I’ve been drafting the story for my shadow puppet animation in my head over the past week and yesterday I sat down and set up an experimental project in After Effects, only to be severely disappointed. Even though I’m current through AECS4, I’m running v6.5 because my processor doesn’t support SS2 instructions. I’d forgotten how parenting, in this version, is laughably primitive for this type of animation. Even with a creative rig of null objects and pre-comps, animation was tedious. I have a solid idea of how I want the short to play out, but without the new Puppet Tool from CS3+, or more sophisticated parenting functions, I just don’t see a way to elicit the performances I need from cut-outs without spending ridiculous amounts of time keying individual frames or tediously editing velocity vectors. Yeah, it’s possible. But no, I’m not going to spend the next two months animating this short when I can get a better result in half the time. I’m loathe to say it, but this is a project which will so clearly benefit from a single new tool that it’s actually worth postponing until I upgrade my hardware. Right now I’m considering drafting an animatic just to get the ideas down. In the meantime, I’ve given the project a reference name: “This Is The Way The World Ends”. Like all my project names, it may or may not end up being the title of the project, but until it’s finished or I actually name it, this is what I’ll refer to it as.

• Congratulations to Wall*E for winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature this year! Also, La Maison en Petits Cubes by Kunio “Mr. Roboto” Kato for taking the Best Animated Short!


• My Dreamweaver/CSS studies were making me claw my eyes out so I switched to After Effects and studiously knocked off 16 chapters today, completing the whole course. I guess that means I’m back to clawing my eyes out with Dreamweaver again tomorrow.

My After Effects training was a lot more dense than I expected. It’s going to take a few days longer to cover all the material, but that’s a really good thing in disguise. I’ve picked up some phenomenal tips and I’m genuinely excited to try some of them out.

• Been enjoying This is Why You’re Fat, a brilliant Tumblr blog.


• Installing After Effects CS4. Looks like small changes overall, so the upgrade should be effortless and cause minimal headaches. Fingers crossed. However, I’m not up to speed on some of the upgrades in the CS series, so rather than put it off I’m powering through an advanced refresher course. It’s about 10 hours of training, but I think I can squeeze it into an evening. After that, I’ll be reading After Effects Expressions, by Marcus Geduld. Expressions are Javescript code snippets which augment the way After Effects manipulates art assets, and since they’re math-driven they can be incredibly powerful. Sadly, I’ve neglected this area as well, using the rationalization that I can do the same work by hand with the type of animation I do. To a certain extent, that’s true. But expressions, once you spend the time to familiarize yourself with them, can make tedious or even impossible to hand-animate tasks a simple chore. Pft, and I thought I’d never need math as an artist. Time to take my medicine.

• Finished up my pages for the Obama comic that were shovelled in front of me. I think the pages were drawn by Chris Allen, which means it will probably come out from Antarctic Press.


• Realized I forgot to re-install After Effects. Wow, how did I miss that? Found out because I was seized by a sudden desire to make a looping animated gif of that cute/creepy stop-motion kid in the new Pop Tart commercial. I really like animation a little too much, I think.


• I’ve developed a fascination with shadow puppets lately, especially the Indonesian variant known as Wayang Kulit. I think the reason they interest me so much is that there’s something essentially primal about them. In addition to being a performance art and all the appreciation that entails, we have a basic need to tell stories to one another, and across multiple cultures shadow puppets are a shared invention. For many, it was how they shared their history, their knowledge, their entertainment; it was culture. It was TV before TV. But it’s more than that, because shadow puppets utilize the same two primary tools animators use: motion and sound. As intelligent as nature has made us, I still find it wondrous that a static object, given motion, can transcend itself in our eyes and become something living. Psychologists call this animism, it’s one of the benchmarks of measuring intellect. If it moves, it’s alive. Cats display this tendency with string all the time. Infants too. When we grow up we know the difference, but good entertainment can make us forget that.
  
  Maybe it’s just the notion that it’s shadow that captivates me. It’s an implied existence, second-hand evidence of something that must be there. Certain cultures believe the puppets represent spirits. Plato had his Allegory of the Cave, which essentially says we’re chained in a cave and everything we consider real is just a flickering shadow play on the wall. Enlightenment is escaping those chains and wandering outside into the real bright light. I especially like the part where, if you go back into the cave and try to educate the people still chained there, they totally think you’re crazy.
  
  All this thinking about shadow puppets makes me wonder how difficult it would be to animate a project inspired by them. It should be possible to rig up a puppet in After Effects using some IK expressions. If I have some free time I’ll try it out.

The reason you can’t find it is because the expression engine was revamped in subsequent versions. It’s handled in Java script now and it’s much more powerful. I had to pull this out from my notes. You’ll have to input this directly from the timeline:

a=5; //decay
b=25; //frequency
k=75; //amplitude
y=position [1]-k*(Math.exp(-a*time)*( Math.cos(b*time)+1));
[position [0],y]

Where k=height, a=duration and b=speed.

This type of thing is much more your specialty than mine, but it should get you in the ballpark. The man to Google is Dan Ebberts, he’s without a doubt the leading expert in the field. I can’t recall if he wrote this or I did, but since it’s essentially obsolete, I don’t think anyone cares. And honestly, upgrade as soon as possible if this type of function is your focus because information on the old syntax is difficult to find since the changes. Good luck.