Friday, January 20, 2012
MY OWN ANIMATION STYLE? [REVISED]
You must think I'm nuts for reposting these two videos so soon after I'd posted them before. I'm doing it because I really do have something new to say about them. They've pointed me in a new direction and I'm so happy about it that I can barely contain myself.
What I see in them is a personal style of acting that's been simmering in my head for a long time. I'm picturing how this live action style would look in animation. If I could draw it the way I act it out, then I'd have a style that would be completely my own. Isn't that what every artist prays for...a unique style?
To see what I see in this video (above) imagine the roles of the little girl and the stern schoolmaster combined in one person. I picture a little girl who obsessively acts out what other people say to her, so there's lots of opportunities for back and forth acting in the same person. I love the idea of writing for the acting, something that few animation writers do. If you want to see what I mean, watch the video from 4:10 to 6:05.
On a different but related topic, I wonder why animation took the path it did, where animators learn general skills then apply those skills in whatever way their employer directs them. That's a good plan for most animation, but does it all have to be done that way?
Why can't I have a character that I animate particularly well, and shop him (or variants of him) around to the studios for use in their own projects? The studio would own the variant of my character that I do for them, but I could animate other variants for other studios. It's as if Clark Gable were a free agent who played many roles for many bosses, but was always recognizably Clark Gable. Does that make sense? Am I explaining it right?
I told this to John and he thought the idea was completely hair-brained, just the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. In his view having an independent artist come in would undermine the director's vision and make it difficult for other animators and designers to get on the same track. Maybe, but in my view John's putting too much emphasis on the independence of the animator. Clark Gable still took direction wherever he went, and so would my hypothetical artist. Anyway, I wouldn't recommend this way of working to John because the way he does things made him the funniest animation director of his time. Why mess with something that works?
Mike Barrier stirred up a big controversy when he suggested something similar to what I'm saying here. You should have seen the letters he got! People were outraged. Me...I think there's something in it.
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11 comments:
Good morning, Eddie. Wonderful post to start off my Friday (very good feeling I'm going to get a special surprise, which I will tell you about later today if it happens)! I think style comes naturally if you already have the talent and skill in the first place. Whenever I draw cartoons, people can always tell I did them and I have a great degree of control over them.
Just wondering though, would getting a master's degree from a reputable art college like the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn after I'm finished completing my liberal arts education (narrowed it down to Georgia State, Kennesaw, Stony Brook, Boston University if I really "sell" myself to them quick, and University of Massachusetts Amherst, my parents are planning to move back to my home state of Massachusetts, hence all the New England colleges listed here. People keep telling me that I'm a "smart," highly intelligent person or whatever) help me to be even more competitive against those with the far more expensive animation degrees. I want to study art history as my major to set myself apart from everyone else. What do you think?
I feel like I ask you all this stuff and I give nothing in return, so I apologize if I ask these things way too much. I just like hearing what other people who have had ten times more experience in the real world.
It's not such a crazy idea. Johns actually done that with some of his characters.
He used George Liquor, Cigarettes the cat and the Heartaches girls for various companies and he still owns the rights to them. It's not like they suddenly becomes the companies intellectual property.
Jim Henson also did something similar, using his Muppets for wilkins coffee, Purina dog chow and other companies who wanted his characters to appear in their ads.
Didn't the late 50s and early 60s see a number of similarly animated characters hawking various products from the same animation houses... basically contour line animations (Piel's real draft seems to stick in my mind) but the characters were more about a style, not a certain personality. I'm not saying it's the same thing, but the animated character had to be secondary to the product, which is diametrically opposed to what a character developer would intend for their precious creation.
It seems like an interesting idea, but the only issue I think there would be is a repeat of the Mickey Mouse syndrome with rubber hose animation. Everyone was doing their own version of the same character. The only difference here is that you would be the one making all the variants instead of multiple people stealing the idea.
It would interesting to see how this would work, some testing/experimentation would be needed obviously.
Could you link to the article that Michael Barrier made on this? Or has that since been pulled down?
I've thought about this, too. It's a hard sell. From an agency's standpoint, it's like signing a celebrity endorsement vs. buying a perfectly obedient, perennially cheerful slave (i.e., owning the character). The challenge is to create a trusted celebrity. If (s)he's unknown outside of the 18-24 demographic, that's even better. There's so much market propaganda all around us that kids will buy anything that suggests authenticity. And Eddie is the real thing.
John has done a great job at this with his characters, but his American ads were for unmarketable products. I think he should pitch George Liquor to the Koch Bros. (seriously).
This is an interesting idea, Eddie. There are lots of possibilities for cartoons that I think haven't really been pursued. I thought that after the worldwide success of Jamie Hewlett's Gorillaz characters, you'd see more bands/performers opting to use imagined characters and stories as a way of revitalizing the relation between music and cartoons, but so far it hasn't happened at all. Actually, you could go back to The Beatles and 'Yellow Submarine' with that idea: the film created a story and a world just as appropriate for The Beatles as 'A Hard Day's Night' was. Maybe this will never happen because the old model of studio = character is too well established.
This sort of thing is done in Japan all the time. Osamu Tezuka had a thing called "Star System" (look it up) where he reused a same set of characters in different series for different roles (ie: a good guy from one series can show up in another as a bad guy).
Fujio Akatsuka did this, too. One of the characters he created was an insane policeman who loves to fire his gun in the sky whenever he's excited (he never runs out of bullets). He showed up in various different series he did, although he is well-known in "Tensai Bakabon", where he played a major role.
Another Akatsuka character, Nyarome the cat, also showed up in different series, too, his best known role being in "Moretsu Ataro". Interestingly enough he pretty much took over the series later in the run, with the main character becoming sidelined in the process.
It should be noted that these guys were doing work for different publishers. Copyrights were rarely an issue, though, since they owned most of the rights for everything they did.
I love the idea of an ensemble cast for cartoons! A series could run like a soap opera, dropping characters & adding new ones forever. You can leave your character in a coma to go do a movie & then revive him later.
I love this idea! And it's not completely hair-brained. Lots of cartoonists on the web have backgrounds or day jobs in animation. There's no shortage of animators who have their own characters, which is a pretty new thing, as far as I can tell. I feel like a whole new type of cartoonist has been created, born partly because studios don't offer career employment, and partly because the web makes it so easy to find an audience.
So the first part of your formula, the idea of animators with their own characters, is already in place. The second part, finding venues for those characters... I have no idea how something like that could work, but I'd love to see it happen.
Roberto: It depends what you're interested in. I would major in European history rather than art history, because it's probably taught more rigorously. Be sure you get European literature classes, too. Forget the American stuff...We did some good stuff, but living here makes it easy to pick that up on our own.
University art classes are often taught by substandard teachers who put too much emphasis on art done in the last thirty years. You can't learn much from people like that.
Art schools attract students who are more serious about art, so if art is entirely what you're interested in, you'd be better off there.
Zillustration: That's not exactly what I had in mind, but it evoked some interesting memories.
ADC: Argh! I'll have to leave that task up to you!
Stephen: Sigh! true enough, studio = character.
Joshua: Hensen's coffee commercials are a great example!
Pappy: Thanks! Your comment gave me an interesting idea.
Joshua, Pappy: George Liquor would make a great spokesman for the right product!
Brubaker: True! We should take a tip from the Japanese, who seem to have a more light-hearted, experimental approach to stuff like this.
Oh! By the way Eddie, in case you were planning another post about faces, I discovered this one while drawing today. It struck me as a face you'd like, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!
*I'm reposting the above just since you seem to be talking about this stuff lately. Not to be annoying or anything...
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