Premise: Character Design - Mrs Pratt

Just some quick designs of Mrs Pratt, Trying to exaggerate her quirks to conceptualise her character. Mrs Pratt was always wearing many different colours so adding colour I think will really add to her character.

Toolkit 2: Stranger Things Infographic

Unfortunately I was unable to batch render the title sequence as it crashed my laptop with every attempt so playblasts will have to make do for the moment. I am not completely happy with the finished product and I am going to revisit this with different tweaks here and there and fully rendering it especially since Chris was so nice to let me use his chiptune version of the theme tune. I really enjoyed this project and its broadened my horizons of what is capable in maya, I do want to learn how to edit motion design such as this in After Effects.

Toolkit 2: Infographic - Animation Progress

Infographic Test 3 from Graeme Daly on Vimeo.

Maya Tutorial: Arnold Part 14 - Physical Sky Light

Toolkit 2: Infographic Test 1

Premise: Concept Art

The Art Room

The Cupboard

Premise: Interim Critique

Premise Crit by Graeme Daly on Scribd

Critical Perspectives OGR

Critical Perspectives OGR by Graeme Daly on Scribd

Toolkit 2: Lighting & Rendering 2 - Arnold part 12 - Toon Shader

@Phil Perspectives: Cone of Cogency

Films as Dreams 

Toolkit 2: Lighting & Rendering 2 - Arnold part 11 - Standard Surface Shader

Life Drawing - Session 15

Premise: Film Review - Belleville Rendez-Vous

Figure 1 Poster Rubber Hose style

Belleville Rendez-Vous directed by Sylvain Chomet (2003) is an animation that feels very french with the animation at the start of the film using rubber hose animation (also known as inkblot animation) which is an exaggerated technique which developed and gained recognition in the late 1920's. Bill Nolan was known as the master of perfecting rubber hose animation with his creation "Felix The Cat" . Rubber hose animation is unique in that it shows the limbs being made of simple curves which exaggerate the motion of the characters. A lot of the films that started rubber hose animation were silent films and had a lot of dance sequences in them which made sense for the characters to have loose spaghetti like limbs and this reflect the opening sequence of Belleville Rendez-Vous.


The rubber hose animation is used at the start of the film to represent a flashback. For the rest of the film the background and environments are extremely detailed and illustrative with bric a brac trinkets being cluttered into the homes of the whimsical characters (figure 2).

Figure 2: Interior showing Bric a Brac Clutter

The film uses a very stylistic approach with strong lines and warm hues (Figure 3)  which look as if it was created with watercolour and the animation as a whole utilises traditional cell animation techniques with Chomet stating that he prefers drawing as the idea of 3D animation terrifies him. In an interview with animation world network Chomet states " Its drawing that interests me. 3D terrifies me. The idea that, in plasticine, one of your characters might melt, or that you might have to start all over again from scratch because you've knocked against the edge of the table thats not for me. If I don't like a drawing, I simply tear it up and start again. Computer 3D doesn't interest me; I like a pencil and a piece of paper" (Chomet, 2003)

Figure 3: Warm Hues In Environment

The character and environment design is interesting when it comes to how it depicts America as the civilians look morbidly obese with the statue of liberty holding a cheeseburger and an ice cream cone (figure 4) albeit it works because the singing triplets are also made fun of for being stereotypically french with their tastebuds having an affinity for only frogs.

The plot boils down to an espionage chase as the son named Champion at a young age becomes enthralled with the bicycle his Grandmother (Madame Souza) gifted him decides to take part in the tour de France. The espionage goons then take captive of the tour de France Cyclists and house them in a massive ship to perform for them like monkeys as they cycle against a backdrop while punters bet on who will win. Madame Souza then forms a crew with the signing triplets and Bruno-Champions dog to take down the thugs and rescue Champion.

Figure 4: The Obese Statue Of Liberty 

The fact that the movie is silent apart from musical numbers meant that Chomet had to make the character design very strong to emote their feelings through their motion alone. Speaking of his choice to use non verbal storytelling Chomet describes "I think that an animation without the constraints of spoken words is stronger. If you have to fit everything to the words, all the gestural movement revolves around the mouth. Without it, you are much freer to create true animation, to talk through animation itself. Animation modeled around the dialogue is like something, which has already been set in stone, theres less scope for interpretation. I have always wanted the animators to bring something to it" (Chomet 2003)

Each one of the characters in Belleville Rendez-Vous have unique quirks with their design which hints at how they are as a person. The Grandmother is a short stubby club footed woman who has one shoe that is higher than the other, The three Belevinne sisters are lanky and gangly with droopy eyelids and the waiter which is probably the most significant impact of character design literally shows him swooping bending over backwards (figure 5)  when weighting the table for the espionage entourage while The espionage goons have massive square shoulders. Tom Dawson describes "Rendez-Vous a deliberately antiquated visual style, and Chomet relishes caricaturing the body shapes of his characters - whether it's the overly muscular thighs and protuberant nose of Champion, or the grotesquely obese residents of Belleville" (Dawson 2003)

Figure 5: The waiter

With a budget of 9.5 million and making 14.8 million at the box office Belleville Rendez-Vous has been critically acclaimed.  The film earned a nomination for the 76th Academy Award 2004 for best animation feature (missing out to Finding Nemo) and another nomination for best original song with "Belleville Rendez-vous"

Bibliography

Dawson, T. (2003). BBC - Films - review - Belleville Rendez-Vous. [online] Bbc.co.uk. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2003/08/06/belleville_rendezvous_2003_review.shtml [Accessed 11 Feb. 2018].

 Henderson, S., Wood, A., Mitchell, B. and Dutton, S. (2015). Belleville Rendez-Vous! DVD release review - Skwigly Animation Magazine. [online] Skwigly Animation Magazine. Available at: http://www.skwigly.co.uk/belleville-rendez-vous-dvd-release-review/?_sf_s=Belleville+Rendez-Vous [Accessed 11 Feb. 2018].

Moins, P. (2003). Sylvain Chomet’s 'The Triplets of Belleville'. [online] Animation World Network. Available at: https://www.awn.com/animationworld/sylvain-chomet-s-triplets-belleville [Accessed 11 Feb. 2018].


Illustration List

Chomet, S. (2003). [image] Available at: https://aeb85937.wordpress.com/tag/waltz-with-bashir/ [Accessed 11 Feb. 2018].

Chomet, S. (2013). [image] Available at: https://seattlescreenscene.com/2015/05/08/the-triplets-of-belleville-sylvain-chomet-2003/ [Accessed 12 Feb. 2018].

Chomet, S. (2003). [image] Available at: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2004/04/20/the-triplets-of-belleville [Accessed 12 Feb. 2018].

Toolkit 2: Mudbox - Strawberry

Toolkit 2: Mudbox - Peppers

Toolkit 2: Mudbox - Orange

orange turnaround from Graeme Daly on Vimeo.

Toolkit: Stranger Things - Infographic Thumbnails

Premise: The Story So Far

Currently this is my story that I am going to tell for the Premise project. Phil has been providing me with prompts that I respond too and this is the story that flourished. I just need to figure out how the story is going to be told - if I am going to be speaking it or if I will get a voice actor. The aesthetic for the film is still up in the air. Alan was telling me that because I used art as an escape that that should reflect the aesthetic with either a sketchy or painterly feel. At the moment I am going to be doing sketches to capture the environment and look and feel of elements that is described and finding gems of inspiration from other animations.

Premise Story by Graeme Daly on Scribd

Toolkit 2: Life Drawing - Session 14

Premise: Film Review - Paprika

Paprika (2006) is a film directed by Satoshi Kon based on the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui. The films plot is about a group of scientists that develop an apparatus called the DC mini that is able to play back the wearers dreams. The DC mini falls into the wrong hands as peoples dreams start morphing into each other and also blending with reality. The main character Dr. Atsuko Chiba and her alter ego entitled Paprika in the dream world set out to restore the world to its natural state. The main themes deal with everything in the subconscious mind, Kon explains his inspiration for making Tsutsui's novel into the animation "What fascinates me in dreams is the idea that they emanate from our subconscious. I think that there are many possibilities to interpret dreams but a great deal of mystery always remains. When a dream is explained to us, it’s necessary to know the personal context of the subject. For example, what his childhood was like, his adolescence, his interpersonal relations. You’ve got to understand all these elements in order to tally up the dream and to decode it." (Kon 2006)


Paprika is a film that really shows the possibilities of animation with the whimsical dream world comprising of morphs and liquefy effects (fig 2) that make it feel otherworldly known as Phantasmagoria which is a sequence of real of imagery images like that of a dream. Paprika is a film that truly could not be accomplished with live action. The beautiful malleable visuals coupled with adult themes and a storyline that makes you think makes Paprika a very mature adult animation.

Kon began his career as a comic artist in university while studying visual communication. Kon eventually being work as a background and layout artist for different anime's starting with the anthology series Memories with Magnetic Rose being Kons first experience with writing the story along with doing being the layout and background artist. Kons later projects including Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress (2001) and Tokyo Godfathers (2003) started to earn recognition in the film making world for his efforts.


Paprika had a budget of $4 million with a crew of 50 people and took two years to produce with traditional had drawn techniques being prevalent. Kon uses a hands on approach when seeing his films from script to screen writing, storyboarding and being a layout artist are all part of his skillset to see his visions come to life. Gregory singer for Animation World Network writes "Unlike other studios, where disciplines may be partitioned and segregated among a large group of people, in Japan the same amount of work is done more economically. With fewer people overseeing more tasks, the crew feels a much deeper sense of involvement in the project." Singer (2007)


On September 2006 Paprika was premiered at the Venice film Festival followed by other festivals some of which include The Tokyo International Film Festival on October 21–29, 2006, and the 44th New York Film Festival on October 7, 2006. Paprika has been critically acclaimed by critics and audiences and has won many awards some of which include a feature film award at the Newport Beach Film Festival, Best music at the Tokyo Anime Awards in and a critics award at Fantasporto.


Bibliography


Kon, S. (2006). Paprika. [online] IMDb. Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0851578/awards [Accessed 4 Feb. 2018].


Pais, J. (2006). PAPRIKA: Interview with Satoshi Kon. [online] ScreenAnarchy. Available at: http://screenanarchy.com/2006/10/paprika-interview-with-satoshi-kon.html [Accessed 4 Feb. 2018].


Singer, G. (2007). 'Paprika': Satori With Satoshi. [online] Animation World Network. Available at: https://www.awn.com/animationworld/paprika-satori-satoshi [Accessed 4 Feb. 2018]



Illustration List


Kon, S. (2006). [image] Available at: http://www.tboake.com/443-wall-paprika-f2009.html [Accessed 4 Feb. 2018].


Kon, S. (2006). [image] Available at: http://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/movies/Paprika/ [Accessed 4 Feb. 2018]
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Premise: Film Review - Waltz With Bashir

Figure 1: Waltz with Bashir Poster

Waltz with Bashir directed by Ari Folman tells the story of Folman who was a soldier in the Israeli Defence Forces on duty in Lebanon.  As he starts to hallucinate images of himself being harassed by a group of 26 rabid dogs when he was back in the war he tries desperately to uncover the secrets in his foggy memory to correlate the reasoning behind the hallucinations and fill in the blanks as to why they are cropping up now.

Waltz with Bashir is the second Isreali animation to exist. The films aesthetic has a very unique, noir melancholy quality with the characters and environments having harsh chiaroscuro (fig 2) which shows the nostalgic quality that Folman has as he tries to recollect his memories. Folman describes his lapses in memory which contributed to the look of the film with "I had a memory: I just had black holes in the storylines that I wanted to fill during the search in this film. The memories got suppressed because I tried really hard not to remember." Foleman (2008) 

The overall storytelling technique is that of a documentary film as Folman tells the story of his time serving for the Israeli defense forces through the malleable means of animation. Speaking of his choice to use animation to tell his story Folman states "A digital image that you see on a screen that is made out of pixels and dots and lines, or a drawn one, both of them are speaking in the same voice? Who decides the video picture is more real than an artist who drew the images for four months?". Folman (2008) Folman visits old veterans to try and piece together his hallucinations and these comrades then delve deep into their subconscious to recollect their sides of the story which is all shown beautifully through the animation.

Figure 2: Harsh chiaroscuro

Folman got his inspiration from graphic novels for the look of the film with the technical aspects mainly being done in flash with some elements being hand drawn and some CGI such as aerial shots. Although Folman has made it adamant that he does not like CGI and it has to be tasteful. People assumed that the majority of the film was done with rotoscoping but in interviews Folman had to dispel this rumour many times. Folman describes the reasoning behind not using rotoscoping techniques "for me, rotoscoping has a big problem in conveying emotions. You see the technique, you see the drawings, and that takes your focus. If this film had been rotoscoped, it would have been hard for the audience to get emotional with the characters." Folman (2008)

Folman's studio entitled "Bridget Folman Film Gang" consisted of a very small team that worked on Waltz with Bashir which includes eight animators, four illustrators, one After Effects artist and one editor. A budget of a mere $1.7 million instated for Waltz with Bashir in comparison to Disney and Pixar with budgets of $150 million.  Folman recreated the stories that were told in the animation by dramatising them in a studio such as by sitting in two chairs with a plastic grill to represent sitting in a car. Foleman made the animatic as accurate as possible to minimise any cumbersome issues in the animation stage. After the animatic stage 3,500 keyframes where drawn at the most extreme parts of the film with art director and illustrator David Polonsky drawing 75 percent of them.  

Figure 3: Folman as depicted in the film

The closing part of the film shows real scenes from the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp. the juxpasition going from the animation to live scenes from the massacre cements the seriousness that war has on people and shows that the animation as a whole tells the impact of war. The film has been banned in Lebanon because of the negativity towards war although the film has been critically acclaimed and has won many awards some of which include Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film,  and Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay. 

Bibliography

Freedland, J. (2008). Waltz with Bashir film maker Ari Folman on war and art. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/25/waltz-with-bashir-ari-folman [Accessed 3 Feb. 2018].

Kaufman, D. (2008). How They Did It: Waltz With Bashir - Studio Daily. [online] Studio Daily. Available at: http://www.studiodaily.com/2008/12/how-they-did-it-waltz-with-bashir/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2018].

Strike, J. (2008). 'Waltz with Bashir': Animation and Memory. [online] Animation World Network. Available at: https://www.awn.com/animationworld/waltz-bashir-animation-and-memory [Accessed 3 Feb. 2018]


Illustration List

 Folman, A. (2008). [image] Available at: https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=1591590#post1591590 [Accessed 3 Feb. 2018]

Folman, A. (2008). [image] Available at: http://thecia.com.au/reviews/w/waltz-with-bashir/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2018].
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