After completing the animations based on my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, I’ve now turned to my 2011 paperback Wakefield Words based on Wakefield solicitor William Stott Banks’ 1865 collection of ‘Provincial Words in use at Wakefield. When I was working on the book, I enjoyed drawing the variety of subjects that he’d included. The pen and ink format is ideal for exploring various animation techniques that I want to try.
I’m surprised in this one that Banks records ‘toathre’ as meaning ‘two or three: a few’ as I would have thought it would have had the same meaning as ‘t’other’, meaning simply an alternative: ‘one or the other’.
With apologies for putting this snippet on a continuous loop, but it would be too short otherwise . . .
Please press pause before it drives you mad!
I’ve come back to an old favourite drawing program, Clip Studio Paint, which, in the EX, version can be used for animation on an iPad. It’s not as simple to use as the FlipaClip program that I experimented with the other day, but it offers far more possibilities when it comes to drawing, not that you’d realise that from this loop animation, which I’ve drawn simply to go through the stages of the process.
The thing that had me mystified was the relationship between frames, layers, folders and animation folders. If you can grasp that you can just get on with the drawing and track your progress in the animation instantly with the click of a button. It isn’t as difficult as it sounds, it’s just that it’s SO OBVIOUS that most YouTube tutorials don’t explain it clearly enough. Fighnimates‘ How to Animate in Clip Studio! (see link below) was the tutorial that finally enabled me to grasp the principle of using animation folders in the timeline.
Animation Folder layers in Clip Studio Paint
The point about grasping the way layers work in the timeline is that I can have my background in one layer and my walking man in a separate layer above that. Getting the man to move for two seconds involved 24 separate drawings. Once I’d got the hang of all that, I realised that I could draw the man’s shadow on a separate layer below the man but above the background. Doing it that way, I didn’t have to worry about accidentally drawing over the silhouette of the man as I drew in the shadows. Of course the shadows also needed to be 24 separate drawings.
I believe that there is now an option to add a soundtrack in Clip Studio Paint, but in this case I stuck to the method that I’m familiar with and added it later when I’d exported the MP4 movie to Adobe Premiere Pro on my desktop iMac. The pair of trainers used to supply the sound effects for the bouncing ball and for the footsteps of camels crossing the Gobi Desert, once again came in for the man’s footsteps.
And I’m sure that my friend Karen Chalmers, who composed and performed the soundtrack for my Brief History of Rhubarb animation, would like me to make it clear that I’m the one who is responsible for the short solo performance on ocarina.
I’ve been reading about getting cartoon figures walking in Richard Williams’ The Animator’s Survival Kit but the only way that I’m really going to understand it is to try it out. The only figures that moved in my Brief History of Rhubarb animation were the camels trekking across the Gobi Desert. I was pleased with those, the way the bags of rhubarb swung gently as the camels walked along, but they were the Adobe Animate version of cut-out animations; Williams focuses on traditional hand-drawn animation.
I’m trying a simple free program FlipaClip, which enables me to draw and instantly play back my frames. The free version watermarks the movie, but it’s an attractive logo, so I can live with that, and I think that it’s a great program if you’re trying to get started in hand-drawn animation.
To practice getting characters to walk, I couldn’t have a better subject than the ‘Ploo Stotts’, the Plough Monday revellers from my previous post. W S Banks, who recorded the old custom in 1865, tells us that a stot is ‘a staggering, clumsy person’, so however silly the walk for the nine figures in my animation, it will be appropriate to the subject.
Continuing with Richard Williams’ Animator’s Survival Guide, here’s my second attempt at the bouncing ball. Williams doesn’t suggest the set of steps, that’s just something that I couldn’t resist trying.
I did think of doing this again using stop action and a coin but I’m keen to introduce an element of drawing. This is still deliberately basic: it would be easy to have the ball squish slightly as it hits the step but Williams advises that it’s easy to overdo that kind of thing.
I used Adobe Animate to add movement to a single Fresco drawing, saved as a PSD Photoshop document, with the ball on a separate layer.
For the sound of the ball bouncing I used a pair of trainers, banged together. I couldn’t keep up with the speed of the bouncing ball, but it was so satisfying to cut and paste the soundtrack to match the precise moment that the ball makes contact with the step.
“Welcome to the Rhubarb Kitchen! “Today we’re making my all time favourite rhubarb recipe, a rhubarb version of the classic baked cheesecake. “It might be very calorific but our local-grown forced rhubarb really is something to celebrate.” My cartoon animation from Wakefield’s Rhubarb Festival features Barbara’s recipe and Karen Chalmer’s music.
After finishing my Rhubarb Festival animations, I realised that it was time for me a bit more about animation. I’m enjoying reading The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams but thought that I’d understand it better if I tried some of the animations that he suggests for myself. This bouncing ball animation took just minutes to film but it took a while for me to find the most effective way to convert the sequence of images into an animation. After trying the timeline in Photoshop and in Adobe Animate, I eventually settled for importing as an image sequence into Premiere Pro.
My studio setup was a precariously balanced iPad and my subject was a 1797 twopenny piece on the studio floor. Appropriately Richard Williams’ hefty Survival Kit provides the necessary gravitas.
Commissioned for Wakefield’s Rhubarb Festival, my cartoon animation tells the story of rhubarb from its origins in the cold winters and rich moist soils of Southern Siberia, through to the heyday of Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle when a regular night train from Ardsley Station carried 200 tons of forced rhubarb to London.
Nicholas Culpeper, currently starring in ‘A Brief History of Rhubarb’ at the Old Market Hall, at the Rhubarb Festival.
Along the way we meet Marco Polo, Ghengis Khan’s camels, Nicholas Culpeper and Rhuben Cushstead, head gardener.
This time-lapse sequence shows clouds moving north-east as the weather fronts that preceded Storm Dennis swept in from the North Atlantic. At the end of the middle sequence you can see the higher clouds are moving in a different direction to the lower clouds, veering off to the east a little.
Righty Tighty
Because of the Coriolis Effect, in the Northern Hemisphere moving masses of air are deflected to the right (the same direction as tightening a screw). I can remember standing on a recreation ground roundabout and feeling that pull. If you stand with the wind behind you, the high pressure area is always to your right.
We planted hundreds of crocus, iris, snake’s-head fritillary and tête-à-tête daffodil bulbs in the autumn and they’ve done well, coming up amongst the cyclamen here in the front garden. The cyclamen have been in flower right through the winter.
This is my first ever post written – and photographed – on an iPhone. My previous mobile phone dates back to 2005, when I was working on my High Peak Drifter sketchbook and Barbara insisted that I should take a phone with me in case of emergencies. I’m going to use my new iPhone a whole lot more.
Shapes, Adobe Capture
Of course I don’t really want to make phone calls, it’s the possibilities of using apps like Adobe Capture to do all sorts of things when I’m out and about that I can’t do with my iPad that appeals to me.
After three weeks, I finally finished my Brief History of Rhubarb animation yesterday, just on the deadline. My decision to enliven the Zucca Bar scene by inviting Rhuben Cushstead, head gardener, and all the other characters to the wrap party proved to involve an awful lot of animation. The Chinese doctor seems to have got into an argument about the medicinal properties of rhubarb with Nicholas Culpeper while his patient, the mandarin, is at the other end of the bar evidently suffering from the effects of one too many Rubarbaro Zuccas. The Zucca Bar is in Milan, so it was a bit of surprise to see Marco Polo from Venice bobbing around in the background. As usual Rhuben is propping up the bar, oblivious to the smart signore, who is trying to attract the barman’s attention behind him.
The snippet of music is Rhuben’s theme from the animation. My friend, Karen Chalmers, writes:
‘for the Rhubarb patch, I put together a little ditty on my keyboard, featuring clarinet (which to me, always reminds me of Yorkshire). I added a few train sounds (haha) for your steam train. It should fit together pretty well timing-wise.’
It fitted perfectly. Sorry there are just a couple of bars here, but you can hear the full soundtrack next week: I’ll post the final cut next week, when this animation and another featuring Barbara’s rhubarb cheesecake recipe get their world premiere at Wakefield’s Rhubarb Festival.
A cartoon version of Barbara introduces the cheesecake recipe.
No red carpet at the old market hall next to the bus station where my work will be screened alongside that of seven other animators, but there will be a chance to step inside a recreation of a rhubarb shed, candle lit and full of real, growing, forced rhubarb rootstock.
