Experimental animations on gender inequality and women's empowerment by Linda Mayoux. Developed for Visual Research Module, BA Visual Communications, Open College of the Arts, UK
Gottfried Mentor is known for his powerful tragi-comic social/political allegorical animations using CGI animals. These are very expressive in terms of visuals, dramatic narrative and sound effects/music and fully comprehensible without text. He works with the German animation studio Film Bilder.
How has Gottfried Mentor influenced my own animation?
His tragi-comic narrative style, and use of bright colours and anthropomorphic animals has influenced my animation in Pig Tales, India.
Oh Sheep! 2012. Two flocks of sheep are searching for companionship. But their shepherds, being at odds with each other, do everything to keep them separated. The final solution that satisfies them through making them look different leads all the sheep to all fight and kill each other.
!! This is the most interesting. Do detailed narrative analysis of why this is so funny and serous at the same time. Use of dramatic timing, sound, framing, similarities and differences – and lots of blood.
Head Up 2013. Story of an old goat who tries to teach a very young one to behave ‘properly’. But when they get to a big crevasse, it is the young goats who takes risks and takes a creative approach who can get across. The old goat learns that he does not know everything and needs to be flexible to learn also from younger kids.
Lambs (2013). The lamb’s parents are shocked, because their little lamb doesn’t sound like the other sheep: It’s making „moo” instead of „baa” and insists on having coloured pom-poms instead of plain white fleece. But they finally see that all the other young lambs are defying convention with new fashion.
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1966). Originally untitled, “Six Men Getting Sick” is a one-minute color animated film that consists of six loops shown on a sculptured screen of three human-shaped figures (based on casts of Lynch’s own head as done by Jack Fisk) that intentionally distorted the film[1]. Lynch’s animation depicted six people getting sick: their stomachs grew and their heads would catch fire.
Lynch made this film during his second year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. The school held an experimental painting and sculpture exhibit every year and Lynch entered his work in the Spring of 1966. The animated film was shown on “an Erector-set rig on top of the projector so that it would take the finished film through the projector, way up to the ceiling and then back down, so the film would keep going continuously in a loop. And then I hung the sculptured screen and moved the projector back till just what I wanted was on the screen and the rest fell back far enough to disappear” (Chris Rodley, editor of Lynch on Lynch). Lynch showed the whole thing with the sound of a siren as accompaniment. The film cost $200 and was not intended to have any successors. It was merely an experiment on Lynch’s part because he wanted to see his paintings move.
The Alphabet
The Alphabet (1968) combines animation and live action and goes for four minutes. It has a simple narrative structure relating a symbolically rendered expression of a fear of learning. The idea for The Alphabet came from Lynch’s wife, Peggy Lentz, a painter whose niece, according to Lynch in Chris Rodley’s Lynch on Lynch book, “was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. So that’s sort of what started The Alphabet going.” Based on the merits of this short film, Lynch was awarded an American Film Institute production grant and became a minor celebrity.
Ghost of Love
Moby ‘Shot in the Back of the Head’
I touch a Red Button Man
Six Figures Getting Sick 1966
The Grandmother (1970, 33 minutes).
The short film combines live action and animation. The story revolves around a boy who grows a grandmother to escape neglect and abuse from his parents. It is mostly silent with only occasional vocal outbursts of gibberish and soundtrack cues used to convey story.
The music in the film was provided by a local group known as Tractor, and marked the first time Lynch would work with Alan Splet, who was recommended to the filmmaker by the soundman of The Alphabet. Initially, Lynch and Splet intended to use a collection of sound effects records for the film, but after going through them all they found that none of them were useful. So, Lynch and Splet took sixty-three days to make and record their own sound effects.
The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988, 26 minutes)
Slapstick, made for French television as part of the series The French as Seen by… by French magazine Figaro. It stars Harry Dean Stanton, Frederic Golchan and Jack Nance.
Lumière: Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1996, 52 seconds)
Originally included as a segment in the 1995 film Lumière et compagnie. Forty acclaimed directors created works using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière brothers.
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 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]
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]
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 filmRyan’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]
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.
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
Evocative charcoal drawings of Johannesburg. Has detailed historical overview, but the images could speak for themselves.
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.
<@!699577798049923083> As you have said, i am someone who can help you with elevating the technical standard of your work, so that is what I will try to do here.
for Mary’s story i can see quite a big disconnect between the drawing style of the face – which I understand has been drawn by someone else – and the drawings to the right of that face.
Maybe this is a good thing or maybe you want to unify them under a consistent style. You could perhaps commission the artist to make more sketches like that one? Or you could meet in the middle of the two styles? Are you basing the styles of the people on the right on other community member’s drawing styles too?
In part 2 i notice the perspective of the landscape. The house currently sits on the horizon. In perspective this would suggest that the house is on the edge of a cliff or is a giant looming on the horizon. Either way, that there is no land behind the house. typically we “cut through” the house, or any object, with the horizon line.
Currently your lines have no pressure input for size or opacity. Whilst this is not wrong, it does reduce the amount of information you can communicate in a line. lines with pressure input feel more organic and give the artist greater control and ability to express with the line.
The drawing process of them forming is quite a nice touch. It might be a little controversial – one could see it as a bit of a gimmick or could see it as a callback to Windsor McCay. I wouldn’t dwell too long on the drawing part of it though, I would just have them form over half a second or less, then the rest be focussed on animation. The wonderful thing about animation is the illusion being played right in front of you. You can see that they are drawn imitations, but you can’t help empathizing with them.
I really love the kind of split screen / overlay of the close up and the long establishing shot. it communicates well that the character is recalling a memory or thought. I think after a bit of time spent on that composition, the audience would understand that and you can move away from that composition, having already established that this is in the character’s memory.
About the overlay of the face – The best example i can think of with these kind of overlays is in Apocalypse now 1979. I’ll post a scene in <#695628377884721174> i can only find the intro montage on YouTube but there are more overlay montage sequences in other parts of the film like the riverboat making its way up river. very different thematically from yours but you can extract the techniques.
In the shot which follows this one, you could take the face out, and have something like a watercolour fade vignette around the frame, which would still communicate it as being imaginary or from memory. That would give you back the full frame to play with.
Disney’s Bambi has some unfathomably beautiful production artwork – the whole film is a piece of art – like it belongs in a gallery
<@!699577798049923083> There is a great animated mini-documentary I think you would like called A is for Autism 1992 by Tim Webb. A real landmark achievement of animation. It assembles hundreds of drawings made by autistic young people, then Tim Webb (and I think a small team of animators?) fleshed out the drawings into frame by frame animation. It is quite extraordinary as the faithful interpretation of the drawings give a window into the special minds of these autistic children. The way he interprets the interview soundbites is just fantastic. I’m sure he has done other projects you would like too. https://youtu.be/cPR2H4Zd8bI
“I am interested in how the materiality of an image can support its 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 Grünewald, Live, Moments Ago (The Death of Mike Brown) (n.d) catherine-anyango.com.
Flash 2D animation in a limited palette South Park style.
An example of a successful independent You Tube animator with over 323,000 subscribers and funded from commercial sponsorship and advertising.The credits at the end state that each 8-10 minute video takes 2 weeks of hard work to produce. Though this may be reduced with recent advances in Adobe lipsync software. Funded from advertising and corporate sponsorship.
Urdu cartoons on You Tube by SharoomkiSketchbook. I understand Urdu and can follow most of what is said. I took some time looking at these animations for insights into Pakistani male youth humour. A
The interest in these animations is mainly in the spoken text and amusing satirical storylines about everyday experience of life in Pakistan, particularly for young men students. But the animation is not accessible to non-urdu speaking audiences.
Apart from lip-syncing the dialogue, the animation itself is not very developed. The main visual interest is in the drawing of caricature characters with stereotypical appearance and attitudes. Together with stylised backdrops including blank rooms, countryside, train toilets etc.
A cartoon In Urdu by about the importance of having passion for one’s work. Has a lot of different character styles and ways of abstracting the figure.
Train Journey. A humorous account of the experiences and annoyances of train travel from dubious fellow passengers, sounds of people clearing their throats and spitting, dangers of dropping a mobile phone through the toilet hole and accidentally lifting the curtain on the wrong family compartment and seeing things one shouldn’t.
Biker Boiz. Asking mother for money to buy a motorbike like friends. Mother worried about accident. ‘no keys needed’ and lots of things missing.no problem.
University Hostel. Difference between laid back richer students and excited students from poorer families far away from the city who are naively generous but get laughed at and exploited. One floor serves as common washroom’ and problems of group study with disturbance of mobile phones etc.
Cold/winter vibes Follow up by one of the dubious fellow travellers met on the train. About winter cold season, coughs and colds, lack of hygiene etiquette and heating appliances. Hot abd cold showers that cant be controlled. Need to pile about 10 layers if clothes. Handshakes with very cold hands.
Similar genre and humour. Simple 3D animation, maybe using Blender free 3D software? But less successful with only 218 subscribers at time of linking.
Load shedding – the issue of frequent power cuts in extreme heat and mosquitoes. Juxtaposed with music from advertisements about electric fans, strip lights and other appliances that look good in TV but useless if there is no power. When the light finally cones in again everyone just wants to go to sleep.
Flash Animation
Urdu cartoons on You Tube by SharoomkiSketchbook. I understand Urdu and can follow most of what is said. I took some time looking at these animations for insights into Pakistani male youth humour. A
The interest in these animations is mainly in the spoken text and amusing satirical storylines about everyday experience of life in Pakistan, particularly for young men students. But the animation is not accessible to non-urdu speaking audiences.
Apart from lip-syncing the dialogue, the animation itself is not very developed. The main visual interest is in the drawing of caricature characters with stereotypical appearance and attitudes. Together with stylised backdrops including blank rooms, countryside, train toilets etc.