Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Plenty of good advice here!

Today’s Google splash page features a fine claymation tribute to Art Clokey on his 90th birthday.  Gumby and his many lovingly crafted clay stop motion animated characters and stories live on.  Of course, I’m a long time fan of Art’s work, as seen here @ mediaspin.com.

My friends at elementalLED, a green business selling LED lighting products, commissioned me to create an online marketing video.  They wanted something fun and edgy, with the potential to catch on as a viral animation, passed from friend to friend, business to business.  Some of the examples they showed me were really wild, almost South Park crazy, so I knew I could let the dogs out and run with this.  As we brainstormed, we discussed the virtue of LED lighting’s low heat emission from the intense light source.  Animals, such as moths, attracted to the light would not be burned.  The idea stuck, and I was off and running, writing, storyboarding and animating the old fashioned way in Flash.

The journey of The History of Lighting According To Moths took me back to my high school days of Mad magazine and Fractured Fairy Tales on the beloved Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show.  It was a lot of fun, and James Goode’s sound track worked wonders to bring the animation to life, and support my corny narration.  Next, maybe I can figure out a migrating bird friendly wind turbine promo.

New credit cards are now featuring something called “blink” technology.  This wireless technology was the subject of my recent motion graphics project for Silicon Valley high tech company, ViVOtech.  I converted their PowerPoint technical overview and marketing presentation into an eye-catching tradeshow animation in HD resolution.  See the online Flash video animation here.

From what I understand, a lot of people at the tradeshow stopped and blinked at the ViVOtech booth.

Recently worked on a Flash splash page for the Kapow Technologies web site that involved a lot of hand animation that could probably be done in Actionscript2 or 3… if I knew the code! So, working on expanding my Flash horizons and found these cool examples, some with source code. Most of these are in my pursuit to deconstruct the iTunes coverflow image browsing interface, and a few are purely inspirational. Here are the links:

• Papervision3D FAQ
• Papervision3D Examples @ dusanwriter
• Papervision3D tumbling cube @ The Flash Blog
• Papervision3D Carousel Example FLA
• 3D Wall using Papervision3D by Flashloaded
• Weber Design Labs Flash iTunes Cover Flow
• Flash Based Coverflow with controllers
• Coverflow using Fluid
• The World of Mekanism (don’t miss the cool LP record shop under About)

Here’s a strange one. It may help you become a better salesperson, and a stronger individual, but this technique is probably not long lasting.

Recently at lunch with friends at PDI/DreamWorks, and the conversation included some of the usual rumors within the feature animation business.  There was the worry that perhaps Sony was shutting their animation studio in L.A. (again?), and there was buzz about “the Mecca Studio.”

“What’s the Mecca Studio?” I asked.

The Zemeckis Studio, they corrected me, which is actually going by the name ImageMoversDigital. The studio is putting down their roots in San Rafael, so it should be interesting to see how this plays out, and what the studio produces.

A few of their artists put up a really cool blog of their ideas and sketches, The Image Depot.

I first attended a SIGGRAPH convention in 1983. The International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques was held in Detroit that year. I traveled with Tim Onosko, a technology writer from Madison, Wisconsin, to learn about pixels and how computers were able to help with the laborious process of animation.

Traditional cel animation had no inate ability to illustrate 3D geometry, only providing photographic 2 1/2 D depth through multiplaned layers of glass shot on the animation camera stand. In the 70’s I had worked on a few independent cel animated projects with Steven Lisberger in Boston, and we imagined that in the future perhaps computers would replace the drudgery of inking and painting acetate cels. I was shocked to see Steve had moved into 3D computer animation when he wrote and directed TRON, and I was determined to catch up on this innovation.

SIGGRAPH 1983 was a rush of excitement, a real eye opener. I attended a 2 day course presented by staff members of NYIT’s computer graphics lab; Fred Parke, Duane Palyka, and Lance Williams to name a few. They were writing their own software and systems to aid 2D painting, tweening and 3D animation. At small gatherings and parties I met some of the leading thinkers in new media at the time, such as Gene Youngblood whose book EXPANDED CINEMA had influenced me greatly in my earlier undergraduate film school studies.

There was a great sense of anticipation and invention. The software engineers and artists at SIGGRAPH 1983 knew they were staring at a wide open territory fresh for developing new frontiers in 3D animation, gaming and filmmaking. Back in those days, the animation industry itself was weak. MTV was just starting to spark new creative endeavors in music video production. Pixar, The Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Ren and Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead, South Park – none of these had happened yet.

By 1984 I was working at NYIT Computer Graphics Lab as a 2D compositor, experimenting with animating a 3D Gumby model which appeared as part of the SIGGRAPH 1984 Electronic Theater. In 1985 and 86 I was NYIT’s post production director for their SIGGRAPH show reels.

The upward momentum of computer graphics and animation in those days was even more intoxicating than the great Internet ramp up and bubble in the late 90’s. Yet today, you can’t escape the influence of computer graphics. Animated pixels and visual effects are part of almost every motion picture, television show and certainly every computer monitor. I would argue that today there is as much or more artwork generated by computer artists than by traditional painters and sculptors.

SIGGRAPH has lost that magical luster of cultish wizardry for me. It’s a routine convention machine now, carefully connecting large educational institutions with large corporations and influencial Hollywood studios. Also, in the past, employers were more willing to help pay your way to a special conference such as the SIGGRAPH that once was. Now the corporations are tighter, and travel expenses to just another convention are often seen as an obstacle. Although the mystical secret genie of SIGGRAPH was out of the bottle over 10 years ago, if I were paid to cover SIGGRAPH I’d go and know what to look for.

SIGGRAPH will still be full of great technical papers, panels taught by smart guys looking to have some of their costs covered, and more student animation than you will have time to sit through. So for me it’s more of the same, mostly redundant stuff, and not the excitement of riding a remote new wave with a small band of pioneers that it used to be.

As the Donald Fagen song The Goodbye Look goes…

The rules are changed, it’s not the same
It’s all new players in a whole new ball game.