April 22, 2008

  • ‘That Man From Rio’ (1964)

    TMFR_008  

     

    “How do you like the new Brazil?” Adolfo Celi asks Francoise Dorleac.  And we like it just fine.  This is a fantastic romp that starts in Paris, travels to the shanty towns of Rio, glides through the super streamlined architecture of the new Brasilia, then ends in the jungle, where suddenly we see the price of the ‘new Brazil’.  Jean-Paul Belmondo hops continents, navigates high-rise scaffolding, hangs out of an airplane, takes on a whole bar of waterside hoodlums, and performs more daring feats than anyone in the course of a 112 min movie, yet still manages to look only slightly pained by it all. 

    Unfortunately the movie only seems available on VHS, so the quality of these images isn’t great.

     

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April 15, 2008

  • A Kentucky Fried Cartoon

    Eddie: This commercial played in Australia when I was about 12 years old.  It wasn’t on TV that much, but when it was, I remember thinking it was the best thing ever!

March 28, 2008

March 26, 2008

  • Jacques Dutronc!

    ((( click the middle arrow on cassette to launch playlist! )))

March 24, 2008

  • Back from TOONBOOM, Montreal

    Back from 4 days in Montreal, Canada, the coldest place on earth!!!  Although, our contacts and hosts at Toon Boom Headquarters assured us that this is not normal. Montreal is experiencing its worst winter since the 1970′s.

    Aside from the weather shock, icy biting winds and Eddie’s “flu”, we were both pleasantly surprised by the picturesque charm of this small city and how ‘French’ it felt. Everyone spoke French, street signage was all in French; there were shops selling all French comic books; we ordered meals from French menus; croissants were delivered to our hotel rooms every morning… I mean, it didn’t feel like the North America that we knew. It was a cultural breath of fresh air – great people, great food, cobblestone streets, lots and lots and lots of snow.


    So how did we end up here in Montreal?

    It all began way back in May 2006 when IDT-Film Roman (now Starz) had organized a ToonBoom Harmony/Solo training session for a bunch of L.A. Flash animators. Eddie and I were part of this training and demo session. See this previous blog entry. At the time we were both impressed by the software but had already started pre-production on Los Campeones so it wasn’t a good time to try a new animation program. (Sidenote: ToonBoom Harmony is the studio package;  ToonBoom Solo was the standalone program which has now been upgraded and renamed ToonBoom Digital Pro.

    As post for Los Campeones is coming to an end and we are gearing up to start on our next project, we contacted ToonBoom to request full training on this program. They flew us to Montreal and offered us a five to ten-day intensive hands-on training course. Unfortunately, due to our many responsibilities and tight schedule here in L.A. we could only do three days. We wished we had more time to thoroughly immerse ourselves in the training but anyway, it was a still a pretty awesome three days and we are glad that we could make it to Montreal at all.

    Some features we like about ToonBoom Digital Pro (bear in mind that we are coming to this from Flash 8′s numerous bugs and limitations):

    • Z-Space! and a Camera that moves in 3D space with multiplane effects.
    • Color palettes for character models! We miss this feature of traditional animation. 
    • Filters and effects 
     

    Training with Jean-Reymand
    Some features that gave us a headache but could be kinda cool when we get a handle on them:
    • Infinitely more sophisticated than Flash is the process of animating with many different views on the workspace (eg, Camera view, Drawing view, Top view, Network View etc.). It is a bit confusing to switch between the views and having to remember which menus and which buttons go with which views. The “Network View” with all its modules and cables is a trip! This is also where animated filters like shadows, tones, glows, blurs are implemented.
    • Inverse Kinematics - We went through the “19 steps to rigging a master template for a character”. Eddie note: I personally want to move away from the ‘marionette’ style/piece by piece approach to animation that has come about mainly due to Flash, so I found this part of the training pretty hard going.  However it is useful to see what the capabilities are.

    • The ToonBoom timeline, and the concept of Pegs and Elements, which are very different from Flash and require a different mindset. “Pegs” in TB are the equivalent of “keyframes” in Flash. TB’s Timeline’s top-to-bottom arrangement of layers also does not truly display which drawings sit on top or underneath, as you are dealing also with z-space properties. Don’t quote me on this, please. Still learning …  

    We also looked at Storyboard Pro - which exports to PDFs and/or Quicktime animatics.

    Link: YouTube Storyboard Pro presentation

    We came away from ToonBoom and Montreal with very positive feelings. One very exciting thing for us is that the people developing ToonBoom used to work in the animation industry, are passionate about their product and are constantly upgrading according to their clients’ needs. They also travel the world supporting various animation studios in countries that we didn’t even think had animation studios!

    More Montreal photos

     Snow!; Park benches are completely buried in snow…

    Eddie outside BEATNICK Records; Planete BD and lots of French comic books!

    Jacques Dutronc EP – from our music haul; Wapati (Reindeer!) for lunch

    Cool record store – Primitive Records on Rue St Denis

    Decadent chocolates from Suite 88 Chocolatier

    Time was short and so we hanged out around the same couple of streets during most of our stay, and enjoyed the dining and shopping recommendations from our friends, Otis, Maurice and Chipple. We definitely want to return to Montreal for a proper visit when it’s warm, and NEXT time, I will try poutine! ;)

March 4, 2008

  • Promotional Artwork That You Won’t See Anywhere But…

    …At
    The Best Fish Taco in
    Ensenada     on Hillhurst Ave., Los Feliz. A big thumbs up from the Tsetse Fly for our favorite local lunchspot. The poster was a X-mas
    present to Joseph Cordova, the owner of the joint who feeds us well
    with fish and shrimp tacos. Last time I spoke with him he said that
    many a customer has shown interest in this poster. And Joseph almost
    beat up a drunken guy who tried to steal it.

    The
    first ever Los Campeones
    stamp!     Created at zazzle.com

    Who will see this
    stamp? Probably the SoCal Gas Company or LADWP. Or whoever we send snail
    mail to ;)

    This week is a big week. We are doing
    D.I. and sound effects on the film and everything looks and sounds so much better than a week ago. Exciting stuff! Will try to take photos of  “Post-Production” in action, the next time we remember.

February 25, 2008

  • If animation is my girlfriend, I want a divorce

    Looking at the Oscars and Ratatouille this year, Happy Feet last year, The Incredibles, etc etc etc…it reminds me of when I was a teenager and we had all these fricken ‘super groups’ like Toto, and Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Yes, and Super bullshit Tramp, and music was all high concept and high production and done by REAL musicians and it wasn’t meant for the likes of you with your cheap Gibson knock off and 3 chords, and then punk came along and sent all these fricken bloated dickheads to the back of the bus where they could jam and wank and never be heard of again.

    So my point is, Ratatouille is Toto

    -Eddie

  • Animating Edd

     Edd-model

    While we wait around for the various post-production tasks to be completed, we thought it was time to dust off ‘Here’s Jimmy’ – an animated sitcom we started, then had to put on the back burner until we finished Los Campeones.

    We recorded voices a while back, including the legendary Edd Byrnes (‘Kookie’ from 77 Sunset Strip, ‘Vince Fontaine’ from Grease, to name but two).  Edd prefers not to do Kookie any more, but he liked our script and agreed to reprise the character for our cartoon.

    I ventured to Palm Springs with ‘Here’s Jimmy’ collaborator Jim Cherry to catch up with Edd, who was signing his biography – ‘Kookie No More’ – at an auto show.  We got to hang and chat with Edd, and of course got our books signed! -Eddie

    EB_JC_EM_feb08

February 21, 2008

  • Flash 8 Filters

    Rather than spend valuable creative time noting our list of grievances with Flash, we decided to focus on the feature that gave us the most pain – filters!

     

    Okay, the filters look great and they will immediately take your Flash backgrounds to another level.  But these filters come with a price; while they look good in Flash and when exported as stills, they are a bugger when it comes to rendering them as animation files from Flash.  So much so, that trying to successfully render and composite scenes that utilize Flash 8 filters has set our production back months as we try different workarounds. 

     

    So having said that, yes – use ‘em, but be aware of the restrictions.

     

    1. They will either disappear or ‘cut off’ (severely chop into the movie clip you have assigned them to) when enlarged to a certain point.  Solution; cut a large image up and make it 2 movie clips, rather than one big one.

     

    1. If you are using filters on several different elements within a scene, some of them will disappear when exported to .swf.  This is a random, indiscriminate thing, regardless of size.

     

    1. If you export you movie as a PNG sequence, the filters will still disappear if there is any up scaling (Zoom in) within the movie. 

     

    example001

    click image to enlarge

     

    1. Not specifically a filter problem, but a rendering one nonetheless: Sometimes an .fla won’t graphically handle an image very well, expecially if there is a lot of detail or a motion BG.  Be warned that whatever you see in your .fla will be what is exported in your PNG sequence

     

    1. This is the big one.  If your layer containing the elements that have filters is set to OUTLINE, the filters will not render!

     

    1. Panning with filter effects.  The best way is to make your image an animated graphic symbol, then within that animated symbol make your image a movie clip and add your filter.  Then motion-tween the animated graphic symbol

    We haven’t used the new Adobe Flash CS suite, so we don’t know if this is a relevent issue with that software.  However, there are a lot of people who paid a lot of money for Flash 8 licenses that are stuck with this problem, so maybe some of this can be of help.

February 18, 2008