Category: Physical media
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:
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:
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
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.
Illustrator Line Art
“I propose the use of animation in relation to indigenous people as a means of just telling you that these people are human. Animation is not related to the indexical image. It is able to emulate the human emotion and experiences even if to a fantastical level…since the artist’s hand is very obviously involved in bringing these images to life, animation is not pretending to be alive as is the case with taxidermy. Unlike ethnography, it is not tied to a singular story or to any absolute truths. It allows multiple interpretations of the human experience”
“Animation can be used to emulate something that is intangible, something that is humanity. It is our soul, unlimited by the preconceptions and expectations of the ‘real’ image.“
A distinctive African feminist voice from Kenya. Highly skilled animator combining work in different physical media: cut-out puppets, drawing and charcoal, photography and video that are then composited and manipulated digitally. The fluid movement comes from the video. The other media are more static with puppet manipulation and boil effects.
Issues:
– Uses a lot of dialogue and text in English
– Many of the concerns are from urban areas. How far do these resonate with poor rural areas, or represent their voices?
Documentary animation technique
Textless NGO shorts
Commissioned political/development documentaries
Uses digital compositing of multiple media. But reliant on English text commentary.
This migrant business is particularly effective visually – the combination of very gritty drawings and manipulated video effects, overlaying newspaper clippings and use of ‘binocular framing. Though the commentary is very direct and not so clear on what can be done by the viewer.
Yellow Fever
Rotoscoped paint over.
Stencil effects
Ahwak Runaway This film was made at the Ölands folkhögskola last week, during a two-day animation workshop. The students chose Kanye West’s #Runaway film to work with. We selected a sequence and each student was given one second (25 frames) to reinterpret in any way they wanted. Most of them printed out the frames, some worked digitally. They began drawing, painting, gluing flowers, and even foil paper onto their frames, playing with masks and blending modes and layering in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects, and worked late into the night to create this beautiful piece. As we were putting the frames together the next afternoon, trying to beat the deadline, we were asking ourselves what to do with the sound. At the same moment, one of the girls began to play a song from #Syria on her phone; Jamal Slitine’s Hobbi Lak.
Ryan Larkin (July 31, 1943 – February 14, 2007) was a Canadian animator, artist, and sculptor who rose to fame with the psychedelic Oscar-nominated short Walking (1968) and the acclaimed Street Musique (1972). He was the subject of the Oscar-winning film Ryan.
Larkin had idolized his older brother, Ronald, whom he described as “the epitome of cool”.[1] In 1958, at the age of fifteen, Larkin witnessed his brother die in a boating accident and, because he had never learned to swim, was unable to save him.[1] Larkin stated that his brother’s death deeply scarred him.[1]
Larkin attended the Art School of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where he studied under Arthur Lismer (a member of the Group of Seven) before starting to work at the National Film Board of Canada in 1962.[1]
Larkin was bisexual, having had sexual and romantic relationships with both women and men during his lifetime.
At the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), Larkin learned animation techniques from the ground-breaking and award-winning animator Norman McLaren. He made two acclaimed short animated films, Syrinx (1965) and Cityscape (1966), before going on to create Walking (1969). Walking was nominated for an Academy Award in 1970 in the category Best Short Subject, Cartoon, but lost to It’s Tough to Be a Bird by director Ward Kimball. Syrinx won many international awards.[1] He went on to direct the award-winning short Street Musique, which premiered in 1972 and would be the last of his works, finished during his lifetime.
He also contributed art work and animation effects to NFB films including the 1974 feature Running Time, directed by Mort Ransen, in which Larkin also played three bit parts.
In 1975, the NFB commissioned Larkin to create a mural for the entrance foyer at its Montreal headquarters.[1][3] He delivered a piece featuring an adolescent boy with an erection, which the NFB removed from viewing.[3]
Larkin left the NFB in 1978.
Ryan, the film[edit]
In later years Larkin was plagued by a downward spiral of drug abuse, alcoholism and homelessness. By this time estranged from his parents, he had developed a routine of spending his nights at the Old Brewery Mission, and his days panhandling at Schwartz’s, eating at Mondo Frites, drinking beer at the Copacabana bar, or reading a book in the lounge at Welch’s used book store.[1] Towards the end of his life, he found himself back in the limelight when a 14-minute computer-animated documentary on his life, Ryan, by Canadian animator Chris Landreth, won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film and screened to acclaim at film festivals throughout the world. Alter Egos (2004), directed by Laurence Green, is a documentary about the making of Ryan that includes interviews with both Larkin and Chris Landreth as well as with various people who knew Larkin at the peak of his own success.[4]
Later work[edit]
As of 2002, Larkin had been working with composer Laurie Gordon of the band Chiwawa on a new animated film entitled Spare Change, his first auteur film since working at the NFB. Together they founded Spare Change Productions and sought funding for the film through Gordon’s production company MusiVision. They received grants from Bravo!FACT, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and SODEC but were still short of financing. MusiVision and the National Film Board of Canada went into co-production only after Larkin’s death. Spare Change premiered at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema on October 9, 2008. Spare Change features three CHIWAWA tunes for which Larkin created storyboards and animation, including Do It For Me from the 2005 release Bright. A new CHIWAWA album Bus Stop Chinese Buffet will include tracks from Spare Change including Overcast Skies whose lyrics were penned by Larkin, and part of a group of Larkin poems – Beat Poems For Grandkids.[5]
MusiVision also produced the documentary film Ryan’s Renaissance for CTV Television about Ryan’s final years, his return to creating art, and Spare Change. It was produced by Gordon and Nicola Zavaglia.[6] Larkin, who had panhandled outside Montreal Schwartz’s deli, appeared briefly in a documentary on the famous restaurant, Chez Schwartz, directed by Garry Beitel [7]
In December 2006, Larkin created three five-second bumpers for MTV in Canada, a preview to Spare Change. Each frame was hand-drawn. It was the first professional work he had executed in over 20 years.[8] Larkin said that he had given up some bad habits, including drinking, in order to better focus on his animating career.[9]
Death[edit]
Larkin died in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec on February 14, 2007 from lung cancer which had spread to his brain.[10]
William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds’ screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
See more information on Tate Gallery website
Animator William Kentridge animates with charcoal on paper, leaving traces of
each drawing behind as the movement progresses. These traces lend a depth to
the image as well as the time of the animation. They also serve a narrative
purpose. Kentridge’s early animations were copied from early Soviet films, placed
in the Apartheid, South African context. Apartheid was a system predicated on
the exploitation of black South African labour in the interests of white South
African society. Kentridge uses his animation to express his feelings of guilt for
being a white male with inherited wealth and status as well as his personal
fantasies of acceptance and forgiveness. The layered shadows of previous
drawings that haunt his animations are ghostly reminders of the time that each
drawing took to make. Animation here serves as a kind of penance.
Working process
Examples of charcoal animation
See also performance from Whitechapel Gallery
Jonathan Hodgson is an internationally renowned animation director based in London, he has twice won BAFTAs for Best Short British Animation in 2000 and 2019. He studied animation at Liverpool Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. After spending 25 years directing commercials he moved to academia, setting up and leading the Animation degree at Middlesex University where he combines teaching with making personal films. He is the animation director of Wonderland: The Trouble with Love and Sex, the first full length animated documentary on British TV.
“I am interested in how the materiality of an image can support its
Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Live, Moments Ago (The Death of Mike Brown) (n.d)
meaning, the tearing or disintegration of paper and marks alluding to
the criminal and emotional disruption of public space. The police
violence in America is happening almost too fast to comprehend and
almost certainly too fast to document. In a series that started with the
death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, I have been documenting the last
image in the victims of police shootings lives. In this film the drawn
footage is worked and reworked until the figures merge with the
landscape and the paper is destroyed. There is a sense of burning,
referencing lynching and also foreshadowing the subsequent riots.”
catherine-anyango.com.
https://www.royaldrawingschool.org/lectures-events/catherine-anyango-grunewald/