BOOK REVIEW: "ACTING FOR ANIMATORS" BY ED HOOK

WHERE ARE THE FUNNY DRAWINGS?

What's funny? Well, for starters, this drawing by Basil Wolverton (above) is funny. Everyone I've shown this to laughs. Why do we so seldom see funny drawings like this in modern animation? It's odd to think that TV animation contains so few funny drawings. You'd think a few would slip in there, if only by accident. I'll bet the artists who designed the TV poster above have drawings of theirs pinned to their cubicles that are 10 times funnier than anything in the poster they made. Why is this? What's wrong? What's responsible for this? Why are there no crisis meetings when a poster or a comedy show fails to include funny drawings?
I love drawings like this (above) because they so obviously exist just to get a laugh. The artist isn't ashamed of being funny, he flaunts it! They're not mildly amusing products for an era of reduced expectations...they're gloriously and unashamedly reaching for a laugh! If I see one more mildly amusing animated feature or TV show I think I'm going to explode. The audience is hungry for funny drawings! Why are we witholding them?

UNCLE EDDIE'S CAREER ADVICE FOR PEOPLE WITH FACES

If you're an actor your face determines the kind of roles you play. The audience has an expectation about you based on the way you look and it's best not to disappoint them. I've often wondered if ordinary people in the real world should do what actors do, and sculpt their personalities and vocational aspirations to fit the way they look.

By way of example, the guy on the upper right (above) should clearly be a drug dealer. If he's an honest and drug-free man then that's unfortunate because nature has clearly chosen a different path for him and he'll never be happy as long as he's living a conflicted life. The guy in the middle of the second row (above) should obviously run a news stand and sell newspapers. Don't feel sorry for him because he'll make more money than you do. Customers will go out of their way to buy newspapers from a man who fits their image of what a newsie should look like.
Some people like the woman in the middle row above are cursed with a bland face. It's as if they have fewer facial muscles than everybody else. People like this are said to make good spies because they don't stand out in a crowd. Once again, don't feel sorry for these people because an inexpressive but pleasant face is deemed to be dependable and trustworthy and employers like that.
Employers don't like faces like these. They look like they're riddled with eccentricities and neuroses. if you look like these people you should put a lot of effort into finding a way to be self-employed.

MY FAVORITE FILM BOOK

This is the best film book I know of: "Grammar of the Film Language" by D. Arijon. Too many film books waste the readers time with personal anecdotes and academic jargon. A lot of this book is made up of diagrams and captions and usually you can tell what's going on without reading the captions.

The book starts with simple set-ups like the one above. I love back shots where the actor walks away from camera into the set and seems to take you with him. We cut to a side shot to pick up the actor entering sc on a close shot. It's a challenging cut but one which is never jarring or confusing.

Arijon likes to cut to actors who are in the same quadrant of the screen that they were in on the previous shot. Is this standard practice or just a preference of the author?

Here's a nifty way to walk a man down a corridor. I like the the way the third shot, where he presumably stops, deliberately violates the screen direction of the previous two shots.

A lot of the set-ups in the book are more complicated than the ones I've shown here, but most of them are understandable without recourse to the text. Skillfully done drawings will often explain things faster and better than text. It's amazing that more books aren't presented this way.

A word about Arijon: he was a filmmaker and teacher in Uruguay when he published this book in the mid-70s. Can you imagine that!? It took someone from Uruguay to show us how to write a textbook the right way!

MY HAIR DYE STORY

You may have noticed that my hair is turning grey and that I haven't dyed it. I wouldn't be surprised if some generous soul admired me for being so close to nature as to allow my hair to take its true color. Actually I'm not close to nature at all and I'd dye my hair every day if I thought I could get away with it. I'm just not very good at hair color. One incident in particular turned me against it.

One day a couple of years ago my son told me that his girlfriend's parents were going to drop by for the first time. He naturally wanted me to clean the place to make a good impression. I thought fine, I'll do that, but first I'll dye my hair so they'll marvel at what a handsome, young-looking dad my kid has. I assembled all the paraphernalia in the bathroom and proceeded to apply the dye.

I was vigorously massaging the dye into my hair like the box said to do when I noticed that little dots of brown dye were falling into the sink and probably staining it. I didn't know what to do then it occurred to me to move over to the toilet and let the drops fall into that. Surely water and porscelin (spelled right?) would resist staining. I moved over and continued to rub the dye in, really energetically.

A while later I emerged from the bathroom all dressed, with my eyes closed and drying my hair with a towel. Just then the doorbell rang and I invited the visiting parents in. The two families assembled in the living room and a fun time was had by all.

After a while my son's prospective mother-in-law asked to use the bathroom and I pointed out where she could find it. She disappeared down the hall and everyone else continued to socialize. After a couple of minutes she appeared back in the living room only something was wrong. She looked sick as a dog. She was positively green and could hardly stand. Her husband didn't seem to notice and asked if he too could use the bathroom. He disappeared for a minute then came out a minute later even greener and more sickly than his wife. The two of them were in extremely bad shape! I couldn't figure out what was wrong. The couple made an excuse and practically ran out of the house into their car.

After they left my still and speechless family cast looks of disbelief at each other. I timidly looked into the bathroom expecting to find some dye implement that I might have forgotten to clean up. No, the room looked OK, or at least it did untill I focused on the toilet. There on the wall just behind the facility were dark streaks of brown emanating in an explosive fan pattern from the open toilet. It looked like...like... I can't bring myself to write it. I found myself turning green. Then I remembered that I was standing over the poscelin when I rubbed the dye into my hair. That was brown hair dye on the wall!

The couple never again visited us and my son and his girlfriend eventually broke up. Since then I've allowed my hair to take it's natural color. I'm frequently praised by ex-hippies for being so close to nature and so regally oblivious to what other people think. Actually I'm scared to death about what other people think. I just haven't the energy to retell the story again and again.

BTW, the girls in the picture are people I never met.

ME BABBLING ABOUT ROMANCE AGAIN

Half the artists who frequent this site are probably in San Diego for the comic convention. Good! I'm in the mood to write something really, really off-topic...something that absolutely no artist will want to read! Here goes....

TWO OBSERVATIONS ABOUT ROMANCE

First off, the picture above relates to my second point and has no relation to the kind of romance I'm writing about in this paragraph. Here I'm writing about the Romantic Era which may have started with Rousseau but reached its height in the 19th century. Now the odd thing is that the Romantic movement quickly split in two. It meant something totally different in England than it did on the continent. In England it was primarily a literary movement. It influenced poetry and stories and gave us novels like "Frankenstein." On the continent it was mainly a philosophical movement and it produced anti-Enlightenment philosophers like Nietzche and Mussolini.

English Romanticism favored people like Byron and Colleridge. Continental Romanticism favored Napoleon. Even the people who fought Napoleon openly admired him. He was informed by reason but he was said to have transcended it through his will. Continental literature of the period was full of references to will and the philosophers codified it. I love what the English did with Romanticism; I can't even begin to understand the continental variety.

Here's the second observation about romance. This time I'm talking about romance in the sense of a man and a woman falling in love. My guess is that romance is one of the factors responsible for the concept of human rights and liberty. Lots of institutions give lip service to supporting love and families but I get the feeling that every institution actually feels threatend by them. People who are passionately in love have their own agenda and they're willing to die for it. It's amazing that the medieval troubadors would have sided with this anti-social behavior. Eventually they persuaded society to support lovers at the expense of the weakening of the state. Interesting, huh?

Thanks to Steve Worth for the French postcard. Also, I hope Blogger will publish the paragraphs in type that's all the same size, as it is in the window I'm writing it in.

SOME LESSER-KNOWN EGON SCHIELE PICTURES

Here's (above) a red woman. She's not exactly a woman painted red but red that takes the form of a woman. We are fields of color that have minds.
Here's a woman (above) reduced to just the interesting parts. She's packaged in a rich brown and presented to us. The picture is sexy but you rebel against it because there's something disturbing about the missing limbs.

Here's legs with transparent, silky stockings stretched between them. It's odd to think that a naked figure is even more naked when wearing something. Transparent color like the green shown here is riveting because our minds can't figure out whether to regard it as pure color floating in the air or as a tint of the flesh color. A vagina thrown into the composition combines the mystery of sex with the mystery of color and texture.


The white woman with the colorful crotch is pure Kandinsky but it's easier to see what Kandinsky was getting at here than in his own paintings. Color here is portrayed as a weird, otherworldly attribute that is tamed and enslaved to allow us to perceive reality, but which has a mind of its own which can assert itself and threaten to show us the chaos that underlies things.Here's an elegant line drawing that suddenly erupts in extreme volume. When you see drawings like this you wonder if volume is the fundamental atom of vision, the thing that art is all about.

J.T. QUINN FIGURED IT OUT!

For a long time I've admired Will Elder's watercolor technique in "Little Annie Fannie" but I could never figure out how he did it. Now, thanks to an animation artist named J. T. Quinn I think I understand it.
A couple of months ago I stumbled on Quinn's blog called "JT QUINN SKETCHBOOK" and there it was, Elder's Annie Fannie technique adapted to Quinn's own sketch ideas! I recognized the look instantly!
Reading on I discovered that Quinn had taken a class with Harvey Kurtzman at SVA in New York city. Kurtzman taught the class Elder's way of painting watercolors. You build the color slowly with layers of transparent washes. Eventually you get a rich, brilliant glaze then you finish by spotting the most important color areas with a little gouache. It sounds simple but I had to read about it in Quinn's blog before I could figure it out.

Quinn's a pretty good sketchbook artist. If you visit his blog you'll find the Elder section archived under August 21, 2005.

TWO KILLER JOHN CARICATURES

Here are a couple more caricatures that John did of me. When I think about the John drawings of me that I've posted up till now I'm amazed at how many ways there are to draw just one face. There's the optimistic me, the seedy me, the retarded me, the rat me, the eager me... it goes on. A number of the ways of thinking about me required John to try a different kind of line or a different design concept.

I don't post these drawings out of ego, because I'm the model. I do it so this aspect of what John does will get into the historical record and so that these techniques won't be lost. And since history is watching I'll cop to accidentally cutting off the final "D" in "dreaded."



Here's me in pantaloons and cod piece. I'm stupid-looking here so the "V" of the head in the disdain drawing is inverted so the wide part is on the bottom, as if my head is too stupid to resist gravity. I like the tiny soda under the soft, rubbery upper-lip flap. The five o'clock shadow looks like it's made of toothbrush bristles. Tiny granny glasses cover the seedy eyes and the long, thin spectacle arm extends all the way back to the hay-filled ear. Warts, of course.

I like the restraint involved in making the wart on the end of the nose tiny and understated. If it had been bigger it would have taken our attention away from the elegant, sloping line formed by the nose and forehead. This long, continuous line is the true focus of the picture.

STEVE'S MIRACULOUS CARICATURE MACHINE

I have no idea what the final layout of this post will look like. I used Blogger settings that I was
warned away from by friends but which I had to try because my curiosity about them was eating me alive. If it all looks chaotic when it's published then I offer my apologies in advance.

Anyway here's some samples from Steve Worth's amazing caricature machine, which is actually a Mac laptop with a camera built in and with Mac Photobooth software installed. This is a $1500 package but that's probably peanuts to the filthy rich artists who frequent this blog. Just get your butler to pick one up next time he goes for a caviar run.

This program is amazing. It contains dozens of virtual lenses all of which distort the face in a different way. You just move your face around infront of the camera till you find a distortion you like then you click to save it.

I learned a lot about drawing by spending less than an hour with this machine. Look at the hand pictures...I never thought of drawing hands that way till I saw these snapshots! This is a great machine but it's going to put a lot of marker and pastel caricaturists out of business. If you do caricatures for a living then consider yourself warned!

My uncertainty about the final layout makes it impossible for me to assign names to the photos. The friends skewered here are: Steve Worth, Jon Trapnel, Marlo Meekins and myself. One more thing...um...I'm not as fat as I look standing behind Jon. That's a camera distortion. Just thought I'd mention that.

Thanks a million to Steve Worth for letting me use these pictures!

HANDS HAVE A LIFE OF THEIR OWN

I love to draw hands. That's because hands have a life of their own.

Hands are pretty good at revealing what their owner really thinks. A face may listen to a boring speaker with what looks like rapt attention but way down below the hands are playing with keys or tapping on the table. Sometimes the hands are more than just magnifiers of their owner's true feelings. Sometimes they have feelings of their own. Hands may be macho, gay, happy, sad, lecherous or virginal, even if their owner possesses none of these qualities (these thoughts cry out for drawings to illustrate them. Sorry, I didn't plan this post very well). I'd love to do a short, pencil-test film of an extreme version of this idea where a guy's hands, acting completely on their own, grope the people around him and get him into trouble.

Here's a drawing where the excitable hand is frightened and clings to the face, which is only mildly disturbed. At least that's what I had in mind when I drew it. The understory about the excitable hand is sometimes for the artist only. Sometimes you want the understory to be so subtle that the audience isn't even aware of it.
Most stories don't lend themselves to this hand theory and those I board the normal way, as above. Even so, it still works for the occassional scene. I'll try to find some examples.

WOULDN'T IT BE FUN TO DESIGN A TEXTBOOK? (PART 2)

A good textbook would have to have lots of faces. Kids need to see examples of civilized, effective, kind and intelligent adults.
It's a good idea to get these pictures from fine art sources. Fine art does a good job of isolating noble qualities.

Some of these fine art faces also get across the idea of man as a rational, fundamentally decent being. What an interesting idea to propose to kids who may see only the dark side of life at home!

THE NEW REN & STIMPY DVD IS OUT!!!!

Do whatever you have to do to get this DVD! Steal purses from little old ladies, sell your children into slavery....anything! It's that good!

A lot of fans were put off by some of the gags in these cartoons and it's easy to see why. There's some gay jokes, some cruelty to animals, some gross gags...most people will find at least one thing that rubs them the wrong way in here. That's the bad news. The good news is that the remaining 99% of the content is pure bliss and, taken as a whole, the contents of this set are probably the most innovative and funny thing to happen in animation in the last half century.

For me the best cartoons in the box, the pearls of greatest price, are "Naked Beach Frenzy," "Ren Seeks Help" and "Stimpy's Pregnant." Naked Beach Frenzy is hands down one of the funniest cartoons ever made. I defy anyone to sit still during the lifeguard and Shampoo Master sequences. Ren Seeks Help is packed with tour de force acting scenes which will probably change the way animation is done forever and Stimpy's Pregnant contains what might be the greatest Mr. Horse sequence ever. And those are just the top three ! I could write all night about the great gags in the other films!

It's a digression but I can't help putting up the note John wrote to his fans on a card on the inside of the box. John is not only the greatest artist working in the industry but he's the greatest writer as well. These are beautiful words. If you read enough of what he writes you begin writing and talking that way yourself. Like everything John does the words beg to be imitated.

BTW, people who pre-paid for the set are getting their's in the mail now. I'm not sure when the discs will appear in the stores.

WOULDN'T IT BE FUN TO DESIGN A TEXTBOOK!?

You'd want to have lots of exciting images in it. You'd want pictures that provoke kids to crave adventure and seek out awe-inspiring events. Let some other book prepare kids for a life of quiet desperation and bureaucracy. This one would show the cubs what it would be like to be a lion!

Kids textbooks should be awe-inspiring! They need to contain pictures like this one of what could pass for King Kong's island. The feeling of menace is palpable! It's also a picture that's full of hope and aspiration. It seems to say, "If you have the guts to get here I'll show you wonders beyond anything you've ever imagined!"

A terrific image for a kid! Earnest and competent adults risk their lives for what they believe on the surface of a mysterious ocean far away from home!

It probably sounds like I'm trying to turn kids into soldiers or pirates. That's because I only have the bandwidth for four pictures so I'm limited to expressing a single thought here. Of course there's more to life and textbooks than what I've presented here.

There would have to be lots of maps in the book. Kids love maps especially when they're illustrated as beautifully as this one. There used to be lots of visionary, artist-conceived maps, especially in the 1910s to 1930s. Present-day maps are merely informational.

MORE "INDIANA JONES" PICTURES

Here's a few interesting pictures from my picture file. I believe this (above) is the ramparts of an old, fortified town in Hungary. I love this picture because it sucks you in and makes you want to run along the colonnade like a kid. Can't you hear the thumping of running sneakers on the wooden floor?

Why can't modern architects make spaces as interesting as this? The roof tops are fairly plain and unadorned but their placement makes them fascinating to look at. From the point of view of an observer looking over the railing the roofs form a kind of roof city, a mysterious town above the normal town, inhabited by...what? You can't stop your mind from weaving stories about it.

A cool castle. I don't know anything about it. I swear this castle just appeared in my file without me scanning it in.


Here's a covered bridge (above) in Switzerland. Notice the paintings up in the rafters. Why would anyone paint pictures in such an exposed place? The wood is thick, ships beam/ Ghepetto's workshop wood. Is there anything more beautiful than thick, weathered, structural wood? The sides seem a bit tall to me. Maybe that's to protect users from cold, icy winds that howl down the stream in the winter.