STORYBOARDS!!!!

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Nina Paley

I totally dig Nina Paley's animations, especially Pandorama, the worlds first cameraless IMAX film:



This animation, along with the stuff I got to do in 6X1, makes me want to explore cameraless animation further. I got really into it constructing out first assignment for 6X1.

I also like Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, and her awesome blog http://blog.ninapaley.com/

Peace out!

BLU

I like this animation. If I weren't such a law-abiding citizen, I'd hijack some brick walls in downtown Wilmington and do something similar.




I'm working on a revision of the script (actually right now, I'm thinking more annihilation over revision). I just think that it's not as abstract as I like most of my work to be. Plus, it ties into a nice little bow in the end, which I tend to hate. Anyway, I'll keep you up to date.

Storyboards

Ok! I'm totally throwing Jos under the bus, but she dropped me off later than expected. Here are my storyboards. I'll email you the script when it's done. I'm crossing my fingers for before midnight. But it will be emailed ASAP!!!

Don't mind the stick figures. I haven't figured out the way they should look yet. My storyboard characters have a tendency to go from this:

to this:


Here you go! You can click on these to make them bigger.

If you want to talk about days to meet up, Joselyn mentioned that she's coming over next friday (I hope that's right) to see Kai. That would be a great time for me, if you're ok with that. It would just be easy considering that I don't currently own a vehicle, I won't have to mess around with the crazy bus system. And I need to know what type of baked goods you would like so I can get over the guilt of being a lazy, bad student. It will get better once the visual stuff happens. I'm not a words person (that sentence proves my point).

Note Cards!

I guess I hit my limit on the last post.

Direct links:

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Ahhhh!!!!

So, I suck! I had half the story typed up when I went to bed last night, but thought it was crap and deleted it this morning. I always do this. It's part of my process.

Anyway, I have trouble with sitting at a computer and writing. I have to handwrite everything and then type it up. Big sheets of paper didn't work, so I switched to note cards. Around 5 p.m. writer's block hit me in the worst way. I tried a few things to get my brain back into it.

I took a short break, tried to give my brain a rest:

Didn't help.

I did some Tai Chi:

What people don't tell you about Tai Chi is that, yes it helps with stress, but only when you're doing it. All the stress comes back when you're done and you realize that your back may feel better, but you still don't know how to write an ending to your story.

I then tried cleaning my apartment:

The only people helped by this were my roommates. At least they're happy.

I then locked myself in my room, opened the windows, turned out the lights and laid on the floor for a while. That seemed to work some magic. (Note to self: When faced with writers block, lie on a floor and freeze yourself to the brink of death).

So, I haven't typed up the notes yet because that would involve dealing with details that I don't think I can take mentally right now. I found out quickly that I based this character on myself in too many ways which meant that I was questioning my life a little too much while I was writing. That might be the main reason for the writer's block.

Anyway, I scanned the cards to prove that I'm not a total slacker (and used pictures in my blog to distract you from the fact that I am a total slacker). I'll type them up in a more script-like form tomorrow after my class. I'll tell you right now, I'm up for the revisions. I'm not really married to the ending. You can click on them to read, but it's more of a look at the inner clusterfuck that is my mind.

Mayday!!!

I’m running writer’s block blog right now! Sorry for the delay! I’m hoping some good old-fashioned valentine's day drinking/Buffy season 4 watching will help get the creative juices flowing. I'm a little over half way there so I'm hoping I can post later tonight; tomorrow for sure.

Quick question: Can I just create the animated version of the BVS episode Hush? I know it sounds highly illegal, but it's gaurentees greatness! Plus, I can promise some live action storyboards.

I hope you and Andre and Kai have/are having a fantastic V-day!!

Combo

So basically when combining the 3 stories, I come up with a girl who lives in a world where everything is the same. She is extremely bored, especially at work where she spends her time daydreaming in her cubical. When she comes home, all she does is watch TV, where she daydreams about living in the fictional television world, then go to sleep, where she... drumroll please... dreams. 

At this point, the dreams are confined to when she is alone, or if she's in public, she only acts them out in her head. The dreams will start to bleed into her reality when she is around other people. She starts acting them out around people.

I haven't quite figured everything out (like the end), but I think when I start writing the script it will all fall into place. I can kind of see where I want to go. I know for my ending that I don't want her to OD on pills. I'm already writing a tragedy for screenwriting and it's kinda bringing me down. Plus, I've been in a good mood the past few days and I want to take advantage of it. I also don't know which technique(s) I want to use, but again, I think it will come to me when finish writing the story and see how it goes.

Animation Project Ideas

Idea #1:
Concept:
I had a small virus about a week ago and had to drink Nyquil by the gallon in order to get to sleep at night. Not only did the medicine help me regain the ability to breathe through my nose, it also gave me some very vivid and f’ed up dreams, which is always fun. This gave me some inspiration for a possible animation project as well. The story would be set around the idea of living in dreams versus living in reality. Can we get too caught up in our dreams to notice what is actually going on around us? If this is an autobiographical animation, then the answer is yes.

The basic story that I have right now is about a girl who believes that her life is boring. She spends most of her time sleeping because she enjoys her exciting dreams. She sleeps so much that she begins to have trouble getting to sleep at all. She starts to take sleeping pills to get back to sleep and her dreams. The entire time this is going on she is ignoring what is going on in reality. Right now, the only way I can see it ending is that she over doses on the sleeping pills. It seems sad to me, but that’s probably because the character is based off me minus the drugs. “Hugs not Drugs” has always been my motto… That’s a lie. I don’t like to be touched.

Moving on to possible techniques:
I’ve always thought that stop animation seemed very dream-like. I think that it could really enhance the story. I was thinking that two different formats of stop animation could be used for this, one for the reality sequences and another for the dreams.

I kind of want the animations for the reality sequence to take place in reality, a lot like Pan With Us. I am still in love with the glass pane animation part of that animation. I don’t know if glass would be the best thing to use for this. I think it’s something that I’ll have to experiment with for awhile. I just know that I want images of the real world going on around the characters real world.

For the dream sequences I think that claymation or puppet animation (Like Aria) might be the best technique to use. It always makes me think of dreams.

Idea #2
Concept:
This idea I blogged about over Christmas break and it’s still stuck in my head. It’s the whole idea about putting pressure on yourself to fit in with everyone else. I want it to play with the idea that we’re all not supposed to do the same things and live the same kind of life. As opposed to my previous idea, I want this one to be a little more comical.

Basically my character lives in a box (a metaphorical one- but the house is also box shaped and she works in a cubical). The characters actions each day are always the same as the previous day’s and also the same as the people around her. The street that she lives on has similar looking houses. Everyone wears the same clothes and drives the same car. Very boring stuff to say the least. One day something happens to the girl (I haven’t decided what yet) and she starts to act different from everyone else. By the end she discovers the importance of being different than everyone else.

Technique:
For this story I imagine it going to the same sort of direction as a Don Hertzfeldt animation. The boring world the character lives in should be very minimal without a lot of color. The easiest way to do this, I believe, would be with cel animation with just black ink on white paper. But I think that the texture in the paper might add some dimension to the world that I don’t really want in the beginning of the story. As the story progresses, I would like to incorporate more and more color and detail to the world. Perhaps the best technique to use would be flash or after effects to ensure that the world stays flat.

Idea #3
Concept and Technique:
I pulled this idea from one of my self portrait ideas. It’s the one about nonexistent relationships. When I first came up with the idea, I thought that it would be best to do a series of still images with me narrating over them. Well when I was thinking up new idea for this project it dawned on me that that is basically stop motion but instead of still images that create a real jumpy effect, I would just have to take more photos to fill in the movements from one thing to another.

The idea came to me for my self portrait because at the time I was thinking about someone I had just met. I often create these whole scenarios of how my relationships with people will go. They never of course work out this way, but my imagination always beats reality. I originally thought of just focusing on romantic relationships and how those NEVER turn out the way I imagined. I think that it would create a nice link from one to the other. It would be really easy, and probably therapeutic, to go from my first crush to my most recent nonexistent affair.
Each story would follow the same path: initial encounter into the imaginary stuff then rewind and go through what actually happened.

For this one, I’d want to use real people in real places. I just need to find people who are not ADD and can stand still for a while.

The Animation Show!

I tried to sit down and write some great 3-5 page essay about what animated shorts I really enjoyed but it just wasn't happening. So I'll try just writing how I feel about the films without over thinking it and see what comes out. BTW, in my world Friday ends when the sun comes up on Saturday so I'm sorry that this is getting in at the wee hours of Saturday but I'm running on weekend time.

First, if I made Pan With Us, I could die happy. If I could pinpoint the type of animations that I want to make, that would be it. I thought that the interpretation of the poem was fantastic and beautifully done. I like the fact that David Russo took a concept like stop motion and changed it up just by bringing it outside is wonderful. I also like the use of different mediums. My background in art is in painting and ceramics (and sculpture) and I found the use of both techniques to make an animation incredible to watch. The use of painted glass to create shadows on the sidewalk was interesting to me and I wondered if you would be able to do it in color; if you could get the paint thin enough to get color on the sidewalk? I don't know. It's defiantly something to experiment with.

I could go on and on about what I liked about this film, but that wasn't really my assignment was it? So onto the link between concept and technique: Russo uses a poem by Robert Frost as his narration. I must say that the first time that I watched it, I didn't really listen to the words because I was basically hypnotized by the images. But even though the words didn't register, I thought that the poem complemented the images. There seemed to be a rhythm to the whole piece and it is really hammered home with the use of the poem. The combination of the editing and the cadence of the poem were probably what sent me in a trance.

It is important that the film is about the Greek god Pan and Russo makes it a point to tell us that Pan is where the word panic comes from. If you are watching the main animated image, the film seems very fluid and smooth, but outside the smaller image, all this shit is going on. It's chaotic. It's like the world around the image hit the panic button and the image just moves through the middle of it without caring what the hell is going on (my mother would probably say that I am the series of images in the center of the chaos).

Second on my list was Aria. This one was another stop motion (I got one more before I sign off). I was amazed at how fluid the movements of the doll were especially the hair (what the hell is up with the hair? It's crazy!). Pjotr Sapegin started with the idea of a puppet stripping itself all the way down to its skeleton. From there he decided to go with a story about suicide (as opposed to a striptease). By using Madame Butterfly, Sapegin already has a tragic story, but seeing the doll rip itself apart and then unscrew itself is very heartbreaking to watch. Even the story Sapegin tells in the booklet that comes with the DVD set about the only thing left being a couple of screws in a box is upsetting. When the doll killed herself, she did it for real. That’s sad! The use of dolls really helps bring the story to life, a lot like the acting in an opera. I always get frustrated with people who complain about not knowing what is going on in an opera because, a lot of the time, the songs are in a foreign language. PAY ATTENTION PEOPLE!! Most of life's communication is nonverbal anyway!

Sooooo....Last in my stop motion obsession is Fireworks by Pes. There are 3 very important things to take into consideration when watching this. 1. Candy Corn does indeed look like fire. 2. Candy is delicious. That is a FACT! 3. Peeps are awesome and their heads coming of are even more awesome!

Moving away from Stop motion, the other kind of animation that really stuck out to me was more cel type animation. My issue with cel animation is that it is that we grow up with it so in order for me to really enjoy it, I have to have a great story that I can attach myself to. I'm usually not blown away with the technique as much as I am for stop motion or claymation. That being said, I thought that Hello and Don Hertzfeldt's stuff were great and unique in their art and for opposing reasons.

Hello has a great story that is relatable. Jonathan Nix uses unique characters to convey his message of love and communication. As much as I liked the technique of Pan With Us, that is how much I enjoyed the concept of Hello. The story was really simple and has been done before (but almost everything has) but I thought the characters served the story well. I thought that the way it was drawn was great as well. It was very detailed and the "lighting" was great. I don't know if you would refer to it as "lighting" since it is just the way that it is drawn, but I thought it was nice that it wasn't very bright. It created a nice mood.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hertzfeldt's stuff is bright and the details are very minimal. A majority of it is just black line on white paper. The minimalism of it plays nicely with the comedy of his work. If there were too much going on then it wouldn't be as funny. It would seem like it were reaching for the joke. It doesn't take too much to be funny. If you try too hard, your audience misses whatever is supposed to be the punch line. Plus, the when something is added that doesn't fit in with the black and white imagery, it makes it that much more funny, like a green sucker, or ink dripping from a characters head. The best one, I have to say, was Intermission in the 3rd Dimension. "It's like I can touch you." Great Stuff! It's is interesting how he incorporates color and texture as well as certain objects in the film. Even when it is just the two characters talking, you can still see the texture in the white paper change. It makes something that seems simple look more complex.