Children. They're All Little Bastards Really.

Not a big entry this time, but I wanted to show a couple line test/end result comparisons from a scene that actually features very little by way of animation. This is the sequence in which the Creepy Kid has brought the Duck home and is in the process of stitching it back together. One of the shots has already been discussed in a previous post with those that remain featuring far less extreme animation.

The first appearance of the Kid in the scene is simply his rising into view.

When offscreen, sound effects will imply his rustling about. To punctuate his emerging from beneath the table we see and hear lightning from outside (fairly crucial to establish its presence as later in the scene it strikes the dead Duck through an open window).

The tricky thing with this shot was getting the secondary motion of his head settling into place right. With the accompanying flashes of lightning I feel it's more or less there.
Here's another shot featuring the same backdrop and composition. All that really occurs is the Kid, having been called to dinner, contemplating the Duck before he decides to leave any further taxidermy until later.

This is done entirely through facial expression, one of my favourite things to animate as I have documented previously.
Here's how it looks with the backdrop (and to show the compositional arrangement with the Duck silhouette).

One more to end on, and my favourite of the three. In this shot the Kid, having supped, returns to his room to find that the reanimated in absentia Duck has buggered off.

This makes for a nice reaction take, and some facial expressions I'm really happy with that convey the Kid's subsequent fear and bewilderment.

With some post-effects (and eventually a soundtrack) the overall shot nicely caps off the scene.

The character of the Creepy Kid is probably the least explored of the ensemble. He has no dialogue and little screen-time, but the audience should hopefully pick up bits and pieces from the glimpses of his behaviour and the environment in which he dwells. My intention was for the viewer to know enough about the character to know they don't want to know any more. Y'know?
Actually, I don't know. I'm starting to smell the potential for a Creepy Kid spinoff. Yep, tons of mileage there...

An Appropriate State of Mind

Some of you in the UK may have noticed that it's been a little wet of late. Others may be too busy floating through the deluged remnants of the town in which you used to live to be reading this. With some luck Bristol managed to be well-situated for this...situation, although it took me an extra five days to get back home after the trains stopped running out of Cheltenham. This wasn't so much a problem in itself, after all it's nice to get away, I can draw wherever I am and, push come to shove, I can swim. However, when the threat of Cheltenham's water supply being turned off presented itself, I made a hasty exit. I'm a man who likes his toilets in working, flushable condition.
Now that I'm home and dry, literally (derp), I can look back at the last few days' work and acknowledge that my frazzled mindset could only have worked in my favour with these layouts. These are some images from the penultimate scene as previously seen in storyboard and animatic form, in which the Hunter has lost his mind. To make this point clear a lot of the poses are off-model and a little grotesque.

These four are cutaway shots that will be used for reactions to dialogue. There's a distinct increase in stubble and a rockin' case of bed-hair going on, as well as the absence of glasses so that I could throw in some crazy eye-acting.

A reveal of the Hunter in the buff, with some shameless shotgun positioning. Naked + hairy + crazy=funny...as long as it's a cartoon. The proportions of the gun and the relationship between his torso and lower gut are a little off and will need to be redone when it is all inked in.

I hope these have enriched your day. I'm off to run all the taps and flush the toilet repeatedly while laughing manically, for no reason other than I CAN. See ya later.

Experiment In Terror

Here is the thrilling final instalment of my film's animatic, featuring the penultimate and closing scenes as previously showcased in storyboard form. Try not to shame yourself with the excitement of seeing the visuals in sequence, timed to a (pretty much) finished soundtrack!
Remember, this is the final version of the ending, so if you don't want to see how it ends, don't watch...


Not much else to say, really. Hope you enjoyed the animatic version - the full-colour, moving one can only be an improvement.

That Indescribable Love Between Man & Machine

I have a lightbox! In a prime example of right-place-right-time I managed to snag one second-hand from Philippe, one of the MA's prior students. And what a device she is.
That's right, I've assigned gender! That's how committed I am to this project.
As you may have gathered from the stilted visuals of the early lip-sync tests, working without one of these was never going to be an option. With the campus closed I would've been up shit creek all summer, so now that I have one of these babies this film actually stands a chance of being made. Hooray!
Have a gander at me cackhandedly explaining one of the most basic animation tests there is, the reaction shot (or 'the take').


I have a feeling Molly* and I will forge a tremendous union while working together. I also have a feeling that I may be losing my goddamn mind...

*That's right, I named it too. After Molly Parker. I live alone, I can do what the hell I want.

Lip-Sync Test #1: Flautism

With roughly a month to go before I hand in my critical evaluation, it might be apt to actually experiment with, y’know, animation of some sort. Being properly introduced to the dope sheet/lip-sync process last week, I figured that’d be a good place to start. After all, the lengthiness of my film is largely down to hefty chunks of dialogue, and if I don’t know how to lip-sync, I’m a little bit fucked.
Rather than brazenly charging into sequences for ‘House Guest’, I thought it’d be best to work on something completely separate and one-off. I’ve isolated three short, random samples of conversation from recordings made for various music projects, with the intention of going through the dialogue phonetically and familiarising myself with the dope-sheet process.

This teeny-weeny chunk of dope-sheet represents about 2.5 seconds of dialogue. Bear in mind this is for a sequence with barely any body animation or direction.

Without a lightbox at my disposal (we have plenty on campus but it’s been kinda muggy, so fuck it - I’m stayin’ in) I put my first attempt together just using a series of rough sketches. While this does the trick for a little bit of test animation, in the long run I won’t be able to use this method when working on the actual film. Inevitably I’m going to have to find some way of obtaining a lightbox for the summer if I want my output to be at all valid.
As I'm dealing with lip-sync primarily, the plan was to have no animation other than mouth movements. However in this first example I couldn’t resist the temptation of throwing in some facial expressions too. The overall effect is pretty stilted (owed mostly to the fact that the bodies don't move at all) but hey, the mouth movements sorta kinda work, which was the point after all. Check 'er out!

Hopefully with the two remaining test animations I'll be able to refine the process a little more. But given that this little sequence represents about six hours of work, and I have until February to make this film, I'm cautiously confident that it may turn out kinda cool...
BTW Many thanks to my anonymous flautist for letting me use her voice.

Voices (Part Uno!)

Given that I can't really start work on the film without a basic soundtrack, now's probably the time to get cracking on it. This is one of the trickiest parts of production for a lot of people on my course as it comes down to finding actors and sound designers. Fortunately with the work I've done producing indie records I know my way around a waveform, and given that the Hunter is a grumpy fucker like my good self I'll opt for the Mike Judge/Seth MacFarland/Trey Parker (etc) route and just do the voice myself. For the Duck however I was able to wrangle an old pal from my thespian days.
Yes, friends, I used to tread the boards like a veritable bard.
Well, not really. My old school used to throw me in every other play to be the token old fat dude, and the novelty of the process wore off very quickly. At least half the time though I'd be there amongst other fellows and fellates (no, wait...that means something else...what's the feminine form of 'fellows'? Why am I even typing this?) in a similar predicament, chief among them Tom Bower, a name I know at least five of you reading this will recognise from my not-even-cult webcomic 'Mitchells In England'. While the comic strip Tom was an unreliable, brain-damaged pothead, the real Tom was a pretty dependable, all-around, level-headed guy (when I was fourteen it made for delightfully clever subversion, trust me). Of course this has all changed, when I saw him for the first time in several years he had devolved into a degenerate pimp with duelling addictions for gambling and crack. But I was able to snap him out of his destructive (albeit decadent) stupor long enough to have him record dialogue for my Duck character.


Although the quality of sound is a little ropey from the camcorder footage, going through the actual soundtrack (that big sexy mic isn't just there to be big and sexy, y'know) it's clear he's absolutely nailed the character, even throwing in some extra embellishment and methods of delivery that give some of the limp bits of dialogue a shot in the arm. So next up, my dialogue, the dialogue for the Prospective Lay, a lengthy editing process and eventually the wonderful world of dope sheets. From what I can fathom, that last one isn't as fun as it sounds...

That weirdo sat in the corner doing his drawings...

Of late I find myself recalling a sequence in Charlie Kaufman's über-meta-headfuckfest 'Adaptation', in which Nick Cage as Kaufman frequents a greasy spoon to do research for the dull screenplay he's been commissioned to write, the vacuousness of his life openly pitied by the waitresses. Given that my apartment is filled with distractions (not to mention my ordinarily-chaste upstairs neighbours are nowadays rutting with such fervour as to suggest they've only just worked out what goes where) and my campus has been closed for easter save for a stuffy library, I've had to search out alternative working environments. It turns out that I seem to get the bulk of my work done in the one remaining café that isn't occupied by scores of braying teenage imbeciles - shielded as it is by a bookstore that surrounds it, a laudable chav filter.
While my project and my waistline have both benefited enormously (pretty much the whole film is storyboarded now and their paninis average out at under 400 calories) my concern is that my body has rejected the concept of routine. Earlier today, three weeks of constant inking and fitful nights caught up with me and the resulting exhaustion nearly drove me to babbling lunacy. I'm also wary that the visual of me in my little corner going through my production sheets isn't a million miles away from that of those smug pricks that bring their laptops into Starbucks.
I guess my point is that I'm looking forward to school starting again - and that's a sentence I never would have imagined myself typing. As fruit of my labours, here are some more storyboarded sequences that follow on from either of my proposed openings.
Here we see the Hunter and Duck meet for the first time.





After the cheeky little fucker's psyche-out, the two have a civil exchange over coffee and the duck embarks on a more calculated, protracted revenge - weaselling his way into some free room and board.










Flashing forward a month, one night has become several weeks and, despite the Hunter's efforts, this zombie duck isn't going anywhere.




What follows in the first draft of the script are four scenes that progress over the course of several months, with their relationship becoming more and more strained. Of the four I've decided to excise two for being overly-wordy and generally unnecessary. Those that remain will be posted in my subsequent entries. Yeah, I know, I'm a tease. I can't give you everything in one go! How would I know whether or not you'd call back?

Case Study #2: Anthropermorfis...Anthrapomorphi...Anthro-pamerphis...Making Animals Act All Human-Like...

One of the greatest freedoms inherent in my aforementioned first love, Ren & Stimpy, was Kricfalusi's ability to caricature and anthropomorphise beyond identifiability. If you didn't know that Ren was a dog (or, more specifically, an 'Asthma-Hound' chihuahua) and Stimpy was a cat - an obvious pairing of species that goes back centuries - it would take an extremely lateral-thinking mind to guess it from their appearance.
Ren's long, distinctly un-chihuahuaian ears might have one lean toward assuming he's some type of emaciated rabbit, or his signature 'W'-shaped mouth at times resembled a proboscis (the show itself referred to him as resembling a mosquito on several occasions). Stimpy, well, Jesus wept, if you honestly thought 'cat' when you saw him for the first time, you should seek psychiatric care. Interestingly, most other animals in the show aren't as disproportionately exaggerated. The deadpan Mr. Horse, though humanistic, was very obviously a horse, even without the name there was no ambiguity there.

Bob Clampett's 1946 Daffy, alongside Chuck Jones's 1953 Daffy...

A more logical case study to pursue would be the greatest animated duck in creation, Daffy (to hell with Donald, the hoarse, lisping bitch). My logic being that, well, my antagonist is also a duck. Ah, my deep and multi-faceted mind.
When you look at the evolution of Daffy (and we're stopping with the late 50s, if anyone brings up the horror of Loonatics Unleashed I will piss-slap them) there is a tremendous change, not just to his design but his character as well. On a DVD commentary for Bob Clampett's 1946 short 'The Great Piggy-Bank Robbery', John K. in his capacity as cartoon historian acknowledges the character was initially 'daffy' as the moniker suggests, evolving into a far more subdued, crankier, 'jerk' character. Where Mr. K and I differ is our preferred variation - while he prefers the abrasive, off-the-wall Daffy of the earlier 1930s and 40s shorts, I'm more a fan of the calmer, calculating one of the 50s, if for no other reason than that's the one I was exposed to more often as a young'un. Obviously of the two of us, John K. knows his shit more than I do given age and experience (in fact, why are you even reading this? Go read his blog right now!) and his taste is doubtless attributed to the freedom the loonier Daffy allows in terms of just how crazy the animation gets.

Stills from Clampett's 'The Great Piggy-Bank Robbery' (1946) - a decidedly daffier Daffy

He alludes to on the commentary (and points out in a blog entry) Clampett's propensity for throwing in dirty jokes, such as having Daffy's beak morph into a sideways pudenda for occasional frames that, within the deluge of the consistently wild drawings, the naked eye is unable to register. The character design is not limited to a strict model sheet, with proportions constantly altering - this is perhaps the most notable derivation in Kricfalusi's own work, and to me one of the most endearing.
By going to the other extreme, we can observe the later 'grown-up' Daffy in the 1953 masterpiece (in no uncertain terms) 'Duck Amuck'. This cartoon is a character study in itself, with Daffy the only actor to appear until the oft-plagiarised ending. Growing increasingly frustrated as the cartoon's animator headfucks him constantly, we see the full gamut of emotion and acting in Chuck Jones's incarnation of Daffy. It is a very different beast to Bob Clampett's - even when he loses his rag completely it is with a kind of disciplined lunacy, (comparitively) conforming to a proportioned design.

Stills from Jones's 'Duck Amuck' (1953) - a not-so-'looney' toon, but brilliant in its subtlety

While some may consider this restricting, it has always struck me that by reigning in the levels of visual absurdity a notch there is less of a likelihood that the audience will be lost. Unless you're an animation devotee like John K. - or if you have a short, infantile attention span like myself - too many convoluted, rapid-fire visual gags can get overwhelming.
To me, the genius of Chuck Jones's take on the Looney Tunes ensemble is the subtlety of the acting. Tiny eye expressions, little sniffs, grimaces, twitches, gesticulations and so on - all done so brilliantly and naturalistically that they are almost subliminal. The look on Daffy's face when he reaches his breaking point is so reserved, yet completely expresses that oh-so-relatable, end-of-one's-tether, borderline psychosis. You know in that look that you're in the eye of the storm, and that very soon the shit will hit the fan. Who here hasn't had a coworker who just fuckin' lost it one day? I imagine it happens with some frequency in the animation industry.
But we don't just see Daffy as an illogical psycho. At several points toward the start of the film he's in good spirits, and these more jovial moments are just as superbly portrayed with the same degree of subtlety. It's the constant poking, prodding and general antagonising on the part of the faceless pencil/paintbrush wielder that incrementally drives him to the edge.
So how is this relatable to my film? Well, apart from the duck connection (I have gleaned an awful lot of research in regards to lip-synching a beak, although I'll try not to throw in those Clampett-esque mouth vaginas) I think that by having two extremes represented by a single character may help with working out what my own visual approach may be. My lack of strict artistic knowledge would see me veer toward the free, unrestricted, loose style, while my amateur status as an animator may automatically restrict what I can do in the time provided, so my character acting may simply wind up as subtle by proxy. We shall see...

Storyboard Outta My Frickin' Mind...

Now that I've refined my script, filtering out the wordy passages and unnecessary scenes, it's time to put together a proper storyboard. I've put this off for a while now because I wanted to wait until the script was properly done and dusted. Given the restructuring of the story and dialogue with each draft, I would have needed to do a completely different storyboard each time, and frankly my wrists don't have the stamina. I'm gonna have to bulk them up if I want to make a career out of animation, but for the sake of civility I won't go into methods.
Anyway...
I'll start from the start, which is just good chronological sense. This first sequence details the initial fate of the Duck, blasted by the Hunter, and his subsequent discovery.
As I'm still at odds as to how the 'zombification' of the Duck will come about, I have done two separate storyboards for this first sequence. The one above is a far longer scenario in which the Duck's corpse is discovered by the creepy Kid, taken to his house and stitched up, then struck by lightning through an open window. The one below has the Duck simply struck by lightning when he washes up on the shore.
I far prefer the former version of events because I really like the design of the kid, and it also explains the stitched-up, falling apart look of the Duck's design (with the latter, more succinct scene I guess we're to assume he was able to do it himself).
So in some way or other, we now have a zombie duck. What happens next? Well, unless you read the concept art post and already know, stay tuned, hombres!

Case Study #1: The Greatest Show on Earth!

I figured that to help shape an impression of where I'm coming from, I'd include in this blog case studies of numerous visual and stylistic influences on my work. So here's the first one. Hooray! As I'm sure you are all aware, YouTube is an invaluable resource for incredibly rare footage, shows you can't buy or watch, hard-to-find interviews, concerts etc. At least, it would be if those fuckin' narcs didn't constantly delete videos because of copyright infringement. In all honesty, how much damage could having a crappily-compressed YouTube video online do to DVD sales or HDTV viewing figures?

But I digress in that interminable way I often do. I had put online a video that got deleted as it's comprised entirely of clips from The Ren & Stimpy Show, the genius creation of contemporary animator John Kricfalusi, with me babbling about how great it was. I think that message frankly needs to be heard still, especially in this era of Loonatics Unleased, 6Teen and all manner of other uninspired dross. This was done as part of my MA course, as an ungraded exercise in putting together a presentation on our creative influences for the sake of getting comfortable with the concept. I decided to do it in a kind of documentary style so I could cram as many points and visual gags as I could.

Painting by Bill Wray, the show's distinctly nifty background artist

If I were to actually post a blog entry as to why Ren & Stimpy was the best thing to happen in animation since the Looney Tunes, it'd be the length of a goddamn novel. So I'll spare you all and stick with the 6 minute summary. My regret with the vid is that I sort of dismiss John K's ill-fated revival 'Adult Party Cartoon' as an afterthought at the end. This is mainly because I consider the two shows to be entirely separate beasts, and 'Adult Party' is laudable in its own right. I may very well give it an entry later on as a separate case study. Adding to the absurdity of Viacom ordering that the presentation be removed, when it was up I got a ton of feedback from people who had never seen the show - or had forgotten it - that had decided to go buy the DVDs after seeing this. So by having it up I was making the company money. Anyway... Have a look (wmv format)

As an addenda, back when this was on YouTube I was frequently asked why my voice was so affected. Unfortunately I really do speak in one of those not-quite-anything hybrid accents. Sorry folks.