KatMilesAnimation

In researching animated documentaries, I re-watched an animated three minute film that I’m very familiar with; The Girl Effect: The clock is ticking. This excellent short graphic-based film uses shapes to illustrate the problems associated with women in poverty. As a teacher, I regularly used this film in lessons to illustrate problems in developing countries that emerge from child marriages, keeping girls out of education, and lack of access to sanitary products, amongst other things. This video, unlike live action, betrays the vulnerability of young girls using a silhouetted figure. This figure can age 14 years in a minute, she can be suspended in air and metaphorically thrust along a representation of time to illustrate her lack of control. In the animation, we are taken through two timelines of our character’s life in under three minutes, with the optimistic timeline showing to us the opportunity for a better future granted by education. This film is both am incredibly effective educational tool, highlighting complicated issues simply and clearly, but it also acts as a powerful camps for the charity The Girl Effect.

Arguably, the music in the film is just as effective as the animation itself, taking us through a journey of danger, optimism, and safety in a three minute composition based on the same motif moving from a minor to a major key. The impact of visual statistics, clear story-telling, and emotive music combines to make an effective educational and informative fundraising tool in this excellent short campaign film.

Recently in class we watched the short film The Big Snit. Whilst absolutely bizarre, I loved the animation style, originality, and niche humour of the film. I really enjoyed the line boil in the animation style, and think that it really added to the sense of bizarre, whilst also building into the drawn world that the audience was introduced to. I loved the world In which teeth shook like scrabble blocks, and a legitimate habit was taking off snd shaking one’s eyes. Similarly, small things like the cat who only ever screamed in a human man’s voice added excellent subtle humour.

In particular, I enjoyed the build up of the story arc, covering the tense but ultimately loving relationship of the couple, under the context of nuclear apocalypse.

Over reading week I sat down to watch the new ‘live action’ version of the Lion King. I’d heard mixed reviews, however as personally blown away by what the animation team had achieved with regards to animating the characters in the films. At no point did I get a sense of ‘uncanny valley’ during the feature. Even small things, like shaking muscles when the characters ran, were executed perfectly. In one short scene, a mouse runs into Scar’s cave; the mouse could almost certainly pass as real animal. (See clip below)

The camera angles and use of mood-setting colour and lighting (for instance, green and blue filters when Scar plots and takes power) reflected the first film, but we’re not ‘cartoonish’ in their use. The expressions used in the characters’ faces convey emotion well without adding unrealistic features. Whilst, in my opinion, this worked incredibly well, keeping true to animal movements obviously presented a problem with regards to mouth movements. Speech was not out of sync, but sometimes the human sounds were reflected in ‘best fit’ animal jaw movements.

close ups we’re largely avoided, however there were a few focusing in particular on the characters Timon and Pumba; surprisingly these full face close ups didn’t present any problems in terms of revealing the CGI nature of the production.

Whilst currently I intend to focus on my 2D animation abilities, at some point in the (probably very distant!) future, I would be enthusiastic to learn more about 3D modelling in animation.

Following this weeks lectures, I have been rewatching Wes Anderson films , focusing on character positioning and colour pallets. Almost every scene in each film that I watched (Moonlight Kingdom, Fantastic Mr Fox, Isle of Dogs, and Grand Budapest Hotel) was carefully shot to ensure that characters were either centered, or followed the rule of thirds, with characters or key props positioned to be more appealing to the viewer. Whilst watching Moonlight Kingdom, and drew up some thumbnails of shot composition. Anderson’s colour pallets are also striking, following themes for each scene, location, and character.Wes Anderson’s style of composition will be interesting to experiment with when making my own film in second year.

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I recently visited the Tate Modern, and stumbled across a short animated film, produced by William Kentridge in 1997, with the purpose of reflecting on the brutal Apartheid past of South Africa.

The film itself was presumably made using cut-out and drawn animation, all using white lines on a black screen. The content was obscure, disorientating, sexualised, and violent. There was not a ‘story’ per se, but an arch of abject humanoid characters illustrating the discomforts of living under a violent, pervasive and intrusive regime. To exaggerate this, the use of anthropomorphised cameras and weapons were persistent themes.

The film was unsettling both in terms of a disjointed soundtrack, and a child-like illustrative style, that had sexualised and violent themes, as the images below demonstrate.

The film was made in South Africa amid the ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ hearings in 1997. The style of animation, according to Kentridge, is intended to place the camera as participating in the crimes committed in the film, which occasionally directly reflect real footage of police officers’ behaviour in South Africa in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

I have recently been watching clips of Tex Avery shorts in order to learn more about methods of exaggeration in 2d animation, alongside good comic timing.

Many of Avery’s films focus around the character of a wolf, recycling old fairly tale stories into a ‘contemporary’ 1940s and 1950s setting. Stylistically, Betty Boop is visible in the characterisation of the female characters such as little red riding hood, however the wolf himself is exaggerated so far beyond the realms of reality in order to achieve comic effect.

For instance, in one Tex Avery short, the idea of a ‘wolf whistle’ is played on to ludicrous exaggerations. The wolf himself is distorted with extreme squash and stretch, whilst Avery uses exaggerated double takes, and smears the wolf to get the impression of rapid and animalistic movement.

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Ghost outlines and wiz lines are also clearly used, alongside further extreme distortion, and an excellent double take where the eyes not only pop out, but the pupils leave the wolf’s body altogether.

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In this scene, when the singer (Little Red Riding Hood) shouts at the wolf, the wolf’s body fully distort as if being pulled apart by the force of the shout.

I intend to watch more Tex Avery shorts in order to gain more ideas of how characters can be exaggerated in order to gain comic effect, and also make the action and story clear to the audience.

Nick Park is perhaps one of the most well known British animators, and is arguably a significant figure in bringing British animated feature films to an international audience.

Park’s first feature film was the now well-known film ‘A Grand Day Out’. Started as a student project, Park sent some footage of his project to the creators of Morph, at Aardman Studios, as they too specialised in clay-mation animation. Enthusiastic about Park’s characters, Aardman hired him post-graduation and the feature was completed.

I have recently been re-watching the ‘Wallace and Gromit’ films, which get cleaner and more smooth to watch with each film. For instance, in ‘A Grand Day Out’ the finger marks on the clay are more apparent (although this arguable adds a sense of charm to earlier films).

In ‘A Close Shave’, the third of the Wallace and Gromit films, the camera angles are integral to the mood of each scene. In the opening scene, suspense and the obviousness of criminal activity are used with rear view mirror angles that hint at suspicious activity, whilst close ups are often used to give comedic effect when on the more light-hearted characters of Wallace and Gromit. Similarly, low angles are often used when displaying Gromit’s machinery to show the audience a full view of the complex machine (and also of how silly it is!)

The colours and clothing in the films tend to be quite bright, giving a light-hearted, childish and nostalgic feel, whilst the consistency of clay used for many of the props keeps the audience in the world of the protagonists.

Watching the films, it could be easily missed how expressive each character is in order to convey emotions, particularly since they lack in eyebrows! In order to get around the lack of eyebrows, the top of the characters’ foreheads move as if there were eyebrows there, sometimes even moving forward, which although is unnatural, contributes to conveying character emotions.

Having recently spent time researching British animators, I have been watching the short films of Joanna Quinn. In ‘Girls Night Out’ Quinn’s Birmingham background is a clear influence. The urban scene is set very early on so that the audience can place the film. The working class, industrial 1980’s setting is made clear, and the characters’ Welsh accents give us a further idea of location without any explicit signals to it.

The style of the film itself reminded me of children’s books from the late 80’s and early 90’s, with what looks like water colour and pencil as the main medium. Quinn uses purposeful boil on the frames, and exaggerates the femininity of the protagonist, with a tongue in cheek style. This is something that notably marks Quinn’s style in further films, such as ‘Body Beautiful’ and ‘Family Ties’.

In ‘Family Ties’, Quinn masterfully animates the film from the perspective of a hand held video camera, held by Beryl, the drunken protagonist as a wedding. The chaotic nature of the wedding from Beryl’s perspective is framed perfectly from the angles approached, and pace only seems to notably pick up when Beryl attaches the camera to a dog, allowing for crude comedy scenes.

In this blog post I have attached some images from ‘Family Ties’ to demonstrate how the camera angle was achieved. I presume that Quinn approached this with references for most of the film in order to get the right angles in each scene.

In this week’s aspect of the course, we studied sand animation. I had never seen an animation using such a non convention material, and it was interesting to engage with such an unusual resources. The main challenge was creating clear no obvious shapes. Our group focused on broad shapes as opposed to details, whilst this was managed, were I to back and do the project again, I would choose to focus more on a clear story line, with art arc that was obvious and easy to follow. The student films that I enjoyed the most had humour through expressions, and their stories were clear. In particular, humour was achieved through facial expressions, which were largely exaggerated by necessity due to the difficulty of achieving nuance with the medium.
The way in which characters and features morphed reminded me of the credit short used by Ridley Scott, and it would be interesting to attempt a morph in a similar style using paint.

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