Concluding it all!

I guess this year has been ample in changing my outlook on what i plan on doing in my life. I came into this course thinking "Oh i'd love to be a children's animator!" and left the first year a little befuddled. My thinking had drastically changed when a man from Escape studios came in and said 1 single sentence.

"If you go home and game, it'd be best for you to think about a life in the gaming industry. If you go home and watch films and appreciate the cinematography then you'd probably be best going into film/TV animation". (Paraphrased)

Now this rather simplistic and shallow statement rang true with me for a while. My spare time is pretty much full of gaming. I game when I'm bored, i game when i should be working, i game when i should be sleeping i just always game.

So without even thinking logically about it and the reason i got into animation i switched my views to game animation. It was like an on/off switch. Now i look back i think it was a rather stupid thing to do. Yes i like games, but could i see myself animating for games?....

2nd year digital animation consisted of me creating 2 games. A take on space invaders and a take on Pong. The problem was all i was doing was re-spriting an already free-source code. So i never actually had any input in the game apart from the aesthetics, which it turns out i really wasn't happy with. That was the first reason my mind began to fall back into place, the second was doing the work for Lauren, i enjoyed the idea of making something mine and falling back into the Flintstones frame of mind, even if I'm asked to work on a cartoon that's been running a while i can add my own style to an already renown model. (That said it didn't work on Dexter's Lab which is stupidly amounts of ugly nowadays).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the 2nd year has swayed me back into my original frame of thought. I want to be a children's animator and i want to be able to tell my kids "I worked on that show". Most games are forgettable but animation seems to stick around longer.

Maybe it's my own ego...Who knows.

Year 3?

The project we did for the 3rd year was really the thing that opened my eyes and made me think twice about what i actually wanted to do.

If i did plan on going into games i think the best route would of been the coding side of things as i could kind of control the way i wanted the game to be. If i went into game animation i think at best i would just be creating the images that i was told to create. There wouldn't be any creative freedom.

Where as in terms of cartoon animating you can add your own style. The Flinstones is a perfect example as almost each episode there would be different animators animating the characters. It isn't always easy to tell, but there are little things like walks/mouths/lines that show us who the animator is.

John K (Ren and Stimpy/Weekend Pussy Hunt) wrote a little blog entrance about it that'll you'll find the link below.

(Ken muse) A personal favourite of mine, not the cleanest or most proffesional out of the bunch but there's something about the lines he uses for Fred's head that makes it appealing for me.

Don Patterson

Link to John's dissection.

Also a Link to my 3rd year work.

The reason?

I can understand why CGI is currently and becoming more and more popular. After the likes of Toy Story being such a monumental hit and the relatively cheap cost of doing CGI (Computers are becoming more and more powerful, yet cheaper and cheaper. Processing power on most computer nowadays enable anyway to animate and render a somewhat decent CGI animation).

I found an interesting "Report" on the impact and the future of CGI in animation (Although it was written in 2002 he was right about a few things) in 8 years computer power vs cost has drastically lowered letting any newcomer animator to the world of cg to successfully use 3DStudio Max and Maya (Among others) I guess in turn this gives animators a head-start in the world of cg, and they bring it forward into their work.

LINK : http://www.zenonic.demon.co.uk/zenocgi.htm

An interesting quote i read was;

"The barrier to entry has gotten so low that it is feasible to create a studio that is under the radar of traditional Hollywood - and therein lies one of the secrets to their success - low overhead, reasonably paid animators, and a passion to deliver high-end product, for low end prices. As more companies begin to specialise, it is not out of the realm of reason to see shops offering Cloth, Hair and Dynamics effects that cannot be completed anywhere else."

,Mark Sylvester

It's a pretty accurate prediction if we compare it to 8 years after the report was written. It's about the cost really.

Another link i found (The first being an accurate study and prediction, the 2nd being a more opinion based but still an interesting read).

http://illbethejudgeofthat.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/cgi-it’s-not-all-good-m’kay/

An intresting point the person made was that " The problem I have with CGI is that because it has become (relatively) inexpensive, other small companies are abandoning hand-drawn animation and while CGI may be more cost-effective, it’s still expensive nonetheless and since the indy companies don’t have huge budgets, the productions they release like; Donkey Xote, Impy’s Island and Farm Kids look shockingly bad".

Wasn't worded quite as eloquently as the previous report but it's a strong opinion and one that i agree with. Once in a blue moon a none CG animation will slip into cinema listings. The like of "Coraline" and "Fantastic Mr Fox" were incredibly good, but i have my sneaking suspicions that cg was implemented in some if not most of these 2 films. It's in expensive it's usually of high quality and doesn't seem out of place (but you can still tell).

In all seriousness i was looking for a counter arguement to the CGI is overused statement but i seriously couldn't find anything. Everyone is all fine and dandy when it comes to slating CGI there are 10's of 100's of blogs/pages stating their opinions on the matter.

When looking for a positive look on the other hand i couldn't seem to find one. I'm not saying in anyway that everyone agrees with me as i know people love CGI for the most part (as do i in some cases) but i feel it shouldn't take over everything mainly childrens cartoons (As stop motion did for a while) Although Stop motion is a different beast because it's still "Surreal" to some extent, where as CGI animation is often used for the "Realistic" touch. I remember the whole idea of Pixar making "Hair" look realistic for the Monsters inc film, yes it looked absolutely gorgeous BUT attempting to do that on stopmotion wouldn't work, so they had to find ways around it. With the likes of Pingu,Morph,Noddy,Postman pat, Oakie Doke, Bob the builder, fireman sam and lots more stop motion is (i feel) a kind of surreal and excentric animation format. And of course my favourite...The one...The only...The Trap Door!

So, just the pig?

Sadly not, there are a vast array of children's shows out there that use CG as there format. Here are a list of just a few. The shame here is some animations that originally started as Stop motion have been pushed aside and been replaced by CG, Below for example.

Chapman Entertainment--

This isn't the original Bob the builder which we all know was "Stop motion". This is in fact the spin off and I'm

guessing for both money and time they switched to cg to bang a few of these out. That's my point entirely they

are made to be made in bulk and with low costs, surely that alone is just cutting the passion and the heart out of

animation? Yes stop motion took longer but you felt each movement was special.

Pukeko Pictures --

The Wot Wots is a funny one because for what they needed to do, they had to use CG. They

"COULD" of used puppets but maybe that would of been too limiting. I wouldn't really consider

this bad as after all it's for young children but it's all personal preference, i'm not a huge fan.

Ian Falconer --

Not much to say here, looks horrible is animated horribly and well....Not a fan.

Nelvana --

Cute - Check

Reasonably well animated - Check

Child friendly - Check.

Does it make it a good animation yes! Does it mean i'll enjoy it...No.

This is where hypocrisy wriggles it's way in because i absolutely love a certain show but it's CGI.

This name?...Pocoyo.

Zinkia Entertainment --

It's stupidly cute, STEVEN FUCKING FRY narrates it and i have a huge soft spot for it.

No reason why i just do.

I wouldn't like to think that this renders my whole argument invalid because pocoyo has a

certain charm that the others i linked don't. His movement, the simplicity of the white

background, his animal friends. All of those add up to something full of charm and well done

animation.

The OVER usage of CG?

I thought i'd make a complete U-turn and unless the last idea i had (which was indie gaming and developers) i thought i'd research and share my opinion on the OVER-usage of CG in children's TV nowadays (I use the word OVER subjectively, you may think differently".

I personally am not a fan of this as I'm a solid believer in 2d cel/digital has a lot more offer in terms of ANIMATION. I understand that CG has become a lot cheaper but i personally thing it only works well in high budget idea's rather than low budget shows for CBBC. The perfect example i can think of is "Jakers! The Adventures Of Piggley Winks." The story of an anthropomorphic Irish Pig.

Now i personally aren't a fan of this, being interested in animation (and being a student) i found

myself on the CBBC channel a few times and have watched some funny things, along with some

awful things, and this (for me) falls into the awful. I won't say that it's poorly done because it's

not...the animation is quite smooth and all the characters are nicely modeled but i think it's

just loss something in the development process. From the few episodes i've watched

(didn't want to judge it after watching one episode) i found that the "Principles" of animation

that are so highly sort after weren't there. Models are incredibly hard (through a somewhat

poor experience) to animate in terms of making them loose and making them fluid, where as 2d

can be as wacky as you want. Squashing and stretching is something that isn't converted well

into cg.