The Animation Options Blog

Two related items of interest came to my attention recently.

The first was Don Bluth’s post to the Animation Nation message board, fretting over the increased isolationism that he sees as a consequence of digital technology (if I’m reading him correctly):

Over the years, I have heard from many animation students who are interested in creating their own picture or their own studio. I believe the computer has been a great boon to our industry but at the same time has pushed each of us into a type of isolation. The feature film can never be made by one or two people; it will always be a team effort of people who talk to each other, inspire each other and explore the romance of an animated story. Someone once calculated the sheer man-hours that were involved in creating Pinocchio and came up with 400 years. That is, if Walt had done it all by himself! What I have loved in my career as an animator is the joy that comes from teaming with other people to build an animated movie.

Those of you that have had this experience will know what I’m talking about. The short will always be economically feasible, and can done by an individual; the computers have made that possible. But, how do we overcome the tendency towards isolationism which is the safe ground, and find a more gregarious way of working together to progress our art while we’re waiting for that “special feature” to be funded?

The second was an Ars Technica article forwarded by my friend, Cal Arts professor Michael Scroggins, questioning the need for university computer labs when the percentage of incoming freshmen with tricked-out laptops is approaching 100%:

What’s the point of running a university computer lab when all the students bring laptops anyway? That’s a question that schools have been asking themselves as computer ownership rates among incoming freshmen routinely top 90 percent. Schools like the University of Virginia have concluded that the time has come to dismantle the community computer labs and put that money to more productive uses.

According to the school’s Information Technology & Communication department, 3,117 freshmen enrolled in 2007, and 3,113 of them owned their own computer. Nearly all of the machines were laptops, with 72 percent running Windows and 26 percent running Mac OS X (six hardy souls ran Linux).

Compared to a decade ago, the increase in student computing hardware is little short of amazing. In 1997, 74 percent of incoming freshmen owned computers, but only 16 percent of these machines were laptops. The Windows chokehold on operating systems looked complete, appearing on 93.4 percent of all machines and leaving only 6.6 percent for the Mac.

Given these numbers, the school began to suspect that its labs might not be necessary, even though usage remained high. When it surveyed the programs actually launched on lab computers in 2008, it found that 95 of the time students spent in the lab was spent running “free” software like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Microsoft Office (the school has a campus license for Office and students can install free $10 copies on their machines). Expensive but niche programs like SPSS—the bane of social science students everywhere—were used only 5 percent of the time.

With labs closing down, the university hopes to save some cash. School vice president James Hilton told The Chronicle of Higher Education that it cost about $300,000 to run the campus computer labs each year, but the amount that the school actually saves will depend on how much it costs to provide alternative access to things like community printers and niche software.

To make specialized software available to students, the school says it will “convene a community to jointly review potential software delivery solutions.” Its ideas so far all appear to revolve around accessing specialized tools over the network, possibly through “software streaming” or some form of remote connection to dedicated machines.

The change also doesn’t mean that the university gets to reclaim all that physical space from the labs. As the university’s explanatory document notes, “ITC understands that students need collaborative space where they can bring their laptops and mobile devices to conduct group work, especially as the curriculum becomes increasingly team- and project-based.”

As for supporting this hugely diverse range of hardware that students will schlep to campus, the mind boggles at the tech support nightmares that will soon plague the dreams of IT workers.

These two pieces point to the paradigm shift that we are seeing as mobile computing becomes increasingly pervasive in our society while encompassing tasks of growing complexity. Though the majority of folks still surf the web at Starbucks or polish their Excel spreadsheets at 30,000 feet, a growing number of professional artists, writers, musicians, animators and filmmakers can be found “out-and-about” creating work. And this is a very good thing. Far from imposing solitary confinement, professional-grade computers have approached a threshold of portability (and even “wear-ability”) that enable digital artists to bring the studio into the field.

I recall my days as a painting major at the Cleveland Institute of Art, working in what is now referred to as “traditional media” (oils). At one point, I developed a case of artist’s block. I had figuratively painted myself into a corner with my current line of aesthetic inquiry, and didn’t know how to get out of it or what to do next. My mentor, Julian Stanczak, suggested that I take the day off and wander around town on foot without anything in particular in mind. “Don’t think, just look,” was his advice. Of course, I’m sure you can guess the result: I returned to the studio with fresh ideas and renewed vigor, based upon my experience of getting out into the world. Here was a case of an artist suffering from “solitary confinement” with brush and canvas - no digital “Big Brother” required. And frankly, we see can see this problem in animation studios around the world, be they traditional or digital. It is all too common to find professional animation artists who are not only isolated from the world (save for the occasional field trip to the zoo or studio visit from Tai the elephant), but isolated from each other. In fact, by the very nature of their craft, digital artists are among the most collaborative around - moreso than many of their “traditional” brethren who often work behind closed doors.

Which brings me back to Don Bluth’s post. In the first place, Mr. Bluth seems to be suffering from the very isolationism that he bemoans: animated feature films already have been created by one or two people. The fact that computing power enables increasingly smaller teams of artists and animators (including solo artists) to create feature-length films is a good thing. Bloated crews of 300+ (and the bloated budgets required to suckle them) are on their way out. Teamwork remains, but within a more feasible scope for the independent creator. And mobile computing makes this collaboration possible anywhere.

The Ars Technica article suggests a re-definition of what a “lab” will mean from now on: a convergence of ideas rather than an offering of hardware. Will students still meet in school labs? Of course they will. But they’ll also meet in coffee houses and friend’s apartments. They’ll take their laptops out into the field to record sounds, shoot video, write, draw and animate. They’ll engage the world instead of hiding from it. And this will only increase the quality of their discourse and of their art, as the silicon miracles which continue to transform our lives sublimate themselves further and further to the creative process.

There has never been a better time to be an artist, there has never been a better time to form a creative team, and there has never been a better time for independent animated features.