24fps: An Animation Blog

     Craig "Spike" Decker and Mike Gribble, known as "Spike & Mike" started a film festival  in the 1970s as a means of promoting rock bands, horror films, and classic movies. Around 1977 they started airing very popular anaimtion shorts from the local area, and these became so popular that it spawned it's own Festival of Animation. Soon, Spike and Mike were getting so many requests from filmmakers all over the country, it became obvious that they needed to expand. Soon they were taking the festival on a 50-city tour.     Responding to the social demands at the time, Spike and Mike started the Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation  in 1990. There were alot of R-rated animations being produced in the states and overseas, that could not get distribution in the states. These film makers were looking for a way to show their films to a more open-minded audience, and the Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation was a great way to do that. These were ...

      The Passenger is an animated short film released in 2006, written, directed, and produced by Melbourne animator Chris Jones. The Passenger is an impressive film, not only in the quality of animation, but also in the cinematography, lighting, FX, and countless other achievements. The most impressive aspect of the film is, however, that it was done entirely by Chris Jones.     In the modern day, it's easy to say that this is no longer possible, to complete such a high-end film by one's self. I would argue, that that's also what you may have said in 2006, when the film was released. Maybe even more so considering how much CG filmmaking was still growing. The quality of the FX, lighting, and texturing of The Passenger easily still holds up today and I find that the older it gets the more impressive it is.     Chris completed the film by himself, but he had one thing many of us just do not allow for. Time.     As documented in Chris's blog, ...

     Just 25 years ago, having an animation studio in your home would have been a distant dream. The tools themselves were often out of financial reach. Just to get started you would need, an animation desk(with an animation disc), a stack of animation paper, a camera that could shoot high resolution in single frames, a filming desk, and editing software. And that was just for one person. If you needed more than one animator, and you most definitely would, you would need to double a lot of that equipment.     Sure, you could do a homemade animation desk, and the camera did not have to be high-end, and the lights for filming could be taped on. But this isn't a school project anymore. You have clients and you need a professional-level animation product if you expect to make a real go of it.     Present-day is a completely different situation, with modern computers and software, you can get up and running within a day and produce high-quality animation by...

      As an animator, and an artist in general, I am always looking for inspiration, something to make me keep pushing my art and my medium. Some animators look to the past, some of the old veterans, others look to the future, trying to navigate an exciting world of ever-evolving new technology. I like to look under rocks, well, that is to say, I like to look where others might not be. I like to find independant animtors, experimenting not only with form, but also story telling and movement. How can an expertly crafted line tell a love story. I found a beautiful piece of animation that I still use for inspiration.      Thought of You , by Ryan Woodward, is an exempliary piece of animation art that I still watch regularly years after discovering it. It feels liek one of the purest pieces of the artform I have yet seen. There's no dialogue, there's no color, or any details for that matter. What ther is, is form and movement, the short lets the animation do al...

      In the early nineties, the world of television animation was experiencing a boom. Theatrical animation was changing direction to new and refreshing directors and artists, and the world of television decided to go in a new direction as well. It decided it was time for some more provocative, experimental, and adult-oriented material. It was time to push the boundaries of animation and test the audiences consuming it. It was time for Liquid Television.     MTV was the home for music throughout the eighties. With almost nonstop music videos, paired with music news and talk shows, MTV was the place for the young and hip. The young MTV audience was growing up a little, generation X was pushing into other mediums and MTV wanted to jump on that train, so they started offering other shows like Real World, Road Rules, and other youth-centric programming. They also began airing more isolated and specific content late at night on weekdays, when kids were up and parent...

Canemaker, John (2001).  Walt Disney's Nine Old Men Disney Edition      Marc Davis knew that he had a gift for dramatic storytelling at a young age. Following in his father’s footsteps, he sought to entertain and entrance. Davis’s father, Harry A. Davis, who performed a “black magic” act was a consummate showman. Harry Davis was a brilliant man who could speak ten languages, was a magician, a musician, and a watchmaker, amongst other skills. Eager to follow in his father’s footsteps, Marc decided to pursue a higher education in the arts. Harry knew that his son had storytelling skills, but instead of putting him in a performing arts school, he wanted him to work at a pool hall, to “learn about life”. Because his father was rarely happy in one profession for long, Marc and his family moved around a lot. He never stayed anywhere long enough to gain any true or lasting friendships, so he had to occupy his time in other ways, often carrying around a sketchbook. Davis lov...

     In the early ninties, Walt Disney Studios was amping up production on a few new features, and were looking for some fresh new talent. The eighties had not been great for the studios, between the poor releases of films like The Black Cauldron, and Don Bluth startig a rival studio. Sp they needed to quickly switch direction, and they figured some new faces could do that.     While on the hunt, they heard about a young independent animator with an oscar-nominated short film Your Face , and decided to make an offer. His film had alot of metamorphasis, which would be very useful in their new film Aladdin, so they decided to make him an offer. One million dollars for his work on the production on Aladdin over the next three years. It was more money that he had ever dreamed of, he couldn't believe it, Disney, the dream of every young animator, came knocking had his door with a truckload of money. The was only one problem...     ...he said no.   ...

      For most of the early days of animation, the art form was seen as a little more than a moving comic strip; a silly character, a funny sight-gag, the end. And for the most part, it was. In the twenties and early thirties, animated characters like Betty Boop, and Feliz the Cat were household names because they would star in an animated short before a feature film. The cartoons were entertaining, and they did tend to stick with the viewer, but they were far from what anybody would call cinematic. The majority of these shorts were a single character singing or dancing in front of a still drawing, it was a very 2D experience.     When Walt Disney announced he was working on the first full-length feature animation, he was laughed at. The response balked that animation was not rich in story, character, plot, or cinematic staging, and the critics were right, and Walt knew that. If they were going make make animation a legitimate cinematic art form, then they had t...

      Disney Studios housed one of the most revered creative groups in our industry history, the fabled Nine Old Men. These were a group of animators, directors, and supervisors that Walt held in the highest esteem in his studio. Most animation enthusiasts know names in this group like, Milt Kahl, Woolie Reitherman, Frank Thomas, and Ollie Johnston. However, a name that is often overlooked, is the man behind some of the best offerings ever to come out of the studio, Les Clark     Les Clark started at Disney Studios before reverence was behind the name, they were like any other small animation studio that produced 5-6 minute shorts. Mostly these were silly characters getting into  trouble, and the occasional music number like Skeleton Dance .     These musical numbers required more than simple gags, and snappy timing, they required dance numbers to a musical beat, and that's where Les Clark shined. He was known around the studio for having an excel...

     Ralph Bakshi was a trailblazer in animation, even if most people in the modern era have never heard of him. He was one of the first directors in animation who saw the art form as it truly was, an artform and didn’t think it should be limited to entertainment for children. Animation was a chance for any artist to express themselves in any way they wanted, and sometimes that included adult-oriented material.      In the last fifties, Bakshi got his start in animation working for TerryToons. He was a cell polisher, he cleaned up animation cells before they were filmed, the lowest rung at the studio, but a solid foot in the door. He was soon promoted to cell painter and then began training in animation.      While struggling to get his animation career moving, he worked on comic strips, Dum “Dum and Dee Dee” and “Bonefoot and Fudge” trying to focus on his own style. Over the next several years he worked with companies like CBS, trying to pit...

Many simply refer to this era as the Disney Renaissance, but what did that mean ultimately? The eighties were not a creative or financially successful period for the Disney studios. They released a series of artistically uninspired films, culminating in the dark and confusing Black Cauldron. It was a mess in production from beginning to end, leaving most artists yearning for the glory days of Disney in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Most artists working in the studio went to Disney after growing up with films like The Jungle Book, 101 Dalmations, and Cinderella, true animation marvels. Not they were producing films that had narratives that barely made sense, and were ultimately ugly. Gone were the days of bright and color palettes dancing behind wholesome characters the audience could root for. In an effort to overtake the new kid in town, Don Bluth Animation, Disney was trying to be edgy and dark, with a studio full of artists that didn't want to make that. So what changed? The management...

Welcome to the 24FPS blog! This will hopefully be a place for animation professionals, novices, fans, and any curious to come a see the amazing world of animation.  I will be posting some animation histories, biographies, and even some art lessons in the coming weeks, and I hope you will stick around for interesting animation fandom. We’re going to be starting with a general introduction to what is known as the “Disney Renaissance”. A time when mainstream animation was reinvigorated and revitalized. In the early nineties, many thought Disney animation was on its way down, with Don Bluth animation starting to take over. We’ll talk about how that didn’t happen and what prevented it. Jumping from that, we’ll go over to Don Bluth, a young, hotshot Disney animator who decided to abandon the studio in the eighties. He saw the direction the studio was headed in the eighties and decided it wasn’t where he wanted to go, so he packed up his stuff, and a handful of top animators, and started ...