Journey for Bernie: Behind the scenes (part 2)

Once the tune was written and I knew the timing wasn’t going to change, it was safe to start the storyboarding process. While I was working on the tune, I would listen to it over and over again in the car on my way to and from my job as an art teacher. I’d make mental notes on what needed fixing in the song itself, but I was also starting to visualize what it would look like.

Necessity had driven the idea of puppets that only show from the waist up and flat backgrounds and set pieces, but I now had to figure out what those puppets and backgrounds would be and do. I feel very strongly that the drastic change Mr. Sanders calls for is a dire necessity, but I also wanted to keep the tone light so I could communicate urgency without being panicky. I set to work on a first pass of square-ratio storyboards (they’re just post-it notes), which you can see here:

The first round of storyboards.

This didn’t all show up at once. Even just this little smattering of ideas is the result of hours of listening through the song, stopping and starting it, and going over specific sections until I thought of something that worked. A lot of the ideas, like the transition of the toxic water going into the boy’s glass, made it to the final product. Some, like the elephant in a gestapo uniform, I decided were too heavy-handed for the vibe I wanted. It was a very difficult line to walk. My favorite shot will probably always be the main puppet (it’s just myself) coming into frame just to drop “seriously,” second from the right on the second to last row.

The worst idea to come out of this process was the text scroll. I was trying to speed up the process so I could make my self-imposed deadline of February 3rd (the Iowa caucus), but this was too much of a corner to cut. When I started converting these sketches into rough storyboards, I got to this section and it felt just awful. The screen was going to be absolutely dead; I did not feel great about myself as an artist that day.

But like every time that happens, I put the project down for a day and came back to it with fresh eyes. The static words, even if I made them dance around or something, were absolute crap. That was objective. But that feeling pushed me to create the coolest sequence of the short, which I unofficially called ‘the four dystopias.’ I wanted to reiterate the point during the bridge (the whistling part) that basically all of our problems as a nation are caused by a greedy few through the power of the businesses they own. Climate change is caused by oil and gas companies who refuse to acknowledge their responsibilities, our health care system has been absolutely devastated by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies, our rights to privacy and to internet are being meticulously dismantled by big tech and telecom companies, and the so-called “affordable housing crisis” is obviously caused by—you guessed it—big real estate. It probably set the whole process back a couple days, but it was worth the planning that went into it. You can see the rough storyboard here:

Obviously, a lot changed. Imagery drawn while angry was removed (it’s never my best work), lyrics were rewritten here and there, I removed a reference to a congressional candidate here in Oregon, and a few other minor edits were made. And again, this animatic (drawn in ToonBoom Storyboard Pro with a Huion drawing tablet), crude as it is, is weeks of work, sucking up all but maybe one or two nights and weekends. But once the planning was finally, FINALLY done, the fun of making all of it could begin! Next time I’ll talk about the fabrication process for the first part of the film.

Journey for Bernie: Behind the scenes (pt. 1)

Now that I’ve finally released Journey for Bernie into the wild, I’d like to talk about how it all happened.

The song itself started as a tune I was humming in the car and eventually grew into a GarageBand file with no future. I can talk more about the music if there’s a demand for it, but I’m mostly interested in sharing the process of stop motion filmmaking.

I had about seven months before I start my first full-time job as an animator, so I decided to spend them making a film. I already had a song for Bernie, I’ve always wanted to do a music video, and I felt very deeply that we are living in a moment in time where I need to be able to tell my grandkids (should they come to exist) that I did everything I could to preserve democracy and build a good world for them to live in.

And thus began the animation process! Deciding to turn a song into a music video is a pretty big task, especially when you don’t really have a budget. I should say that I did have some nice equipment from the beginning, including a digital DSLR camera, a very smooth sliding rig (about $200), a character rig that a very talented friend made me (shoutout to Bismark Fernandes), access to a bandsaw (also about $200), and a couple C-stands. Aside from that, I was using three IKEA desk lamps for my lights, lighting gels I bought for like $18 from Amazon (sorry Bernie!), scrap wood, cardboard, foam core, cut paper, wire, and craft store felt.

I knew I needed to make this both quickly and cheaply; I had just come off directing the short film Con Fuerza, where I’d come to fully appreciate how long and how arduous the stop motion process is. This and the fact that my shoot space was a literal closet is how I came to the idea of building a track system (onto a night stand from Craigslist), like this:

The tracks themselves were cut from one piece of backing for a large bookshelf.

I decided early to use the slider vertically, as nothing else would give me such a precise level of control over moving set pieces on and off in that direction.

Once I had a stage and a scale set, I was ready to start simultaneously planning the short in a process called storyboarding and doing animation tests, which I’ll cover in the next entry!

-Andrés

We sure armature around here

One of the most important jobs in stop motion is, in my view, making the puppet armatures. If a puppet is going to communicate the story well, which is its only job, it needs to be able to move right, and for that to happen it needs to have a good armature.

It begins with what’s called a ‘mechanical drawing.’ We need to draw out on paper the exact size of the character so we can plan out basically what their skeleton is going to look like. Then we take 1/8” aluminum wire and bend it into the correct shape!

The precise and slow-going art of armatures

Every puppet has unique challenges. Saúl, seen here, had two big ones: the character never leaves the chair he’s sitting in, and he’s very wide. When thin characters are made of foam, the foam itself doesn’t put up a lot of resistance and the character is easy to bend. If, however, we were to allow Saúl’s entire body to be made of solid foam, any attempt to bend the wire “spine” would be useless and the character would sit bolt upright through the whole movie. Boring.

The solution, like many, came from SCAD professor Nathan Asquith, who recommended we find a way to create a hollow space inside the puppet’s belly so the wire would be strong enough to hold a pose once there was foam all around it. I wrapped a rubber glove around his torso and did my best to secure it to the middle of his body where it wouldn’t touch any walls in the mold (this would create a large cavity on the puppet’s surface); I did an okay job.

Saúl’s rubber glove belly

There was also the matter of Saúl’s face. None of the characters “speak” in the same way, and Saúl’s challenge is that his face is that of a crocodile and not a person, meaning his mouth is a long triangle that needs to flap open and shut. I had a lot of fun with this:

It took a while to come up with a design, particularly because it was very important to me knowing I’ll be animating him that Saúl’s jaw hinged in the right place, which is very far back in his skull, even behind his eyes. I initially tried to make it with twisted 24-gauge wire, but ended up going with 1/8” so it would have the strength to resist being pulled in the wrong direction by the felt that’s going to be added around his snout.

And while the other characters are either pretty similar or still in progress, I also wanted to share my favorite little challenge so far.

Early work on the grackle which appears in the film

I love animals. Since I began animating, many of my favorite subjects have been things with tails, snouts, and extra legs, so I’ve been really looking forward to this armature. Acting as sort of an echo of the main character, this bird appears mainly in the beginning of the film then sporadically throughout the rest.

To make a living creature, any kind, appear to move convincingly to the audience, it’s important to know how the real versions are put together. I looked at a lot of bird skeletons in different resources to come up with this little design, which is what drove the idea for how to do the spine and the legs. The wings were going to be difficult considering the layering of feathers that needs to happen when birds fly, but for right now the armature was probably going to look about the same no matter the solution.

To get the legs in the right place, I determined the best solution was to essentially make the torso a little sandwich so I could guarantee getting the spine dead center, as well as have a convenient place to drill holes (one in each side) where I could anchor her legs. She’s made of twisted 24-gauge wire and balsa wood, which is super light, easy to wood glue, and can be carved with just an x-acto knife, and whatever that silvery wire I used for her spine is; I honestly don’t know what size it was, I think I just found it somewhere. Her face would be just a magnet so we could make different beaks, open and closed for her to swap out depending on the need. The end result:

My heart!! I can’t wait to see her finished.

I’ll be back with more soon!

We built this city block

Con Fuerza isn’t meant to take place in a specific town or city block within the context of the film, but having never built a Colombian city before we had to model the set on something. We thought, ‘where better than Barranquilla, Colombia, home not only to the film’s producer Alejandro M. Siegert but to its first folk character to have a conversation with the main character el hombre caimán?’

I set to work. The story had been board-driven, with only the first pass completely finished (on sticky notes, seen here).

What that meant was that I was going to have to take into consideration the shots necessary to tell the story, the space we have to shoot it in, the equipment available, and so on, to build the right set.

The first thing to consider was scale. Because this is a student film, the whole operation began by taking the Stop Motion 1 class at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where all the film crew are currently students. The focus of that class was to make puppets, so we used our time there to make the puppets we would eventually use for the film. In doing so, it was arbitrarily decided that Liliana would be 11 inches tall, because of which everything in the world and the world itself then had to be based on a scale that would fit this 11-inch puppet, leading to the insane scale of 11/64 or 17.1875% of reality.

As I used Google street view to look at the many tiendas which Alejandro insisted were the perfect meeting place for these very different characters we’d created, it became clear that we would need a street corner, with buildings on both sides of the street and plenty of sky. As I learned from the very talented SCAD professor of sequential art John Lowe, the best way to start is with a street plan, as seen below.

I began by looking at the thumbnails we had and trying to understand what angles we would need; having the hat on the roof of a house across the street that was still visible in a lot of the shots was particularly challenging. But I came up with a pretty basic idea of what we’d need for the tienda itself, sketched in the first photo. The second and third are iterations of my earliest attempt to digitize the map, giving me much more precise control over the measurements (which needed to be taken into consideration as we had very limited physical space and the scale was already unchangeable). The fourth is the final version, and aside from the wall originally planned at the north end of that drawing is almost identical to what we’ve ended up making. The photograph is of a street in Barranquilla, which I couldn’t stop coming back to despite the huge supply of images we had collected from Siegert’s own trips, those contributed by friends and family, and what we could find on Google Street View. Something about the tiny houses all painted such bright and different colors just struck me, and made its way into the houses we’re now building to go across the street from the tienda.

Once the numbers are crunched and the drawings are drawn, it’s tempting to go right into building. The best way to save an unthinkable amount of time (and money), however, is to build mock-ups, or a version of the set which is the right scale and dimensions but made quickly and cheaply. Fancy productions with bigger budgets often build theirs out of foam core, or poster board. We, however, have cardboard:

I built a cardboard version of the set in my dining room and the team built a version of the interior at one of our school’s buildings (logistically we realized pretty early we were going to need two versions of the tienda walls, an inside and an outside).

Once we get some sawing, sanding, and painting done, we should have a real stop motion set finished and ready to go!

Emoting through Liliana

So a lot of what we hear at first is timing, spacing, arcs and such when it comes to animation. I thought lip syncing would be the painful next step, but honestly once you have the mouth shapes figured out it's not that hard. What WAS challenging was suddenly remembering all the times I've heard about "acting in animation." What does Liliana say "hello" like? I need to know that if I'm going to know how she says anything else, so I gave it another shot (with upgraded eyebrows!).

Thesis film tests

Busy going crazy with the thesis film, but finally have some animation tests I can post here. Take a look:

Of course none of these are final shots for the film, but it's fun to see them finally up and moving.

Wart trouble

So a lot of you guys probably saw the stop motion blue dinosaur I finished a few months ago, which was one of the more rewarding (and exhausting) projects I've worked on recently. Naturally, I've signed up to do something way crazier and way longer in the same amount of time in the fall. SCAD has one of the best university stop motion labs in the world, and they're setting up the stop motion class for us to team up and make a real animated short rather than all of us making smaller, less impressive projects, so it seemed like I ought to take advantage.

To that end, I signed onto a project about a kid with a demonically possessed wart on his back. Not my usual schtick, but with directing ambitions it's important to learn how to work on someone else's stuff. So without further ado, the first pass at a rough animatic:

The nice thing about storyboards is that you have a lot of license to be rough with your lines, as the most important thing is the clarity of the action in the frame. Storyboards are typically used as a tool for directors, assistant directors, cinematographers, producers, and more broadly for the entire crew. Given that, it's important they be easily reproducible and easily legible.

Right now, the biggest problem is that this thing is over four minutes. Our next job is to pare it down to only the NECESSARY action to get the story across, which is a major headache but also one of the most thrilling steps (!!). Stay tuned for a look at how the whole thing turns out.

SCAD Animationfest 2017

So as a lot of you guys know, I'm at SCAD for an MFA in animation right now. The school was recently gracious enough to shuttle us all the way to Atlanta for an animation festival, and it was incredible. There were so many people with so much talent, professionals and students alike, and I did my best to meet all of them. Really great trip.

Kylie, Pedro, myself, and Meghana, all good friends from Savannah.

The only downside was the five-hour bus ride between cities, our shuttles were not designed for the long haul. Fortunately, I'd picked up a fun character design exercise somewhere recently before we left, and was able to spend a good chunk of the trip drawing a bunch of nonsense. You'll forgive the squibbly lines.

I think Nub-legs Bull is my favorite.

Basically the idea was you take a heavy pencil and draw a bunch of weird shapes on a page, then come in with something smaller and fill in the details. Fun stuff!

The long pause

Hey guys!

So you may have noticed that blue dinosaur comics have been a little sparse of late, and I wanted to fill you in a little. Since "the stick," which was released in September but actually happened the winter before, I arrived in Georgia to start working on my MFA in animation. Exciting times! Unfortunately, as it turns out, grad school is really hard. I'm not complaining, I love every second of it, but it doesn't quite afford me the leisure time for blue dinosaur-ing that desk jobs and the coffee shop did.

But I haven't forgotten the little blue guy! In fact, I wanted to share a couple photos from my stop-motion class of a certain work in progress...

Look at his little feet!

Just wanted to say thank you to all of you here for sticking with me even if the content hasn't been surfacing as much as it has in the past. Can't wait to see what comes next!

-a

The stick

Hi everyone. So, today was amazing. I woke up, posted the last 'get the stick' page on Facebook and Reddit, and went to work. When I looked at my phone on my first break, it was hard not to tear up over what had happened in just a few hours.

Some of the kindest words I've ever seen on the Internet had appeared under the little drawings I made, and to be honest I'm still a little floored by it. Rather than paraphrasing:

"Thanks for posting this! really needed it"

"I've been moping around home for the past week, feeling down and awful because i hate searching for jobs.
This just gave me the motto i needed. 'GET THE STICK!'"

And my favorite:

"Don't know if you'll see this in all the replys, but this honestly made me cry. ... Your comic helped me, and I'm going to try to turn my life around because of it."

All I know is it makes me happy that my story could help make a difference for even one other person. And, to at least start to say thank you for all your support and kindness, I made some things.

Should fit most smartphones, I think?

Intended as a Facebook banner, but yours to use as you'd like.

'Til next time,
andrés

New words

It's hard to believe it's been almost two years since Blue Dinosaur first saw the light of day. There's a lot of room for reflection on the journey it's been since then, and while the little blue guy has certainly seen his fair share of obstacles he's not going anywhere.

I'm honored to welcome you to the new site, built using Squarespace rather than Wordpress or Drupal, or certainly by scratch like the earliest prototype (may the code gods forgive me), but honestly I'm just glad it'll free up more time for me to focus on the stuff I really love. 

Thanks as always for your support guys, it means the world. Cheers to you, and I'll see you all again real soon.

-Andrés

Distractions!

Howdy kids! No blue dinosaur today, but here's a character design I made for a thing.

Crafting Mines!

New Horizons

Howdy all! So I've had my head down for a long time over something I'm really excited about, and while I'm not ready to drop the whole thing on you yet you guys may recall way back when I uploaded a sketchbook doodle of a sloth and lizard character I was working on. In an effort to make peace with you all over not doing a million new blue dinosaurs a day, I thought you might like to take a look at some character designs for the thing. Enjoy!

Fan Art: Growlithe

Looks like I'm just doing a bunch of my favorites! Right hand is learning faster than expected too, but boy do these take a while.

Fan Art: Snorlax

I made a thing! I've kind of always wanted to do fan art of some of my favorite stuff, and I figured now's as good a time as any to start, good hand or no. After all, they can only get better! Enjoy, guys.

Feathered Dinos!

Hey kids! I've been an irresponsible cartoonist and spent the past few days making a Halloween costume instead of more comics, but I thought I'd share something I found online while you wait for the next exciting update from the little blue guy. Looks like we found another feathered ornithomimus, one of only three in the world! It's very exciting for those among us who love to look back in time at some of the coolest critters that ever walked the earth, which should be 100% of everyone. Take a look, it's a short read but they do link to the original scientific paper at the bottom of the article (you have to be a fancy researcher to see the whole thing, unfortunately). Check it out here.

Friends

About a year ago, I had the great pleasure of being a groomsman in a wedding for two very good friends of mine. We're all pretty relaxed guys, so the groom's bachelor party was just a camping trip, and at some point someone said "we should do this every year." If I've learned anything since that time, it's that there is no good excuse in the world not to make that time for the people who are close to you. So off we went, all coming from different cities, to spend one weekend out in the country (kinda) together. A few people couldn't make it, which was sad, but all the more reason to do it as much as possible. Today's late-night comic isn't Blue Dino's typical fare, but that doesn't mean he can't be a little sappy once in a while. If you know me, I think you're great and I hope we get to see each other again soon. If you don't, I'm sure you're pretty swell anyway; maybe give someone a call you haven't talked to in a while! As always, thank you all so much for supporting me and this little nonsense I make. Come back soon for more!

-Andrés

Facelift

Hello everyone!

It's been a long road since the little blue guy's first day in a sketchbook. There have been tough times and big changes here in the real world, but he's managed to hang on through all of it. Good thing, too; I don't know about you but he definitely keeps my days a little brighter.

I just wanted to say thank you to all of you. Most of you know me personally, and you've all been incredibly supportive and encouraging as Blue's been getting on his own two feet. To those of you I don't know, it is just so humbling and gratifying to know you're here, and I only hope you'll continue to find bits of joy in the work I do.

To express my gratitude to all of you and to deliver the best Blue Dinosaur experience I've been working pretty hard on a new home for the blue guy and anyone else I might be putting on paper in the near future, and I think you're going to like it. After a couple unexpected roadblocks I don't think there's enough coffee in the world to get me through today, but I'm sure it's well worth it. Welcome to the new bluedinosaur.net, thanks for coming and enjoy your stay!

An interview!

Hello, the world. Yesterday I had the great privilege of being featured as a guest on the "If You Had Superpowers" podcast run by Bob Knarwhal. He's a great guy and was a lot of fun to chat with, if you have an extra fiftyish minutes of ear-time you should totally check it out! http://www.ifyouhadsuperpowers.com/2015/07/is-there-purple-dinosaur-iyhs-ep17.html