them's good broth

words of wisdom from your favourite lecturer

[stiobhart]

The Last Post [Geddit!]

Well, Tumblr folks. This is the last post from "Them's Good Broth" –at least on Tumblr anyway. I've decided to regather all my websites back into the fold and host them myself again. This Tumblr-wotsit will stay here under the old Tumblr default domain for as long as Tumblr leave it in existence:

http://stiobhart.tumblr.com

Meanwhile, the blog itself and all future posts will be on my custom domain:

http://stiobhart.net

[stiobhart]

Introducing Project Mini-Me.

Wherein our humble author attempts to recreate a caricature of himself through the medium of silicone.

If all goes according to plan with regard to our equipment requests for next year, we should [amongst other things] be getting some new materials to work with for the Character Design unit and doing a bit of silicone casting.

Now, back in the black'n'white days when I was a young jackanapes at art college and subsequently a slightly older jackanapes working in design, things like casting silicone were a futuristic pipe-dream, like hover cars and self-removing trousers. If we wanted to make a model, we had to bloody well carve it out of pig manure with our bare teeth.

So, in the finest traditions of 'trying to look like you know what the fuck you're talking about, while teaching', I thought I'd better run a bit of silicone casting practice up the old flagpole and see if anyone saluted. Hence "Operation Mini-Me", an audacious plan to create and cast in silicone an animation puppet of everyone's favourite jug-eared Irish half-wit... me!

So pull up a chair and a bag of popcorn and let's see how this goes....

[BTW-the picture at the top has bugger all to do with this , but I thought I'd better stick something visual in there to lighten up my turgid prose.]

[stiobhart]

Meet BoxComp

It's been a while since I posted anything here.

In my few minutes of 'me time' during recent weeks, I've tended to do do more 'left-brainy' stuff than 'right-brainy', so there's not been a lot to show for it, outside of my vacant skull.

Anyway, part of my weekend tinkering of late has been to do with cryptocurrencies: I've become quite intrigued by the whole 'digital goldrush'. As well as working on my own altcoin, I've been itching to do some hardware tinkering too. So, over the past week or two I've been hammering the credit card a bit, buying various components from Amazon and eBay and, last week, I was ready to join the ranks of them big fellas like Dell and Apple, by building my own computer from scratch [or rather, from off-the-shelf components made by other people which, let's face it, is what they do!].

I'll not bore you with the details of what individual bits I needed to buy and how I stuck them all together. You can dissect the photo above or, failing that, It's all covered in depth in CryptoBadger's excellent tutorials. Instead, let's skip straight to the action shots.

I stuck everything together, which took about 45 mins, using a fetching cardboard box to house most of the components. Then I attached an old keyboard, screen and hard-drive and hit the "ON" button, waiting for a shower of sparks and the smell of my burning dreams. To my astonishment, "BoxComp©" sprang into life and I was presented with the BIOS setup-screen.

So far, so good. But if I wanted more than the computer equivalent of the body twitching on the slab, as the current was passed through it, I needed to install an operating system. CryptoBadger's aforementioned tutorials recommended Xubuntu, a stripped down version of Ubuntu. I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu [might be something to do with the name sounding like the noise a mountain gorilla might make while having an anal orgasm], so I opted instead to install Linux Mint Debian Edition.

I made an LMDE live USB and twiddled BoxComp©'s BIOS settings to boot from this and he finally achieved digital sentience by booting into a 'proper' operating system.

There then followed the tedious business of actually installing LMDE to an old 1TB hard drive, rescued from a now-dead NAS I used to have. Whenever I install Linux, I always somehow manage to fall flat on my stupid face at the final hurdle, by installing the boot-loader wrongly and leaving myself with a computer which will only boot to the 'All-Time Unfriendliest Interface Ever Conceived By The Warped Mind of Satan'©, namely the Grub prompt. This time was no different and it took several goes before I finally managed to head-butt Grub into obedience and [finally!] enjoy the delights of a functioning computer.

OK. the above pic is a bit of a cheat, as it was taken before the LMDE install, not afterwards. You'll just have to take my word for it that it did eventually work.

Now, I for one think that BoxComp© in his cardboard guise does actually have a certain rustic charm. I find the idea of a computer which looks like a box of spare parts fairly amusing. Unfortunately, however, this casing doesn't exactly inspire confidence in its durability. So next challenge was to fit BoxComp© out with a slightly more hard-wearing set of duds.

In keeping with the example of CryptoBadger's tutorials, I looked around for an old crate or plastic container of some kind to rehouse BoxComp©, but couldn't really find anything suitable. Then I remembered that there was an old defunct PC in the spare room. I dug it out and started the fun task of dismantling it.

Everything came apart pretty easily and I was soon left with an empty framework and a big pile of obsolete PC components

First of all I mounted BoxComp©'s motherboard on the main side panel of the old PC, where its motherboard had lived. I had to move a few spacers around to line up with the holes on my new motherboard but, apart from that it fitted really nicely. I then moved onto installing the PSU and graphics cards. To my pleasant surprise, I found that all my new components fitted perfectly into the old PC framework, even though that was about 15 or more years old and the new components were about twice the size of the old ones. Thanks be to the gods of standardisation! [are you listening Apple?]

And so, in about another half hour or so, BoxComp© was reborn in his new metal shell. I've deliberately left off all the facings to maximise ventilation, as cryptocoin mining makes the graphics cards run very hot.

Well, that'll do for now. Tune in same time some other day, when I'll bore you with the tales of my first mining expedition.

[stiobhart]

Character Design

This week, it was time to roll out the new Character Design unit, or Introduction to Methods, Materials and Making Processes, to give it its show name. We kicked off with the old classic 25 Expressions worksheets.

Before springing it on them, I gave the students about 25 mins to come up with a character and then draw him/her/it [head only] from the front. As I’m not a complete bastard, I did give the students a few clues before they started, which would make for more “expressionable” characters, such as advising them to use the full complement of facial features and maybe also include eyebrows or ears, etc.

In spite of that there were still a few groans of dismay from those whose characters were of a more ‘inscrutable’ bent, when I produced the 25 Expressions character sheets and asked everyone to see if they could make their characters run the gamut of emotions from Anger to Zoomorphism… er… actually, that’s not strictly true but these things always need a bit of an A to Z vibe going on!

Anyway, since it was one of those lessons where everyone is scribbling away furiously on good old-fashioned dead trees and not pecking my head every five minutes to help them with some software problem, I had time to play too. So, at the top of this ‘ere’ post, please meet Kevin Peterson, one of my characters who is waiting, poised to spring onto the internet and take the world of animation by storm [Just as soon as ever I get a spare week or two to do some of my own work!].

Kevin Peterson’s claim to fame is having huge teeth, a stupid voice and thinking he has the most unique name in the world. Honestly, it gets lost a bit in the translation. Inside my head it’s a hilarious concept. Just you wait!

After 25 Expressions sheets were complete, I asked the students to take their character and work it up into a finished artwork in Illustrator [it never hurts to practice pummelling those vectors!] and then design a poster, promoting the character and giving some info about him/her/it. Said poster could use any kind of suitable visual analogy; Wanted Poster, Trump Card, Pokémon Card, Movie Poster, etc.

Here are my rough scribbles for a few possible Kevin Peterson posters:

And here are a couple of them worked up into a semi-presentable format in Illustrator:

[stiobhart]

BBC iPlayer Without Flash on Mac OSX

The other day an old work buddy asked me if there was a way he could listen to BBC Radio on iPlayer, without having to install that notorious collection of security holes known as Adobe Flash.

I thought about various ways this might be done, ranging from installing Flip4Mac [hmmm… a Microsoft plugin to replace an Adobe one. Talk about ’out of the frying pan into the fire!] to using VLC to try and open the live streams, but everything I came up with seemed to be almost as dodgy, or more of a pain in the arse to set up, than even using Flash would be.

Then I had one of those forehead-slapping moments where you realise the answer is so simple, you wonder if someone nicked your brain when you weren’t looking: Given that the BBC is quite happy to serve up a non-Flash version of the iPlayer for anyone visiting the site on an iOS device [Steve Jobs famously banned Flash from iOS], why not just pretend to be visiting the Beeb’s website on an iGadget and enjoy the non-Flash version of iPlayer. And, what’s more, it’s a piece of cake to set up.

So, here’s the how-to, for anyone else who fancies some iPlayer action, but hates Flash. These instructions assume you are using Safari. If you’re the kind of person who overrides OSX's default browser, you’ve probably sussed this out for yourself anyway:

1: First you need to enable Developer Mode in Safari. This is as simple as ticking a box in Safari’s preferences

2: This will add a new ‘Develop’ item to Safari’s main menu, underneath which are several menu items useful for web developers. Amongst these is an option to change the User Agent, which is your browser’s way of identifying itself to any website it visits. Changing the User Agent effectively allows your browser to pretend to be a different browser, which is handy when building websites, as it allows you to test code that serves up different versions of the site to different visiting browsers. I think you’ll already have spotted where this is going!

Simply change the User Agent so Safari pretends to be iOS Safari running on an iPad

3: Now try loading the BBC iPlayer pages again

Ha! –We’ve fooled the BBC website into thinking we’re viewing on an iPad and it’s served us up the iPad friendly non-Flash version of the iPlayer.

Enjoy! –but just remember that, every time you open a new browser tab or window, Safari will revert to identifying itself as Safari on mac again, so you’ll have to reselect the appropriate User Agent, each time you want to view iPlayer in a new tab or window.

[stiobhart]

Nostradamus Corner 2014

OK. The bones have been rattled. The entrails have been studied. The huge balls have been stroked. It’s time for the latest round in my occasional game of making a few predictions for the year ahead. So here, in no particular order, are the first ten visions which manifested themselves to me through rips in the very curtain of time itself. Remember to check back in January 2015 and marvel at how uncannily accurate these were:

US [with pet poodle in tow] will find a new 3rd world country to drop high explosive democracy and freedom on. Most likely in the Middle East again. Although it will not be Iran, don’t rule out Egypt getting a bit of a kicking, as things continue continue to deteriorate there.

Prince Phillip will snuff it. Probably at a strategically opportune time when either the Royal Family is ‘getting a bad press’ about some very dodgy scandal rumours. These and all other considerations will be swept away on the usual tide of sycophancy. The Daily Mail will publish a stupendously unfunny cartoon, showing a shocked Prince Phillip being greeted at The Pearly Gates by immigrant worker angels

The Scots will wimp out and fail to vote for independence by an embarrassingly wide margin. The turn-out for the referendum will be embarrassingly low. SNP will blame UK lies and disinformation. Tories will crow jingoistically about how it shows how much the Scots love Britain and being part of Britain.

Nokia lifeboat company Jolla will bring out a breakthrough model which will start competing seriously with what’s-left-of-Nokia’s Windows Phone offerings. What’s-left-of-Nokia will be forced to release a few Android handsets to avert further crisis.

India’s Mangalyaan Mars probe will unfortunately ‘do a Beagle’ and disappear whilst attempting a landing. Meanwhile, Discovery will continue to fail to find any signs of life ever having existed on The Red Planet. In more positive astronomical news, an exoplanet will be discovered which tick all the “Goldilocks Zone” boxes.

The biggest cultural hit of the year will be a film/series/dance craze, paying homage to the Second World War era. Cue lots of tacky supposedly 40s-inspired clothes and tat adorning the ‘tracky-bottoms and trainers’ fraternity for the five minutes it takes for the fad to pass.

Outbreak of civil strife in South Africa as, with the grand-paternal calming influence of Mandela gone, the disillusioned poor start agitating for a bigger share of the pie. Comparisons with Zimbabwe and dark murmurs about “white flight” all round.

Major diplomatic incident caused but full-on conflict narrowly avoided, after a ship sinking incident in the region of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Trigger-happy US most probably the cause.

Humongous shale gas discovery in Scotland will intensify the pre-referendum political fighting.

2014 will finally be “The Year of Linux on The Desktop” [Sorry. Only joking. Couldn’t resist!]

[stiobhart]

This is the Voice of Your Conscience Speaking...

This morning as I stumbled bleary eyed from the shower, I spotted this tiny piece of paper on the bathroom floor and bent athletically to read it. Even allowing for the apparent 'txt-speak' of the 'U' it seemed to bear an enigmatic message:

"Infinity Will Speed You".

"What can it mean?" I thought, stylishly. "Who has carefully cut out this tiny missive and left it here on my bathroom floor? What are they trying to tell me?"

"Infinity Will Speed You". It could be an intimation of mortality, enshrining in words the headlong rush towards the unending blackness that awaits us all. Or it could be a rallying call, a cry of encouragement to get on with what you want to achieve while you still have the chance.

I should point out at this juncture that, in addition to the earliness of the hour, I was verily [and quite possibly forsoothly] hung-over this morning after yet again being dragged to a pub against my will and forced to drink beer all night, the previous evening. So my usually razor sharp mind was not exactly firing on all cylinders

Thus it was that I stood there for a few moments turning over the small fragment of paper in my hands, with a gormless expression on my idiotic face, before I realised that the eerie message was nothing more sinister than a piece of some junk mail I'd put in the shredder at the weekend and which had somehow wafted into the bathroom. And the import of those mysterious words?

[BT] Infinity Will Speed U[p your broadband]

I need to stay in more!

[stiobhart]

Feet of Clay

Time for some more ‘WiPs’ or ‘works in progress’.

I like that phrase. It neatly combines an impression of having had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from where you are straining to give birth to a work of monumental genius –with the removal of any expectation whatsoever on the part of the viewer that s/he is about to see is anything worth writing home about, at this stage.

Meet Kolin The Kidney Bean. A character I shamelessly lifted from an idea by Johny Byrne and which I’m planning to use in a bit of stop-frame animation over the Christmas* holidays.

[*You’ll note that the author cleverly avoided saying which Christmas holidays]

[stiobhart]

Primary Lesson

Yesterday I metaphorically 'broke the sod' on a wee project that's been rattling about in the nether regions of my otherwise vacant skull for a while now. I'm not giving away too much at the minute –mainly because the idea is still in the embryonic stages– but if I say it involves a reindeer with a red nose, you probably get some idea of where this is going.

Anyway, as the following sketchbook scans show, Initially I stupidly tried to draw a cartoon reindeer from my imagination, with the result that it ended up looking like someone had chewed up a load of pencil shavings and projectile vomitted them onto the page.

Chastened by my incompetence, I quickly flew to Lapland fired up Google Image search and found some real photos of real reindeer to work from. Although the results aren't masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, I think they prove the value of always working from life [or as near to it as you can get], rather than imagination. For me anyway.

[stiobhart]

Naming Conventions for Doctor Who Episodes in XBMC

As alluded to in a previous post, I had a right oul' palaver at the weekend, trying to name my Doctor Who episode collection in such a way that XBMC would catalogue them properly.

After trying various combinations of folders, subfolders and file naming conventions to try and cater for the fact that each 'season' is made up of several multi-part self-conatined stories, I eventually hit on the correct naming formula which is as follows:

In retrospect, it may seem pretty obvious but, at the time, I thought I'd have to do some form of sub-organising within seasons to account for the distinct stories in each one. Turned out you just number the episodes in order, starting from episode 1, for each season, and give all parts of the same story the same name. XBMC then correctly lists them as multi-part stories.

Posted here in case it helps anyone else in a similar bind. As I said, I wasn't able to find the answer on the intarwebs and arrived at it through trial-and-error.

BTW –if, as I did, you ever find yourself with eleventy billion files to rename, I highly recommend A Better Finder Rename, a splendid wee app which makes the process *almost* painless.

[stiobhart]

The Best Doctor Who Story Never!

At the weekend –inspired by the 50th anniversary shenanigans, I spent many an hour transferring my entire collection of original Doctor Who episodes from DVD onto the external hard drive on my media server, so I could access them directly through XBMC instead of faffing around with discs.

Much fun and frivolity ensued, as I wrestled for quite a while, trying to find a  naming convention for the files that would allow XBMC to index the episodes [about which, more in another post].

As I scanned through the hundreds of episodes I had, I got the feeling that certain words such as 'terror', 'horror' etc. cropped up quite a lot. So I thought what jolly japery it might be to do a bit of nerdy geeky data-analysis and find out the most popular words for a Doctor Who series name. Then I could string a few of the top words together to make the ultimate Doctor Who series title.

If you want to know how I did the nerdy stuff, then read on after the big reveal. If you only want to know the results, I can tell you that the most popular words [ie. more than 3 occurrences] used in classic Doctor Who series titles are:

99 THE 46 OF 9 DALEKS 7 SPACE 7 PLANET 6 DEATH 5 INVASION 4 TIME 4 TERROR 4 IN 4 EVIL 3 FROM

I therefore propose that the best Doctor Who story never made would have been:

Daleks Space Invasion of Planet Death

Royalty cheques to the usual address please!

Anyway, for my fellow geeks amongst you, here are the meat and potatoes of how I came to this great revelation:

For the task in hand, I used my favourite text-cruncher, Vim in its MacVim disguise. I started with a list of the series titles, snaffled from the BBC website.

Note: I've only used series titles from the first four series as any fule kno that, once Tom Baker left, Doctor Who became officially shite, as it has remained to this day. Also note that the following code examples only show the effect on a short excerpt from the series title list, so don't reflect my actual results:

An Unearthly Child The Daleks The Edge of Destruction Marco Polo The Keys of Marinus The Aztecs The Sensorites The Reign of Terror Planet of Giants The Dalek Invasion of Earth The Rescue The Romans The Web Planet

The first task was to break up this list into individual words. Time for some cryptic Vim mastery:

:%s/\>/\r/g

Inserts a line-break after each word. The list now looks like this:

An Unearthly Child

The Daleks

The Edge of Destruction

Marco Polo

The Keys of Marinus

Now it's time to clean up a bit:

:%s/\W//g 

Will remove any non-word characters. The list now looks like this:

An Unearthly Child

The Daleks

The Edge of Destruction

Marco Polo

The Keys of Marinus

Actually, those both look the same when pasted into Tumblr, but in Vim, the previous version of the list was a lot more ragged. with lots of spaces before and after words.

Let's get rid of the blank lines:

:v/\w/d 

Now the list looks like this:

An Unearthly Child The Daleks The Edge of Destruction Marco Polo The Keys of Marinus The Aztecs

Now we're getting somewhere. Next step is to uppercase all the words, so that the counting and sorting functions don't treat upper and lower case versions of the same word as being different words:

:%s/.*/\U&/ 

This gives us the following:

AN UNEARTHLY CHILD THE DALEKS THE EDGE OF DESTRUCTION MARCO POLO

Now, at last, we're ready to start counting the individual words. First we need to sort them alphabetically:

:%sort 

Giving us this:

AN AZTECS CHILD DALEK DALEKS DESTRUCTION EARTH EDGE GIANTS INVASION KEYS MARCO

After sorting the words alphabetically, we can now use the 'uniq' command to count the individual occurrences of each word:

:%!uniq -c  

At last we have a breakdown of the popularity of individual words:

1 AN 1 AZTECS 1 CHILD 1 DALEK 1 DALEKS 1 DESTRUCTION 1 EARTH 1 EDGE 1 GIANTS 1 INVASION 1 KEYS 1 MARCO 1 MARINUS

Again, Tumblr is helpfully stripping whitespace from this list. In reality, I found that the 'uniq' command re-introduced some spaces before the lines, so i used:

:%s/^\s\+ 

to get rid of those. Then finally I used 

:%sort!   

To sort the wordlist in reverse order, so the most popular words were at the top. The top of my actual real world list ended up like this:

99 THE 46 OF 9 DALEKS 7 SPACE 7 PLANET 6 DEATH 5 INVASION 4 TIME 4 TERROR 4 IN 4 EVIL 3 FROM 2 WEB 2 WARRIORS 2 WAR 2 TO 2 SEEDS 2 POWER 2 PELADON 2 MONSTER 2 MIND 2 MAKERS 2 FEAR 2 ENEMY 2 CYBERMEN 2 ARK

All other words on the list had only one occurrence.

So there you have it. Doctor Who statistics gathering powered by Vim. Could I write a more geeky post if I tried!

[stiobhart]

More from Bradford

Of course, there’s more to the National Media Museum than just the BAF and, whenever I get up there, I like to have a mosey around at the other exhibits as well. Being the gadget freak that I am, I love sticking my nose into all the old broadcasting equipment, cameras, and computer gadgetry too. There is also an interesting section on the history of animation. Here are a few of the things which tickled my fancy from that particular department.

Original models and sets from The Wombles. Unfortunately no sign of MacWomble, who was my favourite as a kid.

    Original storyboards from Bob the Builder. Not my era at all, but I always like to have a gawk at what goes on ‘behind the scenes’ in the crazy world of TV and film.

  Original models from The Wrong Trousers. Apparently nearly all the original models and sets were destroyed in a fire at Aardman studios and the ones in the NMM are all that survives.

A selection of models by Mackinnon & Saunders [I hope! –I didn’t make notes as I snapped away happily].

      Cell drawing from Animal Farm, the first full-length British animated film.

Cell drawing from [I think!] Danger Mouse

[stiobhart]

REVIEW: Bradford Animation Festival –Student Showcases

Yesterday I made my, by now annual, pilgrimmage to the Bradford Animation Festival at the National Media Museum, to check out the latest goings on in the world of student animation, through the two Student Showcases.

Overall, I found this year’s offerings a pretty mixed bag. There was some great stuff and some not so great and on balance I think the quality was ever-so-slightly better last year. However, it was a pretty decent show and –with so much production-line CGI about these days– it’s always nice to see some good ol’ fashioned hand-crafted animation and imaginative use of materials and techniques, for a change.

Anyway, there’s no way I’m going to write an in-depth review of every film in both showcases but here is a brief summary of my opinions of the various films on offer –as deciphered from the hurried notes I scrawled in the dark, while watching the proceedings.

Student 1 Showcase

The Kiosk

Crudely rendered figures. Cut-out puppet style animation. Nice attention to detail with a lot of small vignettes happening in the background. Well-observed characters with personality. Warm, humorous storyline.

VERDICT: I liked this one. Probably my favourite.

The Bungled Child (La Ravaudeuse)

Crudely made cloth puppets –quite sinister looking. No attempt made to hide hand-stitching. Quite a dark storyline. Clever use made of ‘off-camera’ action to avoid need for complex animation, for example the ‘cutting open the womb’ and ‘snipping apart the twins’ scenes.

VERDICT: I quite liked the puppets and dark feel, but the story didn’t grab me.

The Carousel Family

CGI. Quite surreal story-line. Found the CGI a bit dead, lifeless and a bit creepy looking. Was this deliberate? Characters seemed lacking in personality. I think it’s hard to inject personality into CGI when ‘done on the cheap’ [as of necessity with student films].

VERDICT: Didn’t like it. To be fair, the projection broke part way through this one, so it might have turned out good, but I wasn’t enjoying it at the time.

Ab Ovo

Interesting use of clay modelling, where the surface of the models was deliberately left ‘un-smoothed’ so it rippled, writhed moved and changed constantly. However, the storyline was pretty minimalist.

VERDICT: Interesting to look but it felt more like an experiment with a new technique rather than a fully-fledged ‘story’.

The Dewberry Empire

Lovely detailed watercolour backgrounds. Clever use of really sparse animation in opening credits, to set the scene. Animation style felt quite ‘manga-esque’ with low framerate and quite ‘cinematic’ movement and angles [rotoscoped?]

VERDICT: I quite liked this one. Backgrounds were great. Some of the dialogue was a bit difficult to understand –squeaky kids voices played really loud makes my ears bleed!

Plug & Play

Crude line art style. Strange surreal storyline. I’m not sure if it was a profound commentary on comtemporary morés, or just plain ‘weird shit’. Good use of humour, complemented by the use of OSX text-to-speech voices for the characters.

VERDICT: I liked it, but I’m not sure I got it.

First Light

Fairly traditional animation with a naive style to the characters. The cityscapes reminded me a bit of the opening to Futurama, although the overall style was very different. I didn’t find the character or storyline engaging at all.

VERDICT: Dull [that could be a clever ‘light’-based pun, if I was being wittier than I am].

But Milk is Important

Lovely sets and models. Some nice use of unexpected ‘found’ materials for the props, for example a rectangle of denim for the blue lid of a milk carton. Characters were well-observed and had loads of personality. Also well-observed body language and subtle humour.

VERDICT: Probably my other favourite of the day.

When One Stops

Very minimalist line-arty, scratchy style. When the drawing is this basic you need an interesting storyline to back it up. Unfortunatley this didn’t have one.

VERDICT: I was glad when it ‘stopped’ [I’m getting good at this punning lark now!]

Student 2 Showcase

The Odd Sound Out

Very ‘girly’ graphical style which reminded me of illustrations in women’s magazines. Not that I read them of course, but you see them lying around sometimes and simply have to catch up on the lates ‘shoe news’, daaahling! The idea for this one was quite nice, but I found the delivery a bit predictable and irritatingly repetitive [somewhat like the Pink Panther cartoons I used to find similarly annoying as a kid]. Also the main character’s signature noise was really annoying too.

VERDICT: Nice idea, annoyingly executed.

Rabbit & Deer

For the first few minutes, I really hated this one. It seemed pretty tedious and uninteresting but, as the plot developed I found myself really enjoying it. The concept is great and the way the animation weaves a number of styles such as cutout, vector, stop-frame 3D modelling into the storyline is really cleverly done.

VERDICT: Stick with it. It’s really good.

The Shirley Temple

Quite abstract in appearance with a crude woodcut style. Lots of focus on transitions, abstract pattern and shape. Visually quite imaginatively done, but for some reason it just didn’t grab me. I think possibly because none of the characters had any personality, so you couldn’t identify with them.

VERDICT: Should have liked it more. Didn’t

The Magnificent Lion Boy

Interesting technique. It seemed to be done with pastels using a Muto-esque technique, where each frame was smeared and edited in place, without trying to hide the ‘workings’. However there was also some texture there, like it was drawn on hardboard or textured paper which, of course, would make it almost impossible to rub the pastels off. So I was left wondering *“how did they do that?*” The quality of drawing was slightly lacking, given the animator seemed to be going for a realistic look. The storyline was not bad, but not very original.

VERDICT: Quite enjoyable and an interesting technique.

SockSkewerStreet 8

Painted background style. Drawing style very crude. I didn’t really get much sense of personality from the character and the storyline wasn’t up to much. Also, I hate socks and it was a story about socks!

VERDICT: meh!

Miss Todd

Interesting Paddington series style combination of cut-out puppet animation with real 3D models. Good use of the screen to give the sense of a wider landscape existing beyond the frame borders. Very ‘crafty’ feel to the construction of the characters. Apparently based on a true story, which was interesting enough, but a bit too “right on sisters!” for my tastes. Neither did I like the singing, as I hate musicals.

VERDICT: Visually inventive. Spoiled for me by being a pseudo-musical.

Memoria

More CGI. Very cinematic in feel with use of dramatic camera angles, lighting and editing. As with the previous CGI one, I felt the characters were a bit lifeless and the piece relied too much on computer-generated effects. The storyline was not bad.

VERDICT: Too ‘computery’ for my tastes.

[stiobhart]

MOSI Try Harder

Today we sent our entire first year and Alex's Level 3 Art & Design students off to the Museum of Science and Industry [or MOSI to its mates], to have a gander at the exciting sounding Creating the Illusion: Animation in the North West exhibition. To quote the blurb:

Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall met at Granada Television in 1959, and founded Cosgrove Hall Films 20 years later. Without Cosgrove Hall, there would be no animation industry in Manchester today.

This exhibition brings together treasures from our archives alongside rarely seen objects from personal collections, to explore the development of the internationally renowned studio and its impact on the animation industry.

Interesting sounding stuff.

Unfortunately the reality was, to put it mildly, underwhelming. After traipsing up and down various corridors in the otherwise usually excellent museum, we came to a tiny room which I supposed to be the ante-room to the main exhibition: about half a dozen models from fairly recent stop-frame animations such as Bill and Ben in glass cases, a few cells from hand drawn animations such as Danger Mouse in a couple of frames on the wall, and an old magic lantern in a case with a couple of slides.

I had a good look at what was there –which took all of ten minutes and then went on through the door at the back of the room to see the 'main' part of the exhibition.

Whoops! I arrived instead in a room full of exhibits about the development of the Reciprocating Grendel Thrutcher*

The Reciprocating Grendel Thrutcher [possibly]:

"I must have come out the wrong door" I thought, evidencing the deductive prowess for which I am famed. So I tried another exit... and another... But whichever door I exited through, I was confronted by halls full of Reciprocating Grendel Thrutchers and Beam-Engined Frottle-Smashers*. there was no more animation memorabilia to be seen. 

Belatedly I realised that what I had thought was merely the ante-room to the animation exhibition was actually the entire exhibition. Well, colour me disappointed! As Alex quipped at the time "This just gives the impression that animation in the North West is not very important at all".

It also explained why none of the students we'd sent on ahead, about half an hour before we arrived at the museum were still in evidence when we got there. I can't wait to hear their comments on Monday morning!

The 'Exhibition' Room [this photo is actually life sized]:

* These might not be the exact names, but I'm sure they were close

[stiobhart]

Ollie the Ostrich

Nice start to the day today, as someone of the managerial ilk arrived to do an unannounced Lesson Observation on me. No doubt in a couple of week's time I'll get the habitual feedback report telling me what an awful teacher I am again, because I didn't have a lesson plan sitting in pride of place on my desk, formatted to official college standards on the official college spreadsheet and written in government issue edu-babble.

But enough of that dung. Let's get on with the fun art stuff!

All the students put in another hard day's drawing and scribbling away on their Muybridge sequences and one-by-one as they finished, we loaded their drawings onto the rostrums and I showed them how to import the images into DragonFrame. As most people had left very little space between their drawings we then had to export each sequence from DragonFrame as an uncompressed QuickTime movie, which was then imported into AfterEffects for a bit of cleaning up. Where possible, we just cropped the movies down to the central character, using the "Region of Interest" tool in AE. When that wasn't good enough we had to resort to using key-framed vector masks to remove extraneous details. 

In between helping the students and not filling in spreadhseets, I managed to get Ollie the Ostrich's perambulations finished myself. In the end I decided to work with the shitty non-waterproofness of the so-called Indian Ink, rather than fight it. So I used a wet brush to smear it around the edges of the body a bit, as I thought this might give a nice wispy, fluid effect in keeping with the feathery nature of old Ollie. For the legs and neck, I used some quick light washes of watercolour, just to give it a bit of depth. Here is an example still image:

And here is the finished walk cycle, after importing into DragonFrame and a bit of croppage in AfterEffects [assuming, of course, that the intarwebs will decide to play ball with my highly irregularly shaped movie file]. Almost a nice smooth cycle. Just a bit of a jump at the end. I reckon if Eaddy baby had just shot one more frame of Ollie boy, we'd have nailed it:

[stiobhart]

It's Muybridge Time Again

After several weeks of practising their drawing and mark-making skills, our hard working first years have finally reached the point were it's time to start making things move.

To this end, today I introduced them to the larger-than-life colourful character of Eadweard Muybridge, who was one of the first people to use photography to study how people and animals move. Thus making his 'oeuvre' a great source of research and reference material for budding animation students –especially those studying at a college which doesn't have eleventy billion quids' worth of MoCap equipment to call on.

I printed out lots of Muybridge studies of various people and animals across sheets of A3 paper and then wrapped each 'set' in an envelope made from newsprint. Each student then picked an envelope from the pile and thus acquired their subject for this week's task, which is:

1: Tracing from the Muybridge sequence, produce a 'lifelike' version of that sequence. Import the drawings into DragonFrame to animate them.

2: Using your Muybridge sequence [or choose another if you want], produce a new sequence of drawings featuring your own character or creature, but with the movement based on using the Muybridge photos as reference for the various poses. Again, import the drawings into DragonFrame to animate them.

As always, time permitting, I like to play along too. I pulled out this ostrich from our virtual hat. The first 12 frames come as near as dammit to constituting a walk cycle, so I decided to work from them:

Here are my initial tracing sheets. I've decided to work with pen [or brush] & ink at first and then maybe add a bit of colour with watercolour afterwards. I'm working across the sheets, filling in the same body part on every 'frame' rather than producing a complete frame one at a time, as I think this makes for more consistency across the frames. 

As you can see, I started inking in the ostrich's body first, across all the frames. I must say I'm pretty disappointed with the quality of the so-called Indian Ink we've got in our art stash. Admittedly it was pretty budget stuff from Seawhites, but it's piss thin and not even waterproof. So I had to use two coats, just to get decent coverage, which caused the thin layout paper we're using for easier traceability to wrinkle like Methusela's scrotum.

That's as far as I got today. More Muybridge themed shenanigans tomorrow!

[stiobhart]

What an Old Bag!

You know you've been drawing too many cartoon self-portraits recently...

When even some of the auction pics on eBay start looking vaguely familiar...