The Inkling Chronicles

21st Century Animation Desk

Today at the studio where I work a couple of the guys finally did what we had  all been talking about doing for the last couple of months since we got these cool  Cintiq tablets :

Working from a design by layout artist Steven Geer,  Steven and animator Ronnie Williford retro-fitted the Cintiq into a traditional animation desk.  Yowsa! Boys and girls we are now living in the future of 2-D Animation and it's beautiful .  This thing turns smoother than any animation disc I've ever used , and of course the angle of the drawing table is adjustable up and down as with a traditional animation desk. Everyone at work wanted to sit down and take it for a whirl.  Both Steven and Ronnie have woodworking setups at home, so I think they'll be making a bunch of these to have them avaiable for sale soon. I know I'm getting one (for whenever I can afford to buy a Cintiq for home---ha-ha--- hopefully someday soon)   Here are a few pictures I snapped  -----

(click on the photos to see them larger)

It turns to any desired angle,  just like a traditional animation disc :

Sits flush with the surface of the desk,  held securely and turns smoothly
by a mechanism mounted in the hole where the backlight unit used to be:

I love mine , but I had to put a peg bar on it just to make it feel right (the peg bar serves absolutely no practical purpose)  and an old style pencil holder , even though the Cintiq has a perfectly good  holder for the Wacom pen .  What the heck, I'm a sentimentalist .

I noticed that Jamie Oliff and Angie Jones are new "converts" to the Cintiq after they got to use one at Siggraph. Angie and Jamie blogged their experience at Siggraph and posted lots of great photos.  They are the authors of a really good book , "Thinking Animation: Bridging the Gap Between 2-D and CG" , which they were signing (and I hope selling lots of ) at Siggraph .  Buy it !   The other book there in the photo (besides Dick William's 'The Animator's Survival Kit" which I hope everyone who reads this blog already owns)  is Tom Bancroft's new book "Creating Character's with Personality" .  Another must have .

Eric Goldberg's Day at the Races

(I didn't work on this, but I wish I had.  A beautifully animated piece by Eric Goldberg, recently posted on YouTube, so if you missed it when it was broadcast here's your opportunity to see it.)

There was a clever show on for a while called "Drew Carey's Green Screen Show".  It featured Drew Carey as the host , and an ensemble cast of improv actors doing skits in front of a "green screen" .  After the live actors had done their stuff , the footage was handed over to various animators (coordinated by Acme Film Works) to embellish the skit with animation.  The show never really took off , and like all improv sketches there were hits and misses .  One of the hits, in fact probably the strongest piece that came out of this show, was a sequence called  "Racetrack"  animated by master animator Eric Goldberg.



In an article on  Animation World Network there is a bit about the production process they used on the piece .   I was interested to note that they used Mirage for the  ink and paint.  Notice how the drawings have a beautiful, organic hand-colored look , like watercolor washes or markers. According to the article :

Without pre-sketching or testing, Goldberg animated with ink directly on paper, working in a style he was comfortable with, allowing for a certain amount of boil and spontaneity. He wanted the game's horse character to have the same scratchy, rubber-hose freedom of the Fleischer and Krazy Kat cartoons.

His wife, Susan, assisted as art director, and his two daughters helped with mattes. Using Shake for compositing and Mirage for ink-and-paint, Scott Johnston helped achieve the animation's watercolor look.

Goldberg was committed to putting in as much technical detail as possible, such as the secondary action of the horse's reigns (animated by Todd Jacobson), because it makes the piece more convincing and compelling to watch. Goldberg feels this added effort adds a quality and touch that really sells the whole illusion.

There's more in the linked article from AWN , so take a look .   Since my post about Mirage has generated some interest I thought some of you might be interested in this and frankly the Racetrack segment from Green Screen is as fine and funny piece of animation as you're likely to see , so just for the pure enjoyment factor I wanted to share this . Someone was kind enough to post it on YouTube , so here 'tis :