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Lines of communication

Much of the power of animation comes from the drawing style and how far the type of line supports the emotional and narrative content.

Clean outlines lines for manipulation of rigged characters have become the norm. They are easier to read, clearly separating characters from backgrounds and are easier and faster to replicate as part of animation studio production lines.

Hand-drawn lines in natural media, or digital lines that attempt to replicate natural media, convey emotion and feeling.

to recall the reality within the drawing rather than thinking the drawings themselves are real

Isao Takahata

There are many different line styles that can be used expressively: thick lines, thin lines, variable width lines. Choices to be made about the colour of lines and how far they affect colours of shapes. Different types of line can be used for different characters. Or can change with a character’s emotions.

It is also possible to omit lines all together to give greater freedom with palettes. But this requires attention to tonal contrast and negative space so that figures continue to be readable against backgrounds.

The artists and illustrators below present a range of graphic styles with which I would like to experiment in my animation on the iPad. Many of them have also worked with textless, or near textless narrative, and their work as a whole is discussed in more detail as I develop my own animations in Part 4. The full posts are accessed through the title links.

STIK

Stik is a British graffiti artist based in London known for painting large stick figures as street art, often with a very political message about social inequality, homelessness and gentrification of low-income areas..

What interests me is the way in which he manages to get a wide range of expressions and stories in his murals simply through varying the size and position of a few dots in a circle, together with rectagle body and length and angle of the stick legs.

For more details see:

Quentin Blake

Quentin Blake is a British illustrator who is particularly well-known for his illustrations of children’s books. His quirky line drawings over whimsical watercolour wash have a childlike nostalgia and can make even dark themes seem lighter and humorous.

He has authored textless books like ‘Clown’ and some of his work has been animated.

For more details see his website:

https://www.quentinblake.com

Sarah Fanelli

Sara Fanelli is an Italian British artist and illustrator, best known for her children’s picture books

She combines drawing and painting with cutouts and collage to create humorous expressive images. Although she uses text in different expressive handwritten styles, her visual approach could be adapted for animation without text.

For more detail see her website:

http://www.sarafanelli.com

Marjane Satrapi 

An Iranian-born French graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children’s book author.

Biography: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marjane-Satrapi

Yoshimoto Nara

Yoshitomo Nara is a Japanese artist best known for his paintings of children and animals that appear simultaneously sweet and sinister, as seen in his work Do Not Disturb! (1996). He explores themes of isolation, rebellion, and spirituality through printmaking, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and installations.

For more images see:

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin’s drawings, back-traced monoprints and animations about sexuality and violence have a very vulnerable line that reflects their subject matter. The drawing style is somewhat reminiscent of the Indian community drawings of empowerment and disempowerment

Tracey Emin talks about her work for the 2010 exhibition ‘Those Who Suffer’.
A somewhat bemused response from a somewhat bemused and worried male American tourist.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was an African-American artist whose spray-painted gestural expressive marks and scribbled words, referenced everything from his Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage, to political issues, pop-culture icons, and Biblical verse. “If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you’ve got to realize that influence is not influence, it’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.” At only 27, his troubles with fame and drug addiction led to his tragic death from a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988 in New York, NY.

See: http://www.artnet.com/artists/jean-michel-basquiat/

Illustrator Line Art

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Shirin Neshat

Work

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Psycho noir: Hitchcock and Bass

Film Noir

film noir uses strong side-light and backlight. No fill light. Hard shadows. Including use of ‘cookies’, gobos etc.

Hitchcock

Theories of montage:
Montage: assembly of pieces of film that move in rapid succession
Cutting
Juxtaposition of shots in rapid succession eg shower scene 75 shots in 65 sec

The trailer

Interesting because it operates within the constraints of modesty of the early 1960s.

Bl;ack and white

Soundtrack

Framing

Overviews

Shower Scene

Music and sound

Clips

‘Translations’

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Zbigniew Rybczynski

Zbigniew Rybczyński (b.1949) is a Polish filmmaker, director, cinematographer, screenwriter, creator of experimental animated films, and multimedia artist.

He studied cinematography at the Łódź Film School in Warsaw (1969-1973); his thesis films were Take Five and Plamuz. During his studies, he became a founding member of the Film Form Workshop (Warsztat Formy Filmowej), the most important Polish neo avant-garde group. From 1973 to 1980, Rybczyński made his own films at the Se-Ma-For Studio in Łódź. During the political unrest in Poland in 1980, he was the head of the founders’ committee of the Se-Ma-For studio branch of Solidarity.

In 1982, during the martial law period, he managed to arrange a job contract that enabled him to leave Poland for Vienna, where he applied for political asylum. The following year, he and his family emigrated to the US, where they lived in Los Angeles and then New York. The first works he made in the US were the short experimental videos “The Day Before” and “The Discreet Charm of the Diplomacy”, both made in 1984. In 1985, he launched his own studio – ZBIG VISION – in New York, which he subsequently outfitted with the latest video, computer and HDTV technology. It was in this studio that he made his most important American films, including Steps (1987), The Fourth Dimension (1988), The Orchestra (1990), Manhattan (1991), and Kafka (1992). Between 1984 and 1989, he made more than 30 music videos. One of them – “Imagine” (1986), made for John Lennon’s composition – was the first music video ever made using high-definition technology.

In 1994, Rybczyński moved to Germany, where he co-founded the Centrum Für Neue Bildgestaltung, an experimental film center in Berlin, and later worked in Cologne. He returned to Los Angeles in 2001, where he worked for the Ultimatte Corporation and continued his research in the area where art, science, and digital technology intersect working out new standards for moving images. Among the results of Rybczyński’s long-term research and experimentation are his inventions in the field of electronic-image technology, for which he holds several US patents, and which are widely used in the film and TV industries.

In March 2009, Rybczyński returned to Poland, taking up residence in Wrocław, where he set up the Center for Audiovisual Technologies (CeTa) at the site of the city’s historic Feature Film Studio. The center, which officially opened in January 2013, includes a state-of-the-art studio designed by Rybczyński for the production of multi-layer film images, and an institute for research into images and visual technologies. After Rybczyński discovered and published huge corruption in CeTA, they fired him and subsequently he declared the renunciation of his Polish citizenship.

1982 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film 
Superimposition of characters in different colours interacting with each other.
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Zdenkó Gasparovich

Satiemania - Wikipedia
“Satiemania’ by Zdenkó Gasparovich 1978. The subject matter is somewhat inappropriate. But I am very inspired by the mix of a wide diversity of line and colour styles and mix of handrawn, rotoscoped and cutout images for different emotions and effects.
“Satiemania’ by Zdenkó Gasparovich 1978. The subject matter is somewhat inappropriate. But I am very inspired by the mix of a wide diversity of line and colour styles and mix of handrawn, rotoscoped and cutout images for different emotions and effects.
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Terry Gilliam

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Gilliam

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Gianluigi Toccafondo

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Genndy Tartakovsky

Genndy Tartakovsky (born 1970) is a Russian-American animator, director, producer, screenwriter, storyboard artist, comic book writer and artist. He is the creator of the animated television series Dexter’s LaboratorySamurai JackStar Wars: Clone Wars, and Primal on Cartoon Network‘s Adult Swim.

He co-created Sym-Bionic Titan and directed the animated Hotel Transylvaniafilm series. Additionally, Tartakovsky was a pivotal crew member of The Powerpuff Girls and worked on other series such as 2 Stupid Dogs and Batman: The Animated Series.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genndy_Tartakovsky

analysis of simplicity of visual narrative without dialogue.
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Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi (Persian: مرجان ساتراپی‎) (born 22 November 1969) is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children’s book author.

“Drawings are abstract. If she had used real people rather than animation, immediately Persepolis would have become an ethnic film about ‘some Arab people over there dealing with their issues with God’

Persepolis

Persepolis 2

Chicken with Plums

Biography: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marjane-Satrapi

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Yuri Norstein

Yuri Norstein was born to a Jewish family in the village of AndreyevkaPenza Oblast, during his parents’ World War II evacuation. He grew up in the Maryina Roshcha suburb of Moscow. After studying at an art school, Norstein initially found work at a furniture factory. Then he finished a two-year animation course and found employment at studio Soyuzmultfilm in 1961. The first film that he participated in as an animator was Who Said “Meow”? (1962).

After working as an animation artist in some fifty films, Norstein got the chance to direct his own. In 1968 he debuted with 25th October, the First Day, sharing directorial credit with Arkadiy Tyurin. The film used the artwork of 1920s-era Soviet artists Nathan Altman and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.

The next film in which he had a major role was The Battle of Kerzhenets (1971), a co-production with Russian animation director Ivan Ivanov-Vano under whose direction Norstein had earlier worked on 1969’s Times of the Year.

Throughout the 1970s Norstein continued to work as an animator in many films (a more complete list can be found at IMDb), and also directed several. As the decade progressed his animation style became ever more sophisticated, looking less like flat cut-outs and more like smoothly-moving paintings or sophisticated pencil sketches. His most famous film is Tale of Tales, a non-linear, autobiographical film about growing up in the postwar Soviet world.[3]

Norstein uses a special technique in his animation, involving multiple glass planes to give his animation a three-dimensional look. The camera is placed at the top looking down on a series of glass planes about a meter deep (one every 25–30 cm). The individual glass planes can move horizontally as well as toward and away from the camera (to give the effect of a character moving closer or further away).[4]

For many years he has collaborated with his wife, the artist Francheska Yarbusova, and the cinematographer Aleksandr Zhukovskiy.


Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Norstein’s animations were showered with both state and international awards. Then, in a bitter twist of irony, he was fired from Soyuzmultfilm in 1985 for working too slowly on his latest film, a (presumably) feature-length adaptation of Gogol‘s Overcoat. By that time he had been working on it with his usual small team of three people for two years and had finished ten minutes.

In April 1993, Norstein and three other leading animators (Fyodor Khitruk, Andrey Khrzhanovsky, and Edward Nazarov) founded the Animation School and Studio (SHAR Studio) in Russia. The Russian Cinema Committee is among the share-holders of the studio.

To this day, Norstein is still working on The Overcoat – his ardent perfectionism has earned him the nickname “The Golden Snail”. The project has met numerous financial troubles and false starts, but Norstein has said that it currently has reliable funding from several sources, both from within and outside of Russia. At least 25 minutes have been completed to date. A couple of short, low-resolution clips have been made available to the public.[5][6] The first 20 minutes of the film have also toured among various exhibits of Norstein’s work in Russian museums. The full film is expected to be 65 minutes long.

Norstein wrote an essay for a book by Giannalberto Bendazzi about the pinscreen animator Alexander Alexeïeff titled Alexeïeff: Itinerary of a Master.

In 2005, he released a Russian-language book titled Snow on the Grass. Fragments of a Book. Lectures about the Art of Animation, featuring a number of lectures that he gave about the art of animation. That same year, he was invited as “guest animator” to work on Kihachirō Kawamoto‘s puppet-animated feature film, The Book of the Dead.[7]

On 10 August 2008, the full version of the book Snow on the Grass was released (the “incomplete” 2005 book was 248 pages). The book, which was printed in the Czech Republic and funded by Sberbank, consists of two volumes, 620 pages, and 1700 color illustrations.[8] The studio stopped working on The Overcoat for nearly a year while Norstein worked to release the book.[9]

Filmography[edit]