ANIMATING MIME EXERCISES

I'm not working right now so I spent part of my day yesterday animating on my ipad mini and reading notes I took on a book about mime. I'm not thinking about becoming a mime...I just wondered if they might know some things that animators could use.  Anyway, it occurred to me that I might combine the two things by animating a couple of standard mime exercises on the ipad. I could do it rough, with stick figures...it might not be much trouble.

Is it a good idea? Probably not. Even so I'll try one or two. If they don't work out there's always the "delete" button.

If anyone reading this has studied mime maybe you'll recognize this exercise:

Let your attention go to a particular part of the body. It's a soloist. Let that part do something people might like to watch, and keep the rest of the body relatively still.  Gradually let the body join in, in the role of a chorus or a counterpoint. 

Here's another one:

Posit that you have a safety zone, a circle about two feet in diameter. It might be a place of fun while the outside world is one of drudgery, or it could be a place of relaxation while the rest of the world is full of high tension. When you're in it you're safe, but you're allowed to stay in there only for a few seconds then you have to leave.

Interesting, eh?

BTW: The pictures illustrating the end of this post are all of pantomimists, which makes them mimes of a sort. Pure mime is more stylized than pantomime. It's like ballet in that it requires a beautiful silhouette and graceful, silent actions. Pantomime isn't as physically demanding but it's funnier and may allow an occasional spoken word.

Shown are Mr. Bean, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, and Red Skelton.

ANIMATING ON THE IPAD MINI

I promised to put up some of the animation I've been doing on but I'm still having trouble getting it online with the original timing anf framing intact. A friend has offered to help so I guess things'll work out soon. In the meantime, here's a few frame grabs from a recent film, if you can call something as short as this a film..

The time it took to do this? Less than an hour! It's amazing how fast you can go on these little iPad apps.

The key to working fast is to forbid yourself to redraw anything. 

If a line doesn't work, just draw a better one beside it.  

At this point (above) I accomplished what I set out to do...I sat a man down on a chair. All my tiny films have limited goals like that. When the film doesn't seem to be working I just delete it and start another.  If I don't have an idea I just start drawing and hope for the best. It's like doodling with animation.

I still felt like drawing so I added a table and a newspaper.

The man grabs the paper and opens it...

...and lifts it up to read. That's it. You can do zillions of these little shorts in waiting rooms and restaurants or while watching TV.

DRAWING ON THE IPAD

I've been using my iPad mini a lot lately, more so than my desktop. I use it for cartooning (above) and animation. I work on several sketching apps but the one I always return to is "Paper" by a studio called 53. I thought I'd put up a few examples of how different artists use that program so you can get an idea of its range. 

Paper is especially good at watercolor-type sketches (above).  Unlike real watercolors you can dial up the color saturation where you need to and get rich darks that approximate gauche.

People even do acrylic-type pictures (above) on this app, but I'm not crazy about the way they look. In my opinion you're better off using a desktop program for something like that.

Paper seems to work best when it's used for light-hearted, watercolor styles like the one above.

It's amazing how quickly it lets you can draw scenes like this one (above).

You can teach yourself color with it.

Paper doesn't contain any fonts but it's friendly to funky hand-drawn lettering. In a meeting I'd rather have a real pencil and a real legal pad, but Paper's writing could still be useful for other purposes.

There's (above) that 90s light-hearted style again. If you use Paper you may find yourself drawing and painting in that style because the program strongly supports it. If that's not your thing I wouldn't worry about it. Believe it or not, the program's artistic bias actually helps you to define your own unique style. I guess having something to conceptually bounce off of is actually stimulating.

A caveat: Paper is a wonderful app but it has bugs and its stylus, called "Pencil," doesn't always work like you want it to. Face it, none of the drawing and animating apps are perfect. I still recommend it. The basic app is free and comes with their very best brush tool, so you can't complain about the price. If you don't have a stylus you can use your finger. About a third of everything I've done has been with my finger, even when I have a stylus in my hand.

Lots of people have said that this is the drawing app Steve Jobs would have created if he'd put his mind to it. That's high praise.