TED-Ed: "Historical Role Models"

Here's the fourth & latest animation I've directed for TED-Ed (voted one of Time Magazine's Top 50 Websites of 2013 & winner of three Webby Awards!).  It's all about the virtues of American historical figures.  Check it!  I'll be posting some behind-the-scenes work for it in the coming days.
I'm taking some time off from TED for the next few months to catch up on other work, but I hope to come back to TED later in the year with some fresh eyes.  They're some of the best and easiest people to work with, so hopefully it won't be too hard to stay away for so long.

I've also been working on another animated short that's gonna be big!  With explosions!  Kids like those right?  More soon...

PEMDAS: The Process, Part 2

Now that my initial brainstorming and animatic is finished, I can finally move into the heavy design stages of production.   For this short in particular, design proved somewhat challenging to me initially.  I know that there was a simplicity that I wanted to achieve but at the same time I wanted to give it my own touch.  Simple can be hard to do without looking bland.  I wanted to incorporate mathematical concepts into the background, but how should I go about doing that?  How 'round' should I make the Land of Pi?  How the hell am I going to design this dragon and get him animated on schedule?  The clock begins counting down...

Some things clicked right away: the Musketeers, the horses, the supporting characters... all transfered from brain to screen, no problem.  Their shapes were easy to communicate and didn't require as much tinkering.

The Musketeers looking mostly enthusiastic.

Early design of Digit Horse (proportions altered further in animation)

Then there was the matter of designing the Digit Dragon.  I needed to make sure that not only was the design appealing; it had to animatable within the time constraints and be able to work within a variety of scenes.

Early design of Puff the Digit Dragon

While elements of the early dragon design made it into the final, he was way too unruly of a beast to animate along with everything else in two weeks' time.  His legs weren't flexible enough to walk and frankly there were just too many numbers to tell what was going on anywhere.  I also realized that the one-tone color scheme wasn't doing me any favors, so I began work on what eventually became the final version.  With a good variety of sizes and shades of numbers coupled with more prominent eyes and an upright posture, I could already sense more personality coming out of this guy...

Close-to-final design of Puff the Digit Dragon

But where in the hell were all of these characters going to live???  I had to figure out how to make this Land of Pi round and full of numbers.  Would they be grounded in backgrounds or float about over colors and textures?  How abstract did I want to get with it?

Various stages in the Land of Pi development.

Above illustrates the progression of how I got from Point A to Point Reasonably Finished over the period of about a week.  The Land of Pi was a lot more difficult for me to conceptualize than I initially imagined, so I kept it simmering on the back-burner while I went ahead on other designs.  When I began production on this project I initially expected everything to be on lined or graph paper to give it that 'doodling in the margins' feel, but as time wore on I realized I needed something more concrete to fit the style of the rest of the design.  Then it was a matter of roundness... what is too round and what is not round enough?  I'm no Antoni Gaudi... my round houses ended up looking more like tiny Hitler faces than something that looked like actual households, so I decided to keep the "kingdom" at a distance and build any extra scenery that might be needed (i.e. The Senate).  I ended up translating the notebook paper into the color scheme and overall feel of the landscape, something I feel I could've pushed more if there were time.

The Land of Pi

Here are a few other misdirections, ghosts of version numbers' past...

The Planet of the Land of Pi -- Nixed idea for opening, complete with golden spiral for The Mathies™

Original Design for "Robot Things" -- Anyone think a pile of old Nintendo Virtual Boys makes for a good joke anymore?  ... Anyone?  Exactly.

Original Tree Design -- back when I was going to go more painterly with the backgrounds... damn you, time allotted! 

NEXT TIME on THE PROCESS, Part 3: Finishing Up, Final Thoughts.

PEMDAS: The Animatic!

Following up with my previous blahg post, here is the original storyboard animatic that I put together for TED-Ed.  Next time I'll write more on how I got from this to the final animated short!

PEMDAS: The Process, Part I

I've recently posted some pre-production goodness over on my site for my TED-Ed animated short, PEMDAS or How To Defeat a Dragon with Math (YouTube).  I wanted to take some time in this blog to walk thru how I go about making a project for TED-Ed from start to finish.  It may not be the model way to do things but it gets the job done, son!  Overall the whole process from pre-production to final posting takes anywhere between a month and a month and a half.

To get things started, TED sends me an audio file -- sometimes of my choosing, sometimes not -- and from there I begin listening to it over and over annnnd over.  I'll listen to it while I'm on the train, in the shower, grocery shoppin, etc etc so I can start brainstorming ideas & listening for workable rhythms in the narration.  I rarely cut up the audio, to whatever benefit or downsides that may provide.  Mainly I don't do it because I'd rather present the material as how it may play out in someone's head during a lecture.  Plus I don't need it to be any longer than it already is, I have a lot of ground to cover in a short time.  Initially, I start sorting out what could make for funny sight gags and what the characters might look like.

And then I let my brain crap all over my notebook for a few days, like this.

The scribble at the bottom eventually became the last shot in the animation of the desert.

First dragon drawings

Working out how I wanted to represent the musketeers

Fleshing out the dragon, if time permitted I was originally aiming to make him much more complicated.

More musketeer work where I decided on making parentheses 'just arms'

BONUS: Brain Crap isn't just for math design, here's an elephant from my last TED-Ed short.

Ahhh... wasn't that refreshing to get that all out?  I'm always jealous of some of my artist friends who keep amazingly well-kept sketchbooks full of beautiful drawings and proportion studies.  Mine looks like a four-year-old's with randomly fleshed-out drawings peppered in...

Due to the compressed nature of my TED-Ed productions (i.e. just me & producer) I usually start on storyboarding before or during initial character design, so my animatics typically end up looking nothing like the final product.  Certain parts will get chopped up, reworked or removed altogether.  This is true of all my TED-Ed projects but especially this latest one, with a much higher concentration of character interactions and backgrounds than my first two, which had long spans of charts and text animation.

Here are a few select storyboards and screenshots to compare storyboard vs. the final product:

My original design for the imperial senate.  The robot things were ... just that.  Overall, it looked too small and confined for me in the end.

The final design for the senate.  I added a truck with the words spelled out to better flow with the narration and changed the robot things to Star Wars® trash can droids for ease of animation.  Plus -- the guy was making a Star Wars reference and I needed to give it some sort of acknowledgement.  EXTRA NERD BONUS: The Imperial Senate has imperial units of measurement worked into its design. 

This was the animatic's original "Happy Ever After" shot... I had no idea how I was going to represent the Land of Pi design-wise and didn't have it down solid until about 10 days before final delivery.  So instead I had numbers and balloons.  Creativity.

The original "PEMDAS! There's another spot!" ... I wasn't really sure who I wanted to have yelling that line out so I just made a generic person.  The mouth was fun to draw.

This was the way I originally intended to show the musketeers riding their steeds toward the dragon.  After I got around to designing the horses, everything looked too jumbled up and busy so I went with the following design instead... 

The final version of the musketeers riding their steeds.

Finally, we come to the storyboard that eventually became the first image of this blog post.  This went through a few different changes, from the phone yelling to a wanted poster to a Street Fighter-style VS. screen to the musketeers sliding down a fire pole onto their horses.  Sometimes it's better just to keep it simple.

.... to be continued!



TOMORROW:  What Was I Animating 10 Years Ago?

MONDAY:  The Animatic! 

NEXT WEEK:  The Process, Part II  

TED-Ed: PEMDAS

I'll be posting more behind-the-scenes whatnots for this and other TED-Ed work shortly, and probably some sorta nipples for good measure.

NEW TED-Ed Animation - Electoral College

I just finished up my latest project with TED-Ed about everyone's favorite least-controversial subject of The Electoral College.  It's free, buddy!

Special thanks to my lovely producer Bridgette Spalding and the handsome sound designer Eric Hoffman.

Are You Like Most People?

... find out soon!  

TED-Ed: Storyboards VS. Final Product

Here's a side-by-side of some shots from my upcoming animation for TED-Ed.  On the left is the original storyboard accompanied with their final composition.

This scene originally called for more complicated movements by the piano tuner, but in order to meet the deadline I simplified the overall animation in the final.

This character was originally supposed to be a young boy, but given what happens to him I didn't want to have to redo anything... that's why I ended up going with "non-descriptive creepy guy"

There's a lot of text animation in this piece, and I saved laying that out until I was in production mode.

This one turned out pretty similar to the boards.

This scene was modified a bit to take advantage of the screen space... keeping the magnifying glass small on screen for 15 seconds would've looked too awkward. 

I kept his teeth clenched together to save some time... the sacrifices one must make in order to beat the clock!

Coming Soon: TED-Ed

I've been busy with more fun freelance projects lately, the most recent to have wrapped is a short I directed, designed & animated for TED Talks' sister site, TED Ed.  A few months ago my friend Jeremy pointed me to this page on their site saying that I should put my name in the hat for animator nominations.  A few weeks later I was contacted about doing some work and was assigned a four minute lesson.  I was granted a lot of creative control and it was such a pleasure to have the opportunity to work on a project for TED.  Before it's official release, I'll be posting a few bits from the production like storyboards, sound work, design ideas, and other random info.  

In the meantime, here are a few screenshots of what to expect: 

Awww yeah there will be pianos!

... this is where creative control is fun to exercise.

There will also be pianos in pants.

Everyone's fourth-favorite 20th Century physicist!

Storyboard: Fun with Science

Are the powers of ten getting you down?

Rotoscoping a Bodega Apple

A few weeks ago I needed to concept out some rotoscoping using Photoshop.  I used an apple I bought across the street and using a makeshift lazy susan I shot it on my kitchen countertop.  

Almost 30 and this is what I do with my life.

I brought those images into Photoshop and using a palette of about four colors I painted each frame independently and produced this simple but stylish rotoscope sequence.  More to come! 

... something to try with the kids!

Bahck to Blahging

Here we are, almost five months after my last post and what do I have to show for it?  Welcome back to the Marked Animation blog, where I'll return to form posting updates and all that related internet whatnot.  I've also neglected my Twitter recently, something I'm still not sure if I'll get back to doing any time soon.  While I do appreciate it for its networking capabilities and ease of communication, honestly I feel it's just one more thing to worry about in life that's already full of things to worry about.

What I have been up to lately is heading up a few freelance projects which I'll be addressing more in upcoming posts.  

I've been working with a good variety of Wacom products recently, like the still-kinda-brand-new Inkling and the Cintiq.  

If you're looking for something that will revolutionize your sketchbook, don't buy the Inkling -- at least not yet.

There are plenty of things I like about the Inkling, but none of them make me want to use it on a daily basis.  The overall layout of the packaging is great, everything you need is stored in a flip-open carrier that can fit easily into a pencil case.  The easy import of drawings into Photoshop or Illustrator is also a great plus, especially if you're not generally happy with the vector-tracing features in Illustrator.  Lines come in with nice weight variation and ready to edit, bezier-style.  You can also separate your sketches into layers and make adjustments accordingly, a great feature that gives you a lot more flexibility.  

However, there are some issues that Wacom needs to address in the Inkling's design and technology to make it must-have hardware for everyday artisting.  After a couple of weeks of regular wear-and-tear from living inside of a backpack pocket, my Inkling pen no longer wanted to stay inside of its slot.  It hangs loosely inside but no longer "clicks" into place on the spring, meaning that it won't properly charge while plugged in.  To relieve this, I put some electrical tape and a penny over the slot to keep the pen in place.  

Inkling closed.

Inkling open!

I think the technology behind the Inkling is a cool idea that's not quite where it needs to be yet.  While it works great for rough sketches and concepting, the line registration is generally not as accurate as I'd like even when working in ideal conditions.  Drawings can become muddled over minute variables like whether or not you're drawing on your lap or a table and wrinkles that come with physically drawing on paper which seem to interfere with the device's precision.  If you avoid adding too much detail to the image these issues aren't as noticeable, but for someone like me who likes to pile on the crosshatching and body hair, having to adjust or add in those elements separately seems like an unnecessary extra step.   The Inkling works great as a first step to design; a fast way to put your ideas to paper digitally... but ultimately I don't think it's worth the price or time yet.  Here are some side-by-side comparisons of actual drawings (left) vs. Inkling's import (right):

This is probably the best of the bunch, and the loose sketching lends itself well to the Inkling's strengths.

Detailed drawings don't hold up very well.  It's like someone tried to trace your sketch in a moving car.

Again, the overall idea of the image is there, but when you look at details like the collar and face there are discrepancies. 

As sloppy as this sketch is, this import disappointed me.  Even with the loose style you lose what held the original image together.

   

As for the Cintiq, it's the smallest version that Wacom makes and probably not their best but I love it.  There's nothing quite like feeling like you live in the future when you're sitting on the couch next to your girlfriend doing full-color animation on your lap.  Admittedly, the iPad isn't far behind with their upcoming pressure-sensitive stylus coming out in a matter of months and that screen and setup is much better, but for now I'll be more than happy to add my Cintiq to my mobile work station, something I can take with me and animate run cycles like this:

without arms, men are basically scrotums with legs.

Concept Art & Painting in Photoshop

I took a stab at some concept-arting* for a project last month that involved painting in Photoshop.  I haven't done much digital painting yet so it was pretty new to me; I really enjoyed doing it & want to work on refining it more.  Just think of all the detailed pimples & vivid in-grown hairs I could paint... maybe if I ever save up enough money to get me a fancy new Cintiq...**

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

More on these & what they're for later...



* If you want to check out what beautiful professional-level concept art looks like, check out this great tumblr feed: FUCKYEAHCONCEPTART 


** In the meantime, I did take the time to pre-order Wacom's new Inkling on Amazon.com and if you love to draw and are looking for a $200 investment that will change the way you sketch & edit illustrations then I highly encourage you to do the same.  I think it will be a great opportunity to get back into hand-drawn animation as well, since there's no tedious need to scan every image.

Officially Freelance.

That is all for today.