I've been having storyboard trouble, so I took a day off from the evil EVIL storyboard and did this instead.
Didn't have to be anything complicated, but needed to say 'Loughborough' (since it's mainly sent out by the department and associates from the university) and 'Christmas' (but no religious imagery to represent this religious festival! How odd the world is). I was walking past Queens Park and saw the tower and it makes a much prettier Icon Of Lougborough and the uni than towers hall does :) Also,I seem to be on a bit of a fox kick at the moment, there are foxes EVERYWHERE!!! So I put one in the picture to add a bit of life to this otherwise frosty scene. I did try snow, but the only problem with snow is that it's a looooot of white. But I'm pretty happy with this for a 1 day image.
Trailer using detailed drawings but with only a few moving parts for each animated section. I think I could do something that moves like this and is still effective. Also
Again, really simple shapes, no complex movement. I LOVE this guy, he is my Illustrator Of The Week. He has such a great sense of economy, colour and drama, messes around loads with different picture planes and lengths of images, while still keeping it looking really clean and readable.
This is fast becoming a space-based video dump. But then, that was the idea, and I can't leave this little gem out.
Oh yes, it's the Clangers! I used to love this show so much when I was a kid, I went round the house whistling in Clanger-talk. Their idea of space is much more local than some of these big movies. There aren't too many nearby planets, but there's always a nearby SOMETHING. Stuff is always floating around, interesting shapes and objects, things land on the planet often, and they can make short day trips if they want to. This seems more like the environment the prince lives in, with objects and things passing him from time to time so he's not bored, but not many other people about unless you go looking for them
Again thinking about pacing, the intro shocked me when I timed it. The first shot lasts for 22 seconds, that's half of what my outcome has to be!! And he just talks! The camera pans left to right, and the narrator just narrates, and nothing else happens. And then the second shot is just the planet itself, nothing else happens, and that lasts a further 18 seconds! I guess it just shows what you can do with a few simple camera motions, and a minimal amount of movement. In that respect it reminds me of a lot of opening and end credits for anime (non-sci fi/fantasy). The newer ones (last 5 years) are pretty fast-paced too, but ny older than that tend to put the credits at the beginning, and will fill the time up with a few shots of the different characters, often not moving too much. The camera may pan so that the character moves in relation to the background, and maybe their hair will blow, or they will change facial expression, but that's it. Yet this is still effective at holding attention.
I look at all the foxes I keep drawing (the fox is one of my favourite parts of the book) and I realised they all look very similar... and then I realised why.
I used to watch this show when my younger brothers and sisters came home from school Pablo the little red fox
I actually saw a fox last night, crossing the RNIB car park when I walked home from Flix, the student cinema, so I'm now trying to think about that instead.
Haha! I found it! God bless people stealing things and putting them on Youtube
I saw this a while back on C4's 'Animate TV' and dug out the notes I made at the time. This fits with what I'm looking at now in terms of pacing. Most of the slower paced British or American short films I'm coming across tend to have shots of about 4 secs when something's happening, setting a mood etc, with the odd shot being made even longer, usually to match a narrative. This animation, however, doesn't actually have any shot changes at all. It was done in one long shot, taking out any changes of viewpoint, angle etc. It was made by Mr Aubtin making all the elements out of paper and sticking them to a wall - the flower field, the mountain, everything- so for every 'frame' of the animation he would cut out a new figure from paper, or move a previous cutout, and photographed it. By moving the camera up and down a little on each shot he could give the illusion of panning up and down, and also having the female character climb 'on the spot' and having rhe clouds move down faster.
Because this is all cutouts, and taken at at least 12/fps, if not more, it would be impossible for me to do within the time limit, and so also to achieve that single shot effect (at least the way he has) which is fine, I think in 30 secs I want to communicate more about the book than you could in one shot anyway. But it's a great effect, very sombre and slow to watch, and creates the illusion of more time than there actually is because the camera isnt shooting around angles every two seconds. When I'm storyboarding my animation I would love to try a pan shot in some form, maybe showing the prince travelling through space, past all the other planets.
Oh dear, that's probably going to mean using motion again. I could do with going to a tutorial on that. I last used it properly for the Part B big animation project, and I didn't really like it very much then either. Or alternatively, it might work just as well with Flash. I'm a lot more familiar with Flash now anyway, although it doesn't have the same range of filters and effects (which I probably wont need) or so useful a timeline for clips (which would be handy, since Flash works on a frame-by-frame basis. You can't just drag and drop sequences like you can in Motion.
Currently researching the little prince's journey through space and what that might look like for him. What is that really like to travel through space? So I'm having my mind blown over and over every ten minutes with photos of nebulae and weird diagrams of the solar system. I was reading something about a series called 'Cosmos', with Carl Sagan, and somehow ended up seeing this.
Just the ideas he's talking about amaze me.
I also thought of some Disney (rather inevitably *rolls eyes*)
My favourite scene in the whole film, because of the way the images and music combine. They depict this vast emptiness of space but at the same time it's really beautiful, and also very playful (the solar-charging panels!) Same musical pattern, basic underscoring chords and a 'tinkly' bit when he enters space, nice and simple. I love Thomas Newman's music, he does manages to put this amazing bitter-sweet edge onto things. Like 'It's a shame this can't last, but in the meantime, isn't it lovely?" Also, Disney's 'Treasure Planet', but I don't think you need to see that one too :) I liked the idea of combining space travel with nautical navigation, and everything becoming a little bit JulesVerne-esque, with charts and sextants and things but that's not quite right for the Little Prince either. Nice imagery though. (Great film though, more what they should be making, rather than crummy sequals for flippin' 'Brother Bear'. Was NOT impressed when I heard about that)
I was actually thinking when I was watching all this, and what I was thinking was that I don't think this is space as it is for the little prince. I think his version of outer space is a lot more local, no more than a day's travel between planets. Because he talks about listening to stars laughing and being good friends with the sun on his planet, which gives the impressions that things are more like they are in the kids show Tiny Planets- if you have a mind to travel (and a large trebuchet) you can.
The current British gas adverts have this same idea you see in the Little Prince, of all these tiny planets, each belonging to a different person. If I show this aspect of the book and the Prince's journey, I need to make sure I make each planet different and unique.
Thursday, 8 October 2009
Wow. Found this on .4mations.tv when looking at how short films and animations have been constructed, what the pacing is like etc, and this one blew me away. It's very personal and is a brilliant example of what I meant by tailoring the story and the animation 'style' to fit each other. It doesn't feel like an advert, it feels like an insight into someone's life.
I was *actually* looking for an animation I saw on Channel 4 ages back, but I can't find it
Reserach so far has yielded that there has been a musical (watched that), an opera (watched that), an animated series (too cutesy, could only watch the first few minutes of that) and a film (with Gene Wilder in it!) The boy playing the prince is adorable, but very serious. The relationships between him and pilot, and the fox are the highlights of the book for me. Here's a clip of it:
Already I've got an idea of what I want my outcome to 'feel' like. The original book illustrations by Mr Saint-expurey himself are lovely, but not what you'd expect. They are literally doodles done with an ink pen
I want to make sure I have the guts to draw such a recognisable character MY way, but at the same time this whimsical kind of drawing works very well for that story. I think over-drawing this or doing something too rigid and structured would be a mistake. The story is charming and has an ageless quality to it, so I need to make sure my work communicates that.
I know I want it narrated, rather than having words on a screen. Since the point is not to advertise the book per se, but to explain the effect it had on me, it would make it more personal to have a voiceover, even if it's not my voice. NOTE TO SELF: Must therefor book recording equipment from Ben Dolman. The little dictaphone I used for the Girish project worked really well. If I do it in a quiet room then the quality should be fine. In terms of talking, I only have about 30-40 seconds of screentime and I dont want to clutter it, so less is definitely more.
Already I'm thinking about music too, since I can't use existing stuff (which is a shame because I can think of some great tracks that would be perfect) I really care about getting the soundtrack right, and I learned in the Chicago project that a good soundtrack can make or break your piece, and does half the work for you! It's a very quiet, gentle story, with not so much a 'tune' as an ambience - it's set in space after all. Something light, gentle and ... a bit 'tinkly'. Like Mais e Menos by O Teatro Magico.
I think I'm going to do The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-exupery. It was either that or Pollyanna, which is just too twee for words. The Little Prince fascinated me because I read it in sixth form, just before leaving to enter the Bigwideworld and I wasn't quite sure what it was meant to be: Children's sci-fi fairty story, or a commentary on the plight of modern society, who knew? :) It was a great book to read at that point, because I felt very much like the Little Prince. He's just a child -idealistic, good hearted and uncomplicated, but with very little knowledge of the 'real world'- who leaves his home and explores what all the adults are doing. Some are chasing money, some are focused on their jobs and being busy, others are obsessed with power, but in the end he finds the best way to live is to look past all these things and see people as they are "It is only with the heart we can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye." and ultimately not to fear failure or even death. It was a great message to hear before I also left to go into higher education, to remember that some things will always be more important than anything else, power or money or working myself silly (sorry tutors!)
Ok, the idea is to use this blog as a research resource for my Part C year. Hopefully it will make it a lot easier to document and review things I find on the internet that relate to my projects for this year. Any videos, web pages or images I find can be linked straight here for me, my coursemates and my tutors to look at alongside my sketch book. I'll give it a couple of weeks and see how it's working out. I think the main advantage will be the video links, since I'm expecting there to be a lot of that in the near future.
I'm a third year illsutraton student at Loughborough uni, looking for a place to collect all the interesting things I find.
Go check out my Tumblr for more.
http://seraphl.tumblr.com/
