And Now For Some Social Commentary

This is a print-screen of what my Firefox drop-down tab for BBC News Latest Headlines contained yesterday morning.

That's right, the release date for Halo 3 ranks next to the UK tornado and the latest Middle East issues in terms of importance to the world.

It is now the next morning. That tab now lists topics dealing with Afghanistan, Disease Restrictions, US Integration...and still there's an article about Halo 3. No, I'm not a fan of Halo, but I would react the same if the release of StarCraft 2 makes BBC headlines.

Because no game, regardless of its parallax mapping or impact on the gaming industry blah blah, should be up there among the REAL news, the suicide bombings, the strikes, the natural disasters, the diseases, the things that impact entire nations, not just a few thousand baseball-cap wearing chimpanzees who spell their names with numbers in it and think violence is cool.

Okay, so it isn't all doom and gloom. Yesterday afternoon there was a headline regarding the weekend's Twenty20 cricket tournament, as well as one dealing with the current rugby tournament in France. Now, those headlines are gone. Moved over for something important. But Halo 3 is still there.

I feel that says something about modern Western society. Actually, Eastern too, if you consider that professional Starcraft players are regarded as celebrities over there and people get killed for selling virtual inventory items.

Yes, I play games, and there are some titles I'm looking forward to. But if they make BBC headlines I will feel sick.

Not Quite The Budget Of Transformers

'Life is a lot like jazz; it's best when you improvise.' - George Gershwin


And so we did.

While working on a pitch over the past weekend, we needed some background plate footage for two VFX tests. And so an animator (Gavin) kneeling on a skateboard became our dolly. After many crashes and a lot of laughs, we replaced it with a kneeling-posture-chair, pushed around by an editor and animator (Jaco and Kobus) underneath a nearby bridge. State of the art stuff indeed.

A guy with a camera on a chair, being pushed around by two other guys, filming a blank wall across the street.

Yes, people did stare.

...But Wait, There's More...

This one came all the way from the Czech Republic, from the AniFest 2007 Awards back in May, for a job we did last year (which won a Gold Loerie back then, too) The first statue arrived shattered (it's made from glass), but the organisers kindly sent us another.

You can't read all the text on the base in the jpeg, but it says:

AniFest 2007
Mezinarodni festival animovanyeh filmu Treban
Cena za nejlepsi reklamu

The website clarifies: Prize for the Best Advertisement, Introductory Spot.

It's standing at reception now, and is doing a great job as a conversation starter.

We interupt this programme for some shameless self-promotion

Whe-hey! July is the month of Loeries, and Wicked Pixels brought back six of 'em!

Well, since this is the advertising industry you won't see us among the winners, but if you read the fine print for six of the winners, you'll see Wicked listed as the production company and/or animation company (basically the people who did the hard bits). Therefore, as the behind-the-scenes folks, we're entitled to our own statues. 2 Bronze, 2 Silver and 2 Gold ones.

MTN-Stickes, mentioned just below, won Gold for TV & CINEMA CRAFTS-Animation & Special Visual Effects, and Bronze for ADVERTISING-TV & Cinema Commercials.
I mention this one because it's the one I spent about 3 months working on, along with freelancer and ex-Pixel Dmitri. Well, glad all that effort was worth it.

Go check our site's News section for all the details.

No, I don't do autographs.

edit:

Looks like I spoke too soon. On the page for one of the bronze Loeries, our team is actually mentioned by name. Go look, my name is under the Animation section.

But I still don't do autographs.

...And Speaking of Flaming in Comments Sections...

I while back (up until last month) I was involved in a commercial for MTN. Officially, I'm not yet allowed to reveal what and how much we (Wicked Pixels) are responsible for. That will be revealed at the end of this month.

Bizcommunity.com features an article (which, I must say, does skew one or two facts a bit). Anyway, its spawned quite the flame war in the comments section, and it appears that Wicked has been taking the most flak.

The reason is that the commercial is inspired by a YouTube video of similar concept. But then, the entire new MTN campaign is based around YouTube, and doesn't try to hide it.

I've been able to distance myself from the whole thing, and forced myself not to get involved. But I do feel like I need to clear up a bit of confusion.

Wicked Pixels is an animation house. We animate commercials. We don't conceptualize commercials. That would be the agency's job. The agency responsible is Metro Rep (if you've read the article you'd know this).
I therefore fail to see why Wicked is being flamed for the concept. And yes, you could say the concept was 'stolen', and you might be right. But if you're gonna shovel around blame, at least aim it at the guilty party.

But hey, exposure is exposure, either way.

Anima8.com

Among the sea of clips of 'kids crashing their skateboards' that is YouTube, you occasionally find a short animated clip. Now these animations have a real home, away from the Paris Hilton clips (and, hopefully, the juvenile flaming in the comments sections)

There isn't very much to see right now, only 95 public clips while I'm writing this, but it's certainly a site to keep an eye on.

Limbo

A while back I posted a test image from an animated short (about the animation industry) that I was working on at the time. That project has been on hold for more than 18 months now, and will most probably not be resurrected in the near future (if ever). But when I stopped working on it, I promised myself that one day I'd finish a short using that silhouette style.

My inspiration has been a combination of Tim Burton's animated films, especially Vincent and The Nightmare Before Christmas, Filmax Animation's Nocturna and a few others.

And just lately, Limbo.

It's an indie platformer game, developed in Flash, and it looks amazing. Especially the outdoor bits.

The foregrounds are just flat black silhouettes, but the grayscale backgrounds stretches far into the distance and gives the environments an epic scale, which you normally would lose the moment you work with an orthographic viewport and a silhouetted foreground (think of those Chinese shadow-plays). This nicely circumvents that claustrophobic feeling, and gives an essentially 2D piece a 3D quality.

The site doesn't give a whole lot of information about the game, but it does feature some concept art and a video teaser. Go check it out.

"Storietyd!"

So all you South African animators:

What was the first commercial animation ever produced in South Africa?
Who did it?
And when?


And would you believe that if you're older than 18, you've probably seen it several times already?



Start guessing so long, while I explain the background.




Due to...ahem...political reasons...television was only introduced in South Africa in 1975.

Dr Albert Hertzog, Minister for Posts and Telegraphs at the time, said that TV would come to South Africa "over [his] dead body," denouncing it as "a miniature bioscope (cinema) over which parents would have no control." -Wikipedia

Hmm...a very clear-thinking man if you ask me (in that respect. I don't agree with most of his other excuses and views)
This means we got only TV 14 years after Rhodesia (Zimbabwe these days). At least by then it was full colour TV. But, of course, due to the Apartheid policies, just about everybody was boycotting SA on just about every terrain, so just about nothing could be purchased to broadcast.
This then led to lots of homegrown shows like Interster and Wielie Walie...and so to the first commercial animation ever produced in South Africa.

It was the intro to Wielie Walie, a popular Afrikaans children's programme set in and around a house populated by a variety of puppets and two real people called Gert van Tonder and Magda van Biljon. The puppets ranged from a crow with a banjo living on a window-sill along with a friendly sea-monster, a book-worm living in the opposite window-sill along with singing flowers, three sock-monsters living in a cupboard... A merry, merry lot. They always sang. The sock-puppets once got hold of a phone and rang America to hear "the people there speaking funny."

Anyway, the intro was animated in 1975 by Boet Scholtz, the same year that broadcasting started in SA. The show started airing in 1976, and carried on for 20 years. According to creator and producer Louise Smit, the 8 second intro was the very first commercial animation produced in South Africa.

The irony is that I too watched that very intro, possibly more than once a week (I can't remember now if it aired every day or once a week) for several years, and do you think I thought I'd be writing about it 20 years later? Hah. Well, I was about 4, I probably didn't even know what writing was.

Anyway, so here, for posterity and nostalgia, is a bit of SA animation history.
You can find the theme song here.

Thanks to Jaco for capturing, and to Cubus for hosting this for me.

"Swim Away! Swim Away!"

Why, goodness me, what have we here?

It would appear that somewhere in the Big Book of Hollywood Rules there is a bit that says: "Underwater + sharks + animation = Huge success! Go make your own one! Now!"

Now, I haven't seen Shark Bait (The Reef) yet, (although others have) , and up until today I haven't even known about it, so I couldn't possibly comment on the story or animation, but just looking at the poster...well, it looks like a copy, really. I can forgive Shark Tale (2004); Dreamworks had already been working on it for a couple of years when Finding Nemo (2003) was released, although you hear rumours...but anyway.

However, I know the creators of Shark Bait/The Reef/Pi's Story/The Pearl at least knew about Nemo before they started on their version. Okay fine, so you're making an animated movie set under water.
No problem...not the most original concept, but acceptable. Now you work in a shark, a little orange orphaned fish and his love interest, and the concept starts going runny. Before you've even begun, you've come up with something that will inevitably be compared to and measured against the other two. Bad start right there. Already you look like you're just recycling someone else's story, and find yourself in the critics' firing line.

We've seen similar occurances before;
Antz(1998), Bug's Life(1998), Ant Bully(2006)...which were all different enough.
Madagascar(2005), The Wild(2006)...which was pretty blatant.
Shrek(2001 and 2004), Hoodwinked (2005), Happily N'Ever After (2007)...similar concept (the anti-fairytale).

I'm sure the list goes on.
My dad once worked with a guy who often said "Originality is the art of hiding your source." Hmm...enough said, I think.

Watch Out! The Invisible Men!

Forget 300, Spiderman 3 and Pirates 3. This is the next movie I want to watch.




It's called Os Trapalhões na Guerra Dos Planetas (The Tramps in the Planet War, 1978) and it's quite clearly a rip-off of Star Wars, in which four Earth tramps are recruited by Prince Flik (Luke Skywalker) to utilise "their expert help in retrieving half of the “brain computer" back on his home planet.
I discovered this through a review at The Wave Magazine's site (after typing 'tiki drum' into Google, would you believe?) The review alone is a good laugh and well worth reading:

"There’s a slight language barrier since the movie is in Portuguese, which I do not speak, and the subtitles are in English, which the person doing the subtitling does not speak."

"For added drama, the film switches to super-slow motion every time one of them does a spectacular move like kicking clumsily or shoving someone into the sand. This technique is so overused that the fight drags out longer than the spastic disco song they use for background music and the last few minutes of the fight take place in silence."

"While they search for Zuco, they run into random dangers like invisible men, flying fruit, a giant tarantula and a baby birdman. Each problem is solved in the same way – panicking, then going in the opposite direction of the menace."

I suspect, however, that the reviewer didn't even bother trying to be funny. The film seems bizarre enough. Kind of like Kung Pow, although of course, Kung Pow was meant to be bizarre and pointless. I also suspect that, as with Kung Pow, I'll be several thousand braincells poorer by the time the end credits roll. As would anyone else within a 500 meter radius.

Mathter...The planth!

Now this looks cool. I don't know why...I think because it looks like it could be a bit like Nightmare Before Christmas (yes, I know Nightmare is stop-motion). I couldn't really find much about it...only this one picture, the website, the IMDB.com entry, and this page. It's due October 2008. Oh, and it'll feature Christian Slater, Steve Buscemi and John Cleese.

Seems there'll be a short film first, then a feature film. I really want this to be good. There's been so many mediocre (not to mention non-animated) animated movies lately, and it looks like there'll be a lot more to come. It feels like absolutely everybody is making an animated (or, increasingly, mocap) feature film at the moment. And that's good, I guess, although quality often is thrown out the window in favour of making it quickly and cheaply. Ah, the old Creative Triangle...Good, Fast, Cheap - pick two.

Anyway, the point is that among all these titles lined up for release, the sun catches the edge of this one in a certain way...
Maybe I'm speaking too soon. Maybe it won't be anything like Nightmare. Maybe I'll be horribly disappointed when it is released. Maybe this isn't the silver lining on the non-Pixar/DreamWorks cloud. Maybe I'll have to go and burn down their studio after seeing the trailer. We'll have to wait and see.

But I'm hoping....

Mega Robot Returns

A very funny li'l short by Kaktus Film. Such a simple, clever concept. And I love the way the animators avoided the I-BIG-RO-BOT-I-MOVE-LIKE-RO-BOT cliché. The movements are more organic than mechanical. Check out that little extra move just when it figures out where the dog is. Brilliant. Add the fact that it appears to be very irritable, and immediately this thing becomes a character. Well done, guys. Oh, and the ending is great too. So unexpected. I laughed so hard.

A few behind-the-scenes images here. I love making-of's. Always interesting to see how other people tackled a problem that you might've handled in a very different way.

TO DO: Finish typing this senten...

On my harddrive at home I have at the very least 9 project folders of about 40 gigs of unfinished personal projects. I used to think that I have a serious attention disorder, since I've only ever finished 3 personal shorts in my entire animation career (all of which have been in my first 2 years of working, and therefore not fit for viewing these days)

Yes, so sometimes I get interested in a project again, go back, animate a couple more scenes, lose interest, and back into the box it goes. And I have a faint guilty feeling afterwards for pretty much wasting 20 or so hours, but that feeling goes away soon after.

It seems Sean Hayden has the same problem:

"The most enjoyable part of an animation venture is creating the initial idea . I lose interest once I sit down to do it- ( when the hard work starts).
I say this because im currently trying to work on my own film, where inspiration comes and goes. I battle to stop beginning other projects but sometimes I need to just create something - get it out my system - and put it away on the shelf."

Keith Lango also knows how it feels:

"It seems that he, like many creative types, has a kind of weariness for the actual implementation of the cool ideas he cooks up. In his latest post he shares how he keeps that spark alive while not de-railing the current project– Make something new! Just don’t do anything with it for now."


"...like many creative types..." Whe-hey! I'm not alone! I'm not the only one!

I done it in three hours, guv. Honest.

A little something I cooked up last night...empty scenefile to mpeg in just under 3 hours. That includes modelling, rigging, animation and rendering. I'm quite proud of that.

No, it won't win any Oscars (no mocap, see), but that wasn't the point. The exercise was to see how long my attention span is when working on my own project.

Turns out it's about three hours.

Hmm...maybe that's why I lose interest in all my projects so quickly. Hmm...

Thanks to Cubus for hosting this for me.

I haven't failed, I've found 10 000 ways that don't work.

So after my 2 previous posts, which were uncharacteristically whiny, it's probably time for a happy post. Normal service now resumed.








From Dilbert.com

Mocap killed the animation-star

I was going to write a whole story on the use of motion capture in modern 'animated' films...but then I saw this and this on Mr Keith Lango's website. So I'm not gonna write the same thing again, and he's a more concise thinker than me.

Go...go and read.

Life's a pitch

Creative pitch process ethics

from Biz Community

"One of the most constantly vexing issues to bedevil South Africa's advertising industry is the creative pitch process. The problem is not only the amount of time, effort and money spent by an agency preparing ideas and strategies for these pitches, but also the ethics of advertisers getting all sorts of new ideas from the process."

Here we see some local agencies complaining about their clients making them pitch, and the whole ethics issues surrounding that. Then they turn around and have no problems with making as many production companies and animation studios as possible pitch for them. Oh, the irony.

I'm not gonna say much more about this.

'The Time has come', the walrus said, 'to change your blog.'

Yes, welcome to the new Jackal's Blog. New layout, new colours, new content. Hopefully. I've been very lazy when it comes to updating my blog (usually because of a lack of content). But that's all about to change.

This new blog will be all about animation, so if you're not interested in the animation business, now is a good time to close this page and delete the bookmark.

I'm still busy working on the layout and details of the blog, but for now I leave you with a quote by Nick Park:

“If you aim for realism, and you don’t quite achieve it, it can become very ugly. If you separate your work from reality, the artistry and stylization become the focus. For me that’s the joy of filmmaking."