Category Archives: Great articles

No comments

The History of Animation pegs in the USA

  By

new-pegbar-chart-17_acme-1024x817

Print Magazine Online has a fascinating article about the history of the animation pegbar complied by the very famous animator J.J. Sedelmaier who’s animated many many of your favorite classic cereal commercials as well as the season premiere of Beavis and Butthead. We interviewed Mr. Sedelmaier a few years ago so you can check that out too here, if you like. Anyway if you’re an animation history nut, you won’t want to miss this!
From the article:

The drawing/image registration process is a fundamental aspect of film animation. If the images that are animated don’t have a shared foundation with each other, the movement that’s created by the animator has no common relationship with the background or the viewer’s point of view—it just doesn’t work. It was John Randolph Bray who established and patented the peg system of registration in 1915. For almost a century, folks working in animation production have used paper, pencils, various designs of lightboxes, and pegged drawing discs to do their craft, and within this world of registration there were several standards. In New York there were pegs by Acme (a small round hole with two thin slots on either side), Oxberry (a small center hole with wider slots on either side), Signal Corps (close to Oxberry but closer to three round holes) and Fleischer/Famous/Terrytoons (three round holes). California/Hollywood seemed to hover in the world of Acme, but Disney (which switched over to Acme 20 years ago) had paper that was also punched with two sets of holes—one for the animator and one for the Ink and Paint Department. This allowed for less stress/damage on the holes and thus better registration. It’s only been within the past decade that this conventional process and this sort of equipment has proven to be on its way out.

You can read the entire article here.

No comments

The Minimalist Animation of ‘Archer’

  By

1027736-archerarticle0004layercomp5-1200

AWN has an interesting article about my favorite prime time show Archer on FX and highlights their production pipeline as well which is rare for even for an animation interview. Producer Neil Holman and art director Chad Hurd detail the limited but highly stylized animation techniques they wield to devastatingly hilarious effect on their hit FX animated series.

CH: Yeah, well one big new thing that we’re using now is Toon Boom Harmony, which is kind of like a super fancy Flash that’s made for animating. It’s a lot more traditional and we’ve been using this a lot more with our rigs. Anything that you see that has a lot of movement, usually our action scenes, like when we do a big spin kick, that’s done in Harmony. We’ve been using that a good bit more this season. You’re going to see a lot of fun action scenes.

1027736-archerarticle0000layercomp1-1200

You can read the entire AWN article on Archer’s pipeline process here.

No comments

Using Google’s “Tilt Brush” Artists Paint with Light

  By ,

Google has commissioned six artists to paint and sculpt with light using the company’s virtual painting app Tilt Brush. And yes, the big G has captured the whole process, so you can watch the artists work on their masterpieces. The team used Kinect to film the artists at work and tweaked Tilt Brush to be able to show each brush stroke on a browser.

You can see what all the artist’s created as well as rotate in real time as they create AND even switch between what they see and what they look like creating it. Pretty nifty!

Check it out here.

No comments

100 Pieces of Iron Giant Art!

  By

iron-giant-ca93-1024x749

I really do love this film and lately new bits of art keep cropping up, and I find it a shame that a giant company such as Warner Bros. can’t get it’s act together to make another animated film (and no Happy feet doesn’t count). Well today here’s a gallery of 100 pieces of art from Iron Giant! Enjoy!

You can see the full post here.

No comments

Frank Hursh: Painting backgrounds for Rocky & Bullwinkle in Mexico, Part 2

  By

color model

This week, Frank Hursh takes up where he left off, describing what it was like to be in the thick of production on the Jay Ward shows in Mexico:

You can read the entire article here.

No comments

Frank Hursh: Painting backgrounds for Rocky & Bullwinkle in Mexico, Part 1

  By

Frank Hursh Director Fondos Gamma_retouched

What was it like working on Rocky & Bullwinkle in Mexico City in the early 1960s?Darrell Van Citters tells you on his blog The Art of Jay Ward in the fist of a multi part series.

From the site:

During the writing process on The Art of Jay Ward Productions, I put out an all points bulletin on the Internet looking for a few artists who had either worked directly for Jay Ward in Hollywood or for Val-Mar/Gamma Productions in Mexico, the subcontractor for all animation production on the Jay Ward series.  One of those artists was Frank Hursh, an American painter who had headed up the background department at the Mexican studio in the early 1960s, a crucial period in the history of the Ward studio.

Admittedly, my request was a long shot and I had low expectations for any kind of response.  However, while the book was at the printer’s, I received a phone call from Frank’s daughter, Holly, responding to my posting which she had just discovered while searching on the Internet.  She was calling from Mexico with her father standing right next to her.  While it was too late to include any new information or art from Frank, it wasn’t too late for me to ask questions or to find out that his memoirs had been published in a bilingual book in Mexico.  Later I found out that Frank had photos of the personnel and studio from it’s heyday along with a few pieces of original art.  It’s unlikely there will be a second edition of The Art of Jay Ward Productions so I’ve decided to highlight Frank Hursh and his time at the Gamma studio with a multi-part blog post.

You can read the whole post here.