Major Post 7: Limited Animation

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

At one point, animation was an even more time consuming and tedious job than it appears to be now. Early animations required each frame to be painted and drawn by hand individually and for new backgrounds to painstakingly made with hyper realistic details and lighting. This mean that animations required a lot of time and money to be produced. As a result of increasing budget cuts and even greater time constraints this old way was abandoned and replaced with a new method, limited animation. Limited animation implements techniques like animation cycles, mirrored-images, symmetrical drawings, and still characters.

Many early commercials utilized these techniques. The earliest shows to implement them were Warner Brother cartoons. Specifically, Dover Boys and Merrier Melodies.

Due to the financial benefit of limited animations, many shows have used it over the years. One famous studio famous for it would be Hanna-Barbera Productions. Linked below is a clip from Scooby Doo, one of the studios most famous shows, and in it you can see the use of cycled running, reused backgrounds, and sparse character actions.

LeAnn Schmitt

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A1evHuK7xUI

 

Major Post 6: Ub Iwerk

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

 

When you think of the creator of Mickey Mouse I bet your brain doesn’t jump to the name, Ub Iwerks.

Ub Iwerks was born in Kansas City Missouri and shorten his full name, Ubbe Eert Iwwerks, for ease. He was known for his fast ability to draw and his quirky sense of humor. He was Walt Disney’s partner and helped create the face of Disney itself, Mickey Mouse. He also was the lead animators in many of Disney’s early films such as the Skeleton Dance and Steam Boat Willie. But early on into the creation of the Disney empire Ub split off to start his own animation company, Iwerks Studios. This studio brought forth its own line of characters, such as, Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper. The studio didn’t last long and eventually tanked.

However, Iwerks legacy didn’t end there for he snatched up two Oscars for his work. As well as got to work on many other classics like the Looney Tunes and The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock.

LeAnn Schmitt

Below I have linked one of my personal favorite cartons produced by his studio

 

 

 

 

Project 2-WIP 1-Pre-production

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

             Julia and I will be working together once again and this time we feel that we want to shift the tone of our animation and make something rather scary for the paper cut out assignment. We will be leaning toward making paper dolls and trying to establish some kind of depth and perspective with the backgrounds and the puppets themselves. Currently, we are trying to decide if we should use the down shooter to capture out animator or get creative with it and see if we can rig up something ourselves.

             We have also decided that for our materials we are sticking to merely black, white, and grey paper, some pens to add detail and pegs to give the puppets some movement.

Content wise, we have settled on the monster and three shots we would like to accomplish.

We would like to have the monster be all black and have most of the terror come from twitchy uncanny character acting. Linked with this post are some rough boards of the shots we have settled on as well as a rough break down and notes of the puppet for the monster.

Julia Reymundo and LeAnn Schmitt

Major Post 5: Disney and Rotoscoping/Live Action Reference

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

Major Post 5: Disney and Rotoscoping/Live Action Reference

             Walt Disney did more than just animate, he worked to make his audience believe that they were part of the worlds he would create. To achieve this immersion Disney Studios used live action reference and rotoscoping to inspire and create many of their most memorable scenes and characters. Linked below is a shot of early live action footage of Kathryn Beaumont, the voice of Alice from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, which was referenced and rotoscoped by animators.

             Rotoscoping is when an animator will draw over live-action footage of an actor for an animated film. This technique was created by Max Fleischer, the creator of the Out Of the Ink Well series. Originally, it was referenced to as the Fleischer Process when it was first implemented into animation. Rotoscoping can be a good way to make a character feel much more realistic since you are able to capture fine details and emotional shifts that can be hard to see when you are merely looking at references. However, sometimes rotoscoping can have an uncanny and creepy feel to it since it can walk the line between realistic and over exaggerated.  

LeAnn Schmitt

Major Post 4: Oskar Fischinger and his Wax Machine

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

Oskar Fischinger was born in Germany in the early 1900s. He was an animator who spent his whole life working to perfectly synchronize sounds and movement in his short animations. Despite his drive to perfectly pair the two medias his only interactions with music were violin lessons while in school and his apprenticeship at building organs.

Fischinger was more than just an animator and music enthusiast he was also an engineer. He used his skills in that field to build a machine that would revolutionize abstract animation, the wax machine. Early models of this machine had pipe-shaped mixtures of colored wax and clay slowly fed into a slicer with a rotating blade. In front of this device would be a camera that was synchronized with each cut of the blade. You can see the wax veins morph and change in the video I have linked below. Despite his invention being used in amazing films like The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Fischinger didn’t see a cent from the venture since his partner, Ruttmann had legally licensed the wax machine for use in films and commercial work. Fischinger’s bad luck only seemed to continue as he moved to the United States and had big companies like Disney and Paramount discredit him and under pay him for his work.

LeAnn Schmitt

https://vimeo.com/54587174

Major Post 3: Reiniger

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

             When we think of famous animators I bet we all jump talented and influential names like Don Bluth, Walk Disney, Glen Kean, James Baxter, and of course Richard Williams. But I doubt you can name as many female animators. I always knew there were women working in the animation industry way back in the 20s but I never saw them doing more than just coloring cells or painting backgrounds. So, when the Professor mentioned a female animator who wasn’t just a names-less colorist but a creator with full artistic responsibility over an animation I perked up.

             This woman was none other than Lotte Reiniger. A German woman who fled Nazi Germany for the safety of England in the 1935. She was an artist fully influenced by pre-WWII Berlin Germany. She was credited for making and contributing over sixty films in her life time but she was best known for her pioneering silhouette animations. Examples of her work are found in films like The Adventures of Prince Achmed and The Beautiful Princess of China and The Lost Shadow. Although, her works were awe-inspiring and critically acclaimed by audiences she had difficulty getting funding for her projects through most of her career. So, in order to fund her projects she worked for Julius Pinschewer, an early producer of advertising. It is said that two of the four ads she created for them have survived to this day (one of which I included a link to below).

             In the end, learning about Reiniger and all the hard work she put into her craft was inspiring and made me wonder how many other unknown female pioneers of animation are there out there.

LeAnn Schmitt

Project 1-WIP 1-Pre-production and Production

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

For our first project, Julia Reymundo and I will be doing a stop-motion animation about making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. To keep it simple there are no elaborate sets or people in the shots. ( I have a hand cameo but that’s it) We drew most of our inspiration from the Haunted Hotel By James Stuart Blackton and the idea that the objects were able to move independently with what looked like no human intervention.

There was not a lot of pre-production work since we settled on the concept very quickly due to its simplicity. Most of our time went into spit balling ideas on what camera we could use and how we were going to get nice angles without a tripod. We decided we would be using an ipad and a free stop-motion software that I found in the app store. For post production we plan on putting the exported film into Premiere and enhancing the movement of the objects with sounds and background music.

During production we had to get rather creative when it came to shooting since we were in a cramped kitchen trying to get dynamic shots of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We ended up using a bowl, a drying rack, and even a rice cooker as our makeshift tripods. It was a fun experience.

LeAnn Schmitt and Julia Reymundo

Major post 2: Betty Boop

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

Today’s lectures revolved around the cartoons of the 1920s and the impact of Max Fleischer in the animation industry. He introduced a wide array of characters that are as memorable as Mickey Mouse himself. Some of these characters include: Popeye, Bimbo the dog, Koko the clown, and the subject of my post, Betty Boop.

Now, the Betty Boop we know is a bit different from the one made back in the 1930s. While she is still depicted as a baby voiced caricature of a flapper girl on the outside, a lot of her sexual undertones and outspokenness against the old morals of previous generations have long since been expunged from her personality. The sex symbol was criticized by parents due to the message she was sending to their impressionable children. So, with the uproar of parents and the passing of the Hay’s Law, Betty Boop’s risky attitude was watered down. This code was a restriction adopted in 1934 that stifled American cinema and called for harsh censorship of all entertainment in the United States. Due to this censorship, Betty Boop went from being the rebellious sexual fully realized woman to being depicted as a much demurer working girl.

LeAnn Schmitt

Major Post 1: Svankmajer

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

Jan Svankmajer is a Czech surrealist puppeteer and animator who was born in 1934. He uses a mix of both stop motion animation and live action to accomplish a very unsettling storytelling aesthetic. A lot of his work appears to be inspired by early animators such as George Melies who used stop motion as a way to create trick films. You do not need to watch a lot of Svanmajer’s work to see that this same idea of tricking the audience by making strategic cuts and using stop motion elements. However, I will say that his techniques are much more advanced and hold up much better than Melies’s.

             Svanmajer’s most famous piece of work is a three-part short film called Food that features 3 distinct shorts examining the relationship with humans. The whole film is a combination of stop motion, videos, and claymation. Most of the clay is only used for a few frames to create very scary wild expressions that can make the viewers skin crawl by how uncanny and how abrupt they are.

LeAnn Schmitt

Pre_Quarter

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

Of all the animators out there, I would have to pick James Baxter as my all time favorite. Not just because he inspired me to become an animator but I think his work perfectly embodies the purpose of 2D animation. He is a British animator who worked for Disney during the height of its 2D Era. He is most well-known for his amazing understanding and execution of perspective as well as his ability to keep characters moving in it.  He was one of the key animators of the famous ballroom scene from Beauty and The Beast. He also had a hand in many other Disney Classics including but not limited to The Little Mermaid, The Lion Kind, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Recently, he was a featured animator on several Cartoon Network shows that ranges from Steven Universe to Adventure Time. To me his most memorable and impressive work will always be the ball room scene from Beauty and The Beast. I included a video of a rough pencil test from it. https://vimeo.com/78018499