All posts in inspiration

Just caught this in a NY Times article about “How to Be Funny.”

How to Draw Funny Pictures By Brad Bird, creator of “The Incredibles”

Because animation is a relatively complicated process, and because it is not spontaneous, it is often mischaracterized as purely mechanical. In reality, and at its best, the art of character animation exists somewhere between silent comedy and dance. Its success depends on finding a physical expression that is recognizable yet beyond what occurs in real life.

Fred Astaire had unusually large hands and learned how to use them in a way that made his dance more dynamic; he’d fold his hands for most of a routine, then flash them out for accents at key points. Their sudden increase in size made those moves pop in a way that other dancers couldn’t match. Animators use tricks like this all the time in ways that the audience never sees but always feels. Bugs Bunny, imitating the conductor Leopold Stokowski in concert, will violently raise his arms in onetwelfth of a second (two frames of film). Every part of his body will be rock-still — save for Bugs’s quivering hand.

It is impossible for a living being to do this, but not for Bugs. He is truly Stokowski, more Stokowski than Stokowski was himself, because Bugs is the impression of Stokowski: his power, his arrogance, his supreme control over his musicians, perfectly boiled down to its essence. We laugh because it is completely unreal and utterly truthful in the same moment.

As I read on, I noticed this all-too-true tidbit from writer Patton Oswalt:

“Lately I’ve been doing punch-up on computer-animated films, but the trick with doing punch-up on these movies is that unlike the live-action script, which hasn’t been filmed yet, the computer-animated film is usually 80 percent complete by the time we see it. And when I say 80 percent complete, I mean, “We’ve spent $120 million on this, so we really can’t change anything.”

“Uh, well then,” you’ll ask, through a mouthful of takeout Chinese, “what exactly do you want us to do?”

“What we need is for you guys to come up with funny off-screen voices yelling funny things over the unfunny action.”

I didn’t know you could make comedies that way! This is comforting news. Can I take old super-8 footage of a kid’s birthday party, where none of the other kids showed up? And he’s sitting at the kitchen table, and he’s got his little birthday hat on, and a lonely little cake, and he’s crying, and just when you’re about to kill yourself from the pathos, someone offscreen yells:

“I just fell on my fanny in some butterscotch!”

Wow, you’ll think, suddenly cheerful. Someone I can’t see, or will ever see, just fell into some butterscotch and is now talking about it out loud the way no one does or has, ever!

Did I mention there’s lunch? “

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the name, Syd Mead is a futurist and concept designer whose work has appeared in films like Bladerunner, Aliens, and Tron to name just a few. Last week he was in Rochester for a presentation at RIT. I made the trek out for the evening and was glad that I did. Though Mead is now entering his 70′s, the man is still very active in the industry today and has a lot of useful stories and bits of information to share. What I was truly amazed by was his futurist concepts that he did while he was working at Ford in the 1950′s. Somehow he was able to sit around all day creating these wild concepts for vehicles far in the future…I have a feeling that today that position no longer exists. (And not just because Ford is slowly going down the tubes.) Some of Mead’s designs from 50 years ago have become a reality; notably one that functioned much like a Segway. Not that any normal person really uses a Segway. (Which makes me wonder how willing people will be to adapt to new modes of transportation.)

Mead discussed some of his work on Bladerunner, which really sounds like a great project to have worked on. Though it was hampered by budget constraints and Ridley Scott being fired at one point in production, it remains as a high point in sci-fi movie history. You know how sometimes you’ll look at sci-fi concepts and not really understand what half the stuff is? Well Mead revealed that that is just part of the job. He will often throw some shapes together that have just the bare elements of a recognizable setting or object, but with plenty of extra features and dials and shapes to create a futuristic feeling. He showed one concept from Bladerunner of a bathroom in the future. You could tell that it was a bathroom because of the sink and the toilet-like device, (as well as the size of the room) but beyond that you’d be hard pressed to find anything else you’d recognize from a bathroom of today.

He also pointed out another concept (this one from a videogame) that had the classic ultra-detailed overly complex sci-fi look to it. He explained that in the future things would obviously be simpler and many tasks will be accomplished unseen (nanotechnology I assume), but for films and games people expect to see circuitry and pipes and wires and all that schmutz all over the place. To some degree I appreciate that classic look of “run-down and dirty sci-fi future,” but at the same time I think it has been overdone and doesn’t really reflect the way the future will probably be. (Whose to say, but as I mentioned before, there will probably be nanorobots that clean the streets and hopefully pollution will be eliminated.)

The only problem I found with Mead’s work is that it still looks the same today as it did in the 1950′s. His vision of the future has not developed as rapidly as technology has developed, but his rendering skills still blow me away. Mead recently released a series of DVD’s with the Gnomon workshop, as well as publishing a few books from his own publishing company. I picked up the latest one, “Sentury,” and got it signed by him. (Oh and I yanked these works from the net, thanks to whoever posted them.)

More amazing old illustration! This time it’s “Little Toot,” by Hardie Gramatky. Toot is the story of a lost little tugboat. (update: so I’m sitting here reading ‘The Illusion of Life’ all weekend and what do I see? A little picture of a tugboat. And I think – hey, that’s like that book…then I read the caption and it turns out Gramatky was a Disney animator.)

“When animator Hardie Gramatky left the Studio and moved to New York his apartment window looked out on the tuboats on the East River. Almost immediately he found a character like those he had animated. He called it Little Toot, sold the story to Walt, then went on to write book after popular book about the adventures of the youthful tugboat.” – Illusion of Life, pg. 503

So that explains the amazing color and personality in these paintings. Looking for more 1950′s-era illustration? Check out the Flickr group The Retro Kid, started by Ward Jenkins. Retro Kid features illustration from all sorts of thigns from the mid 20th century – album covers, toy packaging, food labels, etc. Also check out Vintage Children’s Books, another Flickr group with hundreds of awesome pictures focused solely on books.

P.S. Has anyone figured out an easy way to download lots of pictures at once from Flickr? It’s such a pain to click on each thumbnail for the larger version, right click, save, etc…Let me know if you have!