Final

Persepolis Review

I LOVED the Persepolis animation, I love that the drawings were so simple, yet the messages within the movie were so powerful and big. To me, the comic book, seemed somewhat like the animatic for the film. They were both very similar (of course the film is based on the comic so it should be related). The movements and motion of the characters were very believable  for example when the two women were examining her jacket and her Micheal Jackson pin, the movements were so vast, seamless. The gray scale also gave the movie a more serious tone. based on the Wikipedia article, Satrapi explained that the movie was in black and white because it "was so the place and the characters wouldn't look like foreigners in a foreign country but simply people in a country to show how easily a country can become like Iran." This tactic works very well because it helps set the mood, tone and the setting (Iran) of the story. Not only that, but the film's characters are exactly like the comic, therefore it should be the same color, like the comic, so the fans of the comic would appreciate the similarities between the book and the film.

The difference between the comic and the animation, is that the comic is separated into two books, with one book about Satrapi's childhood and one about her in adulthood  While, the film has her from childhood to adulthood. The comical aspects of the film, also brings it alive.

Review for Surogat

Surogat is like a moving painting.Everything in Surogat is flat yet,all the characters and objects in the animation is inflatable. The animation has a nice flow, even the hair moves. The water even splashes, even though it's just up-side down 'U's. The animation also had a very happy tone (thanks to the music).The tactic works well, and the collage-like work is effective because of it's artistic view, bringing in two different textures, yet still being able to maintain a effective good look.

Although the technique was good, I disliked the way the animation objectifies women. For example the first woman that the man blew up had big hips but her bust was small, and he deflated her, because he disliked her, and then he got a new inflatable woman with big bust and big bum, but her waist was nothing but a line. The plot shows that only women with big bust and tiny waists are acceptable and desirable, and this is unacceptable  like today's advertisements.

Review for Wreck it Ralph

Wreck It Ralph is a Disney 3D movie. I really enjoyed the movie and the different perspectives. For example, in the beginning of the movie the audience gets the perspective where they look in to a video game in an arcade. The 3D aspect on that part was used effectively because I felt like I was in front of the Wreck It Ralph video game. As the audience looks through the video game, the film transitions to the game world going from a 8-bit image to a 3D high definition image. It was a great idea for Disney to do a movie on the “bad” guy’s perspective, it gives people a sense of sympathy for the bad guys. For example, when the arcade closes, Ralph is basically, being bullied, getting thrown in the mud and then left to live in a dump. Nobody invites Ralph to join the “good guys” when the lights are closed. Another perspective to look at is the different ways each game is drawn. Wreck It Ralph is in 8-bit, Sugar Rush is in 3D, and The first person shooter game is in high definition, and Disney remembers to remind the audience that all these games are designed differently. I forgot that the characters are created with different resolutions, until Felix goes to the first person shooter game and he says, “wow look at the high definition quality in you.”

Another great thing about this film is the different characters and how each of the character has a back story. The characters even created their own verb “going turbo.” In the film “going turbo,” means leaving your game and entering another game. This makes the community believable, everybody knows what it means to “go turbo.” Everything was believable.

One thing I would have liked would be for them to talk a little more about Turbo, how was he able to change his looks? How did he escape, when the other members of the game died with the game.

Final Working Progress

Animation (Working Progress)

Here's the first minute of the animation

Animatic Revised

Here is the link to the story my animation will be based on. The animation is only a possibility of why the girl was abandoned. Nobody really knows what happened before, the nun found her in the market place.

(Note: Something went wrong with the audio when I exported to .mov)

Animatic (1st draft)

My final project will be an animation on an abandoned baby girl. It's based on a true story I found on allgirlsallowed.org. The baby girl was abandoned by her family and left in a basket (in a market place). A nun came by the village and saw the basket with the baby inside. The nun adopted her. Up until this day, the child (whose 18 years old now) still does not know who her parents are or why she was abandoned. My animation will touch on what I think happened when the girl was born, and a possibility of why she was abandoned.

Link to the article

Review of Waking Life

Waking Life is a film directed by Richard Linklater. It’s a animation about dreams and the unconscious  The whole film was rotoscoped. They first recorded live actors and then had different artists rotoscope the frames, using the computer. You could tell that there were different styles in the rotoscopes. Some of the scenes looked like they were just bitmapped. I did not like the fact that they used different artists because the styles were different and therefore the rotoscopes were colored differently and gave the film a shaky feeling. It made me nauseous.

However, I did like how Waking Life had silly little comical animations to connect with the audience more. For example when the girl was talking about love and mini animations came up on the side (they were like visuals of the words she was saying). Then there was one where a guy was talking about how humans are mostly composed of water, and a masked animation of water was building up in him. Then he said something about a gear and his head turned to a gear, and he said world view and the earth comes up. There were a lot of these mini animations on that side that are really interesting, because when people watch interviews, they tend to get bored and the mini animations are a great way to keep the viewers interested. Also some people are better with visuals and having those mini animations would allow the viewer to understand better. The mini animations also help with the plot, which is about dreams and in dreams anything can happen a man’s head can turn into a gear or atoms.

I also loved the transitions from one scene to the next in Waking Life. For example there was one scene where the main character was in a bar and the “camera” panned from table to table in the bar listening in on the conversations that went on, then it went to two men that had guns and when they pulled the trigger, the film transitioned to another scene, like a dream. In dreams noise like gun shots would trigger transitions to a different dream. The use of the monkey projecting the scenes was pretty cool too. Another thing I realized is that things are always floating in the film, which is another representation of dreams.

This was an interesting film, but the shaky feeling really detached me from the film and was a real turn-off. I almost couldn't go through with the film, it made me super dizzy.

Rotoscope

Review of Waltz with Bashir

Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir is an interesting animated piece. The film deals with Folman retracing his steps back to the Lebanon War in 1982. The characters and the environment are all shown in very specific details, even the rain moves in the direction the wind shifts (like in real life). According to Wikipedia, the film took four years to complete and it was made completely with Flash (Impressive!). Wikipedia also mentions that the film is one of the “first Israeli animated feature-length films released in movie theaters since Alina and Yoram Gross's Ba'al Hahalomot (1962).”

The film’s artistic style was the use of realistic graphics, almost like a comic book. Wikipedia even noted that the film actually branched out with a comic book. The drawings are so “realistic” to the point where people confuse it to be a rotoscope piece. Surprisingly it was not rotoscoped, it uses classic animation, in Flash. It used classic music to set the tone and mood of the animation, this is very important and effective because the music helps enhance the audience’s interaction with the movie, and it engages the reader because of the moods.

I love that this film is an animated documentary. The fact that the documentary is animated is definitly one of the reasons I was drawn to the film. The animation made the film less boring and more interesting. It draws the viewer in and then when the viewer is sucked in to the movie, they conclude the film with horrific real life visuals to leave the reader thinking and surprised. It was brilliant!

Weekly Blog on videos Assigned

Jan Svankmajer’s Darkness/Light/Darkness seriously made me a little sick. Why was it sickening? Because the human parts were moving and organs were showing and the body parts were moving individually. It was not a pretty sight. It starts out with two clay hands and then forms to become clay human that is stuck in a tiny room with one light. The disturbing part is the fact that the clay human body parts are apart and the hands put them together. Some vulgar images include an actual tongue and brain that are placed in the clay head. The is obviously not suitable for children. The clay man is also completely naked, and the character is a man, because it was emphasized. Therefore this is definitely a video for mature people.

Dimensions of Dialogue Part 2 shows a female clay person and male clay person (same male from Darkness/Light/Darkness) consuming their love which resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. The video depicts that unwanted pregnancies cause tension between the two lovers and thus become chaotic.

Svankmajer’s Food is separated in three parts breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Breakfast shows people waiting in a long line to get there food. The food vendor is another human being, that delivers food like a vending machine. One person from the line puts money in the person and follows the instructions and then when that person is done eating the “vender” comes back to life and leaves the room, and the person that purchased the food becomes the vendor, it continues in that cycle. Lunch starts out with two customers in a diner. One is rich and the other is in a lower class. Both cannot get attention from the waiter and end up eating everything on the table, their clothes, table cloth, shoes everything. At the end the rich man even tries to eat the less fortunate man. This shows that two people from different classes can act in the same way, and usually the poor follow the rich. It also shows that the well mannered person can turn out to be more inhumane than the unmannerly person (another way of saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover). For dinner it shows four different people adding spices and sauce to their own body part. Each character eats a part of their body that identifies who they are. A married man eats his hand that shows, he’s a husband. A athlete eats his leg, that shows he’s a runner, a woman eats her breasts which shows that she’s a women (how sexist! A woman could be represented in other ways and known for other things.) Lastly a man eats his penis showing that he’s a man. This animation shows how humans can be very inhumane at times.

Pen Point Percussion shows the different perceptions and views of sound. It can be seen as sound waves, or musical notes. Mostly it is the patterns shown in sound waves. Norman McLaren draws sound on film and it creates sound based on the thickness and size of the shapes drawn on the film. The size determines the volume; the tone is controlled by the shape. This process allows me to appreciate the technology we have today, we don’t need to draw the sounds we want in our animations. Although, it’d be nice to create sounds by drawing them.

Patchwork Man

Patchman Work is very unique. It’s interesting that the video was inspired by every memory he has regained after losing consciousness from a car accident. The video is a stop motion that shows a collage of different facial parts. Not only were the images collages but the sounds was also a collage, this work is very unique. I like the seamlessness and how the sound and pictures correspond with one another. The rhythm and timing was perfect. The artist’s story reminds me of the book Catcher in the Rye because he realizes how phony he was before the accident. He saw that he followed everybody’s feelings, actions, and words. This led him to dissociate himself from others. He wants to escape society and reject societal expectations of everybody. It’s almost as if the artist is saying that we are all puppets that act to the wishes of the puppeteer aka society. 

Review on Quay Brothers exhibit

The Quay Brothers’ exhibit in the MoMa consisted of many stop motion animations and other works by the brothers. It felt as if we were in a timeline of the Quay Brothers’ works from beginning to now. Being in the exhibition was like being in the minds of the brothers, the paintings they used as inspiration were put in the exhibit as well, it kind of gave me a feeling as though I were looking at the wall of the Quay Brothers’ studio. Most of their films and art pieces were dark and gruesome. It consisted of doll parts and hardware like light bulbs as heads and hooks and hands. The atmosphere was dark and blurry. The MoMa also featured the environments made by the brothers, we were able to look into the magnifying glass and see the content and the thoroughness of the environments/stage the brothers create for their animations. I felt the Quay Brothers really allowed a connection between the characters and the environments they set up for their characters, which created a sense of realism in their works. The dolls interacted with everything, the beds, coming out from under a door, using scissors to cut the other doll. Personally, their work was a bit freaky and I already feared dolls, this added to the fear (couldn't sleep after the exhibit). However, I must say I really loved how much movement and the characters have and the relationships they have with the environment. I also love how they use every little detail for their stage.

The only animation that did not freak me out too much was The Calligrapher; it was short and to the point.  The character and the stage were made of paper cut outs, not dolls. I like how the colors of the feather pens stand out from everything else, like how it’s suppose to. My favorite part is when the drawing of the feather pen came to life. I enjoy animations that have drawings coming to life, like Max Fleischer's Out Of the Inkwell.

Text Animation

Text animation for I, Too Sing America by Langston Hughes
Dialogue/ Audio taken from Great Debaters movie, the part where Denzel Washington's character recites Hughes' poem.

The Quay Brothers

The Quay Brothers are twin animators. The influences for their animations range from animators, puppeteers, writers to composers. Due to this range of influence, the Quay Brother’s works usually consists of these features. They use puppets made of doll parts in most of their films and their most successful work, Street of Crocodiles, is actually based on Bruno Schulz’s novel, this shows how much puppeteers and writers influence the Quay Brother’s works. The Quay Brothers prefer to use musical scores in their works, rather than dialogue. According to Wikipedia, the brothers have said that they “prefer to work with pre-recorded music.” The Quay Brother style is often dark and freaky, almost Halloween-like. The doll puppets certainly contribute to the dark tone in their films. The Wikipedia article states that the brothers attended the University of Art in Pennsylvania, and moved to London in 1969 and attended the Royal College of Art.  They were illustrators before becoming animators. They illustrated drawings for Anthony Burger’s The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End and Karlheinz Stockhausen. 

Week 4 Blog Post

Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell was made through rotoscoping, a technique Fleischer invented. It is a technique that requires a transparent easel and a projector behind it. The projector will throw images frame by frame and the animator would or artist would have to trace the frame by frame images to create a animation along with live-action film. I really enjoyed this animation, it was both inspirational and comical. I love how the drawings were still for a few seconds and then they came to life. The clown was alive! Literally! It came out of the easel and interacted with the environment. It was a character the viewer can relate to. There were shots where the clown went out of the frame and then back again from behind the house, which created a seamless animation. There were also different animated characters that interacted with the clown, like a cow, bear, and dog, and they all came from the cracked hole. Anticipation was definitely a big part of this film, the whole time, I'm wondering what the clown will do next and I'm also wondering is the clown going to come out and eventually it did. The text was also a great part of this silent piece because it gave the characters more personality. The music also gave the audience the expectations that it would be a comical piece. Everything was seamless till the very end. Rotoscoping is definitely a effective way in story-telling. The reason is because it brings animation to life and in this particular piece, the viewer sees the character (the clown) being created and coming to life, which really allows a more engaging experience for the viewer.

This is my favorite piece out of all the animations for this week because, the story for this one was more captivating. The Dakota piece was very very unique, however it was way too long and tiring to sit through and watch, and the beating drums along with the fast text had that heart attack effect one me. I tried to watch another one of Chang's piece, Riviera. Rivera was worst, I got dizzy the first twenty seconds and just could not go on. Rivera had four sections with moving words, and I tried reading it, which was the reason I got dizzy. All four sections were moving simultaneously, in different directions and it felt as if I was twirling around in a circle. "Early Abstractions" reminds me of a kaleidoscope, which is probably the intention. It's as if the patterns turn into different figures and then come to life and do something and then go back to being a pattern and, it repeats over and over again. Then we have Norman McLaren's Neighbours. Neighbours is a antiwar film. that uses pixilation. Pixilation is stop motion animation, except with real live actors. Neighbours is about two neighbors that fight over a flower. The neighbors fight till both of them die and it was not till their death that the two had peace and each had a flower. The message behind this is that countries get into war, fighting over one thing and they will not get what they want until they fight to the death. There's no point in winning when you've died and cannot appreciate the "award." McLaren did a exciting thing in this piece, he made the characters float in thin air, I like the idea, but was not sure if the characters were so excited about the flower to the point where they floated or if they were "high". Lastly we have Science Friction, film by Stan Vanderbeek. Vanderbeek used collages to create his animation, and I love that idea. It's both very artistic and different, because it's cut and paste unlike the the usual draw animations.

Animation (Revised)

Animation (First Draft)

Animation that I Like

This is an animation that I found on YouTube. I like it because it reminds me of Pixar and Tim Burton films. This is an animation done by students in Ringling College of Art and Design. It gives me inspiration. I hope to be able to create an animation like this one day. I enjoy the story line because its saying that cuteness and kindness can also result in toughness.

This animation follows the guidelines for the 12 principles of animation. For squash and stretch, it follows it because the sides of the characters and environment are 3d so when the characters turn they do not appear flat or squished. The anticipation principle is also applied, when the characters walk their needs bend a little, when they jump their knees also bend, or when the monster came out as a good monster, the audience knew it would blow out bubbles instead of fire.There is a lot of staging techniques in the animation as well, for example when the monster she created was suppose to be evil but it turned out being a pink fluff. Another example of staging is when the monster used it's cuteness to attack the bully. For follow through and overlapping action the audience sees that throughout the animation, one I have in mind is when the little girl threw her witch craft book on the table and the pens and other things on the table started to move showing that she had slammed the book down hard.

At first I was going to chose John Canemaker's The Moon and the Son, but I decided to go for a unknown artist and came upon this.

Environment Project

Original Photo

Flash/Bitmap Version

Week 2 Blog Post (Dots)

Norman McLaren's Dots is a drawn-on-film. This kind of animation is exactly the way it sounds. The footage seen by viewers are directly drawn on to the films. This means the dots seen in McLaren's Dots were drawn on and then processed. The way McLaren uses this tactic is brilliant and simple. It's almost as if the dots are characters. Each indivivdual dot is characterized with it's own musical note/sound. Some of the dots even transform into stars or splats. As the film goes on the dots get bigger and show more movements, it would twirl around and the melody also escalades and gets faster. The story Dots tells is that, dots are not simple. They can turn into different things and dots can come from different things. It could be a raindrop or the period at the end of a sentence. Dots can produce different tones of music as well. The way McLaren tells this story is almost like a symphany. He took such a simple subject like "Dots" and created a interesting story and art form out of it.

Class exercise

Before

after

Week 1 Blog Post (Hansel and Gretel)

For this blog I chose to write about Lotte Reiniger's Hansel and Gretel. The story was told through narration and silhouette film animation. The silhouettes remind me of shadow puppets. The visual aspect of the film is shown in black and white with shadows.  Based on the Wikipedia article about Silhouette animation the technique for this form of animation is simple. It is a form of stop motion and consists of cardboard cutouts and backlighting. Wikipedia states that the cardboard cutouts have wires or thread that would put the joints together, so the cutouts can move, like the shadow puppets. The way silhouette animation is filmed is with a rostrum camera. The cutouts are being moved frame by frame to create the motions as seen in Hansel and Gretel. Once again using Wikipedia I discovered that a rostrum camera is a camera that has two parts, a lower part, where the cutouts can be placed and frame by frame shots can be taken from the top portion which is where the camera lies. Other techniques Reiniger used to tell the story is through transitions. She used fading to transition from credits to story and then story to ending credits. This helps create a smooth story. The narration for this animation is told in story form where the narrator reads the “once upon a time” parts and mimics the voices of the characters as well. There are also sound effects that depict animal noises for the goose and the squirrel. Along with sound effects the story is also told with music throughout the ten minute film. The music helps bring emotions and setting to the animation.

I feel that this form of animation is effective. It’s artistic and very broad. It is broad because the characters do not have specified faces and allows the viewers to have more imagination. Most importantly, the animation was able to tell the story seamlessly. It did not require high end technology to tell the story. This simple procedure is a great way to tell stories. However, I did find some points in the Hansel and Gretel animation, where the narration and the silhouette motions are not in sync. If the motions and narrations were in sync it would be perfect.

Intro

This blog is for my Animation class.