Into Digital Arts

      As many of you are aware, I am currently taking a course in Fundamentals of Digital Media, which is the primary reason for this blog's existence. My major is in computer science and engineering, so an art course is not something I normally would have taken. However, I am going to pursue a minor in visual effects and animation, so here I am. Before taking this course, I never really took an art course just like this one. Of course, I took the elementary art classes where you try and make a prescribed shape out of clay or draw/paint an object. But I've never taken a course that pushed me to come up with my own projects. They were always: draw this pencil or make this owl. This course, however, pushed me to become imaginative and creative in ways that those other classes did not. There were prescribed projects, but they gave me freedom to really explore being an artist. For example my ascii project, the only guidelines given were: use this program to make a drawing. Th...

      Studios like Pixar, Disney Animation Studios, and Illumination Studios are the big players in the animated film department in modern times. Disney appears to be leading the charge in the photo realism department with films like Moana  (2016) pushing the boundary of water simulation and character animation. While Illumination Studios are the king of producing fantastic animated films on a budget.       It was films like Moana and Zootopia  that really inspired me to check out animation. I started by messing around with Blender and seeing what the software was capable of. I created a few animations for a national rocketry competition using Blender and SolidWorks. Recently, I have contiued working in blender and tried to continue learning as much as I can. The water simulations in Moana  really stand out to me and I have produced my own simulation of water using Blender, even though it is nowhere near as good as that which inspired me....

      Keyframes were a huge development in the realm of computer generated graphics. They would give artists more control, but computer animations were still lacking in the graphics department. The first film to produce 3D polygonal animation called A Computer Generated Hand  (1971). This wasn't a film produced from an artistic standpoint, it was purely a research project.  The project focused on developing a program for animation that was able to render complex shapes, including the especially difficult task of rendering curved surfaces. This involved the process of digitizing the wireframe mesh that would make up the surface of the hand. Wireframes are the basic building blocks of any three dimensional object or surface in an animation and they are still used today. But in the sense of this first render, this was no easy task. Before they even began working with the computer, they made a clay hand and drew 350 interlocking triangles onto the surface in order...

      Computers would change the animation industry forever. Producing a full length animated feature film was very expensive, time consuming, and often impossible for small studios of a few artists. But computers would make full length feature films possible at a smaller price. Computer animation, like hand drawn animation style, had its own development cycle.       Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) is considered to be the first film to utilize computer animation. The opening of Vertigo  is an opening credit scrawl, with spirals drawn around the outside of the screen. This opening scene was created by Saul Bass whom insisted that these spirals be accurate to the equations they were intended to represent. For this reason, these spirals were computer animated and not hand drawn.        The computer work in Vertigo  was just a taste to what was to come. The first experimental computer animation was done by John Whitney, calle...

      With the advent of WWII, many artists and studios had to find other means to portray their stories. In this time period, hand drawn and stop motion were the two most conventional means of producing animated films. But these required resources that were not always available during WWII. A very popular medium during this time was puppet animation. This is basically stop motion animation, however most of the films produced using this technique used clay or solid objects in their productions. Puppet animation, as the name implies, incorporated puppets. The work of Jiri Trnka is known for this kind of work. With adaptations of popular books like The Emperor's Nightingale  (1948), popularized this form of animation.       Puppets are very different in their production and how they are presented on-screen when compared to objects and clay. With clay, a characters features can be modified, like allowing the character to blink or move their mouth...

      While Disney was trying to assert itself as the major player in the animation world, there were many other studios who were advancing the field in their own ways. Across the sea in Europe, many different techniques were developed to make animations more photo realistic and easy to produce. Wladyslaw Starewicz created stop motion films using bugs and dolls. He was the film maker to make stop motion into something. Most of the other animators of the time were creating hand drawn and painted works. Starewicz's film The Mascot  created in 1934 was a prime example of this.       There were other small innovations, that seem almost silly on paper, but really helped to bring animations to life. Alexandre Alexeieff used a pinscreen in some of his works. This was a screen with hundreds of thousands of pins stuck into it. This would allow for shadows and rays of light to be cast around the audience that would give the illusion of animated steel engravin...

      With the creation of Gertie The Dinosaur  in 1914, the world was shown that animated motion pictures were capable of creating believable characters who seem to have a life all their own. Up until this point, animated pictures were little more than a spectacle to be admired, solely because the images appeared to move. Now, animated pictures could create thoughts and emotion in their viewers. It is in these early golden days of early animation where Disney finds its roots.       When one thinks of Disney's early animated films, they think of Steamboat Willie  (1928). This was not Walt Disney's first character. His first character, whom he would modify slightly to make Mickey Mouse, was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Disney would lose the rights to this character after a dispute with the character Felix, as he is basically the same. However, Disney's Steamboat Willie  was very revolutionary at the time as it was the first animated film to inco...

      Hello Everyone and welcome back! Last time we covered the early mechanically based origins of animation. At this point, it can hardly be compared to the animations that we are all familiar with today. However, with the invention of socket driven film stock, the earliest form of the projectors we are familiar with today, animation is set to make a giant leap forward that will transform it into the medium of today.       The "first" animation film is difficult to centralize as different sources have different years and people as being the first to create an animated film. All seem to agree that the invention of the praxinoscope in 1877 by Charles-Emile Reynaud earned him the title of First Motion Picture Cartoonist. These films he produced were 10 to 15 minutes long and were shown in his own theater. These films were created by artists painting images directly onto the film stock, in Reynaud's case these images were usually in the style of stick figure...

Welcome back everyone! Today I will be starting a series that I have been wanting to write on the history of animation! I believe it is finally time to take a dive into the topic of which I love so much. At its heart, animation is the art of presenting multiple images, one after another, in order to give the illusion of motion. The early forms of animation are very different from the three dimensional computer generated animated films that are produced today by studios like Pixar and Illumination. Animation finds its humble beginnings in the parlor shows of the early 18th century, predating the advent of the cinema by more than 50 years. The first device to achieve this, was invented by Belgian Joseph Plateu, dubbed the phenakistoscope. This was a cardboard disk that would have drawings around the outside, usually these would be drawings of animals. This device would be spun and each drawing would be shown to the viewer in quick succession, giving the illusion of motion. This i...

Hello Everyone and welcome back! As the year comes to a close, I completed a huge undertaking and built an artist website for my portfolio! Being really into computers, I have always wanted to build my own website, and this finally gave me that opportunity. This website was made using Wix, which is a really nice website building tool that doesn't require the user to write any HTML or CSS to build a nice website, however those options are still available. The first steps I took in building the website was making my "About Me" page. This page would contain my bio and my artist statement. The bio was relatively easy, as writing about my artistic accomplishments was simple since it is all very recent. The artist statement, on the other hand, was a bit tricky to craft. I started with the five words that I thought of when I would think of myself as an artist, and these kind of linked to animation as this is what i would eventually like to do. Those words were: imagination, det...