But this year, much to my surprise and delight, they introduced a special, Sunday-afternoon screening especially for kids, called “Sprites”; excellent! Now I had an excuse to bring the whole family along too! Was it a co-incidence that Shane Walter, curator of the festival, and his lady wife have had a baby this year…? Maybe…

To be honest, I was a bit worried; my daughters are not the most, err, robust cinema-goers. The youngest spent a good deal of the latter part of Toy Story 3 screaming in terror. Still, I was determined (and intrigued) to see what had been programmed, and thought that if it came to it I’d just have to shuffle embarrassingly out of the cinema with a tearful child.

It was brilliant. I can safely say that all 4 of us (me, my wife and a 3 and 5 year old) really enjoyed the show. It was programmed really well, with a mix of 10+ minute long animated shorts, and shorter, sharper sequences. It kept everyone’s attention very effectively. The longest film was one originally intended as a pilot for a series, an unlikely sounding Argentinian creation called Gluko and Lennon, a quirky, contemporary combination of plucky pink and purple protagonists and a depressed superhero. The amorphous pink Lennon (or was it Gluko) was the youngest one’s favourite character of the show.

Like some of the other films, it had quite an edgy feel, but I think kids nowadays are quite used to it; they’ve been bought up on the Yo Gabba Gabba slightly knowing, ironic style.

There was some very high-quality (I hesitate to say it, but, Pixar-quality) animation on display; and by that I mean both beautifully animated and also very well observed and amusing, even for adults. Lucas Martell’s Pigeon: Impossible was laugh-out-loud funny, and Hi-Sim’s Jun and the Hidden Skies was charming and polished.

There was also more traditional animation on display, which can often feel more disturbing somehow, but which were very unthreatening in this setting. The South Korean Cherry on the Cake was in this style, and featured an interesting angle on family life which was especially relevant to “little people”, though maybe a bit bigger than 2cm.

The psychedelic style was also well represented, from the lullaby style of Chico Jofilsan’s My Little Angel to LookListenFeel, which invoked feelings of a long, lazy summers afternoon. Andy Martin was on hand to introduce his weird and wonderfully-scored Dry Fish in person.

The last short was a minute’s worth of scat kitten. Believe it or not this my 5 year old’s favourite. Ah well, there’s no accounting for taste…

So, it was a huge success. I got to see some fantastic animation on the big screen, the kids got to see things they found funny and fascinating, and we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. If you’ve got any interest in animation or film, and a child or two to accompany you, head down down here next year and enjoy it too.

_toplayer = [CALayer layer];

Splitting images

Now we’ve got the layers, we need something to but into them. I didn’t want to create lots of pre-processed images for the top and bottom sections of each number, so instead I wrote a routine to split the images in code, drawing each half into an image context and grabbing a UIImage from it. This is then stored in an array for later use. We can get any of the elements from the array and set it as the content of the layer as required.

// The size of each part is half the height of the whole image
CGSize size = CGSizeMake([img size].width, [img size].height/2);
 
// Create image-based graphics context for top half
UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(size);
 
// Draw into context, bottom half is cropped off
[img drawAtPoint:CGPointMake(0.0,0.0)];
// Grab the current contents of the context as a UIImage 
// and add it to our array
UIImage *top = [UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext() retain];			
[_imagesTop addObject:(id)top];
 
// Now draw the image starting half way down, to get the bottom half
[img drawAtPoint:CGPointMake(0.0,-[img size].height/2)];
// And store that image in the array too
UIImage *bottom = [UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext() retain];			
[_imagesBottom addObject:(id)bottom];
 
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();

Now our _imagesTop and _imagesBottom arrays contains all the images we need, let’s get ‘em moving.

Applying animation

The axes and anchor point of a CALayer

_fliplayer.anchorPoint = CGPointMake(0.5, 1.0);

I use the CATransform3DMakeRotation function to create a transform around the X axis using the vector [1,0,0]. For the first part of the motion, we go from 0 radians to pi/2 radians (0 to 90 degrees), using an explicit CABasicAnimation object:

CABasicAnimation *topAnim = [CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"transform"];
topAnim.duration=0.25;
topAnim.repeatCount=1;
topAnim.fromValue= [NSValue valueWithCATransform3D:CATransform3DMakeRotation(0.0, 1, 0, 0)];
float f = -M_PI/2;
topAnim.toValue=[NSValue valueWithCATransform3D:CATransform3DMakeRotation(f, 1, 0, 0)];
topAnim.delegate = self;
topAnim.removedOnCompletion = FALSE;
[_fliplayer addAnimation:topAnim forKey:[NSString stringWithUTF8String:k_TopAnimKey]];

Drawing layer content

Unfortunately a CALayer doesn’t have a “back”, so creating the flip layer is not as easy as it could be. We need to add a step in the process to change the image displayed by the flip layer half way through its fall. We can do this in a variety of ways, I’ve chosen to set a delegate object to perform the drawing of the layer contents:

[_fliplayer setDelegate:_layerHelper];

This means our delegate object (_layerHelper) has its drawLayer method called whenever the layer needs to display its contents. Be wary though, this may not be as often as you think! Core graphics aggressively caches the contents of the layer, and will only call your delegate when absolutely necessary. You can force it to happen by calling setNeedsDisplay, which invalidates the contents of the layer:

[_fliplayer setNeedsDisplay];

I encapsulated this in the helper object itself, by providing a custom implementation of the isTop property setter that calls setNeedsDisplay. At least that way callers don’t have to be aware of this requirement.

The drawLayer method itself simply draws one of two images into the context, depending on whether it’s in ‘top’ mode. A slight further complication is that when drawing the bottom part, the image needs to be inverted to display upside down. This is achieved by applying a translation and scale to the context before drawing the image:

CGContextSaveGState(context);
CGContextTranslateCTM(context, 0.0f, r.size.height);
CGContextScaleCTM(context, 1.0f, -1.0f);
 
CGContextDrawImage(context, r, [_imgTop CGImage]);
 
CGContextRestoreGState(context);

Avoiding implicit animation

I’ve tried to avoid using implicit animation here, instead using explicit construction of CABasicAnimation objects, because we need some control of when things happen, and the order in which they happen. Normally, it would be easier to just set some property of the view and let the OS manage animating it. Many properties have default transition that are applied whenever they’re changed, so it takes some additional effort to make them change immediately.

In our example we change the contents of the top half and show the flip layer, but we need that to happen immediately so we disable actions within an explicit transaction that we then commit. This gives us the control we need, and avoids the default behaviour of the transition occurring when the message loop next runs.

[CATransaction begin];
[CATransaction setValue:(id)kCFBooleanTrue
				forKey:kCATransactionDisableActions];
_toplayer.contents = (id)[[_imagesTop objectAtIndex:[self getNextIndex]] CGImage];
_fliplayer.hidden = NO;
[CATransaction commit];

Getting some perspective

Although the images I’ve used to illustrate this post are isometric, what we really want is a front-on perspective view, so that the falling piece seems to stick out. For this we have to set a sublayerTransform on the view’s inherent layer, by setting an individual element on a transform:

CATransform3D aTransform = CATransform3DIdentity;
float zDistance = 1000;
aTransform.m34 = 1.0 / -zDistance;	
[self layer].sublayerTransform = aTransform;

This gives us a much more realistic look.

Putting it together

Wow, so now we’ve got some appropriately sliced images, some layers and some animations. Let’s put them together to get the final effect.

The animation states (last is same as first)

- (void)animationDidStop:(CAAnimation *)oldAnimation finished:(BOOL)flag
{
	[self changeState];
}

• TopToMiddle: show flip layer, and start rotation through 90 degrees
• MiddleToBottom: change image on flip layer, start rotation through further 90 degrees
• ResetForNext: change displayed top and bottom layer contents and hide flip layer

Let’s see how it looks in action:

The wow+flutter programme concentrates on “progressive motion graphics”, which can include pretty much anything, while other parts of the festival are more specific: wavelength for music videos, j-star for japanese shorts etc. You can check out the entire list of w+f films are here, but these are my favourites:

Ubik: voxel
I’m a fan of the augmented reality style when it’s done well; and it certainly is here. Striking abstract graphics combine with a haunting location.

Impactist: Parallelostory
A beautifully subtle animation style with a 50’s influenced colour and texture palette.

Bruno Dicolla: Return as an Animal
This featured a striking high-contrast rotoscoped style that looked great on the big screen. Unfortunately the shimmering starfield effect is a little lost in the on-line version. I could almost hear art directors reaching for their iPhones to jot down “must copy this at next available opportunity”.

Christian Schlaeffer: Agent Orange Ready
A dark, disturbing animation in a comic style.

The Lows

Ironically I found the most obviously “digital” films the most disappointing. There was a little too much in the Chris Cunningham inspired glitchy, razor-cut, super-shiny organic/mechanic vernacular. And there was also one film – which I won’t name – that looked shockingly like a Tia Maria commercial. Still, in general the signal to noise ratio was very good.

The Laughs

Some of the most memorable films are those with a punchline; the short film format is a great way of getting a laugh with a simple, funny idea. There’s no risk of stretching it too thin.

Mato Atom: Docking
A laugh-out-loud concept executed nicely and succintly, and it even goes out with an anti-war punchline.

So there you are; just 5 of the 30+ shorts that were shown. If you’re into animation or cutting-edge digital film-making, I’d recommend catching a onedotzero screening wherever you can, either in London or on one of the tour locations.