York Animation

MOVING!

2011-01-05T17:58:00.000-08:00

Dear York Animation fans,

Living the frenetic, bifurcated hyperspace existence that is having multiple blogs, I'm subsuming this York Animation blog into my personal Alex York Art & Aesthetics blog! So, from this day forth, check over there for updates about York Animation. By combining them, my blog will be much more interesting and my posts more frequent.

Best,
Alex York

Progress, slow and steady

2010-11-28T17:29:00.001-08:00

A slew of updates! First of all, I've crafted a new animation demo reel for myself. You can view it on Vimeo, or right here, by clicking on the video below.

Alex York - Animation Demo - 2010 from York Animation on Vimeo.

Also, I'm working on a segment to go into Bill Plympton's Guard Dog Global Jam. This is a redrawing of Plympton's award-winning short film Guard Dog. Each artist has selected a single shot to redraw/reanimate in a style of his or her own choosing. Entries are due Dec. 1. I assume the edited film will be unveiled sometime in 2011. Below is a concept frame similar to what mine will look like in the end.

Lastly, I am making slow and steady progress on SQGRL! My original projections of having it ready by the end of the summer were highly optimistic, but I do believe it would have been done earlier if I'd not had to wrestle with several questions about the direction/needs of my own life. All that to say that my interests have been highly diverted over the past four to six months and I am now refocusing on finishing SQGRL! With that in mind, it will be done before the end of December. I have yet to decide whether to have an online release or start with festivals and move it online after it has, hopefully, traveled the festival circuit.

Work/Death/Animation

2010-09-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

After two months of figuring out a viable work flow for my animation, I've finally done it! Yesterday, I bought a copy of Toon Boom's Toon Boom Studio during a one day "Back-to-School" sale which involved offering school prices to all customers for a single day. With some of the money that I saved, I purchased some highly rated books on film financing and, joy of joys, a book of Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke storyboards!

Anyway, that's all to say that I'm back to finishing up the animation for SQGRL!, and I now have a viable work flow system. Since my animation drawings are on paper, it's a little more work since I first have to get them into the computer and then color them in Toon Boom. Yet, this will ensure that I have HD animation output in the end. Below is a still from the work in progress. This is approximately how the film will look. It'll all be black and white, like the original 16-hour comic. The animation will be vector drawings and the backgrounds will be hand-drawn/inked. This still has a storyboard for the background, though, otherwise the background will be slightly more detailed/higher quality.

NEWS

There's some good news and some bad news to pass around the animation community. The bad news is really bad. So, I'll put it first. Satoshi Kon is dead. He died at 46 last Tuesday, Aug. 24, from a bout of pancreatic cancer. During his lifetime he made some really incredible animated films: Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika. He was working on a film called Dream Machines when he died. I have no idea how far it was a long or what its status is. There's a good bit more over at the unofficial Ghibli Blog. A sad day for the animation community, indeed.

In good news, though, Hayao Miyazaki is working on a new film! Yah! Celebration! Party-time! And, guess what? It's Porco Rosso 2!! Officially, Porco Rosso: The Last Sortie. This will be Miyazaki's first sequel. The man is extremely inspiring.

Lastly, remember to watch for Tomm Moore's Secret of the Kells US DVD release in October, and be on the lookout for Sylvan Chomet's The Illusionist.

Amazingness on the Open Source Front

2010-08-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

I've recently got back to working on the SQGRL! animation, as well as researching possible production pipelines. I'd love to actually use real cells and ink and paint them and photograph them with film, but the supplies are astronomically expensive for a number of reasons, so a digital production method is needed. Although, the animation will still be hand-drawn. No Flash for me.

After checking out Digicel's Flipbook trial version, I think I'll have to pass on it. While it's got some great ideas behind it and some ringing endorsements from some top class animators, there are too many negatives. Flipbook sports a pro interface but it's one that seems unnecessarily convoluted. Problems endlessly persist that suggest to me if the developers had spend just a few more days, or perhaps hours, on fine tuning some of the software, it would pay off in great dividends. I'd love to see this pushed a little more, though.

The major software seems to be some version of Toon Boom software. As a lead provider of animation software, they project themselves as caring deeply for their product excellence and support. Also, I've found that I can probably obtain one of the home versions and not miss out on anything that I'd need for my independent animation. Maybe Toon Boom Studio. One can use a bitmap image as a background and then use the vector layers to create the characters and objects, just as one would have a cell over a background in the old days. There will be some cost, but for a good product and good support, I don't mind.

Also, I've come across the small, but promising Pencil animation open source software. It has many of the same abilities as Toon Boom using vector, bitmap and camera layers, though, it's still being developed. Yet, so far, the drawing seems rather excellent in it, and it will hopefully have a great future.

Lastly, for a video editing platform, I've just come across the almighty Blender. I may have a better impression of this software than it turns out to be, but it's an extremely powerful multimedia open source program. It's main focus is 3D modeling and animation, but it also includes a very nice video editor and a game engine with game dev tools for both 2D and 3D! Oh, joy! Regardless, I may be able to import clips into its video editing program after creating them in Toon Boom or Pencil, and assemble them with sound and transitions. It's all very exciting.

I'm not sure of when this will all come together. I'm still running experiments in the Toon Boom Studio trial version and seeing what I can do with Pencil and Blender, but, overall, I'm really stoked about the prospects of creating some high quality finished hand-drawn HD animation in the coming months!

SQGRL! Pencil Tests

2010-07-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

I've uploaded a clip of some of the storyboards and pencil tests from the in-production reel of my new short film SQGRL! While its far from being done, I feel fairly pleased with most of the animation. It's the best hand-drawn stuff I've done so far.

SQGRL! Storyboards and Pencil Test Clip (2010) from York Animation on Vimeo.

Entrepreneurial problems and Michel Ocelot

2010-06-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

Animation on SQGRL! is still going well, though, I'm running into the problem that I don't quite have the proper animation software. It looks as though the finished version of the film may be a little later than anticipated.

Now, different: Michel Ocelot has announced a new animation project! The man is a wonderful animator and someone with a true classical aesthetic. His film Princes and Princesses is a gem of silhouette animation. This new film will be silhouette with some computer animation for technicalities. It's called, get this, Dragons and Princesses! This is highly exciting. Truly.

Ghibli's Arreitty, Twitter and SQGRL!

2010-06-14T12:55:00.000-07:00

Ghibli released a new trailer for their upcoming film Arrietty, which is scheduled for a July 17 release in Japan! How very exciting! Granted, it will be some time before it comes to the USA, perhaps a full year, which seems the standard legal, distribution and English dubbing period. The preview shows more of the animation than I've seen from the film thus far. The backgrounds, as usual, look amazing, and the animation looks slightly smoother than in earlier Ghibli films, with, perhaps, the exception of Ponyo. Ghibli has, as one would expect, gotten better at animation over the years, but Japanese animation has always had the tendency toward a kind of hardened, scientific movement in its motion versus the fluidity and "squash" and "stretch" of traditional Western animation (Disney, of course, the flagship of that style). But, more on that topic later. I'll have to compile a whole argument for that one. The Ghibli Blog has the goods.

Despite my distrust of the concept and general dislike for trends that encourage superfluous human connection, I've signed up York Animation for a Twitter account and begun posting links to my site and work there. If you are willing, please follow the York Animation Twitter page to encourage its prevalence and visibility.

SQGRL! is coming along nicely. I've begun the in-betweening process and gotten through the first several shots. My pile of paper is growing higher and higher with hand-drawn animation! It's very exciting to me. This will be the first hand-drawn film I've completed since my Time Splork creation back in 2006. I've mostly done stop-motion, cut-out animation since with a few hand-drawn experiments. I'll post an edited pencil test video when I'm further along.

Kells, Blogs, and SQGRL! Production

2010-06-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

Just learned for Killer Film that the Secret of the Kells DVD release is set for October. Granted, I was rather hoping sooner. I haplessly missed the theater release by not paying attention and just skirting through Dallas its last weekend in theaters, only to realize my loss the following day... But, I look ever forward to seeing it.

I've added several blogs to my links list, not least among them the Pencil Test Depot, a great spot for seeing some various animation pencil tests, Michael Sporn and his "Splog", a reliquary of classic Disney animation info and illustration tidbits, and, also, I'm about to add links to the great James Gurney (creator of Dinotopia) and Cartoon Brew, a fresh spot of animation crossroads.

SQGRL! My new hand-drawn short is coming along alright. I've got about 13 scenes left to key frame, and some 30+ done (key frames and some break downs). End of summer (August) is still the deadline for the finished production.

SQGRL!

2010-05-27T11:20:00.001-07:00

I've begun a new hand-drawn animated short film. It's about an eyeball living in a castle on a distant desert planet when his charming evening is interrupted by a strange meteor that comes blazing in from outer space for a spectacular crash landing which our little eyeball friend suits up to investigate.

I originally planned the short to be black and white, but I'm beginning to think that I may color it. Either way, I'm about half-way through the key animations, now. But, I think it'll be the end of the summer before it's thoroughly completed.

York Animation opens new site!

2010-05-27T11:17:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone! I'm happy to announce that York Animation has gotten it's own web site rolling! I'll continue to post on this blog, hopefully, more often (something like once a week) and really get this going.

Go ahead and have a gander:
www.yorkanimation.com

The Boat on Vimeo

2010-02-16T21:29:00.001-08:00

Now you can see York Animation's new short film, The Boat, yourself! Check it out at Vimeo.com:

http://www.vimeo.com/9500805

The Boat, Completed!

2010-02-10T22:43:00.000-08:00

Today, York Animation finished post-production on its first film in 2010, The Boat, a stop-motion paper cut-out animation about a father trying to make his daughter's birthday wishes come true. The film came out to be 7 minutes long, a little longer than I had created the animatic. The film is now on its way for possible selection at two of the world's top animation festivals, the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France and Zagreb Animafest in Croatia. It's back to the drawing board for new storyboards, and, hopefully, a new film in the not-too-distant future.

Annecy and Zagreb

2010-01-14T12:50:00.000-08:00

York Animation is hard at work to create another short film in the style of Alex York's student film, Cell(s), with paper cut-out stop-motion. The film is called The Boat (though, I like the French title better: Le Bateau). We've upgraded to the use of a homemade multi-plane camera set-up. It's coming, frame by frame...

The film will be sent to the Annecy and Zagreb international animation festivals, and, hopefully, be in the selection. So, if you're there, look for York Animation's first

animated short film for 2010.

Logo design

2009-05-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

I just finished new logo for York Animation, and secured a Youtube title/name/identity by the same. So, look forward to some excellent films coming your way, soon.