En Garde!

Today, the creativity bug bit me and I decided to write a scene for a small series idea I had a while back. I intended The Deadly Truth to be one time gag comedy short, but as time passed by, I became more interested in making it a small story, told in a few episodes. I also decided to change the tone of the story from humorous to a bit darker. Here’s a quick sketch of the direction I’m planning to take.

If anyone is interested in script writing  in a more professional way, I encourage you to take a look at Celtx. It is a pre-production all in one software that will blow your mind away. Absolutely free, and available for Mac, Linux/Unix, and Windows.

I was in a creative accident!

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

I’m fine though, don’t worry. I hope you are doing great too. I just wanted to let you know that Sbass and Monica from The Inkwell Alley were kind enough to let me share some thoughts with their readers on Feature Friday. They are creating an awesome community of artists that want to make their creative dreams come true under the motto Is not who you are, it’s who you can become. A writer and an artist, these two great women have been very busy promoting their relatively new iniciative, that I know will be a great success. Make sure to check out their blog at http://inkwellalley.blogspot.com.

If you are coming from The Inkwell Alley, welcome to I’ll tell you a story…. In this blog I share the things I learn while trying to figure out how to make drawings come to life through 2D animation. Since blogs tend to be a bit difficult to navigate, I thought I’d show you around. You might enjoy these posts:

Creativity development

How I’m fighting the animator’s block

The Importance of Staying Creative

The production process

Building Character is not the Same as Character Development

From A Forgotten Piece Of Paper To Life

Illustration tips and tricks

Creating Stunning Backgrounds with TBS!!!

Animating Effects: The Best Form of Procrastination

Backgrounds: Getting your perspective right with Google Sketchup

Backgrounds: From Google SketchUp to Toon Boom Animate

I hope you enjoy this blog as much as I love writing it, but above all, I really want you to find it useful. Any thoughts? Make sure you let me know in the comments. Have a great day!

To do list

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Hello everyone. I have a few things that I want to share with you (although I won’t just yet). First of all, I want to show you The Deadly Truth. Its release is loooong overdue. I thought that was going to be an easy thing, but once again, having a demanding day job and (yes I know) not enough discipline has pushed that deadline endlessly. The purpose was not perfection; just mastering Toon Boom software. Shame on me. After my work trip to Holland, I came back to a lot of backed up work that just had to get done. Things are more relaxed now, so I’ll get right on it. Along with The Deadly Truth,  I want to share a series of posts regarding the various stages I went through to create it (including all the things that should have been done in another manner). In The Netherlands, I met with fellow animation enthusiast Voynitsky, so in the following days you’ll see a post about our conversation and some of his work. Great guy. In the past days I’ve been getting a lot of traffic directly from gooogle, and the search terms that keep coming up are “toon backgrounds” and “animating water”, so I decided to write detailed tutorial posts on how I go about doing those two things. Even if it’s only from my amateur experience.

My purpose is to make this blog as informative and useful as possible so that animation enthusiasts everywhere can benefit from my learning process.

So, over the next couple of weeks you can expect the following:

1) Completion and release of The Deadly Truth.

2) A series of posts about The Deadly Truth’s production.

3) My conversation with Voynitsky and  some of his work.

4) Tutorials on “toon backgrounds” (indoors and outdoors) and “animating water”.

[Update:] I don’t like posts without visuals. After all , this is a blog about visual storytelling, so I want to show you the animation that got me started with this hobby back in 2006. It was done for a challenge at animationforum.net, run by Greg Kapersky. The challenge was called Dance Off and we were given a one minute piece of audio called Lalla, from the album I Have a Small Penis by M. J. Katamajäki to which we had to draw a character dancing. Go figure. I did it in Flash MX and had a lot of fun doing it, so here it is (opens in a new window):

 

Dance Off by Renato Vargas. (Click on the image)

I want to thank everyone that has kept coming back to this blog. It’s been great having you here. Don’t be shy, leave a comment .

The Importance of Staying Creative

Post written by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Some say creativity cannot be forced; that it is something that is either there or it is not; that you either have it or you don’t. Does that mean that you have to sit around and just wait for it to strike you? Well, I say NO, because if I learned one thing is that the longer you sit around doing nothing, the further away you get from being creative. Especially for people who do not necessarily work in a field related to their creative passion. It’s hard to keep up with your daily life, and then come home and burst into a creative frenzy. It is true that you cannot will yourself to be an excellent animator, or just force yourself to have an excellent idea, but there are certain elements of the creative process that you can be intentional about that will eventually lead to a creative explosion. This is not a new idea, but I would like to share with you how I’m slowly applying it to my animation project.

An update on Rezadores’ character development.
You have to intentionally set time aside for your magic. An hour’s work can be very rewarding.

The idea behind being intentional about your creative process is that you have to make an appointment with yourself to develop your skills and to simply, well…  use them. In that time, you have to give a hundred percent, as if you were getting paid to work on your project, and the client expects nothing but greatness from you. Play with your craft, be curious about new techniques, but do it for the sake of it and not because you expect compensation. Of course, to be able to do that, you have to take in stimulus, not passively, but in an active and focused manner.

What does this mean? If you were working on an animation about Africa, for example, it would be in order to spend some time researching about the wildlife there,  maybe do an internet photo search about the place, familiarize yourself with the physical appeareance of the people that live there, or listen to some sounds that were recorded there. You probably knew that, but what you don’t know is when or what to do with all the materials you’ve researched. This is the tricky part.

You have to set time aside for three things: taking in stimulus, processing that stimulus, and putting things into practice.  In that time, the activities you do must reflect an interest in seeing how you can apply the things you perceive to your current project or problem. This is how I’m doing it:

1. One hour a day for me and my creative self. You might be asking, “hey, didn’t he say he’d only be animating three days a week?” You are right, that doesn’t mean that I’m not doing anything on the other days. The actual animation is my practice. The other days I might take in stimulus, process it, or just find another creative outlet (like writing posts about the whole thing ). I try to make a schedule, and if you want to do so at this point, I suggest you do it on a weekly basis. That way, in any given week, you are able to direct more of your attention to any of the three steps I described. At the beginning of any project you might want to spend more days a week taking in stimulus. Later, you might want to cut down on your stimulus intake, to favor the processing part, and once you are well aware of what you want, you might spend more days just creating, until your next project comes along.

2. One hour, and one hour only. Start with a little until it becomes a habit. Oftentimes, when people read posts like this one, they get enthusiastic and set their expectations too high. They think: “Hey, I have more than an hour a day, I can spend three hours doing all this”. Eventually, they get burned, and drop the whole thing altogether. Start with an hour a day. Half an hour would be better. Everyone has half an hour to spare. Refrain yourself a little in order to go on longer. At this point, I realized I was more receptive to creative thoughts at night, so I decided to have my unnecesary creating time around seven in the evening. Some days I’ll animate, others I’ll just work on some concept art or write some thoughts on the subject.

3. Taking in stimulus is an active endeavor. Things like watching youtube videos can be considered stimulus if you take an active approach when doing them. This means that you have to think about whatever project you are working on when you sit down to watch awesome animations on youtube. I will take a blank piece of paper and I’ll write down interesting things I see that can be applied to my project. Is there a cool effect they are using? Are there any interesting camera angles being used? It doesn’t matter; try to get ideas from an otherwise useless activity. Do you have to do this all the time? NO. Remember, this is something you will do in your Unnecessary Creating Time; your hour for yourself.

4. Process your stimulus. The next day, after you’ve taken in stimulus of any kind (web vids, movies, art, television, magazines, etc.) you have to sit down and let your mind generate new thoughts based on what you’ve absorbed. Remember, you don’t have to copy people styles. You are coming up with your own ideas about things. I will take the notes that I wrote when taking in stimulus and think hard about them (maybe, the following day). I then write something about my project or draw some concepts based on that stimulus, taking advantage of what inspired me.  New brain connections are created at this point, and you are able to see things under a different light.

5. Apply what you’ve learned. Hopefully, after taking in all that stimulus on purpose and processing it, you will be eager to use it on your project. That means that when your animating day comes you will be full of ideas of what to do and how to do them. This is when your body switches to auto-pilot and creative explosions happen. Put things into practice. Work your magic!

Staying creative is a crucial part of the animation process for hobbyists (and even for professionals, I think). You have to build disciplines and be intentional about some aspects of the creative process, to be able to respond creatively when the time comes. As I said before, the ideas expressed here are not original. They are just how I’m interpreting and applying them to the animation process. If you want to learn more about this subject, I suggest you visit Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative site and listen to his podcasts.

I would be delighted if you shared your thoughts on this subject in the comments.