Animation made with TVPaint

[oyonawa]

Hello

Here is the first episode of a serie that I am working on for the NBC Universal channel MUN2.
It is going to be 6 episodes about two rats that live under a taco truck and do rap music.
It is focus to an audience of latin american teenagers that live in the USA.
All done with TV paint and finished in After Effects.

I would like to know what you think.

Best,

David

[Klaus Hoefs]

Apart from commercial considerations and compulsions, there are things coming to my mind:

a. character design: the rats at the splash are giving me more the feel of rat-like rappers as the ones with colors. So I'm missing scruffiness and smudginess in the world under the truck.


b. the bird's animation in the beginning is very smooth but the rats in the middle of your clip are missing some inbetweens.



c. putting real-world looking objects with cartoony things together gives me always a look of an ambigous world,although you've done a good job on combining them, it leaves me with ambivalent thoughts.

[slowtiger]

I agree with Klaus. The different amount of inbetweens in the scenes is very off-balance: the landing pidgeons seem to be on one's (rotoscoped?), the dissolving smoke is completely inbetweened, cars and stuff move on one's because they're tweened automatically - but the characters just hop from pose to pose, and not even very strong poses IMO.

Aside from that I liked the colours, and the blend of drawings and photographs was OK.

[Sierra Rose]

I think the character design captures the feel of street kids. And the sound track fits well too. The jerking motion of the rat needing tweens is also obvious to me and distracts a lot, especially after the smooth pigeons and the wonderful dissipating smoke, as Slowtiger noted.

I admire your drawing and painting.

I also like how immediately we get into the characters and story...good for getting teens' attention.

[oyonawa]

Thanks a lot for your comments.
I know it misses inbetweening but i'll see how the timming is coming for the second episode. For this one has been very tight.
The cleanup is the toughest part for me. I like to draw very loose and i tend to be a little bit dirty but for this animation they wanted something more clean, more cartoony which is not my style.

And to answer to Slowtiger, nothing has been rotoscoped and there is not a single photograph in all the animation. The backgrounds have been made by pencil and painted in Painter.

Well...Still learning here!

Thanks!

David

[Paul Fierlinger]

Actually the first thing that struck me as unpleasant was the acting of the voiceovers -- very amateurish, I thought. I didn't mind the unevenness of the animation parts as some did here; at least not for what the piece represents and who the target audience is. Isn't this all they are fed and consider the norm for real good animation? I am convinced that my style or Klaus' style would not be approved by this client. If this may sound condescending then it's because it is, but how else am I to judge a client who prejudges their viewers in such populist and demeaning ways?

So my comment is aimed at the client; people like that make me very, very angry. Such simple minded staple breeds the Sarah Palins of this world who then become the leaders of the Universe by popular demand. I think someone should wring their necks and throw them under a Taco truck.

[tonydusko]

So I guess the intent of the series isn't to teach proper English to Latin American teenagers that live in the USA.

As an elementary school teacher, I am at war with content of this type where to act and sound like a gangster is encouraged.

Paul and others;

Have you ever turned down work because it went against your values and/or ethics? Or is it too hard to turn down the money sometimes?


Now and then I show the work of Paul and Klaus to my fifth graders just to see their reaction to beautiful drawings that also move. They almost always appreciate it in many ways. I feel they enjoy how it isn't the animation they are used to. They are always so delighted to find out that there are other ways to do things.

[oyonawa]

Well

The intention of putting my animation here was not the start a discussion about the proper content to be teached to teenagers but to get comments about the style, rhythm, thoughts and feelings about the animation craft in general.

The client is a Music TV channel for american and spanish young people and obviously this animated series are supposed to be a parody, a joke about rap and celebrity shit and that is it.Period.
It is amazing that something so naive and stupid can be critized like this when we have thousands of ridiculous reality shows on TV that teach the worst values to young people every day.

As I said this is not the kind of animation I like and I am used to do but I still do it because it is a job very closed to what I like to do.

At least I make my money animating, illustrating and I keep learning day by day doing what I like to do and I don't have to lick the asses of advertisement agencies working for WallMart, a new f*cking cellphone company or the US Army.

C'mon it takes time to make a living doing exactly what you like to do.

Sincerely!

David

[Paul Fierlinger]

It's hard to judge animation by the way it's drawn while leaving out its content. Sure, one can say that a children's book has both good illustrations and bad writing. Actually, I thought I pretty much expressed my feelings about this clip. I think when people here go out on the limb to present their work they should be prepared to take the good with the bad without animosity.

When individual scenes of WIP are presented I tend to judge just the animation but when a completed film is presented, I feel that all is up for critiques.

I have an imbalanced record on the subject of turning down jobs I disagreed with. When work was in abundance, I've turned down offers because of its content, but when money was scarce and unpaid bills were plentiful, I've worked on anything that came my way.

My darkest moment came when I discovered that a roller skates commercial (Street Kings) which I was working on and that claimed they are strong enough to play street hockey in, turned out to be a false claim. I had already accepted and spent the first payment and didn't have the guts to turn the job down without being able to return the cash.

On the other hand, I once turned down a request to do some animation which unnecessarily depicted gross cruelty towards animals even though I needed the money badly and had no other job in sight.

In the case of David's film I wasn't criticizing David but his client who, in my judgment, has a very backward view of what kids will like and won't like. In a forum such as this one I feel it is useful for us to exchange our experiences with clients and anything else that influences our work: technology, personal viewpoints on taste, clients, bosses, producers ... whatever comes with getting our projects done.

[oyonawa]

You are right and I totally agree that it is good in a forum like this to "exchange our experiences with clients and anything else that influences our work: technology, personal viewpoints on taste, clients, bosses, producers ... whatever comes with getting our projects done.". Good!
But it is a surprise to me too that, as I said, something so naive like as an animated joke about two rats who want to be famous to be able to pick up girls has been seen as something backward, vulgar or gangster while there are millions of other things in TV today that too me are much much worse than that.
But I totally respect different opinions and points of view.

[tonydusko]

You're right David. I was quick to judge the content of your clip without realizing the full story. (Rough day in the classroom.) And I agree that there is indeed much worse out there on TV and the internet. I wonder how many of my students will watch "Wife Swap" tonight. And BTW, I have enjoyed your artwork since the Mirage forums.

And thank you, Paul, for the valuable insight as usual. I wonder how ethical I would be when faced with mounting bills and no income.

[Mandalaholic]

I liked it.
I liked your backgrounds.
Nobody even my age speaks the Queen's English any more.
Far out man..really groovy. Don't bogart that clip my friend. It was a mind blow. Pretty out of sight.
Now you know what era I grew up in.
Our grandparents hated those phrases.

[malcooning]

content is always a debate.

I have a good friend who is managing a company which makes quality accessories for weapons (not weapons themselves). This is marketed for hobbyists and (hopefully for them) some governmental units. He asked me recently if I can make some animations for him that he needed for showcasing on the company website. Obviously, in need of money, I can go for it. But with a very disquiet heart. Obviously it brings to surface all relevant moral questions. And even then, depends on the acuteness, the moral can be argued in many different flavors.

There is some equivalence to the desires of some parts of the population to change the way meat is being consumed in the market. some animal rights promotions would love to see the animal farming stopped. But this will never happen, not as long as we have choice. The point this promotion is missing is that animal farming can be made better, and closer to the ideal moral. But too often the efforts are not being invested in that direction, and invested in objection instead.

As content creators, we have the choice to either refuse, or take it - and if we take it, we should hope to have the possibility to improve the content by adding some of our inclination to the ideal.

[Julian wigley]

Don't forget the vitality of the drawn moving line (with its captured weight/mass)- some of your earlier work (on the other site) showed this off well, and expressed vitality (stuff the content). A bit like your avatar. Animation must be vital.

[oyonawa]

Here is another sequence in "pencil test" I am working on with TVPaint.

http://www.arteria.com/tvp_test.htm

More loose, more free and also content wise this is going to be illustrating a part of a real kidnapping.

As I said in the original post I don't like the cleaning part of the animation, apart from being very time consuming it ended up loosing expression and volume. Afterwards this volume seems to be recovered with the coloring process but the line looses a lot of power. I don't like the perfection of the vector line like in flash either.