Quaranteam

We’re so weird, but kinda made for this quaranteam situation…

TL;DW

It’s been a really unprecedented year. Zoom is life. Peleton is living.

Mariela started calling our kitchen the quarantina and often just “The Quantina” and then that morphed into “The Can’tina.”

• we fell into the sourdough bread obsession

  • we have a Tartine related starter that is incredible

  • used it to make St. Louis Bread Co. inspired bread bowls and homemade broccoli cheese soup

  • the best avocado toast in the world

• we make our own homemade pizzas with even homemade sauce

• we made sourdough blueberry pancakes from the extra starter

• cold brew iced coffee is on tap every day

• breakfast & brunch are better than ever

• Mariela makes the ABSOLUTE best pie I’ve ever had, still

• and I took over a bathroom to “cure” my new yoga mat with sea salt for 24 hours. Madness

• my hair finally has all the multiple identities it needs

• 2020 is over!!

She’s the HERO, now!

We celebrated our 19th anniversary in quarantine lockdown and there’s literally no where else in the world I would rather be or who I would rather be with. With all that has happened, I’m grateful to wake up every single day. Even if it is a little groundhog’s day. . .

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Like everyone, jobs have fused with life.

The balance is hard. Winter break is usually the only time we can really get into our own huge projects. This project was different than any other though. Mariela contributed most of the graphics, she organized all of the media and really helped to keep the train moving! It was so fantastic!!! (I still want us to work together someday. I mean really work together, instead of both working at home, in the same room, sort of working together! hahahaha)

We had been working in our home studio to create the podcast of our dreams (even adding a dedicated 3rd seat!). I had worked out an awesome workflow of editing so efficiently on my iPad. With three episodes almost finalized…[RECORD SCRATCH] —that studio became our home office. It’s full of work computers, post-its, sketches of work projects and animation pieces scattered around. It’s hard to separate and work on our crazy stories in the same space. So I’ve just pretty much STOPPED working on anything for us and that’s not good or sustainable. I know I have to find a better balance.

That’s my hope for our 2021.

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Other random news, I cannot believe it has taken me this long to order a mechanical keyboard. I customized my easy ease animation key with a little good luck black cat key. Now when a layer needs some smoothing I just think to myself—oh this layer needs some Morty. It’s also amazing because I can program the keys to do whatever I want!!! And saving myself an extra key for each animation key frame is so worth it!

Storyboarding Animations with Illustrator on Desktop & iPad [free download]

Over the last few years I’ve worked hard to speed up and minimize my animation production time. At the same time, I obviously don’t want to sacrifice style or quality. I mean, sure I can spend forever on a project when it is basically for me. But employers and clients often think animation happens overnight…yes duh, time is money.

So this is the workflow that I’ve developed over the years. I shared a version of my storyboard workflow here (from 2016). But since then, I’ve expanded my needs and refined my process with each illustration-driven animation project that I’ve done. I’ve updated the template to reflect these changes. Additionally, as many of you know — Illustrator for iPad Pro has finally arrived!!! It feels like I bought the iPad Pro before it was even really useable FOR ME because I do almost all of my designing in Illustrator. (Why? —Photoshop files are enormous and really bog down whatever computer I am using to render animations. I also prefer to use the camera to move around the scenes and lighting with After Effects. I think that’s just because I’m also a filmmaker, so it’s just kind of how my mind works.)

Anyway, I realize there are infinite ways to do these kinds of projects and honestly I have continually tried out different methods. I would love to hear from others as to how they approach this!? I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I like sharing free tools just in case it’s helpful to anyone else.

I’ve needed a better way to display the script for each storyboard. It’s helpful for my stakeholder’s review process to be able to read along. At the same time, I cannot share enormous AI files with people that don’t use AI, so I needed a way to print to PDF and display the storyboards without modifying the size of each artboard. Obviously, I want to keep each Artboard at 1920p.

• So I’ve created artboards within artboards and labeled them accordingly in the template as “SCRIPT”.

• Each animatable object must be on it’s own root layer (for After Effects), so keep that in mind and stay organized with descriptive names. I tend to make a huge mess in the design phase and then spend an evening partially watching TV and renaming layers. It doesn’t interrupt my flow as much, but whatever works for you.

• The final process is to split the main AI file into individual .eps files for each artboard, skipping the SCRIPT artboards.

• Then you must open each .eps file in AI and save as AI.

• Then you can just start pulling in each organized scene into After Effects.

It sounds like a lot, but an animation is exactly that
—a lot!

Organized Script Artboards

When I have a version ready to share, I export to PDF by selecting “by artboards” and using only the artboards labeled SCRIPT. These are just the larger artboards that will print the script beneath the design in PDF.

Big Picture of Little Pictures

Having storyboards means I can zoom out and see the big picture. I design my whole animation project in this way, so that I can maintain a cohesive style for each project (or at least try).

And now —all of this translates to the ipad with the brand new Illustrator for iPad app! Yay! You DO need to setup your project on a computer (because it’s an Illustrator Template .ait filetype). Save it to your Creative Cloud documents. Then, like magic, you can work on these giant projects with a tactile Apple Pencil instead of being chained to a desk.

Happy animating and designing, graphic friends!

P.S. If you find these tutorials and tips helpful, please consider donating a few dollars to our adoption fund!

Settling In-PR Dreams

Well life is once again a whirlwind and half the time I think I'm still dreaming, but then I wake up on the highway and realize I'm driving one of the most beautiful roads in the country on my way to SAN FRANCISCO...again!!! Yeah, I just finished my first month at...are you ready for this: a TV & Radio station! Don't worry I'm not on TV (yet) but I have an amazing new job doing what I love -- media production. But I'm not writing about my job. I just want to write about the fact that I was told not to chase my dreams in media production. It was never malicious or hurtful, it was real, solid, sound, careful advice that I should pursue something that would enable me to find stable work. The truth is, I wouldn't be here without that stable solid education that I will be literally indebted to until the day I die! But it was never what I wanted to do and that's okay too. It made me have to really work for my media making skills and I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I didn't spend 4 years studying a medium that would change by the time I graduated. I've seen too many "classically trained" filmmakers rest back on their education like it's a card to never have to learn anything new again. Well wake up, this is a digital medium changing faster than software. This isn't the history of the Ming Dynasty...No, I'm actually really glad I studied a whole range of stuff that still interests me. I didn't study one thing.  I spent the longest amount of time in engineering and the skills that I took from that are absolutely invaluable.  The systems and processes thinking and problem solving curiosity never leave. But all along the way I've been trying to tell stories with new mediums and I'm never going to stop.

I spend a lot of Saturday nights working on silly graphics and production workflows but I know that eventually it's going to give me exactly what I want:

• freedom to work at home in my studio
• a house with an amazing private pool (think Chelsea Handler's pool)
• a new black convertible Porsche (911 Carrera, not a Boxster).

I know, it's the little things in life, right... --But wait. Before you go judging me just remember that I grew up an orphan in a cockroach invested shack in a terrible neighborhood. My grandma used to work her hands to the bone for pennies left from your pizza tables. We lived hand-to-mouth every single day. I'm not sorry for wanting more. I work for it. I'll never quit working for it.

By the way, here's the damn puppet that I worked on forever until one day I just decided I was going to write a script and produce something with it and I just did it! So glad I did.

http://vimeo.com/177238092

Stranger Storytelling

I'm sorry but I really don't get the fascination with Stranger Things. I think it was just an algorithmic assessment of what we should all like and find novel from the 80's slapped together in a terribly shoddy storyline with an obnoxiously screaming Winona Ryder...made by a couple of guys that had only just been born at the time it was set. We didn't say douchebag, we didn't chill in cars, we didn't have cordless phones in poor homes in the Midwest just yet, fellas.  Shame on you, Netflix. Do your research and stop marketing this kind of quasi-storytelling. But smooth move using a Stephen King font and almost making it look like its his name in the intro. Clearly it's working. (For some.)

Now go back and pay rights to Stand By Me, E.T., Stephen King, Stephanie Powers (that mom!?)...the list, I'm sure was generated for you before this even began.

Illustrator Storyboard Template | Free Download

*UPDATED VERSION HERE*

I love finding holes in the internet that I can fill. I searched for an Illustrator template after discovering that is precisely what keeps causing me such huge delays in the design process when moving to After Effects.  In my efficient obsessions, I keep trying to skip that step and then my projects immediately become:

• a tangled web of graphic files that are hard to visualize at one time

• impossible to create a more cohesive style

• hard to reuse elements

Sure I create color schemes and burn through post-its like a monster, but I want to be able to see them all together.  I know others do this and quite well I should add, but I've really been researching the workflow of others as well as my own and realized today that I just keep skipping it...

So this is my new workflow plan:

Workflows-storyboard

Anyway, I decided to make a 1080p video size animation Storyboard Template for Illustrator to force myself into this habit from now on. Thought I'd share.  Maybe someone will find it instead of spending their Saturday night formatting a grid with script notes!

If anyone finds this helpful, I'll be back with an update on using a variation on this workflow to work with Keynote animation projects...soon.

By the way, I put the scripts on one layer and backgrounds and swatches also on their own layers in the template setup so that the export to After Effects or split to their own files will make it all a little cleaner. That is THE goal in this life, right.

Use the Illustrator export "Save as" feature to split the artboards into individual scene files to make animation within After Effects possible (because the damn dynamic link is still 10 years away from dynamic).

Cheers, F

Clatterford

I almost never go to the doctor, preferring to work it out for myself with the sage wisdom of plenty of liquids and letting nature run it's course. When that doesn't do it, I also enjoy practicing medicine on myself and others who will let me until I get it right. Who doesn't?

This week, though, I finally gave in to the medical industrial complex because I have this thing happening in my ears that won't go away. It feels like voodoo or someone won't shut the fuck up about me - burning like hellfire and itching deeper than anything should itch - so I gave up and went to the doctor.

And wouldn't you know, this doc in her glossy clinic (that also has it's own app) prescribed. folk. medicine.  They had an assistant wash my ears out with a warm spray solution of H₂O. I was then instructed to go get some vinegar, mix with water and douche my ears out every day with a syringe you can get from the baby aisle. I got some drops too. They are for your eyes, but you can use them for your ears.  Note: Cannot be prescribed vice-versa.

It is any real surprise that in my old age I just want to move to the English countryside and run a little surgery where I can practice medicine myself? Maybe join a ladies guild or something...

Little Red Riding Hound

I came across an old file recently that really made me laugh. It was all of the original photos and page layouts that I created sometime in high school...???  We had a lot of labradors around at the time and decided that we needed to recreate a story with them, for some bizarre and hilarious reason.  So we dressed them up and used real film to take the story photos we needed.  My sister and cousin were instrumental in wrangling and dressing various dogs and struggling through setups.  MD encouraged me and my weird storytelling need, as usual. So since I found all of the originals and I miss my labradors, I decided to whip them together and learn the basics of Adobe Muse at the same time...because I'm a nerd and that's fun for me. Yeah, here she is:

Little Red Riding Hound

Molly was not your typical Labrador. She was a plus-sized model. Fact.