Richard Williams - Career Reviews of Pioneer Animators

Richard Williams is an animator, film title sequence designer, voice actor and writer who is best known for being the animation director on Disney's "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and his unfinished feature film "The Thief and the Cobbler. His other works include designing and animating the film title sequences for "What's New, Pussycat?" along with the title and linking sequences for "Charge of the Light Brigade". He also animated the eponymous cartoon feline character the Pink Panther for the two later Pink Panther films. He attended school Northern Secondary School in Toronto in which  attended has produced numerous other successful people in th entertainment industry.

He earlier produced work in 1958 for the film "The Little Island" boosted his career as it won the 1958 BAFTA Award for Animated Film. In his documentary "The Theif Who Never Gave Up" Williams gives credit to animator Bob Godfrey whose given influence allowed him to start in the animation business. He later directed numerous films which include the Academy Award-winning film "A Christmas Carol"(1971) and the Emmy-winnng television film "Ziggy's Gift (1982)". He later became the director of animation for the film "Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) and won two more Oscars for his work.

He later went into book writing on animation , and has writted the acclaimed animation how-to-book "The Animator's Survival Kit"  which has been published and republished many times and is still widely acclaimed to the present day. Following this, he produced a 9-minute silent short film called "Circus Drawings", and with live accompaniment it premiered at thePordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy in September 2010.

Bill Plympton - Career reviews of Pioneer Animators

Bill Plympton is an American animator, graphic designer, cartoonist and filmmaker who is best known for his several hand-drawn animated shorts - with his best known one being "Your Face" which was created in 1987. He studied graphic design at Portland State University from 1964 - 1968 and became a member of the film society there whilst also working on designing the yearbook. In 1968 he then transferred to the School of Visual Arts in New York City where he majored in cartooning and graduated from SVA in 1969. His distinctive style is recognised easily for being somewhat similar to unrealistic drawings of celebrities due to his common use of over exaggerated and over and undersized facial features.

Numerous illustrations and cartoons of his have been published in magazines and newspapers, ranging from The NewYork Times, to Vogue and National Lampoon, and his political cartoon strip called Plympton which started in the Soho Weekly News in 1975 exceedingly expanded and later appeared in over 20 different newspapers. From 2012 Plympton has created over 40 animated short films and 6 animated features and he has also published his own comic book "The Sleazy Cartoons of Bill Plympton".

He later released two DVDs of animated shorts both titles "Avoid Eye Contact" with two other independent New York City Animators and his work later appeared in a comedy series The Edge on Fox in 1992 - 1993 along with his animated series "Liquid Television" in the early 1990s, and in 1995 he broadened his horizons by contributing animation and graphics to a computer game collection called "Take Your Best Shot". He later collaborated with animator Don Hertzfeldt for the touring "The Don and Bill Show" which played in the USA, and in 2005 he animated a music video for Kanye West's "Heared 'Em Say" and created a music video for Weird Al Yankovics "Don't Download This Song".

Lotte Reiniger - Career reviews of Pioneer Animators

Lotte Reiniger was a German film director and a pioneer in the advancement of silhouette animation which is most shown through her depictions of Grimm's fairy tales such as "Cinderella" and "Hansel and Gretel". Starting with making shadow puppets in aid of telling Shakespeare plays, she later adopted an avant-garde style which was prominently brought on by World War II and was known to have widely influenced the individuality of her animations. She was also an enthusiast for the Chinese art of shadow puppetry.

She initially planned to be an actress and used her early skills as a silhouette maker to attract the attention of film director Paul Wegener who in turn asked her to make silhouettes for the intertitles of his films Rübezahls Hochzeit (Germany, 1916) and Der Rattenfänger von Hameln (Germany, 1918). Her first proper animation was on Paul Wegener's film "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" (1918). Reiniger was asked to animate wooden rats in a stop motion style due to Wegener being unable to control live rats to film as an alternative, and the technique turned out to be a success due to their movements turning out to be highly realistic.

What is useful about her technique is that it enables a lot of freedom in which to convey characters, as in being able to simply use outlines of characters and portraying them clearly without worrying about any individual colours or details to give them as if they were being animated differently.

Don Hertzfeldt - Career Reviews of Pioneer Animators

Don Hertzfeldt is a two-time Academy Award nominated animator, artist, filmmaker and independent writer who has produced such films as "It's a Beautiful Day (2012)" and "Billy's Balloon (1998)". His art style is known for being whimsically cartoon - like and is simple yet significant and exploratory.

Although his films may first appear to convey little plot or scenarios, most of his films are known to actually convey quite elaborate and heartfelt storylines and deal with genuine real world problems which grip the heartstrings of many viewers worldwide. One film of his that portrays a complex but well written real-life scenario is "World of Tomorrow (2015)" which tells the story of a young girl named Emily who encounters a clone of herself who is contacting her from the future, and is thus pulled out of her own time. Current themes within the movie involve a sorrowful but wizened story of her genetic descendent, but as the story is convenyed through the eyes of an imaginative and carefree Emily, it adjusts the plot to be more light-hearted.

From Hertzfeldt's famous hand-drawn style, it is one of the many films that enabled a radical leap for him both as an animator and artist to have a creative breakthrough, as it enabled him to earn how to multitask with drawing and animating, along with conceptualise a plot-line that conveyed a strong use of Photoshop through the wide ranges of colours and gradient backgrounds.

Bouncing Animals - Editing our previous bouncing balls

Adobe Animator Bouncing Balls

For Fridays animation workshop, we worked on the concept of bouncing balls and created different animations of different types of balls bouncing.

The types of balls we had to create bouncing animations of were:

A Ping Pong ball

A Cartoon ball

A Tennis Ball

The 12 Principles of Animation - research

• Anticipation - The atmosphere of a setting and the actions of a character prepare audiences for anticipation, and they also initiate major actions in portraying character development and developing the scenario. Anticipation is known as the backward motion, and the backward motion has to occur before the forward motion can be executed. Almost all real actions involve using anticipation as a forecast.

• Appeal - Choosing an appeal for a character can be through their physical appearance, their personality or their intentions, and the appeal of a character encourages the audience to take an interest in their story. Appeal can even be established in motion design, such as using interesting typefaces or transitions. 

• Arc - the impact of displaying gravity in animations is important, as it means that objects in motion should arc between the start and end points of the animation. An example of this would be shooting an arrow as it rarely flies completely straight. This technique especially relates to many natural movements in the human body because arms, hand and fingers etc move in arcs.

• Exaggeration - Exaggeration can be as broad or as subtle as the animation requires, but it must still display genuine actions. Whether the animation is excessive or dramatic, exaggeration has to revolve around the mood of the character or the tone of the setting. 

• Follow Through & Overlapping Action - When nothing stops all at once. Whilst portraying movements such as dancing, the characters clothing for example catches up with the character a few frames later.

• Secondary Action - When observing primary movements in the physical world, secondary actions support the notion of the action, such as a person walking as a primary movement and swinging their arms as a secondary movement. Smaller actions such as blinking can still be considered as being secondary movements, but by little means are they meant to draw the viewers attention away from the primary movement.

• Slow In & Slow Out - This technique relates to the way in which objects and humans in the physical world pick up momentum before they can reach a full speed, so in animation, it should also take time to decrease speed before something can come to a complete stop.

• Solid Drawing - this means showing realistic drawing skills as a means to show good form when adding a three-dimensional feel to flat work. No matter what tool is used to create the drawing it must work in 3D.

• Squash & Stretch - often used through an object such as a bouncing ball, adding exaggeration to the object in motion gives a greater sense of volume and weight even if the object is displaying flat graphics. The ball appears stretched when falling and squashed when it hits the ground. This technique is also used to morph objects.

• Staging - this technique is influenced by staging positions within the theatre as it helps establish mood, create focus and clarify the plot of the animation. It also demonstrates the difference in values between characters and displays the impact of surroundings.

• Straight Ahead Action & Pose to Pose - this drawing technique allows a chosen amount of fluidity between the animations movement depending on how many frames there are. It involves planning key frames that are drawn ahead of others and are then connected to the rest of the frames afterwards. This leads to more realistic and convincing results.

• Timing - the timing of an animation is essential to displaying characters authentically and originally, and it is also an essential aspect in the way frames are drawn.

Adobe Animator workshop 2 - Timing & Spacing part II

This is an example of a good animation

For the second part of our lesson we were required to make an animation of a pendulum to test our ability to work with balance along with test to see whether e could rotate an animator around a point.

I found this exercise surprisingly easier than our first one because it involved basing the strength of our animating around whether we could align everything correctly.

Adobe Animator workshop 2 - Timing & Spacing

For todays lesson of Adobe Animator, we learned how to animate two circles using 25 frames. We were required to plan different movement paths for our 2 circles and customize them as we wish, as long as they both had the same starting and finishing position. Due to wanting to show more of a difference between the two circles, I tried to colour the second one with gradient colours to emphasize the different speeds of its movement compared with the first circle.

At first it was challenging to create distinct differences in both the circles movements due to trying to get them to both flow abundantly but still give them different speeds. With this, I managed to speed up the movement of the second circle at the start at finish the slow down its movement in the midpoint of the animation. I think this makes a good contrast to the first circle that flows in a simple way and has even movements.