Yerevan - Tempus ALIGN kick off meeting

Yerevan! It was great to meet many of the ALIGN partners, as IADT leads the first Work Programme (WP) of the Tempus ALIGN project “Achieving and checking the alignment between academic programmes and qualification frameworks”. A joy to talk Teaching and Learning with some new international friends - especially with our Armenian friends from Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts! Great presentations - and we survived minus 10 and almost 48 hours with one hour of sleep! All good.Today, I might try to locate the Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinema...

http://www.yafa.am/en/?p=4924

http://www.yafa.am/en

http://ysitc.am/en/

How To Start Your Animated Short Film

So, you’ve prepped your great idea for a film, you’ve developed your story, you’ve done your designs, your storyboards – you may even have recorded a guide track and completed an animatic. Everything is good to go, but you’re wondering… What do I do next? How do I start?

In stopmotion and CGI (and somewhat in Flash), you need to get your characters built, rigged and into animation tests as soon as you can. Without these, there’s no way forward. The big danger with stopmotion and CGI (this also applies to constructing characters in Flash), is that your project now turns into a modelmaking exercise. You shift from the relative safety and security of pre-production into a similarly snuggly, safe and secure craft-based modelmaking discipline. This takes time. Everything must be perfect – all the characters, the rigs, then the sets and props… My advice is to plough through this phase quickly. Set yourself definite deadlines. Get some of your characters done and get animating. Your results onscreen will inform your modelmaking process. You need to find out early what’s working and what needs more work. There’s NO point in ending up with beautiful looking models in four or five month’s time, only to discover that they don’t animate. Build some, animate early, then build again, based on your animation learning from your tests.

This brings me to the question of time… How long DOES it take to produce a 5 minute animated short film? I would say it takes on average around 6 months. It can take substantially longer – it’s rumoured that Tony Donoghue took 8 years to shoot his beautiful ‘Irish Folk Furniture’. I made my 2010 ‘Mister Heaney, a wee portrait’ in one month and I shot the first full pass of ‘Furniture – Murder and Love’ in 23 hours (including voice record and voice edit and a nice 7 hour sleep). On average though, it takes around 6 months to make a 5 minute animated short. Time is your friend and your enemy and time must be managed. Find out NOW how many days you have to your deadline. Map out the different tasks you need to get done – character construction, set construction, props, animation, animation, animation, compositing, reshoots and reanimations, effects, final edit renders. If you haven’t any previous production experience, guess how much time it’ll take you to do each task. I would say try to allocate at least a third of your available time to animation. At least!

I generally start in the middle of the film and work my way to the end. Then I work back from the middle to the very start of the film. In this way, the opening shots are possibly the best animation, because I’m well up to speed by then. The first shots you shoot (unless you’re flukily lucky) will often be terrifyingly terrible! Don’t worry about this. In a week, or a fortnight, you’ll have ironed out whatever problems you’ve found and you’ll be animating smoothly. Keep pressing forwards, shot by shot. Do NOT redo shots at this point – press ahead with the next shot, then the next shot. You can do your reshoots and reanimations at the end of the first pass.

Keep an edit line alive. I drop my animatic (if I have one) into the edit line and then, each day, I drop the shots I’ve animated onto the edit timeline, replacing the animatic shots. It’s a good idea to watch the entire edit timeline from the top each day, just to give yourself a feel for the overall shape of the film, and to encourage you that you’re making progress in your production.

Animate your first pass as soon as you can, then go back and reanimate the bits you hate the most and keep doing this until your animation time runs out.

In CGI, my advice is to render early – every day if possible. Do NOT leave renders to some vague three week block at the end of your production. Get stuff onscreen, in the bag. It can always be rerendered later, with much more polish and finesse, time permitting. Get stuff onscreen asap. This also applies to complicated comping or effects passes with stopmotion or 2d animation – get them rendered now, get them onscreen now. They can always be tweaked and improved at a later date, time permitting.

That’s it – take a deep breath and start.

I’ll be shooting three animated short films over the next six months – one simple (a second ‘furniture’ film), one secret (I can’t say anything) and one more finished and complex. I’ll keep you posted on progress.

Graduation! Postgraduate Diploma in Learning, Teaching and Assessment!

24th October 2013 in Athlone Institute - the second cohort of LIN Dippers graduate! Great to spend the day with Mick Mc Grath, John Ryan, Anne Marie O' Brien, Carmel Kealey, Nuala Harding and Miriam O' Connor. Sinead Bracken and Marion Palmer were missed by all of us! Great also to meet some of the families, who've been supporting us all for the past few years through our long (but hugely rewarding) LIN teaching and learning journey!

As I said to John Ryan as we sat waiting for the ceremony to commence 'we never thought it would end here'! And our teaching and learning journey doesn't end... Next stop 'The Masters'.

Thanks to all and well done to all!

Mick, John, DQ @back, Anne Marie and Carmel at front

The Three Musketeers

Unlikely Scholar!

2013 LIN conference!

A fantastic 2013 LIN conference on Thursday 17th October in the Ashling Hotel in Dublin! Inspirational presentations from Mick Healey (on 'Sustainable Models for Engaging Undergraduates in Research and Inquiry') and from Newcastle University's Colin Bryson and Ruth Furlonger on 'Engaging Students Through Partnership'. Ruth, Newcastle's Student Engagement Officer was, for me, the STAR of the entire conference - a recent grad who drives student engagement through student-driven initiatives! An inspiration to us all! Well done girl!

Other presentations I saw were NCBI's Antoinette Fennell piece on 'Facilitating Design Students engagement with older people and people with disabilities',  IADT's Clyde Doyle's presentation on 'Making Makers' and The Maker Movement and Mary I's Margaret O' Keefe's presentation on student placement in drama education.

Marion Palmer and Nuala Harding did a great exposition on the LIN Flexible Pathway and the LIN Capstone and I, for my sins, did my provocative presentation on IADT Animation's 'links with the animation industry - not a complete bed of roses'.

Thanks to Niamh Rushe, Marion, Nuala and the LIN team for working incredibly hard to setup and run a great day for us all. I emailed them that it was 'like coming home for the day, into the LIN teaching and learning family'. LIN and the LIN conference must persist in some way, shape or form for the future!

DQ does his provocative presentation at 2013 LIN conference

Halle - Day 2 Session 1 - Mike Riemenschneider

HALLE DAY 2

session 1 Mike Riemenschneider (IAMA - DE)

Presentation of the Animation Talent Award

i won't bother you with the funding issues we had..
International Academy - non prof founded in 2004

we produced a lot of student films
started with 9 months and then cut that to 3 months - they had to be v precise

we have individuals, companies
the question was how can we attract people, attract students
how do we stay alive in the market?

can we do it alone? or do we need partners?

tried to find a niche - the idea was to create a festival but there are tonnes of festivals (260 animation festivals) in the world...
how can we find a niche...

maybe do something with music??

not starting with animation, but start with the music...

a web-based short film competition, where you can earn your production budget to turn your ideas into an animation film
warner set some conditions - streaming yes, download no...

design guideline - 
transfer concept into web and digital media
how can we bring everything together?
licencing?


a few people were totally happy to give us music from their new albums...
but the lawyers were a little more difficult...

alan doherty plays the flute - he's from ireland but he lives in Halle - i met him by chance...

pitch video from students who're proposing their projects...
top 10 projects
pitching mode
then they communicate and find additional budget (through crowdfunding pledges)
building up a crowd and then find money
an ongoing process... (still live)

click to support the projects you like...
having found that you can buy 1000 facebook fans for 360 euros, we decided not to rely on facebook

through google analytics - we could see that we were being watched in 90 countries
LinkedIn a great thing to do..

how it's going right now?
they're in the middle of producing the top 10 videos
they needed to get 100% of the money before 20th October - if they're missing 5%, they get nothing (standard crowdfunding)

E2,500 euros is the main prize from ARTE

ARTE is the most important partner
a link with Adobe - unlimited licence of CrativeCloud for 1 year for 3 projects

voting
sharing
like
production
donate
support

we want to establish ourselves as a partner for the animation schools
we were asked if we can licence ATA for India - but I don't know if it's a real offer...

we have projects from
bristol
portugal
belgium
phillipines/indonesia
poland etc etc


www.startnext.de - crowdfunding platform
www.animationtalentaward.com

end of Mike's presentation


were you genuinely surprised by the worldwide interest?
definitely...
also we're talking to samsung, canon

we will then support the finished films
the rights belong to the people who make the movie
but we can use the films for non-commercial projects

normally we'd be finished production, but that was postponed because of the flooding in Halle!

it will happen again next year - if you all help us, we will succeed!

Brainstorming in Halle!

GREAT brainstorming session to finish Day 1 of the ETNA conference in Halle! Topics included 'Student Project Management' and 'funding models'. Strong possibility that we'll establish a rotating presidency for ETNA - to impel our collaborations forward! A pan-European postgraduate animation flexible pathway beckons!

Halle - ETNA conference

Morning One of the ETNA (European Training Network for Animation Schools) annual conference. Good presentations by Richelle Wilder (script development for animation) and Keith Hopwood (music and sound effects for animation).

011013 halle


Richelle Wilder

animation has the widest demographic
animation isn't limited by cultural or social boundaries...

katzenburg 'the idea is king. if a movie begins with a great, original idea, chances are it will work...'

great ideas are rare...

the strongest ideas can be encapsulated into a logline, or 'hook'...

chicken run 'great escape with  chickens'
flushed away 'african queen with rats'
shrek ' greatest fairy tale never told'

when i ran the development department at aardman...
it was a creative forum for generating ideas...

sometimes the original idea FAILS when you try to expand it...

Scorcese said 'there's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.'

pitch: plot, characters, world, tone...

now we're talking about leprechauns...
but Katzenburg didn't like it 'and all our leprechaun ideas left with him...'

hitchcock 'all you need is a great script, a great script, a great script...'

the technical differences between writing for live action and animation are negligible...

writer needs to be hugely imaginative...
all the projects I've worked on have featured multiple writers... a lead writer certainly, but multiple writers...

we follow the three act structure...

it's important the bg designs and char designs are shared with the writer, to make sure he's on the same creative track...

andrew stanton... the first draft is nothing more than a starting point, so be as wrong and as fast as you can...

rewriting can be twenty paces back and five paces forward...
rewriting is about 'getting the story right'

rewrite is about making creative ideas the best they can be...
often multiple stakeholders involved in rewrite - all opinion is valuable...

however, multiple voices (if they're not managed properly) can destroy the script
in indie productions, this role is rarely managed...
managed, not dictated... Dictatorial no...

ideas often get put in the script to please the money people, to greenlight funding...

DEVELOPMENT HELL - the rewrite black hole...
caused by the writing process being poorly managed...
Many scripts get put into development hell, very few scripts get out

dev hell becomes an illogical dance, with lots of crap and random ideas being built into the script...

remember the project's potential, remember the hook...


billy wilder - an audience is never wrong. an individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles sitting in a darkened room - that is critical genius...

end


show don't tell

anim scripts are approx 80 pages in length, live ation are usually 100 to 120 pages...

character world themes and audience demographic

screenwriting is an art
screenwriting is also a craft

lasseter 'the art challenges the technology and the technology inspires the art...'

act 1 who is the main char what is the story about what is the conflict? (this is the inciting incident) first 10 pages, first 10 minutes
the suspension of disbelief must happen in act 1, the audience must buy in

want versus need is the character arc
the char want needs to be established early

drama is conflict...

act 2 longest in length
develops the action (A plot)
develops the main char
develops sub plots

it's essential to have more than 1 storyline

A plot is the action storyline
B plot is the emotional storyline
then subplots

there must be multiple plots, or the story will be completely linear

there can be multiple multiple subplots, adding texture and charm to the storyline

moving between acts is done by turning points - twists

act 3 is the climax
the central premise of the plot is resolved...
shrek gets his swamp back, but with an unexpected twist (fiona)

tv script format...
single drama
mini series (multiple eps)
returning series (many eps)


script development TV:

development workshop
bible
premise
outline - fleshed out without dialogue
scene by scene - again fleshed out without dialogue
drafts x 2 - dialogue in, story structure, basic structure is movie structure with beginning, middle and end (this is usually where finance is greenlit)
polish - final draft, often done by the script editor - script editor ensures continuity across the series

development by committee is a staple of modern TV script development
broadcaster
co producer
series producer

each of the stakeholders will want an active input in the series development (includes financiers, co prod partners and broadcasters), all coordinated by the script editor

all opinion is valuable, but all opinion is. 
an effective script producer or script editor offers the writer creative support and managerial guidance.


katzenburg: every single thing you see onscreen came out of somebody's creativity. It doesn't exist. Nature didn't deliver it to us. Everything had to be dreamed.

end