The great Brad Bird (best animation director EVER!) has an interview up on the Spline Doctor Blog. Talking about animation stuff instead of the same old promotional stuff. Your mad if you don't listen to this, Brad is the MAN!
click the pic for the link
The file is in an unusual format, if you download it you should be able to play it back with Real Player or something similar. If you're an Itunes user then you can us it to do a search for Splinecast, they have older interviews that are well and truly worth listening to as well.
Terry here (for a change). Was just out shopping when I noticed THE IRON GIANT special edition was on sale pretty much everywhere for under $10. This reminded me that, in conversations with the class last year, I found out that the majority of the students I spoke to hadn’t seen this film – THE BEST ANIMATED FILM EVER MADE! I’m not normally one to inflict my opinions like this, but… if you haven’t seen this film, see it now while you’re on a break! Directed by Brad Bird (who went on to make THE INCREDIBLES and RATATOUILLE), this film boasts some of the most gorgeous and subtle performances that you’ll ever see, plus a brilliantly constructed narrative abnd some great gags. It’s pitch-perfect in every department. A few years ago, when I taught a Film Awareness subject, I would show this film religiously, and by the end there’d be not a dry eye in the room (mainly because I was in the corner blubbing). Great DVD too, particularly the Brad Bird commentary. Those of you who’ve seen it… am I right or am I right?
Some other rat movie directed by Big Bird, or someone related to him, won some other, minor, statuette. (Hey, it was a 3D film . That new fangled computer stuff is just a flash in the pan... It'll never catch on).
Back to 2D! (gold lettering accompanied by angelic choir) ...
The blog has someinsider photos that go with descriptions like, "Located in story alley on the second floor of Pixar, you would walk by the corral and hear that awesome sound of pencils sharping and paper flipping."
So I suggest that it might be worth ratting around in Jim Capobianco's Leonardo blog, that has the intriguing byline, "adventure and absurdity in making an animated short" (Grade 2's take note).
If anyone finds a reliable video clip link for Your Friend the Rat, please post it in the comments. Otherwise check out the Extras on your Ratatouille DVD.
Here is an interesting article in which Brad Bird is interviewed about keeping his work and workers fresh and innovative.
Brad - "Involved people make for better innovation… Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them." GOLD.
Found this on Cartoon Brew, can't hear enough about Brad Bird, the sad news is that he plans to move on to live action after his current film is finished. Lets hope he comes back to animation some time.
Here is a great article that recounts how Brad Bird came to be in charge of the Ratatouille show at Pixar and some of the changes he made to mold it into the film that is already winning some amazing accolades
I'm trying so hard not to get too excited about this film, but its so hard. I CAN"T WAIT!
Victor Haboush -“It’s the best animated film since Pinocchio.” Quote from Cartoon Brew
Ok so in case you haven’t been following the drama, after much deliberation the plan is to have all second year students in our course at Southbank making a narrative this year. Even if it’s just a very short one that makes up a larger show reel.
I’m anticipating a hand full of students who are going to be determined to make an epic, so I have been scouring the internet for information about keeping short films short. Its something I can anticipate because it is one of the ever predictable, guaranteed student short film flaws. There is always at least one student who is going to be convinced to the point of total conviction that more is better, or that the 15 minute long story they have come up with is so perfect in its design (after just a few drafts and with no feedback from anyone else? Amazing!) that not a single shot can be cut from it. I hate to sound cynical, but it always happens, and I can relate. I remember coming up with story ideas that were way to long when I was a student. At one stage I even started writing a series of 30 min long TV episodes, and the major student film I ended up making was way to long. I think there were probably two scenes (that’s camera shots for any new 1st year students reading…hi!) in it that I was actually proud of because it was so rushed. You should be proud of every scene in you film, its obvious when you think about it.
Anyway, following a link on Cartoon Brew I found the blog of Kevin Koch (animator at Dreamworks and Animation Mentor Teacher), and after some rummaging around found this great post about just how much information you can convey in a single scene, and how many students try too hard to convey a characters setting and background. He even goes so far as to suggest that MAYBE the great Brad Bird over cooked the character backgrounds in the Incredibles, or at least that the film was just as enjoyable without them.
Here is one of my favourite quotes from his article, “The time required to set up your characters and situations is often far less than you imagine you need. Again, think of being clear and specific. Expect to do some hard work here. Hammer away at your ideas to come up with something so specific and definite that the audience understands immediately. This is why we find bad storytelling so annoying. It takes the creator so long to clue us in on the situation and character, or they keep inadvertently misleading us with useless information, that we disengage.”
All of this information is of course window dressing, before coming around to the idea of narratives for all students I knew it was only worth doing if we were going to keep the films short. I’m just highlighting the information in the hope of getting some to come around of their own accord instead of colliding with me head on. I’m afraid I do not accept that a longer story is necessarily a better story .
The bottom line is I won’t be letting second year students animate stories longer than 1 and a half minutes, and that’s that. I mean it, no excuse will make me budge. I wish someone had told me to slow down and make the best animation I could when I was a student and I think I owe it to my students to address the issue when I see it.
One of the comments posted by an anonymous student that helped to kick off the whole films V’s show reels discussion featured a quote about the student film being a “once in a lifetime opportunity”, well I can tell you that in my 12 or so years of commercial experience I have never again experience such a luxury of time to hone and finish a scene as is afforded to students. Once you’re in the industry you will have ample opportunities to have to rush through your scenes in order to get something finish on budget (on time), the “once in a lifetime opportunity” is to do the best possible animation you can achieve right now. I’m not going to let my students miss it.
Here is another point of view from Temple Of The Seven Golden Camels blog, run by veteran storyboard artist Mark Kennedy. He has a two part post entitled Advice for Students on his Blog that is all gold (part 1, part 2).
"Many students seem to want to make some sort of grand, epic statement and so they try to make a longer film with a lot of scale and heft to it. Every medium has it's own inherent strengths and weaknesses and a short student film is not the best form to make an epic sweeping drama. The most successful student films of all time are, for the most part, short and simple. "
Another post on Kevin’s blog that I just loved and had to highlight was this one about leading the eye from cut to cut. Great advice and also related to efficient story telling.
Ahhh some days I could just give the Internet a big sloppy wet kiss. This youtube vid (recorded some years ago now) is an interview/discussion with 4 legends of modern western animation.
Its over an hour and a half of inspirational animation goodness, especially in the second half where Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton get quite fired up. So grab some snacks and a drink, settle in and enjoy. Its all soooo goood!
Well here it is, a massive post with hours of stuff to rummage through over the next month. I'll be taking a break from the blog until after Christmas but there should be something here for everyone.
because I fear some of you don't have the attention span to get through all of this stuff (don't worry I'm sure its not you I'm talking about ;), I'm going to start with the thing that I think is the best and from which you can learn the most. It's a lecture by Glen Keane (probably the best traditional character animator in the land) that he gave at Calarts some years ago. I'm gona follow that with a pod cast of my own pointing out some of my favorite parts from the lecture and things that I think are particularly relevant to you.
And here is SBIT ANIMATION RANT 02, consisting of me pratling on about the Glen Keane lecture.
Next up is a real rarity, Rejean Bourdages a story artist from Dreamworks gives a lecture on the art of "pitching" a storyboard. This is a craft about which there are no text books or how to tutorials, in fact its the only specific information about doing it I've come across in my whole career. Its real practical stuff too, like where you should be looking as you run through a sequence and so on.
Part1
Part2
Part3
Part4
Part5
Next up is some Richard Williams stuff (for any who don't know the name yet, he's the guy who wrote "the Animators Survival Kit"). First up is a Documentary about the early part of his career in which he talks about having started his epic film about a thief and a cobbler. One of my favorite scenes here is when they show an inbetweener bringing in his scene for Richard to check, the poor guy gets shot down in flames big time, it takes me back to my old Disney days.
Zip ahead another 10 or 15 years and Richard Williams has just finished being the animation director on Who Framed Roger rabbit and he is STILL working on his epic story about a thief and a cobbler. There is some overlap between this and the previous doco, but its worth sitting through for the new bits. One thing to watch out for is where Richard explains in person how he animates a walk, it's the same technique I teach in class.
So what happened next I hear you ask, well you wont find any documentaries about that, it's one of the biggest and most notorious disasters ever in the history of animation. After so long and so much work Richard ran out of money, and he was forced to go looking around for someone to help him finish it. He took it to Disney and they passed on it, then a few years later they released Aladdin (oh what a coincidence) decreasing the value of Richards film even further. Now it just looked like a try hard version of Aladdin, even though it was probably the other way around. Finally a Canadian studio bought the whole film from Richard and proceeded to butcher it, they added songs, made character talk that didn't before, and they chopped the story to bits (at times not even bothering to match the colours of the character properly between Richards animation and their own). What was released as the "Princes and the cobbler" (that you can find in any video store these days) was a mere shadow of Richards original concept. BUT! Thanks to the miracle that is the internet and Youtube, you can see a version that is much closer to the original. Someone has rummaged around to find as many old bits (pencil tests, storyboards) as they could and edited them together with the released version, chopping out the crappy new bits. Its grand!
Here is a video of John Lasseter at this years Anncey festival (Ithink) talking about how he plans to get Disney back into 2D animation now that he is in charge.
part1
part2
Now for some Disney stuff. To start an old doco about the making of Jungle book.
Here is a clip showing Disney's first fiddlings with 3D animation back in the day.
And here is an interesting look at Tarzan, with the storyboards compared to the final scenes.
And to finish things off we look at the emergence of a genius. Back in the 80's Steven Spielberg produced a TV show called Amazing Stories, it was kind of like the Twilight Zone but with an emphasis on the magical rather than the scary. Each episode was made up of three short and they were all live action accept for one. Spielberg decided to give young animator named Brad Bird a go at directing a film. The result was the Family Dog, and its brilliant, try to remember when your watching this that nothing like this had ever been made before, this was years before the Simpons.
Well that's it, Have a good break everyone and I'll see ya on the other side of Christmas. Cheers
