The drawing board

I've been pondering my next submission to film festivals. I've started painting again, which leads me to wonder where I left off the last time I was animating.

A quick search though old posts uncovered these embedded videos of animated works-in-progress that I put on hold years ago. Watching them requires pressing the play button twice. I don't know why.

The Telekinetic Chef

Fatal Error

Fatal Error (storyboard)

The Park (rotoscoping experiment)

Just before the pandemic, I took a video editing course at PhillyCAM that sent my interests in another direction. Looking at these now, I realize I've leaned quite a bit in the past few years (particularly with AfterEffects) that could be applied to my animation.

Maybe I'll kick these projects around or create something new. I take it as a good sign that the telekinetic chef still makes me laugh. I'd also like to return to learning Blender (the 3D animation program) as well. That's another pursuit that fell by the wayside that I'd like to pick up again.

Animation Nation

Wanna watch some cartoons? An inspiring collection of shorts was shown at the Animation Nation festival on Chestnut Street, Wednesday night. Since I've been into rotoscoping lately, I was stunned by this one:

• Ralf Hildenbeutel - Disco, by Boris Seewald

According to the festival's curator, this piece was cleaner before Boris Seewald's 3-year old daughter was caught drawing on it. He saw her contribution as an improvement and the short became a collaboration between them.

Here are some others from the festival, posted online in their entirely:

• Adam, claymation by Evelyn Jane Ross

• Dahlia, painted animation on glass by Ana Mouyis

• Pearl Twirl, stop motion animation by local artist Olive Couri

My very favorites in the show only have trailers online, but it's worth a look at these contributors:

• Sara Litzenberger; trailer for Undiscovered
Explains why no one can get a good photo of Bigfoot

• Polder Animation; trailer for Scrambled
Video game vs. Rubix cube

• Maki Yoshikura; trailer for Billie
A puppy is relocated to a new family

• Irina Patkanian; trailer for Little Fiel
A documentary on Mozambican 'gun artist' Fiel dos Santos

Rotoscoping

Making progress with this segment.

Rotoscoping

More from the park. I'm going to submit this to the line-themed show at the club next month. It will repeat on the gallery TV during the opening. The soundtrack of Washington Square sounds will be in there too.

Rotoscoping

Here's the latest progress from the park. Notice how the squirrel and the kid function independently of each other. It will be clearer once I have more completed, that character segments will be repeating and overlapping in various ways, much like they do in Zbigniew Rybczyński's Oscar-winning short, Tango (1981).

Working on this, I've also taken another look at the most impressive piece of rotoscoping ever, the Take on Me music video from 1985.

Rotoscoping

Squirrel!

Animated set design

Continuing my exploration of rotoscoping, here's my animated depiction of Washington Square. On Monday, I videoed 8 minutes of people and animals wandering about this scene. If you got caught in the video, fret not, I doubt you'll be recognizable in the final piece.

But first, the background. I suppose I could've done this with a filter. I "painted" over the photographic image with colors from the image. Animating the water in the fountain was tricky. This is my second attempt at getting it to look like water. This short clip will repeat continuously as characters walk through.

Rotoscoping

This is my first attempt at rotoscoping. Last weekend I made a short video of the family cat. I've since imported that video into TVPaint and traced over the cat for 150 frames. The original video is in there too, so you can see what I was tracing.

Now I can draw any background behind the cat. The drawing style matches while retaining the realistic kitty motion.

A lot of cool things have been done with rotoscoping. Ralph Bakshi rotoscoped actors into Middle-Earth in the original Lord of the Rings. The 2016 documentary Tower placed actors into an illustrated version of the 1960s.

Festival recap

The Philadelphia Independents 2018 animation festival was a blast. It was great to see the animators back at the club, cheered on by a large crowd of enthusiasts.

Terror Train went over well. I'm going to do some more work on it before I post it, just to tidy up the bits that were rushed to make the deadline. In the meantime, here are some highlights from Saturday.

Rusty Eveland showed his animated grocery carts and talked about animating in public places. Lynn Tomlinson discussed producing music for her films and her clay-painting technique.

Zoe Nowoslawski and Nichola Latzgo recalled the inspirations for their story ideas and Amy Hicks described her process of turning novels into movie flipbooks. Chris Ferrantello shared his animated collages and fellow club member Bob Moore was present to share his animated design work.

Karl Staven told us how he animated the shadows of a tree in his yard before it was removed. Oona Taper described her process of animating objects and rotoscoping. Samantha Gurry showed us animated trading cards for bowlers last year, and this year floppy disks.

There were music videos from Steve Meyer/Jack Kubizne and "art-rock" band Tulipomania. Sci-fi action was provided by Erik Van Horn.

Boxhead and Roundhead by Elliot Cowan were back with a new adventure. The pilot episode of Found Town was submitted from the other side of the world by Tokyo resident Ryan Gilchrist.

There was live-action with animated highlights by Chris McDonnell, kaleidoscopic footage of Philadelphia taken with a GoPro on a motorcycle by Lowell Boston, and a tale from Philadelphia's youth by John Serpentelli.

Curator and host Chris Magee has posted photos from the event. Many thanks are owed to Chris for making this festival possible and gathering the animators every year for the past five years. I'm glad to say I've attended all five and shown work in three. We now have a full year to animate something new for the next one.