Puppet Animation.

I have been looking into puppet animation as I think this is the road I am going to take.

The first I looked at was Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas is a 1993 stop motion fantast film directed by Henry Selick and produced/co-written by Tim Burton.

This was beautiful to watch. The techniques they used were amazing and so life like. The walking and the character's movements looked so authentic and natural looking, really impressive.

Another puppet animation I looked at for inspiration was the recent stop motion horror fantasy film Coraline. Also another one of Henry Selick's pieces. Based on Neil Gaiman's novel of the same name.

The story is amazing and it looks great, but I think there is too much 3D in this film to help me with my puppet animation.

The last puppet animation I looked at for stimulus was Robot chicken.

It is an American stop motion animated television series created and produced by Seth Green and Matthew Senreich along with co-Head Writers Douglas Goldstein and Tom Root.

It is very funny and they send up alot of popular films and well known cartoon characters. They use toys, action figures, dolls and claymation to create their animations. Which has given me an idea for my animation, I want to use two action figures as my characters. I will take photos of their movements to use for my stop motion animation.

Nick Park Interview

I seen a brilliant interview with Nick Park on BBC iPlayer, he was BBC2's Culture Show on the 19th November 2009. One of the interesting things Nick talked about was that Gromit, from Wallace and Gromit was originally suppose to speak, but they found it took up too much time and effort. So instead he took inspiration from Eddie Murphy's facial expressions in the film "Trading Places". Where Eddie plays the street hustler Billy Ray Valentine and used the same sort of expressions for Gromit.

It was great to hear the professionals worry about their abilities and time constraints too. Which got me thinking maybe I could use figures like Wallace and Gromit to do my animation rather than draw the whole thing out. So I am going to do a little bit of research on this and see how hard it would be to do.

Basic Character Drawings

Here are some of my character drawings, the book Dot dot dash : designer toys, action figures, gave me some good ideas for these.

And here are some of my character movement drawings, these were inspired from the book Lutz, Edwin George, b. 1868. - Animated cartoons : how they are made.

I also finalised the dialogue for my animation and used the book Blair, Preston. - Cartoon animation, to help me draw out the lip syncing for that.

Unfortunately when I was doing the character movement drawings I realised if I want my character to even just walk across the room it will take at least 18 drawings. Drawing is my weakness so I am worried that my drawing ability will effect the creation of my animation, as I don't think I can draw fast enough to draw the whole animation out in time. I don't know where to go from here.

Character Development

I have also started work on my character development, I found this book from the Library helpful for that.

Character Movement

I also found this book on character movement very helpful :

Character Movement continued...

Another book I looked at was:

Character Movement

Along with the character's mouth movements, I want to look at the character's bady movements too. So I went to the library and found a few books, which I found helpful, so I am off to try a few of these techniques out now.

Sound

I was trying to do a little research on sound as I will be concentrating on that next too and found this great article in the "Vacuum" paper.

It tells of some of the wierd and wonderful things they to use to create sound effects in films.

My favourite was the "strangling of a leather wallet filled with credit cards to create convincingly gristly sounds of the exorcism scene" in The Exorcist. How on earth do they discover these things.

So I am looking forward to trying a few of these out for myself.

Character's Mouth

I was looking through this book for my typography project when I cam across a great piece on "Lanuage: the spoken system".

It shows a great example of how animator Nick Park created a set of interchangeable mouths to recreate the lip shapes of human speech for Wallace.

I think this would be a great idea for me if I chose to do the cutout character. I would not have to keep changing the whole character everytime he talked, I could just add on the appropriate mouth to his face.

There was also an example of humans talking and how their mouth changes when using different vowels and consonants.

So I thought this woul be useful information to know as I will be looking at my charter's talking parts and mouth movements next.

Workflow.

I have put my workflow onto a large poster so I can stick it up above my work space, so I can tick off what I have done as I go along.

Walking Man Animation.

I then took photos of the pictures I had drawn for the flipbook animation to try out stop motion using this style. The quality is not great as I rushed it and did not tidy up any of the photos in photoshop. I just imported the photos straight into windows movie maker. I will not rush my final piece in the same way, I just wanted to see quickly how this concept might look so I would have more choices for my final piece.

Flip Book

Next I tried doing a flip book animation.

I enjoyed doing this, but it looks a bit slow because I was trying to flip the book and record it at the same time. So next time I would get someone else to flip the book while I recorded it.

Although the drawing takes longer than the cutout animation, it does not take as long to record it, so there are advantages to both types of animation.

Cut Out Animation

The first animation I tried tackling was cut out.

So first I did a drawing of my character.

So next I needed to split him up so the different parts could move.

I started doing this drawing but realised I was not splitting him up correctly.

I am still not splitting him up enough, so tried again.

Then I coloured him in on photoshop, printed him and then cut him out.

Then I tried to make a small animation of him walking using Windows movie maker and this is how it turned out.

I don't think it turned out very well as he looks like he is skipping rather than walking. I think my main problem there was I was not using the proper "Brad" clips to hold my character together, which made it harder to keep the character in the same position as the shot before.

So I will deffinitly invest in those if I chose to do cutout animation.

As I did find it enjoyable, but very time consuming.

Storyboard

I have finished my storyboard so just adding that on now.

Next I will start work on my three different concepts and ideas; cutout, collage and drawn animation.

Drawing styles continued...

I loved this collage piece as it just seems to amalgamate all the different styles together.

So there are a few different styles to get me thinking.

I think next I need to finish my script and start work on my storyboard,

then once that is done I can try a little bit of my story out in each of the different styles to see which I think works best for me.

More Drawing Styles

I know my animation is going to be drawn, but there are so many different ways I could draw.



Do I want to exclusively just draw with ink?

If so will I add any colour?

How will I do this? with colouring pencil, markers or photoshop?

Maybe I could use cutouts to add colour or collage?

Instead of making up characters I could rotoscope and have the basis for my characters already made up.



So I am going to look at and try these different styles and narrow it down for myself.



This first I am going to have a look at the different styles and ten try them out.
The first one is Angela Anaconda. It is a popular children's television show. It uses cutout and collage animation, made using a purpose-shot images put together using a 3D animation program called Houdini.








Then I looked at ink drawing animation.



Ha Ha love this cartoon I found on youtube.

It is amazing how a simple ink line drawing can be so effective AND funny.

It really did not need colour either, I think it was quiet compelling without it.

Next I looked at flip book animation.

This is a series of amazing drawings that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to animate a gun being shot.

It is like shooting on ones and is similar to the ink drawing clip above.

Then there is collage.

Styles of Drawing

I picked up an old copy of "The Vacuum" paper I have. (The Vacuum is a free bi-monthly newspaper published in Belfast by the arts organisation Factotum.) As it was a copy on design and the cover got me thinking of how I would like to approach the next part of my project and that is the "development work". I want to first look at a few different styles of drawing and get a better idea on how I would like to advance with my own drawings.

I like this as it looks manageable and feasible for the time constraint I have in both my timetable and the 3 minutes for the animation. Also looking at the content of my moving image it will take alot of drawing, so I don't want anything too complicated to draw. I want to keep my drawings clean and simple.

Which got me thinking about my old annuals and comics I used to read as they used minimum amount of colours, were clear and could tell the story without even having to read the words. So I thought I would look at them for inspiration (or should I say this gives an excuse to wile away a few hours looking at my old comics).

My favourite was the "Beezer" even now the cover still makes me laugh.

The memories that come flooding back when I open these books. "Pop, Dick and Harry" were my favourite. I just have the whole annual memorised from my childhood.

The colours are amazing they just pop right out at you. But it is the colours in "The Dandy" that I want to concentrate on.

They tended to use one other colur along with the black of the ink drawing and the white of the page it was drawn on, (or more yellow by the look of these pages as the books are so old).

I just think this blue is so appealing and adds to the over all look of the page. I also love the orange as I think it is really retro looking.

So I think I would like to do something like this, do my drawings in ink pen and then just add one other colour.

Research Continued.

So I now know I want to produce an animation using my own drawings.

Next I want to look at the theme of my animation.

It is loosely based on the problems I had coming up with a theme for the project,
so you could say it is a semi-biographical piece.

So I have decided to know look at other artists who produce semi-biographical work.

The first I looked at was Vincent Paronnaud, who is a French comic artist and filmaker as I have recently just seen his latest film, which he has directed called "Persepolis", which I loved.

It is an animated film based on Marjane Satrapi's autobiographiocal graphic novel of the same name. The film was written and directed by Satrapi and Paronnaud. The story follows a young girl as she comes of age against the backdrop of the Iranain Revolution.

The film is black and white in the style of the original graphic novels. The "present day" scenes are shown in color, while sections of the historic narrative resemble a shadow theatre(which is an ancient form of storytelling).

The reason I loved it so much is the animation and drawings are so simple they did not atke away from the storyline, which is the main atrraction of the film.

Next I looked at the work of Joe Sacco. Who is more of a journalist than a comics artist, but it is his autobiograpical work that interested me. He travelled extensively across Europe, writing about it all in his comic journal called "Yahoo". He travelled on to Palestine and Israel and did alot of research there which lead to write the acclaimed book "Palestine". Which was a collection of short and long pieces, some depicting Sacco's travels and encounters with Palestinians (and several Israelis), and some dramatizing the stories he was told. It was serialized as a comic book from 1993 to 2001 and then published in several collections.

A more fun side of autiobiographical cartoonists I looked at was

Joe Matt and his work on his cartoon diary called "The Peepshow".

It is a cartoon diary in which he portrayed himself as a porn obsessed loser, an egotistical liar and cheat - although he maintains that this is not a strictly accurate self portrayal. Since 1992, he has continued to reveal, in embarrassing frankness, his distressing habits and predilections in the cult favourite comic, Peep Show.
Fame and fortune await for Joe Matt as an HBO cable TV series based on his Peep Show comic series is currently in production.

ESSENTIAL READING:
Peep Show: The Cartoon Diary Of Joe MattDrawn & Quarterly, 1991 Cartoon Diary is the definitive collection of Joe Matt's short one page strips which predate his Peep Show comic... Joe Matt is immature, cowardly, cheap, porn-obsessed, neurotic, compulsive, and self absorbed... but he is also very funny, painfully honest and doesn't mind admitting that he has one or two flaws - in print, in front of everybody. Minor ones, of course.

The Poor Bastard Drawn & Quarterly, 1996Collecting the first six issues of his Peep Show comic, The Poor Bastard shows Joe Matt coming to terms with the end of his relationship with Trish and getting back into the dating game. Not a pretty sight. Watch as he alienates lovers and friends in a shamelessly candid and hilarious story about his ruthless quest for a woman who understands him and will meet his ridiculously high standards.

Fair Weather Drawn & Quarterly, 2002 Collecting Peep Show #7-10, in Fair Weather Joe Matt examines his 1970s suburban childhood. In a surprisingly tasteful and thoughtful memoir young Joe Matt is a selfish child who steals from stores, takes advantage of his friends, threatens to burn his mother's house down, teases those weaker than himself, and reveals himself to be a fairly normal child.

Also the work of Lev Yimanz is also very funny and hopefully this will be in direction I would like my work to be heading. http://www.ingredientx.com

Finally I looked at the work of Brad Neely, as I think he has an ingenious sense of humor and makes history so much more fun than I ever remember it being in scholl and his drawings are great too.

Animation Research

I also find Michel's stop motion work in the film "The Science of Sleep" really interesting too.



The link below shows how important Michel's drawings, development work and storyboarding is in the making of the film.








My favourite part of the film is the animation and the spin art because it reminds me of the artist Jackson Pollock's work which I love.

Another artist I love using stop motion is PES, he has become famous for using everyday objects in his animations to create new ways of looking at things for instance the "Human Skateboard" below.

I also like the work of Moo Sudios. http://www.moostudios.com

They create TV and web commericals, but I find their work interesting as it is their piece on Microsoft Live "how to" that I would like to have my work emulate as I would like to animate my own drawings too.

Starting Research

BRAINSTORMING:

So to create a moving image my main three choices are cinematography/film, Machinima(3D) and Animation.

For Cinematography I looked http://www.thesmalls.com

"The Smalls is an online showcase for non-commercial creative work. We are here to inspire and to offer a medium where emerging talent can display work not only to fellow members of the contemporary creative community, but also to our subscription members in the broadcast, film and advertising industry."

There was some amazing short films on there, but unfortunately I don't have a camera to be able to anything like that.

For Machinima and 3D I looked at http://www.mprem.com/e107/news.php.

It is a website to promote the making of machinima movies and has lots movies and tips on there, but 3D is a weak point for me so I have decided not to do machinima either.

ANIMATION

So it looks like I will be using animation to create my 3 minute moving image.

I started looking at the work of Michel Gondry first because I loved the stop motion work he did on The White Stripes music video for "Fell In Love With a Girl".

Michel is a French film, commerical and music video director.

In the video below it explains how in half of the video he used stop frame animation using lego blocks to build versions of the two musicians and then for the other half of the video he used video footage of the two musicians and turned that into pixelated art and made that into lego blocks of the two musicians.

Getting started.

When we were first given the brief I was so confused as I did not know what to base my project on. For days I thought of stories I had heard in the news or off friends. I thought of the stories for films and books, but everything seemed either to long or complicated.

So I decided to go to the library and try and get some inspiration from there.

I looked for books that were about getting started on a project and how to create ideas.

The first was "The Complete Animation Course" by Chris Patmore.

The first chapter said to get started I first had to have a character before I could put pen to paper, well I already knew this otherwise I would not have got the book out.

So I looked at the next book "How to be a Cartoonist" by Peter Maddocks. The first chapter in this book was asking the exact same question I was.

But all this told me again was to start drawing, but how could I draw when I had no theme or ideas, so I browsed onto the next chapter thinking I would get some answers when I seen the name of this chapter.

But again not the answers I was looking for, the best piece of advice it gave was "always carry pen and paper for notes because good ideas know no boundaries", heres hoping.

The next book I looked at did eventually lead to an idea. Hoorah.

The booked was called "Animation Unleashed" by Ellen Besen. I did find this book very helpful in that it said to try and look in hidden worlds, whether it be the hidden world of an insect, santa claus or your own mind. Which is where my idea eventually came out of. But it was what she said on "Generic thinking" that got my mind ticking, she said visual vocabulary can help to alleviate it. Which made think of what I had scrowled down in class that day, Lee said to "Research vocabulary we want to use in our pieces". So I decided to write down the vocabulary that was going through my head to see could this be the start of something.

But all that was coming into my head was CONFUSED, FRUSTRATED AND IN DESPAIR.

So I decided to stick these three words into thesaurus to see what I could come up with.

I liked some of the words it threw up and thought they would sound good in a cartoon. But I still needed to expand it further, so I decided to look at other peoples frustrations, confusion and despair, so I googled this.

The thing that interested me most was people's frustrations or pet hates so I decided to look into this further. And this is where I had my EUREKA moment.

There was my theme it had been staring at me in the face the whole time, WRITERS BLOCK.

Just as Ellen Besen had said sometimes you just have to look at the secret world going on in your own head.