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...

Some interesting lip sync examples

If you can look past how irritating Penny is, the Rescuers has some interesting little scenes that are heavily dialogue-based. Normally there's something of a rule of 'show, don't tell,' but the animators were careful enough to keep enough happening in the scene so it wasn't just two characters talking at each other. There's some great personality expression here — the emotions and movements are exaggerated without being too over the top or unbelievable. If you watch closely the lip sync really isn't completely accurate — often the character's mouths just kind of open and close in time with the words. This is especially apparent in the Jungle Book scene where Shere Khan uses a lot of 'Oo' words but his lips don't really purse at all.  It still reads very well, though — I guess the sight of Auntie Medusa peeling off her eyelashes is so gruesome that you don't really notice anything else!

The eyes show a great deal. They completely change shape to accommodate the lack of proper eyebrows but remain consistent in volume; so far I've found it difficult to get such flexibility and character in the face without distending it ridiculously. There's nothing wrong with that if done correctly, but so far my attempts have just come out looking stiff and lifeless. I think the problem is that I'm isolating them as their own shape, rather than considering their volume and how they affect the rest of the face.

Digital Animaton: Alice & Martin Provensen (textural/colour influence)

I've been looking a little more into Alice & Martin Provensen's work, discovering (to my delight) that that they did more than just bright, primary-coloured cutout work. I found a small selection of grittier images that use a much more toned-down palette which I think is much more in keeping with the fairytale theme I've been pursuing so far.

The cutouts as seen here are still very stylised and simplistic. The boy in the bed on the left, in particular, strikes me as very 'puppet-y'. It's very easy to imagine what he would look like in motion as an animated character.
The background elements are very softly coloured and almost always feature an outline. This is pretty interesting and something I hadn't initially noticed — not giving the characters an outline prevents them from merging into the background and becoming indecipherable. This is pretty well demonstrated in the image below:

The Provensens also did a lot of looser, sketchier work using very rough inks. Much like Arthur Rackham they seemed to use quite limited colour palettes, although I imagine this was a stylistic choice as opposed to technical necessity:

I love the gestural feeling of the drawings and all the textures. From the images above it looks like they may have used some sort of acrylic paint and watercolours with quite thick brushes. It seems as if they might have dabbed or stabbed as opposed to strokes with the brush. It almost has the feeling of a sponge painting.

I think it might be possible to replicate similar effects by almost carelessly overlapping paints. Clearly they weren't worried about staying inside the lines! I may experiment with loosely blocking out the general shapes with a colour wash (or even tea) in order to try and capture the instantaneous, gestural feel of the drawings.

Alice & Martin Provensen

Found myself a bit of a dynamic duo whilst looking through one of the books I got from the library — Alice & Martin Provensen, a huband-wife team that illustrated children's books in the mid-'40s. Martin also designed Tony the tiger!

Image source

Image source

Image source

I love the contrast created between the detailed scenery and the colourful cutout characters. The bold and simplistic shapes against relatively detailed backdrops really brings the character into focus.