1364 - Mr. Eyebrows

A marriage is a partnership.  When you have been married for a while, you and your partner will form a synergy of ideals:  two minds but one thought.  This doesn't occur all the time, naturally, but sometimes what will happen is that your partner will pull out of the universal ether something that you have been thinking about but have not yet formed the will to form the words.  

For instance: my wife says out of the blue "I wonder what Eugene Levy would look like without his eyebrows?"  

It turns out that there a number of fan websites where people use Photoshop to remove the eyebrows of the stars.   Even so, I figured I might as well flex my own digital redaction skills.

Eyebrows are a key visual identifier for facial recognition.  In character design, those at the top level all claim that the trick to achieving the best caricature is to a) render the crookedness of the smile, and b) get the eyebrows right.  Go and look at Shrek, for example.  Goofy big green ogre, but with Mike Myers' eyebrows and smile.   

1142 - Esks Flag Trial

Well, that took a long time to sort through.  I apologise for the delay.  I've got a lot of things to get done that aren't near being finished.  You should see my JSVB post on artists' block.  It's one of my personal favourites.

Anyways, an animated ruff of an Edmonton Eskimos flag.  It's not done and it's dodgy, but the basic idea is there and that's good enough for me right now.  

Please click here to see JSVB Post #176 on the topic of being blocked.  Fun!

1140 - Black Flag

Another day, another flag demo.  This one has better animation, since I took the trouble to look at a  flag model for a while.  

1139 - Floppy Flag

Oh boy, I am animating again.  This is my first attempt in years, and am I ever rusty.  However, it's just a simple ruff, I can fix it later.  Right now, I'm more concerned that I can post anything.  Blogger isn't very helpful at helping me figure out the workflow of presenting full motion.  For example, I drew this in high definition, but it sure doesn't show.  However, there's lots of help online.  I'll figure it out, but in the meantime JSVB readers will endure subpar art.  

1122 - "1122"

Ever since I made the joke on JSVB about the house on the corner of Tigris and Euphrates (remember that one?  No?  Please click here to go way back to JSVB Post #300.), I've wanted to Flintstonize my own house.  That is, I wanted to draw my house the way it would have looked rendered by Ed Benedict who designed the Flintstones cartoon show for Hanna-Barbera Studios.

Now that the JSVB post counter has reached 1122, I thought it would be the best time to draw my humble home in Flinststones style, since 1122 is also my house number.

My wife and I own a duplex, so I drew in ourselves, our car, our neighbours and their kids and their pets, and their car, too.  My wife suggested that I also draw the lawnmower, since I'm normally to be found pushing it over our grass these days. 

1029 - "Our Bucket List"

Once I had a friend take great pains to point out to me that art should be able to stand on its own without need for description, a most highly annoying conversational gambit.

 

Yet here we are; I think this piece speaks for itself.  

804 - Roger At 25

 

From the We're All getting Older And There's Nothing We Can Do About It Department:

 

Roger Rabbit just turned 25.  I was surprised at the news, but checking back I see the crazy 'toon is indeed a quarter of a decade old.  My drawing represents my age more than the rabbit's.  Roger deserves better and indeed he still looks great in his movie, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" (1988). 

 

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit" seems groundbreaking for combining live action footage with hand-drawn animation, but this technology had been used for decades before.  in the case of Roger Rabbit, nobody had attempted it on such a large scale.  Post-production for the film took months of painstaking hand-drawn labour. 

 

The true genius of the film lies with its animation director, Richard Williams.  Williams, who lived mostly outside of the big studio system, was able to convince Disney, Warner Brothers, and other producers to release their characters to him for the Roger Rabbit film.  This was likely the only way that characters from the major animation houses could all be seen at once.  No salaried studio director would ever be allowed to have Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny on-screen at the same time, let alone the dozens of recognizable cartoon characters from Disney, Warner's, MGM, Fliescher, and other studios. 

 

In addition, Williams created Roger, his va-va-voom wife Jessica, Benny The Cab, and several other characters custom-made for the film.  A towering animation talent, Richard Williams also wrote what I consider the best practical guide to animation, the revered "Animator's Survival Kit" (2001, 2012). 

 

Roger Rabbit is the intellectual property of The Walt Disney Company. 

 

 

 

 



692 - Flintstone Bowling Ball Headache

 

I drew myself as a Hanna-Barbera character in the Flintstones universe.  Why?  Because earlier this week, I was rocked by a monumental headache.  Lots of people have lots of headaches so I figure I'm no different, but it did inspire this drawing. 

 

The headache was exactly of the sort you'd expect if you took bowling lessons from Fred Flintstone.  Unless you master Fred's unique bowling stance, that big rock ball is going to get away on you and clonk you right on the top of your head.  My wife claimed she saw a big pointy lump on the crown of my skull.  I kept an ice pack up there for days, until I felt better. 

 

Drawing this pose gave me a greater appreciation for Fred's bowling scenes.  It would be pretty tough to draw a proper bowling motion given the rock-bottom Hanna-Barbera animation budget.  So, Fred moves on a silly loop of animated toe movement and windmills his arms on a pivot around his shoulder.  The result is a lot of dynamic movement with very few frames rendered.

 

For another blog entry related to the Flinstones, please check out one pf my all-time favourites, JSVB Post #300, by clicking here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



514 - Eyes Wide Xmas

Why not make Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999) into a cartoon?  I've frequently been interested in the idea of sending filmed product into the realm of classical animation.  Somewhere on JSVB, I've got fantasy characters of Scully and Mulder ready to go for a Saturday morning X-Files cartoon.  While my drawings are too crude, I think the idea would be awesome.  Maybe parents with kids would think otherwise, though.  Please click here to see JSVB Post #93, which has X-Files character models.

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" (1965) remains as the gold standard for Christmas cartoons.  Filmed years before I was even born, drawn on a shoestring budget with woefully limited animation, it still stands as the most popular Christmas show ever.  Residuals for Charlie Brown keep pouring in, making it an unbelievably profitable property given its lowball budget.  Producers around the world continually try to match the Charlie Brown magic formula, which is why we get acres upon acres of cheap holiday film.  Not much of it seems to be any good, yet Christmas sells almost as well as sex. 

That's my thinking: a sexy Christmas film.  At least there's no crass commercialism or cloying Santa Claus.  Adult audiences would appreciate that.  It's one reason why I consider Eyes Wide Shut to be such a spectacular Christmas film.  Of course, the dead hookers in New York, the strange and aloof orgies in Republican mansions, and Tom Cruise  in general might not come to mind as solid holiday fare as would bell-ringing angel wings, syrupy egg-nog, and Mr. Bean's outsized turkey. 

Eyes Wide Shut, love the story or hate it, comes with some of the finest cinematography in the history of film, period.  It's such a gorgeous motion picture.  Even the minor actors receive a high quality of lighting and camera direction that some A-list stars would never get in their entire careers.  To my mind, the perfectionist Kubrick would have made a stunning director of animated films.  No stranger to animated special effects, Kubrick pioneered several techniques that earned him Academy Awards.   Animators are much more used to working with perfectionist directors than live-action actors, or so I believe.

I started the drawing above in a cartoony style, but in truth, I didn't have a good handle on the character models, so I opted for a more graphic-arts look.  If you've ever watched Richard Linklater's superlative animated film "A Scanner Darkly" (2006), I hope that you will see that I tried to emulate that vision.  I used an embarrassing amount of Photoshop to post-process the drawing into something that might appear filmic. 

453 - Scannergeist

Scannergeist, or ghosts in my scanner.  Not real ghosts, of course, whether or not you believe in them.

A while ago, I repaired the broken spine of my current sketchbook with duct tape.  Some of the adhesive made it onto the glass of my tabletop scanner.  As you would expect, I simply used Photoshop to erase the smudge from several weeks of JSVB posts.  Today, the smudge went across a drawing, so I resolved to clean it out. 

My wife ran a special cleaning cloth over the glass while I pressed the scan button to allow more light on the subject. The result was this image, which shows what the scan head sees as it swept past my wife's hand.  This looks so cool, it is pre-empting my intended JSVB post, which I hope to upload tomorrow. 

Way back in the old days, animators would use photocopiers to squash and stretch their drawings.  If you knew how to time the movement, you could shift the artwork on the glass by hand as the light bar moved underneath.  Then, you'd get some interesting, transformative result.  You can still do this using a photocopier or a flatbed scanner.  It's interesting and fun!  Nowadays, artists just use Photoshop to achieve the same effect, but with greater precision.

Below are some examples.  I took yesterday's JSVB sketch of Sergeant Penny and transformed the scan.  On the left, I stretched her by moving the drawing as the scanner operated.  On the right, I took a pristine scan and made roughly the same transformation using tools in Photoshop.  Neither method makes for a pretty Penny, but in a pinch and with a steady hand, you can make decent squashes and stretches without using computer applications.

Moved by hand.

Transformed using Scale and Liquefy.

Original scan.

439 - Background Check

I've been working at throwing my futuristic city background into a new animation, my plan all along.  All I've got to show for it so far is the inclusion of a tower in the forground and a camera move.

It took me all day just to do that!  Flipbook is awesome software, but the documentation and interface seems to be turned just thirteen degrees towards the obtuse for me.  Once I figure out the trick, it's easy, but figuring out the trick in the first place is very heavy going. 

If I was doing the camera move by hand, it would have taken about the same amount of time, using one of the old-style multi-plane cameras.  Two minutes to set up and take down each exposure times three hundred frames equals six hundred minutes, or ten hours.  That's what this little film cost me today.  The next one I set up will take ten minutes, or less.

There's more to do: add flying cars, animated lights, effects, and an audio track.  I am checking each step as I go to make sure I understand the production flow.  Then I have to figure out how to upload a higher resolution version of the final product. 

414 - "Professor Sack"

I've been asked why I chose to animate a hamster for yesterday's JSVB post.  The answer is because my Francis Xavier Hamster character is very close in shape to the student animator's best friend, the flour sack.

Since the early days of Disney, the animated flour sack has been the proven model to test the skills of budding animators as well as an excellent starting point for those wishing to learn animation art.  The construction of the sack is very simple, yet its apparent weight and mass lends itself to a variety of realistic motions.  Although we call it a flour sack, animators construct the character around the most basic model possible: the bouncing ball.  If the ball gets squashed, so does the sack.  If the ball stretches, then the sack stretches as well.  Wherever the ball  goes, it takes the sack with it. 

It takes very little to suggest arms, legs, hands, feet, and a head if we use the basic sack shape as the torso of a character.  FX Hamster is very much sack-shaped.

Back when I was teaching animation courses, I realized I needed a real sack model to help the students visualize the range of motion the character could achieve.  I picked out some realistic burlap, and my wife sewed together "Professor Sack", my personal teaching assistant.  She based the real sack on drawings I provided.  Notice the pleasing proportions.  The feet lay flat on the ground, and the ears create visual appeal by pointing at different angles.  We stuffed the upper half of the sack with polyester fiber fluff and the bottom half with buckwheat so that Professor Sack would have some heft and could stand up on his own. 

Professor Sack enjoys retirement now, spending his august days quietly watching television.  He was pleased to be featured in today's JSVB post.

To see FX Hamster in a very short, very limited test video, please click here.



    

413 - "Francis Xavier Hamster"

I have animated. 

It's been almost ten years since my last animation.  In that time, my animation skills have dropped back down to almost zero.  Today is a step towards my rehabilitation, or final demise... one of the two. 

After coming into enough money to purchase a tricked-out copy of Digicel FlipBook, I've started animating again.  Today's effort features Francis Xavier Hamster, who jumps three times.  There is no audio. 

I spent the day drawing FX Hamster, which was the easy part.  Much of the time I spent trying to figure out FlipBook's tricky user interface.  Most of it makes sense if you know traditional animation, but some of the bits and pieces are difficult to set up.  Interesting trivia: this animation was rendered completely on computer, and is 100% paperless!  It's the first time I've ever tried to go without paper. 

I am taking my own lesson plan from ten years ago, when I used to teach animation.   FlipBook is much better than the software I had to use back then, but my skills feel like they have evaporated to dust.  It is truly humbling to be a student again with my own decade-old instructor's notes as my guide.  It feels like rehab, which I mentioned already, and like bizarre time travel where 30-year-old Jeff is giving lessons to 40-year-old Jeff.  How I wish it was the other way around. 

If you like this animation, you might want to see the previous character sketches I worked up for this by please clicking here, here, and here.

399 - Twelvefield Bounces Back

Today's JSVB post sure doesn't look like much, but for me it's a huge milestone.   It's a frame from the first animation I have drawn for almost a decade.  In the past, I used to draw animation quite a bit.  My "twelvefield" Hotmail address, maintained carefully almost since the inception of Hotmail itself, refers to the field size of standard animation paper, which is 12 (12fld). 

My stars have aligned to the point where I have garnered enough money to begin purchasing some quality animation software.  Today, I finally had a chance to give it a workout.  This moment, I've just realized how terribly far my animation skills have slipped, though.  I thought I could just pick up where I left off, especially considering that I've been keeping up my visual blog fairly regularly.  Nope.  It looks like I am going to have to learn everything all over again. 

I do hope to post some animation to JSVB, but this jumping hamster looks so uncool that today I will stick to posting a single frame to represent my progress.  



300 - "The Cradle Of Civilization"

Greetings, and welcome to the 300th Post Spectacular Spectacular Extravaganza for JSVB! 

Ever since starting up JSVB, I've kept to myself a personal list of posts I'd really like to see.  After all this time, I'm finally getting around to making this list a reality.  For today's post, I want to uncover nothing less than The Cradle Of Civilization.

Not long after moving to Port Coquitlam, I went on a long walk around the neighbourhood,  and I brought my camera.  At the far end of the local schoolyard is a typical suburban development.  I was strolling in the midst of a row of pretty houses when I was stopped short by what I saw.  I took this picture:

Yes, you're reading that right, and no, I'm not making this up.  This is the actual and genuine Fertile Crescent of legend, the undisputed Cradle of Civilization, i.e. the starting place for Humanity... the crossing of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Naturally, you're wondering what this conjunction, perhaps the most imporant real estate in the history of Mankind, must look like.   Hang onto your hat, Indiana Jones, I took a picture that zooms out to show everything:

The corner of Tigris and Euphrates appears to be taken up with a handsome two-storey home in the heart of a very quiet neighbourhood within easy walking distance to the Costco. 

In terms of human cultural history, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in ancient Mesopotamia created a rich and fertile zone that encouraged some of homo sapiens' first attempts at sustainable agriculture and communal living.   In terms of Port Coquitlam geography, it looks like the suburban developer liked to name streets after major rivers. 

But maybe there's more... I brought this photo to some experts I know for deep analysis.  By exposing a reverse polarity neutrino stream to the chronaton field of the picture (and using a little Corel Painter), I was able to uncover exactly what the crossroads of the Tigris and the Euphrates must have looked like in prehistoric times:

As you can see not much difference.  No next door neighbours, of course, as this address is #1.   Mount Baker is erupting in the background, which could happen again anytime now.

It was a lot of fun to put this post together, but it was also a lot of hard work.  It turned out to be a real joy to draw and paint in the Hanna-Barbera Flintstones' animation style.  It may look simple, but there is a lot of structured artwork designed to make the image look fresh. 

Maybe next time I'll draw my own house in its prehistoric look.  Yabba-dabba-doo!