Pixar - Day and Night

This is one of my favourite animated shorts of all time for a very specific reason: it uses both traditional and digital methods of animation to create one brilliantly executed short film! Besides that element, there are many other aspects of this short that add to its brilliance:


Digital and Traditional Animation:

Because the Night and Day characters are more abstract characters, they exist in the two dimensional world holding within each of them another world, a three dimensional world. They are simply outlines with blackness and nothingness surrounding them. Pixar inventively animated the Night and Day characters using the traditional method of animation while using digital 3D animation for the rest. This also makes the Night and Day worlds a lot more realistic to the audience.

Sounds:

The use of sound is also quite inventive: The characters are silent, in the sense that they don't speak however they convey noises through different occurrences happening in their individual worlds.

 

 For instance, In the morning the Day character stretched out his back as a cluster of clouds appear and thunder can be heard.

 

 Night laughs at Day as a group of ducklings waggle by, quacking. 

 

Night punches Day in the face while a Lumberjack hacks at a tree. Day falls over along with the tree.

 

When he sits up, a flock of birds flies past his head making chirping noises.

 

Night howls with a wolf while Day shows off the women having a pool party during the day.

Character Design:

 Night and Day are quite similar to each other, highlighting what they have in common. Their design is simple but carries a lot of character. For example; what sets Night apart from day is his sharp and pointed nose and narrow head. What sets Day apart from Night is his rounded nose and head. Otherwise, the pair are quite similar yet still strongly recognizable through the short, even after the sun sets/rises and they switch their roles. 

Spacial Design:

Lastly, the spacial designs in this short are incredibly clever: the characters often overlap showing the differences of day and night in the same locations. While they argue and fight with each other, they experience certain spacial elements that contribute to their actions. Apparently, although they are clearly mythical creatures, they are not immune to the laws of physics.

 

Moral:

Of course there is a moral to the story. At the end of the short, Night notices a broadcast that Day seems to miss. Night drags Day back to hear what was being said. The quote is from Dr. Wayne Dyer from a lecture in 1970:

Fear of the unknown.

They are afraid of new ideas.

They are loaded with prejudices, not based upon anything in reality, but based on… if something is new, I reject it immediately because it’s frightening to me. What they do instead is just stay with the familiar.

You know, to me, the most beautiful things in all the universe, are the most mysterious.

Night and Day look at each other, seemingly experiencing a sense of deep understanding and compassion for one another. They embrace. As they do, the sun in Night rises as the sun in Day sets and the two discover that the worlds that separated them were in fact the world they share.

 

Here is the full short film, it is certainly a touching one:

Pixar - La Luna

This Pixar short always makes me cry a little bit for a few reasons. The first, the music is beautiful. It sounds like it is from an old Italian movie and has a warm and cozy traditional feeling. The second, because the story idea is wonderfully creative; it seems to come from the imagination or dreams of a child. The third, because although the culture of the characters seems to be Italian, they resemble my own heritage; Georgian. The appearance of the characters: Dark with bushy facial hair and olive skin also resemble Georgian people. Their constant bickering as well as abstract dialect resemble that of Georgian as well as Italian. Because of this quality, I always feel like a am tasting a bit of home when I see this short. 

Something else I really love about this short is actually very difficult to describe. The music sounds like a Waltz, or music that should be danced to. It is repetitive and has a clear structure. Now, what I find (personally) is that the story 'dances' along with the music. There is a a sequence of events that almost repeats itself; Grandfather and father argue back and fourth then settle on a decision. Then, something beautiful happens whether it be the introduction of the moon, or the boy's bright idea and the music changes. Whenever the Waltz-y music comes back, we return to the back and fourth with the father introducing something to the boy, then the Grandfather suggesting something different, then the two arguing after which, we return to the boy's perspective where he either makes light of the situation or goes through his own experimenting with who he would like to resemble more; his Father or Grandfather.

The story concludes with the boy finding his own voice and way of doing things. He is wearing his cap backwards unlike either of his guardians as well as using his own unique tool when sweeping the stars.

According to Illumination Materialist, Daniel McCoy, each star is unique in that they all have their own individual texturing as well as different levels of lighting. This gives a very organic aesthetic to the stars.

The direction by Enrico Casarosa is perfectly timed and beautifully executed. This is a short film I will never forget.

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Here is Daniel McCoy talking about the process of creating 'La Luna'. 

Incidentally, I had forgotten to mention that the lighting in this short is another favorite aspect of mine which McCoy goes into some detail about. The director, Enrico Casarosa wanted to create the aesthetic of light reflected on water creating a warm glow as well as resembling something of water colors. 

Who am I? why am I here? What do I want to learn?

There are a few reasons why I chose to pursue a degree in Animation. I was never fully satisfied with simply illustrating. I wanted to create characters, stories and settings. I wasn't in the habit of drawing randomly, rather creating lives and universes in which my characters could exist.

Another reason I chose this course is my passion for animations. For example, when the Incredibles came out, of course everyone was excited but I was obsessed to an unhealthy extent. I spent the following month watching the Incredibles every single day, multiple times per day. I would ignore my teachers in class and instead, illustrate each character with refined detail from what I could remember of them. While most kids didn't really know why they liked the movie, I knew it was because of how the hair was animated to look like it had weight and shimmer, how the super-suits had a texture you could not only see but feel, how their lips, eyes and bodies moved. I obsessed over these little details for pretty much any animation that caught my eye. 

I want to move people with my work. I want create something that communicated a message and maybe impacts it's audience in a positive way. I know that I can do this through illustration but there is a world of creativity in Animation and I want to explore and conquer it. Besides this, I want to broaden my skill set by adding the ability to animate. Not only to animate, but to animate very well. I realize that just because I spent my entire life drawing doesn't mean I can easily achieve this. I constantly run into holes where I realize that I am unable to draw a certain pose without a specific reference or maybe at all. To quote an unknown genius, 'All Animators can be Illustrators, but not all Illustrators can be Animators.' I find this to be incredibly true for myself and I want to get to a point where I can excel at Design, Illustration and Animation.

But this is just speaking of technical skill. Something else I hope to gain is a wide breadth of knowledge about animators as well as their techniques from the past and present days. I want to get caught up and immersed in the Animation industry, become aware of the trends and styles and gain information and inspiration from it all.

Throughout the three years I will be studying on this course, I would like to hone my drawing skills and really polish them. I would like to excel at character design and gain a much wider understanding of anatomy of objects as well as humans and animals. I would also like to learn to identify, replicate and perhaps even exaggerate movements from humans and animals. Besides these things, I want to grow into a more organized version of myself. One of my goals is to improve my time management skills so I can become a lot more efficient in my tasks and perhaps even take on more opportunities. 

I definitely believe I have valuable skills that will carry me through the degree course. I am very quick at working, especially drawing. I have been drawing my entire life and have that skill relatively refined, although I will always continue to improve myself. I am very passionate and can often think of creative material through brainstorming. I like to share ideas and inspiration and I love collaboration with other creatives. I used to be disorganized but I have gotten the hang of it through my Foundation course last year and am relatively good at keeping on track.

There are certain things that I would like to improve on over the next three years. The biggest one would be initiative. I would like to get in the habit of 'sniffing' out information and opportunities instead of waiting for them to be handed to me. This is something I have struggled with and am constantly working on improving. Another aspect of myself I would like to see change is my time management. I do a lot of planning-ahead and scheduling but due to an overestimation of my own abilities, I end up simply overwhelmed and unable to complete anything because I cannot decide where to begin. Which brings me to my next point: priorities. I tend to put too much of my time into things that should be finished quickly and not enough time into the things that should be at the top of my priority list. In fact, when I make a priority list, usually several things tie for first on the list. After consulting some of my friends who are experts at time management, I have a solution and that is scheduling my time for very specific things. First, I estimate the time it will take me to complete a task, then I schedule time with that task as if they were a client. This way, everything on the priority list gets its own slot of attention.

In terms of progress tracking and evaluation, much like last year, I keep a diary. This beautiful yolk yellow mole skin notebook is my entire life. In it, I create a weekly calendar in which I mark certain responsibilities with different colored pens. Every morning, I write a to-do list and every evening I reflect on my work to see what further changes need to be made. I am hoping to document my progress through this notebook and hopefully look back and see significant changes. Through constant reflection and self evaluation, growth is inevitable.

Another very valuable tool for evaluating progression is blogging. Through my three student blogs, I am forced to constantly analyze myself as well as the work I am producing. I am also forced to look at other artists and their work with a critical eye. Observing and criticizing is one thing but being able to communicate my opinions in a clear and concise manner is definitely a learned skill for me. Through blogging, I will have constant practice in communicating clearly and in a professional manner.

These next three years are an incredible opportunity to grow, create and make connections. I am absolutely thrilled to absorb and progress and I cannot wait to see the person I will become at the end of this course!

PS Induction 2 - Animation

 Although I learned how to animate with Photoshop last year, I still learned a lot that I didn't know or had already forgotten. 

Here is something I didn't know how to do: create an animation using layers of different 'objects'. We used a backdrop to a video game to create horizontal movement to the left. We used two methods to achieve this; the first, we created video layers out of each image layer and key framed the objects. This made the objects gradually travel from one point to another. The other method we used (which is slightly more effort) is the frame animation in which we duplicated the first frame about 10 times, and shifted each object little by little for each frame. I found that the results for this method were a bit shaky.

Here is the result. This is a gif created from the first method I mentioned. The results are pretty smooth. Another thing to note is that while we were animation the scenery, the borders of the image were a lot wider than what we ended up with. That is because we created a crop preview that eliminates the surrounding edges. This gave us more freedom to shift things around because we were not inhibited by the blank spaces peeking through along the edges of the art board.

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Frame by frame animation is something I am very used to because of my final major project last year on the Foundation course. 

I didn't have a Wacom tablet with me but I created a very quick blip of an animation.

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Lastly, using a storyboard excerpt from the animated movie Brave, we were taught to create a gif from a series of images. This is something I knew how to do but needed a quick refreshing on.

So, I created my own. This is one of my flip books from the 'Flippin' 'Eck' module.