An Exercise

As I hadn’t put pencil to paper other than for doodles for more years then I care to mention, I thought I’d best refresh my skills. Oh boy, was I rusty! I can draw recognisable things but they were lifeless.

I posted a drawing of my hand that I drew using my tablet on www.animationforum.net. I had greatly overused the pencil tool on Serif DrawPlus8, but I was reasonably pleased with it. Then n00b set me a challenge to do a couple a day and see how I improved over a week.

It was so nice to get some actual criticism, that I did it. The next one was damned with faint praise – the thumb was good. It was true.

I sucked it up and took my anger out on the brambles with my shears and got a huge burst blister bang in the middle of my model. Sore, I dashed off another one just using negative space. This time I was asked if I had traced it – result.

My smugness did not last long. I had a day off and then did two using pencil. The first one was crap. I thought the second wasn’t that deadly, but again it was rightly pulled apart as it didn’t show enough volume.

Next a lecture with diagrams was posted for me to learn. In my heart of hearts I know where and why I’m going wrong, but it is practice, or lack of it, that’s failing me. It didn’t help that every time I moved my hand it would split back open along the same line, even when I was sleeping thus waking me up.

Grumbling, I did another one. I knew it was doing me good, but I was tired from being woken up by my model and after doing my day job, it was a real effort to do anything. Better volume, but then a review showed my third hand was the best – the one I dashed off!

I changed the lighting a bit and my next effort was posted. The pads of my palm looked puffy. That’s me saying it.

Anyhow, I thought I should do some life classes, get my shoulder moving again, so I googled (my favourite occupation). I found www.meetup.com and there are a number of groups in my area. Woot! Signed up for one and might be able to go along tomorrow evening. It’s difficult trying to concentrate on drawing with kids, husband, housework and cooking all calling me. Getting a few hours away to do this would be bliss.

The whole exercise has been very illuminating. The one thing I have learnt is not to put too much thought process into drawing and over kill it. I love Matisse’s line drawings and used to try to emulate them. The ability to create volume without any shading is perfect for animation and I need to get back to where I was once.

I had a little contretemps with photobucket recently. If you label life drawing as nudes, it doesn’t like it. Funny that it only removed three out of the eight I’d uploaded. As it pissed me off, I deleted the rest and posted them to Deviant Art instead – within 12 hours I had a subscriber. Any how, photobucket replied to my complaint and apologised for removing my life drawings in error. That was nice, but now I’m wary of this “family wholesomeness” that is prevalent in certain sections of the over PC brigade. Woe betide any child that looks on a picture of a nude person regardless of any artistic merit.

To me a body is to be celebrated in all their forms; an object to be drawn. Fat, thin or perfect, I’ll draw the lot. The one thing I have noticed is that pretty, perfect people are the hardest to do. Give me a knobbly, lanky person with all their reference points and I’m in heaven. A pretty person has even features, is smooth and well proportioned; fewer reference points makes an error shriek on the eye.

So here’s the filth (sketches are A5, the pastel is A3)

Slodge

I haven’t been working on anything much in the last week or so. Work (the type that pays the bills) has been hectic. Coming home all I’ve wanted to is slodge in front of the computer and read about other people’s work.

Just did a cartoon of one of the moderators on www.animationforum.net Hope he likes it.

Frustrating

I didn’t get round to getting more RAM. Instead I learnt a bit about Quicktime Pro that I was persuaded to buy and download to make uploading my animations a bit better. So I splashed out £20 and got the registration key. Everything was fine and I was rendering my animations so much better than before. Then I had to add sound – what did they mean by saying “add the audio clip and it will stretch to fit, or I can mess about with frame lengths.” Excuse me, I have mapped out the whole video for lip synch – a programme should fit in with me not that other way round. Maybe I haven’t found that magic button yet – I’ll keep looking.

So I went back to my Ulead, and checked out a few more options. I found the render by frame that kept everything sharper (whoopee), but if I want to show it on the net, I still needed the QT Pro. It didn’t like that version of AVI and wouldn’t include the sound. This is now hair tearing out time. Finally I got a version out and uploaded to photobucket that didn’t totally reek. The best version is still on my website (all bits here are orphaned from other links).

Sorry, I've deleted the video.

Computer problem

I’ve chopped the scene down to nearly 5 seconds (4 18/25ths to be exact). The whole thing is very complicated with loads of vectors and I think I need more RAM on my computer. I only have 1Gb and it sounds as if my computer is struggling to keep up. It was using over 200Mb of memory usage when saving a section just over a second. This is the reason I’ve split the scene into 9 sections with a frame overlap. I will have to split them even further when I start turning the scene around. Maybe a trip down to the computer shop tomorrow is called for. It would be much better if I could get the whole scene on one take.

Some actual animation

Well, a bit of it. It's not quite right yet. The lip movement on "upside" is not clear enough, the expression as he grows is awful and it looks like he's waddling towards the camera. I haven't put any background people in yet, changed his head position or made him blink.Also, the background needs to be stretched, the flag fluttering and the foreground extended. In the final version the background with all the people except my main character will be turning upside down. This is part of one of the more complicated scenes and will be a whole eight seconds.

Sorry, I've deleted the video

Legal Stuff

Today I’m more interested in the legality of things. The song I’m animating is one that my husband co-wrote many moons ago. Gosh! He even had a minor hit in 1979 (got to 11 and 3 appearances on TOTP)) and we get about 60p a year from the song, but it might have been £1.20 if he hadn’t signed away 50% of the publishing rights early on – that’s a whole pint of milk!

Now the song I’m interested was a ‘B’ side of their third single that sank even further than their second (43 in the chart), and then the band broke up.

The thing is we don’t know what the publishing rights were on the songs that weren’t a hit, and how long the contract was in force. Paperwork was never a strong point for my husband (read non-existent). I eat legalese for breakfast and still have problems finding out the nitty-gritty. Mechanical rights are fine because we’re using an old demo tape recorded in a flat; it’s not that far off the studio version and needed a bit of cleaning up. The master tapes are lost – the album didn’t include the song after being double baked.

It doesn’t help that my husband won’t talk to his ex-manager, who was also owner of the publishing house. Check out his Youtube account (http://www.youtube.com/user/lovedupbritgit) and you might understand why.

I contacted PRS who told me to contact MPA. I did that on 27 February, and have just reminded them that I haven’t had a reply from them yet.

An eighth may be better than nothing, but I want my husband to get a quarter if I make it a hit. Is it too much to ask?