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Essay Scene Analysis

Initial analysis of dancing with dwarfs scene.

The first video was a good resource to hear directly from the animators a little bit about the use of CGI in the animation process and the video below it is the scene I am analysing, primarily the shots set inside the clock tower.

The 'making of' documentary was an amazing resource where I could hear directly from the horses mouth about the process of creating Toy Story and the video below is the scene I am analysing.

Here are some of the quotes I picked out from the making of documentary:

8:30 ‘I remember the moment when I first saw computer animation of any kind. Um, I was working at Disney as an animator and two very close friends of mine were working on Tron and the moment I saw it I was like ‘this is it, this is the next step, the next plateau.’ This is the future. I knew that computer animation wasn’t a whole new medium, it was just new tools within the medium of animation. So all the things that I learned as far as principles of animation and film grammar still apply.’ JOHN LASSETER SPEAKING (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

12:24 ‘to test the models, the puppets themselves’ PETE DOCTER SPEAKING, ALSO REFERRING TO THEM AS PUPPETS LIKE WILLIAMS (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

18:02 ‘one of the things we tried to do with this film was to remove it from its computer look. You have so many choices on the computer, its not the choice- its- it’s what you leave out ahah in a lot of ways. It’s not what you put in because you have a bazillion colours, do you really wanna use every one of them?’ ‘What we wanted to do was make it believable’ RALPH EGGLESTON (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

‘We try to find the graphic equivalent for an emotion. We’re exaggerating what’s important in the scene and leaving out what isn’t.’ (Williams, p.376)

18:37 ‘One of the things that makes Toy Story so unique is the collaboration between traditionally trained artists and animators and these amazing computer geniuses.’ JOHN LASSETER

20:00 ‘Our system is designed for these traditionally trained animators with no computer experience whatsoever, to sit down within a couple of weeks and start animating.’ (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

27:09 ‘Toy Story is just the very beginning of what can be done in this medium and its just the first inkling of what we can achieve here’. (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

27:34 LASSETER ‘Everybody’s gonna notice and talk about the fact that it’s the very first computer animated feature film but the computers are just tools, they didn’t create this picture it’s the people that created the picture and we had such a fantastic group of people and I had so much fun working with them and that’s what I’m gonna remember for the rest of my life’(Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

34:00 ‘its not real, people believe it. That’s better.’ (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

I'm focusing on the introduction of SMISV from 1:00 to 3:29 which features a wealth of interdisciplinary animation techniques to analyse and break down for this part of the essay.

[mi6021tomberry]

Film Development

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[mi6021tomberry]

Animated Feature Film Research

Whilst looking into the history of animated feature films, I was surprised to learn that Snow White was not the first and that El Apostol predated Disney's Snow White by 20 years but unfortunately it is a lost film and it cannot be watched today.

These are some other animated features which again predate Snow White, one German, one Russian. The influence of Disney in the west is made clearer to me because I always believed and was taught that Snow White was the first to make a feature film.

One of the first animations created which I learnt about from Richard Williams' book. McCay's animation involved interaction between an animated character and a stage performer who hands food to Gertie all the way back in 1914.

Whilst looking for footage to analyse from snow white I found the Fleischer Betty Boop Snow White short film, I never knew that Fleischer adapted Snow White before Disney and even more surprising was that it included the famous rotoscoped scene of the Cab Calloway dance. This is always the scene that comes to mind when I think about rotoscoping and I had no idea that it was a part of a great little Snow White short.

[mi6021tomberry]

Research and Development

This was my plan for the essay before reading into anything further, I had a loose idea what I wanted to learn about and explore to benefit both my essay and my understanding of how animation is utilised which should help me with my film.

After reading 'The Animator's Survival Kit' by Richard Williams I started to take some notes whilst I read through my other 2 books. I read 'The Animator's Survival Kit' and 'Hybrid Animation' by Tina O'Hailey from start to finish because in past essays I've taken excerpts from sources which reinforced my argument without taking in the wider context of the chapter and book as a whole. This time I decided to really have a look through the entirety of two of these books so that I was actually learning something that would help me with my essay and understanding of animation moving forward. I'm really glad I did this because I feel like its shaping my essay in a positive way however there was a lot of fluff which didn't really help me. When reading Maureen Furniss' 'Art in Motion' I attempted reading start to finish however after getting 50 pages in I really wasn't finding enough that was relevant to my essay considering the amount of time it took to read through the book. I decided to focus in on the contents and read fully all of the chapters relevant to my essay and it saved a lot of time.

After reading 3 books and skimming through a few videos and articles I feel like I have a solid foundation set for my essay and I'm confident that it will go well. I need to find some sources about Olov Burman, Into the Spiderverse and Pixar which can more precisely inform my arguments. So far I've got a silly number of quotes picked from just 3 books so I'm going to keep things more streamlined moving forwards and just pick out the best quotes.

[mi6021tomberry]

Dissertation Research

I hadn't properly pitched my essay idea to Chloe and Hugo yet and this was where my head was at early on.

The feedback was helpful, glad to hear that my topics weren't terrible, I was a little concerned after how my pitch when previously because I felt like I was at a loss with things but this feedback helped get the ball rolling again.

I had already decided that I wanted to read this book since I've had it sitting on my desk for the past 2 years and knew it must be a useful source of knowledge. Luckily it ended up as a resource which not only helped me better understand some of the fundamentals of animation, it also provides some great quotations which are very relevant to the topic of my essay. These are all the quotes I picked out from The Animators Survival Kit – Richard Williams:

“Don’t do what a camera can do – do what a camera can’t do!” (Page 16)

“in the last few years, the renaissance of animation as a form of mass entertainment is giving rebirth to the old knowledge. The startlingly successful innovations of computer animation are helping to transform animation in all its multi-faceted forms into a major part of the entertainment mainstream.

If ‘classical’ animation is an extension of drawing, then computer animation can be seen as an extension of puppetry – high tech marionettes. Both share the same problems of how to give a performance with movement, weight, timing and empathy.” (Page 20)

“Celebrating the cartoon as cartoon, exploring the medium’s potential for surrealism” (page 30)

“What we want to achieve isn’t realism, its believability” (page 34)

“Disney said – I definitely feel we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real – unless we first know the real” (page 370)

“Creepiness in the almost human” (page373) talking about the UNCANNY VALLEY

“Emphasize what we want, edit out – or ignore what we don’t want” (page 374)

“Almost any bit of animation we do can be inventive. We’re not obliged to imitate life. For that we have cameras” (page 374)

“we’re in the ‘uncanny valley.’ It’s a kind of aesthetic revulsion” (page 375)

“Pixar and other leading producers today keep their human figures quite stylized for this reason – to avoid the uncanny valley” (page 375)

“Naturalism rather than realism” (page 375)

“the “imperfection” in what is being presented which allows us, the audience, to be drawn into the experience” (Page 375)

“Back in 1937 Walt Disney predicted – “someday our medium will produce great artists capable of portraying all emotions through the human figure – but it will be the art of caricature and not a mere imitation of great acting on stage or screen.” (page 376)

“We try to find the graphic equivalent for an emotion. We’re exaggerating what’s important ion the scene and leaving out what isn’t.” (page 376)

“You want enough realism to be convincing, but you don’t want so much that you ask – why don’t you take a photograph?” (page 376)

This was the first book I picked out because it was focused exactly on the topic I wanted to look into because it seemed like a great starting point of the essay. It helped me to understand a different approach to animation, I felt like I was trapping myself by going down the route of Maya which I don't mind but I don't want to trap myself within one medium and O'Hailey described an approach to animation with more freedom - "By now you should be thinking in layers of images. You should be thinking that the output of any given software package is just an image and that your character is made up of multiple passes of images. Good, you have come far." These are all the quotes I picked out whilst reading Hybrid Animation - Tina O'Hailey:

“most common use of combining mediums is for non-character animation elements.” (Chapter 1)

“3D animation assets exist in three dimensions during the creation process.” (Chapter 1)

Visual target not subject matter

Line mileage

Complexity

Team skills versus production schedule

Physical assets and budget

“The visual target or visual style of a film is a large factor in deciding which type of medium will be chosen. It is no longer the subject matter that is the deciding factor. The division between what medium is best for what subject matter has become so blurred as to be nonexistent. 3D software techniques have advanced so that humans, furry animals, and other warm-looking creatures are no longer out of their grasp. Which medium lends itself best to the artists’ final vision is the question to ask. This will be answered with strong art direction and experimenting during pre-production.” (Chapter 1)

“3D crowds were rendered to match the 2D line style” (Chapter 1) TO REDUCE LINE MILEAGE

“A traditional pipeline that has a low budget may be extremely hesitant to take on any different and possibly expensive technique.” (Chapter 1)

Style matching

Registration

Frame rate and image format

Timing

Image sizes

Alpha channel

“work is successful if it is invisible” (Chapter 1) HYBRID ANIMATION USED TO BE SUCCESSFUL WHEN YOU COULD NOT SEE IT

“visual style creates a homogeneous image” (Chapter 1)

“we have limits in the real world and they are called “budgets.”” (Chapter 2)

“whatever it takes to get the right look and also keep the project under budget is what we have to do. Otherwise, we are either losing money, losing work, or both.” (Chapter 2)

“By now you have probably lost a little fear and do not believe that you need to stay in one package for your scenes; heavens, no. By now you should be thinking in layers of images. You should be thinking that the output of any given software package is just an image and that your character is made up of multiple passes of images. Good, you have come far.” (Chapter 4)

“Only the few, who know what their artistic vision is and push to make the software do their bidding, produce images that are not in that monochromatic 3D sea.” (Chapter 4)

“It is just an image.” (Chapter 4) 3D AND 2D SOFTWARE CREATE IMAGES NOT FINISHED FILMS, LAYERING THESE IMAGES WITH VARYING TECHNIQUES CREATES THE MAGIC

“The convergence of all things “digital media,” the ever-growing demand for content, and in particular shrinking budgets and time frames, means the mixing of approaches and techniques is becoming more prevalent. Progressively more examples appear almost every day now, but this trend started years ago.” (Chapter 4)

“The more tools and techniques you have at your disposal, the better your chances of seeing connections that lead to higher aesthetic quality, greater efficiencies, or both” (Chapter 4)

“took the audience out of the moment and showed off the technology.” (Chapter 7) REFERRING TO BALLROOM SCENE IN BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

“bogged down in one method” (Chapter 8) 3D MOVIES WERE STUCK IN PURE 3D, SPIDERVERSE OPENED THE DOOR AS A CLEAR FINANCIAL SUCCESS WHICH GREENLIGHTS OTHER PROJECTS TO EXPERIMENT

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/northumbria/reader.action?docID=1562841

I decided to save these images from O'Hailey's book because they gave me a different perspective on my film making approach. I tend to get stuck on certain types of framing for my shots but the second image here was a creative example of how these drastically different shots can communicate more to the audience. The first image also helped me when thinking about my film because I think my biggest issue previously was that there was no emotion in any of my ideas so everything I came up with (none of which was any good) was missing an emotional core to ground the film. I wanted to keep that graphic as a reminder to focus on the core of the story, yo not get mixed up in all the technicalities which all of my previous projects anded up being consumed by, they never had another layer of substance to back them up.

This was a really informative read into the history of animation of all kinds, it goes back to the start of animation much like Williams' introduction however Furniss explores the development of the companies in more detail (whilst Williams focused on the animation almost exclusively). It gave me a better understanding as to why the sort of innovation I am exploring in my essay is held back in an industry setting. These are all the quotes I gathered from Art in Motion Animation Aesthetics – Maureen Furniss:

“Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn” (page 5)

“the power of the Disney studio is no longer absolute” (page13)

“American cinema has remained dominant on an international level continuing to set aesthetic norms for viewers” (page 15)

“despite the breadth of animation practices worldwide, American cel animation – particularly that of the Disney studio and its ‘nine old men’ – was regarded by many to be the epitome of animated art.” (Page 16)

“historical and industrial factors that helped determine that cels – and not clay or puppets, for instance – would become the dominant technique of commercial animation production” (page 17)

“these techniques lend themselves to a central component of Taylorism, an assembly line method of production” (page 18)

“An assembly line method of production proved to be an effective solution” (page 18) REFERRING TO WHY CEL ANIMATION BECOME DOMINANT DUE TO ITS ABILITY TO ADAPT TO THE DOMINANT ASSEMBLY LINE OF THE CONTEMPORARY IN 1910S

“worked against the control of individuals and toward more automated, mechanized and (therefore) less expensive production” (page 22)

“keeping creative expression alive within the parameters of a profit-making enterprise.” (page 23)

“imitation of the successful product of one company was counterbalanced by the need to distinguish the product of one company from that of another firm” (page 23)

“competitive pattern of innovation and product differentiation” (page 25) REFERRING TO COMPETITION BETWEEN FLEISHCER AND DISNEY WHO SEEKED TO ONE UP EACH OTHER

“both companies were verging on disaster because, financially, they had extended themselves completely. Disney was able to ride the wave, while the Fleischer studio slid into insolvency.” (Page 25) INNOVATION MADE FLEISCHER BANKRUPT. HIGHLIGHTING THE RISK OF INNOVATION DESPITE ITS SUCCESS

Disney has been able to “dominate aesthetic norms” (page 107)

“does the use of full or limited animation seem consistent with the objectives of the work as a whole?” (page 136) REFERRING TO THE USE OF FULL OR LIMITED ANIMATION, FULL ANIMATION HAS BEEN OPENED UP IN A  NEW WAY WITH SPIDERVERSE AND THERE IS REASON BEHIND EACH CHANGE

ABOUT LIMITED ANIMATION “Method eliminates many of the costly features of theatrical animation, yet retains the illusion of movement and life” (Page 144)

“Typical of limited animation, one finds that sound, rather than action, propels the story.” (Page 144)

“spreading the wildfire of limited animation, which lead to the perceived artistic stagnation of the American animation industry” (Page 145) REFFERING TO SUCCES OF THE FLINTSTONES WHICH USED LIMITED ANIMATION

“networks cared little about aesthetic issues” (Page 145) IN REFERENCE TO CRITICS PANNING LIMITED ANIMATION CARTOONS

“As long as its got high numbers, it doesn’t matter whether the show is good or not” (Page 145)

“Assembly-line product was considered the norm” (Page 145)

“the animation industry become more and more commercialized” (Page 145)

“expectations and sensibilities of the critical establishment and viewers are changing.” “limited animation is being used in a more creative and aesthetically pleasing manner” (page146)

“artistic expression was rather limited” (page 173) REFERRING TO LIMITATIONS OF EARLY DIGITAL ANIMATION

“Digital tools quickly eroded the long-standing dominance of cel animation” (175)

[mi6021tomberry]

Essay Development

Initial notes planning out what the essay is centred around. I want to explore how 3D animation is making a transition away from the heavy focus on realism in favour of the outlandish expression of 2D animation. I don't want to take it down the same route which I have seen a lot online about the impact of Into The Spiderverse which incorporated a lot of graphic novel inspired techniques and aesthetics throughout the film. I feel like this has been covered extensively however I really haven't seen a lot about animators like Olov Burman who I have been following for a long time.

This is some of the mind-blowing work that I have seen from Burman, from what I have seen this is the best example of 3D animation/modelling/rigging taking a stylistic approach to mimic limitless expression of 2D animation. There are a lot of issues when it comes to 3D animation in the you are quite heavily bound by the rig itself and you come across a lot of technical issues throughout the animation process and at least in my experience I can't quite achieve the level of exaggeration which I love to see in 2D animation. Burman's rigs seem like magic to me with the sheer malleability of the rig which shapeshifts from pose to pose.

Burman worked on this music video along with Chris O'Niell who I grew up watching and the artistic direction of this music video and many more in this new age of animation with movies like Puss in Boots The Last Wish take an unconventional approach to 3D animation and have a certain "feeling" about them which audiences have responded to very positively recently. I want my essay to uncover what is behind this "feeling" whether its the frame rate choices, the Non-Photorealistic Rendering or smears.

Another example of 3D animation in a flatter 2D style enhanced through the use of 3D to create a level of detail which would take 2D artists far too long.

This video mentions some of the earliest uses of 3D being used to save time on complex 2D animation in The Great Mouse detetive.

A few months ago I also saw that these sort of techniques are being incorporated into video games aswell in the new Super Mario Wonder game which breaks Mario's rig as a stylistic choice to give a flatter feel, a more hand drawn aesthetic to something divorced through many layers from traditional pixel art however it recaptures that feeling.

A breakdown by an animator creating smears in 3D.

These are some of the ideas I have for the essay title, I know that it needs to be niche enough so that I'm not rehashing someone else's essay whilst looking into a uniquely interesting topic.

[mi6021tomberry]

Pitching Flop

I've been deliberating over too many ideas but none of them hold any substance that have stood out to me. I feel like for this past month and a half I've just been arbitrarily spamming out situational ideas for my film to be a silly little sketch because at least if something which is intentionally stupid isn't received well then I can pull out the excuse that I made something stupid deliberately. This is why I've shat out loads of half baked ideas which haven't taken me anywhere so far. I tend to start a bit late so I've wasted a bit of time watching a bunch of films short and long for inspiration but I've not gained anything tangible yet from it all. I'm going to try digging a little deeper to see if I can put something in the film which I am actually invested in so that the project becomes more meaningful and thus I am more passionate about putting energy into the project.

I was thinking about issues I might come into without having any idea what it was that I was making.

These are some of the stupid ideas I came up with, you can tell from this that my framing of it as a stupid or silly short is just leading to a bunch of nonsense that I don't really care about. I came up with some ideas that I liked but a lot of it involved dialogue and I know from past experience that I just don't have the time to do the number of things required to make any of these ideas work.

These were some of the ideas I pitched on 4 hours sleep, it didn't go very well because I honestly didn't having anything to be happy about pitching so my words fell out like verbal diarrhoea and I knew that I wouldn't make any sense to anyone else because a lot of these ideas hadn't been said aloud before and I didn't have any confidence in them. There was just something off, none of the things I came up with made me intrigued to find out where they could go, it all felt very forced.

This is some of the feedback I got from Hugo and Chloe right after my pitch. I later spoke further with Hugo about what to do for my project and he suggested just copying 4 slapstick scenes that I like because we are already a decent way into the semester and I didn't have anything to show for it. Personally I cannot let my final project go forward in this way because I hate a lot of my previous work because they felt very much like technical exercises and I know that doing this would be another instance of this. Despite this Hugo does have a point that comedy is the hardest thing to write and I haven't come up with anything worth making yet, I'll admit I've been slacking quite a bit on this module because I'm enjoying the idea I have for the podcast module but this talk has acted like a wake up call to really start moving. I tend to start late anyway so I'm confident I can come up with something and get the ball rolling soon, I'm going to stop forcing the issue of a slapstick scene because it really was just pulled out of thin air, I need to reset and just make something not something that fits neatly into a genre category, I just need to work and figure it out as I go along so its not quite as contrived as everything else has been so far.

The 11 second club challenges were suggested as something to go ahead with if I'm getting nowhere and to be honest this feedback is pretty accurate for what I've presented so far because I've turned up with nothing and got the sort of feedback you would expect for someone with nothing. I've always managed to figure things out later on and I intend on doing the same, hopefully I won't regret putting my foot down here but worst case scenario I do just go ahead and practise acting with my animations rather than coming up with my own story.

[mi6021tomberry]

3 Ideas

[mi6021tomberry]

Concept Struggles

I have many pages worth of ideas some shit, most half baked with a few sprinkled here and there of which I like a little piece but either can't figure out how to turn it into a film or the practicalities of doing so would be too much for one man to do in just a few months. I boiled it down to 3 of the ideas I have put in some of my previous posts including:

A trip to a bulgarian water park when I was younger where I almost drowned after my mum landed on me at the end of a slide.

A half baked idea for a roller coaster tester being put through the ringer of a new coaster.

And one of the first things I came up with which revolved around different senses being more prominent than sight; one in which sound is the dominant sense where the visual aesthetic is superfluous to the auditory world. I thought it could be funny to think of what would be desirable in such a world, whether deeper or higher pitched voices were better? Would radio commentators be on the level of famous actors? Would they rank more attractive than singers? How would those with undesirable voices act in such a world? Would drugs like helium and sulfur hexaflouride become illicit substances with people gradually getting addicted until their heads inflate and pop like a balloon? All very silly ideas but it could be interesting to develop, I just need to flesh it out and see where it goes.

I tried to develop this bulgarian slide idea into a narrative but ultimately I prefer it as just an anecdote and think it would be underwhelming to adapt. I put too much emphasis on an Adam Elliot-esque film and was limiting myself to quirky stories from the past. I think I'll have to go back to the drawing board and think of a few more ideas until one clicks with me.

I went back to watching some more short films like this one about a world in which people have learned to live with constant prevailing winds with tethered babies floating in the sky to give mothers time to relax. I really like how this film is a not just a fun idea but also provokes a few thoughts about the way in which humans learn to adapt to their environment with the big machine being a little on the nose but acting as a metaphorical talking point about why we ought to continue the way things are when its as silly as things are here? Do we really need the machine or have we just accepted it?

I also found this page when looking more into short films and this highlighted a few of the common tropes in student films whilst also giving a few great examples most of which were closer in duration to what I'm supposed to make.

This also pointed out how common it is for amateur to put exceedingly high expectations on their first film typically resulting in something "incredibly amateurish at best and objectively bad at worst." It's helped lessen the pressure of this project because I feel like that's been inhibiting my ideas because I'm putting the stakes too high instead of exploring something new, good to know that this feeling is so common that its a cliché.

This was a really creative one suggested on that blog, it might seem a little more cliché nowadays with shows like the Simpsons having something like this in the opening of every episode but this sort of thing was much more novel and fit nicely in the time limit back in the 60s.

This short is great, simple concept good execution. I'm hoping to make something in this vein for my film, I'm not entirely sure how but I want something simple which gives me the opportunity to play around with stupid ideas just like this.

Another really good short, no idea how this was someone's final film from university because of how polished it is, this one's ridiculously good aesthetically and its a fun idea for a short.

[mi6021tomberry]

Essay Idea Pivot

After spending a lot of time thinking about anything other than the essay I revisited things and after thinking for a little while thought that this topic could open up an interesting exploration of the pitfalls of hybrid animation. I want to incorporate some level of mixed media animation in my film but I currently have no idea where to start so maybe the essay will open things up in my head a little more (or at the very least getting the essay finished will alleviate some of the pressure).

[mi6021tomberry]

What am I making?

This was another short film that I took a look at and its visually stunning and the music that goes along with it is great but the story itself is very simple which works well with this animation but I can tell that this isn't the sort of thing I want to make. There's loads of scenery design and a lot of emphasis on aesthetics whereas I want to focus more on the storytelling itself, I think from my film I want one or both of these things: to make one person laugh and/or resonate with something. If I can manage that then I'll have achieved my goal, now I need to move forwards into fleshing out some of the many loose ideas I have to see if I have anything which sticks.

This was another great short film I found which again has a really simple narrative but I think the execution is fantastic. I would love to make something like this but I need to stop myself before I get carried away and expect this level of quality on my own over the next few months. The 2D cartoony aesthetic of all of the characters adds a charm to the animation which is hard to replicate otherwise, they've managed to flatten everything whilst enhancing it with the rendering and texturing capabilities of Blender. If I go down a similar aesthetic route as this film I'll use it as a reference because they've managed to capture a cartoony aesthetic in not only the characters and the framing but the environment which compliments it all nicely. The timing, the pacing, the mixed mediums all mesh well with one another, I've no idea how these sort of rigs are made in Maya or Blender but I really want to learn how to go down this route in future but first I need to learn how to rig a face of any kind before specialising in this degree.

I also just realised that assets on PolyHaven are available to use in any projects including commercial works which should save me a lot of time when it comes to making any scenery. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going for yet but this should come in handy.

[mi6021tomberry]

Essay Development

I wanted to use the essay as a means to figure out what I can learn through animation and how I can best utilise the medium for the sake of storytelling and thought this would be an interesting topic for an essay which may help me understand what it is that I want to make for my film. I thought a comparison of storytelling by the same person in different mediums would be an interesting topic however this might be a little too subjective and as Hugo pointed out, sometimes the medium itself is not always a determining factor in the storytelling, it is a means to an end. I agree with this but I was more-so interested in how that chosen medium creates limitations and freedoms which influence the way in which a story is told but again this may be difficult to write about because it is not a widely documented topic and thus I would struggle to find academic resources to reference for the essay.

An alternative direction for my essay could be to explore the differences between animated films written first for the screen VS those adapted from short stories/novels like Grave of the Fireflies based on the book of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka.

[mi6021tomberry]

Early Brainstorming

I'm still trying to figure out what I want to get from this process and i want to avoid cliche but I know that I'm never going to reinvent the wheel so I want to find out what it is that I personally want out of this project; what skills do I want to develop? Is character design a priority? Is script writing? Is animation itself a fundamental priority or can storytelling be achieved with limited animation?

These are some of the notes I have from brainstorming, I'm really not far into any of the ideas, I like the sensory direction playing around with different voices which have their own perceived value in a sound-oriented world and the helium/sulphur hexafluoride addiction could be a fun silly addition. I don't quite know where it is that I want to head with this project so I'm trying to throw a bunch of things at the wall to figure out what I like and what I have time to make.

[mi6021tomberry]

Essay Planning

This was my initial premise for my essay. Ultimately I chose this because I myself want to figure out why I have chosen animation as a medium, I find myself planning out my ideas through the point of view of a camera and it makes me wonder what animation has that should cement me in this medium rather than any other. Because of this, I wanted to explore differing mediums in which the same piece has been explored to weigh their pros and cons against one another.

This was my feedback about my idea, essentially its far too broad so I need to delve deeper into a niche rather than writing an essay which there have likely been tens, hundreds or even thousands written about in the past.

Short essays analysing different niche's within animation.

An examination of animated shorts as a means to create unique parables; the medium innately lends itself to these short moral stories which have absolute freedom to educate in any means possible. It was highlighted that Jesus himself favoured parables more than a direct sermon and animated shorts have the ability to ask "pungent questions" in a compact appealing format. They are open to interpretation which engages the viewer more than a dogmatic speech and thus they come to understand the message more deeply as it is presented to them so wonderfully in any medium imaginable. The nature of these animated shorts captures our imagination by not giving all the answer, they are deliberately open to interpretation to engage our critical thinking skills so that we better understand the message and we discover the conclusions ourselves rather than a sermon which asks that we listen and understand rather than critique as a means of understanding.

Another interesting idea pointed out is that through "vile bodies" we better understand divine concepts because the message comes across organically as we can relate to the flawed nature of the "vile body" and learn through them rather than a "divine body" which is almost too perfect for anyone to relate. We are able to learn through failure more than we ever can through success so a story of sin followed by revelation is a more fitting means to explore divine concepts for people born with Original Sin. Therefore animation is a medium which allows these messages to be exaggerated to such a point that they are accessible to any and all.

G. K. Chesterson “as God made a pigmy-image of Himself and called it Man, so man made a pigmy-image of creation and called it art.” An interesting look into the psychology behind animation and the relationship between 'Creator' and 'Created.'

[mi6021tomberry]

Short Films

I was looking around for short films to get a better idea of the kind of films which work in short form format and found these claymation shorts by Adam Elliot which were really interesting. They're very melancholy but there's a sense of humour throughout to endear you to the characters and the story being told. It manages to make you care about the characters in spite of the simplicity of the animation and storytelling its compelling enough to make you care about the little characters and their story. There's a level of charm in the animation, it doesn't delve into explosive complex animated segments, instead it does its best to focus on animating the charming elements of the story rather than getting lost in a technical display. I find myself getting too focused on technicalities and I really want to avoid that if possible because it always ends up being detrimental to making something I like VS something I learned a lot on.

Here's by the filmmaker, I thought it was interesting that he said he took a lot of risks in this film because later on you don't always get the chance to do so. He said it was his bravest film so I want to do my best to push myself creatively without being bogged down by perfectionist tendencies. I want to make a good film, I know it won't be the best looking film but I just want to make something this year which I like as a final product not a learning experience.

An award winning film later down the line by Adam Elliot.

Here's another student film I remember watching years ago by Tim Burton which I was reminded of after watching Elliot's. I want to try and make something different which isn't just a rehashing of other people's work and that I can find a way to put some of myself into the film to express something which I have always shied away from in the past.

[mi6021tomberry]

Fast Animation Exercise

We had 2 and a half hours to figure out what we were going to make for a 5 second animation based on something we believed when we were younger. I decided to use Toon Boom for the first time in this exercise and spent an hour and a half fiddling around with the software and attempting to visualise myself as a kid in my bed with my toy guns but I just couldn't get anything to work. I had a reset with only 45 minutes left and went for something simpler with a little character turning off the light and quickly running up the stairs.

I realised through this process that I really need to prioritise the key motion of the animation, I spent most of my 45 minutes on the head turn and had no time to actually work on the main run up the stairs. It's very choppy and I ran over the deadline by 17 minutes but I learnt quite a bit even though its a mess.

[mi6021tomberry]

Creative Process Learning

We were told to watch these Ted Talks and read this brief interview to figure out alternative ways of approaching our process for this module. I really like the ideas discussed in the article in which he has a very simple approach to creation moving forward with only pen in his drawings to figure things out as he goes along rather than planning and sketching endlessly.