PPP-Visiting Professional: David Bunting on Storyboarding and purposeful directing

David Bunting is a freelance storyboard artist/animator who has worked on various children's television programmes including Shaun the Sheep and the recently rebooted Bob the Builder. Bunting's interest in storytelling and animation was piqued seeing The Jungle Book and ET when he was a child. As a child, he made stop motion films in Lego, flip-books and short films on a super 8 camera before going to university in Bournemouth and Ballyfermot (animation school in Ireland partnered with Disney) to study animation.

For Bunting, telling stories comes before drawing; a drawing needs context within a scene in order to be effective. Every element in a frame can be used to tell a story and a good storyboard artist can bring the viewer's eye into the frame using everything from the lighting, to the angle of the vantage point. He points out how most of the students he visits draw flatly framed compositions (something I will admit to being guilty of) and stresses how important immersing the viewer in a believable 3D world is when creating animation.

Bunting is a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock, who started off as a visual art director and uses 'Rope' as an example of an experiment in 'Pure cinema' which us as visual communicators can learn a lot from. 'Rope' takes the form of a single continuous shot, similar to a stage play; Bunting calls it an experiment in staging, a departure for Hitchcock who was considered at the time the master of cutting. The audience is almost a character in and of themselves, looking in as the camera seamlessly connects these perfectly composed images. Hitchcock himself said the film violated his own principle of the importance of cutting.

Bunting argues that when a camera pans and there is a blur, the brain doesn't always register the blur, as we cannot pan our pupils in real life, they always have to latch onto something. He argues cutting is not abstract, because it registers the same way our brain registers movement of our pupils. To Bunting, a free-flowing camera is unnatural, as we do not experience the world from a gods eye view.

He then went on to deconstruct the choices of shots during the opening scene to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, making the following points...

• The worst thing you can do when editing a scene is just cut on dialogue. Cut for a reason, don't just randomly cut. Cutting is used in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction at one point to demonstrate a character 'cutting in' to a conversation. Make your cut's thematically relevant if needs be. Maclean states Gravity as an example of a film which does this well with the first cut in the movie occurring when a character 'cuts themselves free'.
• The bigger an object or person is in an image, the more importance is given to them in the viewer's mind. 
• Reaction shots can be used to show how another person is feeling when someone is talking.
• Cut on important/key lines/questions relevant to the story/furthering of the narrative.
• Pull the camera into the frame to raise tension and pull it out to release it. 
• Use the 180 degree/2D Screen Direction rule. In the diner scene in Pulp Fiction, the conversation is occurring on the right with the restaurant left of frame, staged in an almost theatrical way.
• Back and forth shots are a good method of maintaining rhythm.
• Insert shots can be used to draw an audience's attention to a key story point in the scene. (For example; the gun in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction.)

In regards to storyboarding dialogue for animation, Bunting made the following points...

• Know your characters. Research them, get a feel for their personality and attributes; their sense of place in the story.
• Read the animation bible and storyboard with your animation technique in mind. Allow your limitations to inform the direction of your storyboards. For example; when working on Bob the Builder, they used lots of high angle downshots to make the 3D models feel like toys.
• Study silent cinema, particularly  Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Most silent cinema plays out in wide shots, so study how they used elements aside from framing to communicate a story through art direction.
• Floor plans are integral to good blocking and staging. 

As someone with a significant interest of pursuing a career in this field, I found this talk with David Bunting incredibly insightful, further building upon a lot of knowledge which I already had in regards to visual storytelling. Cinematography and Art Direction I feel are some of the most overlooked elements of the production for some, so to hear a professional talk extensively about the nuances of the process in depth, I found fascinating. 

PPP- Online Presence

Tumblr Blog

https://jayeliasfoster.tumblr.com/

Recently I have taken steps to step up my online presence by starting a Tumblr Blog to which I can regularly upload pre-production work from projects I am currently working on. This started out as a necessity as I needed to submit my animations for LoopDeLoop through a Tumblr account for my Responsive module, however I soon found the minimalist design style of the pages ideal for showcasing my character sheets, background drawings and pieces of concept art; a sort of digital scrapbook. Tumblr also allows for GIFs and Embedded video which allows me to share links to my other social media accounts such as Vimeo and Twitter. I chose the name Jay's Art Dump as a sort of working title until I can think of something a bit more marketable such as 'Jay Foster Design', and I plan on expanding the branding, creating a proper banner and company logo for my profile picture at some point in the future.

Vimeo

https://vimeo.com/user45536837

I have kept the same Vimeo account I used last year and have been uploading new animations to it as I finish them throughout the course of the year. I prefer uploading video to Vimeo over Youtube due to the lack of video compression as well as the more creator-focused community and staff curation. Generally the design of the player is also sleeker and more professional than Youtube's; better suited to embedding on Facebook and Blogger. There are however limitations to the amount of content you can upload per week without having to pay for a premium account, which was not so much a problem this year, but could prove to be one in future, especially with longer animations. I've also made the effort to curate my own portfolio of work, privating any videos I feel don't present my work to the standard I hold myself too; mostly older animations.

PPP- Visting Professional: Fraser Maclean on Layout

'Cinema is too powerful a form of storytelling to be left exclusively to the Storytellers.'
                                                                                                                                      -Fraser Maclean

Fraser Maclean has been lecturing colleges since 2000 and has worked on some Major Hollywood pictures, such as Space Jam, Tarzan and Who Framed Roger Rabbit and recently came out with a book on animation layout called 'Setting the Scene'.

During his talk to our course, Maclean dismissed contemporary fine arts as self-obsessed and slammed people like Tracy Emin, Charles Saatchi and Damien Hurst. Maclean asserts that Graphic Design disciplines, such as Animation and Illustration, were the only disciplines at universities which seemed to be aware of the developments of the 20th Century outside the gallery system. He argues, if you're working in any form of visual communication, you're working within three endeavours; creativity, technology and cash. Maclean's creative philosophy rides on the simple fact that technology will change over time, and as practitioners we can either ride that wave of innovation, or get swept under by it.

Maclean studied Graphic Design at Glasgow College of Art in the 1980s and got one of his first jobs out of university working on 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' as an SFX supervisor for the shadows in the scene with the cow with the lipstick, before moving on to work on projects such as Space Jam and Tarzan in a more directorial role. Maclean's speciality lies in layout, an art-form he likens to classical painting; creating not only the scenic aesthetic but also the framing, positioning and movement of characters and props within a given scene.

Maclean asserts that no other animation company was in competition with Disney until the advent of digital production pipelines and digital painting in the mid 90s. He attributes the increase in quality/competition with other animation studios in the late 90s to programmes such as the Deep Canvas system, which allowed animators to paint directly onto 3D models, blurring somewhat the barrier between the artistic and technological sides of the animation pipeline.

Layout is important. Animation is more than just the characters, it is the lighting, the framing, the general balance of the scene Maclean stresses. Cinematography is an important area to study for Layout Artists; Maclean singles out cinematographers such as Jack Cardiff and Stanley Kubrick as examples of artists with an innate understanding of their craft and as such proven masters of their respective fields. Learn the optical properties of cameras and photography (particularly Multi-plane camera setups). in animation design is everything, every aesthetic decision should be conscious, nothing happens by accident so if a design decision is not there for a reason, get it off.

Maclean's philosophy on layout and art direction echoes a lot of how I feel towards the form and how I wish to approach my practice for CoP3, with a focus on distinctively visual storytelling, using layout as a narrative tool. When considering research material for CoP3 I will definitely be giving his book a read as well as Tod Polson's 'The Noble Approach' which he also recommended. We had a brief chat after the talk where I asked for feedback on some of my background designs; to which he told me to study landscape painting and photography, pointing to filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Terrence Malick. As for general advice, he stressed to me the importance of understanding the industry you're wanting to go into and trying as much as you can to own your own intellectual property. Overall I found the talk extremely helpful, providing me with some helpful pointers on art direction and layout, areas which I see myself pursuing in my practice going into Level 6.