Character and Narrative - Limitations in Aesthetics

As far as I can tell the one true limitation of hand drawn animation is the ability (or lack of) to portray realistic depth within a shot. This limitation is based on the fact that, even when utilising parallax effects, it is nearly impossible to achieve a truly three-dimensional looking space in the same way that CGI can. With CG animation the lighting and shading effects alongside imitation lens and motion blurs can give an effect of the third dimension that is almost as real as if it were live action film. In contrast to this, while not technically impossible, it is beyond the reach of any human being to draw and animate a scene that could closely imitate reality in the way 3D animation can.
I see this as the main limitation for traditional animation, and is one of the reasons 3D and digital animation has so many more uses - particularly for 3D which can now be seamlessly edited into live action footage, or used to create entire scenes and backdrops for actors to be placed in. Compare this to the look of Space Jam which while obviously very cartoony and unrealistic, still wasn't able to make Michael Jordan look like he was actually a pat of the scene, rather than just plonked on top of a hand drawn animation.

Character and Narrative - Traditional techniques in modern animation

Traditional techniques may be slowly being taken over by modern digital animating techniques but I think there will always be a place for traditional animation as a tool for getting to grips with the basics and solidifying the 12 principles. Even something as simple as animating a pendulum swing, a bouncing ball or a basic walk cycle is an invaluable step in learning the principles before moving on and applying them to a more specialist type of animation. There is no quicker or more accessible form of moving image than the flipbook - possibly the fastest tool an animator has to share an idea or concept, and while I don't think it is strictly necessary for an animator to be able to draw well (especially animators in the CG field) I think traditional techniques such as the line test will not go out of fashion as a quick way of previewing and tweaking with the timing of a shot or scene.

Character and Narrative - Texture in Traditional animation aesthetic

I have noticed a trend in lots of recent digital animation - applying textures to reduce the bland flatness of digitally coloured images. One example of an animation I think utilises this technique well, and for a number of reasons, is Drawing Inspiration directed by Wesley Louis and Tim McCourt. Whilst many background elements are actually painted in watercolour the character and prop animation is drawn and coloured digitally. Not only would these elements look anachronistic against a painted background, but the cartoony style of the characters could easily make it look playful and exciting - unlike the quite morose mood of the piece. The animation focuses on an alcoholic magician, and I think due to the slightly more mature themes portrayed in the film it would have looked weird if the art style used flat colours. It seems like for many animators who want to make films for adults, adding textures is a shorthand aesthetic cue which separates their work from children's cartoons.
In my own work I have used it as an alternative to line boil when a scene looks like it will appear to flat and lifeless, an animated texture can bring a bit of movement.

Another reason I think this trend has come about is due to a much wider movement in art away from digital techniques and towards more analogue or handmade aesthetics. I think this is due to some new snobbery about digital art now that it is so easy and cheap for the general public to create and publish their work. Maybe it is subconscious but I believe society or at least the art world is placing a renewed emphasis on the handmade, and this has resulted in the increased use of simulated paper textures, analogue noise and other overlays to add texture and depth to a flat image.
I used a similar technique during my "The Other Side" animation at level 4 - overlaying scans of old newspapers to break up the boring flat look of the animation.

Cartridge paper texture applied in Drawing Inspiration

Newspaper texture applied in my animation

Character and Narrative - Aesthetics

Traditional animation has possibly the most scope of all animation techniques in terms of aesthetics. Essentially the term "traditional animation" covers all forms of drawn or painted animation, and is therefore open to any style or aesthetic that can be physically produced in a 2D format and photographed. This can range from very simple black and white stick cartoons like the work of Don Hertzfeldt, to the incredible oil-painted production of Loving Vincent in the style of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. Traditional animation might be the most versatile in terms of aesthetics, and compared to the last 25 years or so of mainstream 3D animation the range of different art styles in traditional animation is vast.
When you look through the history of traditional animation the aesthetics are often linked closely to a social or artistic movement of the time. The very early commercially produced animations such as Flesicher Studio's PopEye the Sailor and Betty Boop films strongly resembled, and were often based on, the newspaper cartoon strips of the time. This aesthetic style was later developed on by Warner and Disney in their shorts, and when Snow White was released in 1937, Disney's aesthetic became the go to for fairy tale type stories for the next 30 years. Later in the 60s counterculture style infiltrated animations such as Fritz the Cat, based on Robert Crumb's pulp comic strips, and Yellow Submarine which drew heavily on the hippie movement aesthetic of the work of Milton Glaser and Heinz Edelmann.
These days we have the ability to look back on and borrow from the entire history of animation thanks to the internet and the instant accessibility we now have. This has allowed animators these days to imitate and reference, and broaden the aesthetic possibilities further.

Character and Narrative - Time/Budget Restraints & Limited Animation

30 seconds at 24 frames per second = 720 frames (or 360 on twos), a scary proposition for someone deciding to do traditional animation, especially if you don't like drawing digitally. I decided to use "limited animation" a time and money saving technique used throughout the history of traditionally drawn animation. Limited animation is the term used to describe a form of animation which reuses as many assets as possible, which became possible when animators began using transparent mediums such as celluloid or acetate to create frames which could be layered on top of each other and photographed all at once. The first major change this brought about was that the animators no longer had to draw the background in every single frame. One single background could be photographed below all the animated frames. When Winsor McCay animated Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914 the background was drawn anew in every single frame, compare this to his film The Sinking of the Lusitania produced four years later, which made use of layers of transparent cels layered above oil painted backgrounds.
Thanks to these new technologies it also became possible to animate individual characters separately, again allowing frames to be reused when certain characters weren't moving within a scene. This was later increased to using separate cels for separate moving parts on the same character, a good example of this being the Beatle's Yellow Submarine movie, in which many scenes are entirely static other than a single arm movement or a foot tapping to the music. In fact it was thought by King Features who produced the film that the film would have been impossible to make had they not used such limited animation (at the time of production no studio other than Disney had been able to produce a feature length animation without going bankrupt in the process).
These days with digital production techniques it is very easy to animate separate parts of a scene individually, and in my own production for Telling Tales I used Photoshop to repeat frames throughout the film.
The main issue I see with limited animation is a very flat and lifeless look in scenes in which there is little movement. Some easy tricks to make things look less dull are making static background characters blink every now and then, or producing line boil. "Boiling Line" means a wobbly look applied to outlines, normally by repeating a two or three frame loop which gives the illusion of movement. There are some plugins available for programs like Flash and After Effects which apply line boil to digital animation, but in my production I drew two frames for every still image to keep my character looking alive, and make the car look like it was being vibrated by its engine.

Character and Narrative - Evaluation

I really struggled to engage with this module, and felt thoroughly unmotivated and disinterested by both the set briefs and my own responses to them. The work I produced for Telling Tales was worse than mediocre - a dull story and visually very uninteresting. I find myself falling back on making work that I find easy to do when I am not interested in the brief or in my own ideas, and Road To Nowhere is an example of feeling like it wasn't possible to play or experiment within the confines of the brief, therefore resulting in a very safe and ultimately uninspired piece of animation.
Normally I find the process of animating much more satisfying than the end product itself, and am not usually worried about the outcome so much as the experience of making the work - but during Character and Narrative I found it a drag even to think about working, and have been more than happy to distract myself with less urgent business for COP or other modules. After the suggestion last year that changing projects to a more interesting idea after getting underway with another one was a waste of time, I spent a long time resisting starting work on a project I was not at all stimulated by, probably wasting more time in the process. I still believe that, as I am a confident and quick animator, my time would be better spent on long consideration of a project before getting underway with the work. I have often felt like there is a pressure or a rush to have settled on a story or project by the end of a briefing session, and I don't think that for me it is conducive to coming up with my best ideas.

In terms of the technical side of the Telling Tales animation, I consider the hand drawn elements to be a step down from work I have produced in the past, in fact there was very little actual animation involved, almost exclusively using line boil to bring life to a flat image. In the one scene in which I attempted to draw multiple frames (when the car drives off into the horizon) the animation is jerky, and the volume and shape of the car seems to warp and shift between frames.
Regardless of this I think that there were some small indications of a more interesting animation lurking under the surface of my Road To Nowhere. Had time constraints not played such a big role in my decisions about what to keep in and what to cut out of the film I would have liked to have seen more use of collage/montage and texture through the scanned elements.
Maybe the single achievement of the production of this piece is a growing familiarity with the intricacies of After Effects. I was able to very quickly transfer my knowledge of other Adobe software, particularly Photoshop, and through the use of adjustment layers, blending modes and effects was able to precisely tweak the look of the film, and to make sure each scene looked the same as the others, despite having been drawn with a range of pens on a range of papers.

I enjoyed playing with the puppet pin tool, mainly due to its speed, although I can't see it being massively useful to me. Similarly DUIK seemed like more effort than it is worth. The time taken to build the puppet in Photoshop, tweak the anchor points and positioning in After Effects and then rig it in DUIK seems excessive considering the limitations of the medium. I think in both cases I would prefer to use cutouts or traditional style animation. Both alternatives would allow me more control and a wider range of possibilities.

Strike A Pose was a fun exercise. I enjoy positioning and posing the puppet in Maya, but not building or rigging. Potentially I would like to try animating in Maya, in collaboration with someone who could provide the rigs. I found MOOM to be a bit of a fiddly character to manipulate, but was pleased with the facial expressions I managed to get out of him, if not so satisfied by the body positions. I found that sometimes looking in a mirror or at reference photos of myself was hard to translate onto MOOM because of the irregular proportions of his body. This is a consideration I will have to bear in mind in the future when modelling or animating in Maya.

In a wider sense I feel like this module compounded my feelings that the way I want to work (still not entirely clear to me) is incompatible with the university set up. I have often felt that the course in general is geared purely towards gaining a job "in the industry", with little to no compensation for those who are interested in animation as an art form (sometimes I forget I am at an "Art School" altogether), and this term has only bolstered those worries. Perhaps I don't want to sit behind a desk pushing a mouse around for Disney or Cartoon Network. Perhaps I don't want to tell tales with a central character and a clear narrative. Perhaps I don't want to write contrived stories which don't interest me just to fulfill the criteria of a brief. Perhaps this course isn't right for me, or I'm not right for the course.

Much soul searching to be done over christmas.

Strike a Pose

I think Moom is a rubbish model as you don't have much control over the legs, and I feel that lots of emotion is displayed through the stance. For example I wanted to turn the knees inwards for a cowering stance to indicate fear, but the knee joints don't have their own controls and only move up and down parallel to the body when controlled by the foot movement.

 

Confusion

 

Pain

Pride

Sadness

Surprise

Full Blown Puppet Mastery

Let's take a trip to the circus, I hear they have a really sick balancing act.

Look at him go!! Keep watching long enough and he might fall off.

I made the mistake of standing in the position I wanted my puppet to be in, with arms and legs slightly bent, rather than in a T-pose or similar position which would have made the warping of the puppet look a bit smoother and given me more control over the limbs.

I like how quick and easy it is to use the puppet pin tool, but it seems fairly limited in its applications. I'm not sure I can see myself using it for much more than warping and wobbling.

All I wanna do is DUIK

In my first attempt with DUIK I tried to create a rig of a pink elephant with fat stubby legs, and I quickly learned that no amount of tweaking with DUIK's controls, the anchor points or with the separate limb images within the rig would change the fact that stubby limbs don't want to pay nice with DUIK.

I gave up on Nelly the elephant when not only did the joints seem to dislocate and float around improperly, but the knees on the back legs decided to bend in the wrong direction.

I decided to follow a new tack, and thought "Who has really long and skinny limbs?" Giraffes, NBA Players, long distance runners, corpses. Maybe a zombie marathon runner would solve my DUIK woes. Introducing Zomboy:

He knows not why he runs.

Character and Narrative - Week 9

Things have finally come together, and other than a few very minor tweaks to the timing of a couple scenes the visuals are complete. I have started looking online for royalty free sound effects. I want to use a lot of different sounds and samples to create that tense buildup of confusion and angst. The biggest problem so far has been trying to find samples for the SatNav voice. I might have to resort to actually recording what I need myself, or asking someone to voice-act for me, but I don't think I will be able to make it sound exactly how I want if I use my own recordings. For now I will carry on building up the texture of motorway sounds.