MAF Day 2 - Masterclass: Blue Zoo HooDoo

Speakers: Tom Box and Catherine Salkeld

#bzshorts

Catherine Salkeld pitched the idea HooDoo for the bzshorts project. Bzshorts, as the title suggest is a commitment for the Blue Zoo Studio to make a few short films throughout a year. The idea pitched for bzshorts are voted, and the one which win the voting will be developed for shorts. Consideration for bzshorts is a concept that pushes the studio forward.

HooDoo

Salkeld was inspired by the idea of tourist going on a holiday, breaking things. She imagined for  HooDoo to have a touristy feel, and its designs are inspired by vintage travel posters. Oculus is the VR goggles that they will be using so that people don't have to move around. The key to immersive storytelling in VR is having a few sub stories happening simultaneously in the whole setting in order to replicate reality; similar to a theatrical play with the player having first person point of view.

There are many challenges faced when making HooDoo. Here are some of them:

• Cues that help the audience focus on the narrative. For instance they deliberately made the section of the world break while the PoV camera was set to a fixed place to prevent audience from strolling away from the main set where the narrative takes place.
• Sound and music are crucial for the VR experience is to use sound to tease the viewers to make and do things for the narrative to progress.
• In HooDoo, they also attempt to use FMOD. A plugins to attach the sound of VR on different places in the scenes. WAV files can be attached to characters so that the volume varies in accordance to the position of the character. Procedural and sounds also follows where the viewer is looking, such that the music on the foreground reflects situation in the scene that's in front of us.
• Making sense of the simultaneous stories happening in the set for the viewers to not miss the important bits.

Conclusion

VR offers a more interactive way of telling stories, and it is a platform of creating a new and convincing content for animation. VR is its own niche in the world of commercial entertainment, and I don't think it can replace the method of existing animated films even when the basic principles of animation applies. This opportunity of trying out VR is a privilege for me as I can hardly get my hands into cutting edge gadgets in day to day life. I am fascinated by the development of VR technology throughout the years. The future is happening, and I got to enjoy it!! (couldn't be more critical than that)

MAF Day 2 - In the Frame: Women in Animation

In The Frame: Women in Animation

Leeds Animation Workshop

A feminist animation studio based in Leeds, established in 1960s. The intention of building a studio is because they feel that no woman is speaking for herself as a human. The Leeds Animation Workshop's purpose is to call for a change and fight back for discrimination of gender instead victimising themselves. They make animated films discussing about current issues through a feminist perspective, while considering ways to ethically represent woman in animation. 

Ethel and Ernest

Not a gender biased animated film, in the sense that it portrays Ethel's role as the pillar in the family realistically. A lead female character that is just a normal working class woman, and not a princess. Ethel also appears as much as Ernest (her husband) in the film.

The film is set at a period of social change and the narrative is how they cope with this social changes. Ethel is vocal about her opinion when discussing political issues and make political banter with her husband; a representative figure of the early feminists.

The portrayal of Ethel is also not exaggerated. For instance, she still has a more conservative mindset while Ernest is more leftist and open-minded. Ernest still make sexist jokes about Ethel's meddlesome attitude towards political affairs.

Joanna Quinn: Girl's Night Out

An appreciation of middle-aged women in comedy animation. It is also a campaign to stand up for sexism in the workplace. I like the expressiveness of Joanna Quinn's animation. The realistic representation of film characters is a change that the speakers expect on the TV animation in the future.

Conclusion

This talk has taught me more about the essence of making short films. I think all the films above has left a strong impression on the issue of female representation in animated films to myself as an artist. As a woman, I myself try to avoid discussing feminism in public because it is a touchy conversation topic. I definitely have respect for these women who use the animation medium to tell people stories that can influence opinion and changes the world's perspective on feminism to the audience regardless of their gender. The talks has also changed my mind on the feminist philosophy because more often than not the undiscerning public had the wrong conception of feminism as a threat against men, while in reality it is just to challenge the discrimination against female in animated films.

When it comes to having a female protagonist in animation, the stumbling block is the dilemma between the popularity of content and audience demographic. For instance, the older generation have the presumption that girls don't buy toys and how some animations are made to commercialise toys. On the other hand, the younger audience have the preconception that preschool female character is bossy and dominant like Peppa Pig. It is definitely something that I did not think of, but I want to know more about. Maybe it is worth analysing in another post?

MAF Day 1 - My Life as a Courgette

A stop-motion clay animation that touches on the issue of kids living in the orphanage. My Life as a Courgette does not appear like an emotional film, but it makes audience cry by the end of the movie. It a really beautiful piece, and I think that this film is a breakthrough in the world of animation because it does not sugarcoat the reality of the life of kids in the orphanage unlike some other Hollywood animated features that wants to advocate positivity yet fails to do so, and became superficial, because the positivity that they are promoting is too good to be true. Courgette, on the other hand, managed to use realism to evoke an emotional response from the audience, and hence is a more successful film in my opinion.

The character designs of the animation tells a lot about each of the character's background story, and makes it easy for the audience to follow the trait of the characters. Also, there is no obvious villains in the story. The whole animation is a journey with situations and obstacles for the main character, Courgette, to overcome which makes the story more personal, and make the audience empathise him better. Despite the depth of the issue discussed in the film, My Life as a Courgette is also a children-friendly film because all the tragedy that happened in the film are subtly communicated in terms of visuals, and is more heavily discussed in the narration.

MAF Day 1 - Short Films Highlight

Fox and Whale

Visually stunning shorts about an epic journey of a fox to find a whale. The film is a pure eyegasm, with advanced visual effects of the environment, while the fox character is 2D animated. Yet another sucessful combination between 2D and 3D medium.

Kaputt

A documentary animation about the life in women prison. It has an interesting animation technique, by not totally rubbing off the previous drawings, giving the animation a surreal look.

How Long, Not Long

Expeimental animation made based on Martin Luther King's speech with the same title. It is a compilation of unrelated footages with Martin Luther King's recorded original speech as a background sound. A propaganda piece that pitched the idea of social change, and advocating a social revolution of the future. The rotoscoping technique used really works well with the message and the aesthetic says it all about social revolution through the use of bold colours superimposed to a white background similar to the colours used in protest and propaganda art. 

MAF Day 1 - Joanna Quinn Life Drawing Workshop

A workshop run by veteran animator Joanna Quinn, whose work I adored. It is a 2 hours life drawing session, but it is not just a normal life drawing session. Despite the fact that I have been regularly attending life drawing sessions last year, I learned a lot from this workshop because Joanna Quinn puts life drawing into the context of animation. She emphasised the importance of capturing the gestures and movements, instead of focusing on 'replicating the life drawing model', or in other words the aesthetic of the drawings produced.

The workshop focuses on getting effective information from the poses in a short period of time because a fresh pose does not last for long. Each of the poses last for 30 seconds to 1 minute.

I am a slow drawer so I struggled a lot to keep up with the timing. I tend to take my time to think of where to put the lines, and from the session, I learnt that it is not good to do so. A good practice, as Joanna Quinn has taught us based on her experience, is to finish up the rough first and go back at it once the rough is done to start to add on details and clean up the drawings.

Another useful tip that I have got is that drawing by looking at negative space would help to get the proportion right. By doing so, the person who are drawing will see the model as a whole, and not just focusing on getting some specific parts of the body right.

Joanna Quinn emphasised the importance of the line of motion and weights in drawing for animation. When working with rough of the character, she suggested that we can start to make spaghetti rough (parallel lines which bends according to the line of motion) to focus on the squash and stretch aspect of the movement. After when we got the bend and twist right, we can add more details on the character so that it is more believable. Interesting gestures consist of overlapping shapes and their movements around 3D space when the character is moving.

Lastly, we studied how lines could convey energy and emotions of a character to the audience: happy, sad, fear and arrogance. Sometimes we overlook the power of lines in a drawing, especially in conveying the energy of a character in an animation. I learned that gestures that are emotionally positive consist of lines that faces upwards, while the emotionally negative gestures have the lines facing downwards, putting more weight on a character.

Q&A:

Someone asked whether she animates on ones or on twos, Joanna animates on twos and she talked about her recent visit to Walt Disney Animation Studio with Richard Williams, and how Richard reanimated a scene of Milt Kahl's animation on ones, and make them look better than the original ones. She acknowledged that animating on ones are better than animating on twos. It makes the animation smoother, but not always feasible due to having to produce work with limited resources.