Just something interesting I found recently, whilst I was researching how to design characters! I was looking up more of Klaus’ character design process by Spa Studios on YouTube and accidentally came across these videos made by a filmmaker and family therapist. They make videos about both live action and Disney films and then psychoanalyse it! I thought it was interesting how they decoded the messages in the Pixar films using neuroscience and psychology! 😀
It’s wonderful to see how these themes actually relate to the real world and how Pixar is able to convey these with subtlety! This is of course for a more mature audience, but it is also notable how kids can be made aware of these situations through the medium of animation!
Cinema Therapy
I’m actually really interested in neuroscience – particularly how the brain forms memories, both short term and long term – how we process information and how the brain stores this wide world of information. Its so wonderful how we process so much information in such little time, but when we are really enthused by what we learn our brains store all of it for future reference!
Human memory chart – Google
I researched quite a bit into this during my Foundation course, as I was making a film based on the memories that I could recall of my grandfather when he passed away. I was very little when he did pass away, so I was shocked at the details that I could remember even though it was so long ago! Maybe it was because I was so attached to him and loved him very much!
I suppose this relates a lot to what they (Jonathan Decker and Alan Seawright) were talking about in regards to the brain processing information that is learnt quickly by converting them into abstract thoughts – a scene shown pretty literally in Inside Out! Apparently our brain does process certain information in these very four stages!
They also talked about the subconscious mind, and how our anxieties or repressed memories that are stored in there, actually come out in dreams. Often referred to as the ID monster in Freudian terms – another one of my most favourite things to learn! I love studying Freud’s and Carl Jung’s theories on personas, find them very interesting!
Cinema Therapy
I also found the above video interesting where they talk about Rapunzel being gaslighted by Mother Gothel, especially prominent in the song, ‘Mother knows best’ – which I’ll admit, I loved the way the song was sung and I thought that the acting (animation wise) was great too!
Another thing that Jonathan and Alan mentioned in this video, that I never noticed, although I love this film and have watched it countless times, that Mother Gothel always touches Rapuzel’s hair (because that’s important to her) and Eugene takes the hair away (looking at her true self)
We had this great workshop with Lucy Lill yesterday! 😀 It was all about stories and character archetypes and the things to think about when making stories for our graduation films next year.
She got us to do a really fun exercise – which made the usual day of just sitting in front of a computer that much more exciting and interactive! I got to see the faces of my classmates, whom I’ve not seen for a while due to all this online learning during lockdown. So the first game we played was, imagining a picture in your mind and then each person adds something to it. Lucy began with a sunny day on the street in Rome, with a boy holding a fish standing next to a fountain. By the time this got around the group, we had the boy licking an ice-cream statue outside a gelato shop with ice-creams mirroring the colours of the rainbow that was formed because of the water from the fountain and the bright sun! I did miss the end because of wifi issues, but it was fun!
She then told us a story from Grimm’s fairytales called ‘The Seven Ravens’:
The Seven Ravens – Pinterest
So in short here is how this story goes –
There was a farmer who had seven sons, but he longed for a daughter. Finally on a wintery night, his daughter was born, but she was frail. So he sent his sons to the village to bring back some water from the well and a priest. His sons rushed off to get some water, but on the way they slipped and the jug broke. The sons came back empty handed to a very angry father, who cursed them to leave and fly away; so they turned into crows and flew far away. The girl however, lived and grew to be beautiful. One day whilst in the village, she overheard some women talking about her now sad family. So she went to her father and learnt the truth. That night, she slipped her mother’s ring off her finger and while her parents slept, journeyed to the very edge of the world, where the sun scorched her and the moon froze her until she jumped. The stars however, caught her in a net and laid her onto the ground. When the girl woke she saw a crystal castle at the end of the field where she lay. She ran to it and found a keyhole, but she couldn’t find a key. So she cut off her little finger with a stone and used it as a key. She finally got in to see seven bowls of soup on a table. She slipped her mothers ring into one and hid in the cupboard. Soon her brothers appeared and one of them found the ring. She then ran out to them and cried and her tears turned them into humans again.
Lucy put us in groups and got one of us to tell the same story in 3, 2 and 1 minute respectively. The point of the exercise was to realise that we can’t get out every detail in a single minute, so by nature we condense the story down to main points or ‘bones’. The audience would still understand the story without all the unnecessary details! So as an exercise we just picked what we thought we the bones of this story.
Sick daughter
Father curses sons, they leave
Daughter discovers the truth
Goes on a quest
Makes a sacrifice
Brothers recognise her
Curse is lifted
Then we spoke about what would be the beginning, development (middle) and the end. For me the first two points would be the beginning, then 3, 4 and 5 would be the development or act 2, with 6 and 7 being the climax ending.
Lucy then gave us another exercise, where we break down a film we love/watched and I picked Harry Potter (the entire series, which was probably an oversight on my part).
Harry Potter – Image from Cinemablend
Here are the bones for Harry Potter:
Orphaned baby boy is sent to live with aunt and uncle
Grows to learn he has magical abilities
Goes to magic school and makes friends
Faces challenges presented by an evil lord
Learns the truth about his past
Goes on a conquest with his friends
Destroys the evil lord and lives happily ever after
Okay that felt a little weird to say the least as I love Harry Potter (both books and movies) and was obsessed with the series when I was a teenager, so it was strange and hard to have to leave out so many important details that make the story so much better!
I also tried to do the same to Ratatouille, another one of my most loved Pixar films! So here are the bones:
Image from Google – sites at Penn State
Rat that loves to cook
Gets separated from family
Lands up hungry in a restaurant’s kitchen
Meets a clumsy boy
Becomes his confidant and helps him cook (literally)
Boy finds out he is the heir to the restaurant
Fame gets to him and is challenged by a food critic
Everyone finds out about rat
Rat opens his own restaurant
She then showed us these two films:
Lucy and the Limbs by Edlyn Capulong
Nuggets by Andreas Hykade
I thought that the animation techniques in Lucy and the Limb were great, especially the combination of what looked like either puppet/stop-motion with 2d characters. I however, did not quite understand the entire story. At first I thought the limbs belonged to the boy who is revealed at the very end, but then the boy discards his body and just becomes one with the limbs. I did understand that it was a story about an unnatural friendship.
The second film Nuggets however, I understood straight away that it was a film regarding addiction and how that has a toll on the birds body as it continues consuming it. The point came across clearly with the repetition in the animation and as the bird becomes heavier the background goes darker. My classmate Clo pointed out how the yellow nugget stays bright throughout, emphasising this metaphor of long term addiction to a particular drug.
The idea was for us to understand that sometimes keeping simple characters with strong stories can help make the point/main idea come across clearer than spending ages with details and intricacies that aren’t required and might have lesser impact on the audience.
In the later half of the session we moved on to characters:
Lucy mentioned Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling: ‘Come up with a character’s personality and then challenge them to do something that they are uncomfortable with and see how they would respond’
We looked at archetypes and here are the ones that Lucy shared with us:
HERO – Slaps chest and says ‘I can do it’
MOTHER – Open arms ‘I love you’
KING – Crown on head ‘make it so’
CRONE – Grasps ‘Mine’
TRICKSTER – Looks over shoulder ‘Who me?’
CHILD – Raises eyebrows with wide eyes ‘Hello world’
HELPER – Raises hand ‘I’m here’
VIRGIN – Head down eyes up ‘I have treasure’
DEVIL – Eyes straight beckoning ‘do what I say’
WISEMAN/HERMIT – Looking up ‘Listen’
We then picked two of these and came up with some drawings for them. My choices were the crone and helper:
We also got together in groups and discussed what kind of archetype pairs would work together, which ones wouldn’t and then what those archetypes are comfortable/uncomfortable with before the end of the very lovely session!
I really enjoyed this fun and interactive session with Lucy and thanks to her learnt a lot about characters and what’s important in a story and what’s not! I look forward to meeting her again next term!
I had a lovely one on one tutorial with Shaun today and he gave me some wonderful feedback on my work. At the end of the session, he sent me a link to Nelly Michenaud’s work, who is an ex MACA student!
This is such a great film! I love the combination of 2D and stop-motion in this film! It lends such a unique feel to this very quirky film! I was talking about mixing 2D and stop motion with my tutor Ko earlier this term, so I am looking forward to trying that out!
What’s amazing is that Robert Bradbrook showed us some clips from this very film a couple of days ago, in his lecture about mission statements!
I’m really loving her style! It seems she loves to mix a lot of the mediums which is very interesting and fun to watch! I love the quirky style that she has because it just works so well with animation. She really pushes the boundaries with perspective too, in her 2D stuff so that is also very awesome and eye catching! I look forward to experimenting a bit with my work too ’cause I don’t think I’ve experimented much so far!
‘Jab We Met’ (When We Met) is a Hindi film (live action), one of my favourites, that I’ve watched quite a number of times. I was just watching it again recently, ’cause why not and I happened to notice something I never did before!
Image sourced from Google
Robert Bradbrook mentioned in one of his lectures, that we don’t or rather shouldn’t start a film with the cliche of someone waking up, eating breakfast, showering and getting dressed and then finally getting to work. We can very easily get away with showing the person in the location they are meant to be in and start there!
This is exactly what I noticed with Jab We Met! We don’t start with the protagonist’s morning routine, but rather him at the office, looking lost – and how do we know this? – by the fact that everyone around him is arguing and we just hear this drowning gibberish, while our hero sits centre screen not paying attention. We straight away realise that something is bothering him, and his actions in the next couple of shots tell us why. In fact there isn’t much dialogue or rather any dialogue at all in the beginning where we are introduced to our protagonist. His body language and facial expression, along with his intense silence, are enough for us to know that he is depressed.
I just wanted to put this here, as a reference and to remember how similar tools can be applied to animation to make it more effective and compelling to the audience! I also find it amazing how I can apply what I have learnt to not just animated films but also live action! 😀
We had another lovely session with Robert this week and this time we discussed Mission Statements and how they are crucial to keep in mind while making stories! 😀
MISSION STATEMENT – DIRECTORS POV/RESOLUTION
Arms you with the “IDEA” of the story
MAIN THEME
What you want to communicate to the audience i.e. what you want to them to feel at the end
Robert mentioned that sometimes its better to start off with the end of the story and then make your way through, so that you know how the film ends. A film usually starts off with an introductory location, where the character is presented with a problem and then a series of events take place, leading to some form of a change that end with the resolution. The location says something important about the character and we need to focus on how we introduce our film. For stop-motion, Robert’s suggestion was to keep the locations to a minimum so that we don’t spend ages on unnecessary stuff.
Over the edge by Amalie Vilmar
A very interesting film by a former NFTS student that Robert introduced us to, that tackles the concept of divorce in a unique way. I think the mission statement was negligence and how the child is affected the most because of the neglect she receives from her parents.
Enough by Anna Mantzaris
Another great film! I love the dark comedy in this film! As Robert mentioned the mission statement of this film is ‘the impulses we feel in our day to day lives but never act upon’. This came through so well in the film and the comedic timing throughout is absolutely perfect! Especially at the end with the man copying the lady who misses the bus!
Wind by Robert Loebel
I absolutely loved this quirky little film! The concept is concise and clear. The simple characters and fluid animation just add to the film and make it that much more better!
We analysed the Mission Statement of this film with Robert:
People living in extreme conditions
It’s amazing how the human race can adapt
But its still stupid how we afflict this on ourselves
Comedic change – The wind is man made
I am Tom Moody by Ainslie Henderson
This was another great film that Robert showed us. I absolutely love the way the director depicted the trip into the character’s subconscious mind, it was very effective! We then analysed the mission statement of this film. He wants to be accepted by the audience but his self doubt (conflict) stops him from doing so. The mission statement (directors pov) is that ‘if you’re doing it for yourself then maybe other’s will like it too’.
LOOKING AT THEMES:
Just taking note of some important points and films that Robert mentioned in the second half of the lecture, for future reference 😀
3 is a magical number in storytelling
They show rhythms and patterns
Repetition pulls the audience in
3 situations in conflicts and then we see the sudden change
Right to say no by Inês Delicioso
This was made by a former student at CSM MACA, the course I’m currently on and I thought it was a successful animation! I loved the style with which she drew the characters, because it leant that sensitivity to the topic. Robert mentioned that the music at the credits is very important as it conveys the nature of the ending; if it was happy/sad, etc. For this film the music at the end tells us that she has a happier ending because the power of the society has helped her understand her right to say no.
THREE ACT STRUCTURE:
ACT ONE – SET UP
ACT TWO – CONFLICT
ACT THREE – RESOLUTION
These usually indicate a characters emotional journey throughout the film. This keeps the audience invested in the film. For instance if there is too much conflict going on for far too long, the audience will get bored and lose their emotional connection to the film. Most films usually follow the Hollywood arc – starts off good, then things get bad and then finally everything becomes great.
Un jour by Marie Paccou
This film is very quirky and different but tells a sad story of how the woman has lost the love of her life and now no one can fill in that hole (this is what I interpreted from the film). I first saw this film in one of Shaun’s theory lectures, where we analysed films throughout the day, it was fun!
Robert mentioned how this film ‘Un Jour’ captures the European style of the arc where the story starts in the opposite way and ends on a bad note. So things go well in the conflict and then towards the end everything goes downhill. The rule of 3’s kind of comes into play here; she first cuts a hole in her dress for the man, then she puts a hat on his head to protect him and when she bathes she gives him diving gear so he doesn’t drown. Repetition is also present in the shot of them eating, where at first they are on different rhythms and then as they continue eating their pace becomes the same.
AFTERNOON EXERCISE: COMING UP WITH MISSION STATEMENTS IN GROUPS
I was put into a group with my classmates Sophya, Penny and Rosie. We had to come up with three images, so thinking about last week, we had to draw the first three things that came to mind.
These were the three images that came to mind: The first one is my (sort of) pet pigeon back home, a pigeon that fly’s to my kitchen window every single day looking for food and I feed it. The second is of my father hanging the clothes to dry in our balcony and the last is me having an Indian chat specialty called Pani Puri with my family.
My three images
We started to discuss our images and then we found out that each one had drawn up an image of food and so we started talking about how during lockdown, food has been our go to thing for whenever we feel lonely. Like we are spending more time in the kitchen preparing meals for our friends/family/partners/ourselves and actually enjoying it. So we thought about making a story that was related to the loneliness created by the pandemic and here is what we came up with:
A boy/girl is alone on their birthday and is sad when they receive a cake in the mail sent from their loved ones and also have a surprise zoom call! They cheer up and then it’s all over and they’re back to feeling a little bit lonely, although happier because they got to celebrate their birthday. They then think of what to do with the rest of the cake and then it strikes them that they would feel happier if they had someone to share it with! So they end up knocking on their neighbours doors and placing a piece of bday cake, waiting for them to come out and then they all have a social distanced birthday party!
We each took a scene (I did the last bit with the neighbours) and Penny put it all together! This was really fun!
Just to follow up from the previous post, my classmates and I had a chat on the collaborate room today, to have a look at the colour scheme we are going to pick, but also confirm our fears and the medium we are animating in!
Here is a quick facial acting exercise I did with my puppet!
Facial acting exercise
Facial acting keys
This was really fun to do and was a little easier considering I had the keys figured out in 2D! I am quite happy with how it turned out but I am going to give it another go purely because I destroyed my puppets hands in the process!!
The cup (also made of clay) turned out to be too heavy for his poor wrist and his wrists would keep on falling off and I ultimately had to stick a pin through the cup and into his body to be able to shoot the rest of my animation.
I also realised after getting some amazing feedback from Ko and Christina, that his eyebrows should probably be more exaggerated purely because it is a facial acting exercise and it probably looked much too similar to the body acting one.
Ko had a great idea to put the sequence into either TV Paint or Photoshop and then take out his eyebrows and replace them with 2D ones! That way I’d be mixing two mediums together! I love that idea and am looking forward to experimenting with it soon 😀
Christina also had this wonderful idea of reshooting it with the puppet using both his hands to lift the cup and then when he reacts to his drink maybe one arm could let go/ alternately just use both his hands to push the cup away from his body! She also said that it might be a good idea to straighten out the arm completely when he rejects his drink and that way it would be far more effective 😀
I also had the idea of animating the cup solely in 2D and that way I’d have the puppet in a safe place to be able to reuse it for my lip sync exercise!
We are doing the personal lip sync project as a group and our topic is ‘My Biggest Fear’! We are all animating this individually as we will be assessed that way. We are also doing our own pieces, although I wouldn’t mind animating someone else’s as a challenge! 😀
So for this, I thought I would pick one of my biggest fears which is arachnophobia! I’m extremely afraid of these weird eight legged creatures, even the very small ones 🙁 I honestly do not know how I developed such a fear of spiders because I don’t know/remember if I was this afraid when I was a kid, but I sure know I am now!
Although I am scared of them, I do research them from time to time, to make sure I know which species I encounter and to also make sure I know all the poisonous ones so I can stay as far away as humanly possible!! When I first got to London, I had this massive spider in my room that I was too afraid to hoover so I had my friend catch it for me haha. After that I immediately looked up all the species found in London just so I could be aware of any that came my way XD!!
I was thinking up ideas and colour schemes related to spiders so I found this interesting article about a new blue spider species (still terrifying to me haha)
I was going to put a picture of the blue spider up here, but I thought it might be triggering for anyone who doesn’t like to see pictures of spiders either.
I’ve been trying to think of ways to animate this and how I want to go about it; I know I’m definitely doing 2D, but I’m not sure if I want it funny/scary. There are a couple of nightmare stories I have experienced myself and one of them was walking into my house, with spiders at every nook and cranny on the floor! They were literally beside anything and everything on the floor and I had to tiptoe to my bedroom (also filled with spiders) and I don’t think I could sleep that night! Another incident took place when my family and I visited this park in Goa, where I randomly noticed a garden spider (huge, with black and yellow stripes) that had spun a huge web literally between two giant trees. The minute I spotted the first one, I moved away only to realise in dismay that nearly every tree had one. It was horrifying and I kept ducking with my hands over my head as I walked through that park.
I also had to unfortunately live at one of my relatives place once, where the bathroom in the room that I stayed in with my parents was full (and I mean it was “FULL” of webs and spiders everywhere) of harmless yet scary long leg spiders (I call them long legs but they’re not as big as the daddy long legs found in the UK). It was my worst nightmare to have to stand in that bathroom every day.. to even go there to brush my teeth or wash my face was frightening!
I’m now starting to think if it was a good idea to pick this one, cause even thinking about this is giving me the jitters! I literally spent like an hour searching my room to make sure there aren’t any!! Anyways, that’s enough of my spider stories, I am looking forward to animating this!
I watched this movie back in October for the first time ever and loved it!! So I thought I’d give it another go but this time analyse it a little further, just for my understanding of the concept, the characters and story line!
The performances and the acting of every single character in Klaus is absolutely breathtaking! Everything down to the minute facial expressions looks so real -almost as if the characters were real people and not just animated drawings. The character design just speaks for itself!
I was watching this video about the character design process for Klaus and I noticed that they use very simple basic shapes and then build the characters on top! For instance, Klaus’s basic shape is a block and Torsten Schrank (lead character designer) mentioned that he wanted Klaus to be big and strong, but also feel secure.
Lovely character poses of Klaus
Jesper on the other hand is made up of triangles; which are usually associated in cliche of being the go to for designing villains; but here it just shows his unreliable personality that is made evident in the beginning of this film. Although, there are points within the film where he seems to be sly – when he warns the kids about being naughty and bribes some kids with the prospect of getting toys.
Character designs of Jesper by Torsten Schrank
Circular shapes usually denote someone being friendly and cheerful, but in this film, although Magdalone and Olaf have round base shapes, they have the opposite of being villainous and unfriendly, even slightly malicious.
This took me back to Bianca Ansem’s character design workshop, where she spoke to us about the use of shapes and strong silhouettes and how these can affect the way the audience perceives a character and their personality.
There are a lot of characters in this film that undergo massive changes to their personalities except for a few like the heads of the Krum and Ellingboe family. The main characters that we see evolving are Jesper of course, Alva and Klaus.
Creating Jesper
With Jesper, it is pretty well established that he is a well privileged and pampered guy with absolutely no purpose to do anything in life than laze around from his body language and facial expressions. His clothes and their colour speak volumes of his mood and personality. For instance at the beginning he is dressed in white silk clothes with gold borders, but as his father threatens to disown him and forces him into his postman uniform, the colours are darker and greyer and desaturated.
He also has this very laid back and casual personality. He is comfortable being rich and this comfort is challenged when he is suddenly sent off to Smeerensburg to become a postman. This earmarks the development of his character and as the story progresses we see his personality change into the complete opposite of what he was. He now has purpose and that is cleverly denoted with the character coming into the light more often.
Image sourced from Google
I think Klaus’ personality evolves from him saying absolutely nothing to being completely open and loving towards the end of the film. Although Klaus is primarily depicted as big and a little scary, we eventually warm up to him. He doesn’t say much and I think the phrase ‘actions speak louder than words’ is justified here. We see his first act of kindness when he makes these little bird houses, which is juxtaposed well with the previous action of him tightening the noose and holding a sickle. I suppose this was the director’s way of confusing the audience and then surprising them with the complete opposite action.
Finding Klaus
With Alva (the teacher), I absolutely love this character because she is so bold and straight up about everything and it comes through so well with the first establishing shot of her performance! She seems a little spooky and malicious with all this fish around her, but we find out just a second later within the same shot that she wasn’t always like that. She takes comfort in the fact that she doesn’t have long left in that sad town, but then is challenged when Jesper sends a few kids to school. We then see a complete change in her perspective and she evolves into this loving teacher that she has actually been all along. Like I mentioned with Jesper above, Alva’s character change is also reflected in her clothes – she comes more into the light and she isn’t lit with the stark lighting that we see at the beginning.
Falling for Alva
Researching these videos and learning more about this film is really helping me understand a lot about the importance of acting things out as a reference. I also noticed the use of timing charts in their test shots and its really lovely to see how they break down each shot. I’m also trying to use this movie as a reference to learn timing, because it is absolutely impeccable and I just love it! The performances just give so much more to the character and I hope that one day I can animate like this! I love that the film is actually 2D but has this very ethereal 3D vibe to it!! I found out that actually some objects like the carriages and carts are 3D models, but they blend them in so well that it looks as though its all part of one world! 😀
Overall, I absolutely love this film!! Everything in it right from backgrounds to characters is gorgeous 😀 The only thing that I sometimes found a little weird were a few extreme close ups of just the eyes, which were done really well but did feel a little unsettling. The only other thing that I found slightly unnecessary maybe was the song about the postman, which just suddenly turned up out of nowhere. Other than that, I think this is a great animation film!!
I attended a really lovely talk yesterday (19th Feb 2021), which was hosted on Zoom by Joanna Quinn and Les Mills! This was arranged via my MACA course, as Joanna and Les were going to be looking at the current 2nd year’s work. We were all asked to attend the first half as the talk was aimed at creating characters and all things animation!
It was extremely lovely to hear their thoughts on animation and how they created characters for their films. It was really amazing and I really love Joanna’s personality and I really think that it showed in her work as well! 😀 She is so lively and full of character and it really reflected in her drawings, which were so energetic! She is a lightning illustrator, so it all really fits!
She showed us bits and pieces from the sketchbook she kept while she was at university (Middlesex) and it was wonderful to see the way she was able to capture movement through a simple series of sketches. She illustrated to us how important it is to always keep recording things we find interesting in our sketchbook and to just jot down ideas as they come to us, because they might be of use to us sometime in the future. What’s really lovely is that Les comes up with the script and Joanna then visualises his words! Les also mentioned how important it is to always keep a detailed description of our characters at hand, so we know how the character would react to different situations!
This is one the first films of Joanna that I was introduced to at university!
Girls Night Out – Joanna Quinn
Such a great film! Love Beryl’s personality and her own unique take on things and it just comes through so well in this film! I think this was her graduation film. I really love this exaggerated style of animation and also how she experimented with the camera angles. It was amazing to know that this was referenced from real life and also based on people she knew. There is so much energy to these drawings and the comedic timing is wonderful!
Another lovely Beryl film that they showed us!
She also showed us her showreel, which was absolutely incredible! The audio is so dynamic and really draws you in and the performances in there are just mind blowing! We also got to see a film that she made during her degree; they were all life drawings that she animated! Absolutely gorgeous! I love life drawing as well, especially gestures so it was really inspirational to see her work 😀
This has really inspired me to keep a sketchbook, just full of notes and drawings, which might come in handy later! Maybe do a lot of movement and gesture studies as well!
We got some great animation advice from her that I’m going to list below for reference:
It’s important as animators to remember that the audience may not react in the way you expect them to, which is a good thing because as a medium animation can mean different things to different people. But we just need to be prepared for that!
We need to start prioritising our ideas! Thinking about what is the most important thing in our film – what is your core idea that you want to convey and finding that!
The most vital part to remember is: ANIMATING WHAT YOU LOVE! ENJOYING THE ANIMATION PROCESS! There is no point in animating something we are dreading as our heart won’t be in it. If at any point the process starts to seem that way, then its best to think about changing it so we can enjoy and learn all at the same time!
BE CLEAR ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY IN YOUR FILM! and then cut out stuff you don’t really need
ANIMATIC should tell the story..the animation should just add to it and make it better
Think about different angles and the spaces around the character or ideally the space that the character occupies within the frame
Do loads of thumbnails and experiment with camera angles! Then you can find one that really emphasises the scene and then stick to it. Don’t just go with the very first thing that comes to mind!
It’s a CHARACTER ANIMATION course! So only do backgrounds if they are extremely necessary for your narrative/story
Constantly asking yourself about what you’re enjoying the most in the animation process!
1/3rd of the time should be spent on animation and it takes about 2/3rds for clean up and colour! So if you are making a film to showcase animation and movement, do the opposite because then you aren’t rushing your animation process just so you can clean up and colour!
We also saw the following film ‘Britannia’ which is about British Imperialism. I love that she used a dog as her main character to convey the entire narration!
Here is a trailer for her upcoming film, which looks absolutely incredible and I cannot wait to watch the entire thing! Really looking forward to Joanna and Les’ talk next Friday! Really learnt so much from them last session and extremely enjoyed it!! 😀
