endearing/horrifying

I don't like polar binaries but I thought these two extremes were noteworthy

Here's a great example of something so freaking endearing it's almost surreal.

And here's a perfect example of something you never want to see in real life. 

Bonus- that woman's nervous laugh is off the hook.

Small Marmot Carrying Baby Marmot :3

Intentional? Maybe. Adorbable? Yes.

Sketchbook: Style Frames I and II

I'm working with style frames instead of an overall style guide as things progress, there's no reason to spend weeks putting together a briefing packet if you're flying solo for most of the production. When I do bring in additional hands it will be colorists and background artists who can work from color guides and rough layouts. The exception, though, is the sound designer. In that case I'll be doing a full cue sheet for sound to work from, something I've neglected to do with my films outside of schooling- and I've seen how the work can suffer from this oversight. Anyways. This post isn't about sound.



A style frame every so often throughout the boards should keep the palette/styles unified. There will be multiple techniques used throughout the piece so when I sit down to a scene I need to know at a glance how it will look and how it will move. Sometimes things get jumbled up in the old noggin' and the references can be invaluable. Of course animators/filmmakers know this already, I thought I'd mention it because... I wanted to.



So here's style frames I and II- these both come from the first 30 seconds of the film. There's earlier posts covering this sequence and hopefully these frames illustrate the stylistic choices I've been discussing. There'll be some animation tests soon but until then it's back to storyboards.

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.

Anthro-projection & A Few Sketches

Thor towers over Saibulu, whirls, cracks his ears with abrupt motion and sharp sound you can get by snapping a wet towel, walks sideways towards Saibulu, and that is enough. The gesture strips Saibulu of his status: Saibulu turns, lowers his head, and moves quickly away alone, leaving no urine trail. Thor follows to complete the encounter.

-Katy Payne, Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants

There's a tendency in media to project human emotions and feelings onto animals. I'm sure you've noticed it; avoiding all the celebrity-voiced anthropomorphic squirrels, donkeys, and hippos bouncing their jovial, flatulent 3-D asses is all but impossible. Replace these animal stories with people and you've got the same drivel as every other disposable comedy- it's just easier to sell because suddenly it's a kids movie and families have no choice but to eat it up because it's there. That leads me to a digression that I'll come back to in many a later post: The broken studio system and the catch-22's that keep it exclusive and dumbed-down.

"But!" Say the fans and the Blue-Sky/Dreamworks/comparable shite-churning studio employees, "this approach allows for new approaches to storytelling!" I agree. Y'know what? I want to see the inside of a beehive! I want to see bees going about their chores with boredom, longing to leave the hive for something better. It's a great idea. What do I get? Bee Movie. Trite, worthless crap with a vomit-inducing candy-coated color palette and lawsuit jokes.

Watership Down and Animal Farm both use anthropomorphicized creatures to brilliant [literary] effect, but the unambiguous truth is that 99.9% of this type of projection gets tossed about as a gimmick.*



I bring this up because I'm making a film about an elephant. It is a true story so for now I'll call him M. M and his fellow relocated denizens still exist today. I ran into trouble with my limitations. Will this be any fun to watch if I keep it fairly true to life? Thankfully, this research into elephant behavior has proven astoundingly illuminating. I don't need to worry about projecting emotion into the lives of these creatures because they have a surprising amount of emotional range and complexity on their own. It's amazing what field research reveals about these huge beasts. They communicate with a language of grunts and body language as well as infrasound calls generated from their nasal cavities that have a range of 4 kilometers. Males and females lead distinct lives but the Family group (a community led by a steadfast matriarch) serves as a roving social unit with as many clicks as you'd find in a human neighborhood. At one point it was documented that members of a Family ripped branches from a tree in order to cover the body of a recently deceased lion.

The deeper I delved the more I realized that the question was not the degree of emoting but the externalization, the method. Practical mannerisms and actions. These animals do indeed feel and love and remember and they do it all without talking.




*Pixar is founded and staffed by inhumanly talented storytellers and thusly unincluded.