Yet Another Animation

This time, it's a bear!

Another Thing Dealing With Animation and Big Cats

Just downloaded the trial version of DigiCel Flipbook. Kinda fun. I made a lion jump (though, as you can see, ran out of room on the landing!). The timing is a little fast, but I'm still working on figuring out the product. Now, if I could only find out how to add frames...

They're Coming

OK, all you right-handed yokels. Today is the day that you will all regret being 90% of the population. Today is the day that you'll regret being less prone to accident-related injuries. Today is the day that we, the lefties of the world, celebrate our sinistrality, for today, August 13, is International Left-Handers Day.

We will not cease. We will not relent. We will spread, and grow. We already have the leader of the free world. We also have the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and will soon have the leader of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth Realms. We lurk among you, so beware.

Lefties of the world--UNITE!

Did You Know That Kermit and Mickey Mouse Are BFFs?

I had heard of the 1990 TV Special "The Muppets at Walt Disney World" before, but I had never seen it, until today. It has classic Muppetisms (Charles Grodin to Rizzo: "You know, you're smarter than the average rat." Rizzo to Charles Grodin: "Well, that's good, because you're dumber than the average human.") and the wonder of Disney COMBINED. Look out for a cameo from Raven-Symone (popular as a kid in The Cosby Show at the time) and for Stadtler and Waldorf serenading an old grandma while riding a trolley through the Magic Kingdom.

Those who know anything about Disney World will notice that they break into MGM Studios but manage to get themselves all over the different parks and hotels. Miss Piggy and Beauregard go looking for the Disney remake of Grauman's Chinese Theater in MGM but find themselves inexplicably in the Magic Kingdom instead.

Random Sketches!

While cleaning out some old notebooks from work, I discovered a bunch of sketches that I had done during meetings and trials, a few of which I share here:

Cheetah and gazelle

Hyena

Shakespeare

Zombie elf

Gorillas

Furry and unicorn, inspired by the Bristol Renaissance Faire last summer. Even unicorns would be freaked out by people who get their kicks by dressing up as anthropomorphized animals, right?

Jesus, from an early sketch for a Bible study my aunt was publishing.

Shere Khan

So, Milt Kahl was one of the most awesome animators ever, part of the famed Nine Old Men of Disney lore. Today, he's known both for being an incredible draftsman (many of the most famous Disney animated films' characters bear his marks--Robin Hood, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, 101 Dalmatians) and for having been a sometimes difficult character to have worked with. He had high standards and expected a lot from his colleagues. So, good for him.

I've copied a lot of stuff from him before, but mostly by individual drawings. For example, he's famous for having been able to draw uber-expressive hands:

My favorite Milt Kahl character, by far, is Shere Khan, the villainous tiger of The Jungle Book. Of course, I'm biased in favor of big cats simply because I think they're so cool. But Shere Khan, in character, in design, and in animation, is brilliantly done. He's a consummate gentleman, though twisted and vengeful. He's graceful but strong, evil but controlled. When my roommate saw a video clip of the tiger he said "He's so gentrified!"

It's true. I mean, who else could so brilliantly handle Kaa, the python:



Or give Mowgli a 'sporting chance' before being devoured:



I decided to try to do a little pencil test, totally robbing a series of images from Frank and Ollie's "The Illusion of Life" (p356-357). Like I said before, using others' art for education and inspiration is great. Copy, copy, copy!

History of English in Ten Minutes

So, English is really cool, right? I mean, I also hated doing worksheet after worksheet on gerunds and participles and non-dangling modifiers, but when push comes to shove, English has a wicked awesome story. It's like someone took a bunch of disparate items--a peach, a radiator, and Gary Coleman, say--and discovered that they actually go really well together.*

Here's a series of animations on the history of the English language (worth watching the playlist in its entirety!).





















*I actually don't think those three things would go well together, but neither would I think Old Norse, French, Latin, Shakespeare, and a bunch of other crap would result in a cool language.

I'm Back, With Math Jokes

Hello, blogosphere. I haven't seen you in a while. I've been cavorting around these United States for the past few weeks. Maybe I'll update on that, if I remember/have time? The first post after a while is always awkward, because you feel like you need to write something totally epic.

I'm not even going to try.

Instead, I will post an email chain that I exchanged with a friend of mine:

From: [Friend]
To: [Me]
Subject: I want your address

You will hand it over or I will send a waveform of hyperbolic ninjas at you.
______________________________

From: [Me]
To: [Friend]
Subject: Re: I want your address. OK!

I have one house in the real plane () and one on the Riemann Sphere, but the directions to that one might be a little complex.

The real-valued address is:

Grand Marquis Joshua Sauerman KG, GCMG, LVO, KStJ
[address withheld]

Oh, wait. That's the imaginary-valued name. The real one should just read "Josh Sauerman". I'd lose my head if it weren't screwed on.
______________________________

From: [Friend]
To: [Me]
Subject: Re: I want your address. OK!

Thank you, Grand Marquis Sauerman.

You are too funny, let's be friends. Some people collect bottle caps. I collect bipedal humor spigots.
______________________________

From: [Me]
To: [Friend]
Subject: Re: I want your address. OK!

Friends it is! Keep me around and your spigot will gush forth milk and honey at a rate of .

______________________________

From: [Friend]
To: [Me]
Subject: Re: I want your address. OK!

You make me want to remember how math works.

In Which I Ruminate Upon Copying Other Artists And Finding Nemo

Plagiarism is a bad thing. I shouldn't have to say it, but some people in our society apparently don't understand that.

However, utilizing another's work for educational purposes is a great idea. Some don't think that's the case (well, he's kind of against the selling of copied art, which I agree with), but in art, at least, copying others has long been one of the best ways to learn things yourself. In fact, since 1793

[The Louvre] has allowed, even encouraged, artists to hone their skills by copying the masterpieces in its collections. Thousands have done so, including great classical painters from Turner to Ingres, Impressionists from Manet to Degas, and modernists like Chagall and Giacometti. “You have to copy and recopy the masters,” Degas insisted, “and it’s only after having proved oneself as a good copyist that you can reasonably try to do a still life of a radish.”

Of course, once you copy other peoples' stuff, you shouldn't go around selling it. Sometimes people will notice and sue you, and that's bad. It's also unethical. So, don't do it.

I have always loved looking at others' work. I love copying it from time to time, especially when I think it'll help me learn something valuable. I did that recently, from one of my favorite "Art of" books, "The Art of Finding Nemo."


I've mentioned before how much I love the artistic choices that went into Finding Nemo, primarily the way the color of the water was used to indicate the mood of the scene (and therefore, usually, the mood of Marlin, the father character). The concept art for the movie's color scripts were done in chalk pastel by Ralph Eggleston, who is awesome. I decided to practice my color and composition by copying some of them. Mine (of course) aren't perfect, but they accomplished their purposes by teaching me some new things about light and color.

For example, Marlin's translucence as a fish means that when light is shining through him, his fins, which are thin, will be lightened, while his body, which is thick, will be darkened. The blueness of the water and the orangeness of his body will turn his body into a nice, deep purple. Fascinating!

On the other hand, when trapped inside the whale, the light is no longer the bright sun shining through clear water. Instead, it is a low yellow, tempered by the blues of the baleen. What's the neatest to me, though, is the light reflection off of the whale's tongue onto Marlin's back fin. Also, the brightness of the outlines of Marlin and Dory, showing off their 'shininess' when they are in the air instead of the water.


The last one I did was mostly for color and composition. The murky green palette does a couple things. First, it's somewhat dank and dreary. No one likes green water, because it reminds you of the scummy, polluted, industrial water of cities and mucky ponds. You don't think of vitality there. Second, it emphasizes how far the tropical fish have come. Dory's bright blue and Nemo's bright orange stand in stark contrast to the green. They don't blend or match their surroundings. They are in a foreign place. The crab, on the other hand, is also a muted yellowy color, which shows that he's right at home where he is. Third, it diffuses the light in a neat way. Because they are swimming above/standing on a metal pipe, the light is reflecting slightly off of it, but only if you are close enough. That's why Dory gets a little bit of that reflection and the crab gets a lot. Nemo, however, doesn't get any. He's too far away for that reflected light to reach him.


So, go and copy! Copy, copy, and copy! Maybe you'll learn something, and then you'll create your own stuff that other people will copy, and copy, and copy!

Exhibits

Exhibit A: Ring-Tailed Lemur.

Exhibit B: Sifaka.