chapter 1

introduction - playing God

You want to captivate people. It doesn't come with just technique, it's about putting yourself inside that character. It's like slowing down your brain and all of a sudden you are that puppet and you move how that puppet moves.

Guionne Leroy – animator on Chicken Run, Toy Story,
James and the Giant Peach

If you want to make great animation, you need to know how to control a whole world: how to make a character, how to make that character live and be happy or sad. You need to create four walls around them, a landscape, the sun and moon – a whole life for them. But it's not just playing dolls – it's more like playing God. You have to get inside that puppet and first make it live, then make it perform.

Animation is animation, whatever the medium. Whether you are drawing on paper, modelling in Plasticine, shoving a couple of matchboxes around in front of a Bolex camera or animating with a computer; to become an animator you will need to understand movement and how to create emotion. You can be a cartoonist or an artist on film, a moving image-maker, and there are many beautiful and hilarious examples of this, but they do not necessarily fulfil the definition of animation that this book sets out to demonstrate. This book is written for someone wanting to take the first steps in creating three-dimensional character animation.

Methods for 2D animation have been documented for a long time. Since the formation of the Disney Studios, their vast commercial output meant they had to find ways of passing on their skills to a large body of workers who needed to know the house ‘style’. The top animators started to look at what they were doing as animators and started to identify ‘rules’ and guiding principles by which they worked. Most of these principles apply to model or puppet animation as well as – as they are derived from the scientific study of movement – the effect of gravity, friction and force on masses. One of the greatest books to read about the development of 2D animation is Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas's The Illusion of Life (1997).

You will have seen computer animation that seems wooden and stiff or the characters glide and swoop about as though gravity never existed. This is simply because, in this new medium, the majority of practitioners were originally from a computing background and have learned the computing skills but not necessarily the animating skills. Director John Lasseter was a successful 2D animator before applying his skills to the computer-generated Tin Toy, Knick Knack, and more famously, Toy Story and Monsters Inc., giving Pixar some of the best computer-generated characters seen so far. Not everyone can handle both skills that well.

In Europe and Asia, model animation has grown out of a tradition of storytelling, fable and legend. Most practitioners developed their own ways of working in isolation, many reinventing the wheel, but in very few cases were methods documented, and certainly no ‘principles’ for model animation had been laid down in the same way as for 2D. But the basic laws of movement apply to any form of animation.

For many years Eastern Europe was the source of puppet animation, in the US the film experimentation settled more quickly to making 2D drawn animation. But in Eastern Europe there was a long tradition of puppeteering; for some film was seen as a natural medium for the art. Puppeteers had to be able to breathe life into a jointed wooden doll in very much the same way as animators do. The design element of the puppet was very important to the storytelling process – they would need to communicate a character over a distance to the whole audience. Jiri Trnka, the Czech animator, paid homage to this tradition with his beautifully made puppet films of the 1950s and ‘60s, the best known of which was an adaptation of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (see Figure 1.1).

Images

Figure 1.1 Titania and Oberon from A Midsummer Night's Dream by Jiri Trnka, Czechoslovakia 1958 © Kratsky Film

nature and caricature

Why don't we just copy from live reference frame by frame? Surely it would save a lot of time and worry. Rotoscoping is used in 2D and computer animation in addition to motion capture techniques to get around some problems. This is literally copying frame by frame off live film. Rotoscoping was used extensively in Disney's Snow White, for instance where Snow White dances around the well singing Some Day my Prince Will Come. It is a technique employed to speed up the animation process, similar to motion capture in computer animation. But straight copying can look strangely lifeless because animation is an art, not just a skill. What the animator is aiming for is to create something more than mere imitation, to create a performance.

Ladislaw Starewitch, one of the earliest experimenters in puppet animation, astonished audiences all over Europe with his animated insects and animals in such films as The Cameraman's Revenge (1911), The Tale of the Fox (1929–30) and The Mascot (1933). Starewitch remembered trying to animate a frog (Figure 1.2): ‘I had a lot of trouble making him swim in such a way that seemed right. At first I did the movements exactly as they would have been with a real frog. But on screen it just didn't work, so I animated his movements almost caricaturally and it came out much better.’

Images

Figure 1.2 The Frogs Who Wanted a King/Frogland/Les Grenouilles qui Demandent Un Roi by Ladislas Starewitch 1927. © L.B. Martin-Starewitch

Sometimes caricature is intrinsic to the characters’ design. Just as Trnka's puppets where the static faces have an eloquence, Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit have an economy of design that allows a range of emotions to be described with the smallest of movements. Brow up: happiness, innocence, worry, enquiry. Brow down: suspicion, frustration, anger, mild annoyance and determination.

Images

Figure 1.3 Gromit. © Aardman/W&G Ltd 1989

Extreme reactions of the 2D Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Tex Avery style are not normally the province of the model animator. Working with Plasticine has certain restrictions and armatures cannot be stretched to express extremes of emotion. The model animator is working in a subtler arena, where body language is employed to greater effect. This is not to say model animation precludes extremes. The use of replacements or substitutes in model animation allows plenty of 'stretch and squash’. A model is made for each different movement, so that the animator replaces a new model for each shot. When shooting on 2s this could mean you are using 12 different models per second of film. (Shooting on 2s is explained in chapter 3, page 22.) Using this method means everything has to be very well planned in advance, but it does allow you to stretch a pose as far as you want. It was originally employed by George Pal in the 1940s for films such as Tulips will Grow and Home on the Range. More recently, Pingu, the delightful series about a penguin created by Otmar Gutmann, was made with replacements – even props were repeated as replacements. Pingu was a great example of the wheel being reinvented.

I was probably more influenced by drawn cartoons: Tex Avery and Tom and Jerry stuff, rather than Trnka and George Pal. Even though you would look back on that stuff now and say ‘Wow!’ – I wasn't really aware of any of that as a kid. It didn't grab me as much as stretch and squash. I suppose that came from Morph (Aardman) and Disney. The performances in the drawn stuff had more life to it, rather than the wooden stuff. That's why I liked Morph so much – it felt more flexible. It had more gags. And I suppose the style comes from just wanting to give something more reality. Instead of a blob with two holes in it – you want to give it a bit more reality – or something more silly.

Jeff Newitt – director on Trainspotter, Loves Me Loves Me Not,
animated Mr and Mrs Tweedy on Chicken Run

There are many interpretations of model animation, stop motion or 3D animation. Two Americans working in Britain, the brothers Quay, use found objects to imbue their lyrical and sometimes nightmarish films with atmosphere, for example in The Street of Crocodiles and This Unnameable Little Broom. Their style derives from an Eastern European tradition of fairy tale and fable and has been described as ‘bringing dead matter to life’.

Jan Svankmajer, another Czech filmmaker, whose more surreal animation ranges from clay animation to pixillation, has influenced many filmmakers including Dave Borthwick of bolexbrothers, who directed The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb as a combination of pixillated live characters acting alongside 8’’ animated puppets. Pixillation (not to be muddled with pixcelation) is moving a normally live object, like a human, frame by frame to create something that moves very differently!

Images

Figure 1.4 The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb by bolexbrothers. © Manga Entertainment Ltd 2002

In the USA a different kind of model animation came into being with Willis O'Brien’s The Lost World, made in 1925, and King Kong, made in 1933. O'Brien, and the assistant who joined him in 1948 to work on Mighty Joe Young, Ray Harryhausen, have probably been the greatest inspiration for today's model animators. Harryhausen's pioneering work with armatures and latex, not to mention his superb drawing and bronze casting skills, laid the ground for many of the techniques still used today. His animation had a more naturalistic movement than seen before, and his animation of the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) is one of his most enduring sequences studied by animators. Harryhausen's work has influenced most of the animators mentioned in this book, among them film-makers like Phil Tippett, who has brought his skills to bear on a whole genre of fantasy and space-legend films, like Dragonslayer, Jurassic Park and the Star Wars films, and who is in turn influencing the next generation of animators.

Several years ago the conversations in animation studios revolved around the advent of computer animation heralding the demise of model animation. Now we are beginning to see model animation studios embrace CGI (computer-generated images), sometimes due to budgetary considerations, but more often because it gives them the freedom to use many more tools, and develop their ideas with fewer constraints. Skilled model animators are able to translate their work on to the computer screen, as 2D or 3D. As always it is creativity and imagination that harness the tools to the best effect. However many animators feel computer animation is strangling the creative process of model animation – which is based on the tension of giving a performance. As Guionne says at the start of this chapter ‘all of a sudden you are that puppet and you move how that puppet moves…’ This is clearly an achievement that it does not seem possible to replicate with the process of character animation on a computer. It is perhaps a harder transition for someone who has grown up with that desire to bring a 3D character to life, than a 2D animator who already works in that ‘constructional’ way.

Images

Figure 1.5 Phil Tippett animating on Dragonslayer. © Tippett Studio 1982

what this book is for

This book is to help those who want to learn the hands-on, tactile craft skill (the artistry is up to you). These are just the basics – you can use the principles explained for whatever animation medium you work in. As computer technology develops – even now there are experiments with sensations of weight, where the operator has a tactile sense of what they are moving. It may be that the animator can drive the technology into a medium responsive enough to be suitable for model animation, so that the animator has the same tactile control over a puppet and can derive that same sense of having given a performance. Although that seems like going a long way round to achieve what we have now: hands, minds and talent.

When it's working you feel like an artist – it's great. Getting there can be very difficult because it's so time-consuming – it's such a long period of time. It's pure faith that keeps me going. I find along the way people who want to work with me, lighting people, musicians. There's a handful who have the same love of creation that jives with what I'm doing. Nobody's making any money – but we're making something beautiful, for the sake of it.

Tim Hittle – US animator, directed the Oscar-nominated short
Canhead, and The Potato Hunter, animator on Monkeybone,
Nightmare Before Christmas
and James and the Giant Peach

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