WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.089 --> 00:00:01.089 Scribble Kibble is about animation. 00:00:01.089 --> 00:00:05.901 All of these episodes and this animation, Death of the Firstborn Egyptians, is the first 00:00:05.901 --> 00:00:11.580 one made in a program none of the others have used: Moho, also known as Anime Studio. 00:00:11.580 --> 00:00:14.191 The link to watch the animation is below. 00:00:14.191 --> 00:00:22.320 The more I look into Nina Paley’s animations, the more fascinating they become because of 00:00:22.320 --> 00:00:24.850 their art style and their content. 00:00:24.850 --> 00:00:29.150 In most cases the characters draw upon the aspects of how people in that time period 00:00:29.150 --> 00:00:30.660 drew themselves. 00:00:30.660 --> 00:00:35.800 So in the Firstborn Egyptians you have Egyptian paintings, but go over to God-Mother and the 00:00:35.800 --> 00:00:39.510 elements are a combination of aboriginal and ancient art. 00:00:39.510 --> 00:00:46.309 Or The Order of the Seder, where the figures are 2d but faces are turned three-quarters, 00:00:46.309 --> 00:00:50.170 as is common in instructive Medieval illustrations. 00:00:50.170 --> 00:00:55.260 What is happening in the animations is heavily informed by religious history. 00:00:55.260 --> 00:00:59.270 There’s a great deal of knowledge that goes into Paley’s animations. 00:00:59.270 --> 00:01:01.289 Layered on top of that is meaning. 00:01:01.289 --> 00:01:05.429 So it’s not simply a straight interpretation of here’s the female essence of fertility 00:01:05.429 --> 00:01:07.090 and creation and the source of all life. 00:01:07.090 --> 00:01:08.359 There’s a point to it. 00:01:08.359 --> 00:01:09.359 Room for interpretation, room for a message. 00:01:09.359 --> 00:01:12.819 Look at Death of the Firstborn Egyptians in that light, and we have the story from the 00:01:12.819 --> 00:01:17.889 Bible, Exodus 12, where the Israelites put lamb blood over their doorways so the spirit 00:01:17.889 --> 00:01:22.499 of God would pass over their homes and not kill their first born children. 00:01:22.499 --> 00:01:26.119 Paley’s animation explores the Egyptian side of the story. 00:01:26.119 --> 00:01:30.319 The Egyptians don’t know to put blood over their doors, so all of their first children 00:01:30.319 --> 00:01:32.399 die, including the Pharaoh's son. 00:01:32.399 --> 00:01:37.159 Interesting point that the plague in this animation kills everything - human, animal, 00:01:37.159 --> 00:01:39.479 and plant children. 00:01:39.479 --> 00:01:40.990 And what do the Egyptian gods do? 00:01:40.990 --> 00:01:43.919 They say nah, screw this, I’m outta here. 00:01:43.919 --> 00:01:52.649 The second half of the cartoon recreates the Egyptian journey into the afterlife. 00:01:52.649 --> 00:01:55.850 As I mentioned earlier, this is made in Moho Pro. 00:01:55.850 --> 00:01:59.450 This program is expensive like any other high end software. 00:01:59.450 --> 00:02:04.759 Its strong point is efficient 2D animation - so that means animation puppets and tools 00:02:04.759 --> 00:02:05.890 to distort artwork. 00:02:05.890 --> 00:02:10.869 It’s not meant for frame-by-frame hand drawings, though I’m sure you could animate that way 00:02:10.869 --> 00:02:12.090 if you wanted. 00:02:12.090 --> 00:02:17.130 The best place to see the program at work in Firstborn Egyptians is in complex puppet 00:02:17.130 --> 00:02:21.890 movements, like the bird wings, these snake tails, and the underwater serpent. 00:02:21.890 --> 00:02:24.200 Let’s look at the snake tail. 00:02:24.200 --> 00:02:29.230 All it is is circles, however, getting these circles to move in a flowing line like this 00:02:29.230 --> 00:02:32.920 is not easy to achieve without the right animation program tools. 00:02:32.920 --> 00:02:37.930 A program like Moho isn’t animating the circles, it’s animating a line. 00:02:37.930 --> 00:02:43.019 The artist distributes the circles along the line and then animates the line. 00:02:43.019 --> 00:02:47.750 The line itself is a series of little bones that you click and drag, like this tutorial 00:02:47.750 --> 00:02:49.270 shows. 00:02:49.270 --> 00:02:54.840 These bones are also how the character puppet rigs work. 00:02:54.840 --> 00:03:01.090 You draw the character, set up its skeleton, animate the skeleton by dragging bones around, 00:03:01.090 --> 00:03:02.860 and the character art moves. 00:03:02.860 --> 00:03:07.650 You can reuse that skeleton over and over in different puppets, as long as their body 00:03:07.650 --> 00:03:09.450 structure is the same. 00:03:09.450 --> 00:03:13.189 The men and women here are about the same, so they can use the same skeleton, just with 00:03:13.189 --> 00:03:14.640 different art over it. 00:03:14.640 --> 00:03:20.400 If you really want to see how versatile a puppet can be, This Land is Mine uses the 00:03:20.400 --> 00:03:22.459 same puppet for every single human. 00:03:22.459 --> 00:03:24.230 They’re all dressed differently. 00:03:24.230 --> 00:03:25.430 That’s it. 00:03:25.430 --> 00:03:35.620 Unless you set rules for the bones, they stretch as far as you need them to. 00:03:35.620 --> 00:03:40.500 For death here, the stretchiness lets the profile stay nice and smooth even as the head 00:03:40.500 --> 00:03:42.069 and body move around. 00:03:42.069 --> 00:03:45.459 If the settings aren’t just right and the animator doesn’t do any touchup, you can 00:03:45.459 --> 00:03:48.260 get breaks or bumps in the profile. 00:03:48.260 --> 00:03:52.300 Notice here how there’s a bit of lumping around the head as death moves from sloping 00:03:52.300 --> 00:03:53.730 from left to right. 00:03:53.730 --> 00:03:56.599 Of course the bone tool isn’t unique to Moho. 00:03:56.599 --> 00:04:01.129 Most professional animation programs have a bone tool, but all of them work a bit differently. 00:04:01.129 --> 00:04:05.139 Adobe Animate, for instance, doesn’t give the animator the same amount of control over 00:04:05.139 --> 00:04:10.480 setting bone rules as Moho does, and it doesn’t let you mesh warp a character for animation 00:04:10.480 --> 00:04:11.480 like this. 00:04:11.480 --> 00:04:15.750 You can mesh warp in Animate, but only one drawing at a time, so you would have to manually 00:04:15.750 --> 00:04:18.390 do one image at a time and it’d take forever. 00:04:18.390 --> 00:04:23.590 There are a ton of animations buried on Nina Paley’s vimeo channel. 00:04:23.590 --> 00:04:24.830 I’ve linked some below. 00:04:24.830 --> 00:04:30.680 A lot are bits and pieces from what looks like is going to be a very long animated feature 00:04:30.680 --> 00:04:33.190 that will come out some time in the future. 00:04:33.190 --> 00:04:57.710 Thanks for tuning in to this episode, and I hope to see you next time.