A full introduction into the alternate reality of the dream space embodied in a large foot.
Animation Production Diary – STOMP
Animation
Animation Production Diary – The wind in her hair
Scene twenty two of the film, the calm after the pyrotechnic storm was another scene I choose to tackle early. The Melancholic Wife’s torso is stationary for the most part so it represented an opportunity to focus on animating a wave, a fundamental animation principle, in her hair. The flow of the movement is also a first exploration of animation timing for the film. I was able to achieve a balanced flow in the animatic and it is my hope and intention to carry this over as much as possible into the animated movement.
Animation Production Diary – Pulling the rug out from under
I decided early on to try and complete scene three from the animatic to inked stage ready for comping. I thought that this would support me to understood the process from start to finish as much as possible before beginning full production. The scene is about twenty seconds long as well so would represent a fair chunk of completed work. It also contains aspects of background, animation and pre-compositing.
The animation I’m sharing below is the follow up to the carpet growth, two arms reach across and pull the grown carpet up. In animating it my pre-occupation was to communicate the tension in the carpet as it’s pulled up, the carpet fights back against the force of the hands until finally being ripped wholesale from the screen.
Artistic Influences – Paul Pope
Another artist who has been an influence on the direction of my work is the Paul Pope, an American comic artist. I love his use of line weight in brush work to convey movement, tone and emotion. His work has an inherent kinetic energy.
Artistic Influences – Jean Giraud
As an illustrator I have had a few influences on my style and it will be interesting to see how this translates from still imagery to images in motion.
I am a big fan of the French artist Jean Giraud, aka Moebius. The aspects which I like to draw from his work include a real sense of weight and volume communicated in an expressive manner; attention to detail; and a potent sense of otherworldliness.
Animation Production Diary – How does your carpet grow?
Early on I identified for myself that Scene Two could be a quick gain in terms of production. It contained some tricky transitions too which would be good to solve early. One of those transitions is the growing of a carpet from a full black screen. I had the idea to create one instance of a carpet fibre growth then multiply it to produce a full floor.
First Test
Second Test – More fibres
Third test – ready to be multiplied in after effects.
Background inspiration
One of my favourite production design styles was employed on the Disney feature 101 Dalmatians. I really admire the sketchy line work that they used and the blocks of colour overlapping the outlines of objects. For me it contributed hugely to the sense of energy in the film and I hope that my backgrounds can be as effective in communicating, in this instance, a sense of otherworldliness to high energy to calm.
Animation Production Diary – First Scene
I have decided to animate my film using the traditional frame by frame method. I am hand pencilling most of the scenes because I really want to portray as graceful a feel as possible to the animation and this is the best way that I know how to. I will then be inking the pencils digitally in Photoshop. With the more complex scenes like the dancing scenes I will really want to nail down the keys through to breakdowns and in-betweens as much as possible in pencils before scanning in to ink. But with some of the more straightforward basic storytelling scenes I’ve found that just roughing the keys and breakdowns then scanning them in for inking can work and will help to economise the process. I realise that the method I’ve chosen is a labour intensive approach so I am consistently looking for ways to speed up the process while not compromising on the quality I want to maintain.
This is the first piece of animation I’ve produced for the film. It’s for scene twelve, the spotlight coming on.
Clawing Hands
In the middle conflict of my film, my protagonist is pulled down into darkness by grasping hands. The inspiration for this comes from many places. First I’d have to mention The Black Cauldron’s villain, The Horned King. The Black Cauldron was the first animated film I went to see in the cinema and myself and my family enjoyed it so much we stayed in our seats for the next showing! It was the villains clawed hands which really stuck out for me as sinister.
I also have to reference the boiler man character from Spirited Away, Kamaji, with his extremely long arms which stretch across the boiler room. I think the idea of outsized limbs really contribute to the creation of an other worldly feel. I also took inspiration from this device for the arms pulling up the carpet in scene three of the film.
Gary Gowran 