5 to 10 second animation -- OUAN403, Apply

The walk cycle of the main character is a one second loop on twos. I am happy with the movement of the legs and head - it conveys a sort of bored attitude that I was attempting, but the arms are slightly too rigid, so i might redraw the last frame of each step, or add in a 6b and 12b frame just to add a bit more cushioning to the swing.

I first drew the 1 and 7 frames, which are copies of each other, except  with a different arm and leg in the foreground. Then I drew the breakdown poses on 4 and 10, finally I drew the remaining four frames in a more straight-ahead fashion without looking at the following frames. The result is a fairly mechanical walk, but the straight-ahead frames add a nice flick to the feet which I think adds more character than I would have achieved if the whole cycle was drawn pose-to-pose proper.

A colour test. still unsure of whether to colour all the characters or keep them as simple line drawings.

5 to 10 second animation -- OUAN403, Apply

The idea for my 10 second animation is a simple side-scrolling loop. The main character of a man with a pumpkin head walks along and is confronted by various ghouls and scary creatures, who all fail to scare him. Towards the end of the loop he will be frightened by something mundane and everyday, I am thinking maybe a stray cat or a baby in a pram.

I plan to have the characters animated in a simple black and white line style, with a watercolour or possibly collage background, similar to Regular Show uses textured backgrounds alongside flat digitally animated characters. I am also playing with the idea of having a parallax effect on the background, using two layers that move at different speeds to give the illusion of distance.

Regular Show uses flat characters on painted backgrounds

Pixilation -- OUAN403, Explore

My pixilation theme is "Lost and Found", and involves someone's keys sneaking out of their pocket and escaping under the door. There is a short chase scene and then the keys are recovered.
The first shoot was successful, and the story is communicated well, but I decided to add in some more photos as the action moves too fast and the actual chase is shorter than I intended. I shot some more with Ewan a few days after the first shoot and inserted the new clip in the middle of the existing footage.

Overall I am happy with the result, but would definitely have liked it to be a little bit longer, with some more variety in the shots. If I was to make another pixilation I would have a look at the place I was going to shoot in and possibly change my storyboard, as it turned out that due to space restrictions in the corridors and the restrictions of my camera's lens it was impossible to get some of the angles and shots that I wanted.

(a) vous regardez un film. -- OUAN402, Animation Skills, Identify

My French is way too rusty to comprehend lots of the text in this short film, but its simple story of a man's morning routine is pretty self explanatory. I found this film on Vimeo, where it received a staff pick. The film uses a really nice contrast between 3D digital and 2D drawn animation between scenes, sometimes mixing the two styles within a shot. Both are very heavily stylised, with the black and white drawn animation using a semi-realistic semi-cartoon style which works nicely with the exaggerated look of the 3D. The environment is a sparse white space which focuses attention onto the main character. There is a nice motif of repeated actions, each time done slightly differently - for example; as the man turns on the radio the narrative text says "(a) he listens to the news", the scene is then repeated, with a slightly different animation, the text reading "(b) he listens to jazz". I really like this sort of slightly self-referential humour.

A Town Called Panic (Panique Au Village) -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

A Town Called Panic is a stop frame adventure set in a bonkers French rural village, and follows the adventures of three housemates; Cowboy, Indian and Horse, along with a cast of other creatures. The production company also created a series of adverts for Cravendale milk which featured a pirate, football player and cow. The animation style is jerky, and deliberately crude - I say deliberately because at first it seems like the character models are simple static figures wobbling around, but throughout the course of the film you realise that the main characters each have hundreds of different models in varying positions. Almost in the way that South Park uses high end 3D software to replicate paper-cutout animations, this film has a rough-around the edges feel that reminded me of my youth spent playing with toys on the bedroom floor with my brother and making up wacky stories and adventures. The film embraces all the surreal possibilities that animation allows, the obvious example would be animals and humans co-existing, but we also see buildings transforming, falling apart and being rebuilt at impossible speed, and various other tricks that break or bend the laws of physics in ways only animation can achieve. In fact this film seems to be proof that the more jerky and unrefined the animation, the more unrealistic or impossible scenes you can get away with. Sort of like the uncanny valley effect seen in robots or waxworks (and in realistic CGI) where, as the imitation of a human becomes more and more lifelike and realistic, the small and sometimes unnoticeable differences become more apparent and give the viewer a sense of uneasiness. Pixar have combated this effect by designing their human characters in a highly stylised way, but in A Town Called Panic they go the other way - towards a more rudimentary look, and I feel like they are able to keep things totally believable even as the incredible or impossible is happening.

The Storyboards of Saul Bass -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Telling Stories

Saul Bass is probably best known as a graphic designer and director of animated title sequences for big Hollywood blockbusters, working with big names like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. His jagged paper cutout animation style has become iconic, and widely imitated (a recent example would be the titles and branding of Tarantino's Django: Unchained), but I only found out recently that he also supplied hand drawn storyboards for some of these directors. His boards for Kubrick's Spartacus (he also directed the famous titles) are heavy water colours, which show camera angles and scenery beautifully but don't describe the action very well, and include no annotation or text. As pieces of art they are very nice, and its possible that Kubrick, being the eccentric and visionary director that he was, didn't need any extra from his boards.

In 1970 Bass created mass controversy by stating that he directed the infamous shower scene in Hitchcock's masterpiece Psycho (released in 1960, the same year as Spartacus). The proof he offered up (despite many crew members and Janet Leigh refuting his claims) were the storyboards he drew for Hitchcock. The scratchy black and white boards (which are much less pretty but much more descriptive than the Spartacus images) fit the scene almost shot-for-shot (and there are 70-odd individual shots in the 2 and a half minute scene), almost the only omissions from Bass's storyboards are the shots of the shower head, now almost as famous an image as the shadow behind the shower curtain. In fact many of the most famous images from that scene are in Bass's story boards, including the silhouette of Norman Bates with his knife raised and the close up of the bloody water swirling into the plughole. We will never know now who really directed the scene, but we can see how the role of storyboard artists and directors are entwined.

Here is a helpful video which places each shot and storyboard side by side so you can see how they are related.

My Storyboards "Mary, Mary" -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Telling Stories

I wanted to go for a slightly creepier version of Mary Mary Quite Contrary.

I will use a dull colour palette with lots of greys and murky browns and greens. The character of Mary will have a pallid skin tone and raggedy clothes.

Sound effects like howling wind and the screeching bird will help to make a creepy feeling.

I am going for the Salad Fingers vibe, quite a slow pace, with a fair amount of spacing between lines of dialogue. This gives the viewer more time to ponder what is going on and creates an even more uncomfortable atmosphere.

Emmy Winning Storyboards -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Telling Stories

I was recently surprised to find out that Emmys could be won for outstanding storyboard work. In the sea of posts from various animators and cartoonists that makes up the bulk of my tumblr feed, a post by Tom Herpich stuck out - just a single photograph of his table at the Primetime Emmys awards ceremony, with four golden statues on it (only two of them were his). One of these awards was given for his storyboard of the Adventure Time episode "Walnuts and Rain", which he also wrote. The full board can be viewed here.

I don't know why I was surprised that you could win awards for storyboards - I always knew that they were an important part of production, and more so in animation than most other moving image forms, but I suppose you don't expect kids' cartoons to be considered worthy of celebration (although obviously I disagree, but I think it's a widely held view - even some of my "arty" family members laughed when they found out I was going to art school to make cartoons).

Looking at the board I can see that it is very descriptive, shows every different action within a shot and even includes reference materials (like a photograph of a game of Freecell, which one character plays in the background). I can tell that it is a good story board from a production point of view, it contains enough information that a team of animator who know nothing of the story would not be able to mess it up too much, but in all honesty I don't know what makes it worthy of an award.

When The Wind Blows -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

Set during the cold war the story centres on an elderly couple as they attempt to survive nuclear holocaust by following the instructions of a government pamphlet.
I was very impressed by the mix of 2D animation (used for the characters) and 3D models (used for the setting of the inside of their house). This is something I have wanted to try for quite a while and I thought that the film pulled it off very well - I definitely preferred the look of this movie to that of "The Snowman" which attempted to imitate Raymond Briggs' drawing style. Other than this I mostly enjoyed the story, despite finding the two characters (and particularly Hilda) extremely irritating at times. I was glad that the film didn't have a happy ending as all the way through I was dreading a big Hollywood finale where some heroic medics burst in and save the day, maybe things would have been different if the film had been made in the US - certainly the quietly humourous script would have had a different feel to it.

Tame Impala music video -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

Tame Impala - Feels Like We Only Go Backwards

Directed by Becky and Joe (of "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" fame), the video for Tame Impala's   track is a 3 minute plasticine trip. Essentially composed of a series of lurid and dazzling loops, transitioning between each scene with the repeated use of a zooming out head motif. The visuals are deliberately psychedelic to match the band's sound - although this particular song is more of a straight pop song (and a bit of a dirge in my opinion) than many of their others. The continuous zooming out gives the video a slightly trance-like tunnel vision quality, and I wonder whether this was intentional or a happy side-effect. Each seperate loop is individual in looks and content to the others, but there is a general theme of objects moving towards or away from the camera, and very few of the scenes break from this. This is a shame in my opinion as some of my favourite parts were the dancing water droplets, and two scenes of a figure walking up stairs and running in profile.

Song of the Sea -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

Directed: Tomm Moore
Released: 2014

A joint Irish-Belgian-Danish-French-Luxembourgian production, Song of the Sea is set in modern Ireland & tells the story of Ben, a lighthouse keeper’s son and his sister Saoirse who is a Selkie - one of a race of magical women who become seals when they put on a sealskin coat. Whilst the human characters are all drawn in quite a standard cartoon style, the character designs of the magical creatures are quite heavily stylised, borrowing elements from Celtic and Pictish carvings. I particularly liked the design of the Faeries who reminded me of the decorated standing stones seen all over Ireland. The background art has the look of water colour painting, and was full of grungey texture which helped make it easier on the eyes, and gave depth to the wild Irish scenery. I thought that if the whole film had been coloured in flat tones, like the characters were, it would have looked like a cheap kids cartoon and been hard to sit through for an hour and a half.

Danger Mouse, new series review -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

Danger mouse has been rebooted, the latest in a long list of remakes, franchises and superhero movies proving that there are no longer any new ideas left in the world (or at least no producers or studios willing to risk making a loss on an unproven story). On top of this, the once warm and lovely hand drawn animation has been replaced by cold lifeless digital drawings, and all the characters slightly redesigned (Baron Greenback suffers the worst here). The original series was famous for cutting costs at every turn - reusing clips across multiple episodes, and setting whole storylines in the North Pole to save on background art - but these days money is saved by using cheap and visually offensive digital animation, and the overall product suffers.
It is a shame because the first episode did make me laugh, the impressive cast (including Stephen Fry and Alexander Armstrong) read from a smart script, with many meta and self referential jokes (Fry’s Colonel K mentions the special effects budget, and even communicates with The Narrator). The story of the first episode is a well-worn trope, but one that won’t get old - Greenback has stopped being evil, and is manufacturing robotic bodyguards for every head of state in the world, and everybody but Danger Mouse and Penfold believe in his innocence. Of course it turns out that the bodyguards are in fact kidnapping machines, poised to capture every world leader and leave Greenback in charge and DM has to swoop in at the last minute to save everyone. I understand that the target audience of CBBC viewers probably aren't particularly worried about any facet of the cartoons they watch, be that storylines, visuals or script, but it seems like a shame to me that the look of many of today's kids' cartoons has taken such a hit, even compared to what I was watching as a child only a few years ago.