "computer" that I could find that started with F).

After my last post, I ran across some other info that said that the power supply might be to blame, and I began seeing other evidence to support that theory. Shortly thereafter the computer just refused to boot, so I had to do something. With the exception of the first item below, most of my attempted somethings were done this past Saturday...

Bought a beefier power supply. Still nothing.
Bought a new motherboard. Got it home and found that it didn't have enough slots to take all my existing RAM sticks.
Exchanged the motherboard for a newer one that required a new CPU (picked a nice energy-efficient dual-core). Got home and found that the location of all the externals (keyboard and audio hookups, plus the location of the PCI slots) wouldn't work with my case.
Trekked to Best Buy for a new case. I was tired of messing with hardware, so I paid them to move all the guts from the old box to the new one while we went and had a nice Valentine's Day family dinner.
Came back a few hours later to find that my old RAM wouldn't work with the new motherboard, and that the board only had one IDE connector, so the DVD drive had no place to connect. Bought new RAM and a new SATA DVD drive, and had the Geek Squad install both. Brought everything home.
Nothing booted. Found that the hard drives were connected in the wrong order. Had to swap their positions in the case because of the awkwardness of the IDE cable.
Found that the DVD drive wasn't being recognized because it was connected to the wrong SATA connector on the motherboard.
Booted into BIOS, set everything up, then started to boot into Windows. Had to re-authorize Windows, which ended up taking several phone calls to MS. Thankfully I brought the old machine home, or I would not have had access to the product key label that was conveniently stuck to the back of the case.

Based on information that I read in some of the articles I found online after the last post, I thought that I would have to run a repair install of Windows in order to get it to play nice with the new hardware. Once the re-authorization was finished, though, Windows booted up without any issues and just started bugging me about all the new hardware it was finding. I haven't had any BSOD's or any noticeable system hiccups.

In the end, all this hardware futzing cost about the same as (or more likely more than) a new MAChine (*ahem*), and in the end I wound up with essentially a new machine, so I guess it kinda served its purpose. Our key concern was getting access to all the data on my hard drives again (especially financial data). It also got us thinking about where we want some of said data to reside for better long-term, computer-independent access.

So there we go! Done!

I hope!

Most definitely NOT the monitor

2009-01-05T07:39:00.002-06:00

In the ongoing fight to get my desktop system fully functional again, I feel I've pretty much eliminated monitor problems from the equation. I just finished two quick tests. I moved the monitor to my wife's machine and hooked it up via the DVI input. No problem. I then moved it back to my machine, pulled out the new graphics card, and ran the motherboard's on-board VGA output to the monitor's VGA input. No problem. In fact, I'm using that VGA hookup now, which is the first time I've been able to use the desktop for the past several days.

All signs at this point are aiming squarely at the motherboard, and specifically the PCI Express slot in which the video card sits. The rest of the board seems to be working fine, as my presence here (hopefully) indicates. While it's nice to have a fairly solid target at which to direct my next efforts, it's not the target I wanted. If it were the monitor or video card, it wouldn't be much of an issue. Get a new one, plug it in. With the video card, there would be drivers to install, but that's still a piece of cake compared to the work involved when swapping motherboards.

A new board typically means reinstalling Windows from scratch. At least that's what it used to mean. However, I just found a couple web pages that have detailed instructions on how to swap motherboards without affecting Windows. It's still more work than installing a new video card or monitor, but much less work than a full re-install.

So....here we go!

Curse on Apple lifted....for now

2009-01-04T22:46:00.003-06:00

Wouldn't you know it....I found a solution not five minutes after that last post:

Import the photos into iPhoto. Then go back to iMovie and drag the photos in from the iPhoto library.

But seriously...that's still a few steps too many. They should "just work" (famous last words, Apple) when dragging the photos in from the Finder, no?

The day I curse Apple

2009-01-04T22:14:00.002-06:00

That day is today.

I don't know why they did this, but in iMovie HD, all vertically-oriented photos get rotated back to horizontal orientation, and there is NO way provided in the software to rotate them back.

Sure, I could import them into a photo editor, lay them over a horizontal black background, save them out, then pull them back into iMovie....but come on. I just wanna make a stinkin' slideshow with some videos intercut here and there. What happened to the ease of use that they keep touting in all their ads?

I could've sworn that I used some vertical shots in a movie project a while ago, but for the life of me I can't remember how/if I pulled it off, and an hour (or more) of Googling has not yet led me to a solution.

That said, the evening wasn't a total waste. I did manage to develop a headache! Thanks, Apple!

Third time's a (very frustrating) charm

2009-01-03T21:57:00.003-06:00

This is just getting more annoying all the time. My initial tests led me to think it was the monitor, but later I was able to get the monitor to work with the laptop, so I thought it had to be the video card. Now I've got a brand new video card, but I still have no image from the desktop machine, and the laptop still works just fine with it. So where does that take me next? The motherboard. Ugh...

I think I'm going to see if I can get the motherboard's on-board video to work. If so, then my guess is that it would mean that something tied to the PCI Express slot is messed up.

However, that still doesn't explain why my wife's monitor worked fine with my computer in one of my earliest tests. I think I'll try that one again as well. If that still works....well, I'll be completely stumped.

NOT the monitor!

2009-01-03T08:33:00.003-06:00

Looks like I typed that last entry too soon. While things worked okay last night, I got absolutely no signal this morning. After more cable wiggling, more detaching and reattaching, and more under-the-desk spelunking, I decided to try plugging my Mac laptop into the monitor. Bingo! Beautiful picture...and it was via the DVI input. After all the other tests, that could only mean one thing:

I've got a dead video card.

Oh joy....

(BTW...absolutely meaningless bonus points for those who can decipher the slightly cryptic reference in this post's title. Think early 90's TV...)

Minor Monitor Mayhem

2009-01-02T22:53:00.002-06:00

I seem to have this thing with monitors. About a year-and-a-half ago, my trusty CRT died on me in the middle of a live Q&A with my Animation Mentor class. That paved the way for the purchase of the current widescreen LCD monitor, which was humming along just fine...up until this morning.

I powered the computer on, fiddled around for a half-hour or so, then hit the sleep button on the keyboard before heading off to shower. Upon returning a little later, I hit the space bar on the keyboard to wake up the machine. The computer woke up, but the monitor didn't.

At first I thought it might just be a really long delay while the system was processing something before it would fire up the video signal. It had occasionally behaved that way in the past, but after a minute or so of no picture, I figured something else was amiss, so I started testing things. Cable wiggling got me nowhere. Borrowing my wife's monitor (identical to mine...the result of one of those "as long as you're replacing yours, would you mind getting a new one for me?" requests) and plugging it into my box gave me a good picture. That told me that the video card and cable were probably fine, but that the DVI input on my monitor was probably dead, so after work I bought the necessary accoutrements to use the SVGA input, and it doth work again. Yea, verily! Glad to know it's not a total goner. The SVGA signal doesn't look horrible, but it is a tad blurry. Still, I'll gladly sacrifice a little clarity in order to save some dough.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas, and wish you all the best in 2009!

Lights up, claws out!

2008-12-19T22:39:00.002-06:00

I was watching a movie recently with some friends. I had really enjoyed the film -- much more than I expected that I would going into it -- and was eager to discuss it with my friends after it was over. The credits rolled, the lights came up, and folks started talking.

Not one single positive comment was made.

To their credit, they weren't being venomous or vicious with their comments, and I agreed with some of what they were saying. Still, I had hoped that someone would mention at least one part that they liked.

Nope. Nothing but criticism.

I swear, it was like someone took a needle and just popped my enthusiasm balloon.

Big Idea nearly gone

2008-12-02T20:18:00.004-06:00

Randy came up to me today and asked if I knew if Greg Hardin was still at Big Idea. "I think so," I said. "Why?"

"Well, because his status on FaceBook sounds like he may have been let go."

"What?!?"

Sure enough, he was gone...along with about two-thirds of the rest of the crew. Big Idea is down to eleven people, with most of them in marketing, and only three on the creative crew.

This brings back unpleasant memories of the layoff that happened right before Christmas of 2002. The studio was already on edge after the round of layoffs that practically coincided with the theatrical release of Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie, and a bunch of folks losing their jobs right before the holidays didn't help. Layoffs at any time of year are a pain, but it tends to feel especially cold if it happens before Christmas. I'm not saying that it's a decision that anyone felt good about, either then or now. It's just really rare for a single company to have to dip into those particularly cold waters twice. My gut says that for those who are left who remember both dips, the lingering chill from the second submersion probably has a bit more bite.

My heart goes out to everyone involved: those who are no longer with the company who have to figure out what to do next, and those few who are still with the company...who also have to figure out what to do next.

Site down

2008-10-27T16:47:00.002-05:00

Looks like some clever hackers found a way into my site and planted some oh-so-fun phishing scripts in there. I was contacted earlier today by my host, and informed that they've suspended my site until we can get it worked out. Here's hoping it won't take long.

I am voice actor. Hear me flail!

2008-10-08T22:38:00.004-05:00

I was asked to provide vocal noises for the guy in the large plastic ball in this DriveTime spot that we produced at work about a month ago. Most of the stuff in the early part of the spot had to be mixed really low under the main voiceover, but you can hear me loud and clear (well, muffled and clear) when the guy goes rolling toward the camera. No pay for this gig, but it was fun all the same.

Python decorators: getting a little closer...

2008-10-06T22:31:00.003-05:00

After further searching, I finally ran across a very well-written article that attempts to explain Python decorators from a very basic level. While it hasn't brought to mind any situations in which I would want to use decorators in my code, I at least have a handle on what exactly they are and how they work.

To clarify my earlier post, one of main things that (at first) didn't click for me with regard to decorators was how exactly they allowed the programmer to effectively modify a function after it was written. Sure, I'd learned that you could assign a function to a variable and pass it around like any other piece of data, but even in that context I saw the function itself as essentially static. If I passed a function as an argument, I only expected the target function to call the function I passed as-is. I never thought about the possibility that a target function could actually do something else with/to the function I had passed.

As with other things I've unearthed in the process of learning Python, I have a hunch that this would've been easier to learn if I had a more formal background in computer science, and that's probably the biggest frustration that still crops up as I dig through Python documentation. Bits of programming terminology are often casually thrown around with the assumption that the average reader knows what they mean. One example is the term "first-class objects" that can be found at the head of the article linked above. I've seen that term used in several places, but even though the sentence immediately following the phrase in the above article is related to the phrase's definition, I still had no idea what it meant until I dug it up via a Google search. The way it was phrased in that article, it felt like the status of Python functions as first-class objects was a separate concept from that which immediately followed it, so I was left thinking, "Okay...so what are first-class objects?"

That's probably not the best example of my frustration, though. I guess the point is that it feels like there's a gap somewhere. At one end there's good introductory material, such as the tutorial by Guido von Rossum that covers a lot of ground-level topics. At the other end there is very nice reference material that covers the individual modules in the standard library, the data types that the language offers, etc. However, between Guido's tutorial and the other reference material there's a bit of a void, because some of the reference material makes reference to programming concepts that aren't explained in Guido's tut. I'm not necessarily implying that they should be covered by Guido's tutorial, but it's a gap all the same, and one that many in the Python community seem to ignore. Perhaps that is an inaccurate observation, and I'd be more than happy to be shown evidence to the contrary. However, from my observations, many experienced Python programmers seem to assume that you're either a newbie learning the basics, or you're a fellow pro. The folks in the middle who aren't totally new but aren't full-on professional programmers seem to get overlooked.

The most frustrating part is that I feel like I'm square in that gap. Yeah, I've been scripting/programming since I was about 12, but sadly that doesn't necessarily mean that I have a complete understanding of modern programming terminology and concepts. I've taken very few formal programming courses, and those few took place a long time ago. Everything else I know has been the result of self-study and on-the-job experience. However, the farther I delve into this stuff, the more I feel like self-study (at least what I'm currently doing) isn't cutting it.

So here comes the million-dollar question: do I stick with self-study and see how far it gets me, or do I go back to school? I've been around enough self-taught animators to know that it's possible to get to the very top of that game without formal instruction, but I don't know if the same holds true for the world of programming.

Still can't figure out decorators

2008-09-17T21:01:00.002-05:00

After a couple months (roughly) of Python programming, I'm very happy with how far I've come and what I'm able to accomplish. When all this started my biggest struggle was the basic object-oriented programming mindset. After further study and a good bit of trial and error, though, I feel I've got a pretty good handle on it. I'm not a whiz by any stretch, but I'm a lot more comfortable with it now than I was when this all began.

That leads me to the next programming concept I'd like to grok: decorators.

I just stumbled across a blog post in which the author claims that Python's decorators are "radically simple." I'm sorry, but I've read a good number of explanations behind decorators -- including the Wikipedia article on the subject, which includes a pseudo-example in Python -- and this "radically simple" outline (i.e. the slides that Mr. Diederich used in his PyCon UK talk) hasn't made the concept any clearer for me.

Does anyone know where I can find a truly clear description of Python decorators? Perhaps this is something that could be more easily understood if I had a solid computer science background instead of an animator-who-fell-in-love-with-programming-on-the-side background.

Yarg....

iPod Touch vs. the clock

2008-09-13T12:31:00.002-05:00

I noticed recently that my iPod Touch wasn't syncing its date and time properly with the computer. At first I thought it might be a glitch in the Touch software, so I experimented by syncing several times in a row to see if I could find a pattern. The only pattern I noticed was it gave me a different time (and I assume a different data) with each sync: 1:24 AM, 4:11 PM, 9:18 AM, etc.

A quick Google search led me to a thread that outlined the true source of the issue: iTunes. If you put your computer to sleep with iTunes open, and then try to sync the iPod Touch after waking it up, iTunes appears to invent a random date and time to send to the device. To avoid this, simply close and re-open iTunes before syncing.

Python and list copies

2008-09-12T14:02:00.013-05:00

While working on a tool at Reel FX, I couldn't figure out why the data lists across several different class instances were all returning the same information. Normally working with lists in Python is tons-o'-fun (especially when compared to the gymnastics required to do similar operations in MEL), but that fun can come to a screeching halt if you forget one little important detail: copying a list doesn't necessarily copy the list.

For example, say there's a list assigned as follows:

   data = ["apples","oranges","pears"]

Some time later you want stuff to be a copy of data:

   stuff = data

If you've come to Python with some previous programming/scripting experience, you might assume (as I've done more than once) that this would do the trick. However, that just tells stuff to reference the list assigned to data. If you end up changing data later on, and then look at stuff, you'll notice that it shows the same changes. That's because they're both pointing to the same list in memory.

So how does one get around this little annoyance? Pretty simply, actually:

   stuff = data[:]

That bit on the end tells Python to make stuff equal to the entire contents of data, instead of making it just another pointer. To be more accurate, it duplicates the list to which data is pointing, and then points stuff to that new list.

Dictionaries also exhibit this same point-instead-of-copy behavior, but the syntax is different if you want to make a true copy:

   newdict = olddict.copy()

(Pardon the crazy formatting. I've never tried to insert code blocks into a blog post, and getting it to look decent with the controls available in the Blogger editor is driving me nuts. Methinks it's time to consider an alternative blogging system...)

Open Season 2 trailer

2008-09-06T11:10:00.002-05:00

Pop on over to the Reel FX web site to take a look at the first trailer for Open Season 2. I think it was a little over a year ago when we animated the test for Sony, we started working on cycles in October, and primary animation ran from early November through June/July of this year. Even with the initial animation stress mentioned in an earlier post, the overall project went very smoothly, with very little overtime, and everyone did an outstanding job. From what I understand, it'll hit shelves around January of '09.

RIP Don LaFontaine

2008-09-02T05:48:00.002-05:00

The man known by many in the voiceover industry as "the voice of God" has returned to the one who lent the voice. Don LaFontaine died on September 1st at the age of 68, following a rocky battle with a collapsed lung and subsequent complications. I never had the privilege of meeting Don, but those who have speak of him as the most humble of men and a willing mentor, despite his place at the pinnacle of the voiceover industry.

Rest in peace, Don.

The "joys" of technology

2008-08-30T18:21:00.003-05:00

Oh yes, technology can be so "fun" at times, it just makes my mouth hurt to smile to much.........NOT!!

Okay, here's the condensed version of the problem and what I found to be the solution in my case. I'm posting this here in case anyone else runs into a similar issue, but I can't promise that the same solution will work for you.

I had to re-install Windows a few weeks ago (long story behind THAT bit of "fun"), and for the most part things were humming along just fine as I gradually re-installed stuff. However, somewhere in the past week -- maybe a little more -- I noticed that the system performance would occasionally take a big hit...and stay hit. Looking at the Windows Task Manager, I saw that the CPU usage meter was hovering up around 75% or so, even though the main view showed that the System Idle process was the one supposedly taking up 99% of the CPU. In short, there was clearly something very un-idle cranking away, but Task Manager wouldn't show it to me.

After a number of Google searches, I came across a site that recommended using a little-known program called Windows Process Explorer to take a deeper look at system processes. The moment I ran it, I immediately saw the problem. Apparently that 75% of the CPU time was being taken up by hardware interrupts. More Googling led me to a number of possible solutions to that particular problem, but most of them didn't help. However, I finally stumbled across a comment in an NVIDIA forum thread about NVIDIA IDE drivers sometimes causing problems (apparently they're optional drivers, and sometimes have a hard time operating properly when the computer comes out of sleep mode, which I use a LOT as an alternative to fully shutting down). I dug into the Device Manager and found an entry under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers named "NVIDIA MCP51 Serial ATA Controller". I right-clicked on it, chose "Disable," and immediately the CPU meter in Windows Task Manager dropped to near zero. Woohoo!

"Animate a Face" available once again!

2008-08-23T16:58:00.002-05:00

Just added a "Buy Now" link to the info page for my "Animate a Face" CD-ROM set. There are only 12 sets remaining from the original production run that Anzovin Studio made. Once those are gone....well, we'll see.

I also added a "Donate" button to the tweenMachine info page. No, I'm not gonna do any major begging or anything like that. Not even minor begging. It's all up to you. If you feel inclined to toss a few coins in the pot, bless you. If not, bless you anyway. Either way you look at it, you're blessed. Not bad, eh?

Here there be Pythons!

2008-08-21T21:13:00.008-05:00

I recall first hearing about Python when it was added many years ago to Blender, a cool little 3D app that I used for a stretch near the end of my days at the Art Institute. However, its inclusion in Blender was largely meant (from what I can remember, anyway) as a means to assist in the development of interactive 3D applications...namely, games. I wasn't interested in doing games, so I ignored it. I discovered Animation:Master not long before graduation, so Blender went bye-bye, and so did any thoughts of Python.

The next time I recall hearing about Python was some time in the last year or so, when I heard that we use it at Reel FX. It's becoming very popular to embed Python support into 2D and 3D production software, and number of the tools that we use are apparently making the shift to Python from their own proprietary scripting languages. I noticed its inclusion in recent versions of Maya, but didn't dig into it right away for some unknown reason. I think that part of my hesitancy was because I heard that Python was an object-oriented language, and the few times I had tried to wrap my head around object-oriented programming, something just wasn't clicking.

One of the things that was discussed in my annual review was broadening my knowledge base in the area of programming/scripting languages. It was recommended that I start with Python, so after we wrapped animation on Open Season 2 and things settled down a bit, I started digging into it. I've only been working with it for a short stretch -- less than a month, I think -- but I feel it's pretty safe to say that I've become a Python junkie.

I just can't get enough of it! I don't think I've ever found a language that was so powerful, and yet so easy to learn. While I spent a good bit of time reading about it before I sat down to start actually using it, I found that I was able to jump into real, usable programs very quickly because the core syntax is so intuitive and easy to learn, and because there are so many things you can do with the collection of modules that come packaged with it. After using it for only a couple days, I was able to start writing some fairly in-depth tools for work, and in some cases it's the kind of stuff that would be literally impossible to do with MEL (the Maya Embedded Language). The majority of what I've done with it so far has been organized in a very "structured" way, similar to how I would build a MEL script. However, I'm starting to explore classes and objects as I work on porting our existing MEL-based pose library tool into a Python-based animation library tool, and it's coming along really well.

I certainly wouldn't call myself a "Pythonista" at this point, but I'm very pleased with what I've been able to do with it so far, and I'm super excited about all the possibilities that it opens up. In addition to using it at work, I plan on using Python for a number of personal projects. One idea I'm toying with is rewriting some (or possibly all) of my tweenMachine tool in Python, which I hope would speed up some of its operation, and also would make it easier to add some of the new features that I've had in the back of my mind for a while. I also plan on using Python for a personal web project that was originally going to be driven by PHP, and might convert some existing PHP-based web stuff to Python as well.

Yeah, I now...I can see some folks making the hammer/nail comparison when I talk about it like that (i.e. when a guy gets a new hammer, all the world becomes a nail). However, Python isn't just a hammer. It's an entire toolbox, and that's what I think I like about it the most. As the Python community likes to say, it comes with "batteries included," and I'm eager to put those batteries to use!

P.S. Yes, this is one of the reasons why I haven't yet posted a link for purchasing the last few Animate a Face sets. I do hope to get that up soon, though, and I appreciate those who have written so far to express interest in it. Watch for an announcement here in the hopefully-not-too-distant future! :)

Looking back on the year

2008-07-10T20:57:00.005-05:00

Yeah, I know most folks do this kind of thing in December, but considering that I just had my annual performance review at Reel FX (they always do it in the summer...don't ask me why), I thought it would be appropriate to toss some stuff out here.

It's definitely been an interesting year since my review last summer, with the most significant change being the switch from animator to TD that happened about halfway through. If you'd told me last July that in six months I'd be stepping away from animation, I probably would not have believed it. It might have sounded like an interesting hypothetical situation, but I still don't know that I would have accepted the reality of it it too readily. Even when I knew that I absolutely had to step away from animation, it was difficult bringing myself to actually believe it. After thinking about this for a while, I feel that part of that reluctance was due to recollections of a special church blessing I received many years ago. In this blessing, there's a phrase that's always stuck out to me. From what I recall, it says, "Don't get stuck in a rut in jobs you don't like."

It sounds pretty straightforward when you first look at it. For me, though, I never imagined that animation would become the rut. I always saw it as the thing that was keeping me out of the rut, and up until the point when the stress really started settling in, the mental picture of my career path was full of nothing but animation. I also remember hearing in high school about how the average person has several "careers" over the course of their lifetime, and recall thinking to myself, "That's ridiculous. Why go through all that? Just find something you like and stick with it. Why is that so hard?" And again, once I landed upon animation, I always felt that would be my job for the rest of my life. Why go through the hassle of switching when I've found something I love?

Well, apparently that love wasn't as deep as I initially believed. I'm still picking through the pieces and trying to find the one that is/was the key to the crash. Even if I don't find that piece, though, I'm at peace knowing that I've successfully made the transition to something that I truly believe I love more. Now don't get me wrong, I still have a strong love for the broad spectrum of animation. It's something about the process of animating that isn't exactly my cup o' cocoa.

It's interesting, though...several people have made the comment, "Once an animator, always an animator," and initially I was quick to dismiss that thought. I figured that once it's gone, it's gone. However, after further thought, it's probably not a good idea to be so quick to toss it out. Perhaps something will arise down the road that will call me back to do a personal animated project. I can almost guarantee, though, that I won't return to full-time animation. But you know what? I'm all right with that.

Getting back to my annual review, one of the concerns that was expressed by my supervisors back in January when I initially made the transition was related to my salary. They told me that they would find it difficult to justify paying a TD the salary of a senior animator, and that if I wanted to have any chance of keeping what I had, the expectations would be very high. To make a long story short, I worked my tail off and was pleasantly surprised to receive a raise. More importantly, though, I enjoyed every day of work since the change was made.

I'd say this year is coming along quite nicely so far. :)

News regarding "Animate a Face"

2008-06-17T23:13:00.002-05:00

Back in August of 2004, Anzovin Studio began selling "Animate a Face," a dual-CDROM set of facial animation video tutorials that I'd produced in partnership with them. Part of our agreement was that if they decided to stop selling it, they would turn all rights back over to me. Sounded like a good deal, so I agreed.

Fast-forward to the end of May, 2008, when I received a note from Anzovin Studio that they were going to cease sales of all their Animation:Master tutorials and plugins. I've since received the final paperwork returning all rights for "Animate a Face" back to me, plus the few remaining units they had in stock. Looking back at the sales records I'd kept for my own purposes, it has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 copies in nearly four years. Not stellar by any stretch, but not too bad, either.

I've been debating whether or not to open my own online store to sell the stuff, but sales through the Anzovin store had already dropped very low, so it probably wouldn't do much. It's more likely that I'll just sell the remaining units at a bargain price and let it go, although I did find an interesting site today that would make it easy for folks to grab a copy whenever they want, and I wouldn't have to worry about keeping stock or anything like that. Anyway, keep an eye here and on my main site for the final decision, which will probably come down in the next few weeks.

Patricia's Gift

2008-05-27T15:09:00.003-05:00

My animator buddy Dimos Vrysellas has a niece (the aforementioned Patricia) who is trying to raise money to help kids with cancer. She's also going to be donating a substantial sum of her own hair to the cancer society to help make wigs for young cancer victims. And the coolest thing: she's doing all this to celebrate her 7th birthday coming up on June 1st!!! How cool is that!?! :)

Her goal was to raise $500 to donate along with her hair, but people have already blown that number away and she currently has $2500 in donations. I think it would be AWESOME to make that number skyrocket even higher! If you're able to help, please visit her personal page and make a donation. Even if you can't make a donation, please spread the word. Thanks!

Voices for "Boom Blox" commercial

2008-05-13T22:56:00.004-05:00

I'm occasionally called upon to provide scratch voices for spots produced at Reel FX, and did a quick session at the end of March for a commercial we produced for EA's Boom Blox. In addition to the announcer, there were five small character parts, and we decided to record that stuff first. I love doing character voices, and even though it was only supposed to be a scratch track, I approached it like a paying session and tried to make the characters distinctive and fun.

It took maybe 15-20 minutes to get through all five, and when the time came to switch to the announcer lines, the producer suggested that it might be best to get someone else in for that part in order to provide a bit more separation from the characters. I was cool with that, and left the booth with the usual "You never know...the client might decide to use you after all" ringing in my ears like so many scratch sessions before.

I didn't think much more about it until a couple weeks ago when the producer on the project came to my desk and said, "The client wants to use your voices, so it looks like we've got some money for you. How does [insert attention-getting amount of money here] sound?" Now, I didn't have any way of knowing if it was a fair offer or not, but my gut told me that it was more than reasonable for a 20-minute session that produced 10 words and a handful of animal noises and yells. After returning my jaw and eyes to their normal states, I agreed to the offer.

I confirmed earlier today that the spot has begun airing, so it is with great pleasure that I present my national television voiceover debut. This is a HUGE step in my efforts to pursue voiceover work, and I'm looking forward to assembling a character demo one of these days.

A new direction, part 2

2008-05-09T21:18:00.004-05:00

Well, I'm a little over three months into the "new job" (see the last post for details), and it's going very well. And just to clarify a point that might have been confusing in the last post, my new work isn't a mix of animation and TD tasks. It's all TD, all the time. No animation at all. None. So far, that's turning out to be a very good thing. I still haven't quite figured out how all this is going to play out in the long term, but the immediate impact of the change has been very positive, even though the hours I'm spending at work tend to be a little more than what I spent as an animator. I'm providing technical support and tool development for somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 animators at the moment, about 70-80% of whom are working on Open Season 2. (Thankfully they don't all need help at once, or I'd have had a breakdown in the first week.) It's interesting work to say the least, and it definitely keeps me on my toes.

What's really going to have an impact on the future of this role for me, though, is our annual review, which just started this week. I've got to have my personal evaluation turned in on Monday, and with three-quarters of the past year's efforts going toward animation, it's going to be an interesting review. The process won't wrap 'til June or July, so I won't know until then how the switcharoo will impact my income. Here's hoping nothing changes...

A new direction

2008-01-26T20:34:00.001-06:00

If you had asked me about a year ago if there was anything I would rather be doing besides animation, I would have quickly said, "No." From the time I learned that people could actually animate for a living, it was all I ever imagined myself doing. It seemed to be the perfect mix of my interests in computer graphics and acting, and I pursued it with a passion. I ate, drank, slept, and breathed it all through my time at the Art Institute of Seattle. I had the stereotypical grand vision of one day working as an animator at Pixar, and stereotypically sent them my reel once I graduated from AIS. Naturally I landed somewhere else for my first job, but that first job thrilled me all the same. And despite some rocky spots here and there, that thrill has stayed pretty strong for the majority of the past six-plus years. Going to work wasn't work. It was fun!

But then something changed. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly initiated that change. I have a handful of ideas what it might be, but despite the cause, the change happened. In short, there came a point where it wasn't fun any more. The joy of bringing characters to life was gone. It had become work. Not only that, but it had become quite stressful. If it was just tedious, I think I could have pushed through it, and there were several times that I tried. But there was more to it than just tedium. Something about the process of sitting down and doing the work just stressed me out. It wasn't until recently that I ran across this quote, but it seems to sum up my feelings at that time pretty well:

"Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else."
James M. Barrie

In the middle of some of this stressful, confusing time, we had a break before ramping up for Open Season 2. While most of the rest of the animation team worked on rig and blendshape testing for the characters, I was asked to spend about a month doing MEL scripting. It was a mix of writing new tools that the animators had requested, and revamping some of our existing animation tools to clean them up, add new features, etc. While I was doing all that heavy left-brained stuff, I was nearly in heaven. The time just flew by like it hadn't in ages. It hardly seemed like a month when it was all over. To top it off, it nearly filled me with fear as I looked at what the rest of the crew was doing and thought about going back to animation. When I finally did get my first assignments for OS2, I tried my best to plug away anyhow, and I got off to an okay start. However, the frustration and anxiety were all there, and I definitely felt like I would rather be doing something else.

I had a series of long talks about this with my supervisors, and to make a long story short, they were gracious enough to let me shift gears. A little over a week ago, I made the official change from Animator to Animation TD. While there are a lot of things I still need to learn to truly fill that role effectively, I do know this: the joy is back. It's back despite the fact that I'm running more directions in a given day than I have in a long time. It's back despite the increased demand outside of "normal" work hours. Some might call this stress, but compared to how I felt the last time I sat down to animate a shot, it's bliss.

That said, I haven't totally given up on the world of animation. I still love talking about it. I still love analyzing it. I still love helping the students I work with at Animation Mentor push themselves and learn and grow as animators. I'm working with Class 6 this term, and it's so much fun to help them take their short stories to the next level. I'm also doing some of the weekend makeup Q&A sessions, and it really feels good to do a demo or answer someone's question and see comments come back that what I did or said helped them to understand a certain concept more clearly. It's just frustrating that the act of doing it myself has become so....well, frustrating. However, I'm thoroughly enjoying the more technical work I'm doing now, and feel that my time as an animator will only help me be a better animation TD.

So that leads to the next question, which I probably won't answer until a later blog post because I'm still figuring it out myself:

What's to become of "justinAnimator.com"?

About blogging, about change

2008-01-16T22:22:00.000-06:00

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

The best blogging techniques.
How to get traffic to your blog.
How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

In other news, there's likely to be some change a-happening around here. And by "here", I'm mostly talking about my main site, justinanimator.com, but to some extent it will likely affect this other "here" as well. Confused yet? Join the club...

At any rate, things are a-shifting at work. In a way, it's scary and confusing and I never thought it would ever happen. But in another way, it's taking me to a place where I feel at peace, so there's gotta be some good in it, right? Anyway, we just started making the transition today, but it's not totally final and not totally announced, so I'm keeping hush-hush about it for now...except for really annoying teaser posts like this, of course. More later...

More ketchup?

2007-07-22T00:23:00.000-05:00

Yeah, another "golly gee, it's been ages since I've posted here" post. Not much to say, really. Things have been busy on all fronts, and I haven't exactly felt terribly "inspired" to put anything here. I think it's time to back off and slow down a little...not from the blog (that's already been done, as you can see), but from other things. It's just tough deciding what to back off from and/or where to do the down-slowing, you know? I've got a few ideas I've been collecting, though...just can't post anything about them as yet. Need a bit more time to think and pray and ponder and so forth.

On another note, I saw Ratatouille again tonight...er....last night, this time with my whole family. Still struck me as strongly as the first viewing, and this time, I actually got to see all the credits. The first time I saw it -- with Emmah, a couple weeks back -- the projectionist chose to turn off the film shortly after the main credits began to roll. I wasn't pleased. I voiced my unpleased-ness, but was told that people were waiting for the next show.

I'm sorry, but I paid to see the whole film. Our showing had started late anyway, and I didn't hear any complaints about the late start, so why can't the folks in the hall do what we all did wait an extra minute or two for the credits? It's a huge disrespect to the artists (and to any folks in the theatre who are waiting and expecting to see the credits) to cut them off. I was extra disappointed considering that this was my first visit to a new theatre that had opened in our area. I was too upset about it to talk to the theatre manager before I left, so I voiced my feelings to the corporate office via e-mail. I won't be going back there for a while.

Let's see, what else? Saw Transformers...yeah, it was a little corny, but I didn't expect a stupendous plot. My wife and I both loved it, and want to see it again if we can. Harry Potter 5 was also quite fun. Picked up the final HP book last night. We read the first couple chapters aloud together after we got home, then read a bit more aloud this morning, but then Genie just took off on one of her reading sprees, and now has less than 90 pages to go.

Biggest news on the home technological front was the death of my old 17-inch CRT monitor a couple weeks back. I was about 45 minutes into my first Animation Mentor Q&A of the summer term, when it just died. Shut off completely. Wouldn't come back on no matter what I tried, and made a strange pinging noise when plugged in. It was about 6+ years old, so it was about time for it to perish anyway, and I was just waiting for some excuse to get rid of the ol' clunker so I could switch to LCD. My wife also used it as an excuse to replace her CRT as well, so I ended up taking the funds I'd originally planned on putting toward an iPhone and put it toward two 22-inch widescreen LCD monitors instead.

That'll probably wrap it up for now. There's more that could be said (I think), but it's just past 1am, and I do have church tomorrow...er....today. Hopefully it won't be months before the next update...we'll see...

Catching up

2007-04-25T23:18:00.000-05:00

While the previous post was the first actual "content" in the past five months or so, this is the semi-obligatory "Holy cow, I haven't written in ages!" catching-up post. A lot has happened since last November, but even as I type this, I'm still evaluating how much of the goings-on of the past five months to share in this space. Hmmm...

Work-wise, most of my time was spent supervising a BOZ Christmas special which is slated for release later this year. In the middle of that, I had an opportunity to help with our portion of animation on TMNT. In the end I only animated one shot, which is probably why my name was omitted from the credits, but it was fun all the same. I was also able to contribute a little bit to the cinematics for the upcoming Transformers video game. Animation-wise, it was only one shot (again), but I actually appear -- in silhouette form, anyway -- in one scene of the game.

There's been a bit of a break recently in BOZ video production, so I've had the opportunity to animate on some other projects. Recently we've been doing a number of promotional bits for Shrek the Third -- TV commercials for product tie-ins, character interviews, etc. -- and earlier today I put the finishing touches on a rather long (25-second) shot of Puss in Boots. The model is nicely rigged and was fun to animate, although it was strange looking at the fur-less version of Puss and wondering how the poses I made would appear in the final render. Anyway, I saved out a number of videos showing the progress of the clip from start to finish, and once I have my hands on a rendered version, I'll post the collection to the Animation page of my site.

An interesting non-character animation opportunity arose while working on a shot for one of the commercials. I probably shouldn't give the details away until the commercials airs, so for now I'll just say that it involved animating a number of cylindrical objects bouncing and spinning on a tabletop. Hand keying all that spinning action in a believable way would have been a huge pain, but luckily I was able to draw upon the work I'd done roughly six years ago for an Animation:Master rig experiment and build my own rig for the objects that made the spinning animation SO much easier. I was even able to add an element missing from my original A:M rig that automatically offsets the contact point as the object tilts, which makes the spinning action more realistic. There have been times when I've questioned the value of those old non-character animation experiments, so being able to go back and draw upon one of them to get a job done was a fun sort of validation. Unfortunately there's still a hitch in the Maya version of the rig that I wasn't able to overcome due to my limited understanding of Maya's constraints, but working around it for the purpose of getting the shot done was fairly easy. Once I figure it out, I'm thinking of constructing an auto-rigger and sharing it on the MEL scripts page of my main site. No guarantees, but it'll probably happen...eventually...

That's about all the time I have for updates at this point. I'll try to be more active with this crazy blog thingamabob as time permits. As with the auto-rigger mentioned above, though, there are no guarantees, but it'll probably happen...eventually. :)

Thoughts on studying animation

2007-04-25T22:59:00.000-05:00

Wow...first post since November? Yikes! Well, I'm lazy...and busy. Mostly busy, I think, but laziness certainly can't be discounted. Anyway, I had an e-mail conversation recently that I thought was worth sharing, and was further encouraged to share it here after sharing it with my current Animation Mentor class in our Q&A earlier this evening.

I was contacted not long ago by a former AM student who was taking some time off, and was planning on studying a lot of classic animation (Disney, Warner Bros., etc.) during his break from school. In part of his message, he asked if I had any "tips for studying these clips frame by frame." Initially I couldn't think of anything specific that I do that's terribly different from what most people do...study poses, arcs, overlap, breakdowns, etc. But then a new method of studying animation occurred to me, and my reply went as follows:

I rarely have/take the time to break down clips frame by frame any more. I know I should, but I'm either busy with other things, or when the opportunity arises, I kinda breeze through a single shot, see some interesting stuff, log it away, and move on to something else.

Anyway, I think it's cool to pick out things like arcs, line of action, poses, etc. when studying a clip, and I'll often focus on those myself. However, one thing that I haven't yet done -- and that I would really like to try some time -- is to fully dissect a clip I want to study. By "fully dissect," I mean start clear back at the beginning, treating it like it were an assignment that I were receiving to animate myself.

For starters, take a step back and look at what's happening in the story. Look at the surrounding shots for context. Where is the character coming from, and where is he going to? Track the path of his emotional arc and figure out where he is emotionally at that given moment. Also take some time to figure out the character's personality (if you don't already know it). Is the character easy-going? Uptight? Aggressive? Passive? Whatever it is, work it out. Then ignoring the finished animation for a moment, look at the shot and identify the vital action bits...what does the character need to accomplish in the shot? Perhaps Wile E Coyote is pushing a cannon to the edge of a cliff, so the pushing of the cannon to the edge is the needed action.

With that, you have pretty much everything the original animator had when they animated the shot initially. You know the context of the shot within the larger story, you know the character's emotional state, the character's personality, and the needed bits of action. Let those settle and gel for a bit, and then start examining what the animator did with that information to turn those raw facts into a piece of entertainment. Let's say it's Wile E pushing the cannon. What did the animator do with Wile E as he pushed the cannon? Does he push the cannon directly to the edge? Does he stop and catch his breath along the way? Do his feet have perfect traction, or do they slip? Is this the first time he's pushing it, or the tenth time, and how does that affect his performance? How does his personality come through in the action of pushing the cannon? How is he affected by earlier bits of the story? Are there any obstacles in his way that he must overcome to get the cannon in position? If so, how does he overcome them, and how is THAT action tainted by his personality, emotional state, etc? Is this a key shot in the scene, or is it secondary, and based on that, how did the animator massage the performance based on that understanding? In other words, ask yourself all the same questions that you would if the shot were yours to animate. Then observe what the animator did to answer those questions, and notice how those answers led to specific poses, and timing, and spacing, etc.

It's easy to approach the process of studying classic animation in terms of breaking it down into the mechanical components...arcs, overlap, poses, etc. And while that stuff is important, the decisions made by the animator in creating the performance of the character are equally important (if not more so) because of the influence they had upon those mechanical bits. However, they're not always as carefully considered as the mechanics and technical princples, largely (I feel) because we can't directly see the animator's decisions. We only see the results of their decisions. It takes much more effort to reverse-engineer the thought process that led to the performance than it does to reverse-engineer the mechanics of that performance, but both are equally valuable when studying animation.

Thanks and stuff

2006-11-23T22:16:00.000-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving to all those celebrating the holiday this weekend! It's been a while since I've posted a significant update here, so I figured it was about time to crank through a few different things.

First off, The Very First Noel is going to be airing on DirecTV beginning Friday, November 24th, and running through December 31st. It'll be on channel 103, with the first show at 7:30 am, and repeats popping up every two hours after that.

More candy ballistics tests are on the way. Shortly after the first installment with Smarties, Steve and friends ran another test with Starburst. How on earth did they manage to get Starburst down the barrel of Steve's gun? What happened to it once it was fired from said weapon? Stay tuned for more candy gun fun...

Some questions have come up regarding further updates to the tweenMachine. I still have plans to add additional features, and even started working on some of them shortly after releasing 2.02. However, those efforts were short-lived, as I was just a little too burnt from the big push I made to get the updated TM released. Things were complicated further when the motherboard on my home box died and I had to get a new machine. My old hard drive survived, thankfully, but I haven't yet re-installed Maya (and to make a long story short, Alias doesn't make that very easy). Anyway, I do plan on picking up the torch again one of these days, but at the moment I'm working on a totally different scripting project that will likely keep me busy 'til the year is out.

And finally, on a more personal note, some of you will be receiving notification of a new e-mail address for me in the near future. While our spam filter does a great job of setting aside junk mail, the ratio of spam to real mail has taken a dramatic leap in the last couple months (about 10:1 at this stage...even worse on my wife's account). If you don't receive a note with the new addy and start getting bounces from my current address, just use the handy-dandy contact form to get in touch with me. (Sadly, even that has needed an update or two recently to deal with form-spammers. Just sick-n-wrong.....)

There are a couple other things I want to talk about, but they're a bit more involved, so they'll be coming later in their own topics.

Disney rips off Chinese culture?

2006-11-23T12:38:00.000-06:00

I'm only joking, but that's one thought that came to mind when seeing the hairstyle on this Chinese artifact. (More info about the piece)

Ah, the things that amuse you when you're sick over the holidays.

Blog tweaks

2006-11-12T21:57:00.000-06:00

Just migrated to the new Blogger beta, and I'm also switching my blog host to Blogspot instead of hosting on my own server. The look of the blog won't change (i.e. it should still mesh nicely with the rest of my site), but I believe that the hosting switch means that those who are tracking the RSS feed will have to point to the new location: http://justinanimator.blogspot.com/ . That said, it's possible I'll be moving it back to my site if I decide to install Wordpress, but I haven't made up my mind yet.

To pilfer a phrase from the inimitable John Berry, catch ya on the flip side! (Okay, so maybe it's not a John original, but he sure says it a lot...)

Fun at work: Smarties Ballistics Tests

2006-10-07T23:32:00.000-05:00

Steve Kolbe, who is head of layout and asset management for BOZ, has a modified Nerf gun that he constantly likes to "test". It has much greater air pressure than the off-the-shelf model, and an added tube allows it to shoot the smaller Velcro-tipped darts as well as the larger missile-style rockets it was originally designed to launch.

Most of Steve's tests lately have been attempts to shoot the small darts at my desk, which is on the opposite side of the studio from his, but this past Friday, someone brought in a bunch of Smarties rolls, and it was suggested that Steve shoot one of those from his gun. I didn't have my camera ready for the initial test, but it ended about how you'd expect. The Smarties lost big-time.

Steve's next attempt was with two Smarties packs at the same time, and this time I was ready with my camera. The white dot on the target wall is the impact point from the first test.

A final test later in the afternoon involved a repeat of the shotgun test, but shot inside the studio (in the back, where there's large, mostly-empty space). However, I wasn't aware of this test until I heard the gun go off, then the sound of Smarties raining down on filing cabinets, old monitors, etc. Fun stuff. :)

The Very First Noel

2006-10-04T15:14:00.000-05:00

We just wrapped production on a really sweet project: The Very First Noel. I animated a few shots on the side from my main work, and had a great time. It's definitely going to DVD, but the directors are pushing to get it on TV as well. Anyway, check it out and get ready for the holidays!

NFB puts 50 animated shorts online

2006-09-26T11:22:00.000-05:00

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I watched a lot of Canadian TV, and was exposed here and there to some of the great animated work done through the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). When a DVD was released of some their top animated shorts, I jumped on it. While it's not all character animation, even their experimental stuff intrigues me. Recently I also learned of the release of a DVD cataloging the work of one of their more popular animators, Norman McLaren, and I'll jump on that when I get the dough. And now I find that the NFB has put fifty of their animated short films on their web site! Sweet!!!

Everyone's Hero clips

2006-09-22T00:23:00.000-05:00

Just posted a couple Everyone's Hero clips on the animation page. One is from the film, the other is a fun test from pre-production.

And yes, I know this note is redundant considering that I posted the same note to the front page of my site, but that page doesn't have an RSS feed. One of these days that front page will be this blog...or this blog will be the front page...or something...

Everyone's Hero, Part 2...sort of

2006-09-22T00:06:00.000-05:00

I'd originally planned to post this part closer on the heels of the first one, and ideally before the film was released. Now that the film has been out for a short stretch, it probably won't mean as much, but here it is in a nutshell...

I'd heard/read several comments prior to the film's release about how the first trailer gave away the plot of the film, and people were less interested in seeing it if they already knew the ending. True, it did reveal a lot about the begininng and end of the film. What it didn't reveal much, though, was the middle...the journey.

You see, if films were about nothing more than beginnings and endings, they'd be dull. A lot of what makes them interesting and appealing is the journey in the middle...the experiences the characters go through on the way from the beginning to the end, and how those experiences change and influence them. While the end of a film is certainly important, it is nothing without the journey. So while we may say we go to a film to see how it ends, I have a hunch we're really going for the journey. It's the journey that gives the ending its power.

Now, while the journey in Everyone's Hero may not be earth-shattering or mind-blowing in its depth and complexity, it most certainly has an impact on the end, and there are some fun things that happen during that journey that make the end more meaningful. So even though you may know how the film ends, I think it's worth seeing for the journey.

Everyone's Hero, Part 1

2006-09-12T23:26:00.000-05:00

My involvement with Everyone's Hero has a bit of an odd twist to it. It started when I was working as the lead animator at DPS, which was/is a sub-company of IDT. Somewhere during late 2003/early 2004, we got word that the head of IDT, Howard Jonas, had written a story called Yankee Irving that he wanted to have made into a feature film. At first, all I knew was that the title character was a young boy, and the story had something to do with baseball. Next we heard that Christopher Reeve was going to be directing it, and he even came through the DPS office at one point (I saw his bald forehead as he rolled down the aisle on the other side of my cubicle wall and into the editing suite for a meeting). Before I left DPS in the spring of '04, modeling had begun on a Yankee and the baseball, Screwie, but I still didn't know anything more about the story. After leaving DPS, I freelanced for Reel FX before they hired me full-time in the summer of '04.

Fast-forward to the late fall of 2005. I'm walking past one of the Reel FX conference rooms, and as I glance in, I catch a glimpse of an animatic that's being projected on the wall. My eye latches onto the lower part of the image, where I read "Property of IDT Entertainment." That made me stop and look more closely at the animatic drawings, and I saw that they were of a boy and a baseball. Was this Yankee Irving? I checked with my sup, and sure enough it was. We were bidding to help with animation and lighting on a project that I almost worked on at my previous job. How weird is that!

Not long after that, we started getting the character rigs to play with, and by late January of this year, we had started animating the first shots out of of roughly 20 minutes of footage that we were assigned from the film. A short while later, we got word that the name of the film had changed to Everyone's Hero, and about that same time I had to shift gears as I was starting to take over as animation supervisor for the BOZ video series. In the end, I only animated five shots for the film, and I'm probably only going to post one of those on the animation page of my site once the film comes out. Despite my short time on the project, I'm pretty happy with how my shots turned out, and I'm grateful for the things I learned in the process.

I was going to write more tonight, but I gotta crash. In Part 2, I'll be responding to a comment/complaint I've heard about the film's trailer...

tweenMachine v2.02

2006-09-12T23:13:00.000-05:00

Didn't announce 2.01, so I'll cover that and 2.02 in this little update...

For v2.01, which was posted a couple weeks back, the major update was to make the tweenMachine play well with character sets. Now you can easily key character set data with it, using one of two methods. You can create a custom character set group (using a special menu item) that will key the active character set, or you can import your character sets into the tweenMachine.

2.02 just got posted, and adds the ability for those using Maya 7 and higher to toggle the use of Maya's "special" tick color for keys created using the tweenMachine.

tweenMachine v2.00 is ready!

2006-08-20T04:34:00.000-05:00

Yep, it's approaching 5:00 in the morning. And I'm gonna get an earful from my wife for staying up so late. But at this point, I really don't care. I've felt this crazy urgency to get v2 of the tweenMachine assembled ever since all the upgrade ideas came to me late last month, and this is the final push to get it out there for people to use. There are still some "icing" features to add, but those will come more slowly. For now, I'm happy with the "cake" I was able to assemble during the last month or so, and hope it tastes good to the folks out there.

In releasing this beastie that has taken so much of my free time and brain power lately, I must first and foremost give thanks to God for giving me the capacity to make this tool and share it with the animation community. Thanks to the folks on my "beta team" for their patience and willingness to take it for a spin in the early stages of development, and for helping me work out various display issues and bugs that cropped up. Thanks for the notes of enthusiasm I've received, in reference to both the original version and the beta of v2. It makes me feel good to know that it's helping folks with their animation process. I'm especially grateful for comments I've received from folks making the transition from 2D to 3D, expressing how the tweenMachine has helped make the shift easier.

All right, off to bed wit' me. Enjoy!

tweenMachine v2 in the works

2006-07-23T14:55:00.000-05:00

While a tiny UI with one slider that operates on selected objects is useful, it's also extremely limited. I'm in the early stages of development on v2.0 of the tweenMachine, and wanted to let folks know what's coming. This will be a major update with a number of new features, including:

Sets: Users will be able to create custom sliders that affect a specific set of controls. With this feature, you can more easily sculpt the start of a breakdown pose without selecting a single object. For example, make a slider that affects the entire body, another that only affects the spine, one for the left arm, etc. Controls can be assigned to any number of sets.

Groups: Any number of set sliders can be organized into collapsable named groups. For example, you could create a group for each character in your scene.

Save with scene: Data for groups and sets is saved with your scene file. When you reload your scene and start the tweenMachine, it will read the existing data and rebuild the UI automatically.

Load/Save: Save data for all groups and sets to a text file, and load it into another scene.

Import: Import specific sets or groups from a saved data file.

Timeline ticks: Enable/disable ticks on the timeline for any set or group, so you can see where your poses are without having to select anything.

Stay tuned for more!

New animation software: Reflex

2006-07-14T14:30:00.000-05:00

Work buddy Bryan Engram just shared some info he found about a new animation package being developed by some CG animation industry vets. Gotta keep a close eye on this puppy...

tweenMachine Update

2006-07-13T12:48:00.000-05:00

Updated the tweenMachine tool last night (a.k.a. early this morning). Now it recognizes when channels are selected in Maya's channel box, and only operates on those channels. This allows you to easily favor specific channels in different ways, which should make it a lot easier to block out arcs, overlap, and other things I probably haven't even considered. I've been wanting to add this feature for some time now, and finally got the "oomph" after reading a post on an Animation Mentor forum from David Martinez that he was looking forward to it. Ask and ye shall receive and all that. ;)

La Linea

2006-06-24T09:51:00.000-05:00

La Linea! It's online! I remember watching these cool little animated shorts when I was a kid. A student on AnimationMentor.com posted a link (found on the Drawn blog) to this site that has 50 of the shorts online. Now here's the funny part...I remember watching them on American TV, they're of Italian origin, and now a French site is hosting a bunch of them. Gotta love it!

EDIT: Apologies to Justin Weg for not properly crediting him as the source of the post on AM.

Trailer for Everyone's Hero

2006-06-16T23:17:00.000-05:00

The first trailer for Everyone's Hero is up on the film site. Kinda small, though. Oh well...it's up!

"The Myth of Talent"

2006-06-14T00:22:00.000-05:00

Found a link on a photography forum to this really cool article called "The Myth of Talent". Very inspiring read!

Site up for Everyone's Hero

2006-05-18T12:01:00.000-05:00

The official site is up for Everyone's Hero, a film we're helping with at Reel FX. We just finished animating about 20-odd minutes of footage, and we're lighting a good chunk more than that. The characters were very fun to work with, and the story's got some heart to it. I only animated about five shots on it before I had to back out and focus on supervising the next BOZ video. It would've been fun to do more. Here's hoping I'll be free when the next one comes along...

House up, e-mail down

2006-04-03T10:22:00.000-05:00

Well, it's not exactly like that, but anyway...

With the move into our new house that happened last weekend, we've had some hiccups getting phone and DSL service installed. Long story short, I've been without access to my home e-mail account for just over a week. So if you've written and haven't had a reply yet (or if my mail server is bouncing stuff 'cause it's full...I hope not), I apologize. Only a few more days to go before it'll be up and running again. Thanks for your patience...

Crazy Hair Day at Reel FX

2006-03-14T13:50:00.000-06:00

To celebrate the release of the first two BOZ videos, the folks here did a five-business-day countdown with different activities each day. Today being the final day, with the theme "Wild about BOZ!," the challenge was to come to work with crazy hair. It was about time for me to cut mine anyway, so I decided to be creative with the cut. My wife helped to sculpt the back into the nice V shape. And of course I couldn't stop at the hair, so I decked out the rest of me as well. Pics are posted in our family photo gallery.

And I won! Woohoo! :D

"You're nuts...I applaud that!"

2006-02-25T21:54:00.000-06:00

Following the ceremony for the first Texas Avery Animation Award last November, Reel FX hosted a private party at the studio for award recipient Brad Bird, Reel FX employees and their families, and selected other guests. I had my camera in tow, and shot a ton of photos and video throughout the evening. This is just the first of several posts I'll be making to share little tidbits from the event.

The focus of this first post is a comment that Brad made to a budding young filmmaker. Chuck Peil, our executive director of business development, told Brad that the young man wanted to be a filmmaker. Here's the entire exchange, which I was lucky enough to capture on video...

Quicktime - H.264 - 1.44 MB

I like Brad's final follow-up remark just as much as his initial reaction, because it really says a lot about this industry. There's nothing the least bit logical about making animated films. Where's the logic in taking several years to craft an experience that's over in an hour or two? Or in telling stories with characters that don't really exist except as drawings on paper, or as numbers on a computer? Logic has nothing to do with it. It's all about emotion. If you're willing to let your emotions -- and your desire to share those emotions -- carry you through the roller-coaster ride that is the creation of an animated film, you've gotta be just a teensy bit loopy.

Personally, I think that's part of the attraction. :)

Gugulix and Sushipajamas online!

2006-02-18T12:35:00.000-06:00

Quick note to plug a couple blogs. First is a new blog created by a friend of mine, Doron Meir (nickname: Gugulix). I worked remotely with Doron when I was at DPS a couple years back. He was the anim supervisor at DPSI (DPS Israel), so we got to chatting quite a bit online. He's quite an accomplished artist in both 2D and 3D, and his work has inspired me a lot. I was stoked to hear about his new blog, and I can't wait to see more of his work on a regular basis!

On another note, my friend Lydia Williams (latest nick: Sushipajamas) put up a blog not too long ago. She's currently a student at SCAD, but we first met several years ago when I was working at Big Idea. She's learning a lot at school, and is developing a really fun style with her artwork. In addition to studying animation, she and some friends started a program to teach animation to students at an elementary school near SCAD. Way to go, Lydia!

Simplicity and story

2006-02-16T12:09:00.000-06:00

Just read a great bit of commentary from a story artist on the beauty of simplicity when it comes to story. Well worth checking out!

Ray Harryhausen coming to Dallas!

2006-02-15T09:06:00.000-06:00

Got wind of this from a friend a couple days ago, and today the official announcement is online. Woohoo! Can't wait for this one! I've still gotta post some stuff from the Brad Bird event last fall. Not sure when I'll get to that...hopefully soon.

Observations: "The Runaway"

2005-12-17T20:22:00.000-06:00

A while back I was sitting in a doctor's office, waiting for the doctor to return to my exam room. Naturally I was doing what we all tend to do while waiting for doctors to return: I was glancing at the collection of Norman Rockwell artwork hung on the walls. I'd seen most of the pieces before, but seeing that the doctor was keeping me away from animating, I decided to study the prints to see what could help me as an animator.

One favorite on display was Rockwell's classic, "The Runaway." It's such a deceptively simple image, and yet it's clear that Rockwell took great care to construct the image in such a way that your eye can't help but go where he wants it to go, which is to the facial exchange between the kid and the cop. Some of these guiding elements are related to the tonal values chosen for the setting and the characters, but there are also a number of things in the characters' poses that are good to study from an animation standpoint:

One of the biggest pose "guides" is the angle of the cop's right leg. Follow that up and it'll take you directly to the kid's face. Notice how the cop's gun is angled to nearly match the leg angle. Also notice the nice negative-space triangle formed by the right leg, the stool post, and the seat. That also helps the right leg to draw our eye.
To contrast that, notice the cop's left leg. Even though it's angled in the opposite direction, it has been posed in such a way that it doesn't lead the eye nearly as clearly as the right leg. There's no negative space associated with that leg, either, so that also helps put more focus on the right leg and where it's leading us.
The cop's right arm is angled similarly to the right leg. While it doesn't point directly to the kid's face, it does aim at the well-crafted negative space between the two lead characters' faces. Looking at the left arm, the forearm angle blends with the edge of the countertop so it doesn't really stand out, while the upper arm guides the eye up and over the cop's left shoulder toward his face.
Working with that upper left arm is the radio on the back wall. The cord coming up on the left, the shelf upon which the radio sits, and the little extra dangly bit of cord on the right all work to subtly emphasize that shape of the cop's upper left arm and shoulder, and guide your eye where it needs to go. In case that wasn't clear enough, that little dangly loop of cord to the right of the radio is pointing at the cop's head.
While the cop's eyes are clearly looking at the kid, the brim of his hat adds an extra bit of emphasis. It looks like it's pointing right toward the kid's eyes.
Check out the notebook in the cop's back pocket. The bright white silhouette of the pages points directly toward the kid.
Even the face of the counter man has some guides. The angle of his smile leads you to his cigarette, which is pointing directly at the kid's face. The very trianglar shape of his head also leads you into the heart of the action.
From a more broad perspective, compare the poses between the kid and the cop. While there is a little countering between the kid's hips and shoulders, his pose is essentially vertical, whereas the cop is arcing to the right. Combine that with the cop's bulk compared to the kid, and your eye goes to the pinnacle of the two poses, right to their faces. The angled bulk of the cop feels like a towering mass toppling in the direction of the kid, which further emphasizes the emotion of the scene.
While checking out the background info about this image on the site linked above, I was clued in to another guide: the stick on the kid's hobo sack. The site points out how the stick's diagonal angle guides your eye toward the stools, and from there up to the characters, but it doesn't mention exactly why the stick works so well. I believe it works because the right end of the stick was carefully placed out of frame. That only leaves the left end to act as a pointer into the scene.

Such carefully crafted poses that show you exactly where to look, and yet it feels so comfortable and natural...so "un-posed". Awesome stuff!

Artists and doubt, revisited

2005-12-13T17:31:00.000-06:00

Just got word that my buddy Bill Jacoby has started a blog, and his opening entry touches upon a subject that I briefly mentioned a while back: art and fear. Bill is quite the insightful guy, and his comments really hit home as I read them. Definitely keep an eye on this dude!

While I'm at it, it's way past time I updated the blog list on the sidebar. I've found a host of interesting and inspiring blogs since I started this thing earlier this year, and I apologize for not sharing them sooner. More fun stuff to come as I find it!

Relationships, emotions, and animation

2005-12-03T04:03:00.000-06:00

I've had this kooky little theory floating around in my head for quite a while now. I've mentioned it on occasion to different folks, but have never taken the time to write it down in any detail (well, actually I have, but that's another story). Without getting to fancy-schmancy about it all, here's the gist of it...

I believe that every aspect of life, down to the tiniest detail, can be described in terms of two things: relationships and emotions. I believe that everything is involved in some sort of relationship -- whether it's social, physical, chemical, audible, visual, spatial, chronological, etc. -- and that the nature of the relationships that we're involved in affect us emotionally to varying degrees. It can be a bit of a deep concept if you really start to break things down, but for the purpose of this entry, I want to focus on relationships and emotions with regard to animation.

Animation is definitely an emotional art form.* We don't talk about its power to convey great logical concepts. We talk about is power to move us emotionally. Why are character and story always touted as being so important to quality animation? Because without carefully crafting those elements, the audience won't feel anything. If the audience doesn't feel anything, they'll move on in search of something else.

The emotions in an animated story are controlled through a wide variety of relationships. While we most often use terms that don't include the word "relationship," there's a relationship to be found at the heart of each concept. Here are just a few examples:

Pose: the spatial relationships between the different parts of a character's body

Staging: the relationship between the camera and the things the camera is viewing

Squash and stretch: modifying the relationship between the height and width of an object to change its shape

Timing: a chronological relationship between poses

Spacing: the relationship between the positions of an object in space over a given period of time

It can be difficult to find words to describe the relationships that are present in some animation principles (I gave up on "arcs"). They're definitely there, though, and here's the key thing to remember: By altering the various relationships over which we have control as animators, we consequently alter the emotional tone of the result.

When it comes down to it, an animator is just a specialized relationship counselor. My job is to understand the emotion(s) that the director wants to create in the story at any given moment, and then craft all the relationships at my disposal to create that emotional impact. All those relationships have to work in harmony -- or in other words, the relationship between all those individual relationships needs to work properly -- or else the resulting emotion won't be the right one for the moment.

So how can I use this kooky little theory when I'm working? Well, I personally find it a LOT easier to think about animation using the more traditional terms most of the time, rather than using the relationship-based breakdowns of those concepts. However, what this theory has helped me to do is to hone in on the emotions present in everything I do as an animator. As I'm planning out a scene, I make sure that I identify the desired emotions, and then make sure that everything I do -- poses, timing, spacing, etc. -- helps to feed that desired emotional tone. As I'm posing a character, I'm aware that the slightest adjustment to a head tilt or an eyelid level will change how that pose feels. When I'm reviewing a shot, whether it's my own or someone else's, it can be especially helpful. If there's something that's "just not working," and I can't easily put my finger on it at first, I'll break down the emotional impact that comes from each component; i.e. how do the poses feel? How does the timing feel? Spacing? Breakdowns? etc. This breakdown often helps me to isolate the part that's not contributing appropriately to the emotion that's required for the shot or scene.

An example of this kind of troubleshooting happened fairly recently as I was looking at an acting test that someone asked me to critique. At first I was tempted to comment on some of the technical issues that I saw with the animation. However, the more I watched the clip, the more I felt that the main problem was something deeper and more basic. The moment I started looking at some of the core relationships in the clip, the problem jumped up and started waving at me like Molt from A Bug's Life. "Oh! Pick me! Pick me! Oh! Oh!" I felt a little silly that I hadn't seen it sooner, but what was jumping and waving was simply the relationship between the dialog and the animation.

The animator had used a short line spoken by Kip from Napoleon Dynamite. If you've seen the film, you know how Kip talks...fairly mellow and soft, with a slight lisp, and a touch of a sing-song delivery to his lines. If you've never seen the film, you can still tell what kind of guy he is by the way he talks. He's a wimpy, soft-spoken, ever-so-slightly-arrogant nerd. The problem was that the animator didn't animate the character to be a wimpy, soft-spoken, ever-so-slightly-arrogant nerd. They pushed the confidence level a bit too high in the physical performance. There was a small moment that almost worked, though, and I think that's what threw me. It was off just enough to feel off, but not enough for the problem to draw attention to itself right away. It wasn't until I started picking apart the individual relationships that I found the culprit.

A similar example from a few years ago also comes to mind. I was involved in some discussion on the 10 Second Club forums following the competition that featured Anthony Hopkins from Silence of the Lambs saying, "I do wish we could chat longer, but...I'm having an old friend for dinner." One forum member commented that he didn't create an entry for that round because he really enjoyed doing humorous animation, and he felt that Hopkins' serious delivery wouldn't allow him to do something humorous. I got the impression that he equated humorous animation with fast delivery of witty dialog, so in my reply, I pointed out how it would still be possible to create a humorous clip using that very mellow line. It's all in the management of relationships.

As illustrated above, one relationship that must work when animating to dialog is the one between the emotional tone of the vocal performance and the emotional tone of the physical performance. It generally doesn't work to have someone talking very calmly but moving very quickly. If you try to do it, your voice will still give subtle clues that you're not acting as calmly as you're trying to speak. With a mellow delivery, there must be an equally mellow performance. So how do we create comedy from this situation? By playing with the situation itself, or in other words, playing with the relationship between the mellow delivery/performance and the specifics of what the character is doing.

The example I provided for this 10SC animator was regarding another entry from that round that used Hopkins' dialog. The animator of this other clip had chosen to have the character picking his nose while talking on the telephone, and eating the boogers he pulled out of his nostrils. When the character went to eat the little booger ball on his finger, he reared back quickly, and quickly thrust his finger into his mouth. It gave a very typical "Look, I'm doing something funny" feeling to the performance, which contrasted with the very mellow and serious tone of Hopkins' vocal delivery, and caused the clip to be less successful. I believe this same situation would have been absolutely hilarious, however, if the animator had gone for a very serious performance, and let the humor lie in the contrasting relationship between that seriousness and the absurdity of what the character was actually doing.

Imagine the character treating the snot-ball as if it were a delicacy, something to be savored. Picture him gently inserting his finger into his open mouth. His lips softly close around the base of the finger, and he slowly closes his eyes. After a slight pause, he draws his finger out ever so slowly, eyes still closed, and he leans back, an expression of pure ecstacy on his face. By leaving the vocal/performance relationship intact, what would make it funny would be the relationship between this very serious performance and the absurdity of eating one's nasal nuggets.

Relationships and emotions are inseparably tied together, and play a huge role in animation. The more I understand how the various relationships in animation affect the emotion of the end product, the more effective I believe I'll be as an animator.

* This also applies to many other things, like photography, music, painting, filmmaking in general, etc. I'm simply focusing on animation for this entry, so please forgive the ommission of these other forms of expression.

Observation from voting

2005-11-11T09:26:00.000-06:00

It's interesting the way our minds work, and how we often react to things out of habit rather than really paying attention to what's going on.

I went to vote the other evening. At the place of polling, there were three lines of people waiting to get their ballots, with the lines dividing folks alphabetically based on their last name. Occasionally someone would trek to the back of the line and make sure that people knew about the division, as the o' so helpful signs were out of view once you rounded a corner and left the main room. Now, if I were describing this scenario as part of a fictional story I was constructing, I would most likely have the exchange go something like this...

Poll person: "What letter does your last name start with?"
Voter: "M"

What was interesting to note is that in all the exchanges I heard, the majority of them didn't go that way. Instead, they went like this:

Poll person: "What letter does your last name start with?"
Voter: "McIntosh"

Interesting, eh? I have a hunch that most people focused on the "last name" portion out of pure habit. Most of the time when we're asked about our last name, it's usually not just the first letter that someone wants to know, so it becomes instinctive to just rattle off our full last name.

That takes me back to the whole idea of writing this scenario as part of a fictional work. If we are so conditioned to instictively answer with our full last name, it would seem more natural to craft the story that way. The trouble is that during the course of writing, an author might not think about something like that. Because he/she generally isn't in the natural moment, or observing someone else in such a moment, the response that they write to that question will likely be logical, like the first version, rather than instinctive and natural, like the second version.

In terms of animation, what this experience reinforced to me was the importance of observation. We often think we know how a character will do a certain action or react in a certain situation, but in doing so, we're in danger of creating something that feels more logical than natural. By taking time to research and observe as we plan an assignment, we will often find things that might not have come to us if we'd gone purely on our own thought process.

An example of this was shared by Bobby Beck at the presentation he made here in Dallas during the Industry Giants event this past summer. He asked the audience to think about a child doing a somersault, and picture how that motion would look. He even did a somersault for us on stage, demonstrating the gut reaction that most of us would have if asked to animate something like this...just a plain ol' somersault.

He then showed us some video reference of that was shot while he was working at Pixar on Monsters Inc. In the clip, this little one- or two-year-old boy bent over and put his head and hands on the floor, ready to do a somersault. However, he had simply bent down from the waist, keeping his legs fairly straight, so he didn't have the leverage needed with his legs to push himself over. He shifted his feet from side to side numerous times in an attempt to finish the somersault, all the while balancing his upper body on his head and hands, and everybody in the audience just cracked up. It was hilarious to see, but more importantly, it was so much more natural because it was real.

It's entirely possible that someone could come up with the same idea if given enough time, but the point Bobby was making was that observation gets us to those instinctive, natural ideas much faster. And the sooner we can get to those great ideas, the sooner we can start putting those ideas into our work.

Observe, observe, observe!!!

More Escher and animation

2005-11-07T18:43:00.000-06:00

I'm cleaning my desk (whew!) and found another one from a month ago that I should have posted. Great relevance for animation...

Whoever wants to portray something that does not exist has to obey certain rules. Those rules are more or less the same as for the teller of fairy tales; he has to apply the function of contrasts; he has to cause a shock.

More weekend thoughts from Escher

2005-11-07T16:09:00.000-06:00

If this doesn't apply to animation, I don't know what does...

We hanker after the unnatural or supernatural, that which does not exist, a
miracle. As if ordinary reality isn't enigmatic enough!

The wierdest taste...

2005-11-07T14:34:00.000-06:00

I swear, Taco Bell's pink lemonade has to be one-quarter Pepto Bismol. But I'm drinking it anyway.

That's all for now...