ARTIST EXPLORATION: TERMINALMONTAGE

TerminalMontage is a YouTuber who creates animated content centered around mostly Nintendo video-game parodies. His distinct style of animation and comedy makes for a great source of entertainment. On the platform for more than 9 years now, he has developed into one of the major animation YouTubers, accumulating almost 2 million subscribers and millions of views per upload; his most popular videos reaching 25 million views.

Style

TerminalMontage has a particular style blending rather harmless character designs with crazy personalities and actions. His videos are very fast-paced and details in the background are hard to catch on your first watch. He includes some animated gifs for dramatic effect as well. His use of certain SFX also complements his bizarre style. 

Progression

Starting out making second-long animated memes on YouTube, TerminalMontage has progressed into making animated shorts; some reaching the 8 minute mark. In his early years, your able to view some of the animatics  he uploaded, giving you a look at his creative process.

Overall

Overall, I believe TerminalMontage to be the most entertaining animator on the YouTube platform. His animations always always make me laugh. Although the comedic style leans towards the those familiar with games, the style and effort behind each video makes it worth a watch and enjoyable for anyone.

My Favorite of His:

Exploring Free Animation/Graphics Resources

Adobe products are great for art and animation, but they can also be pretty hard on our wallets sometimes. I want fellow animators and artists should know that there are great alternatives to these programs - and you don’t have to pay a dime to use any of them!

Krita

Krita is a program I use all the time. It’s an open source graphics editor, which in my experience can do pretty much anything Photoshop can (you can also make pretty good animations with it!) Luckily there’s plenty of official manuals and instruction videos to learn from on the official website and youtube.

Website: https://krita.org/en/

Example of animation done in Krita:

I use this program frequently, and definitely recommend at least trying it out if you're an artist/animator.

FireAlpaca

FireAlpaca is another program I’ve personally used in the past. It’s simple, but you can make nice art and animations with it.

Website: https://firealpaca.com/

Example of animation done in FireAlpaca:

I prefer Krita now, but this program was great for learning how to make simple animations.

Wick

Wick is another open source animation program. Unlike the others, this one is online (you can download your work for later though). Despite this, Wick is a decent alternative to Animate.

Website: https://www.wickeditor.com/#/

A nice video overview of Wick:

I've been playing around with this one, and it looks promising!

OpenToonz

OpenToonz is another interesting free and open source animation program. This one is well-known for being use by famous animation studios like Ghibli.

Website: https://opentoonz.github.io/e/index.html

Animation made with OpenToonz:

This is just a small sample of all the free programs out there. You can find all sorts of alternative software and other resources on the crowdsource website AlternativeTo:

https://alternativeto.net/

The Midnight Gospel

.. this is stunning.
I'm at a loss for words.

This is a collaboration between Pendleton Ward (Creator of Adventure Time) and Duncan Trussell (Comedian/Podcast Host : The Duncan Trussell Family Hour.)
The impact crater this has left on my senses/being is unimaginable. Is without boundaries.

I am forever grateful art has the power or confluence or however it is best and most properly described to alter how you see the world with such overwhelmingly saturated experience and soaked to the core with the dopamine equivalent of indescribably mind blowing, ego shattering, pan-sensory driven revelations.
Art so good it simultaneously both puts you into and and blinds you to the fact that you are now cycling through the five stages of grief.
Within moments of watching this show I knew it had imprinted on me.
And I honestly got really excited to get to share it with you guys.

The amount of change art can enact is soo amazing.
And these guys knocked it out of the park. :D

Animators have made Propaganda films since the animation industry grew in the second world war. It's what saved Walt Disney's company during the time of financial hardship. Times have changed and propaganda has become a staple of our society. It has indoctrinated us in a specific system. Individuals are using many different platforms to express themselves and creating important thought-provoking art that goes against an agenda.  

David James Armsby is an aspiring film-director and makes animation short films on youtube to showcase his work. I found one of his animations on youtube that had a distinct style and name that made me want to see what it was all about. The title of the animation is called "Model Citizen" | Dystopian Animated Short Film (2020). What caught my attention by the name "Dystopian" is that it will have an anti-propaganda message. The style of the 50s era mixed with future controlled by robots gives this animation an eerily nostalgic feeling. The storyline is very strong and meaningful that it amplified the overall animation.

Studio Bones

Studio Bones is well known for producing anime such as Mob Psycho 100, Eureka Seven, Fullmetal Alchemist, My Hero Academia, and many more fan-favorites. Studio Bones was founded in October of 1998 by former Sunrise Inc. members Masahiko Minami, Hiroshi Osaka, and Toshihiro Kawamoto. They left in hopes of making their own studio, and have had great success.

Within Studio Bones, there are five studios, labeled Studio A through E. They each specialize in the different anime they're working on. For instance, Studio C is led by Yoshihiro Oyabu and is known for currently only working on My Hero Academia.

Studio Bones has produced anime adaptations of manga. This includes Fullmetal Alchemist originally by Hiromu Arakawa, Soul Eater by Atsushi Okubo, and several others.

Fullmetal Alchemist

Manga - Anime

The greatest thing about Studio Bones is the fluidity in their work. Whether it's their original work or an anime adaptation of a manga, this consistency is prominent in all of their works. Anime such as Eureka Seven, Mob Psycho 100, Space Dandy, and Dragon Pilot have certain styles that make them unique and recognizable. Studio Bones' animations are always of the highest quality and showcase the strengths of the studio. They truly know how to make their drawings come to life.

Dragon Pilot: Hisone and Masotan Animation Trailer

                Animation by Studio Bones

Indice 50

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXX_9DTv0LA

Indice 50 is a short film by ESMA. The story follows a family on their beach day which gets interrupted by a mosquito. The reason I chose this short animation is because I really liked the style of it. The drawing style reminded me of Pixar and all of the details were really well drawn. Although the film was an animation, it appeared quite realistic. I also really enjoyed the use of the difference in scaling between the characters and objects. For example, the dads character was purposely drawn to be big, so it was interesting to watch him holding objects that are significantly smaller than him. I also loved the transition where the story shifts to the mosquito's point of view, because it adds more to the story and was really interesting to watch. I think this is a great animation short. I recommend that everyone view this film.

Hair love

This is a short film about a African American father who had to do his daughters hair for the first time. It is an Oscar-Winning short animated film from Matthew A. Cherry.
The project was a collaboration with Sony Pictures Animation that was created as a Kickstarter campaign back in 2017 with a fundraiser goal of $75,000. Strong support promote collected almost $300,000, making it the most funded short film in Kickstarter history.
I picked this film because I liked the topic of  it being about hair. Little African American girls sometimes experience having to deal with hair problems or shall I say a parent unable to do their hair at some point. I like the color contrast, layout and the topic. I really enjoyed this short film.

Hope you enjoy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNw8V_Fkw28

Crimson Alpine

Spotted this animation a while ago and thought it would be great to showcase it to our class as it as the animator also showed the process of making it and thought it would bring some insight and tips. the creator goes by Resh on YouTube and has other projects on his channel. this can be accomplished using the paint brush tool as shown, that is how he created the outline look but he also mixed 3d which i thought he did very well.
Warning: there is some blood, and guns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZSkFLJx4fE

here is the prosses video:

Augenblick Studios

http://www.augenblickstudios.com/

Initially, I revisited Shorties Watchin' Shorties
(http://www.cc.com/video-clips/moygm1/shorties-watchin--shorties-evel-knievel)

Immediately, it struck me it was made with Flash.
Free Transforms, Tweening, Graphic Symbols, Layering.
Reusing Symbols and assets for new scenes.
Is very exciting to see from just inside the tools how things were kinda produced.
The show is definitely a bit coarse for posting to a school forum, so if you guys
are unfamiliar with the show please be forewarned: It is not for the feint of heart.

But the animations themselves are a really good resource for Project 1.
Simpler characters with multiple different examples of how Easing and Free Transforms can be applied effectively in a pretty straight forward way to get really delightful expressions of emotions and actions and exaggerations.
With a bit of observation these clips are good studies for how to layer character parts, too.

In re-watching these clips, eventually I got curious who had been the animators and if they had other stuff.

Which brought me to Augenblick Studios.
Is amazing to see these guys were also responsible for lots of beautiful animation.
Their Main Page is clean and efficient and I can't help but feel kinda giddy knowing the ENTER button is a Button and is UP: Red / OVER: White / DOWN: White (or a frame extension of OVER)
/ HIT: is the font size itself (also probably an extension of the OVER frame.)

Ugly Americans is really pretty.
(http://www.cc.com/episodes/atpo45/ugly-americans-pilot-season-1-ep-101)

In the opening they use Parallax Scrolling.
If you like this style you might like Charles Burns graphic novel Black Hole
(http://www.fantagraphics.com/artists/charles-burns/)

^Fantagraphics is awesome too! They have a store in Seattle.


They made some Super Jail episodes.
(https://www.adultswim.com/videos/superjail)
This style is really nice too.

Is very cool.
Am excited to begin searching up the chain for more things I've loved.
Once I remember them. :)

P.S. This interview animation is really good too. Is from their page.

http://www.augenblickstudios.com/home/video.php?item=jefftweedy

Cat City

Cat City is an animation made by Vewn (Victoria Vincent). She is an illustrator and animator; uploading her animations to YouTube. Cat City is one of Victoria's most popular works. It tells a story about a cat who decides to run away from home to live on his own. At first, he feels as if everything is working out fine. As the days go on, everything gets worse and worse. The screaming becomes louder, and the music and animations play faster. These all symbolize that the cat's life was going to shambles. He confronts what's been bothering him, and at the end, he finally decides it's time for him to go back home.
I particularly love the line art and coloring of Victoria's animations. At some points, it looks like crayons were used to color in certain objects or backgrounds. The colors she used are very soft and the line art makes the animation look sketchy. She has a very unique and cool art style and great animations that relay a message.

Cat City by Vewn

Vewn's YouTube

NOON

Noon is a short 2D animated film. It was animated by Cindy Yang; she graduated from Taipei National University of the Arts. She is currently a character animation student at CalArts and working as a freelance artist.

This film is about a student who sleeps at noon, and finally gets up and makes herself lunch. 

The reason why I chose this short film is that she uses a watercolor effect. What really stood out to me is the calm music, it creates the perfect atmosphere. It's a nice and relaxing film to watch. I loved the contrast between the busy life in the streets compared to the quiet apartment. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUoTMfU1P8o
https://vimeo.com/tzucin929
https://www.facebook.com/ddtzucin929/

The Senile Scribbles

For my animation, I chose something a little different from the others shown. I chose a series made by YouTuber called Seanzoz, real first name only known to be Sean. This is a series I've watched since it first began way back when. I found it by chance when I was interested in the game it's based off of. The reason I chose this was for it's sentimental value you to me and just how entertaining someone was able to make characters that are essentially just paper cut outs that have been rigged up. The humor, while vulgar at times, plays with the subtly in the animation and characters as well as the references to the game, Skyrim. On top of that, I have an admiration for the skill, talent, dedication that was put into this animated series. Through years of work this creator ended/slowed work on the series with nearly an hour of total animation with the videos spanning from 2011 all the way to the end of 2019. There is a visible improvement to the art and animation over time that can be really noticed and appreciated.
I look up to creators like this who can show so much passion in their work, relay so much creativity, with out the same budget or styles as the industry animations.

First animation of the series
Full main series

Most recent animation made

The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling

This is a short story created by Joseph Wallace. It was shot with a Canon 5D and Dragon Frame and almost everything is made from cardboard. This is a graduation film from the Newport Film School, that shows us that being overprotective does not make you fragile life secure.
This film shows how I go through life everyday trying to be careful because I am afraid of falling or becoming paralyzed. And this expresses that and I like how it was created, oh and it took them eight months to create it. Hope you like...

The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling (Future Shorts)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCZAf_qLgkY

Bee & Puppycat

Bee and Puppycat is a cartoon web series made by animators from Frederator (known for work such as The Fairly Odd Parents, Adventure Time, My Life as a Teenage Robot, etc) through the Cartoon Hangover youtube channel. It's about a girl named Bee thats in her early 20's who's unemployed and when walking home one night is met with a cat/puppy creature (Puppycat) which she takes in. When the cat starts taking notice of her caretaker's financial struggles, she transports bee to another dimension to be given an job by Tempbot, a huge TV in space. The job involves fighting space creatures and through these space ventures we kind of learn about the backstory of Puppycat.

The show started off as two 5-min episodes and after being so well received by the audience, Cartoon Hangover started a Kickstarter in 2013 whose $600,00 goal for the production of a season was more than met with a total amount of $872,000, making it the most successful Kickstarter animation project at the time. They then released 6 10-min episodes in the summer of 2016.

In 2017 they announced that they were going to be writing new episodes which were expected to air in 2019 but have been pushed to sometime this year.

Wings by Casey McDonald

Wings is a short animated film created by Casey McDonald as her final year thesis at School of Visual Arts. Casey McDonald is currently a freelance animator and has created works for Salesforce, Luminopia and many more. The story is about a little mouse named Nutmeg who collects feathers because she wanted to learn how to fly. One day, when she was out collecting feathers, she came across an injured bird named Bluebell. So she took Bluebell in and help nursing him back to health. When Bluebell was fully recovered, he did not just fly away. Instead, he let Nutmeg ride on his back so Nutmeg can finally fly. The reason I picked this particular work is because I think the animation was very well done.I can also find many elements that relates to what we have learned from class so far. For example, she did a very good job on the character's movement. Everything was very smooth and detailed. From Casey's website, I also got to see her story board for this film which is very interesting and gave me more insight of how the film was made. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtU8nBnpFVE
https://caseyanneimation.myportfolio.com/resume

Design Exploration - Tula Microphones

I discovered the Tula Microphones website and I thought it was a great example of clean, simple design and compelling animation and user interaction.

Here's a link to the site: https://tula.redcollar.co/

Knights of the Light Table

Knights of the Light Table is an animation studio who is most well known for their music videos that they animate for the different bands that exist on Youtube. Not much is known about them because they don't have an official website, but they have plenty of posts from other websites dating back to 2014, so they have been around at least for that long. Their animations are clean and nice to look at, and with their most recent work, they have really outdone themselves.

This is their most recent work:

How It Should Have Ended (HISHE)

How It Should Have Ended (HISHE) started when animators Daniel Baxter and Tommy Watson started talking about different endings to movies they watched and also talked about different ways a movie could have solved the issue at hand if they would have done one thing. In 2005, they launched there first video "How The Matrix Revolutions Should Have Ended"  and soon after in 2007 they would launched there website HISHEdotcom due to the success of there animated videos. They also joined up with Starz Digital Media to help with rights to videos they create and in 2010 they were awarded Best Animated Web Series at Streamy Awards. As of 2018, HISHE has 8.5 Million subscribers on Youtube, 200,000 likes on Facebook and 19,000 followers on Instagram and still growing.

How The Matrix Revolutions Should Have Ended

Terminator - How It Should End

How Frozen Should Have Ended

How Avengers Infinity War Should Have Ended - Animated Parody

At Home with Mrs. Hen

A bonus blog to share because:

The chicken pants
They way they walk
The way they flap their wings to express themselves.
I can totally relate to Mrs. Hen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBibWZOBclE

Example Flash Site

Found this website this morning and thought I'd share.
It's an information site for a video game themed restaurant in Tokyo.

It's called the 8bit Cafe, if you'd like to look it up yourself.

http://8bitcafe.net/index.html

Animation smears - Squash and Stretch

REACTING to ANIMATION SMEARS - These are SO WEIRD!!

at 2:00 skip to 2:52

This is video is from a Youtuber that specializes in art and creation. This video, he shows different animation smears from various cartoons and studio. Animation smears are also referred to as the Squash and Stretch Rule. Through that process, you can see how animation change throughout time. I enjoy this video because it shows you the different styles of smears you can use and how detail crafting an animation can be.

Blizzard Animated Short - Dragons

About Blizzard Entertainment:

Blizzard Entertainment is a game company based in Irvine, California. Blizzard released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. Blizzard created several other video games, including Warcraft sequels, the Diablo series, the StarCraft series, and in 2004 the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. Their most recent projects include the first expansion for Diablo III, Reaper of Souls, the online collectible card game Hearthstone, the seventh expansion for World of Warcraft, Battle for Azeroth, the multiplayer online battle arena Heroes of the Storm, the third and final expansion for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Legacy of the Void, and the multiplayer first-person hero shooter Overwatch.

Animated Short - Dragons

https://youtu.be/oJ09xdxzIJQ

Storyboards and Animatics

By Celeste Arguello

Storyboards are an integral part in any visual storytelling. It allows you to understand what shots you need, from what angles, and how you want them to move. Artists may take a script and translate it into a storyboard or skip directly from an idea to the visuals. Dreamworks offers a few tips from their style guide to help creators make dynamic shots and help understand where your key images are in space and in relation to others.

https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/10-tips-for-creating-storyboards-from-dreamworks/

Animatics take storyboards a step further by setting these shots to motion. A rough animated sketch could really help the members of the production understand exactly how shots flow into each other or help express difficult movements that would be confusing on paper alone.

Animatics have grown popular in fan communities specifically, taking characters from established media and telling stories through music from either the same or alternate sources. It’s a good way for fans to share their ideas without having to spend the production costs for a fully rendered scene.

https://omegafrisk.tumblr.com/post/180965435875/song-x-i-still-cant-believe-i-finished-this

Here for example, they used basic shapes for both the characters and their surroundings, and only included the essential parts of the background, as drawing too many details may become confusing in this sketch style. There are a few shots that keep appearing with slight differences to better show the change happening in between. The fight cuts much quicker between shots, showing more varied angles, depth, and closeups compared to earlier in the scene. It makes use of some of the tips listed above too, using over the shoulder looks, items at different levels in view, cutting on relevant lyrics or action, and making full use of the area by allowing Seam the cat to travel through the depth of the scene on multiple occasions. They keep faces off centered and looking to one side of the camera, or in one particular case, looking at the camera as Jevil, the smaller creature, crouches threateningly.

From the get go, you can tell their cuts are motivated by the music and they fit very well, as especially seen when the song gets more intense and the visuals must step up to keep pace. The main character, Frisk, travels from the right side of the screen to the left, showing them reverting to a dangerous and hurtful path away from what is right. Arrows help clarify the motion throughout. At one point they included a grid to clarify the distance Frisk stands in an over the shoulder shot. As a primarily black and white animatic, they make use of shading and spots of color to portray meaning or draw attention to key elements. The shot where Frisk screams up to the heavens is probably my favorite because the music is building up to this and you can feel it with the dark tendrils wrapping about both them and Chara in the background, and this shot just shows so wonderfully that breaking away. You can tell this is a turning point and the low angle makes the movement even more grand.

Lost and Found (Twice!)

Wabi Sabi Studios gives us a very heart-wrenching stop motion animation short "Lost and Found" featuring two knitted animals. The 7-1/2 minutes of cuteness overload is delivered with a strong storyline. The animation uses all kind of camera angles and panning and zooming and spinning to upside-down shots and everything you can think of. 

   

The effort is backed by Screen Australia, a government agency that supports Australian film work. 

Wabi Sabi Studios is made up of a fair-sized cast of creators, led by;

Animation by Samuel Lewis

Written by Bradley Slabe

Directed by Andrew Goldsmith and Bradley Slabe

Production designer Rennie Watson

The credits fail to tell us who knitted the animals.

This story is a twist on the classic hero tale where the hero, (a knitted dinosaur) must sacrifice himself by unraveling to save his knitted love, the toy fox. The little fox tries to thwart his attempt and the tragic events that unfold are underscored by the dramatic background music. Event sounds are well cued to help create a believable world and actions.

I found this film on a YouTube channel called Short of the Week, a great place to find some wonderful animation and other film work.

Not to be confused with, but worth checking out, is another animated film with the same title:

This "Lost and Found" features a boy trying to help a lost penguin find home. It is based on a children’s book by Oliver Jeffers.

Very interesting to see the development between the book and the film! A typical length picture book (32 pages) is, in this instance translated to a 25 minute film. The lovely, but fairly simple drawings from the book are translated into richly detailed 3-D work. Amazing! 

How a Stop-Motion Animation is Planned & Worked Out

The previous blog I posted explained about the process of filming a claymation. This one is more of an explanation of how a stop-motion movie is worked out during the process of filming.

In this video, Daniel Alderson, a stop motion animator, explains the process of working on creating a stop-motion animation movie. In the video, a stop-motion animator explained is like a transition from the characters to real life to tell the story (Example of movies like Fantastic Mr. Fox, ParaNorman, The Box Trolls, and even Kubo and the Two Strings, which is shown). They have a schedule put together as a path to creating a film as a puzzle. The start of the process begins with the editor and the director to get the idea of a scene put together on how the story is created, and then once given, they act out the scene as reference to get the idea on how it’s worked out. Once done and with a reference for the filming, they work on the puppets to determine the rigging for the animation (Example in the Video: Weight support on the rig). Once ready, the filming begins working with the team to get the frame by frame performance on camera, positions, and the shots as planned, moving the puppet to get the movement for the scene. The facial animation if used during the process of filming is already worked out beforehand from a 3D printer, and they have a schedule layout of the scene for when the facial animation needs to be changed. The filming has an emotive process to it and that the people have an understanding of what the character is going through.

How the puppets are built in the movie ParaNorman: