PPP1 Evaluation

             PPP was definitely one of the more enjoyable modules, as I love to binge watch animations and usually have a couple of freelance projects going on on the side. The only issue was that I rarely felt that I had the time to sit down and really get into the research because of all of the other work I had to do. Half of PPP1 was completed throughout the year and the other half was completed at the end of the year. With the latter, I still enjoyed the process as I was able to really get into the research and follow one animation to another discovering new studios and artists that inspire me.

            Doing this kind of research really got me thinking about the kind of work I want to be doing in the future. When watching animations created by the students of Gobelins School of Image in Paris, I realized that I need to raise my standards of animating to a much higher level and aim to not only utilize but also perfect my use of the twelve principles of Animation. My other realization was that to create interesting ideas I need to absorb a lot more information. To quote Chuck Jones with regards to creating ideas, what we need to do is "Read everything. It doesn't do you much good to draw, unless you have something to draw. The only place you'll get anything to draw is out of that head. And the only way that you can exercise the mind is by bringing new ideas to it, so it'll be surprise. And say, 'god I didn't know that!' That's the greatest thing in the world, 'Gee, I didn't know that!' And there you are, you know?"

            What I really liked about Gobelin’s student work and Birdbox animations was that not only was the quality of animation to a very high standard but their ideas were rich with cultural and sometimes political references. With Birdbox studios, the animations were short but very clever and played as a visual joke with a visual punchline. I think to get to that level of thinking it is important to, as Chuck Jones said, read. Thus, my second goal is to absorb as much information as I can through reading books, keeping up with the news and researching as many recent as well as old works of animation as I can. Not only that, I believe it is also important to research different types of art to help inform my projects.

            Lastly, researching professional animators ignited a curiosity in learning every aspect of animation, not just the parts that interest me (character design and animation). I want to explore creating three-dimensional spaces within backgrounds, playing with lighting and color and really challenging myself by trying out things I’ve never tried before. During the following year I want create a short animation to do just that and to really push my skills to the next level. I also crave to really dedicate a significant amount of time to just one animation to really tick off everything I want to work on, down to creating my own sound.

Understanding Copyright

Copyright gives the owner, artist, writer or publisher full control of what happens to their work. This includes any animations, film, illustrations, books, music etc. Copyright isn't exclusively for individual creatives, collaborative work can also be copyrighted as it is as much of an intellectual effort as individual creation. Copyright in the UK is automatic, requires no registration and (depending on the media) can last 70 years to a lifetime.

Copyright does not allow you to copy, adapt, distribute, transmit, perform, rent or lend anything that has been created by another individual or individuals without express and prior consent.
Owning someone elses intellectual work does not allow you to destroy or damage it as copyright indicates that an artist can object if that is the case. Buying or owning a creation doesn't equal buying and owning copyright, those are rights that need to be legally transferred.

Who owns copyright? In the cases of music or drama, the author or creator of said music and drama would own the copyright. In terms of film, it would be either or both the director and producer would own the rights to it. With work like illustration, animation or game design, the rights would go either to the creator or creators if it was an independent project, or  the company or employer who commissioned the creators.

In terms of using copyrighted work, you do not typically need to ask permission if it is used for educational, research or other non-commercial purposes. However if you need to use another artist's work for marketing or commercial uses, it is crucial to contact the creator or employer for permission.

To prove that you are the creator of your work, you need to leave or deposit your work with a bank. To prove that it existed at a certain point in time you can post it to yourself. Lastly, make sure to sign and mark your work with your name and the year and even date it was created.

The Science of Sleep

Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry is one of my favorite films not only for it's unique storyline and characters but also for his use of stop motion animation within the film. According to Alain Bielik from AWN, Michel Gondry did a lot of the animating himself wanting it to have more of a childish and amateur aesthetic. This was to illustrate the main character, Stephan's childish personality as well as draw some distinction between the dream world and the real world. Although when those lines would get blurred, Michel Gondry would not make the transition very clear and would begin implementing stop motion into live action. Stop motion as well as creating the sets and the characters was something within the plot that linked Stephan the main character to his love interest Stephanie as they discovered their mutual love for creating little objects and bonded over it.

The Animation, although rough as Gondry had intended it to be, has an endearing and charming quality to it. Using Plasticine and cellophane, Gondry created charmingly crooked scene's with rouch and unfinished armatures. The video below is several scene's from the film, and the last video is my favorite scene from the film.

  Stephan really falls in love with Stephanie even though originally he showed more of an interest in her friend. 

 

"I am collecting beautiful objects. They are made from wool and felt with apparent stitches. Their delicate unfinished appearance is friendly, they are quiet. Stephanie made them and I will expose them in an exhibition."

 

World War II Death Count - Neil Halloran

I have been more and more interested in motion graphics and graphic design and this video is a great example of why. Visual communication is, in my opinion, the most effective. With a good design that communicates and illustrates information clearly you can bring a lot of people's attention to very important issues and actually make a difference in the world. In this case, what is being communicated is war statistics, in particular casualties. The design is somber with a color palette that is dark and sometimes has a splash of red. In order to really create an impact on the viewer, the casualties are counted with little figures each representing 1000 casualties.

    

 

  

The animation is also quite chilling as well as the subtle sound effects. For instance, when the little figures gather, they flock in with a sound of a deck of cards and they flock away in the same manner disappearing into blackness. It is haunting to visualize so many casualties and Neil Halloran does a beautiful job elegantly illustrating tragedy in a statistical manner.

Click here for the animation: https://vimeo.com/128373915

Ma'agalim - Yuri Lotan

 This beautiful animation illustrates quite hauntingly how life can just pass you by and you don't know where the time has gone. We take on the perspective of the figure with the scarf walking around in loops and witnessing people living their lives, building families, failing and ultimately dying. This music video is quite appropriate to the lyrics (translated below from youtube). However unlike some animated music videos, this one stands on its own as a very touching Animated short film.

The level of detail and texturing is quite incredible and one may easily confuse this for a real wooden penny arcade machine as opposed to the CG animation that it is. The designs are also very charming.

 

 

 

 

Music - Jane Bordeaux Band
Producers: Uri Lotan & Yoav Shtibelman
Director: Uri Lotan
Co-Director: Yoav Shtibelman
Art Director: Ovadia Benishu
Additional Art: Avner Geller
Lighting and Shading: Yosef Refaeli
Additional Lighting: Uri Lotan, Rob Showalter
Storyboard: Yoav Shtibelman
Modeling and Rigging: Uri Lotan, Ore Peleg, Or Ofri
Texturing:Yosef Refaeli, Dor Ben-Dayan
Animation: Yoav Shtibelman, Toby Pedersen, Ron Polischuk
Effects: Phenomena Labs
Compositing: Uri Lotan, Ilia Marcus
Coloring: Ilia Marcus

lyrics:

nights turn into days, days turn into years
and in that time i'm walking fast in circles

Winds are blowing at me, Blowing down my neck
Everything looks too distant, for my size their too great

Its not me that's moving forward, Its only time that slips away
Its another train that passes by, It's another tightening rope

Sunrises setting fast, As more seasons pass
And me, still the same while time is getting short

Its not me that's moving forward, Its only time that slips away 2X
Its another train that passes by, It's another tightening rope

Reflection

In reflection of the year and our curriculum I have designed 7 characters each representing a module. The characters are designed based on the modules as I perceived them as well as my personal life at the time.

Animation Skills:

 

This was the first module of the year and I was super excited about beginning the course. I liked the module because of its short and practical tasks, I liked jumping straight into the practice of animation and I was proud of the work I was producing. During this time I was organized and managed my time perfectly. My personal life wasn’t it’s best but there was no chaos. I worked outside of Uni on average about once a month and for the rest of the time I threw myself into my Uni work. I would stay at Uni from 9am to 9pm every day (It also helped that I didn’t really want to go home.) The character I designed for Module OUAN403 is an organized little girl who is quite on top of things and quite pleased with herself.

 Process and Production:

 

I definitely enjoyed this module as we had a lot more time to focus on one project. Pre production is probably my favorite part of the design process and I spent a lot of time in the pre production of this project. I loved doing it! December I received some unsettling news that rocked my personal life. As a result, I spent most of December flip flopping between doing work and wallowing in self pity. After New years, I snapped into shape and plunged back into my work, working up to 14 hours everyday. I wasn’t completely proud of my work as I had to rush it towards the end but I was proud of myself for pulling through. During the last two weeks of the project I felt quite focused but definitely melancholy.

Visual Language:

 

This was definitely one of my favorite modules as character design has always been my favorite part of the animation process. I also feel like I’m in heaven when I draw and this module was all about drawing and drawing and drawing! For the first half of the module I felt quite relaxed, organized and confident. The second half I felt the opposite: Nervous, disorganized and rushed. The reasons for this were that I had just found out that my tuition could no longer be paid. As an international student, I am not eligible for loans and my father was helping me with my tuition. At the beginning of this year, the currency in my fathers and my country substantially depreciated. I spend the following few weeks desperately searching for scholarships, putting aside my studies. Unfortunately, I came up with nothing that could pay me through the next year of College. The character above is the same but represents two very separate parts of Visual Language. On the left, I am organized and on top of my work my personal life only mildly unnerving. On the right, everything seems to have fallen apart and I am completely the opposite.

Context of Practice:

 

I definitely liked this module for a few reasons. The first, Richard is freaking hilarious. And I absolutely love his lectures. After each lecture, I not only felt I fully understood what was taught but that I could go out and explain it to someone else. I really respect Richard as a teacher. The essay work was challenging especially the research however I felt the benefits as I was becoming a lot more rounded in terms of artistic education. Towards the end of the module, it began to feel a bit daunting. Since it was a year long module, OUAN401 quietly hid behind the other modules until it stomped out into the light and I realized how much work I had left to do. 

Applied Animation:

 

I really like this project as well! I felt as if I was in the industry and working for a specific clients with specific constraints really pulled in my focus. I finally felt professional and organized again and I worked quite quickly. However, the last few modules including this one I did fall behind on with all the time I had lost looking for scholarships, working to save money, and since it was spring, battling severe allergies that took me out of Uni a couple of days a week.

Personal, Professional Practice

Throughout the year, OUAN402 has been a sense of comfort. Everytime I stepped away from all of the stress factors in my life to blog about something I really enjoyed watching or reading about I felt like I was getting lost in the research. This module was comforting and fun and despite my life being chaotic so far for 2016, PPP has felt like a fuzzy hug.

Enjoy the Ride

A motion graphics animation created by one Robby Prada. According to him, he found the poster online and created an Animation from it using After Effects. This is the kind of thing I want to play with more using the program and picking a poster and animating is quite an exciting challenge!

Sketchy Dual - Birdbox

 

All the reasons I mentioned in my earlier post about Birdbox work: the simplicity and the comedy. The character designs (especially in this short) are incredibly simple but carry a lot of character not to mention their mannerisms through animation tell you everything you need to know about them without seeing their faces or hearing their voices. 

The joke in this one is that the two gentlemen cannot for the life of them shoot each other and instead destroy everything around them. The punchline is that when they are finally face to face they have run out of bullets so instead decide to beat each other up.

 

Made in China - Gobelins

Wooden people in a wooden world go through daily experiences with struggle. I really love this animation because of its simplicity; not a lot occurs but the little that does is quite impactful. The character begins by simply performing everyday tasks and failing simply because of the nature of their environment. As the film progresses, the character begins to perform acts that are more out of the norm as a desperate way to find deeper meaning or soul in his existence such as attempting to free a bird. Of course the bird falls straight to the ground because it is a wooden toy. Finally, the character attempts to kill himself by laying down on train tracks. Of course, because of the nature of his environment, this fails to kill him as well and he simply is pushed forward on the tracks by the wooden train. The overall atmosphere of this film is quite eerie as well as emotional and the characters seem to become more human towards the end as pointed out by my friend Steven from illustration.

The designs are also quite enchanting. There is little to no detail highlighting the emptiness of the atmosphere. There is no real perspective, it actually seems as if everything were on a grid (like MC Escher's work).

 

 

The scene with the train tracks is particularly haunting. There is no escaping this miserable reality and you can't help but feel sorry for the poor fellow when he can't even off himself. I also like that the music is quite repetitive and mundane but rises in intensity during this scene only to drop right back down to its repetitiveness after the train pushes through the figure.

Dinner - Birdbox Studio

I love the simplistic background in this animation; it is scratchy and out of focus and doesn't contain a lot of detail but enough to communicate the location and even time. It looks like morning because of the bright and almost golden lighting and the silhouettes of a mug and coffee maker as well as the fridge and the tile floor show that it is a kitchen. The shot angle as low so we can focus more from the Dog's perspective. 

The movement of the puppy is fluid and his mannerisms greatly resemble any dog but what I really like about him is his simplistic design. It is actually something I admire about all of Birdbox animations; the characters are very simple but the animation is quite nuanced. This really makes you appreciate the animation and the aesthetic is also adorable!

Lastly, I love the story. Bridbox animations are just like jokes; there is a set up and then a punchline at the end. In this case, the dog gets his bowl stuck under the cupboards and very intelligently figures out a way to get it back out. The punchline is that he screws up again by getting the bowl trapped in the cupboards on the other side of the kitchen. This is funny especially because the dog proved his intelligence only to make the same mistake again. This juxtaposition of intelligence and ignorance makes this short all the more funnier.

In Between - Gobelins Students

This short film created by Alice Bissonnet, Aloyse Desoubries-Binet, Sandrine Hanji Kuang, Juliette Laurent and Sophie Markatatos from Gobelins School of Image in Paris.

Crocodile:
I love the flexibility in movement with the crocodile and the contorted positions he is place in. I also think it's impressive that they were able to make a vicious predator seem adorable, playful and harmless.

 

 

  

Shot angles:

I like the shot angles in this short, the ones below in particular because they help set a certain mood depending on the shot.

 

Backgrounds:

The backgrounds have a charming unfinished aesthetic that reminds me a lot of the backgrounds from Looney tunes as well as from Disney's 101 Dalmations. The colors are simple and there isn't too much detail which allows the viewers focus to be centered on the action as well as create a nice atmosphere around it.

 

 

Lighting:
Looking at it closely, the lighting is quite simple. The animators play a lot with direct sunlight contrasted by shadow and darkness.
 

Camp Hollywood 2016 T-Shirt Design

This is the third year Graphic Designer Augie Freeman and myself are designing a T-Shirt for Swing Dance camp Camp Hollywood. Each year we try to capture the feeling of dancing in California, pulling out references from old California dance clips like the Venice Beach Clip from 1938:

 

We have been focusing more on California originated dances such as Shag and Balboa to further strengthen the Camp Hollywood brand and really set it aside from other dance camps with it's unique identity. Below is some reference imagery from old cartoons, vintage as well as current day photographs of dancers.

To start, I explore the body shapes to find clean and simple forms to make the design more efficient.

Steve's Birthday

I was commissioned by one of my friends to create an illustration of her husband in his favourite street of Amsterdam. The trick with this illustration was to combine all of these visual elements without drawing a three dimensional gigantic picture (as the restaurant and the couple's apartment were on different sides of the street.) My friend Janine sent me these photographs as reference for the project:

This is Steve's bike.

Then I began to sketch out my ideas. I thought of a flat image showing the city and Steve crossing a bridge however we decided that this might be too much for one illustration and the focus should be more on the specific street that is his favourite.

 

So I narrowed down the idea to this: I placed the apartment building right next to Steve's favourite restaurant (even though that's not actually what the street looks like) Janine and I both thought it tied together the elements perfectly. 

 

Here is the final illustration: Steve on his bike carrying flowers (to Janine). This is a more subtle suggestion that I highlighted with the pink color. Steve, the flowers and their apartment door are all red suggesting that there is a connection between the three.