I'll tell you a story…

Post written by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Some say creativity cannot be forced; that it is something that is either there or it is not; that you either have it or you don’t. Does that mean that you have to sit around and just wait for it to strike you? Well, I say NO, because if I learned one thing is that the longer you sit around doing nothing, the further away you get from being creative. Especially for people who do not necessarily work in a field related to their creative passion. It’s hard to keep up with your daily life, and then come home and burst into a creative frenzy. It is true that you cannot will yourself to be an excellent animator, or just force yourself to have an excellent idea, but there are certain elements of the creative process that you can be intentional about that will eventually lead to a creative explosion. This is not a new idea, but I would like to share with you how I’m slowly applying it to my animation project.

An update on Rezadores’ character development.
You have to intentionally set time aside for your magic. An hour’s work can be very rewarding.

The idea behind being intentional about your creative process is that you have to make an appointment with yourself to develop your skills and to simply, well…  use them. In that time, you have to give a hundred percent, as if you were getting paid to work on your project, and the client expects nothing but greatness from you. Play with your craft, be curious about new techniques, but do it for the sake of it and not because you expect compensation. Of course, to be able to do that, you have to take in stimulus, not passively, but in an active and focused manner.

What does this mean? If you were working on an animation about Africa, for example, it would be in order to spend some time researching about the wildlife there,  maybe do an internet photo search about the place, familiarize yourself with the physical appeareance of the people that live there, or listen to some sounds that were recorded there. You probably knew that, but what you don’t know is when or what to do with all the materials you’ve researched. This is the tricky part.

You have to set time aside for three things: taking in stimulus, processing that stimulus, and putting things into practice.  In that time, the activities you do must reflect an interest in seeing how you can apply the things you perceive to your current project or problem. This is how I’m doing it:

1. One hour a day for me and my creative self. You might be asking, “hey, didn’t he say he’d only be animating three days a week?” You are right, that doesn’t mean that I’m not doing anything on the other days. The actual animation is my practice. The other days I might take in stimulus, process it, or just find another creative outlet (like writing posts about the whole thing ). I try to make a schedule, and if you want to do so at this point, I suggest you do it on a weekly basis. That way, in any given week, you are able to direct more of your attention to any of the three steps I described. At the beginning of any project you might want to spend more days a week taking in stimulus. Later, you might want to cut down on your stimulus intake, to favor the processing part, and once you are well aware of what you want, you might spend more days just creating, until your next project comes along.

2. One hour, and one hour only. Start with a little until it becomes a habit. Oftentimes, when people read posts like this one, they get enthusiastic and set their expectations too high. They think: “Hey, I have more than an hour a day, I can spend three hours doing all this”. Eventually, they get burned, and drop the whole thing altogether. Start with an hour a day. Half an hour would be better. Everyone has half an hour to spare. Refrain yourself a little in order to go on longer. At this point, I realized I was more receptive to creative thoughts at night, so I decided to have my unnecesary creating time around seven in the evening. Some days I’ll animate, others I’ll just work on some concept art or write some thoughts on the subject.

3. Taking in stimulus is an active endeavor. Things like watching youtube videos can be considered stimulus if you take an active approach when doing them. This means that you have to think about whatever project you are working on when you sit down to watch awesome animations on youtube. I will take a blank piece of paper and I’ll write down interesting things I see that can be applied to my project. Is there a cool effect they are using? Are there any interesting camera angles being used? It doesn’t matter; try to get ideas from an otherwise useless activity. Do you have to do this all the time? NO. Remember, this is something you will do in your Unnecessary Creating Time; your hour for yourself.

4. Process your stimulus. The next day, after you’ve taken in stimulus of any kind (web vids, movies, art, television, magazines, etc.) you have to sit down and let your mind generate new thoughts based on what you’ve absorbed. Remember, you don’t have to copy people styles. You are coming up with your own ideas about things. I will take the notes that I wrote when taking in stimulus and think hard about them (maybe, the following day). I then write something about my project or draw some concepts based on that stimulus, taking advantage of what inspired me.  New brain connections are created at this point, and you are able to see things under a different light.

5. Apply what you’ve learned. Hopefully, after taking in all that stimulus on purpose and processing it, you will be eager to use it on your project. That means that when your animating day comes you will be full of ideas of what to do and how to do them. This is when your body switches to auto-pilot and creative explosions happen. Put things into practice. Work your magic!

Staying creative is a crucial part of the animation process for hobbyists (and even for professionals, I think). You have to build disciplines and be intentional about some aspects of the creative process, to be able to respond creatively when the time comes. As I said before, the ideas expressed here are not original. They are just how I’m interpreting and applying them to the animation process. If you want to learn more about this subject, I suggest you visit Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative site and listen to the podcasts.

I would be delighted if you shared your thoughts on this subject in the comments.

Post written by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Over the past week I have been discussing how hobbyists like myself tend to omit certain steps, professional studios are obligated to take in the process of creating animated stories, because they feel that everything is in their heads. I certainly followed that logic, and it brought me nowhere, since I didn’t give my characters a chance to develop correctly, which ultimately lead to very inconsistent character animation. It was so bad, that it looked as if the character that started the motion slowly transformed into a completely different one (and not on purpose). You see, the animation process became stagnated, due to the fact that characters weren’t properly taken out of the crummy piece of paper they were conceived on, and put on a nice model sheet that could serve as a reference throughout the entire project, before the actual work started.

From my Rezadores de la Recolección original concept art.
(Click on the image to see the other side of the paper.)

After reading a lot about animation, it became clear to me that I had to adhere, more or less, to the workflow that studios have used since the first half of the twentieth century if I ever wanted to finish my little project, as I stated in a previous post. It’s a proven formula that just works. It was time to put my money where my mouth was. We’ll, I’ve been doing my homework, and it is turning out nicely. I thought I showed you a bit.

Inspiration hits you in the most unusual places. I was at a conference on climate change when the idea for the look of my characters flooded my mind. Luckily for me, they handed out little note taking blocks for the event and I was able to get a couple of poses drawn before the Q&A round. This past week, in an attempt to get this project going, I pulled the little piece of paper (which you can see by clicking, either on the picture above, or here), scanned it, and decided to make a nice model sheet out of it, to be consistent with what I previously discussed about character development. It is nowhere near finished, but it’s a start. Here’s are the steps:

1. Take the character’s measurements. It’s a good practice to think about your character’s size in multiples of its head. That way, no matter where you draw it on the screen you’ll always know if it’s dimensions are right, just by counting “how many heads tall” it is. This was a good time to correct my character’s original measurements, since I wanted him to be exactly five heads tall. No matter what program you use for your animations, make sure you do every step in its individual layer. That way you have more control over the entire process. Here I just drew a couple of horizontal lines marking the head’s superior and inferior edges, copied them and pasted them down the page as reference. A couple of red lines delimit what would be an imaginary sphere embedded inside his head, which is useful for drawing him rough.

Notice how I drew lines that represent its height in “heads”.

2. Rough it out, and draw a half or a full turnaround. This is the time to start figuring out how to quickly draw your character in various views. Make any adjustments to your original sketch here. Don’t forget to use a new layer for this. Block the rest. You don’t want to mistakenly ruin something. In the following image the original bitmap layer is turned off, but you might want to keep it on while you draw on top of it. At this point, keep it simple. You just want to learn to draw your character in various poses and get its dimensions right.

Look for simple shapes that will help you draw your character faster.

3. Clean it. In a new layer, take the pencil or pen tool (something that will give you same width lines, no matter the zoom) and cleanly outline your character. You can take your time with this step. Use your software’s tools to edit the points or nodes that make up the lines. You’ll end up with something like this:

Be very careful with this step.

4. Color it. Our model sheet is starting to look good. Now it needs some color. You can copy and paste the contents of the clean lines layer onto a new one and color your character there. That way you’ll have both versions in case you need to revisit your lines (say, if you’re writing a post about them ). Document what colors you are using. If your software doesn’t have color palette management functionality, make sure you know the RGB values for all of your character’s colors. You might (and probably will) need them later. Just write them down.

This is a nice picture you can tape to your wall as reference for your project.

Our model sheets are on the right path now. A couple of expressions and some action poses would be in order, and seem like the next step. What do you think of my process; any suggestions? Tell us all about it in the comment section of this post. See you next time!

Post written by Renato Vargas

If you have read some of the posts I have written here, then you already know that I have delayed the completion of my animation project for a couple of years. But during that time, I have found myself procrastinating in great ways. Yes, in not doing what I was supposed to do, I ended up learning one or two cool things, and I have to admit that I love to waste time animating effects.

Click on the image to see it in motion.
(Be patient; it takes a while to load sometimes)

Water is one of the most entertaining things to animate. It is very difficult to get right too (and I probably haven’t yet). I became interested in water animation after I first came in contact with Adam Phillips’ Brackenwood shorts. I could not believe they were done in Flash. I had to find out how he had done them. Fortunately enough, he wrote a post on his blog about ActionScript camera effects in Flash, and he posted a small waterfall scene of Prowlies At The River to illustrate his point (I tried to find the original post to give you a nice link, but I had no luck). The camera was a nice feature indeed, and I used it a lot, but I was amazed by the waterfall itself. It was in that file; all of its frames. I felt as if I had struck gold.

What drew my attention is that the final result looked wonderful and everything was accomplished with only six drawings and a hold for each of the waterfall’s elements; meaning it was done “on two’s”. He was still animating at twelve frames per second at that time (He animates at 30fps nowadays, I think). I tried to replicate the same principles with the fountain you see above these lines and I ended up with a nice result. I didn’t know I was developing a useful skill, which solely landed me all of the freelance gigs I’ve done.

There are other animated effects, besides water that never stop amazing me, like lighting effects, smoke, fire, and moving sand. The thing is that, even if they are important skills to master, they should come last in your list of things to learn, since there’s no effect that can outshine a good character animation. Character animation is the soul of your piece and it is the only thing that will say whether a story is good or not (or finished in my case). What I’m trying to say is… “stop reading and get back to those characters!! Are you done with your model sheets?” But before you go, share your thoughts about animation procrastination in the comments.

Post written by Renato Vargas

When someone is doing an entire animation on her or his own, there’s a tendency to avoid taking some of the preparatory steps that studios often cannot ignore, such as creating character model sheets, among other things. “After all”, one thinks, “it’s all in my head”. Wrong!

Image courtesy of yashrg.

Character development is a crucial step that often gets neglected by hobbyists such as myself. We might see the character in our minds and think we’ve got it all covered. We probably drew our character on a napkin for the first time and it looked excellent. Our buddies thought it was “awesome”, and the girls all thought it was “so cute”. You’ve got a winner… until you start animating.

Your first frame requires your character to be in an entirely different position than the napkin’s. So you rough it out and voilà; instant Picasso. Your drawing skills are more or less solid, you think, but your drawing of Little Timmy doesn’t look like him. He looks awkward. “Hmm, it’s something about the nose”, you think. Okay, you erase him and start over. Another piece of abstract art flows out of your wrist. “Damn it”, you get angry, “I can’t tweak each drawing for 30 minutes. I’m never going to finish like this”. And you’re right.

As it turns out, character model sheets were invented for a reason and they can help you speed up the animation process if done right. Their purpose is to give your animated character a consistent look throughout your project, regarding not only its features, but also its dimensions and colors. A good model sheet should have images of your character in various positions, and looked at from different angles, so that you’re able to compare every drawing you do to it, and judge whether you are “on model” or not. But how do you make one?

1. Dimensions. You need to know how big its head is, in relation to its body. Are its arms long or short? How many heads tall is it? On a blank page (or frame, if you draw it directly onto the computer) draw horizontal lines spread apart by multiples of the head size and draw your character standing in a full 180 degree range of drawings, meaning you will draw it facing front; a quarter left; full left; three quarters left; and back, all next to each other, and then flip them to have their right counterparts(unless its sides are different, because then you would have to draw the others too).

2. Facial expressions. Under your full turnaround, draw as many facial expressions as you can.

3. Sitting poses. Fill the blank space with a couple of drawings of your character in a sitting position.

4. Action poses. On a new page (or frame) draw him in active poses, such as running, walking, or things your character would typically do. Does it play basketball? Does it eat frantically?

The purpose of this is to practice building your character. Drawing him or her should come naturally to you and model sheets are an excellent practice. Keep it simple. Your character’s main structure should be made with simple shapes such as circles and cylinders. Add details last.

Tomorrow is animation Tuesday for me. I won’t animate though. I’ll be going back to model sheets, because my character’s face cannot stretch anymore. It’s all over the place. Wobbly, wobbly, wobbly. He’s starting to look like plastic man. Learn from my mistake and just start with a nice model sheet for each of your main characters, before you do any of what I mentioned in point 1. of my previous post.

Do you experience the same consistency problems I do? Let everybody know in the comments.

Post written by Renato Vargas

I don’t know if professionals suffer from this condition, but as a hobbyist I can honestly say that there is something similar to the creative block that writers feel, but in the world of animation. I am probably not coining a new phrase but yes, I suffer from the animator’s block.

Image courtesy of my mom

Writers fight the dreaded block in several ways. Some say that spending enough time preparing for the actual writing process can help a lot, meaning that they will outline their writing carefully and have brainstorming sessions to stock up on ideas for their piece, so that when the time comes the writing will come naturally as it is the only thing that hasn’t been done. Others take their mind completely away from their writing, doing unrelated activities, in hope that their subconscious will work during that time. Others take hallucinogenic agents that give them a lot to write about, even if some things don’t make sense (that’s what editing is for). What can an animator do? I guess smoking peyote is out of the question.

I first conceived the idea of doing an animated series about Guatemala’s spooky stories from its rich oral tradition back in 2006. I bought a domain and hosting service to showcase them. I then adapted one such story for the little (computer) screen and made a rough storyboard. Since then I’ve made countless “tests” for everything, but haven’t completed one single scene. Not one. The story is only a couple of minutes long, but it does not get made. Over the years I’ve learned what needs to be done (countless bouncing ball experiments, walk cycles, etc.). I have bought the software to do it, and I have everything ready for it. I have even worked on freelance projects. I just don’t sit down and do my thing. I am not animating my stories. I sit at the computer staring at the timeline, and nothing gets done. I play around with a few frames. Do a little here, a little there, and in the end, nothing looks completed. I have decided it’s time to end this.

Here are the steps I’m taking to combat my animator’s block:

1. Stick to the system. Animation is a well established business and its productivity rules were discovered by the big guys decades ago. It would be dumb not follow a natural sequence of steps that has proven right for big and small studios alike. Here goes the short version: storyboard; sound; animatic; backgrounds; rough keys, breakdowns, and in-betweens; cleanup; color; and postproduction.

2. Develop the habit of animating. Since my income does not come from my animation skills, I tend to go for weeks and even months without drawing one simple line. A very wise person often speaks of making one-and-a-half hours a day your unnecessary creating time, where you go crazy and just create. I will animate for at least three hours a week. I will sit down and put my tablet’s pen to good use every Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday for at least one hour each day. If I miss a day, it doesn’t matter; I’ll just pick up where I left off the following day.

3. Do the key drawings first. This rule may seem similar to number one, but it is an important one to remember. Oftentimes, I will sit at the computer and stare at the animation program without doing anything until I turn it off, only because I don’t know where to start. It’s easy. Start with the key drawings, and tell the story as if it was a comic book, going from pose to pose.

4. Develop accountability. The problem with animation hobbyists is that nobody is breathing down our necks for the animation to get done; especially when you haven’t developed a fan base. That can change by telling others about one’s project so that they keep asking about it. I will announce a release date for my first short and advertise it any way I can so that there is no turning back.

I am confident that these steps will work. Are you getting your animations done? Tell us all about it in the comments.