sydney October 4th, 2007
I’ve been in Denmark at the sooper-cool Animation Workshop these last few weeks teaching a crash course in transitioning to CG from hand-drawn animation. Everyone who has worked with me in CG can now be reduced to hysterical laughter at the thought of me trying to teach someone how to do constraints, cope with breaking rigs, etc. etc…
On the last day of the course just for a change I talked a bit about animation as a stylized theater– before I studied animation I did a degree in Theater History. I was particularly interested in masked theaters, such as Noh or Commedia del’Arte, and as I got more into animation I started to see it as obviously part of this tradition– an animated face, after all, very much resembles a mobile mask:
It isn’t so easy to find good reference about this sort of thing and it helps to know your way around some theater history lingo so I promised the class I’d collect some stuff and put it up on this website. You could write several large books on this subject so this is going to be more like a Rough Guide to Abstract Theater with a lot of YouTube links:
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sydney August 12th, 2007
I’ve been meaning to draw at the local mini-farm for ages. There was one rooster with a hideous but useful disease which revealed some of his featherless anatomy in a kind of cross-section.
sydney July 11th, 2007
Not much time to draw these days, but there’s always dailies:
We’re all getting kind of tired..
sydney June 17th, 2007
You put up with a lot living in London– basically, things in general not working at all (transport, weather, infrastructure, household mold, etc.). On the other hand, I can personally emerge from work any day of the week and randomly decide to walk to the opera.
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sydney May 24th, 2007
Tarted-up sketch of our dailies ringmeister Jan.
sydney May 15th, 2007
“Typically animators drank heavily, both to relieve their tension and loosen their inhibitions; alcoholism was practicaly an occupational hazard, though it may also have something to do with the fact that the kind of men who were attracted to animation were likely to be emotionally stunted and loners, lost in their own heads.” Walt Disney: The Biography, Neal Gabler
I picked up the new biography of Walt Disney, and naturally (as one does), the first thing I did was look up Milt Kahl in the index for outrageous stories. This led me to the above quote. I nearly spilled my martini! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to surfing the internet for Harry Potter theories while inventing clever comebacks to things people said to me 10 years ago.
Coincidentally, I was having a conversation with a guy in rigging (at a pub– +1 alcoholic, -1, emotionally stunted loner) about why there were so few female animators. In an effort to give it a positive spin, he suggested that animation required a level of self-absorption most girls don’t have (except I suppose for Paris Hilton). Poor fellow was kind of stuck insulting me one way or the other!
sydney May 6th, 2007
Some little chameleon studies for the film I’m working on at the moment.
Cute little dudes, chameleons, but the colour-changing thing doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s sloooooow and mainly goes from ‘brownish’ to ‘brownish-green’. According to National Geographic, they can change colour in about 20 seconds, which they seem to think is impressive. Pah! Now an octopus, that’s impressive… Continue Reading »
sydney April 28th, 2007
If I don’t run fast enough to dailies, I have to sit on the floor and not on the comfy couch. It’s better for drawing though!
sydney April 15th, 2007
Sketched on the underground, tarted up with digital washes.
