I've been off so long, it feels like a lifetime. (And yes, I did intend to keep updating my blog throughout the long holiday, but the thousands of projects I habitually assign for myself leave me brainfried, and things I originally intend to do get forgotten).
I didn't forget about our upcoming project either; this one has to be under 3 minutes long and character-based. I think, though, that the time constraint is more a combination of Dave trying to make sure we don't bite off more than we can chew and shoot for The Lord of the Rings: The Animation! and because, if I remember right, the 3 minutes is the time limit for a submission to the Pictoplasma animation festival. But I think longer animations will actually be acceptable provided we can manage to finish the things in time, as the other animation festivals allow longer submissions.
For this project I decided to do cats. Why cats? Because I like cats! And birds actually. Magical birds. And the cats are tribal and one's a warlord who's actually an owl with a magical voodoo mask that turns him into a cat. And he's worshipped by the real cats. Who bring him birds. Magical birds. And he takes the magic from the magical birds which makes them into dead birds. It's the perfect plan!
Seriously though, there was actually a thought process that lead to this, but I'll get to it later. I expect I'll just blab endlessly about it when I do the research commentary (research is very awkward to write, isn't it? Honestly, I looked at this cat... and I looked at this bird... it's... a cat... and a bird... ) and finish all that up by Monday.
I'm actually hoping that this will be my first mixed media animation - I've realized, over the past year, that I am very, very dependent on Adobe Photoshop. Good old Adobe Photoshop! But while I stay using it, I'm not using other techniques or anything, and I'm worried my learning has suffered for it. So, this year, I'm forcing myself into a brand new work flow! I'm going to use more traditional techniques and try to combine different media and/or type of animation (and honestly, I think this intent did have a hand in shaping my project idea in the last stretch of its initial conception, it's hard to explain). For the most part, I think the animation will be traditional, hand drawn animation - on a light box, not on Adobe Photoshop... (though I might colour it up on either Photoshop or Illustrator, but Illustrator makes everything look -very- perfect with those fancy vectors and I would rather it was sketchy and rough looking) and the magic sequences I would like to do a different way, perhaps using cutout/silhouette animation. I was going to give the bird's magic very African-feeling patterns and colours, changing the background to a lush red and the like, so silhouetted characters I think would work nicely.
I'd also be able to use them to make the final fight between the protagonist and the antagonist quite nightmarish which would be exactly what I want.
I've also given myself a challenge to learn to use watercolour pencils or paints for the backgrounds while magic isn't being used; to get a sort of pale, easy on the eyes natural location... that is if I can learn to use them. Watercolours are much harder than they look!
I'm also interested in trying a bit of collage or stitching. Two years studying textiles and I haven't used a single technique in my animations. I mean... I'm not great at it by any means, but perhaps some mola cutwork or something for the magic sequences... I'm not sure.
Anyway, enough of my waffling about that. My original idea was about cats, and what they do when humans aren't looking. Anyone who's owned a cat knows that they have this amazing ability to vanish at will (Invisible Cats: The Movie?) and only return at dinner time, or when they smell your tuna sandwich. It was partially inspired by an in-joke I had with my sister about our old cat Tamara - yeah, Tamara was a snooty mastermind, he owned a casino underground. And our younger cat, Sunny, a stocky beast of a cat, he's a bouncer.
The story was originally going to be Sunny/a character inspired by Sunny discovers the casino, gets hired as a bouncer, and experiences gangs clashing; this series of events all being held together by the giggles stemming from the fact that Sunny is as thick as a brick. However I became hesitant to base a story so much on faces from home, so my second brainstorm became about a Sphinx cat (that would eventually become Okko), a cat adopted by two blackbirds after being mistaken for one of their chicks. The Sphinx grows up with the birds and becomes the avian equivalent to a superhero, fighting off the tame cats that hunt the birds in huge, exaggerated Kung-Fu Panda type fight scenes. The final challenge would be to take down the fiercest bird-killer of all, referred to as the Terrible Catbird, which is actually a large owl (this would later become Vorquan, my current draft's antagonist). Again, this would sort of be its own parody, and not meant to be taken seriously. The reason I actually dropped this draft - or altered the crap out of it, however you like to look at it - is because I was worried about this trend of funny slapstick stuff I seem to have fallen into. The thing is, I never touched or attempted funny stuff before I started my first year. It's not that I don't appreciate the talent and effort that goes into a good joke, but I don't have that talent. I'm not funny and I keep trying to be. I don't even like slapstick!
For that matter, I never usually have animals as characters either, but I don't mind it.
So, I thought okay, perhaps I'll do better on this project if I stop trying to do something that I'm just no good at. This prompted me to tweak the setting of the story: I swapped the houses and gardens for a great forest/jungle hybrid and added some fantastical elements. No where in the animation will the viewer be told they are in a more magical world, but hopefully the rules of the world will be fairly apparent: birds are naturally magical, and it is this magic that allows them to fly. The cats are magicless and somewhat tribal but still follow some general animal behaviour.
The story itself is about a cat called Okko, who is a Sphinx cat (Trivia! In the early drafts, she was male. I changed her into a female because when I sketched her she looked feminine and because I'm a feminist. :D ) who lost her mother as a kitten, but is adopted by Ralla'ool, a Purple-Crested Touraco. When Ralla'ool is kidnapped by cats and brought before the supposed God and warlord cat, Vorquan, Okko must fight to save her. During the fight, though, she strikes a blow to Vorquan's face and knocks off his mask, and he reverts to his true form, a Great Horned Owl roc. Okko finally defeats him by slamming his mask back onto his face mid-flight, turning him back into his cat form, and he falls to his death. Okko is saved from a similar fate by Ralla'ool.
The story still has its fair share of issues and the plot doesn't tie together as neatly as I would like, but I'll work on it.
As a random aside, here are some of my favourite commercial cat animations! Finding less mainstream animation with the accuracy of movement and lack of extreme stylization I'm after has proven, well... it's hard. I mean... unless you count this.
Oh, Mr. Oreilly, you do disturb me greatly. :)
There's this too, 'Please Say Something' which I really like in its own right but it isn't what I want for this animation.
Please Say Something from David OReilly on Vimeo.
...and Catface.
And here are my favourite mainstream animations so far! Firstly - and you'll see this one coming a mile off - Disney's Aristocats.
Apologies for the fact that it's not in English, it was better quality than the English ones I could find. What I love about this film is how realistic the cats are; they still have their typical Disney style as far as the character designs themselves go, but their proportions and anatomy is a bit more down to earth and it helps the movement look very natural. Compare the cats here to, say, Lucifer from Cindarella.
Doesn't really move like a cat at all. He moves like the typical cartoony slapstick character; he moves like Tom from Tom and Jerry moving on four legs instead of two. Oh, hey, another cat to look at. Fancy that!
I could do a huge long list of Disney cat characters that are poorly animated in the sense that they don't move like cats compared to the characters in the Aristocats, but I think it would be slightly redundant. Sergeant Tibbs in Disney's 'One Hundred and One Dalmatians' has a lovely design but he doesn't really move like a cat. To be fair, most of the time he's marching, but the animation is still nothing compared to Aristocats. But the dogs move fantastically. Why? Because the main characters are dogs, they get the most screen time, so its reasonable to say that more time for research and more time for animation was afforded to the leading characters. That's all it is, really, I believe. On a very random aside, the animation of the cats below still isn't as good as the Aristocats. But they needed to be posted somewhere. You can't look at Disney cats and not look at these two.
They're so cute, yet so evil, and so catlike, yet so evil. Love them. They do look curiously like the Siamese from the 'Everybody Wants to be a Cat' song in Aristocats though.
Stop. DonBluthtime.
Don Bluth's 'Banjo the Woodpile Cat':
I'll tell you now, I love Don Bluth. He is the master of facial expressions and dialogue animation - just take a look at 3:09 to 3:25 on that first video. I watched that bit so many times its unbelievable.
The cats in this animation are a bit odd in that they flip-flop very severely between being excellently accurate to... getting up on their back feet and dancing the night away. It's somewhat typical of films like this (it happens in Disney films too) that in upbeat sequences the characters become more humanlike, though, and its not really something that bothers me too much, but when the cats are being catlike, it's done fantastically. I wouldn't go as far to say that it's better than the Aristocats, but its still very good. And the characters are adorable, especially Banjo.
Next up I'm going to take a look at Studio Ghibli's The Cat Returns. Good film, if a touch short.
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