Most of us can easily recognise a Disney animated film when we see one, as well as a “Looney” toon, a Pixar piece, and for you old school folks – the lovable Hanna Barbera characters. They all have a distinctive look to them that makes them globally iconic. These styles have been adopted and enjoyed by millions world-wide.
There are so many categories and sub-categories. Below is a very broad overview of the most popular to date. (Please click on the links for further viewing!)

3D computer graphics are all the rage nowadays (and hence a bit of a thorn in one’s side as an animator who prefers the classical 2D way of doing things). The life-like three dimensional feel in these animated films bridge us between flat cartoon animation and live action cinema. Below is a film by my dear friend Kim Leow. This is her final film in college and took her about 5-6 months to do from scratch.

Some other links that you maybe interested in:

Oktapodi

Burning Safari

I grew up watching Disney and Don Bluth (The Secret of NIMH, The Land Before Time) films like countless others. These traditionally animated, 2D features are still going strong today.

But how are they made? I though I would include an interesting clip which explains all, taking the classic ‘Beauty and the Beast’ as an example.

Also check out one of Disney’s newer shorts. Its very nice, but rather bittersweet.

Another popular style we see nowadays is the very flat, graphic, cut-out, paper doll style.

One strong example is Nina Paley’s ‘Sita Sings the Blues‘.

The rest of this film is on youtube (in HD!). And if you like it, check the website out to follow the creator’s journey through the making of. Usually this kind of look in an animated film is done with software like Flash. South Park is another example of the cut-out paper look.

Another look that is developed with software like Flash, and has a similar flat graphic appeal, is being used heavily in Saturday morning cartoon shows nowadays. Popular examples  are the Fresh TV produced ’6Teen’ and Warner Brothers ‘Johnny Test’. This look is also popular in video games. The much successful ‘Castle Crashers’ for the Xbox is a prime example. Dan Paladin, the artist and animator behind the game, shows us here how he works his magic:

Rhotoscoping or cell-painting are similar techniques where you take live action footage and you literally trace or paint over it to give it a more illustrative feel. ‘Waking Life’, ‘Waltz with Bashir’ and ‘A Scanner Darkly’ are prime examples of this sort of animation. Did you know that Disney’s ‘Snow White’ or the dance sequence at the end of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ both used this technique? The highly popular iTune commercials are a very simple example:

Stop-motion animation is a very fun form of animation, especially for those who enjoy crafts and toys. Tim Burton uses this form quite a bit. His ‘Nightmare before Christmas’ is a classic, and the recent ‘Coroline’ is a big favourite this year. This technique incorporates the use of a camera, taking snap shots of an object as it moves – where each shot represents a frame of animation. The music video below not only uses stop-motion, but also shows us how its done!

Claymation is a form of stop-motion animation that specifically uses clay or sculpy to create the objects involved. Nick Park’s ‘Creature Comforts‘ is a wonderful example.

Taking the basic squash and stretch principles of animation and literally stretching it out of proportion, you have the aptly named style of Rubber hose animation. Incidentally this style was the first to set the standard of animation in North America.  This is where the likes of Looney Tunes characters like Bugs Bunny, Ren and Stimpy, and Hanna Barbera toons take their cue from. The originals like Felix the Cat were treated more like rubber dolls, with flowy, stretchy limbs. Below take a trip back in time with Flip the Frog in this black and white rubber hose classic.

If you or your children watch Cartoon Network then I am sure that you have heard of Dexter’s Laborotory. The creator of this show, Genndy Tartakovsky went on to make ‘Samurai Jack‘, noted for its highly stylised, outline-free, and super detailed look. It has a very cinematic style, which caught the attention of Star Wars creator George Lucas, who then asked Tartakovsky to make the animated Clone Wars. Personally I think Samurai Jack’s look and colour schemes remind of me Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, though the latter is not as stylised.

However, intense detail is not always the key to a successful animated film. Even simple stick figures can tell a good story. Don Hertzfeldt proves just this in his academy award nominated short ‘Everything Will Be OK‘. Quite possibly my favourite animated short ever, by Cube, also adopts this method of minimalistic animation:

But how could we continue this article without mentioning the Japanese culture of Anime that took the world by storm? The large sparkly eyes…the sharp, pointy, two dimensional noses? From Astro Boy to America’s answer to anime – Avatar: The Last Airbender, this style has become quite a phenomenon. Incidentally both films mentioned, have live action films coming out very soon! I remember renting my first anime cartoon on VHS when I was really small, and I think its still probably my favourite to date – ‘My Neighbour Totoro‘ by Studio Ghibli. Sadly this is just a link to the trailer. Rent it on a rainy day. Its very cute!

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is a giant hub for experimental animation. I would highly recommend taking a trip to their building in Toronto and pouring through their library of animated films. Sand animation is a great example. Using sand to etch out beautiful drawings frame by frame, Caroline Leaf created “The Owl Who Married A Goose“. That must have been such hard work! Flashlight animation is another example. This can be done easily as long as you have a camera and a small source of light like a cell phone or a flashlight. Wait till its completely dark outside, or do this in a dark room at home. Using a slow shutter speed setting, one just draws an image in the air with the flashlight while they have someone take a picture of it. And voila, you will have a drawing completely etched with light! Of course, actually making consecutive drawings to create motion is a little more complicated. But you get the hang of it eventually, and its quite fun. Sprint did a neat commercial using flashlight animation. The third installment in the experimental series is chalk animation. Below is a wonderful clip by Blu.

Apologies if I have missed something crucial. I have tended to pick clips that have impacted me, above others. There are a lot of visual art styles of animation out there, that belong in the categories similar to those that I have mentioned, or fall into grey areas in between. I have tried to pick examples that were more on the obscure side without compromising quality (obscurity usually comes with its reasons after all); in the hopes that my wonderful Zincroe audience would be entertained by something new, and learn new things in the process!

Since my son Owen was born a year and a half ago, only a handful of great books and tv shows plus a CD or two have become things we love and come back to again and again. So, without further ado, a few of my (and Owen’s) favourite preschool things.

TV Shows

Sid The Science Kid

What I love about this show: The characters have lots of depth and the voice actors do a great job of bringing them to life. The humour and attention to detail make it genuinely enjoyable to watch, the science is fun and accessible and finds the fine line between educational content and something kids would actually choose to watch.

Where to find it:The show airs on TVO (in Ontario) and on PBS Kids in the US. It’s also available on DVD from Amazon.

Word World

What I love about this show: The character designs are brilliant – seriously, how do they make everything out of letters?! Learning about words and reading is worked into the plot in a really, really clever way – in my favourite episode, everyone’s afraid of a Shark, except Duck, because he mis-pronounces it as Sa-Hark.

Where to find it: The show airs on TVO (in Ontario) and on PBS Kids in the US. It’s also available on DVD from Amazon.

Pocoyo

What I love about this show: The simple character designs and plain white backdrop let you focus on the wonderfully detailed movement and sound – every nod, jump and step has a sound that helps tell the story – which is great for kids who haven’t got words yet. Also, I wish Stephen Fry (the show’s narrator) would read me bedtime stories and this is as close as I’ll ever get.

Where to find it: Pocoyo airs on Treehouse (in Canada) and is available on DVD from Amazon.

Kids’ CBC Friends

What I love about this show: It’s Canadian content that isn’t lame! Mama Yamma’s kitchen in Kensington Market feels a bit like the best parts of Sesame Street, the characters are well-written and funny (my personal favourite is the Breakfast Froog’s non-sequitur ribbit) and the hosts aren’t over the top. The Youtube video above really doesn’t do the show justice – Kids’ CBC, get with the times and make your content easy to find, embed and link to!

Where to find it: Kids’ CBC Friends isn’t a show, per-se, but short segments that get played between shows (instead of commercials). Kids’ CBC Friends airs on CBC in Canada (there’s more info on the Kids’ CBC website).

Music

The only music that’s become a staple in our house is Sing-A-Longs & Lullabies for the Film Curious George by Jack Johnson. The album has a good mix of accoustic songs and fun bluesy stuff (like the adaptation of Three Is A Magic Number about the three R’s). The lyrics are geared towards kids without being eye-gougingly repetitive, so listening on repeat is no problem.

Books

The Amazing Machines Truckload of Fun
by Tony Mitton and Ant Parker

What I love about these books: The words-to-pictures ratio is just about perfect – one or two short sentences per page – which means you can read everything before flipping the page! The text on each page reads like a poem and is fun to read just for the rhythm and the way it rolls off your tongue. If I had to pick just one, I’d have to go with Dazzling Diggers.

Haiku Baby
by Betsy E. Snyder

What I love about this book: The beautiful illustrations and pretty little poems are fun to read over and over. Hands down our most-read book.

Yes Yes! A Box of Board Books
by Leslie Patricelli

What I love about these books: The text on each page is so simple, it means you get to make up a story to go along with the illustration (umm… no, no hitting other kids with hammers?). Simple illustrations on plain backgrounds keep the distractions to a minimum. It’s a toss-up between No No, Yes Yes and Yummuy Yucky for which one gets read the most.

As a computer programmer, I’m always on the lookout for cool online content – it’s a geek thing.  And so, as a new-ish member of zinc Roe team, I thought “hey, let’s see what the kids are into these days”.  Of course in my own nerdish youth, I had to suffice with a BBS and a whole wack of CocaCola.  But kids today have a myriad of cool websites that cater specifically to their interests.  And so,  my homework assignment became a crash course into the world of (today’s) tech-savvy kids – what they play with and the connection between physical “toys” and virtual worlds.

Undoubtedly there are few parents who haven’t heard of the Webkinz phenomenon. A Webkinz is a cute plush creature (virtually any species from unicorn to tropical tree frog) that is tagged with a special code that unlocks a virtual online gaming world. There, your adopted pet’s avatar can participate in a variety of educational (and some not so educational) activities. The cuddly avatars compete to win KinzCash that can be redeemed for in-game items such as the Oak Paneled Pool, coveted Lunar Moon Bed, or the glittery Webkin pet Tiara. What bejeweled pet hippopautumus wouldn’t appreciate a soak in its very own pool?

In a similar yet less cuddly fashion, Lego’s Bionicle represent a sophisticated multi-dimensional toy franchise. These Lego bionic monsters come with some basic assembly instructions but to find out more about your character’s story you’ll need to visit the Bionicle online portal. Here, background story, character biographies, and a handy online store with registered wish list are all available at your fingertips. (Not only promoting the “gotta catch-em all” phenomenon, but also as a parental aid for Birthday and Christmas time shopping!) The web portal also includes a game section where each character’s stats are carried over. By far the coolest game is the Glatorina Arena which pitts the various characters against each other. Players challenge the computer and progressively face more and more difficult opponents. The pay off: kids can achieve awards and experience points that they can distribute among the characters so as to beef up their stats. Kids are also awarded with the ability to unlock new characters as they play. All in all the entire experience is that of a very well populated, scarry post apocalyptic world that 9 year old boys adore.

In exploring the Bionicle toys, I was invariably lead to the My LEGO Network (or MLN for short) which is a special Social Networking site much like Facebook but built especially for children by the LEGO Group. It is a safe environment that lets players of all ages create their own home pages, interact with other players through pre-written mail messages, and progress through an online game by collecting, building and trading virtual LEGO items.

Generally speaking there seems to be quite a few great examples of toys that bridge both physical and online worlds. Kids are going online at a very young age – and toys that can offer the benefit of physical ownership along with aspects of computer gaming seem to be harnessing a very compelling combination.  If anyone else knows of other examples of this virtual media and physical product pair up then post a comment and let me know!

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
— A.J. Liebling

Eons ago, when the web was emerging from its grey-background Times Roman infancy, one of the aspects that drew me and many people to it was the relatively cheap and open platform it offered as a publishing medium. While desktop publishing innovations in the 80′s put a new class of tools into homes, there was still a large price barrier to publishing and distribution. The web came along in its initial creeping 2400 baud glory and a new medium that offered creation, production, publishing, and distribution began to flourish.

We’re now a couple of decades into referring to the many things that are “The Web” and countless billions of words and pictures have been published by individuals with many others worldwide also acting as simultaneous creators, publishers, collaborators, and audience. It’s still exciting to see the variety and scope of work that appears daily and to boggle occasionally at just how much has changed. But it’s interesting how some things stick with us.

That excitement I feel for everything that interactive media can be hasn’t stopped me from also continuing to be drawn to the products of those “old” media. Sometimes ink on paper just feels like the right thing. The tangible experience of a book, a zine, a poster, or a card can be intrinsically unique and enjoyable. Where am I going with this?

Recently, I’ve been excited to see some advancements in printing and production technology have bled some of the open new media back into the old. A variety of on-demand services mean we now have cheap (even free) access to printing presses and tangible distribution networks. Publish your novel yourself? Why not? Make a glossy magazine that people around the world can buy? Sure. Releash a graphic novel? Easy. Have a funny t-shirt slogan? Someone could buy one from you five minutes later. Very thrilling stuff.

Here are just a few websites which in different ways offer over the keys to the press:

MagCloud.com is a pilot on-demand magazine project from HP. If you have the software to produce a letter-sized PDF, you can make and sell a magazine with MagCloud. Just browse through the wide variety of titles already available. Amazingly, making a magazine this way is free! Yup. That’s right, the beer and the speech are free! Here are a few choice magazines to check out: Fray, Mankind, LAB, Rubyist, and Kalina.

Want to publish a book? Head over to Blurb.com or Lulu.com. Once again, the relative ease of creating a PDF is all you need. Because these on-demand publishers have multiple size, cover, and printing specs, the process is a bit more involved. But the outcome is similar to MagCloud, you can publish and sell your book through either Blurb or Lulu at no cost to you. Here are some examples from Blurb (I love photography so I’ve chosen some photo titles): Johnstown by Ed Panar, Removing Mountains by Daniel Shea, and Indoors, Out-of-Doors by Helen Jones

How about an on-demand print option that uses something many of us already have on hand? Moo.com lets you upload or import photos that you already have on Flickr, Etsy, Facebook, and other networks and print high-quality cards and stickers. At Moo, you do pay for what you order but it does allow you to print just a few totally unique cards which is not something you can easily and cheaply do with your local print shop. The images can be photos, illustrations, whatever… A smart friend of mine made a beautiful set of mini calendar cards as a New year’s present one year.

Finally, for something really different, you can now create and sell printed apparel like t-shirts and hoodies without forking out for that 4-colour silkscreen press you’ve always wanted in the middle of your living room. SpreadShirt is one of the recent companies that will host an online store for you and produce all sorts of products on-demand. My friend Dave Cole runs his Glarkware shirt jobbery on SpreadShirt.

I wanted to do my show and tell on something I know really well. I had a really hard time trying to remember all the cool mind blowing art I was shown and discovered on my own over the last 6 years. Even after having shared during my show and tell I know there must be some brilliant work that got lost somewhere over time. I found myself pulling out my old art books (links to which I will put at the end of this post) and leafing through looking for the most interesting works. While there was less contemporary work in them, it definitely helped revive the passion I had felt while learning and reminded me just how interconnected and complex the history of new media art really is.

Daniel Rozin – Wooden Mirror

While the execution of this artwork is very simple, it is highly effective at creating a non-conventional mirror. It has all of the connotations connected to a mirror, but everything from the input to the materials to the sound is entirely non-conventional. Rozin has also created mirrors out of other materials including trash, wooden pegs, chrome balls etc.

Wooden Mirror documentation and other works

Solar Collector

A great local interactive artwork that is really well done in every aspect – from planning, to production, public participation to eco-friendliness this one seems to have it all. This was the one artwork I was most looking forward to showing.

Users can log onto the website and create varying patters of light for every night’s performance in Cambridge, ON. Every aspect of the project is powered by solar power and was built using recycled materials.

Theo Jansen’s & Arthur Ganson’s Kinetic Sculptures

Theo Jansen’s Creatures

More Theo Jansen videos including his TED talk

I find it amazing the complexity that goes into making creatures that are able to walk and move so beautifully and organically with no mechanics whatsoever. Ganson’s kinetic sculptures seem the antithesis to Jansen’s complex creatures – incredibly simple, step-by-step cyclical movement that animates everyday objects. I highly admire their technical skills.

Arthur Ganson – Walking Wishbone

More Ganson videos:

Machine with artichoke petal

Machine with eggshells

Cory’s yellow chair

Ganson’s TED talk

Max Dean

Max Dean has perfected making very simple, clever robotics. Taking everyday objects and giving them personality he’s making us question our interactions with technology. If you can be befriended by a table, what next?

Videos of The Robotic Chair

Video of The Table

Documentation on The Table

Overall I found the show and tell very successful. People seemed engaged in what I was showing and hopefully I was able to show pieces that most hadn’t seen before.

Things that used to inspire me were brought back to the forefront and will hopefully push me to add more new media elements to my artwork that has lately been all analog. Seeing the amount of changes to technology in the short time since I was learning it in University is pretty staggering. All of the changes look to have made the process (especially in Max/MSP) much more user friendly. Now I just need to find the time for some experimentation.

Recommended books:

Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers

At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet

New Media Art

World Of Art Series New Media In Late 20th Century Art

Camera.activityLevel

The most basic way to detect activity through a webcam in flash is by accessing the Camera object’s activityLevel property. This returns a number from 0 to 100, depending on how much activity is going on. While useful in simple applications, this doesn’t give us a way to check for specific gestures or a way to check a specific section of the video for activity.

BitmapData.getPixel()

A popular way to detect motion is by using the BitmapData object in flash. By taking “snapshots” of the video coming in from the webcam constantly (using either Event.ENTER_FRAME, or the Timer object), we end up with frames that we can compare by looping through each pixel and checking to see which has changed. This technique is useful for checking which areas of the video has activity. We can use it to interact with buttons or other display objects by simply waving our hand over it. Though it can be very intensive (specially when working with video that has large dimensions), it is one of the best and most reliable way to detect motion in flash.

Augmented Reality & Marker Tracking

As mentioned earlier, another option is to use saqoosha’s FLARToolkit. If you haven’t played with it before, you should definitely check it out…after reading my blog post to the end, of course. From what I understand (and correct me if I’m wrong), this neat library also uses the BitmapData object to take stills of the video from the webcam. It then manipulates the bitmaps in order to detect and extract the position of a marker in 3D space. You can then use flash 3D libraries like Papervision to apply those coordinates to a 3D object and display it on top of the marker as if it’s a physical object. This method requires the user to print out a specific symbol and display it in front of a webcam. The wicked thing about FLARToolkit is that it doesn’t restrict you to using just Papervision, you can use Away3D or no 3D at all!

Though it comes packaged with Papervision and Away3D, with a bit of “code spelunking”, you can strip out the 3D stuff and gain access to the marker’s x,y, and z properties. By doing this, you end up with a basic marker tracking library which you can use for pretty much anything your nerdy heart desires. In my case, my nerdy heart and I created a very basic game where you have to catch falling apples using only simple vector MovieClips. Check it out below:

Download Source

Moving MovieClips with your hand (or other limbs) using the webcam

Now after playing with the BitmapData motion detection and the FLARToolkit, I went on a mission. A mission to find/figure out a way to interact with display objects on the stage using the webcam, BUT without using markers. After a bit of searching, I was able to find this demo on youtube which is close to what I want but with more control over the display object’s reaction.

Using what I’ve learned, and some inspiration from the youtube demo, I threw a quick example together as a learning exercise for myself. By checking for activity where our “box” movieclip is located, we can check which side has the most activity and move the box in the proper direction as if it’s a physical box you can push around. Though it’s not perfect and could DEFINITELY use some more code optimization, I was very satisfied with the result.

Download Source

AS3 Real-Time Face Detection

Another technique worth mentioning is face detection in flash. Here’s a snippet taken from Mario Klingemann’s blog about the subject:

“Yesterday Seb-Lee Delisle pointed us via Twitter to this great example of a Flash based real-time face detection. It turns out that already more than half a year ago Ohtsuka Masakazu had been porting the face detection part of OpenCV to AS3 and added the source code to the Spark project – which is like a Actionscript candy box full of surprises.”

He then explains how it works and how to optimize it, it’s a good read for those interested in the subject.

So there you have it, we went from detecting basic general webcam activity in flash to complex face detection algorithms. Big kudos to the folks mentioned in this post as they’ve put in many hours coding in order for the rest of us to create awesome and engaging content with ease.