Movement, Story & Structure: Three-act structure

Still pootling along and worrying my silly head off. Tried to start organizing my ideas into some kind of vaguely coherent mind map in the hopes that it might give me a better sense of direction with the whole thing: (s'why I like these blogs so much — helps me restructure my incoherent ramblings into something vaguely cohesive!)

Pretty much a summary of what I've covered so far in a more visually coherent manner. Toying with animal masks and the concept of emulating "desirable masculine qualities" in each of those animals?

Considering the ending, looking at 'Oozat' as a frame of reference. The trick is to keep it simple — Oozat isn't tremendously complex, after all, but it's so well executed and portrayed with such confidence. It really works. Sorry, that's my anxiety speaking again. I am rubbish.

I stumbled upon Marx's "character mask" theory whilst doing some research earlier today and I suppose I'm now beginning to really worry that my idea isn't sophisticated or clever or deep enough. I keep catching myself trying to shoehorn more meaning into it to make myself seem bigger, cleverer and more imaginative than I have any right to be at this stage — maybe I really am just worrying too much.

I've been toying with a slightly sillier ending, involving perhaps the main character (dressed as a lion) getting into a fight with somebody else (to gain dominance) — the girl, irritated, getting up from the bar and calling animal control or something. It's a bit less generic, but again, worried it has no strength.

Movement, Story & Structure: Animal costume research

I'm actually really quite liking the idea of dressing up/imitating animals to "attract" this girl, so I've been looking at some examples of animal behaviours/mating rituals. One of the more interesting ones is a bird that can moonwalk!

I think there's a lot of fun that could be had here — an endless amount of animals with bizarre or hilarious behaviours he could emulate.

Movement, Story & Structure: Finalising the story/thinking about the pitch

I'm trying to really dig into my idea so far and bulk it out so that it stands up — I don't know if I'm thinking about it too much or trying to overcomplicate things, but it seems that the more questions I answer the more I start worrying!

Trying to condense it down:

The story is about identity. Many of us project different identities or aspects of ourselves to others, depending on what we're trying to achieve or communicate. We may dress up to make ourselves look big and impressive to a potential employer. We often feel we get a fairly good impression of a person based on what they're projecting — the mask that they wear. Conversely, there are things about ourselves or others that we make every effort not to project, things about a person you can't read based on their physical appearance, things that can completely jeopardise our attempts at communicating with that person. 

In this a story, a man attempts to communicate his interest to and subsequently impress a young lady he has seen. He dons a number of extravagant masks and costumes, projecting desirable qualities in an attempt to impress her, but she fails to take notice. Eventually he removes his costumes and stands there as he is — showing his true face for the first time. She appears to acknowledge him and he prepares to embrace her — but she walks right past, hugs and leaves with another girl who has just entered. It's left ambiguous as to their relationship — friends, lovers, family?

I think I have a fairly stable concept, it's just the execution of the story that I'm a bit flaky about — mainly the ending.

I'm thinking that a lot of the meaning could be conveyed through colour — he is so wrapped up in himself and his own insecurities that he fails to "read" her — his costumes/personas could be very bold and colourful in contrast to the drab scenery. She could perhaps be black and white, very sparsely detailed, representing his lack of interest or consideration of her. 

This is a really weird comparison but I think of peacocks (or any bird/mammal, really) trying to attract a mate — they make themselves attractive, or big and impressive. His "personas," masks or costumes could be based on animals, displaying what he considers "desirable" traits? Beauty, power, etc... 

When he displays himself without the mask at the end, the first time we see his face, he could be black and white and low detail as well. When the two girls embrace they could become colourful — I thought they could maybe turn into birds, but that seems silly. Not too sure so far!

Movement, Story & Structure: finalising a story idea/concept

Inspiration has struck at an ungodly hour and I think I may finally have something I can work with!

I was thinking about a number of different situations in which people may exaggerate or project certain aspects of their personalities, and I resorted to an old cliché — "man tries to impress a girl, but she's not interested."

I'm a bit stuck for the ending — I don't want to overcomplicate it, maybe just have her get up and leave with somebody else — but I don't know if that's too generic? She would ignore his advances and he would resort to more and more extravagant means to attract attention, to no avail — he would grow frustrated and paranoid — "I'm just not good enough!" rather than considering that, instead of being about him and "not being good enough," it could be something about her — there are certain things about people you are unable to ascertain by physical appearance. Things that can jeopardise our attempts to communicate, or that stand in the way of getting what we want.

I had a bit of a vision of the closing scene in my mind —

Maybe the guy is standing there, revealing his true face for the first time — she's looking at him (first person). We see the door crack open behind him, and she stands up, as if acknowledging him, he moves forward to hug her, but she just goes straight past him and embraces the figure who has just entered. He stands there, dejected, before slumping into his seat. View cuts to the front again, we see the two of them leaving together.

Might be interesting if they were both girls? Leave the relationship between them ambiguous — could just be friends, family, lovers?

I'm a bit shaky on it, I don't know.

Movement, Story & Structure: Developing the 'identity' idea

I've been exploring the idea of masks more and more, trying to develop a simple scenario in which emotional baggage could cause conflict. My initial thoughts, as suggested by members of the brainstorming groups, was to simply portray a number of family arguments perhaps caused by physical conflict of the gigantic mask bags they lug around with them. Perhaps a wife is trying to wash up with her bag beside her, her husband hauls his onto the worktop and breaks a plate, a fight breaks out, a cat steals a mask — that kind of thing. I didn't feel it was strong enough though — there wasn't so much of a meaning I could try to express. It just felt to me like a family wearing a bunch of masks and arguing.

I also tried toying with the idea of the businessman again — perhaps he's stopped taking his 'work face' off at home and his wife is sick of it. There could be pictures on the walls of happier times as she remembers the man he used to be? Again, though, quite a generic message and I was having difficulty deciding how to portray it visually.

I started toying with the idea that the masks don't have to be conventional masks at all — they don't even have to be human. Masks have always been thought of or used to disguise one's true intentions or identity, often so they fit in with another crowd —

Masks contain complete social schemas. Others look at the mask and understand what it represents and know what mask to wear themselves. [...] Masks thus protect the person and facilitate interaction with others. I wear a mask in different situations to be the person I want to be there.

— http://changingminds.org/explanations/identity/masks.htm

Pretty much what I wanted to express. People project themselves differently depending on who they're with or what they want. A good example might be primary school where you get students segregated into clusters — anybody that doesn't slot into any of those groups is usually picked on. I've always thought of school kids as packs of animals or wolves — I thought that might make a nice metaphor? Wearing wolf or sheep masks?

I had a brief spark of an idea involving a kid being chased through the playground by a pack of 'wolves,' carrying his huge sack of identities, and trying to hide amongst the other 'animals' — but I didn't get very far with it. I think I'm straying too far from the original concept. I need to revert back to the 'domestic' concept. I'm just over-tired and in no fit state to think clearly. I've had a look at quite a bit of reference material, maybe I just need to take a step back and let it sink in?

Mr Stache

OK, this one's a bit sillier and it's not animation but it made me chuckle and it's quite a nice take on the theme of identity:

It was created from a very bizarre pitch received in a competition, in which a guy, staring deadpan into the camera, describes a "very serious drama about a guy who grows a mustache and everybody hates his mustache and he's sad because everyone hates his mustache." All's well, though, as our hero eventually finds acceptance in a girl… with a mustache.

It's totally silly but actually quite a refreshing look at the whole thing. Again, an example of a relatively simple concept executed with a bit more depth. It's quite dialogue-heavy, though that tends to be more for comedy value rather than story progression. I'd imagine you could tell a very similar story with no dialogue at all.

Café Bar

Another one from British Animation Classics — Café Bar by Alison de Vere.

I'm really liking the style — the inclusion of a mask is an added bonus — using colours to emphasise all the important or dreamlike segments, a ray of excitement in an otherwise bland existence, establishing false identities before finding acceptance in the mundane and regularity of everyday life.

The scene in the beginning where the man takes off his beard and glasses also got me questioning my use of masks and whether they have to be masks at all — could they not be props or costumes used to project a different identity? What if they weren't human masks? I think the biggest issue at the moment is that I'm trying to make a concept around a film rather than a film around a concept, causing me a bit of difficulty in actually progressing. It feels a bit like I'm creating symbols with nothing to actually symbolise. I think what I need is to take a few steps back and try to come up with a solid concept or theme. If I can summarise my intention — the message of the film — concisely in one sentence then it might be easier to start fitting the rest of the pieces into place.

Movement, Story & Structure: 2nd brainstorming session & ideas feedback

Yet another intensive day (thinking hurts)! We had to present our three most robust ideas for feedback and decide on one to develop further in preparation for the pitch next Tuesday.

My three presented ideas were... varying in overall quality, I suppose is the diplomatic way to put it, two centring around identity and the last related to phobias.

My first idea I was initially quite keen on, as previously described I wanted to animate to a recorded interview — similar Aardman's 'Creature Comforts' shorts:

It's a great example of how the best comedy or the best ideas simply come from everyday life and conversation — people say the strangest things and sometimes just shifting the context can make such comments hilarious, poignant or even just depressing. Very witty use of characters and subject displacement — something as simple as a piranha with a toothache works really well. I suppose this is something I'd been hoping I might be able to emulate as well — but in hindsight it's a very different subject and it probably wouldn't have lead to the desired result.

I was thinking of asking people to describe a type of person, group of people or subculture and have the character be built, come to life and change in accordance with the given description. I thought this could have been pretty interesting but it was problematic in that I would have been very limited to what information I could get from interviews. The idea would depend almost entirely from what was given to me — it would have been difficult to plan and schedule for it, and even (as Andy suggested) trying to gently engineer the interviews to give the desired results would have been tricky.

The second idea was the one with the masks; Andy did note that it was the third mask idea he'd heard that day but wasn't terribly surprised as, with four fairly standard themes, common ideas were bound to occur. It is, after all, how you approach and present the idea that's most important. He liked my suggestion of a big bag of masks, being awkward to carry around, representing emotional baggage, and suggested that I condensed the idea down to a simple domestic situation with conflict caused by or involving this baggage, as opposed to having a big long tale of a man getting up, going to work and encountering lots of people. He mentioned I should look at the way Darren Walsh used masks in his graduate film 'Oozat' — so I'll be having a poke around for that.

The third idea was quite similar to the first in terms of execution. Rather than interviewing, I was thinking of simply having some sort of recorded voiceover giving a (fictitious) account of something that had happened to them — a typically 'adult' worry such as debt, redundancy, or some other difficulty but animating that as a child might understand it. I was intending to represent the idea that as we grow older, fears and phobias are commonly seen as something 'childish' or as a sign of weakness — by illustrating them from the innocent perspective of a child I'd hoped to suggest that we are all reduced to a childlike state in the face of fear or danger. The biggest problem with this though is that I wouldn't be writing something that I knew — having never experienced something like severe debt (for example) I'd probably end up giving a very shallow portrayal. I did have some things in my head that I thought could have worked fairly nicely — representing 'debt' (or whatever) as a big, scribbled monster destroying a house as the voiceover described how their family and home was lost — but, ultimately, I do completely agree and it wasn't an idea I felt was really 'working' for me.

I think I'll be sticking with my second idea. The tricky part is going to be coming up with a relatively simple set up and conflict with enough legs to work with. I've been toying around with different settings — an argument over breakfast, washing the dishes, a pub — but nothing's really been sparking my imagination so far. Hopefully a quick break will help!

'The Itch of the Golden Nit'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13298320

Interesting example of children's illustrations used in animation — this could be an interesting technique to use in contrast to some quite 'adult' phobias, such as debt, redundancy or getting old.

Phobias are often seen as something quite childish and even a sign of weakness — animating with contrastingly simplistic and childish drawings could represent the perceived innocence of fear, the idea that even the strongest and most authoritative of us are reduced to 'children' in the face of fear.

Electro-Phobia

Really nice little animation I just found on Youtube... super-simple story, just over a minute long, in which a pint-size criminal spends the days leading to his impending execution avoiding everything electrical. I especially love the shower scene.

It's a simple idea but quite well executed! It brings to mind other situations in which you can play around with characters and unfortunate circumstances or conflicting situations — perhaps a vet that's afraid of dogs or a bird that's afraid of heights. The tricky part is keeping it simple and fitting it into a narrative...

Movement, Story & Structure: Post-briefing and initial thoughts

Straight into the new project and had a pretty intense brainstorming session. I managed to weedle out a few ideas that seem to have legs of some description, but generating ideas is very often a tricky process. I suppose the problem so far is that I'm too concerned with finding a "good" idea and am censoring myself too much, worrying that "this is stupid" or "that won't work."

We were given a set of four themes/working titles to play around with, all of which are broad enough to allow us creative freedom to do pretty much whatever we like but still providing us a good starting point:

• Fears/phobias
• A moment in time
• Memory
• Identity
• A commercial

I found a commercial and a moment in time to be the trickiest. It seems that so far I'm attracted more to "identity" — I've always had a great interest in people, the ways in which they behave and why. I just love watching the way they interact with each other and figuring out exactly what makes them individual.

We've got to have at least three solid/robust ideas by tomorrow, ready to select one to roll with in preparation for (gulp) the big pitch next Tuesday. I'm a little apprehensive — how robust is robust? How fleshed out does it have to be? I suppose I can only do my best and just need to push my ideas as far as I can.

So far, the ideas that have really stood out to me amongst my masses of indecipherable scribblings have revolved around the identity theme, though I did have a vague sort of concept for phobias as well.

For the first, I was thinking of interviewing some people and asking them to describe a type of person — an old man, for example — and as they're describing his physical appearance he begins to be built on-screen (this could be using a multitude of techniques, such as drawing or collage from photographs) — and then as they proceed to describe his personality he begins to move to reflect that. For example "they're usually really slow and grumpy and are really rude!" This could also potentially introduce interactions with other characters (built in the same way) — e.g. "they hate young people." It would basically be examining the how different people perceive the same groups or individuals, etc. Kind of similar to Aardman's "Creature Comforts," in which a number of interviews with regular people on a variety of topics (doctors, housing, etc) are animated to using animal characters.

The second idea was more of a "conventional" narrative, about a man who works a very serious office job and has a number of cardboard "masks" he wears (each with a different face or expression) to suit a different social purpose — for example, one for work, one for his family, one for greeting a friend on the street, one for drinking with mates. Everybody in the world has a number of different personas or identities that they rapidly switch between to suit different purposes — a boy trying to pull an attractive girl will behave much differently than when he is with his family, for example. I was imagining the character repeatedly encountering different people throughout the course of his day and needing to change his mask to accomodate each situation.

The third idea was very similar to the first — again, involving interviews, this time asking children what they are afraid of/what frightens them most. It could be quite interesting to animate to this soundtrack using very child-like drawings. I'm really not sure about this one. It could be interesting but I don't feel it has as much weight as the other two?

I'm going to sit down and have a closer look at them though, see if I can pull them together more solidly. 

Sketchbook: Thumbnail storyboard 21/01/2012

Following on from yesterday's comic, it occurred to me that despite my very obvious discomfort and what, at the time, felt like an onset of a seizure, nodody appeared to pay any particular attention. I don't go out expecting attention, per se, and to be frank I'm quite glad nobody did, but this is certainly not the first time it has happened. On a number of occasions I've been walking down the street and witnessed somebody having a seizure, or falling, or in some other form of trouble, and the amount of people that simply walk on by or — even worse — cross the road to avoid the situation is quite startling.

That's a bit of pointless preamble, but anyway — it got me toying around with a bit of an idea that I decided to very quickly storyboard as practice. It's unsophisticated, unrefined and just generally quite crap — but it's more an exercise in habit-making. I need to start jotting down everything and developing stuff. I tend to fool myself into thinking I have no ideas, when I do — it's just that I haven't learned to recognise them as such. I'm rambling again.

At any rate, here are my terrible thumbnails (my sketchbook is tiny and there was no space for annotations, so forgive me as I type my ramblings. Do yer best to follow along)

Scene opens with a figure waiting at the bus stop. The bus pulls in and scene cuts to inside, showing a side-view of the seats. The figure, a woman carrying a purse, settles herself into a window seat. She glances idly around — out at the aisle and up at the ceiling.

Cut to a front view and she opens her handbag, reaching inside.

She pulls out a small tin of mints/packet of gum and pops a piece into her mouth, chewing.

Cut to side view. Still chewing, others begin to make their way onto the bus. She casts a wary glance at each one as they pass but appears ultimately at ease.

Cut to first-person view, looking towards the front of the bus. There is a pause and a strange clunking sound. An old man with a walking frame (making the clunking noise) hobbles into view and purchases his ticket. He turns and begins to hobble, very slowly, towards her, his walking frame clunking rhythmically with each step.

Cut to side view again and she shifts in her seat slightly as the old man shuffles past. He comes to a halt next to her and, reflexively, she tightens her grip on her handbag. There is a pause, and she slowly turns her head very slightly to glance at him. Cut to first person view.

We see a comically graphic close-up of the old man's incredibly wizened, wrinkled face as he turns his head to smile broadly, ancient skin stretched taut and revealing a large number of missing or discoloured teeth.

Cut back to regular view and the lady recoils slightly, eyes wide. The old man turns and settles himself into the seat next to her and she hurridly looks away, sitting slightly straighter. Cut to front view as the bus rumbles into life and begins to pull away.

There is a moment of slightly awkward quiet between the two, the only sounds are of the bus's engine and the chatter of fellow passengers. The old man is smiling good-naturedly to himself and the lady continues to stare straight ahead, drumming her fingers slightly on her handbag.

The old man turns his head and smiles sweetly at her. She returns it, weakly. Delighted, the old man begins to chatter away,

Cut to side-view. She glances desperately over the old man's shoulder as he waffles away. There are a few cuts to other areas of the bus — ordinary conversation, but gradually everything begins to change very slightly. People leave faint motion blurs behind as they move and the conversations become slightly muted.

Cut to side view, from the opposite side (looking out into the aisle). The lady leans forward slightly, turning her head towards the window, fingers on her temples. The old man is seemingly unconcerned and continues chatting away.

Front view. The old man is laughing and talking and the lady rubs her temples, casting a sideways glance at the old man.

First-person view of the old man. He, too, is leaving motion blurs and appears very bright, almost over exposed or with a "bloom" effect — and something about his face is off. His mouth is moving out-of-sync to the rest of his face, slightly delayed as he turns and moves his head so it slides across his face to catch up with the rest. His voice is muted too, a faint ringing/humming sound begins to creep up.

The next series of shots are choppy, cutting between random snatches of conversation, the old man and various other parts of the bus (the ticket machine printing etc.) These random shots are repeated, getting faster and shorter and louder, interspersed with the lady gradually leaning further and further forward, hands clutching her head, the ringing noise growing louder and the motion blurs increasing as people move. Her vision becomes clouded and colours get distorted — eventually reaching an almost thermal-vision-like effect. It grows more and more rapidly intense until —

cut to black, and silence.

There is a pause, and we hear the squeak and rumble of a bus. We see the side of the bus as it begins to pull away, revealing the lady standing behind it.

She is outside her house again, and all is still. There is a faint wind, birds are tweeting. She pauses for a moment, takes a deep breath, then turns, adjusting her handbag over her shoulder. She walks up her garden path, fumbles with the lock, pushes it open, and steps inside. She closes the door behind her.

As I said it's not at all a sophisticated or clever idea and I'm concerned that it would appear as a shallow or needless representation of this kind of thing — I dunno? I can see the whole thing very clearly in my head and I wish I'd put a little more into representing it visually, but like I said, this was just an exercise in catching an idea and getting it onto paper quickly before it escapes.

A lot of the visual/sound ideas I'd pictured came from an experience I had in primary school — I still don't really know what happened, I just had a really funny turn and everything got extremely bright, I couldn't hear and everything looked like I was seeing it in thermal vision. Not exactly a broad representation of the entire spectrum of such panic/anxiety/etc attacks but, I dunno.

I sort of knew what I wanted to say to wrap this up but unfortunately it escapes me. Best just leave it here.

Sketchbook: hyenas, cats and old people

I've been wanting to keep myself busy over the break and had hoped to be able to get a head start on the next project. I've been drawing somewhat irregularly — my aim is to make a habit of it. I'm building up slowly — trying to do at least one drawing (or page of drawings) per day, which of course in the long run is nowhere near enough, but I want to get to the stage where it becomes second nature, where I don't even have to think about pulling my sketchbook out.

I had intended to start generating ideas for the next project already, before I learned that we would probably be given a list of words or themes to work from. Still, it's probably good practice to keep the ideas ticking over.

That being said, here are some doofy pages from my sketchbook from the past few days:

Nothing really behind these... just some doodles of hyenas. Top page was an actual exercise in observation, on the bottom is a page of doodles done whilst trying to sleep!

One of the books I got from the library gave some great suggestions on generating ideas; one was to take classic scenarios or stories and reverse character roles or insert new ones. I was just kind of messing around and turned Snow White into a disgruntled housewife who has to 'rescue' (or wake up) her oafish, sleeping husband.

I didn't really take it much beyond imagining some scenarios in my head before I got distracted and started drawing cats instead.

I looked at how some other artists and animators have simplified cats for use in comic strips or animation, to better understand how the relatively complex physiology can be broken down.

Understanding how something is built is crucial before you can start breaking it down and making it move, so I tried to get to grips with the basic anatomy of cats. They have really weird legs! 

I found a great little handout online discussing the anatomy of a cat for use in animation which I found really helpful, so I did some simplified drawings based on some of the examples there.

And then some more attempts to understand how the hell their hind legs work.

I don't really know if this was headed in the right direction but it's gotten me drawing again, which is always valuable practice. I think I'm rushing myself to try and get all the stuff in my head down on paper. I need to stop that, stop the panicking and just focus on a few little things at a time.

Andy suggested that I work on keeping the energy and quality of rough drawings through to the cleaned and refined version, which is something that I'd notably struggled with in the last few projects. I'm thinking of doing some more comic strips for general drawing/ideas/storytelling practice, so it might be good to try and combine the two. The last set of comics I did suffered a lot from the 'stiff artwork' problem (and just generally looking bad) so I need to get used to being less precious and working more loosely. 

More character sketches

Some quick doodles done during the lecture today, still experimenting  with my character and thinking about how he might move. I wasn't sure whether to post these these up or not, but I quite liked a few of the poses so I thought it might be worth putting them here. I'm beginning to get familiar enough with him to see him move around in my head which is really quite nice, but also kind of annoying — he won't leave me alone. He started tapdancing across my thoughts at 3 in the morning. He has absolutely no concept of personal space...

Walk & ball exercise: Further character development

Spent a little more time with Mr Frenchy today, trying to get a feel for his personality and how he should move. I toyed with giving him a face but I thought it looked stupid and didn't really work, so I'm probably going to scrap that.

I wasn't too sure how old he should actually be — after being briefly inspired by George Hautecourt of the Aristocats fame I toyed with making him a bit of a crazy old coot with a walking stick.

Though I kind of like it, I started worrying that adding props was venturing too far into the realm of 'overcomplicated.' I'm not sure if props are 'cheating' and take away from the movement? Or do they add interest? It's a grey area. Or maybe I worry too much.

Not too sure how well I could work this guy into my initial idea so I played around with it a bit more.  I want to stick with being a bit down to begin with, so he's kind of shuffling along, dragging his feet. Maybe he gets hit in the back of the head with a ball, staggers along in pain — reaches a flight of stairs, and he's afraid of heights, so as he's getting higher he starts getting more and more anxious and keeps looking behind him.

Then I thought that maybe he reaches the stairs first. He climbs up them, slowly, slowly, then reaches the top and he's standing there, peering over the edge, gripping the rail for dear life. His knees are quaking and he starts inching his way along, hand-over hand on the rail. Then he pauses, takes tiny shuffling steps forward to catch up with his arms. If that makes sense.

Then, a ball rolls past him? His fear forgotten, he follows it, gives it a good kick and is really pleased with himself, starts strutting, swinging his arms, swaying his hips?

I'm not too sure where to go from there. I'm toying with the idea of the puddle again. He's not looking where he's going and just walks straight into it. Then he gets wound up 'cause his good trousers are all wet and just kind of storms off. 

I wasn't too sure about this idea at first, but now that I come back to it I'm starting to see potential for little bits here and there. Rather than being a generic, super-deep cartoon puddle, maybe it's just a little one — but it's muddy, and he puts his foot straight into it, and he's standing there staring at his sopping leg in disgust. 

I'm still worrying though — is this too complicated? Is the design okay? Personally I don't feel he's too complex; he's quite fun to draw and I'm having a bit of a laugh with him so far. But the movement — will that be okay? How will I animate the shuffle? 

Just gonna keep playing around and seeing what happens. If there are no crucial adjustments I need to make I might start rolling ahead and seeing if I can start getting to grips with some of the movement.