Laura Heit's 'Animation Sketchbooks'

Shortly before arriving at Leeds College of Art I purchased Laura Heit's book 'Animation Sketchbooks' after seeing it in a book shop at the Baltic Art Gallery. What struck me was just how rough some of the sketches from acclaimed animators were. I am guilty of obsessing over the quality of my pre-production work, to the point in which I will ditch entire sketchbooks if I don't feel the sketches in them are presentable. A quick flick through this book served as reassurance that the main priority in pre-production work is effectively communicating an idea, not necessarily presenting an idea. The book also gave some interesting insight into the creative processes of some of the animators featured in it, such as with the art director for the film Waltz With Bashir who states he drew sketches with his left hand despite being right handed in order to employ a rougher aesthetic.

A lot of what animators do in this book has inspired me on how I will go about presenting my pre-production work in second year. Next year I would like to keep a sort of sketchbook like a scrapbook, in which I create collages of ideas for my mood boards. Having a separate sketchbook for each project I feel would also help in containing and refining ideas.

The Depressing Beauty of Charlie Kaufman

Few screenwriters working in Hollywood can boast the sheer imagination of Charlie Kaufman. Over the past 20 years Kaufman has collaborated with some of the most acclaimed directors in the industry to bring his imaginative screenplays to life as well as directing his own feature film with 2008s Synecdoche New York. Kaufman rose to prominence through his collaborations with Spike Jonze with 'Being John Malkovich' and 'Adaptation' as well as Michel Gondry with "Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind'. Kaufman often communicates visually interesting ideas in his work, such as erasing memories in dreams and a door in an office building that leads into actor John Malkovich's head, so when I heard he was collaborating with Duke Johnson, one of the creators behind Adult Swim's Moral Orel to create Anomalisa, I was excited.

Anomalisa follows the story of Michael Stone, as played by David Thewlis, as a practicing motivational speaker disillusioned with the world around him. In an interesting aesthetic decision, Stone views everyone around him as identical, all voiced by the same actor Tom Noonan, apart from this one woman Lisa. The film was made on a budget of just $8 Million dollars and uses stop-motion miniatures created en mass using 3D printing techniques. What's interesting about the aesthetic is the attention to detail in the subtle facial movements of the face, comparable to that of 3D animation or dare I say live action. Particular attention is paid to the subtle, nuanced acting in this film, a rarity in a animation which often relies heavily on exaggeration, anthropomorphisation and distortion of human features in order to communicate action to the audience.

PPP Reflect Presentation

What have you learned and also what do you want to learn?

• The importance of pre-production and research
• Skills using various software packages
• History and context of animation as well as the fundamental principles
• The importance of garnering feedback from my peers
• The importance of evaluating and reflecting upon work in order to improve future work

What have you enjoyed during the year and why, also what have you disliked and why?

• I have enjoyed most of the modules this year
• I did not enjoy the Visual Language module, as I feel it strayed too far away from animation and I would have preferred it had we been working toward an animation in the end with each study task.

What mistakes have you made (in and out of college) and how have you learned from them?

• Leaving things til the last minute and poor time management
• Not experimenting with different styles more often
• Not keeping my blog up to date, especially with CoP
• Attendance and missing important sessions

Has this made you consider how you do thing or will approach things in the future?

• I’m planning on keeping a sketchbook with annotation next year to inform my blog
• I’m going to write up CoP lectures the day of and not 3 weeks later
• I’m going to be more experimental in my technique and drawing style, more graphic/3D work, less 2D/default drawing style
• Drink less

What are your strengths and how will you develop them further and begin to apply them?

• I like to think my writing skills are to standard and would like to write more for my blogs
• I’d like to focus more on Pre-production and compositing

What are your weaknesses and how do you intend to address them?

• I need to learn 3D software over the summer
• I need to experiment with different styles

What did you want to get from the year? Have you achieved this?

• Broader knowledge of animation and where it fits in the cultural context.
• Fundamental animation skills with a broad understanding of the processes.
• A clearer idea of what career path I would like to specialise in.

Lee Hardcastle: Celebration of Excessive Violence

Animation on the internet has a bit of a reputation for being excessive in it's depictions of sex, violence and questionable themes, but few creators make this as big a part of their overall aesthetic as Lee Hardcastle. Hardcastle is most notorious for his stop-motion parody of The Thing starring characters from Pingu, which the BBC tried to remove from the internet, forcing Hardcastle to remake the animation, this time with cats instead. Plastercine has a certain tangibility, other forms of 2D animation (which is the most commonly used medium for animation on the internet) simply do not. There is definitely something disturbing about seeing children's characters such as Pingu recreating scenes from John Carpenters The Thing, even is the blood and guts is just food colouring and plastercine.

Hardcastle, since posting this video on the internet has been commissioned to do work for Adult Swim, 20th Century Fox and Square Enix, but commercial work has not compromised his gorey, exploitation-film aesthetic and has since gone on to develop his own web series of Claycat film, television and game parodies. A lot of what Hardcastle does could be dismissed as crude, but there is a level of artistry to systematically constructing and creatively destructing one's characters in increasingly excessive and violent ways.

Mary and Max: Colour Motifs

Mary and Max is an Australian claymation film from director Adam Elliot which follows a pen pal relationship between an 8 year old girl from Melbourne and a 44 year old man (played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) from Manhattan. Despite it's seemingly sweet aesthetic, the film explores some very adult topics such as loneliness, aspergers syndrome and alcoholism, with characters experiencing different forms of loneliness and finding solace in each-other's letters.

One of the things that stood out to me most about the film is the way the environments reflect the internal characteristics of the two main characters. Max lives in Manhattan and feels isolated and alone, relegating himself to the walls of his room as he is isolated from society, unable to connect. The colour scheme for Max's scenes is almost pure black and white apart from the slight bit of red from Max's headwear. Mary on the other hand, despite living in a country with a far different climate has a similarly dour colour scheme, though this time it is more of a washed out brownish tone, but also with a hint of red with her hair clip. The reoccurring motif of red on both character's headwear  establishes a link between the two characters visually, which is explored more deeply in the film.

The Films of David Lynch: Making it up as you go along

David Lynch is one of the most aesthetically distinct and influential directors of a generation. His work has such an immediately recognisable style that he has his own adjective, Lynchian. Lynchian means macabre, absurd, uncanny, defined by films such as Eraserhead with their oppressive atmosphere and the duality of people and environments as explored in Lynch's Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. There's something about the macabre nature of the Lynchian aesthetic which really appeals to me as a creator. The man has a brilliantly imaginative eye for aesthetic, brilliantly blending the surreal and dreamlike with the mundane and dual natured.

Just watch any interview with Lynch and nine times out of ten he will mention how dreams play a role in his creative process. A lot of Lynch's later films have a distinctly dreamlike nature, an aesthetic Lynch owes to his time working on Twin Peaks. Lynch is a master at making it up as he goes along, reincorporating his suggestive imagery in more meaningful contexts later down the line and I do not in any way mean that in a negative way. Lynch famously left Twin Peaks once the infamous Laura Palmer murder was solved, as Lynch was insistent the murder never be solved. After this, Twin Peak's quality took a nosedive as the plots and themes meandered, before Lynch returned in the final two episodes to salvage the themes and get the show back on track before a cliffhanger ending which was never resolved. For Lynch, Twin Peaks was always about the suffering of Laura Palmer, so when the show left her behind, so did Lynch. The feature film follow-up Fire Walk With Me refocuses the story of Twin Peaks back on the character of Laura Palmer, with an extremely unsettling depiction of abuse and the duality of man in a way that almost has you believe this was Lynch's intention all along.

Lynch has also delved into the world of animation on occasion with his short animated internet series Dumbland. Dumbland is stylistically similar to the work of illustrators such as David Shrigley, with crude line drawings that probably wouldn't pass in a primary school art class, but Lynch uses this to explore macabre subjects, with graphic violence in a sort of crude variation on Looney Tunes or Bob Godfrey's Rhubarb and Custard.

Paul Wells: Scriptwriting

At the beginning of the year we were given a reading list of books which would help us in our understanding of the fundamental principles of animation, one of these being 'The Fundamentals of Animation' by Paul Wells which unfortunately was sold out. So, I decided to pick up his other book 'Scriptwriting' in which Wells explains some of the essential rules of pre-production.

The book outlines some of the specific vocabulary of animation as a practice, such as...

• Metamorphosis: The ability to facilitate change from one form into another without edit.
• Condensation: The maximum degree of suggestion in the minimum of imagery.
• Anthropomorphism: The imposition of human traits on animals, objects and environments. 
• Fabrication: The physical and material creation of imaginary figures and spaces.
• Penetration: The visualisation of unimaginable psychological/physical/technical 'interiors'. 
• Symbolic Association: The use of abstract visual signs and their related meanings.
• Sound Illusion: The completely artificial construction  of a soundtrack to support the intrinsic silence of animated forms. 

Probably the passage which has stuck with me the most since reading the book was when Wells states that...

'It is useful to remember that animated films are normally essentially made in their pre-production phase, while live action films are made in post-production.'

This is certainly true. As stated in the book, 'advanced preparation of material is crucial in executing the particular intentions of the piece' due to the time consuming nature of the technical processes of animation. This is honestly something I had never thought of in the past, but it's true that animation is a lot more pre-planned than live action film, rarely is the director making it up as they go along, as this would be wasting everybody working on the project's time. 

Visual Storytelling in Drive

Drive is a film which gets a lot of unnecessary flack, often dismissed as pretentious, style over substance or an arthouse Fast and the Furious. I however look at it as a great case study in Visual Storytelling, using the audio-visual medium to it's fullest to tell a relatively straightforward story in an interesting and engaging way. Drive has an atmosphere more akin to a music video video game, with emphasis placed on sound and visuals over dialogue and character. The unnamed main character speaks very little, but is characterised by his actions, body language, facial expression and even the lyrics on the soundtrack. Director Nicolas Winding Refn went through the script during shooting and stripped out what he deemed all the unnecessary dialogue, opting instead for more visual ways of telling the story.

For example, the famous elevator scene in which The Driver moves Irene out of the way of an assassin, kisses here goodbye before caving the man's head in while Irene looks on in horror is an almost ethereal moment which says a lot by doing little, but really emphasising character moments giving the movie a lot of depth. The positioning of the characters in the scene puts Irene in a position of vunerability which the driver moves her away from, acting as a sort of wedge between her and the assassin. The slow motion in this single long shot adds weight to this moment as the soundtrack swells as the two of them kiss in the elevator. As The Driver moves away he proceeds to brutally murder the assassin at normal speed with a series of quick close up shots which add to the confusion before finally we settle on a slow motion shot reverse shot of The Driver turning as Irene looks on in horror and the elevator door closes, separating the two forever. Without a single word of dialogue spoken we establish The Driver's willingness to sacrifice his relationship with Irene if it means protecting her and showing her his violent side. Drive may not be particularly deep thematically, but it tells a simple story in a thoughtful and interesting visual way which makes it a modern classic in my books.

Fears of the Dark: Mood, Tone and Atmosphere

Fears of The Dark is an animated french anthology film consisting of various collaborations with animators from all over the world exploring the concept of fear in different cultures and to different people. As with all anthology films, the film consists of numerous short films, each one different in it's approach, but consistent with a common theme of everyday fears. From traditional pencil animation, to clean digital lines, the film showcases numerous different styles of animation, giving each short film a different and distinctive mood and tone.

The opening prologue depicts a gloomy victorian landscape beautifully rendered in black and white pencils, giving the scene a rough texture and unwelcoming atmosphere before minutes later we are thrust into a story of body horror rendered in crispy clean and almost sterile 3D black and white animation. The constant shifting in style lends an air of unpredictability to the film which the filmmakers use to convey a constant sense of dread throughout the duration. There is barely any colour in the film, with the art style in each short film focussing more on mood and atmosphere through various styles of gloomy black and white animation, which works in instilling a dark and fearful tone.

As somebody whose work up until this point has often strayed away from using much colour, Fears of The Dark shows how many different styles can be adopted with this approach. Tone, texture and mood can all be conveyed without the need for colour and lend work a sense of dread and fear which can be effective in manipulating an audience's fears. Personally I really like the opening segment with it's rough textures and expressive pencil strokes as I feel the looseness lends to the unpredictability and gives the animation a sense of flow absent from many of the other segments in the film, not to say that they were not effective. The clean, defined linework I feel lends a sense of unease to the body horror particularly, as it seems at odds with the subject matter. Horror is in the uncanny and is something you can't always put your finger on and as someone with more than a passing interest in the genre Fears of The Dark provided me with a lot of inspiration.

PPP Disseminate Presentation Notes

As part of PPP we were required to produce a presentation exploring a topic relating to animation that interested us. For mine I chose to do a presentation about visual language and storytelling in film and animation, listing off examples and providing insight into the things that interest me personally about the topic in question. The following are my notes for during the presentation with accompanying slides...

Show Don’t Tell: Design as a method of storytelling

1. Title

2)

• Stanley Kubrick, one of the greatest visual storytellers of the 20th Century and arguably the master of encoded meaning in the filmic medium, insisted on a green table cloth in the War Room of his Cold War satire ‘Dr Strangelove’ to hit home the idea of his characters playing poker with the fate of the world, despite the fact the film was shot in Black and White.

3)

• The point is Kubrick put thought into every aspect of the design of his films and used the visual medium to it’s fullest in order to communicate ideas and concepts in uniquely visual ways which might not necessarily be picked up upon by the viewer on their first viewing, which is part of the reason why his films are so widely celebrated and lauded as shining examples of the medium.

4)

• As Animators we have been put in a unique position.
• Everything that is put up on the screen is a conscious and calculated decision made by artists, from the movement of a camera, to the design of a character, and thus has the potential to carry an encoded meaning.
• In film encoded meaning can be found in everything from the staging of a scene to the design of a character.

5)

• David Fincher is a film director who often uses camerawork and the staging of a scene as a way to communicate the power dynamics between characters in a scene.
• Fincher is famous for taking calculated directorial decisions and overseeing the previsualisation process of his films, making sure every decision made by him is motivated and has a purpose in the broader context of the film.
• SPOILERS

6)

• For example: during climax of the movie Seven, when disturbing revelations are made clear and the situation takes a turn for the worst, Fincher shoots his detectives using a handheld camera  to reflect the instability of Detective Mills and the anxiety the audience feels for their situation, while our antagonist John Doe, who has all the power in the scene is shot on a tripod in extreme close up from a low angle, emphasising the power he has over Detective Mills and Somerset.
• The audience may not consciously pick up on these directorial decisions, but it is an effective use of camera angles and camerawork precisely because it falls under the radar.

7)

• Colour motifs are another way of communicating meaningful narrative information through visuals.
• While there is no universal way of applying colour, the colour red is often used visually to symbolise blood and violence.
• In Lynne Ramsay’s film ‘We Need To Talk about Kevin’ based on the novel of the same name by Lionel Shriver, the colour red is used on numerous occasions to imply the mother has blood on her hands.
• The violence for which the mother feels guilt for is implied rather than shown, through the uses of the colour red.
• Often the colour red surrounds our main character, externalising her anxieties and inner struggle to come to terms with the violence she feels indirectly responsible for.

8)

• Colour plays an important role in costume design also...
• For example, the colour Yellow is often used to invoke feelings of the hazardous such as Walt in his Hazmat suit from Breaking Bad, Lee from Utopia and the Bride in Kill Bill.

9)

• Some Directors often stick to a strict colour scheme in their films in order to evoke a certain tone or Mood.
• Wes Anderson for example often sticks to Autumn tones and complimentary colours to evoke a vintage retro feel in keeping with the aesthetic of many of his films.

10)

• While we’re on the subject of Wes Anderson: Composition and Staging serves an important role in emphasising what visual information on screen the audience’s attention should be directed to.
• Anderson will usually play out scenes in a single master shot using ensemble staging, often emphasising a character or action by placing them in the centre of frame and balancing it by making the composition either vertically or horizontally symmetrical.
• Movement of the camera is usually restricted to lateral movement, with restricted movement on the y and z axis. This is most apparent in his animated feature film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox in which shots play out sort of like an animated diorama.
• Anderson is very much a post-modern director, as his aesthetic and directorial style can be best described as a multiplicity of different styles from different eras. The staging of scenes often makes reference to this as characters face the camera and break the fourth wall.
• This aesthetic suits the source material also, as Anderson’’s postmodern fourth wall breaking is a perfect fit for the wisecracking character of Mr Fox.

11)

• I don’t really have a segway here so onto Environmental Storytelling…
• In animation particularly, backgrounds are often seen as an afterthought when actually they are a vital part of visual storytelling.
• Environments, when utilised to their fullest can be characters in and of themselves which shine insight into the world the characters in the story inhabit.
• For example, the architecture of the cities in dystopian sci fi films such as Ghost in the Shell and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner evoke a conflicting sense of time and place, juxtaposing modernist architecture with more futuristic architecture to reflect the disillusionment characters have with the advancement of technology and direction their societies are heading, which by extension is the authorial intent and preferred reading of the films put forth by the directors.

12)

• Video games are particularly good at environmental storytelling as often the designers have to try and find ways of directing the player in the direction of progress without being too obvious.
• Journey is an excellent example of thematically relevant environmental storytelling, as there is no dialogue and communication between players is completely non-verbal, with the player having to rely entirely on the visuals to gain understanding of the story.

13)

• The goal of Journey is to reach the top of the mountain which looms over the player throughout the entire game, giving them a clear direction.
• The mountain, with its ethereal light omitting from the top and seemingly angelic presence itself serves as a sort of metaphor for heaven, thus the ascension towards the summit serves as a sort of metaphor for life.
• The journey to the summit takes the player through a series of environments, each one symbolic of the different struggles we go through on the journey through life.

14)

• On a slightly darker note, another fine example of environmental storytelling in Video Games is with PT and it’s looping hallways, littered with beer cans and prescription meds which symbolise a deranged alcoholic father’s Post Traumatic revisitation of the night he murdered his family while being haunted by the ghost of his dead wife and unborn child out for revenge.

15)

• PT tells its story through interaction with the environment and has to be pieced together by the player by finding clues and solving puzzles.
• While only a short demo for a cancelled Silent Hill Reboot by Guillermo Del Toro and Hideo Kojima which was erased from the face of the earth, PT is a masterclass in environmental storytelling and non-linear narrative in the video game medium.
• The beer cans and prescription meds that litter the hallways hint at the father’s alcoholism and paranoid schizophenia while the talking foetus in the sink and injuries to the ghost of the dead wife hint at some extremely sinister deeds on the father’s behalf that I won’t go into, but can probably be pieced together.

16)

• Alright, lets wrap it up with something a little more lighthearted and less murdery.
• Character Design can also serve a valuable storytelling purpose and bring the audience closer into the character’s world.
• Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea makes use of the subjective perspective of our main character Ben’s point of view, telling an almost allegorical story of a young boy and his mute sister as they try to get home to the sea and escape their Grandmother.
• On their journey they encounter an array of characters based off various characters from Irish and Celtic folklore, such as The Great Seanachai (seana-chqui) and Macha, whose designs in the film resemble the characters Ferry Dan and Granny respectively.
• Both the Celtic folklore and literal versions of each character serve similar purposes in the eyes of our main character. Ferry Dan and The Seanachai both provide passage while Macha and Granny are antagonists in pursuit of our main character, though ultimately in the end not necessarily for selfish reasons.

Summary:

• So in summary, everything that is put up on the screen is a conscious and calculated decision made by artists, from the movement of a camera, to the design of a character, and thus has the potential to carry an encoded meaning.
• As animators we shouldn’t slack on any one element of a scene as it is the combination of all these ideas that creates meaningful art.