Reference Reference

How does an elephant lie down? It pulls itself forward, lowering its rear half onto the knees, then settling the front half on the elbows. (Link to video)

A free website called ReferenceReference has a wealth of stock video clips of such animal actions. Most clips are a few seconds long, and they're intended as reference for animators. 

But illustrators will find them fascinating too, because it's really important to know where a pose is coming from and where it's going.


Most of the clips show human action. There are several categories for fighting poses, including hand-to-hand, weapons, kick boxing, and defense. Typically they're shot against a simple background, with a grid to show the perspective of the floor.


There are also clips in categories like dance, contortionist, and push-pull-lift. The actors are divided into men, women, and children, with a variety of ages and ethnicities.


In addition to full-figure actions, there are close-up actions and facial expressions. Often the same action is presented from the front and side views at the same time so that you can get a clear spatial sense of what's going on.

For any actual illustration or animation job, of course, you will probably want to cast and direct your own models, but this resource is useful for generating ideas, for understanding basic principles, or for getting yourself out of habits.

And it's a good supplement to Muybridge's Human Figure in Motion or the Books of art poses.
ReferenceReference

Schubertiade

Schubertiade by Moritz von Schwind

A Schubertiade was a house concert celebrating the music of the Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828). 

This image of a Schubertiade is by Moritz von Schwind from 1868.

Julius Schmid painted this reconstruction long after Schubert was dead. It's carefully composed, with a circle of light tones in the center and repoussoir figures on the outside.

These Schubertiades must have been magical occasions, infused with the light of candles, the rustle of silk and the scent of flowers. Gustav Klimt captured the delicate radiance in this painting from 1899. Unfortunately this painting was destroyed in World War II, but at least someone photographed it in color.
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Bard College will be hosting a Schubert festival this summer in New York's Hudson Valley.

Tony Sarg's Sea Monster Hoax

Tony Sarg was a cartoonist, illustrator and puppeteer who also originated the giant character balloons in the Macy's Parade.

In 1937 he and a few of his friends used one of his parade balloons for a hoax in Nantucket. He advertised sightings of a sea serpent, and followed it with giant footprints on the beach.


By the time the giant monster appeared on South Beach, newspaper articles had built the anticipation.

Nearly everyone in Nantucket came down with their cameras to see the beast, and as a result many photos survive.

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Here's a Flickr collection
More images from Retronaut 

Book Review: The Lost Notebook

I recently received a copy of the new book The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheis and the Secrets of Walt Disney's Movie Magic. 

The large hardbound book of 292 pages is a facsimile reproduction of a detailed scrapbook kept by Herman Schultheis, a technician at the Disney Studios in the late 1930s, while they were developing Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and other classics of the art form.

Effects animation used in Sorcerer's Apprentice

Schultheis thoroughly documented every aspect of the production process, presumably to impress the boss someday, but the notebook was kept secret and was lost and forgotten for many years in a chest of drawers. 

Meanwhile, in another human mystery, Schultheis himself disappeared without a trace into the Guatemalan jungle, so his story hasn't been adequately told.

The scrapbook contains many photos of costumed models who provided reference footage to guide the animators. This aspect of the production process has become fairly well known.

But there are other revelations of pre-digital engineering ingenuity. For example, the movement of the fairy ballerinas in Fantasia based their movement on the workings of a contraption with steel rails and revolving spools. Snowflake cutouts were mounted on the spools and moved along the rails, creating geometry that would be impossible to accomplish otherwise at the time.

An expert camera technician, Schultheis shot many of the photos reference to guide the animators, such as the ballerinas and ostriches for the "Dance of the Hours" segment in Fantasia.

Even the mechanical clocks that appear in Geppetto's workshop (link to video clip) in Fantasia were created in workable form, so no wonder they're so convincing in the film.

The ghosts in the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence of Fantasia were shot using a distortion mirror, and thankfully, Schultheis photographed the setup and described the process.

This book should spark a lot of ideas for working artists interested in exploring pre-digital film technology, and it will offer a wealth of insights for animation history fans. Given all the painstaking work that went into them, it's no wonder that the Disney features of the late 1930s were so expensive to produce. The marginal notes by animation historian John Canemaker add a lot to understanding each of the pages.

On a broader level for any artist, the book is a testament to the value of putting time and effort into research and development.

At Amazon: The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheis and the Secrets of Walt Disney's Movie Magic

CLEMENTOONS: Behind the Scenes

 

I'd like to introduce a behind-the-scenes tour of CLEMENTOONS, the animation technique I've been developing to tell the story of Clement. (Direct link to YouTube video)

Clement is a bold little guy, but he's always getting himself into trouble. He's on a journey through our ordinary world to a magical place called Melville, where cartoon people have congregated to form a surreal society.

He'll meet plenty of other characters along the way. I'll release the next episode, "Clement on the Can" later this month.

High School Drawing

Pen and ink on scratchboard was my favorite medium when I was 13 years old, and here's a drawing that I had a lot of fun with, a young ape raising a toast in a Renaissance court. 

For those who aren't familiar with scratchboard, it has a clay-coated surface that lets you scratch off white lines from any inked area. 

I can see now, looking back on it, that I was trying all different kinds of styles and textures of ink work, and having a hard time integrating them into one vision. And it's pretty obvious where my photo reference stops. But I guess it was a step in the direction of what I've always loved: imaginative realism and fantastical juxtapositions.

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Tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. Eastern time I'll launch the first video intro to Clementoons here on the blog and on my YouTube channel.

Animation Title Cards

When I was developing a title card design for the CLEMENTOONS series, I looked at a lot of the opening graphics that inspired me as a kid. Most of my favorites were from the Golden Age of American Animation in the 1930s and '40s.

When a cartoon started with the Looney Tunes titles it made my heart race with anticipation--still does. I love the cockeyed block letters, and the concentric circles airbrushed to look like a tunnel. It was a special treat to see Bugs or Daffy or Porky featured in the title. 

And I was crazy about the manic energy of the Warner Bros. theme music, based on the tune called "The Merry Go Round Broke Down." 

I also adored the title cards from the Walt Disney cartoon shorts of the 1930s. They conveyed the promise of beautiful animation. Note the "burlap" background, the gradated light, the dimensional lettering, and date written in Roman numerals.

All the cartoons from that period had beautiful titles. They were all colorful, beautifully lit, with an interesting texture behind the letters. I couldn't figure out how they made them, but they seemed to be made by hand from real materials.

For the Clementoons titles, I wanted to see Clement actually animated in front of the titles, and then somehow jumping back into them. If I made the stepped windows rectangular, in the same proportion as a 9x16 video screen, then I figured the camera could dolly back into that space, following Clement as he jumped into his new adventure.

I did all sorts of R&D for the letters, and finally discovered that craft foam worked best. I cut the letters out with a sharp X-Acto knife and spray-glued them onto a spacer above the background. For the background texture, I experimented with real burlap, but it didn't look right, so I hand sculpted the texture out of Magic Sculpt.

Here's what the set-up looks like with my Canon T3i camera mounted on an improvised Lego dolly and set up for the stop motion sequence. Note the white "C" shape in the upper left. That's called a "gobo" and it's made of an aluminum pie plate. It's used to shape the light on the titles.


Here's the final sequence, which takes about 8 seconds. (Direct link to YouTube video) Note the focus pull and the dolly move at the end, zooming into the stepped rectangle.

I recorded the blink sound effects on a mandolin, plucking the strings between the bridge and the tailpiece. The theme music is courtesy of a young band called The Yanks, in which my son Dan happens to be the accordionist.

The Clementoons theme tune is called "If There Weren't Any Women in the World," an old barn dance they learned from fiddle player Seamus Quinn. If you listen closely, you'll hear a saxophone on the track, played by three-time All-Ireland champion Isaac Alderson.
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More about animation title cards at Animation Treasures
Respective titles © and ® Disney Enterprises, Inc / Warner Bros. / MGM / Paramount / Universal
Clementoons is © and TM little old me.

First Look: CLEMENTOONS

Yesterday blog reader Jeff Jordan commented: "Just curious, Jim--when are you gonna bust out a Gurney animation? I sense there's something in the works........."


You guessed it, Jeff! Here's the first look at a series of animated films I've been working on called Clementoons.

Clementoons gets its name from the main character Clement, a three-inch-tall cartoon person who began as a castoff toy in a clementines box. He is trying to find his way to Melville, the enchanted world where comic characters have come fully to life.

Along the way he'll meet other characters living their lives among us in the real world. Not all are cute and friendly.

I'll be premiering the first episode this Thursday at 8:00 a.m. Eastern time. I'll launch them here on the blog and on my YouTube channel.

During the last six months, I've been carving out time from my other work in plein-air painting, illustration, writing, and lecturing to design and build the dozens of stop motion puppets required for this project. And I've developed several techniques of animation that I'm quite sure will look like nothing you've ever seen before.

I have also been documenting the process on video and will be releasing tutorials showing everything from puppet fabrication to animation techniques to Lego-powered motion control dolly systems.

This is a return to a joyful obsession of my youth. I spent much of my free time in high school and college creating animated films, and my first job was in the animation business.

More previews tomorrow.

How to write a query letter

If you want to write a book or a magazine article, it helps to write a query letter first. The query can be fairly short. You don't have to write the book or article, just describe it to the editor.

One thing that helps me in writing a query letter is to follow this basic form, with just a sentence or two on each topic:

1. THE PROBLEM. Why is this book or article needed? What's the gap in the market? What's the story that hasn't been told yet?

2. THE SOLUTION. How will the piece I want to write address that need? What is my piece not going to be? What other published works are similar or different? 

3. THE SCOPE. How big is this thing, how long, how many pictures? How much is finished already? What is the look, feel, tone, or style?

4. THE MARKET. Who is this work for? How am I connected with the audience? How big is the market? The actual marketing and publicity will be a joint effort, but authors often know their market best.

5. THE DELIVERABLES. What am I going to provide? Who will bring in the text, captions, permissions, and photos? How long will it take? What will I need help with?

6. MY QUALIFICATIONS. If the editor doesn't know me already, here's the chance to say why I believe I'm the best person to write the book.

As an example, here's a brief letter where I spend just one sentence answering each question. Brevity helps. One page is usually enough, two pages if you must.

Dear (Editor of ImagineFX magazine)

Workshop: 10 Tips for Working from Photographs

Artists are always looking for reference tools to improve the realism of their imaginative paintings. They know that photographs offer a useful tool, but also a potential pitfall. I propose to give your readers 10 tips that will help them use photo reference effectively, preserving their innate vision without the risk of photo-dependence.

I envision this article appearing in the Workshop section of the magazine, running about 2000-2500 words with approximately 12 - 18 illustrations. Several case study examples would show some works developed with drawings alone as reference, and some with photo reference.

As before, with the “Visual Perception” and “Lived-In Future” workshops, the completed article can be delivered to you in hard copy and/or via email within two weeks of your acceptance.

You can accompany the query with links to works that you've already written, and you might also include a résumé. You can submit queries as emails, but if you want to cut through the clutter, you can send it as a good old-fashioned letter. A query letter arriving by post is a rare diversion for editors these days.

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Previously on the blog: Using Photo Reference

CG Short: Pinnipèdes

Two sleepy but irritable elephant seals try to take nap, but they get interrupted.

This is the first 3D animated film by Victor Caire, who has a nice sense of timing. It's made with 3DSmax, Vray, Zbrush, and Krakatoa.

(Direct link to video) Via CG Bros.