Be sure not to miss

John K just posted his explanation on Why Cartoon Animation Steered Off Course. The discussion below the article is also very interesting. Well... I think it is interesting.
If you love classic cartoons, be sure not to miss this post!

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-animation-steered-of-course.html

How fast

People sometimes ask me how fast my camera is. I answer: "It is fast. It takes five photos in a second with shutter speed up to 1/8000." What does this mean in real life? The illustration is below. These images were taken in a shadow at dusk at ISO 640 and speed of 1/2000. I could have probably achieved better result at 1/1600. This is a point and shoot sequence. What I did was to choose the settings i thought would be appropriate for the lighting conditions and the action that I was about to photograph, then wait, then follow the target and press and hold the button. The photos came out underexposed so I did some color correction in Photoshop. The newer DSLR models should be even faster, have better auto-focus and produce more detailed images.

Pacific Black Duck, Tasmania

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An unnoticeable (probably) but important change

I've just changed the explanatory note below the title from "wildlife photography and occasional thoughts on animation" to "wildlife photography through the lens of an animator".

I had two main reasons to do this:

firstly: Over a whole year I only wrote two or three posts on animation. It's not that I have nothing to say. On the contrary – I have a lot, but in my spare time I'd better do other more pleasant things than think of animation. Animation nowadays brings me more grief than anything else. And there is no use of complaining or theorizing either.

secondly: (But it's actually more important) I found a person who speaks on my behalf. In John K and his frequent posts on animation I found someone whose thoughts I agree with 99%, whose tastes in cartoons I share, and whose hopes and frustrations about how this industry goes or should go are my hopes and frustrations.
He is very serious about his blogging. He is an influential figure in the animation world and he loves cartoons as much (or even more) than I do.
So from now on every now and then I may link to one of his posts. And this should be enough.
John K is the spokesman of many of us, I guess. :: http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/ ::

I will keep the label animation and whenever I feel that a photo might be useful to animators studying action I will tag it.

John K on "Artistic Graphic Shading in Cartoons VS Cold CG"

A recent post on Jon K's blog which I wish I had written :) I agree with every single word there and would invite anyone who loves cartoons to read it.
below is the link:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/08/artistic-graphic-shading-in-cartoons-vs.html

An "Animation" :)

Well... I played with the sequence a bit today. Click here to see the hi-res version of this loop.

Pacific Gull, Tasmania

Comic Strip

I haven't posted 'comic strips' for a while, but this one is pretty exciting. You must click and see the hi-res version to get an idea what I'm talking about. The shutter speed for this sequence was 1/1600 of the second. The Gull caught a little fish after this plunge. [updated 28/08/2008]

Pacific Gull, Tasmania

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Wind is so much fun!

It's all about captured moments, right? About things that we would miss with naked eyes. But then if the quality is not perfect it is very disappointing. Still, I think that this pic deserves to be published as it shows a very unusual action pose. Good reference for animators too.

Juvenile Kelp Gull playing in the wind

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Flash :(

Being a classically trained animator, having the bad luck to start working at the end of the analog era, I'm quite a proficient user of Flash, Toon Boom and many other animation and graphic apps. After all my 14 years in this industry, working in nearly all the possible creative positions, I know three things for sure:
- no tablet matches the resolution of paper,
- no stylus matches the pressure sensitivity of a plain pencil,
- no software is better than a lightbox.

Cutouts are OK. In the hands of Animators who can draw and know what animation is, cutouts can produce some decent results. It becomes a real disaster when people who know the technical side of the programs are hired as animators and do that awful mechanical crap that is so often shown on TV nowadays – thoughtlessly tweening pre-drawn symbols.

My post was triggered by these (click and click) two discussions. If you like cartoons, if you are an animator, you might find them interesting.

A Flash production is usually the best kind of work an industry animator could get nowadays :(

Here are the links again:
http://cartooncave.blogspot.com/2007/10/flash-in-pan.html
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/11/flash-vs-traditional-vs-asia.html

Perspective is not some kind of black magic

Unlike art in general perspective could only be right or wrong. It is science and as all scientific disciplines there are certain rules and laws that define how three dimensional objects should be drawn on a flat surface.
All perspective problems were solved by the 14th century. The Italian Renaissance artists and the Dutch painters were masters of perspective and optical distortions.

It is so stunning to find out that 600 years later many professional artists don't have basic knowledge of its fundamental principles and how simple primitive volumes should be drawn correctly in perspective. Ellipses and cylinders are thought to be some kind of magical elements that twist and stretch as we look at them from different angles.

These observations make me sad!

Were all those years lost?

I bought some Mickey and Donald cartoons from the twenties and thirties. They are crude compared to cartoons made 20 years later, but they are better than what we do today. The gags are funnier, the animation is heaps better, and the characters have life in them.

How could those people achieve results much better than what we do now with our core2duo ultra-powerful machines? They could draw and they were willing to draw a lot! Animation is a complex combination of many elements, but the main thing are the drawings that come to life.

It seems that all the years between those early animators in 1920-s and us were lost. Instead of improving what they have achieved, we make less funny, cheaper, uglier, poorly animated cartoons and we educate our audience that this is modern, this is cool. So cheap, crappy and ugly is now perceived as stylish. Mediocrity rules and reproduces with an incredible persistence.

I can't see a way out of this.

Fierce Little Miners

I wish that the quality of these shots was better. But even these reveal how intimidating the Noisy Miners are. I was stunned when I saw the photos. Such skillful fliers those brave little birds never hesitate to support each other and attack much bigger creatures defending their territories. I hope to have the chance to witness such a fight again and take better pictures...

above: Noisy Miners attacking Forest Raven, Hobart

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