Ryjak's Animation Blog

I just spent the better part of three hours finalizing designs on the first 6 seconds and animating and trouble shooting it. All with a track pad. I wanted to shrink everything in the frame over the next 3 seconds of animation, zooming from a wedding cake (elaborately decorated, again with the track pad) to happy couple, which I cant get to shape tween because they are a photo and not vectored properly, and I just need to get my hands on some illustrator software so that I can vectorize this picture of the wedding couple now, and the whole thing will be half done!
On a brighter side, I’ve been taking a good long look at some of the animations, and I like what I see. Ride the Fence, a political cartoon about indecision and revolutionary thought, was the New York winner for best cartoon in 2002. This cartoon makes heavy use of symbolism, as it is a music video, and it desperately trying to keep up with the pace of the lyrics, while getting its own visual message across. America is represented by a large snake drawn in brilliant stars and stripes, while the democrats and republicans are symbolized by their respective animals, with tail fuses, implying that they are going to blow up. Uncle Sam makes an appearance attempting to shoot an antelope, symbolizing the African Americans, and it morphs into an African American and they duke it out. Corporations are shown as a gigantic fat man standing on top of a huge pile of money, and when the people take the money, he comes crashing down, implying that greed can place them in a precarious situation of having to depend too much of money to keep their money. Unions are portrayed as dogs, and Microsoft represents trusts, which are cut in half by a blade, while police get the title of “antichrist”. But in truth, this is a simple enough animation, mostly done with tweens used very effectively. I just wish my stuff could look this good.

Hey there you swinging animators out there! This week we take you way back to the early nineteen hundreds with the flash animation Bulbo in Bulboland. Following the links provided by Flash-Forward, I looked for past winners of various categories such as “cartoons” which is where I found this little gem, done in the style of the old serials from when our parents were still a twinkle in their parent’s eyes. Done stylishly in black and white with no dialogue, this cartoon was somewhat reminiscent of the style of Anna and teddy. But flat color schemes and nonexistent dialogue is where the similarities end. This story has a discernable problem/ solution story basis, and a beginning, climax and conclusion, unlike the Anna and teddy cartoons. In the beginning, Bulbo is faced with the problem of being cold and uncomfortable, and so he spies a travel agency and decides to go to historic bulbo land. After a funny scene where he simply walks across a very large boat to get to the other side of the perceived ocean separating what looks like New York with bulboland, he notices that everyone in bulboland looks exactly like him, and that they all are eyeing him suspiciously. Problem two is encountered when the police compare his visage with that of someone who looks exactly like all of them with bulbo, and chase after him, providing the climax. He narrowly escapes with a false moustache, slips by them all (now looking completely different from everyone else in bulboland) and grabs onto a plane which he falls off of into a “citizen of the year” award ceremony being held for… someone who has a false moustache just like his! I’ll admit it was quite short, but it gets the message across clearly without any sound effects or speech to help drive it along, and for this it helps to instill a kind of nostalgia with its repeating music and contrasting black and white color scheme. The site is quite funny, and you should all go check it out for yourselves here at Bulbo.com.

I swore that I would never go to the Barbie site again after that day in class, but due to some problems I had on the Todd Gallina site, and the overall lack of content or a complete story at Teddy and Anna, I decided (reluctantly) to give myscene.com another look. What I found was that my original suspicions about the site were indeed well founded. While designs and backgrounds were extremely detailed, extremely detailed moving parts were scarcely to be found. The artist’s use of layers and motion of mainly larger single polygon fields and the more detailed faces lent a lot of their mobility to the overall telling of stories on myscene.com. Still, it is incredibly detailed, and involves hundreds of tweens per movie, probably taking several days or even weeks to complete an entire animation. Unless they are slipping in some action scripting I haven’t figured out yet.
In the “Getting Ready” storyline, Barbie and a friend stop by their friend Belinda’s house for a surprise visit because she sounds stressed, and find that her cat has had kittens. After a few jokes, and some simple motions by the cats and the friends (with near constant background motion by the cats), we learn that they all have a big group date that night, so how will they get ready for it? By indulging themselves with lip-gloss, designer duds and scented soaps of course! After two shots (one long and one close up) of the girls in the mirror, we cut to a long shot of Barbie in the tub, with very little movement of the environment, and then cut to a quick close-up and a fade to the boys. They all move their heads and eyes slightly, and look at the girls, who assume a fashion magazine like spread across the entire screen, with each girl perfectly in focus and sporting a pose. Then to a cut of one of the boys faces, and an over the shoulder shot, and then to a group face shot of the girls looking in surprise at… a long shot of a horse and buggy! The boys, always considerate when it comes to going on dates, have spent the immense amount of money to rent a horse and buggy (with no driver, I suppose the extra character was seen as being unnecessary) and get the permits to drive him down city streets themselves. A flash of lines a silhouette and Barbie is in a torso shot of her boyfriend and her standing next to the horse embracing. Back to a headshot of the friends, and then cut to the silhouette of the horse and buggy (the people are conveniently not seen) in a two frame zoom out movie, shrinking into the horizon line.
In the next scene, the girls and guys team up for a noble cause, namely finding all the kittens good homes, which they do, and head on home for the evening after deciding to keep the kitten who got into Barbie’s pink hair dye. This is a complex scene, involving many background changes, and some interesting transitions, including three wipes and a focus in/ focus out cut. I should try some of these for my upcoming “Solomon Grundy” animation, to add some spice to the otherwise rather plain simplicity of it.
That’s it for this week! Tune in next week for an update on the progress of “Solomon Grundy”!