Canadian Animation Resources

showcase: ‘How To Be Alone’ – Tanya Davis & Andrea Dorfman

sir warren b leonhardt — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:00:39 +0000

After seeing how this short racked up 1,063,244 views on YouTube in just two and a half weeks, I just had to track down the collaborators of the gentle yet stalwart film ‘HOW TO BE ALONE’ (2010). It has obviously struck a chord and is filling a void for viewers. Not only that, but I like it. A lot.

The filmmaker half of the creative team, Andrea Dorfman, was kind enough to answer our patented ’8 Second Exposure’. UPDATE – Tanya Davis, the poet half of the team, also replied this week! We’ve just folded in her answers below. So we’re reposting it.

First, the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs

1) Names?
Andrea Dorfman (Filmmaker) and Tanya Davis (poet)

2) Where ya from?
ANDREA: I am from Toronto but have lived in Halifax since ’92.

TANYA: summerside, pei

3) Where did the inspiration for this project come from?
ANDREA: When Tanya and I first met, I had just gotten into a relationship after being single for a while and Tanya had just become single after being in a relationship for a while. As we were getting to know each other, we talked a lot about the worthiness of being alone. We decided to apply to Bravo!Fact for a grant to make a film based on one of Tanya’s poems but she wanted to write something new and asked me to give her a theme of something she could write about so I gave her the title, How to be Alone, and said, ‘okay, go!’. The rest is history.

TANYA: yes, andrea and i were talking a lot about being alone, solitude, art, loneliness, inspiration. and we already had wanted to do a videopoem together, so we thought we’d do it on this subject.

4) What governed your choice of media for it?
ANDREA: I had the idea that I wanted live action mixed with hand drawn animation but had never done it before. I asked my friend, Sam Decoste who was an imaging technician at the NFB in Halifax a few questions and just sort of figured out how to do it. I wanted the animation to feel like these were Tanya’s thoughts, or ideas that she’d write about in a journal or sketch in a book…

TANYA: andrea is a filmmaker and i am a poet/musician so videopoem seemed fitting. also, she has recently gotten into animation so wanted to include some
5) Whatcha doin for money?
ANDREA: Right now I am doing the second of two animated short films at the NFB in Halifax and I am teaching a video class at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the fall. I also occasionally work as a cinematographer for hire.

TANYA: i try to make money through the arts. grants, donations, odd jobs, touring, record sales.. debt, credit, investment, etc etc
6) Where can we see more of your stuff?
ANDREA: On my youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/andyradorfman or my website www.andreadorfman.com also, you can get my two feature films PARSLEY DAYS (2000) and LOVE THAT BOY (2003) from the video store (only the very awesome hip ones though – they’re minimally distributed).

TANYA: tanyadavis.ca for more of my stuff
7) Future plans?
ANDREA: Make more films, make more art, spend as much time as I can with people I love and eat great food.

TANYA: i have a record coming out in november. then some touring. also, i;m writing a solo show based in performance poetry. Andrea has lots on the go, always. We will be doing another project together, too.

8 ) Do garden gnomes really do the gardening at night?
ANDREA: Duh!

TANYA: garden gnomes are contemplatives who sit around and play classical guitars and serenade the night bugs.

So there you have it, folks! If you or anyone you know is hitting it out of the park & posting animation films online, drop us a line & we’ll drop the ’8 Second Exposure’ …on them.

comix: Hymen the Surly Panda, by Nick Cross

Mike Valiquette — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:00:17 +0000

click on the image for the link

Here’s an old comic by Nick Cross.

Oh, Hymen…

Showcase: ‘Almonds & Wine’ – Arnie Lipsey

sir warren b leonhardt — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:11:26 +0000

After seeing this wonderful film posted on Mark Mayerson’s blog, I just had to find out more about the artist behind it. Toronto-based artist Arnie Lipsey was kind enough to play our patented ’8 Second Exposure’ which is posted after his film. There’s even a BONUS film in the Q&A! Enjoy:

1) Name?
Arnie Lipsey

2) Where ya from?
Originally from Montreal, but that was long ago, in a land far away…

3) Whatcha doin for money?
As the heir to the vast Lipsey fortune, money is rarely a consideration.

4) Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
As an animator working in the industry, I needed to find something to do during “off” times, and had always wanted to work on short personal films (after all, I was trained in Montreal, and the NFB was always the ideal). And so over time I managed to produce two of them (a previous film, “The Crow and the Canary”, and more recently, “Almonds and Wine”). A&W started from an interest in the revival of Klezmer music. It seemed apparent to me that klezmer was the missing link in understanding the roots of 20′s jazz, and in fact strains of it can be heard on sound tracks of old timey musical cartoons. I thought it might be interesting to interpret a piece of pure, unjazzified klezmer for a personal animated film; to go back to the source, as it were. And using it to depict the history of Eastern European Jewry’s immigration to North America in 5 minutes seemed an appropriate challenge.

5) What did it inspire others to do?
Jeez, you’d have to ask them…

{Ed. note - for starters there was a mural of the film installed on the west side of Bathurst Street, two blocks south of Lawrence Avenue in Toronto. It was built by Cristina Delago. Pics HERE, HERE and a vid of the opening ceremony HERE! Arnie’s too shy to mention it, but we’re not because we think you should go see it!}

6) Where can we see more of your stuff?
The Crow and the Canary is also on YouTube:

7) Future plans?
My first animated feature, “3D House of Bagels” (see below.)

8 ) And the best kosher bakery in all of Toronto is – ?
Not really into Kosher bakeries, but don’t get me started on bagels (There’s only one kind worthy of the term- the Montreal Bagel. An authentic facsimile is available in Toronto at The Bagel House.)

Thanks for playing, Arnie!
It was fun!

If you or anyone you know is knocking it out of the park and posting their films online (and I guess happens to be from Canada), contact us and we’ll give ‘em the ol’ ’8 Second Exposure’!

Teletoon announces it’s schedule for the Detour Pilot Project

Mike Valiquette — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:11:23 +0000

Here are the listings I have so far. I didn’t get the press release for some reason, so I had to crib this from my pal Cameron Archer. I’ll update when I have the rest.

UPDATE: These are all the dates announced so far. Teletoon has just released their October programming highlights. We’ll have to wait and see for the rest.

Sunday, October 17 at 11:30 p.m. ET/PT

Fugget About It: Powerful New York under-boss Jimmy Falcone and his family try, unsuccessfully, to fit in the suburban life in the witness protection program in sleepy Oakville, Ontario.

Sunday, October 24 at 11:30 p.m. ET/PT

Dunce Bucket: Canadian comedy geniuses Lori Elliot, Terry McGurrin, Christian Potenza, Adam Reid and Renee Percy join forces to create some of animation’s most memorable and insanely funny characters in this sketch comedy show.

Sunday, October 31 at 11:30 p.m. ET/PT

Angora Napkin: A unique musical bubble-gum pop trio, Angora Napkin is a band unlike any other. Composed of three sexy girls, Beatrice, Molly and Mallory, their impromptu peppy songs attract trouble along with the macabre.

jobby: Junior Graphic Designer (Web), Crowdwave Games, Ottawa

Mike Valiquette — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:59:48 +0000

Game studio looking for a graphic designer to fill a junior position. Nature of the work is web and interactive oriented.

Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign skills desired.

Contact mikev@crowdwavegames.com

Position is full time, in-house. Ontario residents preferred.

jobby: Compositors, Starz Animation, Toronto

Mike Valiquette — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:35:48 +0000

Compositors needed.

Starz Animation Toronto seeks several compositors available to start working immediately. Stereoscopic feature work and VFX TV series work.

Contact Lance LeFort, Recruitment Manager at Starz or see the listings on the website at www.starzanimation.com for more details. All applicants need to be available to work in Canada.

If I were in Vancouver…

Mike Valiquette — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:25:35 +0000

…I’d be here: SPARK 2010

They’re playing Walt and El Grupo , and Waking Sleeping Beauty tomorrow night. Am I ever gonna get to see these movies?

Dangit.

PROCESS: BG Paint, with Nick Cross

Mike Valiquette — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:57:06 +0000

Nick Cross (Yellowcake, Angora Napkin, Waif of Persephone, Mr Floaf) is a generous soul. He shares with you, and he shares with me. Just look at his blog. See? Sharing. Nick has been generously sharing his process in a series of posts, the latest of which exposes the secrets to his succulent background painting. Nick has been generous enough to share those posts with us, Canadian Animation Resources. When you’re done wrecking your head with this awesomness, go stick your eyes on the rest of Nick’s stuff here.

My BG painting process 101

As of this week, animation on “The Pig Farmer” is now complete and I have moved on to painting the backgrounds.

For the first background, I chose to paint the opening establishing shot since it contained a lot of the elements that I would be using throughout the film. As I promised earlier, I saved a few versions along the way to make a brief tutorial of my process. It’s kind of a broad overview, in the near future I will do more detailed posts about specific steps as I finish other paintings.

Okay, here we go, first we start with a rough drawing.

By ‘rough’ I mean, tightly drawn but not super clean. Since I’m doing the whole thing myself, I can leave a lot of subtle and small details for later. This saves time since it’s sort of a pain to trace over small details and there isn’t much point doing something twice if you don’t have to.
At the layout stage, it’s important to remember what the focal point of your scene is supposed to be. In this case, it is the farm house in the distance. You want the viewers eye to immediately go to where you want it to, especially since this painting is intended for an animated film. Therefore, you have to be sure to keep in mind that the audience will only get a few seconds to take in the entire image.
As you can see, I made the roadway lead up towards the house. But I also had other elements in the image point towards it as well to keep the eye from wandering aimlessly around. Also, note that the focal point is not in the centre of the composition. It’s a more natural and more interesting if objects are not centred and aligned symmetrically.

The next step is to block in some rough tonal areas.

Since this part of the film takes place in the morning, at sunrise, I had to be sure that the lighting represented a sun just peering up over the horizon. Clouds at that time of day tend to be darker than the sky and shadows are longer. I also wanted to be sure that the lighting didn’t compete with the composition. So I placed the house in a pool of light surrounded by darker shadows. Since this is a cartoon, and therefore doesn’t necessarily have to follow real-life logic, I can put spots of light where ever they need to be. In this case, I wanted to have the house sitting in a pool of light.

Next, comes the colour block-in stage:

In this painting, because it is morning, I kept the colours in the warm range. Even the greens are warm (more yellow than blue). Notice that the sky is orange but not a garish vibrant orange, and it gradates to a warm gray as opposed to a vibrant “sky” blue. The most important thing to remember when dealing with colour is to avoid using intense and saturated colours. Never underestimate the value of using gray. Grays and neutral colours gives the eye a place to rest and this allows you to save the brighter colours to use as an accent. There’s a million other colour theories, but I can get into them more specifically in future posts.

Now I block in the secondary details. I also further refined the sky, adding a sun and lighting to the clouds. Again, notice that the colours in the sky are muted. The ‘blue’ is actually a cool gray. It only looks blue because of the relation to the warm colours next too it. I tried to look this up online, but no one seems to be able to explain it very well. But here is the colour in the color mixer in Photoshop to show where it actually exists value and tone-wise.
The other major change I made at this point was that I found that some of the shadows were too cool, notably the front of the house and the tree. They looked a little too out of place and didn’t suit the mood of a warm summer morning.

After this, I went ahead and added all the finishing details. I forgot to save any more steps, but I’ll try to explain what I did. The main thing is I went into the larger colour forms and added smaller forms of subtly different tints. Here is an example:
Although there are quite a few different colours within the main form of the tree, they are all tonally similar to each other. This helps to give life and variety to the main shape of the tree without breaking it up into separate random unrelated clumps.

Here’s a detail of the road. I tend to avoid using too many textured brushes. I like to use texture sparingly – much like colour – I find a little can go a long way. Here, I used just three tones of the same colour to represent the stylized ruts and ripples of a dirt road.

A detail of the sky to show how loose I kept everything. Again just a little texture for variety.

Well, I hope that this was somewhat helpful. I will be doing more posts shortly as I get more backgrounds finished. Keep watching this space!

Many thanks to Nick for letting us reprint this in its entirety. More to come.

Comix: Topshelf Reaches Infinity, numero deux, by Mike Geiger

Mike Valiquette — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:30:25 +0000

click on the image for the more Topshelf

jobby:3D Generalist, 3dsMax Animator/Rigger, 3D Modeler, Compositor, Digital Matte Painter,VFX Artist, Klokwerks Digital, Toronto

Mike Valiquette — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:11:13 +0000

September 3, 2010

3D Generalist / VFX Wanted:

Klokwerks Digital Inc. is looking for an experienced 3D Generalist / VFX artist available for contractual work. The applicant should posses experience in modeling, texturing, animation, lighting, rendering, vfx, camera projection, 3D tracking and compositing. FumeFX, Krakatoa and RealFlow experience is an asset. VRay experience is an asset. Production experience is an asset. Applicant must be able to work in-studio.

Excellent communication, interpersonal, and organizational skills are required. The ability to be creative and meet deadlines within a fast-paced production environment is a must.

Please do not submit applications if you cannot legally work full-time in-studio in Toronto or do not live in Canada. If you feel you may qualify for this position, please submit a direct link to your digital reel to careers@klokwerks.com.