Those are wonderful! It's really interesting to see Jansson's take on the characters and settings. When I read _The Hobbit_ in the early 1970s, there was already a well established tradition of how to portray Tolkien's world. Jansson's seems very fresh to me.
Also of interest, and probably just as upsetting to some, is Gene Deitch's version of _The Hobbit_ which was made in the mid 1960s in an attempt to retain the movie rights. Made in 30 days!
The Hobbit is today usually viewed through the lens of The Lord of the Rings, and The Lord of the Rings is viewed with the baggage of 70 years of post-Tolkien epic fantasy culture.
Being deeply embedded in that culture myself, I must admit that these illustrations don’t appeal to me at all, and don’t match my mental imagery of the story. But I can see how they might have looked like a perfect fit to someone who read The Hobbit with a fresh eye when it was still fresh. I wish I could have read it like that.
I inhaled Lord of the Rings on first reading. I lived inside it. And it had no illustrations except maps, right? But later when the movies came out they were a big disappointment for ne, they were not the world I had visited. And they were boring. Had I not read the books before, they might have been just fine.
Yeah, the (Peter Jackson) movies were basically LotR seen through the lens of decades of D&D and Warhammer Fantasy, a peculiar aesthetic which of course grew off LotR itself.
I'm guessing that Tolkien would have deeply hated it all with a burning passion.
It's quite alright. Done in a classic childrens' story illustration style, rather than the modern sleek style of CGI-heavy fantasy. Tastes may have changed a bit in the last 60 years or so.
Getting knowledge from comedians is worse than having leaders who are reality tv hosts and failed casino owners? The leader in question is trashing the world economy, deporting people, without trial or due process, to concentration camps in El Salvador, and ignoring judicial orders.
I’ve seen very little cost cutting that matters in that $35 trillion dollar debt. But I’ve seen plenty of cutting social programs that will result in much misery. And trashing of long standing allies and economic partners.
For fun go and look at the history of the ups and downs of that $35 trillion dollar debt, and which administrations it shrank and grew under.
As for “billionaire businessman”, I’ll go with real estate swindler and gangster. And insurrectionist too.
I understand that it's not for everyone, but for me the value of an iPad is easy to understand.
I draw on it. Sketching and painting. I design 2D layouts on it. I sculpt on it. Lately I've been doing some 3D polygonal modeling on it.
Now are there desktop/laptop apps that can outperform an iPad? Yes. (Though, for drawing an iPad is hard to beat. I prefer it to my $3500 Cintiq in a lot of ways.) But the iPad is lightweight, both in actual weight and in the cost of starting to do something on it.
If I want to do something on a desk top, I first have to go to the desk top, boot it up, load the application(s), and deal with all the distractions and gravitas that a desktop comes with.
With the iPad I pick it up, swipe to the drawing app, or the sculpting app, and start messing around with something. Very low barrier to entry, and I can put it down just as quickly. It's very much like picking up a sketchbook as opposed to setting down at an easel, uncovering the pallette, pouring out some oils, etc.
And I can do it on the couch, in the car (not while driving of course), in a cafe, at the park, on a mountain top, waiting for someone in the lobby. You get the idea.
Lately I've been doing some hand drawn animation on Procreate Dreams. Very nice.
Not everyone does the kind of work I do, and has the same work habits and needs. YMMV.
I also write on the damn thing with the pencil. Not perfect, but its getting there. I can truthfully say that I've written some things that wouldn't have happened if not for having an iPad handy.
It's also great for reading comics and manga. I can't say that I like it for movies or TV. And I'm not interested in it for listening to music. But it's definitely an important tool for me.
As an animator for 40 plus years, I can tell you that in-betweening is a very difficult job. The fact that it's often cheaply outsourced is more of a factor that the people paying for the animation simply don't care about the quality. The results are seldom good.
As to how much poor quality in-betweening hurts the performance to the audience is a complicated discussion. Animation that is _very_ bad can often be well accepted if other factors compensate (voice acting, design, direction, etc.)
A good in-betweener is not simply interpolating between the keys. For hand drawn animation at least, there's a lot more going on than that.
We'll leave out any discussion of breakdowns here. For one it's a difficult concept, much more difficult than 'tweening to explain. The other is that different animators will give different opinions on what a breakdown is or does.
I will say, though, I think that properly tagged breakdown drawings could significantly improve the performance of ai generated in-betweens.
Anyone who is seriously interested in the process should read the late, great Richard William's book, _The Animator's Survival Kit_. This is especially true for those who want to "augment" the process with machine learning. The book is very readable, even for non-artists. And he gets into the nitty gritty of what makes a good performance, and the mechanics behind it.
Edit: Another good resource, and relevant to 3D animation as well, is Raf Anzovin's _Just To Do Something Bad_ blog. He has many posts on what he calls "ephemeral rigging" that are absolutely fascinating. Be aware that the information is diffused through out the blog and not presented in a form for teaching. His opinions are fairly controversial in the field. But I think he is onto something. (https://www.justtodosomethingbad.com/)
Post author here - would be very interesting to hear more of your thoughts on this! It's not easy to find a pro animator willing to consider the question given the current level reached by AI methods
I would suggest reading the Williams book as a place to start. Thomas and Johnson's _The Illusion of Life_ is also a must. Thomas and Johnson were two of Disney's 9 old men. The Preston Blair book, simply called _Animation_ is good.
The thing about animation is that it is not about interpolation. It's about the spacing between drawings. The methods developed by animators were not at all mathematical, but something that they felt out by experimentation (trial and error).
The math that does enter into it are directly related to the frame rates. If animation had started in modern times, with frame rates of 30 fps or 60 fps, it would have been a very different animal. And much harder!
At 12 fpt or 24 fps you have a very limited range of "eases" that can be done. So while eases do figure into it, its the arcs, the articulation, and the perceived mass of the parts of the character that make it seem alive. Looking only at the contours and the in-betweens misses all the action.
An awareness of the graphic nature of the drawings, the stylizations of figures and faces are also critical. Cartooning is its own artform and it is tied directly to the way human brains make sense of what the eye sees. Getting more realistic often takes you further from your destination.
Storytelling is also a core part of good animation. Making a character seem to think and react, like it is alive can be done by a good animator. But you won't get there by imitating the real world directly. Rotoscoping has very limited use in good character animation and storytelling. It's all about abstracting out what the brain feels is important and what it expects. You can get away with murder if you caricature the right details.
When I've worked with training new animators, one of the points I stress is that it is articulation and the perceived mass of the character that really sells a performance. The best art style in the world is nearly useless if the viewer doesn't buy into the notion that they are watching a thinking person reacting with a physical body to events in an interactive world.
My feeling is that you will get further if you build articualated rigs and teach the ai to make it move. 2D or 3D. There is footage of tiny AI driven robots in a Google eperiement that are learning to play soccor. The ai is learning to make them move and solve problems (running around the soccar field and scoring goals.) Very natural looking behavior (animation!) develops almost automatically from that.
Trying to solve the problem by dealing with lines, contours, and interpolation seems very far away from the important parts of animtion.
Just my two cents worth.
Get a copy of the Williams book, it's on Amazon. Read his thoughts, he explains things much better, and more entertainingly, than I do. Sharpen up your pencil and start making some simple walks. Simple stick figures and tube people work just fine. And you may find that you enjoy the art form. Even if you don't become an animator yourself, the exercises will deepen your appreciation and understanding of the art form.
I've read Williams' book, and I've studied animation and done some, though I wouldn't call myself an animator yet.
I hope to avoid building rigs because they're, well, rigs. Much nicer and more flexible to control things though drawing than a rig which has a bunch of limitations and then there are issues with hair/cloth/water/etc. What can be done without a rig is another question but the methods I reviewed in this post are not the most that can be done for sure.
Rig can mean a lot of things. Hand drawn animators often use a rig, it’s just the rig is made of graphite lines on paper driven by a meat based neural network.
I'm not just being cute when I say that. The problems the AI in the examples was having have distinct analogs with the problems human animators have. Arcs are a problem, as is the notion that in-betweens are mostly about interpolation.
As I said, timing and articulation are at the heart of most kinds of animation. Even very stylized animation must be aware of this, if not being a slave to it. Imagination and expression are important, but first the audience has to _believe_.
The term Channel Surfing predates all this by at least a decade. I first heard the term in the early '80, about the time when cable systems starting becoming the norm.
It's not too much a stretch to go from channel surfing to internet surfing.
Similar phrases that were, as it were, in the water at the time: bar surfing, bedroom surfing, boy/girl surfing.
I suspect a lot of these usages were regional, I know "bedroom surfing" was something I heard while living in Los Angeles. But "bar surfing" (and bar hopping) was common in the south as well.
Not trying to take anything away from anyone who first published the internet variations of this. But it was a thing before the internet.
Looping recursive simulation... That sounds very interesting and very very scary somehow.
Now i haven't done any recursive programming except on some basic programs on the ZX Spectrum many many years ago, but it felt kinda weirdly evil and forbidden when i was able to order code to modify itself.
Is that anything like Authenticity in an Advertising Economy?
I have to admit, I've never really understood (or used) Twitter/X. Short form posts lacking depth but very, very timely? The only time I used it very much was early on when I was living in Boston and it was useful to find out if there were subway outages. Lacking depth, timely, but pointedly useful. Somehow that function stopped working after a while. I've no idea why.
I suspect I simply don't understand Twitting. I've never figured it out. Facebook and Youtube figured _me_ out, and they both provide stuff I'm actually interested in. (And yes, I find it mildly disturbing as I use something that I don't really control or understand. But FB and YT actually do work.)
Twitter/X despite several attempts on my part to play its game, simply has never produced much attention or engagement for me.
Hell, I've gotten more use from Instagram than Twitter. Though not much.
For what it's worth, I'm older, in my mid 60s. I do note that FB tends to skew older. Or at least my FB experience does. Possibly an artifact of it's algorithm. But when I click on it's recommendations for "friends" I find the older users active and the younger users accounts a ghost town.
My suspicion is that the changes we are seeing in how social media works with people, especially people of different ages, is a kind of societal immune response. To hark back to my initial reaction to this post, advertising has certainly evolved, and evolved its audience over the last century. It's still here, and still pretty deeply embedded. But what it does and how it does it has changed. Insert your own viral analogy here...
In my experiences with Twitter, if you can find a group of some sort that you interact with a lot, Twitter would try to keep that group of people interacting with each other in some way. So part of Twitter is just "being part of a group" and is usually used as entertainment or self-promotion.
If you are just there for the drama, you'll love it. There's always drama. If you are just there to interact with other music producers, there are enough of them that there's usually something new worth listening to or discuss. If you just want dumb memes, there are also plenty of them.
But very few people are going onto Twitter to "be themselves" in the first place, so looking for true human interaction is a lonely time on Twitter.
> Short form posts lacking depth but very, very timely?
...and funny. That's what was good about the Internet. It was ephemeral, like Geocities gifs and Flash cartoons. Funny posts on Twitter would generate conversations, and quote tweets would allow people to out their own spin on it.
Unfortunately VCs thought it was a billion dollar idea and ran it into the ground by turning it into the internet equivalent of talk radio.
Also of interest, and probably just as upsetting to some, is Gene Deitch's version of _The Hobbit_ which was made in the mid 1960s in an attempt to retain the movie rights. Made in 30 days!
https://youtu.be/UBnVL1Y2src?si=rpd-dOk-t4BYFP_Q