A “pencil test”, as I mentioned in my recent post about Pencil Test Depot, is a hand-drawn animation sequence (or entire cartoon) in pencil, prior to the steps to final inking and painting.

A rare Disney animated short that was never finished, a classic style 7 minute Mickey Mouse cartoon called Plight of the Bumble Bee, directed by Jack Kinney in 1951, has surfaced on YouTube., giving us a rare glimpse of the classic animation process.

In much the same way that hand drawn animation has a visual charm distinct from any kind of computer animation, the even more raw and immediate look of animated pencil drawings has a wonderful look all its own.

The cartoon has a full soundtrack, and can be enjoyed as a if it were a finished work, but with the x-ray view of penciled-in characters against more fully (and wonderfully) drawn backgrounds.

Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News has posted the cartoon to his site along with a plea to John Lassiter to consider applying the contemporary Disney (Pixar) studio crew to finishing the unfinished work, and distributing it as an opener for a new Disney theatrical release (which was the role of the original classic cartoons in the early to mid 20th Century).

Great Idea.

[Suggestion courtesy of Gregory Frost]

[Addendum 9/2/10: This has been removed from YouTube by the Disney Copyright Hawks, but as of this writing is still viewable on Ain't It Cool News.]

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, sometimes shortened to Royal Society of Arts, or RSA, is a British institution founded in 1754 to “embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufactures and extend our commerce”.

Among their many endeavors is a series of talks in which leading thinkers examine social challenges and seek to shed light on issues both contemporary and timeless.

Some of those talks have been incorporated into animated presentations, in which the speaker’s words are accompanied by time lapse animation of a cartoon illustrator drawing and writing a clever whiteboard presentation of the topic.

These are created by a studio called Cognitive Media, though I couldn’t find individual artist credits. The stop motion is occasionally accompanied by added animated elements, but the end result seems seamless and is often clever in the way already drawn elements are repurposed as the talk and animated presentation continue.

The result is a visually entertaining presentation that holds your interest and adds clarity to concepts that might otherwise be a bit off-putting an effective combination of words and pictures.

[Via BoingBoing]

Sketch Theatre collects step-through demonstration videos of artists from comics, film and game design, animation and related fields.

Created by Alex Alvarez, founder and director of the Gnomon School of Visual Effects and the Gnomon Workshop, and produced by Lily Feliciano, Sketch Theater allows artists in these fields to give quick instructional demonstrations that pass on some of their techniques and working methods to other interested artists.

Some are longer and more elaborate, others are short, but usually still informative. Many are extracted from longer instructional DVD’s offered commercially by Gnomon Workshop, but usually stand on their own as a demonstration piece.

The videos are all shown within the amusing conceit of a mock theater interface.

There is a list of artists, apparently arranged alphabetically by first name, many of whom have more than one video clip.

There are also video interviews with a number of the artists, news, a forum and a store.

(Images above: Travis Louie [top 2], Christian Lorenz Scheurer, Jordu Schell, David Krentz and Syd Mead; see my posts on Christian Lorenz Scheurer, Jordu Schell, David Krentz and Syd Mead.)

Studio Ghibli, the animation studio of Hayao Miyazaki, which is responsible for some of the best Japanese animated films (and a number of my personal favorites, like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away), is entering the video game arena, partnering with Level-5 game developers to produce a game called Ni no Kuni: Black Mage.

There is a brief trailer on YouTube that shows that Studio Ghibli will be bringing some of the style and visual charm of their hand drawn animation, along with their talent for all-ages fantasy storytelling, to the world of CGI gaming environments.

Spirited Away is still the most popular movie of all time in Japan (animated or otherwise), and Miyazaki is revered there, so the game is expected to do well in Japan. It will be intresting to see how it does here. So far, Disney, which has the rights to distribute Studio Ghibli films in the U.S., has been unable (or unwilling) to market them well, so Miyazaki is not exactly a household word outside of Anime circles.

There is a brief article about the Studion Ghibli/ Level-5 collaboration in the New York Times.

[Via Cartoon Brew]

The Blank Page is a short (3 minute) stop-motion animation by student George Metaxas that helped to get him accepted into the experimental animation program at Cal Arts.

Metaxas describes it as “An allegory about the creative process”.

What’s particularly interesting is the visual charm he accomplishes with his limited materials: a range of cardboard shapes that have been painted or drawn on.

There is an interview with him on Design Federation in which he discusses his process that includes some storyboard drawings.

Other than that I can’t find a site or other internet presence for Metaxas, but I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing more from him in the near future.

[Via Cartoon Brew]

Linear perspective is an attempt to codify the way that we perceive the relationships between the size of objects, and the shapes of objects, based on their relationship to us in three dimensional space and convey that perception on a two dimensional surface.

The most important rules of linear perspective are that objects appear smaller in the distance, and parallel lines converge on a hypothetical distant vanishing point.

In true reverse (or inverse) perspective, these rules are reversed, in that objects are larger in the distance and parallel lines converge in the direction of the observer’s position.

Reverse perspective is sometimes called Byzantine perspective because of its use in icon paintings, in which objects like thrones or platforms are depicted as wider on the portion farther from the observer. The notions that have been applied for explanation are that the important point of view is that of God, not of the human observer. Whether this is the actual intent is unknown, but it’s worth remembering that the invention of linear perspective postdates the Byzantine, so they could not have been using the reverse of codified rules they presumably didn’t have.

For those of us who have been exposed to linear perspective in images for all of our lives, the idea of reverse perspective is hard to visualize, but Jeremy Mooney-Somers has used 3-D graphics software (a modified version of Art of Illusion) to make an animated visualization of True Reverse Perspective.

I have to emphasize that the images above do not convey the idea. You must see the animated version to get the effect.

(It’s interesting to contrast this with with the Reverspective of Patrick Hughes; though not actually true reverse perspective, it’s an interesting variation on the way we perceive three dimensional relationships.)

[Via BoingBoing]

As usual, this year’s wonderfully talented (and obviously superbly instructed) crop of students from the Gobelins, l’école de l’image (Goeblins School of Communications) in Paris have created short (60-90 second) animated films that are shown as introductions to the events of each day of the years’ Festival International du Film d’Animation d’Annecy (Annecy Animation Festival).

Also as usual, these are wonderful, whimsical, charming, beautifully realized and reaffirming of the lively state of hand drawn animation.

(Film titles for image above: M. Eustache, Soapy Trip, Chaman, Junk Space, Red River Bay)

[Via Articles & Texticles, as usual)

Quite often, the best part of an animated short or feature is the backgrounds.

Since background images are onscreen for extended periods, and don’t need to change rapidly as do the characters, they are frequently the subject of intense design work and beautiful rendering.

For a demonstration of how wonderful animation backgrounds can be when isolated from the movie and empty of characters, visit the Animation Backgrounds blog.

Maintained by Rob Richards, this is a treasure trove of stills from animated shorts and full length features that showcase the background artist’s work.

There are lots of terrific scenes from animated gems, like the great Warner Brothers classic Hare-Raising Hare (top two images), the beautifully subtle lighting of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence from Disney’s Fantasia (above, third down) and the enchanted forest from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (4th down, designed by Eyvind Earle).

There are also backgrounds from more recent films, like Disney’s Atlantis, The Lost Empire (5th down) and Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt (bottom).

You can browse through the pages using the “Older Posts” link at the bottom of each page, or jump to individual topics using the links in the right side bar.

Either way, there is enough here to classify as a delightful time sink, and Richards seems to be adding posts on a regular basis.

[Via Cartoon Brew]

A pencil test is a step in the process of creating traditional (hand-drawn) animation in which the artist draws a sequence in pencil, which is then photographed and run as an animation.

This allows animators to see, assess and, if necessary, adjust the crucial elements of motion and timing prior to creating the more elaborate inked cells that are used for the final animation.

These are never meant for the public, any more than concept art or preliminary sketches; they are just intended to be tools for the animator. The images are often rough and characterized by smudges, false starts and scribbled notes.

The process is fascinating, though, and so is seeing the characters move and act, but in a rough state that makes it more obvious that these are moving drawings.

Pencil Test Deopt is a blog maintained by animator Jamaal Bradley, in which he gathers together pencil test videos from around the web and posts them along with descriptions of the piece and the animator(s) involved.

There are some pencil tests from classic Disney animations, as well as some recent additions from great Warner Brothers animators.

This is a tremendous resource for anyone interested in animation, and the process by which drawings “come alive”.

[Via ASIFA-Hollywood]

Jeu (French for “game”) is an award-winning short (4 minute) animated film by Swiss filmmaker Georges Schwizgebel, by way of the National Film Board of Canada (top two frames above).

In the tradition of Disney’s Fantasia, it’s visual interpretation of a piece of music, in this case fairly free-form and constantly changing and morphing.

It gets most interesting about 2 minutes in, when Schwizgebel starts to play games with the structure of architectural interiors and related elements.

Schwizgebel plays some similar games with perspective and “camera angle” in L’homme sans ombre (”The man without a shadow”, bottom two frames above), a longer (10 minute) animated short about a man who makes a Faustian deal to trade his shadow for wealth.

Both films are wordless. The animation throughout has a rough, hand-painted look of gouache or pastel, though it may be oil, in a technique known as “paint-on-glass animation“.

I did not find a dedicated site for Schwizgebel, but you can find more of his films with a Google video search.