The Astronomer's Sun - a new stopmotion film

Jessica Cope & Simon Cartwright - two friends I met at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) - have recently completed their new short animated film, The Astronomer's Sun; and if you're in the UK there is every chance that you can watch it at a cinema near you over the coming weeks as part of the British Animation Awards 'Public Choice' screenings.

Jess & Si both graduated from ECA in 2008 after producing their graduation films: The Owl House and Splendid Isolation respectively.
The Owl House was screened at the Flip Festival in Wolverhampton at the beginning of November 2008, was nominated for a BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award in March 2009, and went on to get screened in the McLaren Animation Awards programme at the 2009 Edinburgh International Film Festival.

A short time later Jess & Si won a commission from 4Mations Digital Shorts to create one of 13 "ambitious, original and thought-provoking animated short films from new and emerging animators" with backing from the UK Film Council's New Cinema Fund, Channel 4, and Screen Yorkshire.
The resulting film is The Astronomer's Sun - a 6 minute stopmotion film in the wonderful trademark style of Jessica Cope, about "a young man who visits an abandoned observatory to confront memories of his past and follow his father on a journey into the unknown".
Stills, production photos, and further information about the film can be found on its production blog at: http://theastronomerssun.blogspot.com


Their film is showing in Programme 3 of the British Animation Awards, where the audience will get to vote for the best piece of animation in various categories. And after the votes from all 27 screenings across the UK are counted, the most popular piece from each category will be declared the winner at the British Animation Awards ceremony later this year.
Interestingly, each winner receives as their trophy an original piece of sheep-inspired artwork* created by notable artists from the animation industry: Previous contributing artists include, amongst many others, Nick Park and Tim Burton!
You can see all the previous trophies in the Awards Gallery of the British Animation Awards website here.
*("Sheep-inspired trophies" are due to the fact that the initials of British Animation Awards is "BAA" - which is commonly known as the sound of a sheep's bleating).

Amongst the other nominated animations are:
The 2009 OSCAR-nominated This Way Up (Smith & Faulkes, Nexus),
Simon's Cat - 'TV Dinners' (Simon Tofield, Tandem Films),
Codswollop (The Brothers McLeod),
Fields of Vision (Rob Zywietz),
The Black Dog's Progress (Stephen Irwin, Animate Projects),
Coldplay's Strawberry Swings music video (Shynola, RSA Films),
several Cadbury's Creme Egg adverts (Chris Cairns, Partizan),
and the CompareTheMarket.com Jingle advert [AKA: the original "Compare The Meerkat" advert] (Darren Walsh, Passion Pictures).

To see a full list of all the animations that are showing in each of the three British Animation Awards programmes over the coming weeks, please visit: http://www.britishanimationawards.com/public_choice2010.htm

The Astronomer's Sun will be screened as part of Programme 3, which is screening at the Filmhouse cinema, Edinburgh on Wednesday 24th February. Tickets for this screening will be available to buy online from the Filmhouse website here.

The other 26 national screenings will take place at the following locations:
Belfast, Bournemouth, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Derby, Dundee, Exeter, Falmouth, Farnham, Glasgow, Harrow, Lincolnshire, London, Liverpool, Maidstone, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Norwich, Ormskirk, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Staffordshire, Totnes, and Wolverhampton.
To read the full list of Dates & Venues for each programme screening, please visit: http://www.britishanimationawards.com/Venues_playdates.htm

If you're interested in this, please try to attend one of the screenings, and then help out Jess & Si by voting for The Astronomer's Sun.


Images copyright of: The Astronomer's Sun, 2010.
Images used with permission from Jessica Cope.

UPDATE - 9 October 2010:

The Astronomer's Sun was broadcast by Channel 4 for the first time on Thursday 7 October, and for the next month it can be viewed on Channel 4's 4OD (4 On Demand) internet screening service by clicking here.

Fool Moon (animated graduation film, 2008)

Here's Aaron Johnston's fun short animated graduation film Fool Moon, which I worked on as Colouring Assistant during my 3rd Year at ECA in 2007/2008.

It's a comedy about a football-mad boy and his pet monkey searching for a ball-shaped object to use as a football on their native desert island, but after various mishaps they set their sights on capturing the moon.



This is one of the six animated graduation films that I was credited for working on during 2008, and is the first to make a full appearance on the Internet.

Synesthesia experiment hailed by iotaCenter

An experimental/abstract animation that I made in February 2008 for part of my 3rd Year Animation course at ECA has been noticed by the iotaCenter on Vimeo, and has been added to their Experimental Animation album on the site.

The iotaCenter is "a public benefit arts organization devoted to Abstract Cinema and Visual Music". They have an extensive collection of writings, original research, (and even DVDs for sale); which I found useful for researching some of my final year dissertation. Their description for the Experimental Animation album that recognises my video on Vimeo reads:

"iotaCenter is interested in both new and classic works being created and uploaded to Vimeo. Here we'll keep a list of those works we found to be unique".

My featured work [embedded below] is a 19 second experimental animation called Synesthesia Animated, which utilises an audio clip of the song Drive (Orchestral Live Version) by Incubus from the album Make Yourself: Tour Edition.

The animation sequence was composed over 2 weeks to synchronise with (and visually interpret) the elements of the audiotrack as I heard them.
The visuals are made from about 80 abstract watercolour paintings on 4" pieces of card, using a technique similar to cameraless animation - where I created each frame of animation without tracing the layout from the previous frame.
This technique causes the visuals to have a looseness that would be missing if the frames were traced, while the watercolours further enhance the vibrancy of the animation, which I think nicely reflects the audio.

Surprisingly, as of June 2009, there are only 5 videos in the album, but it is very nice to get recognised by the iotaCenter for creating a 'unique' piece of work...
I'd like to extend my gratitude to Murray Dalgleish for lending me the Tour Edition album, and to Alison Cross for lending me the Make Yourself album (as well as the S.C.I.E.N.C.E album) for the same project a week earlier than Murray.

Pigment of Imagination: Summary

Andy Macpherson's debut film Pigment of Imagination was produced as part of his final year course work at Edinburgh College of Art for a BA (Hons) degree in Visual Communication (specialising in Animation).
It is a 3 minute animated suspense film inspired by the work of Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, I Confess) and Jean-Luc Godard (Bande a Part, Alphaville), with many other eclectic influences helping to further enhance the unique style of the work.

The story follows a young woman searching for her lost beagle in a spooky old mansion, unaware of the psychotic artist lurking behind one of the many doors.

Produced over an 8 month period from November 2008-June 2009, the film utilised live-action referencing similar to A-Ha’s Take On Me music video, and was drawn with black ballpoint pen on A6 paper to create a vibrant and much-praised visual style.
The drawn animation frames interact with watercolour backgrounds that are painted under Expressionist influence in order to enhance the unique visual style of the overall film and break away from the constraints of modern commercial animation.
Further to this, digital shortcuts were kept to a bare minimum during the production of this film, and assistance from other people was restricted in order to keep the film looking as personal and as hand-made as possible. This makes the film look like a piece of traditional artwork and helps to counter the commercial industry’s reliance upon CGI for almost everything these days, which this director feels is ruining the magic of film and television.

A 30 second trailer for Pigment of Imagination is embedded below, and more of his video work is available to view on both his YouTube profile and Vimeo profile.


Pigment of Imagination premiered on Screen 1 of the Filmhouse cinema (Edinburgh), on Monday 15th June 2009 as part of the Edinburgh College of Art animation degree show 2009, and had a repeat screening on Tuesday 16th June 2009.

His full film (plus a small selection of portfolio work) was on display along with the work of another 12 animators and 400 other graduating artists as part of the Edinburgh College of Art 2009 degree show held from 13th-23rd June.


The full film will be available to view online late-2009...

UPDATE: Please click here to watch the full film on YouTube.

Filmhouse premiere

We finally had our big Animation premiere at the Filmhouse cinema in Edinburgh on Monday night.
Despite having my debut film on show for everyone to see, the evening didn't feel particularly special to me, and when my film came on I felt really laid-back (despite expecting to be a nervous wreck)!
I'm also disappointed that the duration of our film show was so short (I don't know exactly how it compares to other years, but it certainly seemed to be over much quicker than previous years)... Although I suppose it is better that it feels compact than for it to seem to be dragging on and on.

I'd like to thank everyone who has spoken to me about my film after seeing it (either at the Filmhouse, or at our degree show exhibition space in the Evolution House cafe); but I'd particularly like to thank Hazel Leszczynska because she is the only one so far to have given me some criticism (and it isn't like I didn't try to get people to say bad things)!
My preference for criticism may seem odd to many people (particularly those at ECA), but I strongly believe that you can learn/improve a lot more from criticism than from positive comments... After all if you only ever hear about the same old good things then you are less aware of what people don't like/understand, and are therefore going to find it harder to mitigate in your future work.

10 Steps To Succeed: A Guide For Future 4th Years

I've learnt a lot over the past 3 years from helping lots of 4th Year animation students, and now that I've gone through 4th Year myself, I thought it'd be a nice idea to share some of my insight here so that future 4th Year animation students can make their final year at ECA as straight-forward as possible. So here it goes:

1) Do your research, and LOTS of research! The word 'research' can be used for everything, so use it as an excuse to watch loads of films or do all kinds of bizarre things...
Animation does not, and like any art form, should not, be confined to influences from within its own circle: If animation is influenced by animation how far can you really develop it?
For sure there is an incredible variety of styles within animation, but you can get much more out of the original source (eg: painting, illustration, photography, graffiti) rather than from an animation source that has taken those original influences and filtered them down to a fraction of the brilliance of the original art forms.
You can then use all your influences to fully develop your own style and create something new, which deviates from the stereotypical. This is exactly what the examiners are looking for when they assess your work, so make sure you give them plenty of it in your end-of-year portfolio if you want to get the best grade you could hope to achieve... (Just make sure you document why it influenced you, and how you developed it into your own work within your portfolio).

2)Try to experience using various different animation techniques before starting 4th Year. Not only is it going to be an interesting experience, but it can be vital to how your film turns out too...
If you've only ever done one type of animation then you don't know about the potential you have with other techniques. Likewise if you've tried lots of different techniques you will have the knowledge to decide which is best suited to your temperament and/or which is best suited to telling the story of your graduation project. It certainly isn't worth sticking with one particular technique just because you prefer it/because it suits the story/because it is quicker or easier... You should try to strike a balance between all the important factors (your interests/the artistic potential/time available/costs/requirements/etc).

3) Try to learn about all the software available to you before starting 4th Year. I went into 4th Year with a project proposal stating that I wanted to make 4th Year as slow and challenging for myself as possible, therefore I intentionally avoided digital shortcuts (like AfterEffects) in order to do as much of my film by hand as possible; but in that process I missed the opportunity to learn how to use AfterEffects properly (which is not good for my CV).
By learning about all the different software available at college before starting 4th Year you can make informed decisions about what is the best way to achieve whatever you are trying to create; you don't have to waste time learning the software during your already busy 4th Year; and choosing to use programmes like ToonBoom or TVPaint (which currently seems to get ignored at eca) could save you a massive amount of time during production in comparison to Photoshop.
I would certainly recommend TVPaint (available on some of the college computers) for everyone who plans on doing a drawn film with traditional cel-style colouring (similar to Scooby-Doo) because it only takes half an hour to get used to it, and thereafter it takes seconds to colour each frame, which in comparison to Photoshop could save you at least a minute per frame!

4) Start thinking about your film as soon as possible. In other words, start working on your 4th Year film as soon as 3rd Year is finished (if not earlier), and spend as much time as you can afford during the summer holidays developing your ideas so that they can get as much development as possible. This way you can get the most out of your ideas without worrying about the limited time you have left, or worrying about your CVCS projects on top of your animation projects (as will happen once Term 1 begins).

5) Don't begin work on your CVCS project until Term 1 begins. It may seem like a good idea to get the less enjoyable part of the course [if that's what you think of CVCS] out of the way as soon as possible so that you can spend all your time in college working on your animation; but in reality when you return to college you will be asked to write a short proposal for CVCS, and for the remainder of term 1 you will be given SO MUCH really beneficial advice and unknown research topics from the staff that all the work you had done over summer will become pretty pointless - and you will then regret not spending that time on your film instead!

6) Get a good idea of your story and/or technique before the end of 3rd Year. That way you can get vital feedback and advice from the staff and/or current 4th Years before leaving for the summer, and you will have a good idea whether your concepts are possible or not. From this you can discover how much potential your ideas have from an early point and develop them from there, rather than spend all summer working on an idea only to discover 3 months later that it won't be possible to pull off successfully.
Ideally you should have a film concept with as much pre-production complete as possible before returning to college in September. If you can create a portfolio with the basic script, visual designs, storyboards, etc, by the middle of October then you will be in the best possible position for getting the most out of your remaining time at college (the time flies past incredibly quickly!).

7) Don't be afraid to make drastic changes. No matter how much work you have put into the project, don't be afraid of making drastic changes because they can lead to much greater end results - but don't change things constantly all through the year or use it as an excuse for unfinished work!
If you are not happy with your project there might be something small that is not noticeable to you, but very obvious to outsiders - so seek their advice. If you feel that your idea is constricting your artistic capabilities then at the very least take a short time to check if there is something new that will get more out of you, because not only will it result in a better film at the end, but it will also be more enjoyable to work on too.

8) Work in stages. After writing your script and completing the storyboard animatic do everything else in stages so that you've always got a full story to show (regardless of how it looks). This allows you to check how well the story actually works, means you can do editing all through the year, and means that if you run out of time at the end of the year you at least have the full film available for assessment without it looking too jumbled or confusing.
I'd suggest having the animatic assembled at final screen resolution (eg: 1020x576 at 150dpi) first of all. Then go through the animatic doing rough animation for all the shots - adding them to the animatic as you go. After the rough animation is complete you will have an animated version of the film, which gives a very strong idea of how the film will play, and will allow outsiders to give critical feedback without misunderstanding things as they might do with a crudely drawn animatic.
Next do cleaned-up animation for all the shots (starting with the most valuable shots, leaving the least important shots until the end), and add these to the animatic as you go...
Finally do the colouring, texturing, backgrounds, or whatever else you want to have, and continue doing those in stages too.
When colouring, go through the entire shot with one colour at a time, and then go back and do the next colour for the entire shot, and so on and so on... This process saves you a bit of time per frame because you only need to pick the different colours once each for the entire shot, instead of once each for every frame. It may not seem like much time to save, but over the course of your entire film it will be a very substantial saving.
Likewise, if you plan to add digital textures and other smaller details that affect the aesthetics, but which don't particularly enhance the film (ie: things that aren't vital to the story), leave them until the rest of the film is fully finished. This will allow you to dedicate all your time to the most important things so that by the deadline you have a film that appears to be complete even if you have not finished it to your original plans... (And you can always continue working on those smaller details after the assessment deadline if you want).

9) Say goodbye to any social life you had. 4th Year is almost certainly going to require much more work than any other year of your life - and if it doesn't then you haven't pushed your project far enough; so you can pretty much say goodbye to living a normal social life for this year. Some animation techniques will give you more room for error than others, but regardless of how long you expect your film to take to complete, don't say to yourself "I'll just cram more in towards the end".
You have the entire year (October-May) to work on your film, so use it! It will be easier to cram as much of your work into the early stages of the year than to try cramming everything into the last few months - when you will have even more than just your film to concentrate on... (I originally predicted my film to be fully rotoscoped by the middle of March because it was such a quick process, but it was also very tedious and didn't look how I really wanted, so in reality I was just trundling along while putting things off to try finding a better solution, and in the end I was still animating at the start of May - which I really regret with hindsight!)
You will probably need to spend term 1 on pre-production balanced with your CVCS project, and don't waste your CVCS project because it could bring in valuable marks at the end of the year to mitigate if anything goes wrong with your animation project.
During Term 2 you should spend all your time on the animation project because it is the only time during the year that you will have completely free for it. At this point you should also begin arranging helpers, sound designers, and whoever else to work on your project because help is always a very valuable resource (and it's better to have that from an early stage than only during the last few weeks). Sound designers and composers will need a full version of your film before they can do audio work, and they usually prefer to work towards the end of your year, so try to get most of your film (if not all of it) complete before the beginning of term 3.
Term 3 is the final 5 weeks of your project when everything becomes more frantic. As well as working on your film, you will need to: write loads of things for the degree show and press release forms; spend time working with sound designers and composers; compile your full years work into a professionally-presented portfolio for the assessments; finish writing/printing/binding your production diary (depending on whether you write it by hand or type it on the computer); designing postcards and/or business cards; designing and printing your DVD presentation; create a trailer for the degree show catalogue; and a load of other little things that the college will demand are mandatory...
No matter how organised you are, there are always these little things that are likely to get forgotten or in the way of "more important" work; and although you can't ignore them, it really does make life so much easier if you get things planned and done within plenty of time. Term 3 will be stressful enough, so don't leave things to the last minute - particularly because things tend to take longer than you'd expect (who could ever have imagined it would take me over 12 hours to satisfactorily bind 6 production diaries?!), and you can't account for all kinds of potential problems (computer crashes, corrupt files, printing errors, low printer cartridges/no replacement cartridges, misplaced documents, forgotten showreel, mislabeled DVDs...).

10) Seek assistance (or if you are not in 4th Year, try to assist the 4th Years). Over the past 3 years I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to help other students from outside of my own year group, and I cannot stress enough exactly how useful those experiences were!
In 2nd Year I did most of the scanning for Lora Jensen's film, and from that I discovered how much physical work is involved in creating a 'short' film - it was unbelievable... Even at the end of my 4th Year I still can't comprehend the vast amount of paper that has been used for my 4 minute film; and the hours required to pull it off can be overwhelming if you are not prepared...
In 3rd Year I got to do a wide variety of tasks with the 4th Years, which meant that before I had even finished 3rd Year I had very strong knowledge of everything that needs to be done during 4th Year, and it helped me plan everything for my 4th Year to near-perfection (there are always some things that don't go to plan)!
I have always had very strong motivation, a willingness to work all hours (if required), and a curiosity to see exactly how much work/stress I can put myself under before giving up, so I had always planned on doing my 4th Year film without any assistance, and although I did to some extent achieve it (I was up for 61 hours straight by the end of the final day, having never even done 40 hours before) I don't think it was worthwhile... The self-satisfaction I received from managing to make my entire film by myself before the deadline is almost non-existent; I didn't enjoy the emptiness of working on my own all year; and I could have developed my leadership skills by getting others involved in the production of my film (which is always good for ye olde CV); and by allowing others to help you then if nothing else, you can at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you have given others some very valuable experience and possibly assisted in the development of their own work.


___________________________________________________

Here are some quotes from others in the department that I found useful:

- “If I can give you one piece of advice; it’s to start planning it all right now [May - end of 3rd Year], and make sure that you’ve got the story, the style, the process, EVERYTHING, completely sorted out before October. That way you can get as much time as possible to work on the animation. I always thought to myself in 3rd Year, 'Gosh, how are they all struggling to finish? They’ve had all year to work on it, why are they finding it so hard?'
Don’t do what I did, and keep putting it off - start planning now, and then get started right away. I’m now in the situation where I left it so late, that I am at the end of the year and I’ve only completed half of the animation” (Louis Hudson, 23/05/08)

- “I think it’s best to just pick a simple concept right from the beginning. Many people go into 4th year expecting to produce a 10-minute masterpiece [of the quality like Disney, Petrov, or Burton] and then they realize much later that they won’t be able to achieve it, and they have to cut it all right down – which ruins the story... It’s only a student film after all, it’s not a big expensive industry film.
At the start of the year, mine was the shortest at 3.5 minutes, but even I’ve had to cut it down, so I think the final animation is going to be about 2.5 minutes - and that includes the titles and credits” (Erica Weiste, 21/04/08)

- “Make a strict timetable at the start of the year, and remember to factor in CVCS, holidays, illness, fashion show, problems, etc… You don’t really begin animating until the middle of term 2, and then you’re really pushing time” (Grace Chan, 08/12/07)

- “It’s good that you’ve found something that you enjoy doing and is interesting to watch [the paint on glass animation]. After all, if you need to do the entire film in a style you don’t enjoy then it’s going to show in your film. If you enjoy doing what you’re doing, then you’re going to enjoy the film, and the audience will appreciate it all the more too” (Aaron Johnston/Erica Weiste/Neil Kempsell, April 08)

- “We as an art college, should be striving to produce innovative, exciting new works; and be attempting to break new ground for the future animators… We shouldn’t be trying to imitate someone else in the professional world, or settle for what we know and have access to. We are the explorers of today (like Lye, McLaren, or Disney were in the past). We have the rest of our careers to comply with the industry and do as someone else tells us, but for just now, as students, we should do what we want to do” (Neil Kempsell, 14/04/08)

- There’s no longer enough time to do what I was hoping to achieve. So I’m just going to have to cut it down, simplify it all, and struggle on… It’s a lot to do in the time we have” (Alison Cross, 15/04/08)

- “I hope that I can get it finished on time; I think I will be able to do it… I’ve only got two scenes left to animate, but I’m already 2 weeks behind schedule. I’m just grateful that you’ve been able to help, because that would probably be another two weeks of 24 hour Photoshopping!” (Erica Weiste, 21/04/08)

- The animation is getting easier, but there’s still so much to do that it will mean not sleeping for the next few weeks” (Alison Cross, 24/04/08)

- “That room has changed you all” [the stopmotion animators]. “You’re not even a shadow of your former selves” (Simon Cartwright to Jessica Cope, 23/05/08)

Back to my good ol' ways

Last year (by that I mean my 3rd Year at eca) I spent much of my time helping lots of my friends in the year above me with their graduation films. Their deadline was on Friday 23rd, which means that tomorrow will be the first anniversary of that occasion. On this night last year I was completing my final bit of assistance for those friends by designing & printing the DVD presentation of Alison Cross' graduation film Tale Soup. Since then I have offered assistance to some of my classmates, but due to all the work I had to do for my own film I've not been able to do anywhere near as much as I did last year. However today was just like back in the good ol' days...

I went into college for a 10 minute meeting with staff as part of my assessment, and then I spent the rest of the day helping my postgraduate friend Nicole Volbeda with her Masters project called Lilly. (Click here for Nicole's blog about the project).

Nicole briefly taught me how to use TVPaint, and then gave me a bunch of shots to colour. The process was really straightforward after I familiarised myself with the programme, and before long I was colouring like a semi-pro. (I was going to say pro, but there's probably a bunch of keyboard shortcuts I've not figured out yet, so that statement would be a lie)...
She has added the latest draft version of her project (featuring some of my colouring) to YouTube for everyone to see; so I've embedded it below.


It was nice to get back to working with others again, but I'm surprised that the college never used TVPaint before now... It is really simple to use and (compared to Photoshop) would have saved my classmates SO MUCH time if we had been taught it before starting 4th Year*. (Take note future 4th Years!)

hmm... deadlines, posters, and confusion

One of my sources in the eca Jewellery department is quoted as saying "Degree show crunch time has hit ECA hard" (Fools Gold, 2009), but I have not realised any change... The animation department is near empty, and I still feel little stress).
There is only 15 days until the assessment deadline, and like my source at Fools Gold I got nothing done yesterday in terms of studio work. Instead I spent all day doing things that I don't remember, but which seemed important at the time, and then I stayed up all nite (from midnight-7am) trying to create the first version of my film poster for the eca Design school degree show catalogue (which nobody has been given definite instructions for)... Last nite I was aware that our image for the catalogue had to be 30cms tall at 300dpi and in portrait format, which therefore renders all my animation stills useless as they are only 12cms long at 150dpi and in landscape format). I therefore made what seemed like a sensible decision, and decided to create my film poster now so that it can be used for this catalogue as well as for the degree show exhibition.
I created my poster in a painted/design style inspired by classic film posters such as Jules et Jim, Les Quatre Cents Coups, Casablanca, Contempt, La Fiancee du Diable, La Strada, Nosferatu The Vampyre, Questa e La Mia Vita, The Trouble With Harry, and especially Psycho)... Below is my poster design as it currently looks, but I'm going to improve the fonts, repair the badly Photoshopped painting, and hopefully add more useful names to the list on the right hand side at a later stage...

After spending the best part of 9 valuable hours over two days on this poster for the Design school degree show catalogue, I received an e-mail from staff stating that there is a possibility that we, as filmmakers, may be getting permission to use our native landscape format instead of being forced into a portrait format - but we will find out for definite tomorrow (which seems a bit daft, after all that is just a day before our original catalogue image hand-in deadline)! If the powers that be decide to change their minds about the format of our pictures, it means that the time I spent making my poster was a waste of important rotoscoping and sleeping time (cos my workload obviously isn't yet stressful enough for me to go completely without sleep until the deadline)...

Congratulations

I've had some great news over the past few weeks from several friends, so here I would like to share the excitement, spread the good news for those of you not yet aware of it, and to congratulate each of them...

Jessica Cope has been nominated for a BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award in the Animation category on Thursday for her graduation film The Owl House.

Johanna Wagner's Masters degree film The Inner Shape (for which I created a Paint on Glass animation sequence) was also nominated for a BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award, but in the Factual category.

And finally, Lora Jensen (whose film I scanned two years ago) worked on This Way Up directed by Smith & Foulkes at Nexus Productions in London. This Way Up was nominated for an OSCAR in the Short Film (Animated) category, but lost out on Sunday to La Maison en Petits Cubes.

Well done to each of you for your achievements so far, and thanks for all the experiences you each gave me during our time together at eca.


UPDATE (21 March 2009):
Jess lost out in the BAFTA's Animation category to Julia McLean's The Finger Trap.

Johanna won the BAFTA's Factual category.

Influences part 1: eca animation dept

The opening post dedicated to my artistic influences is in regard to the animation department at Edinburgh College of Art, because without it my knowledge of animation would barely reach past anything further than Disney, Hanna-Barbera, and The Simpsons.
Through the tutors and my classmates I have learnt about the wide variety of ways in which animation can be used, and how animated works can look like something other than an anthropomorphic blob of flat colour with a black outline... For example: the cool music videos by Michel Gondry; the highly artistic Paint on Glass films of Aleksandr Petrov; the beguiling films of Yuri Norstein; and the abstract craziness of Norman McLaren or Len Lye...
I have been able to work on many graduation films directed by my friends in the years above me, which has given me a lot of experiences and useful advice about how to make my own graduation film this year. Many of those friends have, in some way, helped to develop my graduation film (through their art, their advice, or both), so here I shall praise them:

Erica Weiste:
I did most of the scanning and colouring on Erica's lovely little graduation film The Gardener. Erica has one of the nicest drawing styles I have seen in animation; I just wish the Photoshopping didn't hide the beautiful line quality - but it's still a really nice film. The Gardener has been screened at the Flip Festival in Wolverhampton (England) and at the Kettupäivät Film Festival in Helsinki (Finland) both during November 2008. Working with Erica throughout the last year was a wonderful experience, and I would love to work with her again in the future.
My work with Erica last year has given me an extremely accurate timetable for all the scanning that I will need to do in my own film [does anyone want to test it to the nearest minute?], and she introduced me to some of the animators who I have found to be influential on my own work - such as Piotr Dumala and Michael Dudok de Wit. While I was searching for Dumala's version of Crime & Punishment (after Erica told me about it) I stumbled across the live-action film by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki - who has also become a big film influence on me recently!

Alison Cross:
Ally made the beautiful 2D stopmotion film Tale Soup (in a style loosely similar to the work of Yuri Norstein). Although not complete, the film is visually stunning and is my favourite from last year [sorry to disappoint the rest of her class!].
Ally had a lot of great story ideas, was always friendly and approachable (even after spending a full month working RIDICULOUSLY hard on her film prior to the deadline), and she is also [to some extent] responsible for the sarcastic humour that I developed throughout the last year ("Ally, I've bought you a cake for your birthday. But I ate it"). This sarcastic humour culminated with my pitch for a short film called The Invisible Cat "where you see nothing, it's just a blank screen... but you might hear some cat sounds"). As I have written in an earlier post, Ally had a lot of those cool 3D bookcover photographs by Thomas Allen as research, and she did some early visual tests for her film using illustrations by Arthur Rackham - whose work recently influenced the drawing style of the storyboards for my graduation film.

Jessica Cope:
Jess has a really cool expressionist style in all her artwork, which I have always found really interesting. Her influences (as listed on the BBC Film Network) include Edward Gorey, Brian Froud, and Tim Burton - each of which I have found relevant to the development of my graduation film to various extents. I helped Jess with her 3rd Year museum project for the 20 Years Of Pixar exhibition when I was in 2nd Year, and through that work I learnt how to set-up the scanner for animation, how to colour frames of animation with Photoshop, and how her film would later get edited together in Premiere and AfterEffects (things I would otherwise not have known much about until at least a year later!) Jess' great graduation film The Owl House was a big influence on my desire to produce a 3D stopmotion film this year, but the story for my film no longer suits that technique, so regrettably I won't be doing it this year...
(Jess can share with Ally part of the responsibility for my sarcastic humour leading up to The Invisible Cat; so thanks you two, I really enjoyed last year!)

Lynn Gerlach:
Lynn came to eca on exchange from HGK in Luzern (Switzerland) for two terms of 3rd Year while I was in 2nd Year. Lynn was not here for very long, but she left a big impressions on me - I was fascinated with the film she made for the museum project (a 2D stopmotion style like Tale Soup but with a Japanese theme), she gave me lots of critical/interesting feedback about animation that I have not had from anyone else in Edinburgh, and she introduced me to the conceptual animations of Paul Bush (a part-time tutor at HGK) which uses various unusual techniques that I would like to experiment with at some point in the future.

Julia Petitperrin:
Since helping Julia with her graduation film Another Nasty Little Character last year I have realised that it can offer me a lot of relevant experience for my graduation film. Julia used an unusual colouring method for her film - of rendering everything in a minimalist grey/black tone with crosshatched pencil or ballpoint pen over a plain white background.
She was animating on 12" animation paper, whereas I plan on animating with a 35mm field size, but Julia's loose rendering style is directly linked to the look of my film. The colouring is voluminous and the lines are very noticeable, yet rather than looking messy and abstract, it created a very vibrant aesthetic for the film. With my film I plan on drawing with ballpoint pens on a much smaller scale than Julia, therefore on the cinema screen my film should also look really vibrant. However I am slightly concerned that my drawing style could become too vibrant and therefore make the film look really abstract - as I had initially feared would happen to Julia's film.

I will also mention:
- Lora Jensen whose graduation film Harold & Margaret I worked on while in 2nd Year, and which was recently screened at the Exposures Film Festival in Manchester. Lora's colouring technique inspired some of the colouring techniques that I later experimented with in my own work during 3rd Year.

- Bob Robinson and his graduation film STYX, which was shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June 2008.
Bob recently e-mailed me some photos of the miniature sets that he built for his film and also gave me some advice about how to do it effectively because I was planning on incorporating a similar technique into my film.

- Ewan Green who has been a great classmate since 1st Year, always has lots of constructive feedback, and was a strong director when we worked together on a project for the 2007 Degree Show in 2nd Year.

- Our tutor Alan Mason who almost always persists with his Friday Film Show, and which has over the course of the past 3 years slowly been responsible for me spending a ridiculous amount of time and money buying/renting/watching films. I barely had any films on VHS or DVD when I was in 1st Year at eca, and my cultural acknowledgment of film back then probably went from the odd mainstream cinema release to Aardman animations on TV with little else in between! Nowadays I have a bookcase stacked full (and then some more) with DVDs and a few VHS tapes of films from countries including: Japan, Finland, Germany, and France - with directors such as Kaurismäki, Tarantino, Godard, Hitchcock, and Burton... (Don't ask me what my favourite type of film is, because thanks to Alan I now watch just about anything)!

- Dr Jonny Murray for the last two years of CVCS seminars/lectures. [In 1st Year and 2nd Year I never thought I would want to thank somebody who tries to lecture us about Modernism and Postmodernism and other random modern art nonsense; but for these last two years Jonny has been providing us with much more stimulating seminars focusing on Film & Animation]. 3rd Year's What's Up Doc? Introducing Animation module was interesting, and the big bad 4th Year project was great! Not only did the lectures/seminars get better as each year progressed, but they gradually became more and more relevant to my own studio work by critically analyzing processes and debating the reasons for animation being the way it is today... Unfortunately my CVCS research has given me a huge prejudice against all CGI work, but I'm now trying to remedy this.

Why CGI will never fully replace traditional stopmotion

How Pixar’s “Cars” reflects upon our fondness for nostalgia, and therefore describing how stopmotion films like “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” will continue to succeed in the age of CGI.”

The success of CGI animated films has led to traditional forms of animation, such as cel animation and stopmotion, being considered “a dying art” (Depp, 2005); and the increasing cost of traditionally animated film-making had led Walt Disney Feature Animation to convert from its traditional cel animation technique to full-CGI (StudioBriefing, 12th March 2004). This is verified by Jill Goldsmith (2004) who reported that Chicken Little would be Disney’s “first computer animated picture sans Pixar”. As a result, Disney’s animation studio in Orlando was shut down after the completion of one of its last hand-drawn films Brother Bear (StudioBriefing, 25th March 2004). Meanwhile a seperate report stated that Walt Disney Feature Animation (now known as Disney Animation Studios) “will sometimes produce hand-drawn toons (sic), such as 2009's The Frog Princess” (Garrett and McClintock, 2007).
The fact that Disney - possibly the world’s best-known traditional animation company - chose to abandon cel animation shows that CGI is becoming so dominant within today’s animation market that it threatens the existence of traditional forms of animation.
Excluding the two stopmotion films from 2005 (Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-rabbit, and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride) it personally seems - through looking at the List Of Animated Feature-Length Films on Wikipedia (16th March 2008) - as though the last major/notable traditionally animated feature film (that does not rely on lots of in-computer drawing and colouring) from out-with Disney or Japanese animation was produced in 1996 with the cel-animated Beavus & Butt-head Do America, or the stopmotion/live-action film James And The Giant Peach (produced by Tim Burton).
The decline of traditional animation techniques in any format (whether being adverts, children’s television, a cartoon series, or feature film) can mainly be attributed to the breakthrough in 1995 of the world’s first completely CGI animated feature film Toy Story, created by Pixar. Since then, it seems as though almost every major animation studio has attempted a CGI film (Holson, 3rd October 2006), or at least heavily incorporated the use of computers into their animation process (either for drawing, colouring, compositing, or post-production editing).
Although CGI can produce animations of a fantastic quality (any work by Pixar would be a fine example) it is also all-too-often responsible for producing work which, despite its sophisticated graphics, is heavily compromised (Hittle quoted in Frierson, 1998. Pg 183) by a lacking sense of character or life (Svankmajer quoted in Steinhart, 2002) that traditional techniques almost always exuded. A simple comparison of the different methods employed in creating children’s television shows is a perfect example of this now that several of the old, traditionally-animated shows that were once popular long-running series have recently been re-created in CGI and began to lose their original personality (Magic Roundabout, Scooby-Doo, and Mickey Mouse are examples of recent CGI conversions that have, to various extents, failed to recreate the original magic).
Unfortunately the large attraction for companies to switch to CGI is because it is usually quicker to produce and a lot cheaper than traditional animation techniques. As a result, CGI is now so commonplace that only the few large-budget CGI productions that can afford to invest in both the aesthetics and the narrative will ever be huge blockbusters – only 3 from the Top 20 computer animations, based on Lifetime Gross, were produced by a studio other than Buena Vista or Dreamworks (Box Office Mojo, 2008); the remaining majority with their smaller budgets, recycled stories, and standard plastic-looking aesthetics will just merge together on the rubbish heap looking like Lego bricks in Legoland.
This is why, when a cel animation or a stopmotion project emerges from between the triliions of pixels that we are subjected to each year, it always feels fresh and ‘new’ (despite having a much longer and more interesting history than CGI), and why we jump at the chance to see it in the cinema; re-hear the same old story of how a stopmotion animator is actually some sort of life-creating God:
"Animators have… recreated for each new generation of filmgoers a myth of the artist as Pygmalion: an ingenious creator who can breathe life into the inanimate using a kind of magical process that is extremely laborious and inaccessible to common people…" (Frierson, 1994. Pg1)
and why we can wallow in nostalgia by watching Blue Peter once again just to see their feature about the stopmotion process (which I remember watching in 1995 when Wallace & Gromit appeared in their third short film A Close Shave, and again in 2005 just before the premiere of their first feature-length film: The Curse of the Were-rabbit).
This point of how we almost always seem to disregard the primitive old world in favour of our exciting, high-tech new world is beautifully portrayed - although rather ironically in this context - within Pixar’s 2006 CGI feature film Cars.
Cars was the 7th feature-length CGI film released by Pixar following on from a number of award-winning animations by Pixar, including Oscars for Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. (AMPAS, 2008)
In Cars we follow the protagonist Lightning McQueen (a rookie racecar challenging for The Piston Cup in a large corporate stockcar championship similar to NASCAR) who gets lost during his transportation to the championship-deciding race, and who ends up trapped in a desolate little village called Radiator Springs, somewhere along Route 66. Despite constantly struggling with his attempts to escape from the quaint little village and get back to his buzzing, high-tech, corporate world of stockcar racing; Lightning gradually realizes that it is “nice to slow down every once in a while” (McQueen, 2006) after having formed close friendships with its simple old citizens, and discovering the beauty of the past.
The film, based on life-experiences of director John Lasseter (2006), is a long winding road of discovery but is essentially just a nostalgic nod back to when the world was simpler and more pleasant, based on the history of American transportation and community.
Although the film - through looking at the deterioration of communities along the now “Historic” Route 66 as a result of the construction of the interstate - is based on Western societies abandonment of our past, it also shows how we can find beauty and solace in the past because it offers an escape from the frantic pace of life in the 21st century, and suggests to us that all those gadgets and materialistic goods do not make us happy.
This theme from within Cars offers an accurate analogy of stopmotion’s place within an animation market saturated by CGI in the 21st Century: we are living within a market filled with modern luxury cars (CGI) where technological advancements make them obsolete within a couple of years, and where simple old classics (stopmotion) are being disregarded, apart from the rare renovation - which in comparison to the modern luxury cars paradoxically looks new, fresh, and exciting.
This analogy reveals that most forms of animation will always have a place within the market as long as producers are prepared to invest in the time and costs involved in using the specific technique, and as long as the market is not already filled with just that one type of product (like CGI has become at the moment).
Due to the high costs, long production time, and precise nature of stopmotion, it has found itself being readily replaced by CGI for convenience. It is fitting that the opening song in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride says:
“It’s a beautiful day... Assuming nothing happens that we don’t really know; that nothing unexpected interferes with the show; And that’s why everything, every last little thing; every single, tiny, microscopic little thing must go; according to plan”.
Although it is a song about the wedding rehearsal for Victor van Dort to Victoria Everglot, the content of the song reflects perfectly the nature of attempting a stopmotion feature in the age of CGI.
“It’s a beautiful day” may be seen as a reference to how nice it is to see a stopmotion feature (or two considering that Wallace & Gromit’s first feature was released a few weeks earlier) within all those CGIs that were released the same year including: Chicken Little – Disney’s first CGI film; Hoodwinked; Madagascar; and The Magic Roundabout – a CGI film version of the classic stopmotion TV series. (Wikipedia, op. cit.)
The rest of that passage could refer to how much planning went into making Corpse Bride, and why if anything went wrong, regardless of how minute the problem, it would have had bigger repercussions on the rest of the film.
John Halas (1987. Pg 166) wrote that for Burton’s earlier stopmotion film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, they had produced 3300 storyboard images amounting to a sketch for every 1.5 seconds of film. That shows just how much planning can be involved in stopmotion projects.
The issues pertaining to stopmotion today have resulted in a perceived willingness by producers to settle with CGI instead of stopmotion. These producers could be linked to lines later in the same opening song of Corpse Bride where it says, “How could our family have come to this? To marry off our daughter to the nouveau riche”. At this point, the ‘family’ would symbolise stopmotion, the ‘daughter’ represents the animation project, and the ‘nouveau riche’ would be a reference to those producers who have acquired wealth through the cost-savings available by giving away stopmotion to CGI.
Despite the modern problems of stopmotion, there are many critics who argue that CGI cannot recreate the textures or even the life that is present in a stopmotion film (Purves, 1996). The ‘life’ in stopmotion perhaps comes from the spontaneous way in which things occur while filming and because, as Purves is quoted as saying (in Furniss, 1998. Pg166), “even the animator cannot exactly predict where the puppet will go”.
Due to this, stopmotion has a “great group and rare group of people” (Burton, 2005) that are still specializing within its field, rather than moving to CGI.
Tim Burton is perhaps one of the most prominent film directors today, and it is his creativity and interest in stopmotion that has helped to bring traditional animation back into the public eye. (Saunders, 2005. Johnson, 2005).
The cult status of both Tim Burton and his various stopmotion projects has shepherded conversations about animation away from the zoo of talking animals that we have been constantly revisiting over the past decade (Holsen, 2006), and has hopefully renewed public interest in both the animation process and the creativity behind it.
Corpse Bride for example, has utilized the old-fashioned method of stopmotion – a technique that is often associated with early cinema’s special effects thanks particularly to the extraordinary work of Willis O’Brien & Ray Harryhausen – but Burton has executed it so flawlessly that it feels as slick as a CGI production (Abbate, 2005) and along with the release of Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit the same month, stopmotion should have had a strong effect on the audience.
Just like in the conclusion to Cars when we see the two modern vehicles (in the form of Lightning McQueen & Sally Carrera) “just going for a drive” along the twisting old roads of Route 66 through the beautiful countryside, and reveling in nostalgia; we can only hope that some of the big CGI studios will divert from their usual highway of modern animation, and try traveling on the back roads of traditional animation where they should not “drive on it to make great time…” but “… drive on it to have a great time” (Carrera, 2006)
But even if those two popular stopmotion films do not encourage a breakaway from CGI in the coming years, at least we have seen that the traditional animation techniques still have a charm and a quality within them that we will always be able to revisit.

Written by Andy Macpherson,
Edinburgh College of Art, 19 March 2008



BIBLIOGRAPHY
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