Inspiration/Influence: Svankmajer

A brilliant piece by one of my favorite animators. Part III is really an inspiration for what I'm going for with certain characters and design for the first two minutes. Part II has the craziest Foley work I've heard and is probably my favorite of the sequences.



If you like this, check out more of his work. I own his first major collection of shorts and one of his features, Faust, but both remain hijacked by Datach'i. Man, I need to get those back.

Meanwhile, my storyboarding and thumbnailing continues. That's all for this week.

A Question of Technique

I'm trying to nail down what I want this opening to look like. The initial idea was for a simple earthy textures- a different texture for each person or layer- to be the clothing base and then have skin tones colored traditionally.

I had attempted to put up an animated GIF of the test but it's not playing.

Anyway. An idea pops up. Some Rwandan artists do this great banana-leaf cutout artwork. My sister sent me this card:
If we could include this look it would unify the symbology of the opener and give me a nice motivated simplicity. What more could an animator ask for? So I'm trying to work out a way to achieve this look without using actual cutouts. I will most likely end up seeking banana leaves (or similar,) and drying them out, scanning color blocks, and using a limited assortment of alpha channels to separate the hand-drawn character components into cloth, skin, etc. Another test will determine if this is a viable techinique.

Fiscal Sponsors

Ahoy! 2009 is off to a grand start. Artists' collective Fractured Atlas has chosen this film project worthy of their fiscal sponsorship program. This means not that they are offering money, but that through them contributors receive tax benefits for cash contributions to the film, which is now an entity of the Arts. There's also benefits for contribution of services and equipment but these get a little convoluted so I'll come back to them. It also gives us a bang-up look for government grants and for employee-matching in corporate funding opportunities. Here's to hoping this film can become a full-time gig for me because right now it's really the only thing I want to do.

By the end of the week I should have more of this fleshed out but there's no question- this is a hefty workload. Pre-Production just got real.

One last thing to be done this week before this film turns into priority one, and that's polish off this series of commissioned paintings.