Animation through the years...

Creativity is all about personal expression.

Creativity can come in so many forms. I funnel my creativity in many different ways including drawing, painting, collage, dancing, website design, graphic design, interior design, feng shui and fashion. Over the years I have had many influences that have developed my style to what it is today. My first formal artistic training outside of high school art classes was hand-drawn animation.

1995

Hand-Drawn Animation - Applied Techniques

Enmore TAFE

Prior to our current digital medias and software, animating images, to make cartoons was all drawn by hand. Animation companies had different artists to design and draw differing components of their world famous cartoons e.g. Mickey Mouse. At 16 I decided to explore hand-drawn animation, my teacher was the background artist for Disney cartoons, their office was opposite Central Station in Sydney.

What I did and what I learnt...

We drew and drew and drew every Saturday for months at Enmore TAFE. To understand and demonstrate movement our first project was to draw a floating balloon frame-by-frame. The skill is to consider the movement of a floating balloon and draw multiple single drawings to seamlessly create that movement.

We were given tools to assist in the precision of each drawing.

• Grid paper (pictured)

• Animation examples of movement (pictured)

• A metal tool (like a ruler) with three prongs to hold the papers together and keep each image aligned

• A light-box

• A blue pencil and a led pencil

Drawings start in blue pencil and are then traced with a led pencil for a bold outline. A technique I still use to this very day. After an initiation with our tools of the trade, we created our own animation including original characters, movement, and a story line.

Did you know? One second of animation is around 18-24 slightly altered drawings. It goes without saying this is a lot of drawings! An animation that goes for a solid hour could require up to 86, 000 hand drawn pictures!

Designing a character to animate

I pondered what to animate and two characters came alive: Bupp (pictured below). Bupp was a character I drew before I began the course and Nokisua whom is a combination of many Australian animals including a platypus, echidna, kangaroo, and koala. Bupp was a perfect fit with Nokisua and she was also very easy to draw!

Character model sheets

Before starting our drawings for animation, a 'character model sheet' was designed. A 'character model sheet' consists of the characters in differing poses and action shots, alongside their general dimensions and a few character quirks. It was important that we had reference points of what our characters looked like in various poses. Below is an example of Nokisua's 'character model sheet.' A 'character model sheet' is imperative in this process to keep our character consistent in pose and most importantly dimensions.

Designing the storyboard

Following the character model sheet, a basic storyboard is designed to show the major changes in the scenes. The fundamentals of storyboarding for animation are the same for a film or a play. At times the storyboard would change as the frame changes may have been a bit too ambitious.

Making it all come alive

A massive task! All images would be drawn to get from one movement to the next, one step to the next... frame-by-frame. With our grid paper, model character sheet and storyboard, we'd pick up our blue pencil and commence drawing on our light box.

Once hundreds of images were drawn they were placed under a camera, each being photographed, placed in a reel and after required corrections, each image would play at about 24 drawings per second. This is when our hard work and images and our characters came alive. There was no Final Cut Pro at this stage or readily available computer software, so i do not have the final cartoon. :(

2004

Majors: Multi-Media & Digital Arts

Southern Cross University

Close to 10 years after doing the hand-drawn-animation course at Enmore TAFE, I enrolled in a degree at Southern Cross University. Through all my travels, trials and tribulations up until this point, there was one thing I had always held on to, my artwork.

Digital technology

I majored in multimedia and digital arts at uni, alongside film and philosophy. This was the time when modern technology and creative software came to the forefront of the creative industries. Many of the pages that I drew in 1995 sat in a portfolio and years later I brought my characters back to life! I dusted off my drawings, took photographs and using both illustrator and photoshop I digitised Nokisua and Bupp, giving them colour and a new lease of digital life.

Once the vector images were created I animated my characters through software, specifically coding using the very popular but also quickly defunct Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash. During my time at university, I continued to create characters digitally by going back and forth between Photoshop and Illustrator.

Animation using flash

Digital software came on the scene in the 2000s, graphic designers were seen as rockstars and there were not many around. Websites had to be hand-coded from scratch using html and css. Website front and back end systems like wordpress, wix and square space simply did not exist. If you wanted a website, you had to code every single little part of it, to which i did. Even Dreamweaver required a good understanding of html.

Flash was all the rage in the mid-2000s, it was a new program and it allowed website pages to be dynamic. Flash enabled objects to move on our computer screens, it enabled websites to be a visual spectacle of artistic talent. Yet all this movement had to be meticulously coded, in a flash-only code. I spent hours upon hours, days upon days, months upon months, learning this new code, to have my character (and website) move, just like I had 10 years earlier.

As Flash took off, more and more website designers uploaded their visual masterpieces onto the world wide web. This was a time when one person designed, built the website, did the coding, reviewed the SEO and finally published the website.

Flash was very popular for a couple of years until it was realised all the coding, text, imagery, and anything within the flash file was invisible to search engines, the only thing a search engine could find was meta-data. All the website content was in a virtual vault and search engines like Alta Vista, Yahoo and Google could not find any content within a flash site. To find a website designed in Flash the exact URL had to be typed in. Search engines and Flash did not communicate at all. As good as the websites looked they simply could not be found. During this time we were all learning about SEO, understanding how and why a website got picked up by a search engine. There were no instructions to this, this was grass-roots learning of how to optimise our websites to be found by the general public.

With a lack of SEO capability, Flash as a website development tool had a quick rise to fame and an even quicker fall to oblivion. Creating advertisement banners using Flash lingered until around 2010 when the program became completely obsolete.

Stop-start animation

During my time at university I became fascinated with the most amazing stop-start animator: PES. PES was and is the king of stop-start and continues this craft today. I played a little with stop-start, yet I can only find one video, which isn't the best quality. It is ASTRO BOY skating over the textbooks that helped me learn creative software. You will note this stop-start depicts how I felt at the time spending years learning about and coding animations with Flash. This video is a little rough, yet it shows the results of stop-start animation.

Animation and its influence today

The last time I animated was using flash in a professional context, creating banner advertisements circa 2010. I no longer work artistically animating or producing original images through digital arts as a form of creative expression. I do still design websites and associated graphic design - just like this one.

I picked up the paint brush (again) around 2005. I have never stopped drawing. I continue to paint and draw (mostly) in the two-dimensional form, that I first learnt at 16 years old. I embrace the styles I learnt through formal training. I continue to be inspired by my idols with similar styles: Howard Arkley, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and even Ken Done.

This framed image of Nokisua , is right next to my desk where I sit writing this blog, it reminds me of a significant and very influential period of my creative journey, 30 years ago.

~ atuk~