Stop-Motion Photographs, Postmodern Edition

Rotoscoping Cartoons

More, and an explanation, at the link.

Ten Rotoscoped Sketches

How Paul Robertson Should Market His New Animated Film

[Via]
Crazy-good animator Paul Robertson has been trying to figure out whether to try to charge money for downloads of his soon-to-be-released short film. He has been getting a lot of advice, some good, mostly bad. Here's TiP's perspective: Selling digital content per se is a losing proposition. Bundle it, make it concrete, add more physical stuff, give it rarity, and you will give it pride of ownership and fan interest and thus monetary value. Here's how.

1. Create a nicely-packaged DVD. Produce and include some random stuff for purchasers that can be spread around, shared on peer networks or emailed around. A bonus clip, higher-res film, application icons, avatar images, whatever. Include something that cannot be ripped off - an original poster, a T-shirt, really nice cover art, a sheet of stickers.
2. Release in limited and open editions, with the limited edition being a real limited edition - not 10,000, not 2,000. One hundred, maybe two or three. This is not where you make your money, at least not most of it. Include something in the LE run that will become the stuff of legend, which relates well to the movie - a custom-run toy, a wall-sized wheatpaste, whatever. Spend and you will be rewarded. And this is important: The cost must be driven by high quality, not by editioning. There's a reason they give away boats on The Price is Right, because people have a hard time pricing boats, the price is incredibly variable, and the service provided by matching up buyer and seller is at a premium. This is your sweet spot. Even the people who buy and will never resell should feel like they "made money" when they watch the price rise on eBay as the package is parted out.
   
3. Get input from fans if needed to help determine what your packages should contain, but not much. Be coy. Get them curious. Get a bit of feedback or solicit ideas, promising to reward someone with a pack of goodies if their idea gets used. Draw on your fans' creativity.
   
4. Pricing is the tricky part, because the LE needs to disappear so that people know they are gone and start wondering if and when you'll do it with your next project. Don't think of this as a luxury item, because luxuries are measured in ability to pay, which is completely antithetical to the spirit of the medium in which you are working. It should cost more but not too much more, so that fandom is rewarded more than willingness to pay out. Cover your costs and get a bit out of it but don't overshoot. Better here to make a little than a lot, just make sure you are making the financial risk at least moderately worth your while. Reserve a few to give away on launch and a handful more to sell when you need the cash and they are worth more.
5. Make the movie itself as widely and freely available as possible. Put it on every network. Track it. Respond to feedback and fandom. Charge nothing. Do not, under any conditions, release the film until you have any and all sale materials ready to ship.
   
6. Advertise. Partner. Send high-res versions to mags and bloggers who will write about it, but don't give them any schwag, it makes them fat and lazy and they will brag about this and this will keep others from buying it legitimately.
   
7. Get the goods out the door and paid for. Consider a paid fulfillment service which starts with warehousing and ends with shipping, even if you choose to process payment through an automated system you are in charge of. All of the people who didn't buy/win/steal the LE and who are even remotely candidates for buying anything from you ever will automatically buy the open edition at $10 or $15. Unless you want that to become your job for a while, consider what your time is worth and what scale of response you want to be ready for.
   
8. Become rich and forget all about me.

Physics For Google Sketchup

SketchyPhysics is a Windows-only plug-in for Google Sketchup that adds laws of physics to the world you create and toy with.

[Via|Link]

Bugs Bunny Does Opera: Notes On Adaptation and Censorship in Musical Storytelling

Over on Z Recommends today we reviewed Music Tales, an album of drawn-and-quartetered versions of classical compositions used to sound-illustrate fairy tales and children's stories. A subsequent interview led us briefly to Warner Brothers' fantastic operatic adaptations, "The Long-Haired Hare" and "What's Opera, Doc?" which have Rossini and Wagner spinning in their graves to this day.

What strikes me as most interesting about the comparison has hit me only in hindsight. In our review I gently criticized the album for its inclusion of moments of graphic violence in some of the stories, elements that have been easily and deftly removed by other authors; in Tomie de Paola's Favorite Nursery Tales, for example, the story of the Three Little Pigs is no worse off for having the wolf give up and go home rather than being "boiled to bits" in the pigs' pot.

I missed the Bugs Bunny connection from the outset when I asked the group's violinist if their "mashups" had any antecedents in the modern era, so I'm grateful she mentioned the cartoons. But even then I didn't recognize the other parallel, which is their willingness to display violence. Fairy tales may contain more visceral violence than classic cartoons, but the thread certainly runs through them both, and some fairy tales have been so thoroughly sanitized that some critics are beginning to welcome the reintroduction of at least a touch of violence in stories old and new. I'll stand by my criticism, though, to the extent that I'm talking about a toddler audience, not one of older children. When our daughter Z is a bit older we will enjoy the old Bugs Bunny cartoons together. At three, not a chance!

Apparently some networks took their concern about cartoon violence even further when it came to "The Long-Haired Hare." From Wikipedia:

The ABC version of this cartoon cuts the entire sequence where Bugs is dressed as a bobby-soxer looking for Giovanni Jones's autograph and gives him a dynamite stick disguised as a pen.

The CBS version of this cartoon is a little more heavily edited (as the censors hated the cartoon due to its violence). Not only is the bobby-soxer sequence that was cut from ABC also cut here, but also the scenes where Giovanni Jones beats Bugs up every time he ruins his singing lessons (i.e., Jones breaking, then smashing Bugs' banjo over his head; Jones slamming Bugs' harp on his neck; Jones pulling Bugs from the tuba, tying his ears to a tree branch, and pulling his body back so it'll snap back and have his head hit the branch).

Most websites don't list the cartoon titles included in Looney Tunes collections, but after a lot of digging I confirmed that "Long-Haired Hare" is included in Looney Tunes' Golden Collection Vol. 1. I couldn't find the studio's lesser-known Wagnerian masterpiece mentioned as being included in any collection - if you know where to purchase it, let me know in the comments!

Both cartoons can currently be viewed on YouTube, so why not settle in to watch a couple of hilarious, not to mention history-making cartoons?

Long-Haired Hare


What's Opera Doc

New Painted Film Stills By Rebecca Whipple

Rebecca Whipple has completed animation for a new piece entitled "Steve Martin On The Loose a.k.a. The Big ShaBang." The piece is 4:55 and the stills she sent me to post as a sneak peek are gorgeous.




Music is being composed by Benito Meza. Here's a clip with him playing (he's the clarinetist):

You can read/view previous coverage of Rebecca Whipple on TiP here and here, or view more work on her website.

Colorization of Popeye Cartoons

John Kricfalusi has an interesting post up today about a new DVD set of Popeye cartoons. After pointing out the many great things about Popeye and plaintively asking why they are off the air* he starts picking at the color palette of the few color cartoons on the disc, comparing the colors of the Popeye "Ali Baba" and "Sinbad" cartoons. See if you can tell which one is "very rich with lots of subtleties" and which one is the "My Little Pony version."

Head over to John K.'s blog and let him show you how great Popeye was and is. [Link]

* In my opinion, it's the violence between human characters that did Popeye in. You can only get away with cartoonish violence as a major plot device when you are dealing with animals, i.e. Tom and Jerry.

Visualizing Taste in "Ratatouille"

Michel Gagne, the animator behind this summer's animated film Ratatouille, shares sketches, musical compositions, and animations used to develop the taste visualizations in the film. Above, cheese. Many more of interest at the link. [Via]

Soviet Squeeze Animation By Ivan Maximov

Information about the animator here.

[Via]

Advice for A Young Animator from Ward Kimball

Animator Will Finn posted a great letter he got from Ward Kimball back in the early '70s in response to a probing fan letter. Kimball had already created some of the most memorable characters in Disney films - he created the crows in Dumbo, and had a field day with Alice in Wonderland, animating Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat - and Finn was a 15-year-old high school student at the time and he got some great advice.

Kimball's style of animating was truly transformative. In Alice, for example, he took characters that had already been illustrated in book form and made them very much his own.

I have transcribed the letter below for those of us fond of ASCII text, which can be copied, pasted, printed, and discovered better than a letter-sized JPEG. I have corrected a couple of misspellings but otherwise this is the letter as it was written. You can read from a scan of the actual typed letter on Finn's blog.

Dear Will Finn:

Good Christ! When you write a letter, you really write a letter! When I was in my second year high school I could hardly get through a sentence. From the gist of your essay I take it that you are shot in the ass to become an animator. Well, that's just fine. It helps to know just what you would like to do this early in the game. However, take caution. Don't try to rush it or force it. First off, you gotta finish high school. Then you have to take the first important step: ART TRAINING! This means at least three years in a reputable art school or art college. And be ready for that jungle out there you gotta be a jack-of-all-trades. By this I mean, you gotta know all the insides and outs of film making. And with animation in mind this means: BASIC DRAWING, LIFE DRAWING, DESIGN, LETTERING, ARCHITECTURE, COLOR THEORY, MATERIALS AND THEIR USE, PAINTING, MODELING, ART HISTORY, WORLD HISTORY, ANATOMY, HUMANITIES, FILM EDITING, SOUND CUTTING, RECORDING, STORY SKETCH,---You name it, you gotta be with it. What I am trying to say is that becoming an animator is a growth process that involves basic curiosities for all things, because man, animation is just not making things move, it is THINKING, THINKING, THINKING! You can't know enough about everything. Curiosity is the key word. See everything! Do everything! Find out what makes everything tick. How does it work? What motivated this---What motivated that. Learn from others, BUT DON'T COPY THEM! Try to retain your individualism while learning the basic rules. Don't be docmatic because you're going to change your mind about what you like and what you dislike hundreds of times before you're thirty! This will happen if you develop your imagination along with your curiosity. You gotta be able to draw a grand piano from any angle as well as a pretty girl looking over her shoulder. Learn a musical instrument. Any goddamned instrument. Play it to have FUN. This will help you if you become an animation freak. Remember this: You really can't animate a person dancing a boogie, a Charleston, a frug, a twist, a ballet, unless you can do 'em yourself, or at least analyze clearly the basis for each step. You can read all the animation books in the world but learning the art has to be done while doing. You notice that I have ignored some of your topics of discussion, but this is done to stress the point that you should be thinking of first things first and this means finishing your education as required and then going on to specialize in additional training, all the facets required of a truly, well-rounded animation. Go see the "Yellow Submarine" if you have not already done so. Go see "Fritz the Cat" and if it requires parental guidance, then bring your old man! See everything, as I said above. Go to film festivals. Be a Laurel and Hardy fan. Study Buster Keaton. Study their timing and how they stage a gag or a comedy situation.

Of course, Hanna Barbera are pretty crude compared to Disney's. But this is a problem of economics. H&B are filling a need and it is a business just like selling washing machines. We all can't be part of an organization such as Disney's with almost untold capital to underwrite full animation. Lots of Cartoon Co.'s would like to indulge in full animation, but the economic realities of the jungle prevent it. It's o.k. to have an idol and a goal but a realistic assessment of what's going on in the world of animation and the reasons behind it all are very important. Blah! Blah! Blah! If you find that you don't at first like this reply to your seemingly knowledgeable letter, put it aside and read it again at a later date, and you will see that hidden between the lines is a lot of good advice, even though the writing is crude, to say the least!

Ward Kimball

[Link]

New Animated Shorts By Rebecca Whipple (Interview)

Rebecca Whipple, who I interviewed last year about her amazing "Language of War" watercolors, has begun working in animation. She produces individual drawings or paintings and then scans and stitches them together into animated sequences, and has so far been creating shorts which recreate short scenes from films. The first series she's showing is a pair of related film sequences, one from George Lucas' Star Wars and one from Akira Kurosawa's 1958 The Hidden Fortress, each showing the film's respective hero on the attack. Her process echoes that of Jeff Scher, but the end result is in a visual language and rhythm that is uniquely her own.

TiP: How long did these films take you to produce? What is the frame rate?

Rebecca: The Hidden Fortress animation took me about a month, but only because it was the first animation I did, so I had to learn the program. I could do the same piece now in about two weeks. The Star Wars sequence took longer because the drawings were more exact, about a month and a half or two (once again I was still learning the programs.) The frame rate is 15 fps, the same as the original film.

TiP: How did you select the films and scenes you used? What is the relationship between the two?

Rebecca: George Lucas admittedly took inspiration from the characters and story of Hidden Fortress for Star Wars. I picked the two scenes because the movements were parallel, the hero running in pursuit of the enemy; I wanted to compare the motion.

TiP: Any more in the works?

Rebecca: This project is in collaboration with Mark Bartlett, theorist and critical analyst, who is going to write an essay about the same material, i.e. the film scenes. There will be a few more film scene pairs, based on related kinds on motion, comic, action, dance, etc. This is a side project for me, and therefore, as I am working on it between other projects, it will take a while to complete. I would also like to stress that the version available of this work online is low resolution. I wish I could put a full resolution version online, but questions of ownership prevent me.

A note on another animation work: I have just finished a five-minute animation of a very different sort; it is a dream animation starring Steve Martin. It has taken up all of my energy over the last 5 months and is quite exciting. The music is not finished, so I can't show it yet. Benito Meza, a breathtaking clarinetist who plays with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, is writing and producing the score.

Animated Disney Characters Discuss Fair Use

[Via]

But Where's That Part Where He Pees On The Chevy Logo

Bill Watterson will be shutting down this unauthorized tribute in 5...4...3... [Via]

Stop-Motion Wheatpaste

"Animated" Knots

AnimatedKnots.com came up with a nice, simple online interface for learning how to tie almost any knot. Rather than using embedded video, the site threads together flipbook-style photographs which run once automatically and then can be accessed step-by-step using a timeline-style menu. Elegant, low-bandwidth, and better than video. I've never been able to learn to tie knots from a book, and this looks like a much easier way to do so. [Link]