Monday Medicine

Been feeling a little run down.

Maybe I should've done this.

Designed by Phil Marden and animated by Tissa David around 2002 or so.

Simple Gifts - No Room At The Inn, Animals

"No Room At The Inn" may be the crowning segment of "Simple Gifts" -no mean feat considering the strength of the others.

At the very least it represents the apex of the simple line Blechman style.  After this, his long form work took a tilt towards the fantastic with "The Soldier's Tale" and a curve towards a fuller style with the stillborn films like "Bird", "The Golden Ass" and "Candide".

Before posting the full segment and further thoughts tomorrow, I wanted to highlight my favorite scene.

This film is very stage-y.  It all happens along the same flat plain with some variation on shot length, but almost always playing as through a proscenium.

Ed Smith animated most of this film.  Those are Ed Smith animals right there.   They have an unmistakable humor to them.  They're cute without being cloying.  Expressive but not telegraphic.  Really just great animation.

Also take note of the wind blowing.  Phenomenal really.

When the schedule started to draw to a close, Ed needed some help finishing up.   Tissa David took care of several scenes towards the end.  I may be mistaken, but I believe this was her first time animating in the Blechman style.  I can only imagine how nervous Bob must have been, he had long been unhappy with the way animators approached his art and finally found the perfect guy in Ed.  Of course, any trepidation would prove groundless.

Still, the differences in their line is visible.

Above, an Ed Smith donkey.

Tissa David donkey (and sheep).

Also amazing is Ed's draughtmanship of horses.  Here's an 11 drawing cycle.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Simple Gifts - The Great Frost - Dances

Here's a scene which must have been a real nightmare. But Tissa David excels at two things like almost no other animator -1) elaborate dances 2) making limited animation look like its on ones.

E01

I've pulled what look to be the extreme drawings in this scene.

E02

Traditional dancing like this is easy to go pose to pose and still look natural -after all, dancing is about putting your arms and legs in the right place at the right time.

In a few recent dance pieces we've done, we even go so far to key positions off of reference footage and inbetween from those.

E03

There are eights sets of dancers (plus the star couple) in addition to the musicians.  One couple here is highlighted, the other seven are basically the same.

E04

Although these are extreme positions, they still have a lightness -the kind of thing you often find in straight ahead animation.  The positions aren't hit "hard", they're intrinsic points which the animation/dance moves through.

E05

This scene is silhouetted so that the men face camera.  Typically, a dance involves the man as a centerpoint for the action/motion of a woman.  Here, the men's lines are clearer, so the women's billowing skirts cover the foreground while the men's defined legs (and arms) showcase the motion.

E06

This bow has a few drawings that go into this pose and one more still after this position leading out.

E07

The entire cycle appears to take 50 drawings.

Below is another dance sequence, this one just starring the main characters.

Simple Gifts - The Great Frost

Here's the Great Frost in it's entirety.

The audio's awful. Poor mix to begin with, probably, and terrible VHS copy.

Shocking that they'd let so much film dirt on the air.




In the comments on Friday, Michael Sporn wrote of how he struggled to work Tissa David's drawings back into Seymour Chwast's style.

As the film goes on, you can the drawing look more and more Tissa, especially the woman.

Thinking Animation

In the arm's length list of things which are difficult to do with animation, showing a character thinking is near the shoulder.

Or maybe, it's in the wrist.

1.

This is a scene Tissa David animated in "The Great Frost".

2.

 

It's limited animation.  Apart from these first two drawings (which are on threes), the numbers below the image represent roughly the frame on which the drawing is exposed.

5.

This is digitized from a VHS, so the accuracy isn't precise.  Plus this was animated at 24 fps and I didn't do a .8 multiplication to convert from 30 fps.

8.

 

The body might be on a separate cel level, though I doubt it.  It's more likely the eyes and mouth are on a top cel and the body is traced back on three cels which alternate exposure when the face animates. 

12.

When the head turns, the body follows and there's no color pop.  Which means either something really complicated happened, the production artist was really good at mixing colors, or it was on the same level the whole time.

19.

 

I'm inclined to think the eyes and lips were separated onto a top level, the whites of the eyes were painted on the bottom/body level and only the blue of the eyes and the line work were on the top level.

22.

 

But it's also entirely possible that 30 odd cels were fully painted.  That's the sort of crazy thing that happens sometimes.

27.

No matter how this was produced, you can bet a lot of thought went into it.

35.

I remember going over a scene with a very skilled assistant animator and production artist.  She was moaning and wailing about all the things Tissa did in the scene that didn't make any sense.

Not knowing anything about anything, I happened to make the right call -"just follow the sheets and instructions and we'll deal with it later."

39.

A day or so later, I checked in on the artist.  She said that it's a good thing we didn't change the scene to do it her way -it wouldn't have worked.  Tissa had already figured out the simplest way to put the whole thing together.

61.

So these drawings trace back from 39 to the 60s.

65.

Slight head turn here.

69.

Traced back into the 90s.

96.

I'll also hazard a guess that the inking was done on the photocopier only because it's a very tight traceback and that's the cheaper way to go.

101.

Back to the art production story.  We followed the animator's instructions and the scene worked.

138.

It worked because she had already thought through the entire scene, not just how to get the action to move from storyboard panel A to storyboard panel B.

142.

That meditation comes through in the animation.  Honestly, I think it's something that gets lost in digital production -most especially "symbol" based Flash animation.

146.

If it takes you a few hours just to figure out how to approach an scene, it's almost a given that your animation will be affected.

208.

 

A few things make this scene work.  Make it look like Orlando is actually thinking.

212.

The limited animation actually helps.  The drawings move slowly and the space between them is small. 

214.

The movements are small and deliberate.  Only the mouth twinges a little and the eyes go from one side to the other.

218.

The eyes are cast downwards.  A naturalistic representation of thinking.

221.

There's a continual drift into the face.

It's slow but it goes from a fairly comfortable close, medium shot to a tight close up on his features.

224.

 

This camera move creates an intimacy which would not be so easily achieved with a locked camera and animation alone.

227.

This post is much longer than I had planned.  Proof that planning is everything.

230.

Gerard Goulet taught me a word.  It's a Quebecois Englishism - "planification".  It's a good word and useful in animation.

233.

Watch the eyes in these drawings.  The small differences between 227, 230 and 233 -that's where the character can be found.

236.

It also helps that there's a voice over in this scene, the narrator describes what's going through Orlando's head -but I really don't think that's the key to the illusion of thinking.

239.

That's all in the eyes and mouth (and camera).

241.

The overall understatement of the gesturing.

244.

There's a scene which follows this one in which Orlando starts to think with his arms.  He raises them in anguish, covers his face.

247.

If you're going to double cut on a scene, you want to have somewhere to go, I understand.  But in this case the gestures of the second shot become too broad.  They're too broad period, but in comparison to the elegant understatement of this shot they're Jerry Lewis.

250.

Orlando appears to think here because of the simple subtleties in line and the deliberate nature of the timing.

253.

The whole of Orlando will be posted tomorrow, then we'll look at a dance next week.