Macro Macro Mind

It’s taking me a long time to get through Don Graham’s book, Composing Pictures, however there’s so much stuff in it that I don’t want to speed through it and end up missing something. And boy did I find a gem last night.

It happened to be talking about the age-old thing of avoiding copying exactly what’s in front of you when you’re drawing, a lesson I have come across over and over again. But this time an extra element was thrown into the mix.

I’m sure most people are familiar with the fact that the further into the distance an object is, the more it appears to flatten out due to the limitations of our binocular vision. When, for example, an artist draws from a life model, he is looking at a person that may be some distance from his easel. If that artist was to draw exactly what he sees, then he would end up with a somewhat uninteresting picture as it would be flattened out to some extent (as seen in figure 355-A from Don’s book below).

The solution to this, as illustrated by figure 355-B, is to imagine yourself as being much closer to the model, drawing what you might see from that vantage point. The dimensions of the model are much more apparent close-up, and the volumes that the different parts occupy are a lot clearer. In photographic terms, you’d effectively be using a smaller focal length (wider lens).

This hit me like a sledgehammer. Though I try not to, I do end up copying what I draw sometimes. My efforts to avoid doing so have been more to do with gesture than anything else. I have often been disappointed with the apparent flatness of my drawings though, and now I know the reason why. It’s so obvious! How didn’t I work this out before?

Don also talks about combining this with using multiple station-points, something I won’t attempt to go into here. I really can’t recommend this book enough. It’s not an easy read, but it has taught me so much about pictures that I just had no clue whatsoever about before.

More Backgrounds

Another background experiment. The idea with this one was to reflect something of the mime’s design in the background elements, hence I’ve made the tree trunks look like stripes, and kinda made the foliage resemble his unshaven look.

Though the thought was there, the result is a failure for a couple of reasons. Firstly, despite me toning down the strength of the lines and blurring them, they still compete too much with the mime himself. Secondly, my reason for making the location more organic (a park) was to avoid lots of vertical lines, and what have I gone and put in?!

My first attempt is still my best I think, so I decided to return to it and apply the film effect that I’ve used on my subsequent ones just to see what it looks like.

In this one the tree is mainly dabs of paint rather than linework, which seems to work better with the lines of the mime.

Another Mime Background Experiment

Since my first little experiment regarding backgrounds for my mime short, I’ve done a few more, and I’ve noticed that my experiments have extended to the general look of the film. Recently I’ve been investigating the viability of playing around with Super 8 cine film, just for fun, so I decided to try applying a film effect to my next background test.

I drew the tree with pencil and overlaid some strokes with a brush pen. I scanned this drawing and laid it over an aged paper texture, after which I did a bit of fiddling with colours. As before, I stuck a pre-existing mime head over the top to see how it fits in with my intentions for the colouring of the character himself.

After I had finished all that, I applied a blur to the whole image to try to reproduce the slight blur of a low-gauge or old film, followed by a vertical-line film grain.

I actually have a bit of an uneasy feeling about simulating a film effect digitally. I’ve always criticised computer work that pretends to be something it’s not because I always prefer to see the real thing. For example I really dislike CG that pretends to be stop-motion animation. I see what I’ve done here as a bit like that – ease of creation at the expense of honesty. Why I feel so strongly about the matter is beyond me, but there we are! That said, I don’t currently have the knowhow to be able to create my short on actual film. Plus I’d have to mess around with cels.

Anyway I’m not quite there yet with the background, but I’ve got a bit more of a clear idea of what I want a whole film frame to look like now, so that’s good at least.

Thoughts on Perspective (of the non-drawing kind)

It’s funny how priorities change in life.

Ever since I can remember I had the ambition of moving away from England and living in the USA. First as a physicist, and later as an animator. On discovering how tough immigration is there, my sights refocused on Canada. My dream, as unlikely as it may be, was to work my way step-by-step to a job somewhere like Disney where I could perhaps work on 2D features.

Last year I had the great fortune to be given a tour of the Disney animation studio, both the old and the new ones, by animator Andreas Deja. As I have previously mentioned on this blog, the trip, while mesmerising, really drilled home that it is sadly not the studio it once was. I left my trip with a changed priority – I just want to be the best animator I can be, I don’t need to tie my dream to a single studio.

I aimed to make a jump to Canada, Vancouver to be exact. The fact is that there are very few opportunities for animators in Great Britain, and there are more on the other side of the Atlantic (at least that’s my perception of the situation). I thought that I could at least try to venture into the film industry in Canada.

Then something suddenly changed. To be honest, I don’t know what happened. I suddenly started to feel that such a move was unwise. I came to realise that with the best will in the world, family ties would suffer, and no amount of career opportunity was worth that. On Sunday, my girlfriend and I made the decision to knock the Canada idea in the head, opting to remain in Britain. There are lots of things that we want to do in life that would have to wait if we moved abroad.

So where does that leave my animation career? Am I dooming myself? Well I don’t know, but I’m choosing to remain optimistic about it. My aim is still to work on feature films, and I will continue to work towards that aim. Perhaps such an opportunity will present itself within these shores one day. In the meantime I will try to find animation work that I can be passionate about and learn from my experiences there. At the same time I will be continuing to work on my own short films.

Most importantly of all though, and this is something that I only realised upon having made the decision to stay, I can now start to enjoy life today rather than waiting for some distant uncertain date. This is something that is good for both me and my work.

To quote the over-quoted line from Brad Bird, “Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can’t create it if you don’t have one.” As obvious as this may sound, I’m only just beginning to understand what it means.

I’m hoping that by relaxing my grip on my dreams, they might be permitted to flourish.

Looking into the Distance

I’ve been thinking about what to do with the backgrounds in my mime short. My current thoughts are along the lines of something simple. Here is an experiment from tonight. I drew the tree in pencil and added a little acrylic paint. I then scanned it and fiddled with it in Photoshop before laying over one of my recent mime drawings.

It’s not yet something I’m happy with, so a little more experimentation is needed, but I thought I’d just show things like this as I go along :)

Dance Study 1: Puttin’ On The Ritz

I haven’t done an animation analysis in a little while, but rather than do another one today, I thought I’d look at a piece of dance instead for a change. This is the brilliant thing about animation - so many things feed into it that make it a joy to study. The particular piece I've chosen is Fred Astaire's dance to the song Puttin' On the Ritz. Tap dancing is not normally my cup of tea, but Fred does it here with such elegance that I'm captured by it. I've picked just a short section of the dance to talk about here, but you can find the full scene at the end of the post.

There is one thing that really stands out to me with this dance, and that is texture. By "texture" I mean the variations that avoid monotony in any piece of art. In the case of dance it is variations in timing and movement. Although the dance is obviously to a beat, Fred does everything he can to create this variation, keeping his moves interesting.

Right at the start of the clip we have a flurry of quick foot and hand movements, which are then followed by a very slow pause.

 

 

 

 

 

Note how the twirl of the cane also adds interest to the movement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then he goes into a brief section where he establishes a constant beat, hitting each beat of the music with a tap of his foot....

 

 

 

 

 

.....but then he breaks this pattern with a much quicker flurry of taps. By setting up a pattern he is creating expectation in the audience's minds, and by breaking the pattern he is creating surprise, which by definition is interesting.

 

 

 

 

I love how in the middle of all his movement, there is a moment where he throws his cane up and it appears motionless for just a moment, becoming the focal point briefly before being spun around. It's like he's saying to us "ok now look at this because I'm going to do something interesting with it".

 

 

 

I like the way that whenever there's some large amount of movement, there's always something that remains stationary, in this case his right foot as he's spinning his cane. I feel like it's an anchor point that somehow makes sense of the movement. A point of reference perhaps.

 

 

 

And then he does a quick spin on the spot before going into a sort of penguin waddle. The waddle contrasts well with the preceding spin.

 

 

 

 

 

I love the slowness of his movement as he brings out his cane in preparation for smacking it on the floor. Such a move is not spectacular, it's not difficult for him to do, but in it's restraint it helps out the quicker parts of the dance. It's a bit like how a slow section in a song can give more impact to the exciting chorus.

 

 

 

I absolutely love the spinning section he goes into next, tapping to the beat, but hitting mid-beat with his cane. I see this as being analogous to secondary action in animation - the extra bit of business going on at the same time as the primary action. He gets into a pattern with this again, and he again breaks it on the last spin.

 

 

 

Then the following smooth floating section where he remains facing the camera contrasts well with all the spinning we've been watching, feeling like a sort of a settling motion.

 

 

 

 

He then does a bit more of a quick flurry......

 

 

 

 

 

 

.....before doing a really slow movement, again contrasting well and giving more 'meat' to the dance.

I love the quick tap of the cane he does while in the middle of this move. Again, it's unexpected and interesting as a result.

 

 

 

The slowness of that move makes the strong punctuated taps that follow all the more full of impact.......

 

 

 

 

 

.....which themselves contrast well with the following graceful move backwards.......

 

 

 

 

 

......which contrast too with the dramatic section at the very end of the clip.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s the scene in its entirety:

So that's it! A wonderful piece. I hope some of you find my analysis of it useful :)

Questionable Things I Have Been Taught (Part 1)

Trying to write the meat of a short film has had me trying to whittle things down to their bare essentials, stripping out any superfluous compositional elements to distil the unexpurgated whole down to it’s most potent, comprehensible articulation. As that sentence makes clear as mud, I’m not sure whether I trust the theory that simplicity is best.

To quote the great Stephen Fry in a conversation on swearing,

“It's not necessary to have coloured socks, it's not necessary for this cushion to be here, but is anyone going to write in and say 'I was shocked to see that cushion there, it really wasn't necessary'? No, things not being necessary is what makes life interesting.“

The Triangle: The Mime, the Actor, the Dancer

I’m reading a book at the moment called The Mime Book by Claude Kipnis, and I came across the following passage comparing the mime to the actor and dancer. I thought it was interesting in that it shares an opinion that is similar but yet at the same time quite different to my own:

Actors and dancers coexist rather pacifically because they have so little in common. Once the mime enters, discord follows. No one will give the poor fellow room. The actor wants to claim the mime's speaking body, and the dancer claims his silent movements. It seems that many people will not let a mime be a mime. "All right, so you do Mime, but which are you, an actor or a dancer?" But there are differences among these three, even though they all appear on a stage.

The actor is primarily verbal; the mime is not. Take away the actor's words, and he is a silent actor. We wait for him to commence talking again. Whatever his other virtues, and he may have many, the actor is judged by how well he manipulates his words, how well he creates a space in them for his acting. The actor approaches his text in the way a mime approaches his body. The actor makes plastic his words, flexing them, giving them tension, shaping them to give feeling and direction. As we have seen, this is what the mime learns to do with his body. Both produce the illusion of reality, but one has his hands and legs and torso to use, the other his voice and all of its sonorities.

To understand the weight of language for the actor, consider the production of a play in a foreign language. Although you may not grasp what is being said, the total effect of aural rhythms, intonations, pauses, and the rest will make sense. Now tune out the sound, as though this were television you were watching, and the production will lack sense. It does not simply lack comprehensible words; it lacks the sinuousness of language itself The mime creates the sensuous forms of reality by first excluding sound. Words are to him objects, almost figurines which he could admit to his stage as he might an interesting stranger - with curiosity but caution. The problem for the mime is that the addition of words can sometimes break his illusion; the problem for the actor is that the absence of words can sometimes jeopardize his.

Dance would seem to be Mime's twin; after all, they both use the non-verbal body. But, despite appearances, Mime and dance are probably more clearly separated than Mime and acting. "Dance is evasion; Mime invasion," said Etienne Decroux. Dance can avoid the consciousness of knowing, for one can watch a dance without giving it meaning, or understanding its meaning. It is a celebration, in which "to celebrate" is the operating verb, bypassing our need to know, reinforcing our desire to participate and be. For this reason, dance, like music, is perhaps a purer form of the theatrical art. The shape is total; the relationship immediate; and therefore no mediation is required between the dancer and his audience.

Mime, on the other hand, must be comprehended. There must be consciousness. The mime fails when he is incomprehensible. Perhaps the dancer fails when he can too easily be comprehended, when his dance is too full of significance and articulate meaning. The dancer becomes heavy, too "verbose." In his turn, the mime who leans toward dance lightens his ability to make meaning and becomes equally heavy. His audience can only lose track of what he is saying.

The dancer, the actor, and the mime share the stage, but each takes a different part of it. Their angles of vision form a common triangle, but at the same time it keeps them separate. Each should know more about the particular visions of the other, but it is not enough merely to give the actor a little dance, the dancer a little acting, and for both of them a little Mime. One does not learn a new language by taking a short vacation in a foreign land.

-- The Mime Book, Page 142, Claude Kipnis

I happen to believe that art, not just theatrical art, exists on a big spectrum. I see each art form as occupying an area in this spectrum, and these areas have diffuse edges where one form mingles with another. The final sentence of the above quotation holds a lot of questions for me. I think there is a great deal to be learned in studying the work of artists in other, sometimes quite different, fields. All art has more similarities to me than differences.

A Quick Plug

A colleague of mine at work alerted me to his new blog today, so I thought I’d give him a quick mention here. His name is Chris Dicker and he’s a extremely talented guy and an inspiration to a lot of people at work. He helped me to organise a few life drawing sessions there a few months ago and he put us all totally to shame!! :P

 

http://chrisdicker.net/

 

Check it out! :)

Mime Expressions

After a few days away from the drawing board, I’ve been trying to get myself back into the swing of things. Over the weekend I spent a while learning the anatomy of the upper arm, and tonight I got back to drawing the mime. I decided to spend some time just playing with facial expressions to see what I could do with him. Here’s the result: