Animation Obsessive

Oh it's nice to see Animation Obsessive here. Their blog https://animationobsessive.substack.com/ is worthy of a subscription - most of their articles are both informative and very well written.

Stories like this regularly make the rounds when movies or shows that the original creators put a lot of love and thought into are "remastered" on the cheap. The last one I saw was the story about the garish colors in digital versions of old Pixar movies - amongst others, they intentionally exaggerated green hues in the digital original to compensate for the transfer process to analog film stock which was less sensitive to green. When Disney transferred the movies to digital formats and streaming, they took the digital original 1:1, so the colors now look off (https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-remember)

The bigger short in "Memories", "Magnetic Rose", is one of my all time favorite stories (It's Satoshi Kon, Koji Morimoto, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Yoko Kanno !!!) https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-secrets-of-magnetic-rose

Cartoon Modern was recently made available digitally, for free [1]. Well worth the download. [1] https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/our-treat-to-you

Blender Guru (Andrew Price) has a newsletter I enjoy for all things Blender https://www.blenderguru.com/newsletter Dave Verwer has IOS dev Weekly that always has something interesting https://iosdevweekly.com Edit: and Animation Obsessive for a bit of weekly animation history https://animationobsessive.substack.com

If you enjoyed these UIs, I highly recommend this piece in Animation Obsessive about how some of the early anime light effects were achieved: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/dangerous-light Keu quote: You have the normally painted animation, and you have a mask for the lighting element which is mostly black, leaving a hole where it shall shine... Repeat for each glowing element with a different color. First you film the animation, then rewind. Second [exposure] is the matte, with a light under the table switched on. Usually you will have a color filter or gel in front of the camera now. This pass will create some lighting with a sharp edge. Sometimes an additional frosted gel is used for blurring that shine, but that takes some light inside the edge of the matte which may not be desired. In that case a third pass is done with the same matte, but out of focus, or with a slightly frosted gel, and/or some additional effects lens

In some cases, the artifacts of the medium can be desirable -- especially when consuming media that was created with those artifacts in mind. Take a look at pixel art on CRTs vs LCDs [0] and Toy Story on film vs. digital [1]. [0]: https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-are-better-… [1]: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-remember

The first mention if UPA style in the article is a link to their article about it: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/what-the-upa-style-actually-…

The "Cal Arts style" owes a lot to UPA, yes. In part because one of the UPA people taught there for a while - see this article from the same blog: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/what-the-upa-style-actually-…

> I now have a small library of simulated materials: watercolor washes, dry brush strokes, felt-tip pens, cracked glaze, pencil fills. None of them are physically accurate. I’m not simulating fluid dynamics or anything like that, I don’t need to. They’re impressions, heuristics that capture enough of the character of a material to be convincing and evoke an emotion. I find this to be a key insight. I've been working on a black-and-white film app for a while now (it's on my website in profile if you're curious), and in the early stages I spent time poring over academic papers that claim to build an actual physical model of how silver halide emulsions react to light. I quickly realized this was a dead end because 1) they were horribly inefficient (it's not uncommon for photographers to have 50-100MP photos these days, and I don't want my emulator to take several minutes to preview/export a full image), and 2) the result didn't even look that good/close to actual film in the end (sometimes to the point where I wondered if the authors actually looked at real film, rather than get lost into their own physical/mathematical model of how film "should behave"). Forgetting the physics for a moment, and focusing instead on what things look and feel like, and how that can be closely approximated with real time computer graphics approach, yielded far better results. Of course the physics can sometimes shed some light on why something is missing from your results, and give you…