My first director’s credit was supposed to happen 30 years ago. That’s how I saw it all happening in my head, anyway. But I quickly found out that unless you’re born into the system at the right level of connectivity, that’s just not going to happen. If you have responsibilities to anyone but yourself, it’s just not in the cards, because you can’t risk letting them down.
And so it went, until I was 61, and I was finally in a position in my life to try something, because at this point I had to try something to move forward because nothing else was working anyway. And what I did was this.
Aphrodite and Ben from ‘Mighty Aphrodite!’
I created an animated web series almost on a whim, using a machinema engine that ran on my phone. We made a Kickstarter, it succeeded, and by the time we’re done we’ll have four animated episodes, about 3 minutes long each.
Gone with the Wind it is not. But it’s real, and it’s mine, and it’s my first producer’s credit, my first writer’s credit, my first director’s credit. As small a project as this thing is, I brought this into being by sheer force of will, and with the help of my wife Susan (without whose support it wouldn’t have been possible, and without whose participation it would have suffered from a character arc standpoint), and my actor and voice actor friends, we made a thing. It’s up on IMDB now, and it gives proper credits to everyone who worked on it.
The thing is, in my 20’s I thought I was going to be a director by the age of 30. I went to film school, graduated from UCLA, concentrated on screenwriting because it was cheaper than paying for all that film lab work, and I had a bunch of friends at the time who were all going into terrible debt paying for their student films. So I got my degree and out into the world I went.
And part of it was because UCLA at the time was not all that great a film school, and part of it was because I lacked the industry connections to make any impression on anybody, but my career foundered after that, and I went into computer programming and game development instead, and it was only after years of that that I finally came back full circle. Computers were now being used to make movies with, and I sort of slipped in the back door while nobody was looking and ended up with some 30 odd film credits. Unfortunately since I was working for an often neglected department in a very large studio, I almost never got screen credit for the work I did.
No matter. I still did the work, I still learned what a world class organization looked like from the inside, I still learned what world class artists and animators did every day and if not in every detail how they did it, at least what they did and where to look things up.
And now my lifelong dream of becoming a director and writer has come to pass, but it’s on the smallest project one could imagine. But it’s a commercial project, for a company – my own company, which I founded – and there’s an IMDB listing.
What more may come of Mighty Aphrodite! The Web Series?I have no idea, but I bet we can make some waves with it once I get the fourth episode done – and then we can release them all as a single piece, a ‘fifth episode’, if you will, which will be a good solid fifteen minutes of animated narrative.
I’m certainly humbled by the entire process. I imagined myself at the helm of much greater projects than this, but starting with literally nothing but an idea, I and my friends made something happen. We moved the needle.
I’ve always wanted a home at the Magic Store. I didn’t anticipate either that I’ve have to build the Magic Store myself, nor that the roof might be made of cardboard.
This year I’m hoping to put some shingles on that roof.
This is probably obvious to everyone reading this, professionals and fans alike, but animation is hard work. I’m learning this the hard way. I’m in the middle of production of my first animated web series Mighty Aphrodite!, and I’m quickly finding out that there are a lot of hidden tasks involved in producing something like this that actually haven’t anything to do with animation at all.
It’s fundraising, yes, but after that it’s writing, and scheduling, and recording voice artists, and editing.
And then it’s design and animation (in my case nearly all the design work was done by somebody else, an artist at the company who makes Plotagon), and then you have to render it all out. It was supposed to be a short little thing, just a few quick inserts to cover things Plotagon couldn’t do.
Ben is holding a box. You can’t do this in Plotagon either.
And then reality hit. Plotagon, as neat as it is, really isn’t suited for dramatic storytelling. Not really. Your actors can stand or sit in interesting settings and talk to each other. And that’s it. No walking through the scene, no getting up or sitting down as a motion, no carrying anything, no hand props (unless you count a cell phone welded to their hand), no running, no falling down, no dancing (unless you count dancing in place doing a weird sort of Austin Powers dance move). Even something as simple as a character handing a bag of coins to another character requires special animation.
So, you do your best, and you light everything, and render it out, and then you discover that you haven’t checked your scene well enough before sending it to the render queue, and you’ve just wasted $100 of render farm resources, and you didn’t have it to spare. Vowing not to waste any more money, you render it on the one machine you have, and 216 frames takes 3.5 days. So you’re now trading dollars for time.
Aphrodite standing up from a seated position. You absolutely positively cannot do this in Plotagon.
Some people use a game engine to produce their animation. Some animate straight up in Blender, or Maya. I’m doing a hybridized approach, animating using something similar to a game engine, and then padding out its capabilities when I hit something in the script that I need to do that it can’t do. The next result is that, at most, I have to hand animate perhaps 500 frames out of the some 8000 frames that comprise the episode, which is an enormous savings of time and effort. I only have to animate about 6% of the completed episode, and while that sounds great, and it means my production costs are $300 to $400 per episode instead of $25,000, it’s still a daunting, soul sucking amount of work. The production literally owns you until it’s done.
So far my damned project is about four months behind schedule. Thank God my backers are all behind me and being patient. But boy, lesson learned. An errant line in a script can mean weeks of extra expense and production effort. I’m so looking forward to finishing this episode, so I can get to work on the next two. This is a story that needs to be told, and we need significantly more money than I got on the first Kickstarter to make it not painful to produce the next batch of episodes.
The payoff, though, should be pretty huge. I’m using Plotagon to save me 95% of my production costs and time, at least, but it’s something that isn’t likely to be spawning a hoard of imitators. My show is going to set some records, and hopefully be greater than the sum of its parts.
I wrote this piece a number of years ago. Since then, I have been made Top Writer on Quora for 2018, and this kind of piece I think is one of the reasons why they did that.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The phrase is Latin, and is literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
In other words, “Who watches the watchmen?” I have encountered this for years, and I finally figured out the answer to that question.
And it’s a real answer.
The real answer to “Who Watches the Watchmen?” is, “We watch ourselves. We are answerable to our own conscience, ethics, morals and sense of duty. We can trust no one else’s more than our own.”
And that implies that we are being asked to follow somebody else’s ethics and morals without questioning them, and that’s exactly what we’re being asked to do by those very people who ask “Who watches the watchmen?” What they’re implicitly saying is that our own judgment should give way to theirs.
This argument is almost always used not in the search for truth, but in the obstruction of it. It introduces a self-referential logical conundrum that cannot be solved, thereby stopping any reasonable discourse in its tracks. By attempting to declare that there is no clear acceptable answer, the speaker implies that the opponents are intrinsically wrong, and this is a logical fallacy. An unknown solution does not imply incorrect action. It’s basically a false dilemma fallacy, similar to a loaded question such as “Have you stopped beating your wife?” or “Are you going to admit that you’re wrong?”
Those who stand up for the good, the innocent, the right and the just are often publicly attacked by those seek to set themselves on a throne and tell others how to think, feel and act — or worse, seek simply to do society harm and not be caught at it.
The next time you hear someone ask “who watches the watchmen”, think about why they’re really asking this. The answers may surprise you.
I was on a forum for internet radio broadcasters the other day, and the topic came up of why the music industry is in such trouble. iHeartRadio and Spotify are both facing bankruptcy, with iHeartRadio $20B in debt (mostly due to debt carried from a leveraged buyout), and Spotify in the soup for $1.5B. How did they get there? In part, it’s because about 70% of their income goes to pay truly exhorbitant music licensing costs.
The reason why is strange indeed, and it has to do with the way music streaming is licensed. Where a terrestrial radio station broadcasts a (usually digital) signal for anyone to detect and decode back into music in the room where they’re sitting, internet radio sends out an individual signal for each person. It’s as though there was an individual radio tower just for that listener, on a special frequency that only they could hear. Because each signal is legally considered a “duplicate copy”, a whole new set of licensing kicks in.
Now, I’m going to launch into a discussion of digital copying, which is at the heart of internet radio licensing law, but when I’m finished I think you’ll agree that it makes no damn sense.
Making a copy of music from the radio is legal. Before the internet, you used tape recorders to do this. And lots of people did. The recording industry tried to kill cassette tape, because they claimed it allowed people to make illegal copies of music. However, making copies of music for personal use is specifically allowed under most countries’ copyright laws. It falls under Fair Use.
Enter the digital age, and now internet radio uses a different technology. Instead of putting a single signal out into the aether for anyone to detect and decode back into music at their receivers, each individual listener needs to be feed their own copy of that signal. Every listener needs their own separate stream.
Because the signal is now duplicated at the server end when a listener requests a connection, instead of converting the signal into an audible sound stream at the listeners’ receiver itself, the licensing organizations want to call that a “mechanical copy”, and they want it to be treated the same way as a tape cassette or a CD copy of that music. And in fact, the United States, Canada and the U.K. all refer to streaming music over the internet in these terms. This is despite the fact that nearly everyone captures the stream and immediately converts it into sound, discarding the music moment by moment as it plays.
Recording the audio is certainly possible, by a variety of means, but in the purest sense this is no different than sticking a microphone in your stereo speakers and hitting the record button. The stream from your radio station isn’t a copy. It’s data, like what flies through the airwaves from a radio station, every moment of every day. It’s not a copy until you store it.
This Sounds Fishy To Me …
Me too. But as internet radio operators, we have to pay two licenses, one the original artists’ licensing that all terrestrial broadcast pays, and the other this “duplication fee”, because the PRO’s have managed to convince the lawmakers (in most countries) that broadcasting a digital stream through the internet is somehow fundamentally different from digitally encoding and broadcasting that same stream over the airwaves.
How did the music industry function before internet radio was a thing? It was obviously possible – yet somehow we have this redefinition of what a broadcast is because we’re using different technology to accomplish exactly the same thing.
All this lunacy aside, ripping a stream means making an illegal unlicensed copy of that music, even though doing the same exact thing with a terrestrial radio is perfectly legal.
Are we, as internet radio providers, liable for this? No, we’re not. The crime does occur, but it occurs on the far end, where we can have no control whatsoever over the people doing it. It’s literally out of our hands, and we have no legal responsibility one way or the other to stop them from doing it, even if we could tell for certain what they were doing.
So How Does This Hurt the Industry?
It’s murdering it, but not because of stream ripping. What’s happening is that the licensing fees charged to the big internet radio stations – and that’s what most people listen to now, not terrestrial radio – are roughly double what a terrestrial station plays. I don’t know the actual ratio, but it’s a lot.
This basic misunderstanding of the true nature of internet radio is part of why internet radio companies are going out of business right and left. At this point in time, independent internet radio in the United States is down, by my personal estimate, by about 85% from the number of stations present in 2015.
Terrestrial radio stations don’t count here. Most of them have internet feeds too, and they have to pay the extra fees like everybody else. The tiny stations that run on shoestrings, though, they’re the casualties here.
The loss of an individual station doesn’t have much of an effect. Pushing music licensing out of reach of all but the most dedicated business operators, though, has had a massive, very evident chilling effect on an entire communications medium in the United States, and forced many of them to move their operations outside the boundaries of the United States into other countries where U.S. internet broadcast licensing does not have jurisdiction. Almost no country but the U.S. has such restrictive and expensive laws regarding this industry, and the greed of the performance rights organizations are strangling the industry.
This Sounds Bad. What Happens Now?
What happens when iHeartRadio and Spotify (two of the big four, the other two being iTunes and Pandora) collapse under the strain of these fees? The music industry is in for a massive shakeup, and the performance rights organizations like BMI, ASCAP and SESEC are going to be the losers in this.
I never write about specific incidents in politics, because it’s such a snakepit of a topic, but today I need to make an exception. I believe that something evil is afoot.
Senator Al Franken (D) New Jersey has recently been accused of groping cast member Leeann Tweeden during a USO tour in 2006. There are so many things wrong with this accusation, and a lot of reasons why I think this whole thing stinks to high heaven.
She was rehearsing for a USO skit, for a script she read in advance (a script Al Franken could not have written so as to take advantage of Tweeden, because he wrote it in 2003), so she knew what was going to happen before it happened. She was on that USO tour because at the time she was a famous soft-core porn pinup girl. It was literally her job to titillate the enlisted men. This does not diminish the potential validity of her claim of abuse, but it does demonstrate that she should have been aware that her personal space was likely to be violated during the trip, and repeatedly, while the show was on tour, as part of or related to the entertainment being presented.
The photo shows Franken pretending to touch her, but if you look at the shadows under the fingers, he never actually touches her, and the photo was quite obviously staged. This is theatrical limerence, not sexual aggression. Feel free to disagree with me, but this is what I think. You’ll also note that she’s wearing a flack jacket. He’s pretending to grope her through a flack jacket. Let that sink in a moment.
This photograph was taken on a USO airplane. Tweeden was asleep. You can clearly see the shadows of Franken’s fingers on Tweeden’s flak jacket, so it’s very clear that he was not actually touching her flak jacket.
Franken was under military guard the entire time he was there. Even in the men’s room. They followed him into the men’s room. It was that guard’s duty to stop any untoward or forbidden behavior Franken might attempt should he do so, and he wasn’t left alone for a moment. Literally. Tweeden’s claim that Franken lip-locked her once he got her alone couldn’t have happened the way she claimed. They were never alone, ever.
The accuser is a Fox News employee and Trump spokesmodel, so she’s part of an organization that has a great interest in taking potshots at Democrats, especially Senators who might have something to say about who gets approved on judicial nominations. Fox News is a strong ally of the GOP and parrots the GOP spin machine virtually unedited most of the time.
Franken has called upon Congress to launch an investigation into his own behavior. This is not typically something something you do when you are guilty. Tweeden hastily responded to this by saying,”Oh, no, that won’t be necessary.” She’s already come out with this accusation, and we’ve all seen the staged photograph, so that’s established. What would an investigation uncover? If Franken is volunteering, you can bet the answer is “little to nothing”, or why do it? If Tweeden wasn’t serious about the accusation, why make one? If she was, why back away from Franken being investigated? What’s she hiding? She’s an entertainer, and used to being paid to say and do all sorts of things that might not be in her nature. Where’s the real Leeann Tweeden in all this? How much is fiction? How much is real?
She’s already been offered a book deal by Sinclair Publishing. This is a branch of Sinclair Communications, well known for pushing right wing agenda as though it were news on TV and radio stations across the country. THAT was fast. How did they know to set this deal up this fast? Interesting. Usually you wait to see if a person’s story isn’t going to fall apart under scrutiny first. Like, a day or two at least.
She allegedly showed the picture to her husband shortly after it happened in 2006, and neither she nor her husband felt it important enough to do anything about. It wasn’t until Franken became a political powerhouse that it was suddenly relevant – not because of what Franken did, but because of what Franken became long after the fact.
Lastly (and this one is big), it appears that the photograph in question carries metadata, which shows the actual time, date, and equipment used to take the photograph. It says that the photo was taken on December 21, 2006 and not on December 24 as Tweeden claims. Her allegation is false in some major aspects. It gets worse. The metadata also shows the picture was altered the SAME DAY Coleman conceded to Franken, meaning someone was planning on using this against him from the second he became senator. This data is called EXIF data, and it shows not only when the photo was shot, but the last time it was altered. In this case it shows that the photo was altered on July 1, 2009, so it’s been through Photoshop. This doesn’t mean it’s been doctored, necessarily, but it does mean that somebody cropped it and made a copy of it for later use, on a very significant date.
4. The photo here, if you check the metadata – was taken at 5:19 PM on December 21st. So – not Christmas Eve. Not at night while sleeping. Folks, grab a copy of the photo and follow along with me. https://t.co/XQL5yQO3sN
This absolutely reeks of a setup – and the GOP is trying anything to fix their Roy Moore problem. It looks like he may not win his Senate seat, and they need him to vote the way he’s told in the Senate. They’re possibly looking at taking Franken out as a way to counterbalance losing a seat to Doug Jones, Roy Moore’s democratic competitor.
And then there’s this. This video shows Tweeden grabbing the ass of a lead guitarist on stage, and doing a sort of lap dance thing against his leg. Does this mean her own accusations are invalid, or make them somehow less true just because of this? Does this make her a “loose woman”?
Of course not.
She is a performer, an actor. She was being paid to do this, just as Franken was.
However, it also shows that she knew full well that she was part of a theatrical production, and knew in advance what was in the show and what was going on. She shouldn’t have been taken by surprise by any of this; the point here is that she knew in advance that things like this were likely to happen, because she was doing them herself.
This whole thing is evil twice – once simply because it appears that the charges are largely concocted to try to take out a political adversary of the GOP, and once because it poisons the well for the #metoo movement of women (and a few men) coming forward to talk about the sexual aggression to which they were subjected.
My conclusion? It’s all fabricated. The most evil thing Franken might be guilty of is a joke in poor taste.
Obi-Shawn’s t-shirt design for his morning show on Krypton Radio, “Good Morning, Tatooine!”
This was written in 2017. We changed the name of the station to SCIFI.radio on January 25, 2021.
We use Patreon to keep our sci-fi radio station, Krypton Radio, fueled up and on the air, and it’s been working for years. However, it’s also a struggle, and we’re not doing anywhere near as well as we should be given the size of the market. Getting the word out is an enormous problem when what you do is a service, not putting 100% of your energy into a single one-shot incendiary mortar shell of a geeky project.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
Patreon is Hard
The main issue with Patreon is that you have to live there to make it work. You can’t run your stuff out of your web site and visit only occasionally, you pretty much have to move into Patreon and run your entire operation from there.
For most creators, that’s a real problem, because they’ve spent years developing a following on the web and in social media, and it’s very hard to get your fans to follow you over to Patreon, and it’s hard to keep their attention once you do. Patreon is not social media, and it lacks all the things that make people hang around for extended periods. Once your patron is done reading your page, there’s nothing else to keep them there.
Very very recently Patreon has released a plugin for WordPress that makes it possible to post Patrons-only content on your own web site, so that lets you bring the Patreon to the fans instead of having to do it the other way around, and we’re about to start experimenting with members-only content that way. We have no idea how much or how little that will help yet, it’s totally uncharted territory for us.
One important factor with Patreon is that you have to be very very active in it or people will think you’re out of business. A post a week isn’t bad. Two a week is probably optimal.
Another important factor is that you’re going to have to plan your productivity to include creating assets specifically for Patreon that aren’t directly part of whatever creative thing it is that you do. You’ll need videos, graphics, short articles, sound bytes, all sorts of things specifically shaped to the needs of running a continuous crowdfunding campaign. It’s like running a Kickstarter, but you never get a break and it never stops.
But Does It Work?
Well – I can honestly say that we wouldn’t have a radio station if it didn’t work.
Advertising certainly doesn’t work. Nobody clicks on anything, and web browsers are built to filter them out by default. Kickstarters are a pain, and very stressful and make you crazy. Subscriberships are the only way to go if you want to be paid every month for what you do.
What About the Perks?
That’s one of the things we’re struggling with.
We produce audio, so there’s no finite physical product that we can send people. We have to come up with content specifically geared to being output in little parcels that our fans would want, so we’re exploring publishing fiction exclusively for our subscribers.
We’re also developing a sci-fi radio drama, and when that comes out we’ll have props and costumes, and challenge coins, and patches, but it’s a massive push to get it done, and it’s taking years longer than we planned to do this.
We also feature a line of sci-fi / geek t-shirts that we’ve designed ourselves that nobody else carries, and you’d think that would be an attractant, but to be completely honest, apparently nobody gives a @#$#@ about t-shirts. Like, at all. We’ve given away maybe two of them as perks in the last two years when people ask for them, despite the fact that half our patrons are eligible for them.
White Elephant? Why, Yes. Yes We Are.
Part of our problem stems from what we are. We’re a full time sci-fi fandom format radio station, and that makes us unique on the planet (one or two other stations lay claim to this, but they also do things like fill up 60% of their air time with metal or hiphop). We don’t fit categories. In anything.
Most radio station listing services don’t even have a listing category for us, so we get stuck in “Other”, or “Eclectic”. Nobody searches for “other” when they’re looking for a radio station, and people don’t think to search for sci-fi radio because all they get is podcasts when they try it – so we’re hard to categorize, hard to find, and searched for much less than we’d like because people don’t even realize that full time sci-fi radio (as contrasted to a podcast) is a thing.
Our response for that is to hit as many distribution platforms as we can. We get another dozen patrons, and we will be able to get listed on iHeartRadio. Suddenly we’ll be exposed to 70 million iHeartRadio subscribers, and available in people’s cars, which is where most people listen to the radio in the first place. We’re hoping our fortunes will improve after that.
What’s Next?
Our biggest problem is that since nobody knows we’re here, relatively speaking, we have to maximize our exposure. We have to position ourselves so that the maximum number of people have a chance to find us by serendipitous search. I can’t tip my hand just yet, but there’s another distribution network we’re looking at in addition to iHeartRadio, and between the two of them we’ll have exposure to a new potential audience of 190 million people that we didn’t have access to before. We’ve never made a jump this big before, and surprisingly, the two services we’re going after will make us big fish in a small pond despite the huge subscriber numbers for each service.
The reason is, once again, that Krypton Radio is unique. Literally nobody else in the world does what we do the way we do it. It’s not like regular radio stations. How many hip-hop stations are there across the country? About 250. Rock? About 360. Oldies? Oh my god, 500 plus of those. Metal? You get the idea.
But full time sci-fi geek culture genre format stations? There’s one. When people look for that, they find us, and that’s it. I’m hoping to improve our odds by expanding our “broadcast range” so to speak.
Nine tenths of success is not giving up. We’re already heard in 135 countries and we reach between 65,000 and 100,000 listeners a month depending on the season.
Expect to send out about 30% of what you get as perks. People pay money to get stuff, as much as to help you. Show your true appreciation, even if it hurts a little. You’ll be much better off. Of course, you do have to make your goals, so you’re walking a fine line when you’re just starting up. It helped a lot that Patreon started doing fulfillments as a service, so that we can spend our time actually doing the thing instead of churning around trying to do fulfillments, which we were very bad at.
Name Yourself Something that Makes Sense
When we changed our name from Krypton Radio to SCIFI.radio on January 25, 2021, suddenly our findability and listener traffic jumped 30% – and it stayed there. It was a permanent boost, and the boost we needed. Now we’re reaching 300,000 listener connections a month, over about 110,000 uniques. This, in turn, has translated to a big boost in Patreon receipts, a bigger jump since the January name change than we’ve ever seen in the history of the station.
When I first sat down to write about Star Trek: Discovery, I had some very clear thoughts about why I wasn’t happy with it. Then I posted them on Facebook, then I copied them here.
After I had done that, I was given a teachable moment, and learned from a writer and director exactly why I was on the wrong track with most of it.
First, What I Thought Was Wrong
Here are my thoughts on Star Trek: Discovery, and why I’m disappointed in it.
After a 12 year drought, we finally have new Star Trek to watch. It should be the return of the prodigal son, but it isn’t. Here’s just a few of the things wrong with the show from my perspective, having nothing to do with CBS’ abusive treatment of the makers of Star Trek fan films, or the bizarre decision to put Star Trek behind a paywall for U.S. audiences.
If you haven’t seen Star Trek: Discovery and plan to, STOP READING HERE, because there are SPOILERS after this. You have been warned. Anything bad that happens to you after having read this warning is therefore your own fault.
People have been asking me what I think of Star Trek: Discovery, and I have to tell them that it’s just not wonderful.
They’re dumbfounded. Yaaaay, Star Trek, there’s finally new Star Trek, yaaaay.
And then I tell them, I’m sorry, but while somehow despite all its faults it’s watchable, and that this is an achievement, all the problems mean it’s not great Star Trek, or even great story telling.
And then they get incredulous, or defensive (even aggressive in some cases), and demand that I explain myself.
So here goes:
If you can’t get a lock on a body without a life sign to beam it back, why can you get a lock on a body without a life sign to beam anything to it?
Spores are how fungi reproduce. They cannot, by definition, quantum entangle. This is not science fiction. It is deus ex machina. What they have created here is magical woo-woo space boogers.
The potentially dangerous anomaly is too far into the danger zone for the ship to fly. So instead of sending, oh, I don’t know, how about a PROBE? No. We send Michael Burnham in a space suit. Wait, what?
If a pile of Klingons and an entire Federation away team couldn’t control the Tardigrade, how did Captain Lorca manage it? And why didn’t he do that in the first place instead of letting it kill all those people?
How is it that a creature than can instantly teleport anywhere in the universe be contained by a security field? Woops, watch your step. Plot holes are everywhere.
We have a primary hull that spins now, like – what is that thing it reminds us most of? Oh yes. #usspizzacutter
The Discovery’s chief of security, one of the most trusted officers on the entire ship, is really such an arrogant, irresponsible trigger happy goon that she gets herself killed over it? Really?
In 2369, on the Enterprise D, the holodeck was this remarkable new technology that had never been in a Federation starship before – and yet, here we are on the Discovery, in the year 2255 and there’s Captain Lorca and Lt. Taylor doing combat training in one, 114 years too early. Continuity is apparently for losers.
Peace loving Vulcans shoot first. Wait, what? What did I miss?
Vulcan soul katra does not work like a telephone. Or shouldn’t. The fact that it does in Discovery is more space magic deux ex machina. In Star Wars it’s established that you can talk to Force ghosts this way, or send very simple messages over relatively short distances to other Jedi, but in Discovery it works like a 3D holodeck, complete with tactile feedback.
Why did the first two episodes exist at all? These should have been folded into Episode 3 as backstory so that we could start the series actually on the Discovery to start with. This is just bad writing, this is screenwriting 101 stuff. This must be why we’re getting 15 episodes instead of 13 – they padded it with two pointless extra scripts.
Why is the Klingon makeup so over-designed to the point where the actors can’t move or speak in it? What was the point of doing that? They could have saved twenty thousand dollars just using slipcast rubber masks if that’s the result they were going to get. I’ve seen better makeup in fan productions.
Can whoever is in charge of the lights on the bridge please turn them on? Seriously.
Can whoever is in charge of the lens flares on the bridge please turn them off? If there are no damn lights on the bridge, where are the lens flares coming from?
When we saw the delayed reflection of Stametz as the cliffhanger of one episode, why did we completely drop the subject in the next episode? Okay, so that was nothing. Then why was it there? Or if it was something, why was it there instead of someplace else where it would have made more sense?
If the Tardigrade could have jumped away the entire time, why didn’t it do that in the first place? (See above complaint about not being able to jump out of a force field.)
The Tardigrade rehydrated itself in the vacuum of space. Where did it get the water? We could presume that since it could teleport anywhere in the universe, it might also be able to teleport anything it wants to it, but that’s rationalization, not established or set up in any way in the plot.
They ejected the Tardigrade directly into space through a tube that led from the heart of engineering straight to the outer hull opening directly to space. Really?
Why were the stealth detection devices Burnham took onto the Klingon Ship of the Dead so bright, flashy, and noisy? They were custom built for the job, so a conscious decision had to have been made to make them as stupidly non-stealthy as possible. This makes no sense whatever.
Harvey Mudd knows more than probably any one person alive about how to get past the security methods on a Federation starship, and he killed the captain 52 times trying to take the ship, using a time loop device. He’s possibly the single most dangerous man known to the Federation at this point, and was spying for the Klingons, but they let him just sail off with his wife when it’s all over, with no punishment whatsoever. Wait, WHAT? And whle we’re on it, why are were these episodes even produced? They literally add nothing to the story line, and apart from the marginally necessary first two episodes, are the only other episodes that don’t.
Captain Georgio and 1st Officer Burnham, the two most senior officers aboard the Shinzou, decide not to send trained security personnel on a ship-to-ship mission to a Klingon heavy cruiser. Neither of them is armed with more than a hand phaser, the two of them together weigh 280 pounds soaking wet. They know Klingons are big, because Michael Burnham killed one. So they beam over to a hostile ship with no knowledge of how many of these hulking, bred-for-combat highly trained adversaries they might be facing. Wait, what?
Surprise, Tyler was Voq’ the whole time. Seven episodes in. Like we couldn’t tell four episodes back. Please.
Surprise, Lorca is from the Mirror Universe, like we couldn’t tell twelve episodes back. Please.
The entire series leads up to handing the Klingon woman the genetic key to the bomb? Hello, just kill her. The bomb can’t detonate if she doesn’t push the button, and she can’t do it if she’s dead, so giving her control of the bomb solves literally nothing. They can’t make it a deadman switch either, because as soon as she dies of old age, kaboom. Or leaves the planet for any reason, kaboom. That’s the weakest ending scenario they could possibly have gone for. And she’s just like oh, yuppa yup, okie dokie, I’ll end the war now. Uuuuuhhh, what? Did everybody just take stupid pills?
How many was that? Two dozen issues? And I didn’t even get into the ridiculous “reimagining” of the Klingons that loaded the actors with so many silicone appliances and different sets of goofy teeth that for the most part it was all they could do to huff out their lines through the unresponsive makeup. They had their occasional moments, but for the most part they simply didn’t work. Nor did I address the series ending, where all 23 houses of Klingons suddenly decided to act responsibly instead of the leader of at least one house succumbing to Klingon battle rage (something Klingons have always been known for).
And to be frank, that’s not even a comprehensive list of all the script problems, and you’ll notice that I didn’t even touch the jarring discontinuity of Starfleet technology as a significant flaw that affected every single other creative decision they made after throwing that out. It’s not just a fan being butt hurt about the show being inconsistent with established canon. Canon is useful for a reason: if you stick to your continuity, your show fits well with the rest of the established universe and can be taken seriously as an addition to the universe. If you don’t, then what you do looks like a tacky attempt to pump money out of a franchise.
Of course it was restricting. Of course it’s difficult. There’s a cure for that, though. It’s called “writing”.
When red herrings and “deus ex machina” are regular plot devices, and when the writing just falls apart from day one, and when the art direction runs amok, it detracts from one’s ability to actually watch and enjoy the show.
Is anybody actually in charge? Which of the show’s eight or nine executive producers actually producing? I’m guessing not very many, and the ones that are are either overtaxed or not paying attention.
This is why I’m not as enthused as I wish I could be about the new Star Trek. That there would be so much wrong with the show after only six episodes is staggering. It’s also insulting, because it demonstrates very clearly that CBS thinks we’re all just too stupid to notice any of this.
Each episode appears to have had a great deal of spit and polish applied to it, with a great many people applying their very best efforts to make it look as good as they possibly can. The attention to the quality of the acting and the visual design was obviously there, even if we don’t all necessarily agree on what that should have looked like. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be anybody watching to make sure it all meshes together properly, and in many cases it simply doesn’t.
This should be a triumphant return. Instead it’s a deeply flawed exercise in dumbed down “pew-pew” sci-fi, and while I’m sure it’ll be okay for people who don’t care that much about whether a story has internal consistency or not, if I tried to send a sci-fi book manuscript to a publisher with these kinds of problems I’d get it kicked back for a massive rewrite in a heartbeat.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is pulp sci-fi. Star Trek should have been above this.
What They Got Right
Now, in its defense, you can see where the story arcs have been set up, and why, and how the characters are meant to progress from their various falls from grace, their struggles for redemption, and the mirror arcs of characters who are supposed to be in control gradually losing that control. That part of it is working, but I think there’s more to this problem than just acknowledging basic dramatic constructs like Checkov’s gun, that if you show the audience the gun in act 1, that this gun should be used by act 3.
The character of Michael Burnham is complex, and a little alien because of her upbringing. That’s part of why she’s been unapproachable as a character, why people aren’t warming up to her. Hello, she’s been raised as a Vulcan. Of course she’s going to have a severe case of broomstick-in-uncomfortable-places.
As much as we might not like the technology as portrayed in the series, from the standpoint of having to sell this to the general public it makes sense not to make things look like the 1960’s view of the future. The fact that this makes it not mesh well with Discovery being a direct prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series is just something they have to work around. There’s no smooth fix, but in CBS’ defense, frankly, sooner or later you have to give the whole universe a face lift. You can’t stay in the 1960’s forever.
The characters took 10 episodes to make sense in some cases, but eventually they got them where they needed to be from a dramatic standpoint, and from a storytelling standpoint. A friend of mine called this a “long build”, and that you have to have patience with the process, and more of it will make sense as we go. The simple visceral requirements of the story are met, yes. They could yield some satisfying story arcs out of all this.
In the End, It Falls Far Short of the Mark
But this – this is not only presented as Star Trek, but as science fiction as well, and with science fiction at least, there is an additional overlay of requirement: the story must be internally consistent. In this way it is like a mystery novel. Everything in the story has to feed back into the story and clearly connect with other parts of the story with a decisive *click*. These moments are few and far between in Star Trek: Discovery.
It’s certainly not the worst Star Trek we’ve seen. We don’t, for example, have a story about how a tweaky variant of warp drive turns the captain and the first officer into giant lizards who then have sex and create a new species, like we did in Star Trek: Voyager.
However, this is damning with faint praise. No, to fix Star Trek: Discovery, they’d have to get some people who understand science fiction into the writing pool. It’s obvious, to me at least, that they don’t have them yet.
Whether you enjoy this iteration of Star Trek depends on how much you care about internal consistency and story arc. The acting is pretty good. The stories they tell are a jumbled, jangly mess. Each episode contains some sort of internal contradiction so bad that it takes you out of the moment, ruining the episode and the experience if your brain is engaged at all. And, the first season ends in a jawdropping Whiskey Tango Foxtrot event that makes zero sense given the setup and the history they’ve established for the Klingons.
The first two episodes really have very little to do with the story arc, and were really just back story which should have been used as subtext for the remainder of the season instead of being uselessly produced at a cost of about five million dollars.
Two episodes in the middle have to do with a hilariously misinterpreted Harry Mudd, and suddenly drop the series from being story arc driven to episodic, only to have that course reversed again when they’re over.
A sign that something can be cut from a story or script is whether you’ll notice something missing if you were to cut it. If you cut out these two episodes, and pretend they never existed, nothing happens. Five million more dollars completely wasted. As far as the story they claimed to be trying to tell goes, they could have just filmed the cast shooting soda water down each other’s trousers for 84 minutes. It would have been a lot cheaper, and it would have had the same contribution to the story line.
So they shot fifteen episodes and didn’t have the sense to realize four of them could have been cut without hurting a damn thing, and it ballooned their budget by ten million. 1Every episode out of the remaining 11 had at least one “wait, but THEY JUST SAID…” moment in it, and the whole first season leads up to a belly flop of an ending.
Yes, it’s possible to watch, and even enjoy, Star Trek: Discovery. But leave your brains in the bucket by the door. You can pick them up again on your way out.
Yes, Virginia, there is a difference between taking snapshots and taking photographs.
Here is what that difference is:
A snapshot is something you take on the spur of the moment. It’s meant to capture an event, or a memory, to remind you of what it was like being there at that moment. It’s usually unplanned, and usually not designed.
A photograph, however, is an expression of photography as an art form. Every factor is taken into account by the photographer: the lighting, the mood, the color balance, the composition, the thematic elements, the story the photograph tells.
This is a snapshot. I took it spur of the moment with almost no planning. It’s a fun subject, but other than that it’s nothing special.
Two fellows I met at a Dr. Who convention in 2015 who happen to look like Roger Delgado and Tom Baker.
And this is a photograph. This was a very different endeavor. This one was taken at Gallifrey One over the weekend, and this tableau presented itself in the convention’s hospitality suite. The lighting, the wall, and the young lady all just happened to be exactly right for this photo.
The subject was seated beneath a single light source that produced some fantastic surface modeling on her hair, her face, the dress, the subsurface scattering in her skin and the scarf, and created a dramatic chiaroscuro effect. The point source lighting beautifully modeled the geometry of her face, shoulder and hands, and the eye is led in sweeping arcs from one to the next. The subject has texture, from the delicate white scarf to her red satin dress, to the soft mute of the wall behind her, to the glowing human warmth of her skin. Light and dark dance together to create a sense of substance and presence, and it almost looks more like a clever painting than a photograph because of the color palette rich in that one specific color of red.
This is photography as art. This is a photograph.
I’ve seen paintings by Degas and Rembrandt that used this technique to great effect, so when I saw this happening before my eyes, I had to have the picture.
By the way, no, unless you’re the subject Brenna Koneval, you can’t have a copy. I don’t have a contract with Brenna to sell her likeness, so that means you can’t use it either. That’s why this photo has a watermark on it in a place that it would be very difficult to remove.
Photographers live for moments like these. Keep your eyes open. What makes it art is constructing the image in your head, knowing exactly what each part of the image is for and how it works, and then getting the camera, setting and subject to do precisely that thing.
I got totally lucky. I didn’t design this shot – it just happened in front of me, and I had eyes enough to see it in its moment of perfection, and ask the subject if I could take a photograph. She agreed, and this is the result, unretouched, unfiltered, unprocessed and unplanned – but seen with a photographer’s eye, and captured by intent.
I had posted the latter image on Facebook asking for help on the possibility of starting a side career in photography. What I got was this comment: “I’ve seen nothing in the other snapshots you’ve posted online to suggest that you have what it takes. This image is has a great subject and composition – but it’s poorly lit.”
So I looked at the photos this guy had posted himself. Every single one was a snapshot, lit brightly and colorfully, without a single thought given to lighting other than getting a good exposure. He had apparently never taken a photograph where artistic expression was the goal.
Like this one. Shot the same day, by myself, at the same SF convention in 2014. This is Michael J. Galloway, known as “Scratch” in LASFS circles (that stands for “Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society”), shot in natural light.
Michael J. Galloway – photography by Gene Turnbow
And that’s the difference between a snapshot and a photograph. And, specifically, why the self-styled critic on Facebook was full of baloney.
Years of study and practice go into each animated scene you’ll ever see. There are university degrees in it, and whole colleges dedicated to the study of animation. The foundation of it all was worked out by trial and error by working animators, making it up as they went, and they were first famously codified by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in The Illusion of Life. You’ll find it on pages 47-69, and it’s called The 12 Principles of Animation.
I had spent a lot of my life studying animation informally, as a lot of fans of the work of Walt Disney tend to do. Then one day I found myself out of a job as a game developer, and needing something else to do professionally, and started working on it in earnest. My first animation was sold to Saachi & Saachi of New York, for a Lexus commercial. Partly on the strength of that work, I got myself a position at a major motion picture studio (Rhythm & Hues) and for just shy of ten years I was immersed in the art, technology and culture of feature animation, teaching – and being taught by – some of the best animators on the entire planet. I helped write the animation training curriculae during my time at the studio, and some of my students went on to win Academy Awards for their work.
One of the core topics I taught was the Twelve Principles of Animation, but I adjusted mine to more properly apply to modern 3D animation. Yes, there are some differences in approach, and to be honest there are a lot more principles to learn. Some say there are as many as 28 – yet, these are the main ones, and the first you learn in any animation school.
Let’s begin.
The 12 Principles of Animation, Updated for the Modern Age
The material here came originally from the “Illusion Of Life” by Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston.(pp.47-69), and has been quoted and paraphrased by a number of other seasoned professional animators who know far more than I (and I’ve added some of my own observations as well). The original idea was to describe how animation ought to be done in hand-drawn animation, but most of them apply equally well in computer animation.Animation is animation regardless, of course, whether you use a pencil or a computer. Computer animation isn’t 3D animation any more than hand drawn animation is 2D – we simply use different tools to achieve the same end, and the result is a two-dimensional representation of the action regardless of the method used to produce it. Even now, with the push to make everything a 3D film, the same principles still apply. Motion is motion, and in the end, it’s what we perceive from our fixed vantage point as an audience that really defines the art.
Squash and Stretch
This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions. How extreme the use of squash and stretch is, depends on what is required in animating the scene. Usually it’s broader in a short style of picture and subtler in a feature. It is used in all forms of character animation from a bouncing ball to the body weight of a person walking. This is the most important element you will be required to master and will be used often.
Note here the difference between the rigid ball and the deformable one – the ball is considered not as a single mass, but as though it were a volume of fluid, confined by its skin. When you animate an object, every part has its own center of gravity, and moves accordingly. Every part has its own individual weight, and mass.
Three-dimensional squash and stretch can be implemented with a variety of techniques: skin and muscle, springs, direct mesh manipulation and morphing. It can also be implemented in more experimental ways with weighting, especially for dynamics simulations, and unusual IK systems.
Anticipation
This movement prepares the audience for a major action the character is about to perform, such as, starting to run, jump or change expression. A dancer does not just leap off the floor. A backwards motion occurs before the forward action is executed, and that backward motion is the anticipation.
A comic effect can be done by not using anticipation after a series of gags that used anticipation. Almost all real action has major or minor anticipation such as a pitcher’s wind-up or a golfers’ back swing. Feature animation is often less broad than short animation unless a scene requires it to develop a character’s personality, but the concept of anticipation is always there.
The technique of anticipation helps to guide the audience’s eyes to where the action is about to occur. Anticipation, including motion holds, is great for “announcing the surprise.” In three-dimensional computer animation it can be fine-tuned using digital time-editing tools such as time sheets, timelines, and curves. More anticipation equals less suspense. Horror films, for example, switch back and forth from lots of anticipation to total surprise.
Staging
A pose or action should clearly communicate to the audience the attitude, mood, reaction or idea of the character as it relates to the story and continuity of the story line. The effective use of long, medium, or close up shots, as well as camera angles also helps in telling the story. There is a limited amount of time in a film, so each sequence, scene and frame of film must relate to the overall story. Do not confuse the audience with too many actions at once. Use one action clearly stated to get the idea across, unless you are animating a scene that is to depict clutter and confusion. Staging directs the audience’s attention to the story or idea being told. Care must be taken in background design so it isn’t obscuring the animation or competing with it due to excess detail behind the animation. Background and animation should work together as a pictorial unit in a scene.
[su_note note_color=”#70bcf3″ radius=”17″]An Important Gotcha:
This isn’t really an animation principle so much as a production-wise “don’t do this”: don’t just stage for the camera. Stage for the lighting too.
Remember that your character is participating in the lighting solution for the scene as well as for the taking lens, and if it’s in the wrong position in the scene, your character will either cast shadows in the wrong places or it’ll be impossible to light correctly – or the pose you meant to be the centerpiece of the scene will be lost in shadows itself.[/su_note]
Remember that as light and form contribute to the composition of a scene, so does motion; you can create contrast and focus in a scene by using motion, or lack thereof, to draw the audience’s eye to a specific action or event on the screen.
Motion that takes place directly in front of the character tends to be lost. If at least part of the action can take place in profile or silhouette, it is much more readable.
Three-dimensional animatics are a great tool for previsualizing and blocking out the staging before the primary, secondary and facial animation. There are many staging techniques to tell the story visually: hiding or revealing the center of interest, and a chain reaction of actions-reactions are a couple of them. Staging can also be aided with contemporary cinematic techniques such as slow motion, frozen time, motion loops, and hand-held camera moves.
“Straight Ahead” and “Pose to Pose” Animation
Straight ahead animation starts at the first drawing and works drawing to drawing to the end of a scene. You can lose size, volume, and proportions with this method, but it does have spontaneity and freshness. Fast, wild action scenes are done this way. Pose to Pose is more planned out and charted with key drawings done at intervals throughout the scene. Size, volumes, and proportions are controlled better this way, as is the action. The lead animator will turn charting and keys over to his assistant. An assistant can be better used with this method so that the animator doesn’t have to draw every drawing in a scene. An animator can do more scenes this way and concentrate on the planning of the animation. Many scenes use a bit of both methods of animation.
However, at motion picture studios most scenes are blocked out pose to pose first, in order to get approval on the basic motion in the scene before too much time is spent on actually animating it. Time spent animating before approval is given for the approach you’re using is usually time lost.
Follow-through and Overlapping Action
It is not necessary for an animator to take a character to one point, complete that action completely, and then turn to the following action as if he had never given it a thought until after completing the first action. When a character knows what he is going to do he doesn’t have to stop before each individual action and think to do it. He has it planned in advance in his mind. When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail. Nothing stops all at once. This is “follow through.”
[su_note note_color=”#70bcf3″ radius=”17″] Keep GoingYou’re not going to be an animator just by reading my regurgitation of the twelve principles of animation, but at least it gives you an idea of what animators think about when they do what they do, and what you should be thinking about.
If you want to animate, then do it! Don’t wait for somebody else to give you permission, or you’ll be waiting all your life. If you need permission, then consider this your permission.If you want to be something, then be it. — Gene Turnbow[/su_note]
An example of “overlapping action” is when the character changes direction while his clothes or hair continues forward. The character is going in a new direction, to be followed, a number of frames later, by his clothes in the new direction.
For example, when Snow White starts to dance, her dress does not begin to move with her immediately but catches up a few frames later. Long hair and animal tail will also be handled in the same manner. Timing becomes critical to the effectiveness of drag and theoverlapping action.
There seem to be five main categories of this kind of movement:
If the character has any appendages or loose clothing, these continue to move after the rest of the figure has stopped. This is easy to see in real life. The movement of each must be timed carefully so it will have the correct feeling of weight, and it must continue to follow through in the pattern of action in a believable way, no matter how
broad the motion is.
The body itself does not move all at once, but instead it stretches, catches up, twists, turns and contracts as the forms work against each other. As one part arrives at the stopping point, others may still be in movement; an arm or hand may continue its action even after the body is in its pose.
The soft parts of a character is more resistant to changes in speed than the solid parts are. They have more inertia. This trailing behind in an action is sometimes called “drag”, and it gives a looseness and a solidity to the figure that is vital to the feeling of life.
The way in which an action is completed often tells us much about the character being portrayed. The anticipation sets up the action we expect (or is it the action the character expects?), the action whizzes past, and then we come to the “punch line” of the gag, the follow through, which tells us how the whole thing turned out.
If an animated character we’ve accepted as being alive suddenly stops moving, it looks as though it’s died. In real life, no living thing is ever truly completely stationary. The moving hold takes the concepts of follow-through and overlapping action to keep the character subtly moving on the hold, so as to keep this from happening.
The Moving Hold
In hand-drawn animation, it is very common to animate an action, then slow into a pose and hold the drawing of that pose for several frames, then move into action again. Being two dimensional animation, the action stays alive even with the use of held drawings. The same goes for puppet and clay animation. But in 3-D computer animation, as
soon as you go into a held pose, the action dies immediately. I’ve seen it happen with every animator that came out of traditional animation.
It must be the combination of the dimensional, realistic look and the smooth motion (usually on “ones”) that makes a hold cause the motion to die. The eye picks it up immediately, it begins to look like robotic motion. To combat this, use a “moving hold.” Instead of having every part of the character stop, have some part continue to
move slightly in the same direction, like an arm, a head, or even have the whole body.
Even the slightest movement will keep your character alive. Sometimes an action that feels believable in traditional animation, looks too cartoony in computer animation. Because of the realistic look of computer animation, an animator need to be aware of how far to push the motion. The motion should match the design of the character and the world. Animating very cartoony motion with lots of squash and stretch on a realistic looking object may not look believable, as would realistic motion on a caricatured object.
This is the pitfall of using motion capture devices to create final animation. Motion capture from human actors will always look realistic… for a human. But apply that motion to a chicken and it will look like a human in a chicken suit. You can use the motion capture data as a starting place, tweak the timing and poses to make it more caricatured, then apply it to the chicken and the motion will match the design of the character.
Slow-In and Slow-Out (also called “Ease-In, Ease-Out”)
This principle all has to do with physics. Objects at rest need a constant thrust of energy applied to them to put them into motion, and moving objects require that same amount of energy applied over time to bring them to a stop. It is this, and how we manage it, that gives us visual cues about how the weight or mass of an object. The more time it takes for an object to come up to speed, the heavier it appears.
As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like. For a gag action, we may omit some slow-out or slow-ins for shock appeal or the surprise element. This will give more snap to the scene.
Arcs
All actions, with few exceptions (such as the animation of a mechanical device), follow an arc or slightly circular path. This is especially true of the human figure and the action of animals. Arcs give animation a more natural action and better flow. Think of natural movements in the terms of a pendulum swinging. All arm movement, head turns and even eye movements are executed on an arcs.
Arcs are often simply done for you as an animator if you’re working in 3D, but they’re still important – problems in the motion of a character can be diagnosed by turning on visualization of each body part’s motion path. Little hitches and pops will show up visually as knots in the motion path, and you should be able to clean up those keys pretty easily once you can actually see them.
You can see here in this illustration how arcs define the movement of organic structures. Everything’s a pendulum, attached to something else. You can also see an example of overlapping action, where the swing of the hands on the wrists is slightly delayed due to the swing of the arm it’s attached to. The same is true of the foot in a walk cycle. The foot on the ankle lags behind the motion of the leg it’s attached to. Both respond to the swing of whatever they’re attached to, but in a slightly delayed fashion. Remember, every body part has its own relatively consistent mass and momentum.
Secondary Action
This action adds to and enriches the main action and adds more dimension to the character animation, supplementing and/or re-enforcing the main action. Example: A character is angrily walking toward another character. The walk is forceful, aggressive, and forward leaning. The leg action is just short of a stomping walk. The secondary action is a few strong gestures of the arms working with the walk. Also, the possibility of dialogue being delivered at the same time with tilts and turns of the head to accentuate the walk and dialogue, but not so much as to distract from the walk action. All of these actions should work together in support of one another. Think of the walk as the primary action and arm swings, head bounce and all other actions of the body as secondary or supporting action.
Timing
Expertise in timing comes best with experience and personal experimentation, using the trial and error method in refining technique. The basics are: more drawings between poses slow and smooth the action. Fewer drawings make the action faster and crisper. A variety of slow and fast timing within a scene adds texture and interest to the movement. Most animation is done on twos (one drawing photographed on two frames of film) or on ones (one drawing photographed on each frame of film). Twos are used most of the time,
and ones are used during camera moves such as trucks, pans and occasionally for subtle and quick dialogue animation. Also, there is timing in the acting of a character to establish mood, emotion, and reaction to another character or to a situation. Studying movement of actors and performers on stage and in films is useful when animating human or animal characters. This frame by frame examination of film footage will aid you in understanding timing for animation. This is a great way to learn from the others.
Exaggeration
Exaggeration is not extreme distortion of a drawing or extremely broad, violent action all the time. It¹s like a caricature of facial features, expressions, poses, attitudes and actions. Action traced from live action film can be accurate, but stiff and mechanical. In feature animation, a character must move more broadly to look natural. The same is true of facial expressions, but the action should not be as broad as in a short cartoon style. Exaggeration in a walk or an eye movement or even a head turn will give your footage more appeal. Use good taste and common sense to keep from becoming too theatrical and excessively animated.
Exactly how much exaggeration to use will be dependent upon – and can help set – the tone and spirit of the overall animation. More exaggeration is more comedic and cartoony; less can sometimes border on too stiff and lifeless. How much to push the exaggeration in a given action will be an aesthetic decision, but it should always be a decision and not an accident or chosen at random.
Solid Drawing
From the Renaud Galand Sketchbook
The basic principles of drawing form, weight, volume solidity and the illusion of three dimension apply to animation as it does to academic drawing. The way you draw cartoons, you draw in the classical sense, using pencil sketches and drawings for reproduction of life. You transform these into color and movement giving the characters the illusion of three-and four-dimensional life. Three dimensional is movement in space. The fourth dimension is movement in time.
I realize that “solid drawing” doesn’t translate directly to computer animation. In traditional animation, the drawing is the whole of it, but in computer animation you’re often given a prerigged model to work with, and you’re limited to whatever that rig will do. It’s up to you to get the best out of that rig (which may include giving the rigger some constructive feedback on ways to make the rig more usable).
To me, “solid drawing” means creating your forms and poses with confidence and by specific intent, and not just hitting your marks by accident. The concepts of good design still apply, even if you’re not using a pencil to execute them. You can still create poses that tell a story and please the eye. Remember that if you make the audience work to figure out what the character is doing, you’ve already blown it. Everything has to be clear, clean and understandable in a split second. Every part of the character’s pose has to make sense. Everything in the scene should be there by intent, not accident.
Appeal
Yzma from “The Emperor’s New Groove”. She’s an appealing character, but she’s also quite the villain.
A live performer has charisma. An animated character has appeal. Appealing animation does not mean just being cute and cuddly. All characters have to have appeal whether they are heroic, villainous, comic or cute. Appeal, as you will use it, includes an easy to read design, clear drawing, and personality development that will capture and involve the audience¹s interest. Early cartoons were basically a series of gags strung together on a main theme. Over the years, the artists have learned that to produce a feature there was a need for story continuity, character development and a higher quality of artwork throughout the entire production. Like all forms of story telling, the feature has to appeal to the mind as well as to the eye.
Yes, but what is it?
The above paragraph comes more or less straight out of The Illusion of Life, but doesn’t really explain what “appeal” means.
So what is it?
An appealing character is one that the audience finds engaging and intriguing, as well as easy to interpret and understand, and to which the audience can personally relate. This has to work on a number of levels. The more of these levels are addressed, the more appealing a character will be. The audience must be able to make sense of what they’re looking at, while putting forth the least possible effort in order to do so.
The audience has a split second in each scene to size up everything the character or characters in it are doing, saying, thinking, feeling and planning, the context of the situation in which the character finds himself/herself/itself, and even what that character’s basic personality traits are. Anything that obstructs this detracts from the appeal of any given character.
In the end, a character is appealing if it can fully engage the audience to the point where it can take in the character as an experience, instead of having to work to analyze what they’re looking at. It is a seduction – the appealing character is made to be effortless to absorb and understand. An appealing character is the animator’s gift to the audience.
“Appeal” does not mean “likeable”. Villians and unpleasant characters can be appealing too – the same rules that make a positive or heroic characters appealing and interesting to the eye work for the negative or villainous ones.
Design
Here are 36 silhouettes of some famous cartoon characters. Note that they’re all immediately identifiable, even in silhouette. That’s some strong design. How many can you name?
Usually this won’t be controlled by the animator in a three-D environment, but an appealing character will consist of smooth, clear, uncomplicated lines and motions. Angular, complex lines and motion are harder to absorb and interpret from a visual standpoint than smooth, uncluttered ones. By the same token, if a character’s motion consists of smooth arcs, the various parts of the character’s body will move in an easy to anticipate, viewer friendly manner that reduces the amount of work it takes to understand what that character is doing. Design, then, is as much about designing the characteristic motions as it is about the character’s initial appearance.
Characters with unique phrasing or ways of moving will be more appealing, because the audience can quickly identify the character even if the character is in silhouette.
Profile (or “Silhouette”)
By now you should realize the importance of the character’s silhouette, but you probably hadn’t figured out the why of it.
As it turns out, the human eye sees the outline of a shape first, and the detail within that outline afterwards. Action clearly seen from a character’s silhouette will make the character and his actions easier to absorb and understand. Overlapping limbs, or limbs that overlap the body, create a visually confusing presentation that the viewer must then sort out. One of the most important rules of animation is, “don’t abuse the audience”. Don’t make them work harder than absolutely necessary to understand what it is you’re trying to show them.
Animators frequently rig up a button in their animation software interface that lets them turn off all the lights and check the profile of the character they’re working on with respect to the camera, and this is the reason they do it.
Emotion
If a character’s emotional state cannot be immediately read and understood by the audience – if one cannot tell by looking at the character precisely what he’s thinking as he moves through the scene – the character loses appeal very quickly. The audience wants to know the character’s state of mind. If you don’t provide some strong clues, the emotional state cannot be resolved, and unless the character is understood to be an unthinking machine, the audience’s interpretative process comes to a screeching halt.
Intent
What the character intends to do in a given scene must be understood. It doesn’t have to be laid out all at once at the beginning of the scene, but the motivation of the character should be clear. It can be something simple, like “Run away from the giant boulder to avoid being crushed.” or “Take the hand out of the open flame before the rest of the fingers burn off.” At the other extreme, it can be some major plot point the character is thinking or scheming about, and what is likely to happen in the next two or three scenes after the current one. If the character does not have at least one clear motivation in a scene (it can have several), he ceases to be interesting and his appeal is greatly diminished.
That’s a Wrap
Now you know a little something about what goes through an animator’s head each time they sit down to animate a scene, whether it’s on paper, or using clay or table models, or on a computer. All the same principles apply.
If you’d like to try your hand at it, learning to draw is a good first step – but if you can’t do that, or you’re impatient to begin, you can try Blender. It’s free, sophisticated, and comes with a staggeringly enormous fan and user base who will be more than happy to help you along your way, including providing you with free, pre built animation rigs to play with.
There are also online communities of animators. A really good one is the 11 Second Club, and they have weekly competitions to animate scenes to the audio clips they supply. It’s a great deal of fun even just watching the different approaches each animator makes, and you can learn a great deal from not only the pro’s that partake in it, but the amateurs as well.
Just so you know I know what I’m talking about, here are three short animations I did, one a hand drawn animatic called The Ant, and one a dialog challenge from the Ghostbusters, a scene you may recognize, and a very short silent clip called When Slots Attack that demonstrates all the principles I have outlined above.
Now that you have some basic direction, go animate! Of course you’ll suck at first, but everyone does. Don’t let that slow you down. The studios are full of animators who didn’t.
Muslims do not hate America. That is fiction. There are millions of Americans who are Muslim. There are an extremely radical sect who claim to be Muslim who do, but actual Muslims reject them as strongly as we do. There is nothing Muslim about what ISIS is doing.
To buy into the fear that Fox News sells every day is to make yourself a shill. It certainly doesn’t help that statements made on Fox News are right only 18% of the time (there have been studies, yes, and it’s 18%).
Liberals are not trying to “subjugate Christians”. That’s fiction. There is no anti-Christian agenda. There is, however, a push-back on people who would force their fears and unbending viewpoints on others, and that’s what the radicalized Christians are doing.
Nobody’s going to put Christians in special reeducation camps, or punish them as a group because of their religion. That’s a paranoiac fantasy, set forth to give the alt-right a reason to be aggressive towards everyone else. What most liberals want – and indeed what nearly all Americans want, regardless of which token animal represents their chosen political party – is for everybody to get along, and to live their lives without other people – the power mad, or religious zealots of any stripe – telling them how to do that.
This is why religion has no place in government, or in fact in any discussion of how the government should be run. Each person should be free to choose their own path, so naturally when things happen that limit freedoms based on the religious right’s views on race, religion, or sexual identity, there’s going to be a push back, and a big one. Our country was literally founded to protect those sorts of freedoms.
Regardless of what Fox News tells you, there is no “war on Christmas”, no “war on Christians”, no “war on Republicans”. Nobody is being sent to interment camps, rapists are not pouring through our borders. These are statements designed to make you afraid, so that you can be controlled through that fear.
All that is happening is that most Americans now reject that fear. Clutching that fear to your chest does you far more harm than good.
I am frankly astonished at the number of people who simply parrot whatever the right-wing owned media tells them to say. They hear it all the time, so they believe it’s true without actually checking anything. It’s all about kneejerk reactions, territorialism, xenophobia. They’re all wrapped up in their own personal feelings, putting themselves above the needs of the society at all costs. They all seem to have forgotten the core of nearly every religion, which essentially translates to nothing more complex than “be excellent to one another, for we are one.”
The subject was seated beneath a single light source that produced some fantastic surface modeling on her hair, her face, the dress, the subsurface scattering in her skin and the scarf, and created a dramatic chiaroscuro effect. The point source lighting beautifully modeled the geometry of her face, shoulder and hands, and the eye is led in sweeping arcs from one to the next. The subject has texture, from the delicate white scarf to her red satin dress, to the soft mute of the wall behind her, to the glowing human warmth of her skin. Light and dark dance together to create a sense of substance and presence, and it almost looks more like a clever painting than a photograph because of the color palette rich in that one specific color of red. 
I’ve seen paintings by Degas and Rembrandt that used this technique to great effect, so when I saw this happening before my eyes, I had to have the picture. 
Note here the difference between the rigid ball and the deformable one – the ball is considered not as a single mass, but as though it were a volume of fluid, confined by its skin. When you animate an object, every part has its own center of gravity, and moves accordingly. Every part has its own individual weight, and mass.
A comic effect can be done by not using anticipation after a series of gags that used anticipation. Almost all real action has major or minor anticipation such as a pitcher’s wind-up or a golfers’ back swing. Feature animation is often less broad than short animation unless a scene requires it to develop a character’s personality, but the concept of anticipation is always there.
It is not necessary for an animator to take a character to one point, complete that action completely, and then turn to the following action as if he had never given it a thought until after completing the first action. When a character knows what he is going to do he doesn’t have to stop before each individual action and think to do it. He has it planned in advance in his mind. When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail. Nothing stops all at once. This is “follow through.”
This principle all has to do with physics. Objects at rest need a constant thrust of energy applied to them to put them into motion, and moving objects require that same amount of energy applied over time to bring them to a stop. It is this, and how we manage it, that gives us visual cues about how the weight or mass of an object. The more time it takes for an object to come up to speed, the heavier it appears.
All actions, with few exceptions (such as the animation of a mechanical device), follow an arc or slightly circular path. This is especially true of the human figure and the action of animals. Arcs give animation a more natural action and better flow. Think of natural movements in the terms of a pendulum swinging. All arm movement, head turns and even eye movements are executed on an arcs.
This action adds to and enriches the main action and adds more dimension to the character animation, supplementing and/or re-enforcing the main action. Example: A character is angrily walking toward another character. The walk is forceful, aggressive, and forward leaning. The leg action is just short of a stomping walk. The secondary action is a few strong gestures of the arms working with the walk. Also, the possibility of dialogue being delivered at the same time with tilts and turns of the head to accentuate the walk and dialogue, but not so much as to distract from the walk action. All of these actions should work together in support of one another. Think of the walk as the primary action and arm swings, head bounce and all other actions of the body as secondary or supporting action.
Exaggeration is not extreme distortion of a drawing or extremely broad, violent action all the time. It¹s like a caricature of facial features, expressions, poses, attitudes and actions. Action traced from live action film can be accurate, but stiff and mechanical. In feature animation, a character must move more broadly to look natural. The same is true of facial expressions, but the action should not be as broad as in a short cartoon style. Exaggeration in a walk or an eye movement or even a head turn will give your footage more appeal. Use good taste and common sense to keep from becoming too theatrical and excessively animated.
By now you should realize the importance of the character’s silhouette, but you probably hadn’t figured out the why of it.
What the character intends to do in a given scene must be understood. It doesn’t have to be laid out all at once at the beginning of the scene, but the motivation of the character should be clear. It can be something simple, like “Run away from the giant boulder to avoid being crushed.” or “Take the hand out of the open flame before the rest of the fingers burn off.” At the other extreme, it can be some major plot point the character is thinking or scheming about, and what is likely to happen in the next two or three scenes after the current one. If the character does not have at least one clear motivation in a scene (it can have several), he ceases to be interesting and his appeal is greatly diminished.
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