Madame Tutli-Putli

Madame Tutli-Putli is a stop-motion animation produced by NBF of Canada. A story of a woman on a night train, twisting illusions and reality, get lost in her fear of unknown and imagination. The frames flows perfectly so the camera must be carefully held in place so each picture are steady in place, increase the quality of the film.

In my understands, the train she's about to take represents a new journey to hide away from the extreme pressure, which is the luggage she's got. it introduced identical characters with ugly faces, which all representing a certain group of people, or depressing society phenomenons.

I wondered that how they've made the character's eyes so realistic when the first time I was watching it, so I went into a small research of it. The process of animating the eyes of the character is also one of the highlight of this piece of stop-motion, it was captured with real people's eyes and animated digitally afterwards. 

Usavich

Usavich is series of comedy short animation of story of two rabbits, one of my favorite. The characters are flat, but I would still indicate it as a 3D animation. It has not contain any dialogues, but it doesn't effect the understanding of the animation. This is the first episode of season 1 of Usavich.

It is a formal animation with the same pattern within every episodes, with the same background music but narrating different stories, which is similar to lots of series of animations, for the main purpose of entertaining. It face a large range of audience because it is understandable to young people and interesting to a group of elder people.

The physical movements are exaggerated and clearly obey the 12 principles of animation, especially the overlapping action, well presented with very smooth sequences.

Cat Soup

Nekojiru so(Cat Soup) is an experimental 2001 Japanese animated film directed by Tatsuo Satō, is the journey of a kitten to a bizarre world trying to save a half of his sister's soul took away by the death. Through the journey they met a series of strange people, one even wanted to make the kitten and his sister into soup. The film leaves an open end to the audience, without determine whether they are alive or dead at the end of the story.

It contains a lot of irony and metaphor in my point of view, the "God" changes the time of the world just to pick up the food, which is earth, that he dropped off. The kitten has lost his sympathy as saving his sister is the only purpose to him, he started to act cruel in the second half of the animation, such as hitting the pig for walking slow, and pushed the man into boiling water instead of becoming cat soup. It indicates that they finally starts to fight back but in a cruel way because there's no other choice. In contrast, the pig indicates who surrendered himself and willing to be someone else's slave, he fought back and bite the kitten's pawn off at last, but it doesn't make any difference to his pathetic life.

I am extremely interested in this kind of animation implies a deeper meaning, and leave the audience a huge space to spread their own imagination, but presented in a comparatively childish style of drawing, similar to some dark fairy tales.

Pixilation Development

At first I was deciding from lost-found and host-parasite, these two themes both inspired me with ideas. The first idea came into my mind is someone lost his soul which fly away from him and didn't want to get back to his body, but find it back at last. As for the host-parasite theme, I came up with an idea of using everyday objects to make a parasite and myself as host, making a pixilation with a wild freedom of altering the movements.

The following are the storyboard I did, while having some differences to the final outcome:

Omelette

A short animation done by Madeline Sharafian of California Arts. It is a sweet story of  a pet dog helps the man to cook omelette while he's just back home from a bad day and in a depressed mood. It is a digitally animated 2D piece, the idea of it is interesting and adorable. 

It is more likely to serve the purpose of entertaining, or to demonstrate the friendship between the character and his dog to the audience. What I like about the animation is the application of basic principles of animation on the movement of the dog, although it's simple and not perfect, but it makes the dog lively and vivid.

Pose to pose animation

I've made my swing of pendulum very methodically, with guidelines carefully measured to make sure the timing and spacing are correct animated, or otherwise it can go wrong.

Pendulum

A short animation produced by Tekken, a Japanese animator in 2012. It has a piano background music in the original video, but I enjoy this version more.

It leads us through the life of a man and a woman with a very unique way representing the lapse of time, which is using a clock  pendulum swinging in the frame of the animation while the characters movements are animated in the bottom bit of the pendulum. And it leads to the scene near the last part where the soul of the man trying to stop the movement of the pendulum in order to stop his wife from growing old and dying eventually. It all happens fast, therefore I watched it several times to understand all the information that it's trying to deliver.

A Stop In the Mist

This is one of the final pieces of 2015's graduation students of Communication University of China. Purpose is to fit the criteria of the module,  and the audience could be any individual who are able to understand the context, the story line of the animation. It explored a various range of camera angles for dramatic effect, such as shots of the character though the reflection of the water. Obviously varies of techniques are applied.

The expressing methods of demonstrating that the old man is flashing back his life are cleverly used, which might not be understood at first, but obvious at the point when him from the memory sink into his body, it effectively communicates with audience of the contents of the animation, with smooth narrative and a bit use of metaphor.

The audio track is one of the highlights of this piece of animation, fit every scene with fluent transfers into another. Obviously picked carefully and thoughtfully, especially the song in the highlight where the old couple finally meet in front of the stop. 

12 Principles - 5 Follow through and Overlapping Action

This principle is the movement of objects or characters after the main body stops. In this example I've chosen, shows the follow though action of the cloak after the character lands on the ground, because of the air resistance compare to the gravity, the cloak falls much slower than the body itself.

This is also a good example for the movements of animals, which is particularly obvious in the movement of the squirrel's tail at the moment it's landing and jumping off.

12 Principles - 4 Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose Animation

These two different animating methods produce quite different outcomes, where straight ahead animation often create effect that the animator won't expect of, an interesting progress and outcome. It is easy to do as key frames are not required, also a fast progress perfectly fit for quick checking of ideas. But on the other hand, it is therefore easy to lose the volume of the objects through animating.

The other method which is pose to pose, is where key frames are used. It is well planned and the main progress is to fill in the gap between key frames, with consideration of other principles of movements as well. This method prevent the problem of losing volume of object, planned frames gives clear guide of how the movement is achieved.

League of Legends: Get Jinxed

Get Jinxed is a advertising animated video for the game League of Legends. Therefore its main purpose is to advertise, and to inform the old players of what's new in the game. It is also one of my favorite concept art piece of the game as well. As in this piece of animation, it focuses on demonstrating the personality of the new character introduced to the game, rather than narrating a clear story line. The content of this video depends on the purpose and it does the job of advertising the character well.

3D animation is not an area that I know much, but most of the pieces inspires me a lot on varies aspects. Such as this one, the animation cooperate well with the music, makes the crazy personality of the character stands out.

Ori and the Blind Forest

Ori and the Blind Forest is a 2D  adventure game last about 10 hours to play through for the first time. When I first played this game, I was amazed and inspired by the opening and the animations through the whole game. Every single scene is well drawn and fluently animated. I have managed to find a trailer video of this game on YouTube. Regarding to the animation's purpose, it is a game trailer, therefore persuading audience to play the game with a touch of experience of the game in this short film.

It is a combination of extracts from the game, cleverly chosen that links together to briefly introduce the story line. It doesn't need a fairly detailed story, to leave some mystery to the game and to capture interests, also to present how delicate the game is with epic bit of short animations. It successfully interested me, and is the reason why I played the game.

12 Principles - 3 Staging

For the third principle, staging, I've found  this video which explains it to me clearly. As it says in the video, staging is how you plan the stage of the animation in order to grab attention where appropriate, is how elements and characters work together to communicate of the content of the animation. It is an important element which should be considered carefully, as it indicates if the piece communicates with audience effectively, it decides which part of the scene should capture attention. Camera angle and positions are examples of what's needing consider to develop a good staging.

12 Principles - 2 Anticipation

"Anticipation is preparation" when a character is achieving a certain movement, due to physical of human body there is a preparation movement which is towards the opposite side of the movement force itself. In the example I picked, the movement of the rabbit is the punch to the dog, the anticipation movement is him pulling back his arm with the center of gravity on the left feet, in order to gain the energy for the major movement, which in here is the punch.

Similar to this sample, nearly every single movement have anticipation, for example before start running, we shrink the body to the back and then start running. Especially in animation, anticipation indicates the next movement of the character, often exaggerated to create dramatic effect.

Flippin Eck

The 12 principles of squash and stretch, timing and spacing are involved in the process of making the flipping book, as follows. In both of my flipping books, the objects are balls.

12 Principles - 1 Squash and Stretch

The first principle of the Disney's 12 principles is squash and stretch of objects in the animation, which is the basic rule that must be applied when producing animation. It is common in daily life but as in animation, it is exaggerated into a certain degree, such as the example I've put, from the book the Animator's survival kit.

Applying the principle to characters with muscles is developed from the same principle but with arms and legs, which all follows the rule, the body of the character can be simplified into a ball, with the same property of the bouncing ball of the last example. In this piece of example the red lines clearly demonstrates the stretch of character's leg when landing and taking off in a jump cycle.

Character Design for the Storyboard

After decided on the story board I'm going to work on, I started to think about the character, if I should leave it as a stick man or give it a more detailed appearance.

Initial Design of the Storyboard

I've roughly planned my storyboard and choose the nursery rhyme pease porridge, and the original is as follows:

"pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, 

  pease porridge in the pot nine days old

                        some like it hot, some like it cold,

                                        some like it in the pot nine days old."

I came up with a few initial ideas, and this is the one I did the rough story board on post-it note.

The Lion King

An extraction of the storyboard of the Lion King

This is the very first animation film that I've watched when I was little. 

As it is a animation with dialogues, instead of putting caption, dialogues are annotated, information is delivered effectively, almost like reading a graphic novel. The expressions of the characters are well presented in an identical Disney style, the character in some panels even comes out of the box in order to include the whole character.

Up

Up is one of the films that most move me for its wild imagination and the fascinating story line.

On the hand of the production process, evaluating the storyboard of Up, instead of just capturing key frames, the panels of the storyboard are intense with a continuous pattern which can even form a flip book itself. the advantage is that they can be easily grouped and analysed of its needing of existence, just like on the image that I've included in the post.

A grey scale storyboard demonstrates a better form, because it does not need to be distinct as the impact is to communicate ideas. A bit of red is involved in the last few panels, as a great way of highlighting his expression in an grey scaled piece.

Spirit

It is not the first cartoon film that I've watched, but it has been my favorite movie during almost all of my childhood. In the recent research of story boards, I was lucky  to find the whole storyboard and recall the memory of first watching this movie.The quality of the pictures is blurry and were individual pictures, so I reorganized the storyboard into a easier understood form. 

A horse, the main character of the film, a range of research is complete in order to make the movements of a creature other than human beings looks realistic. Depending on the target context of an animation, it is essential for any projects on the aspect of backup researching. It was done by pencil but with quality of accurate lines to express the scene in imagination in the first place. The slight blend of color gives a delicate outcome.

All fundamental elements, the carefully chosen camera angle and the transform of each scene made this a great film which I feel so lucky that I've not missed it.

My Kindom

The impact of the storyboard interests me for both films and animations, which demonstrates not only the ability of narrating but the communication between the production group as well. These are sections from the storyboard of the movie My Kingdom.
The caption in-between demonstrates the camera movement and the minor details of the scene where the image is unable to.

Similar to a storyboard of an animation, it delivers the accurate movement of the camera with arrows to the production group. The second panel of the storyboard is slightly longer than the others, which is because it's a shot includes the whole group of people with the camera moved from right to left, in order to show the size of the crowd.

Tonynest

This is one of the practice story board by a Chinese artist named Tonynest.

What I like about this storyboard is it communicate well even without annotation. The key panels are picked precisely to demonstrate the story line in a effective way, arrows are placed to help the understanding of the movements of the characters. He also wisely applied the shift and the cut of the camera to reach the purpose of narrating the story effectively. The extreme close shots are applied in appropriate situations to make the scene have even more visual impact.

First few panels express the thoughts of the woman which is the scene if she falls down are painted into a grey tone, which I think is a good way to determined the difference with the other panels if the story board is done in grey scale.