Animators React to Bad & Great Cartoons 9

foreigner, this is a rare video right here, yes, it is a deep canvas, it was the way of painting with brush strokes in 3D space. I don't know if people today understand how fundamental short films and movies were to technology. I mean, everyone was animated in Maya. Still, that wasn't yet is Disney's tool, look how small their arms are, thanks to Raycon for sponsoring this video, stick around so you can find out how to get 30 off vacations on Christmas packages. Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of the

animators

react

. I'm Nikon, I'm joined by long-time guest Alex Snow and a new guest, Patrick Osborne.

I directed Beast for Disney. I was an animation supervisor on Paperman and made another short for Google called Pearl. I had the opportunity to do a lot of really interesting things. I decided to talk about some animation with you. These guys are actually very successful and I'm a little nervous sitting here among them. It's going to be a really good time, so let's get into it. Then you directed the journalist, who was the animation supervisor I did. The shot, uh, 3D and 2D. John Cars, who directed this, was a Pixar animator. He was going to make the short at Pixar a long time ago, but he ended up moving to Los Angeles to be the animation director for Tangled.

After Tangled, he asked management if maybe he could revive it. the short, but not like something in 3D, but a kind of mix of 2D and 3D, can you talk about that? Because the best of Paperman, in addition to being the best short of all time, was a kind of first step towards this new era of CG animation that has more The style and type of taking a step towards the appeal of 2D animation it's done once, which is strange in 2D. Normally you don't go out of your way to make so many intermediate points in such tight and intermediate places, and the only reason you can do that is.

This is because we have created software that helps with that and makes it a little easier to operate. You can draw vector lines on top of a rendered image. That rendered image had pixel-precise motion vectors, so I knew where the 3D animation was. was moving throughout the shot, so when you pressed play, that line would assume it would travel with whatever was below it, but you could also draw a picture, paste it 10 frames down, fix them, and then Auto in the middle while using the moving arcs of the animation below. It's really amazing to have software developed while you're making the movie because you can have an idea that would make it easier and sometimes engineers might find it possible today, it's just a commitment to it, I mean, it really sets the framework. . stage for I mean everyone knows Spider-verse at this point a good point to look at a good landmark is like the nose when you turn you can see the silhouette of the nose and you would draw that you can see when it's not cutting the silhouette it's more like the nostril that is emphasized and then you see the rest of the nose with the shadow, but it has to calculate when that nose turns, when to draw the bridge, when not to draw the bridge, it's giving you a lot.

You're welcome, it's doing complex calculations to understand art, it's as if the computer were like an artist, but that's very similar to what they did in Spiderverse and that's just a small example of what they try to calculate in these CG animations. The first step in moving to the 2D look and feel, the technology reminds me a little of what people have been doing with the EBC sense. When you make a 3D animation, you can have each pixel give you information about how fast the pixel is moving and where it's going so that, in theory, you can pin things to those pixels.

The EB synthesizer does the same thing, you know, AI-predicted motion vectors for video get weird and blurry. I mean, you can see it in all of Joel Haver's videos, yeah, the trick with doing it at a studio level is the editability and fine pixel control that became the most important thing to really focus on, that it still felt polished. and complete and I still see errors, but like you see errors, yes, whatever how you achieved the shadows. As in a close up, you can see that the shadow is more like a brush, everything is hand painted.

I feel like painting by hand is

great

, as long as it's not a pain to edit, it's like adapting in real time to you and you. You can hit play and see if it breaks or not, it's really nice to work that way, so the whole tool was pretty real time. If they used CG shadows as a base and then painted over them, you would draw the character over a finished render. I got it, it would have like a Pixar style render and it's time to manipulate it and you see you walk in, it was flat, it was a little bit flatter, but yeah, it was like a two tone render, you know? you could you could use dropper the colors straight from the red oh cool, why haven't we seen a movie with this kind of technology?

Whoever is running the studio has this balance to deal with How Art House, how fresh, how unique, although This feels like Disney and classic Disney, it's not necessarily the Disney of the last 10 years. As soon as you see that poster or that trailer, you should know that it's a Disney movie and I want to see when it occurred to junk cars to make it like that. style and it was partly because we were there working on Tangled and Glenn Keane you would animate a shot and Glenn Keaton would sit at your desk for three hours, you could redraw a Passat anime with you having that vibe in the studio I think.

We felt like we didn't want to forget these things. Could we make a high tech version? That would be kind of inspiring if you play the mascot that was featured in the LA Times. That's how I might even like it. show it, it's a weird video right here, yeah this is combined with the feeling that 2D needs to come back somehow and John has the short paper man ready to go and wrote those lit things at the same time to make the Meander Tool it is also possible. The Meander the paper Man drawing tool was initially an effects tool and it was meant to work automatically between really complex effects drawings, so I'm going to do like smoke and fire and yeah, there are things that are really tedious to draw. take a drawing and another drawing and then you could draw an arc that represented time in the middle, but I wouldn't do it mechanically, so this is all Maya viewport, just color objects and then paint over them a little bit, oh really, viewport rendering, viewport rendering.

Are you painting each frame by hand? Yeah, for stains and stuff, or you like that final image. That's cool, so they're like a really good texture job in 3D modeling. He's just cops, man. I feel like there's a big barrier to animation. That's how it is. What's been taking a long time is where we are on that spectrum where animation is super accessible, anyone can do it and make a movie, or was it 50 years ago, 100 years ago, where you had to draw every frame by hand on paper. I think we are like 20 years behind the k camera revolution.

You know, the beautiful high quality cameras decreased in accessibility, so the real vision and the hand of the artist are a little more like right in the front and I think the animation tools with EV, unreal and unity are bringing it down at that level where it's a little more sandboxing, they're all still pretty technical. I think you still need like four or five years of ramp with a specialty where you become a model or an animator or whatever, but once you have that foundation, the toolsets are really fun, now our industry changes massively. every 25 or 30 years and everyone has to know what's going to happen and move forward every time I'm working.

With a new tool or technique, what does it offer you for free? With a 3D program, changing perspectives is free, you just learn to move the camera and that's fine, but you know that rendering is not necessarily free, on the other hand, if we are dealing with paints and pencils, rendering, it is literally free, like if you put the painting on the paper arm, it's there, like you don't need to render it, it happens instantly in front of you, but of course you change the perspective of a drawing well, now you have to redraw the whole drawing, whatever Whatever medium you use, the more you can take advantage of the tools, so whatever they give you for free, take all of that, yes, and use as much as possible, and this is to make the simpler complex more achievable let me put in the old mill because This idea of ​​pushing technology has always been at the core of why Studios makes shorts 37 says old in the title now this is beautiful and colorful, so what's so special about it?

This Network short film, well, is the beginning of the legacy of using the short form to make something that pushes looks and technology. More of what they are getting is learning and this was one of the first ones you know to put color and sound. together in a multi-plane camera that let them know they could go and do Snow White. I don't know if people today understand how fundamental both short films and movies were to technology like Pixar, all those

great

ones, you know, like Nemo, go, come on. I've never gone underwater to watch a movie, it's like, oh, first, exactly, there's a reason.

Beyond creativity, technology has been a driving force, especially in CG, but even in 2D, people forget that if you didn't have a multiplane camera, you could do it. I don't have things on different layers, I mean, the animation is already as complicated as putting the sheet and not having it a little bit to the right or to the left with some little pegs that are just made of paper and now you have a multiplane camera. with like seven layers that you're doing by their glass planes on a literal shelf that the camera is shooting through, it's like 15 feet high, there's always pictures of a guy smoking a cigarette like, he's working on it, yeah , Indiana Jones, oh me.

I have one that fits well with a little deus ex machina right there, yeah I don't know if it was the animation at that time somewhere with this quality or it's like an exception, this is a big exception, how is this animation different of other things that were to come? around like look it's good, it's good, this was like equivalent to the Pixar boom of getting into CG and you start asking questions: how do you do that? How do you build, build, build, build? This is a lot further from the music too and I think that was a big problem, like thinking about doing those water effects even now, like I don't really know how to do it.

I don't know, it's a good question. Are you moving anything in your Rippling? I want. It could actually be, I think it could actually be like a glass or something, yeah, like a glass of water or like a wavy glass that moves, yeah, yeah, that makes more sense. I mean, I really love animation like that right now. It really felt like a magic trick, one of my weird internal goals when I do something is like I show it to Alex or Nico or whoever knows it and it can still be a magic trick, yeah I'll be happy with myself, yeah , that is. cool trick, one of Disney's awesome secret weapons, this guy named Eric Daniels, who worked on a deep canvas for Tarzan the Deep, the canvas was the way to get brushstrokes painted in 3D space, which was one of the first paint strokes in 3D space, you know? yeah, the stuff I always thought was pretty cool.

I have no idea where it is in Tarzan, although at any time, yes, any tunnel, yes, yes, this one you can start to feel with my 2022i, it shows, yes, sure, but still only a little. I mean, and when you're not looking for it, if you're looking at Tarzan, you just go, yeah, that was cool. I mean, the integration is great. I mean, this is kind of similar to what Blender is. You can do it now, yes. Yes, I love that every artist has this. Now you can grease it with pencil, yes, and do it. How do they get the textures there?

As I understand it from Eric Daniels, you had 3D as a reference and you made a painting. on it every few frames and every brush stroke was remembered and it was created as a polygon and stuck to things manually, there were no tapes or anything like that yet, so it was like a graphics tablet like an Intuos type tablet. and then of course Glenn Keane's amazing animation on top of it doesn't hurt because that's what you're seeing, you know, yeah, and we can. I guess we can go to Feast once in a while I can talk about how to get there.

As? This evolved from Paperman, what were the big changes or what were the big things you ran into? There's very little line work in this, but a lot of times there's Neanderline line work on the dog and we were able to draw over the frames like in Paperman, no. lots of moving cameras, which makes this kind of thing much easier. It was really the soup of visual effects that Josh put into this that really made it work as something cohesive. Looking at Charlie's paintings, a simple appearance like a melody, but not a tone of melody. I hate cartoon shadow why do you hate tunes?

It creates too much detail, so if you look at Winston's dark and light lighting when he's on, the lighting on him is rendered but then changes,so we made it so you could alter the division of darkness and light. so I didn't give them too much 3D detail a lot of times the nose has complicated shading and it gets into nooks and crannies in a 3D model and we want it to be clean so you guys developed a technology for that o Yes it was similar to the paper man , but as a way of sticking nuclear masks on top of 3D models that would follow, sometimes you want to make it look a little light, but not be a literal light.

I also like. your beard is just a texture and then some hairs, the trick with things like that is when the thickness and quality of the line is not considered from the camera's point of view, so you never want to see a line getting thin like it was projected on paper and these are all cops or cops in front of the camera vectors rendered at the end, so it's one of the other. I think it's kind of a mix here, if you have your digital lines in the shot like this character here, this beard, let's say you got up and walked away from us, you wouldn't want those lines to get thinner, like the artist was using sharper ingredients, pencils, the further you go, you want to stay the same way, yeah, you get the hang of it and dimensional things like that are the hardest, you really want a level of detail. where things disappear or are redrawn differently, if it's too smooth you'll notice it, so when you animate things like that you want to have hit moments where you can disguise the exchange of whatever you're doing like that, I mean even If you look at his eyelids it's like you're designing for the shot and the camera angle, like when his eyelids are closed, they're not just two flat lines, you know, the curves depending on the attitude, the emotion in the angle of the head. .

How do you make the edges work like the edges in this other than inside out? I don't know if I've ever seen this successfully achieved in CG and inside out it basically does it with a diffuse texture, which is not what it is. much easier than that this is a paper man it had the same thing it was a noise field like it looked like television noise if you paused it but that noise field faded between some other noise patterns every eight frames or so and then the motion vectors of the character, blur it, but if you press play and just look at the noise pattern, you can see the animation on it like a magic eye and that's used to mask the edges of the character and bomb, you bleed the characters out, you make them bloom a bit. and then you put it back on top of itself or on top of the background with the extraneous noise mask.

Still that he was not still is Disney's tool. My philosophy on tools now is like doing what the computer does well for whatever you're good at. I'm saying try to do what the artist would do, but make it easily fixable. Now I'm a Total Blender person, really yes, I'm just a fan of live development with a great feature that allows you to block things and such. It can't be broken and you want to make sure you're consistent, but a lot of what I'm doing is like testing to pitch movies and TV shows and I need to be flexible but also be able to do it with any tool. is on hand and Leonard has a lot of that, you know, last year I did well the only live action thing I've ever done, which was a concert movie with Billy Eilish and I previsualized the whole thing in Blender because I was like I want to know where Tell the kids to put the camera right.

You know how copyrighted music is on YouTube. They want to learn more about this. There is also an amazing fact. That's all folks. The end of Porky Pig and the Hollywood Bowl, check it out. This episode ran on our website quarter digital.com, so we're seeing all these examples of similar artists spending months with the same passion and skill. We have gained another spectrum and now we are going to go to the other end of the spectrum. because it's educational, it's good to criticize things, it helps us figure out how to be better, so let's take a look at Bratz Rock Angels Part Five, let's look at some background inspired by Batman, the animated series, yeah, wow, it's like a video game, Shader, you know you're talking about. the appeal of the characters and you really feel like Bratz has defined the peak of the character's appeal hello hello I'm missing something the dialogue is if you haven't seen this clip the dialogue is equally fantastic it's in London you can tell because it's okay it they're doing like an Akira slide, yeah, what's a little shocking is that opening up that opening environment is almost cool.

I mean, I don't know where in the world they have these gloomy gothic towers, it's London, there's a red phone box. It tells you right there, I mean, there's no deformation on their faces, like their eyes and things that move along the model, but no wrinkles are created when you raise your eyebrow, there's no volumetric change, so it's like eyebrows were like textures, yeah, and like the The British flag is weirdly projected all over the helmet, in a wraparound style, so not really, yeah, I mean, they definitely just Googled the image of the flag and got they put it I would like you to know the transition to the Moon, this is how it is done. thing oh yeah a little art with some ambition guys I've had an over the top emotional breakthrough yeah I love the boys I love the boys like a 1997 boy band haircut the hair is As in reality, it is sometimes simulated, it seems so.

I mean everything moves from pose to pose, which is fine, but the computer is doing more than the animator here, so the anime is like doing a pose, jumping forward two seconds, and hitting a second post, yeah, it's like yeah, and then maybe like an in-between pose where you have to like if the arm gets scared, they're connecting it, but things just move and hold or hold with a little change in the next pose, these jobs exist, companies want to do things like this, yes, and if you are learning it is better to learn while someone pays you and get used to a pipeline, hopefully, it will pay well, you know, and I think yes, get used to liking doing pose a character and deliver something and on a timeline that's probably 30 to 40 minutes.

I imagine the timeline is incredibly fast, yes it takes time to polish the animation and everything starts to look like this, this is what the design looks like in some aspects and then you spend more time improving it until it is taken away from you. There is so much to learn to be able to animate anything, even badly, that you become obsessed with improving to become as good as the movies you watch, you don't realize that that is one aspect of the job, there is so much more to work for someone who works only on your own time it's like there are deadlines, there are opinions, there is a workflow that you have to develop where you can change things when you get notes so that you are not as is and you are fine, what if you move this little thing , you think everything is going to blow up because that's not a good place to be and I mean it's going to happen anyway, so someone messaged me the other day with all these finished projects that aren't published, yeah. and they say I would get involved in all this.

I take it very personally. How can you still be passionate and do good work when these kinds of things can happen and I think you have to enjoy what you're doing? during the day and not make your job satisfaction part of the right to release or receive what other people think. You only have control over the seriousness and effort you put into the real things you do day to day. and I have to be a little stoic about how I can't control those other things, so yeah, it can't be why you do the job well, it can't be part of what makes you more about your own growth or experience. because if you're learning you can join this, I think it's amazing, yes, and use it as a springboard to do better things later, it's also an achievement, as much as we can do it that way, it's an achievement, yes, who knows as.

A lot of

animators

were into that and what they had to offer if you told a Disney animator to make as much footage as they probably had to make. I don't know how different it would look. Also, in these big studios you have libraries of poses that have been If you look at the design, you have a better starting point if they give you equipment that barely works and there is no prep work because you just have to go, it's harder to get to the point. to which they are reaching, it is a very different process to elevate what is already there.

Where there are a lot of decisions being made, you better be given a chance, where you go, she looks at the computer, she realizes, it lasts 10 minutes and you think that these two sequences together are the size of a feast and almost nothing. it happens as far as I can tell find out yeah it's a feat to do anything and finish it so you always know I like smaller arms sorry it's like a baby now at the end of the movie cast episodes of review movies. They always end with and so and so, any director made a movie and that's pretty amazing, yeah, there you have it, regardless of what we think.

If you have any suggestions for stop motion or experimental animation, please say so, let us know and take a look. Guys, I'm Jordan and I'm here to talk to you about our sponsor today, Raycon. What I like most about wireless headphones is, first and foremost, the fact that I can work out with them and they don't have a cord to catch me. tangled and they have super long battery life and if I feel like they are going to die soon I can put them back in a rechargeable case. Raycons come in a variety of different colors and can match your personal style.

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react

ing and have an amazing vacation.

Thank you very much for seeing us. Thank you very much for joining us. Alex and Patrick, these guys didn't want to promote anything, so I'm going to ask them to watch another movie. Patrick, uh, there's a short on YouTube called Mall stories by Elizabeth Ito and it's wonderful and sweet and she's amazing, so she goes and checks it out. What about you, Alex? I was literally going to say Mall Stories. What really, oh yeah, come on, no, I got it. I screened it in the mall here and yesterday I was talking about it about chromosphere studios and the stores in the mall, so watch that movie twice, great, enjoy them all. stories and consider subscribing.

I'm not going to promote our stuff, just go check out all the stories, good luck.