Chris Wasden

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: A little chase sequence I’ve been working on lately.

This sequence is meant to be a practice with working with dynamic cameras. Since most of the work I’ve done thus far as a student has been flatter and static, it’s been refreshing to approach a sequence with a different understanding than what I’ve done in the past.

One of the things that I have been learning more about is advice given to us by a BYU alumni working at Disney: “The camera is the laziest character in the scene.” There were a few shots in this piece where I tried to be sophisticated or whatever, and after it didn’t work I went back to simple camera work and things were much smoother.

I’ve also used this as an opportunity to look at my workflow, see what I do quickly and what I could use some work improving my skills and process. It’s been an enlightening experience.

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: “Step Into the Page”, a pretty amazing video of animator Glen Keane doing sweet stuff with virtual reality. I don’t want to spoil it, so just watch it!

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: “An Object At Rest”, by CalArts graduate Seth Boyden. “A stone travels through the course of millenia, facing nature’s greatest obstacle: human civilization.”

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: I’ve been watching Kurosawa, and I want to talk about the films I’ve seen so far. A kind of cheat, since this isn’t animation at all. But Kurosawa’s so awesome that I think it’s forgivable.

Kurosawa’s Wikipedia article is a pretty full summary of his life, and provides a lot of details to someone who really came into his own post-World War II. He made 30 films over his career of nearly 60 years, and it’s cool to see the variety of topics that he addressed in his films. Recently, I found out nearly all of those films are in our university library, and I realized it was high time I learned from a master.

Here’s two video essays from Every Frame a Painting about how Kurosawa did different things in his films: composing shots with movement, and another on the geometry and staging of a scene. Both essays are very instructive and insightful. Every frame of a film needs to be created and composed, and there are ample ways to present a story effectively. 

I had already seen two of his films - they were the ones I started with here:

Rashomon

An interesting psychological film where a samurai’s murder in the woods is presented through multiple different accounts. But none of the accounts make sense together; who is telling the truth? What is the truth here?

I watched this for the first time maybe three years ago, and I noticed the choice to stage the murder and its resulting stories in the forest. The light from the sun is obscured by the trees above, so that all of the truth in the story is obscured by the witnesses’ bias. Contrast that with the court where the trial proceeds, where everything is open and clean and clear (or should be). Also, interesting that in the court the characters are speaking to a judge off screen, much higher than the witnesses - and we are on the same level, just as unsure who is telling the truth.

Here’s an interesting article by Norman Holland analyzing the film much deeper than my own thoughts here.

The Seven Samurai

Hands down my favorite Kurosawa movie of the six I have watched so far, and one of my favorite films ever. I’ve seen this at least four times, and it’s still viscerally powerful and engrossing. Each of the seven samurai are memorable, and the battles are thrilling.

If you’ve never heard of this movie, you’d probably recognize the basic plot: a group of warriors are hired to protect a village from bandits who steal their food (A Bug’s Life, anyone?). I’ve read articles that describe this as the proto-action movie, or a movie that defined a number of the conventions of the action genre.

This film is three-and-a-half hours long, but every time I watch this, I lose track of the time. Much of the film is spent building up the characters, showing their relationship to the villagers and each other. It’s a slow burn, until the bandits arrive once more and the fight commences, and lives are lost.

The Seven Samurai was remade in America as The Magnificent Seven, a western set in Mexico. While a good and fun movie (with a ton of Hollywood stars as the seven cowboys), I think I care for The Seven Samurai as characters and as a film altogether.

Yojimbo

You might have noticed the same guy popping up in a number of these films, like the man in the image of Rashomon and the samurai second to the left in The Seven Samurai. This guy’s name is Toshiro Mifune, a prolific Japanese actor who was in 16 of Kurosawa’s own films. He is once again the star for this film.

Yojimbo is the story of a ronin (leaderless samurai) who wanders into a town infested by two rival gangs trying to rule the town. The samurai slowly dispatches the gangs by turning them against each other.

Just as The Seven Samurai has elements of action movie in it, Yojimbo has the feeling of a Western. The above shot shows a clear example of this - just that everyone is wearing kimonos instead of shirts and pants and boots. (In fact, this film was remade into a spaghetti Western - A Fistful of Dollars).

Sanjuro

The ronin from Yojimbo is (kind of) back in this pseudo-sequel. A similar kind of plot: the ronin finds samurai in need of help, and he must use his wits to right wrongs in town.

This film is much lighter compared to Yojimbo - with the ronin clucking and tsking all of the impulsive samurai trying to do the right thing, I didn’t feel nearly as concerned for his ultimate outcome as I did in the first film. Yet it is a fun film in its own right, and once I accepted its differences, it was quite enjoyable. Although the best and most intense part of the film, at the end (where this screenshot is from) is my favorite scene. Whew.

Ikiru

Finally leaving the feudal period behind, we watched Ikiru next. Ikiru is the story of a mid-level bureaucrat who is diagnosed with stomach cancer and is faced with a crisis about what he should with his life.

Kurosawa made a number of films that are concerned with social impact - I could see it in the first four films that we watched, but it was even more evident here.

I felt the first half of the movie was stronger than the second - I was surprised by the direction the plot took in the middle, and I had a hard time staying engaged. But the ending, where the man swings and accepts his life for what it is - beautiful movie magic.

One Wonderful Sunday

Another one of Kurosawa’s social films. An engaged couple spend one Sunday together in post-war Japan. 

A lot of people compare this to Frank Capra’s films, namely It’s a Wonderful Life, where the film focuses on the common person, with their own triumphs and successes on a much smaller scale. Some would criticize it as sentimental, and I can see where they are coming from.

I think the most interesting part of this film is its portrayal of life in postwar Japan. This movie was made in 1947, while America still occupied the country, and although there are no Americans in the movie, these people have many of the same hopes and dreams and challenges that so many others face all over the world. Cultures might be different, but the basic needs are the same.

This is Kurosawa as a younger filmmaker starting to come into his own. I noticed his trademark staging in many places, just not as tight well-composed as it eventually grew into. It’s not my favorite of his films - but it is sweet, and I appreciate it for that.

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: The Dam Keeper, by Tonko House. A young pig is bullied at school until he meets a new friend that changes his life.

The Dam Keeper was conceived and primarily made by Dice Tsutsumi and Robert Kondo, two former Pixar art directors that formed their own studio after their work on Monsters University. They have a beautiful way of expressing light and life in their paintings:

(These two are by Dice)

(And this is Robert. Robert also has a Tumblr with neat sketches and paintings on it.)

The Dam Keeper was released in 2014 and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short. It’s a beautiful hand-crafted little short, and was born out of the childhood experiences of the two creators. In that, I think it’s best quality is its honesty as it presents a situation that many of us have experienced. It’s an interesting discussions to have with kids.

Reading about Dice and Robert’s collaboration is also inspiring. Here’s a recent article from The California Sunday Magazine talking about Tonko House, what they’ve accomplished, and what plans they have next.

For our Animation Spotlight: “Animator vs. Animation IV”, by Alan Becker. A stick figure fights back against its creator. For a little context, watch the first Animator vs. Animation to get a sense of what’s happening, but you won’t need to see the other ones to get what’s going on.

I saw this in our animation lab this last week, and I thought it was brilliant. There’s so much happening in this short! So many ideas packed into this, all coming at a rapid pace. There’s so much happening that even though this is 13 minutes long, it feels much shorter and engaging.

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: a trip WAY back in time, to 1914: Gertie the Dinosaur, by animator pioneer Windsor McKay. (You can skip to about 6 minutes in to start seeing the animation.) 

Gertie the Dinosaur was originally part of a vaudeville show that McKay put on. He would talk to Gertie, give her commands, talk to her (this version of the film has titles of what McKay would say to Gertie while they were on stage performing) - and audiences were astonished to see that this picture of a dinosaur was interacting back! (Remember, in the 1910s, silent films were growing in popularity, but back in 1914, animation was still a brand new field that only a few people had delved into; most film were experiments instead of stories like we watch today.) What’s more, this dinosaur had a personality! She cried, she sulked, she played and bowed to the audience.

During his lifetime, Windsor McKay created a lot of techniques that were used for the first time, like inbetweening, cycling, and other things. These techniques helped make drawing animation more efficient, which every animator is grateful for, I’m sure. (Apparently McKay didn’t patent these new techniques; he said, “Any idiot that wants to make a couple of thousand drawings for a few hundred feet of film is welcome to join the club.” 

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: the newest episode of “Every Frame A Painting”, looking at the great Chuck Jones and how he grew as an artist and filmmaker.

Every Frame a Painting is a relatively recent video essay series by a editor named Tony Zhou who I think has a knack/talent/gift/whatever of commenting about various filmic techniques. As someone who is studying cinematography and film in general, these are very insightful for me, and I’ve gotten a lot out of his pretty small collection that he has amassed over the past year and a half.

This video by Chuck Jones is different in that Tony talks less about film technique and more about Mr. Jones’ evolution as an artist. All good thoughts. I love that implied in his message is the necessity of time in order to become more skilled, more nuanced and more whole. Personally, I am starting to understand how crucial time becomes in developing yourself and growing as a professional, artist, citizen, and person.

There’s a lot of excellent videos EFOP has made; some of my personal favorites are this one on Akira Kurosawa and how he used movement, and this one on Jackie Chan and how he made Action Comedy so brilliantly. (Seriously, Jackie Chan is insane. Some of the stuff in just that short video is bonkers.) All of them are interesting and insightful. Most of them have varying amounts of language, whether in the commentary (in some of the earlier videos) or from the movies that they pull from, so heads up if that’s something that concerns you. The two I referenced are clean, so they can be a good start if you want to see what they’re about.

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: the latest trailer to “The Peanuts Movie”. I’m getting super excited for this!

One of the questions I’ve seen around (and I’ve wondered myself) is how well this would translate into 3D from the flat world of the comic strip and the television specials. I was a little surprised to see this come up:

Here it is, a direct comparison of 2D and 3D for all of us to see!

So does it work? Personally, I think there’s so much to consider here that it is difficult to make a conclusive evaluation; I love the organic lines of the original drawings, and that’s something that 3D isn’t able to duplicate. But I do think that Blue Sky has been able to translate Charlie and the gang into 3D very well. It feels bigger and more fleshed out, but still with the charm and feel of the comic strip. It looks super sweet.

I’ve noticed a few principles that they seem to be following to help them as they’ve translated from the page to the screen:

First, the animation of the characters. When animating in 3D, previous attempts between mimicking 2D involves smearing, double limbs, a number of techniques that I frankly don’t have enough knowledge or experience to be able to explain it properly. (The newer Wil E. Coyote shorts by Reel FX do a great job with this). There’s a number of instances of this in the trailer; here’s a example of Snoopy:

Some of these look bizarre when they’re freezed framed - Snoopy changes size a number of times, and that last image has double Snoopy heads. But when these are seen in real time, they feel frantic and read clearer. The same techniques that Looney Tunes animators used! (By the way, I love that Peppermint Patty is totally out during this shot.)

Here’s another shot of Charlie Brown flying through the air. The silhouette of Charlie Brown and his clothes looks like an image straight from the comic strip!

Another interesting point is the camera movement, or lack thereof. Many of the shots are extremely flat and and have limited camera movement. There are exceptions, of course, but overall the feeling seems to mimic the feel of the comic strip, where the perspective can’t move in a shot. The visual beauty comes from the staging of the characters and their movement - just like the strip.

In addition, there’s not much motion blur in any of these shots - another trademark to make something look and feel “live action”. Hit pause on just about any spot in the trailer where there’s a lot of movement, and there’s not much blur or smearing going on. (The big exception I found was the plane flying around, presumably because the camera is also moving around in 3D space a lot.) The conscious decision to not include something that we recognize from real life shows that this is not a cartoon transported into real life, but a cartoon in another medium that tries to keep the spirit and life of its original creation.

Will this work? I guess it depends on your perspective. I love the comic and the television specials, and this film will no way be able to replace them for me. But at least Blue Sky has paid attention to to what made the Peanuts so memorable and visually striking so that this feels less like a corporate cash grab and more like a piece of art that everyone can enjoy and appreciate.

(Now if they could make a story that is awesome and meaningful, without the modern hip-hop music in the trailers, that would be excellent! But that’s another story for another time…)

I thought it was interesting that the Mom had Sadness in charge and Anger seemed in charge of the dad.

For a catch up of sorts on our Animation Spotlights: some thoughts about the recently released Disney/Pixar film Inside Out. A 11-year old girl’s emotions come into tough times as the girl and her family move from the Midwest to San Francisco.

My wife and I just saw this movie this afternoon, and had a wonderful, enjoyable, and moving experience. Well made, beautifully designed, deep and engaging without losing the audience, funny without pandering to crude humor, and earnest and moving. The kids in the theater loved it, and the adults laughed as much as the kids — and teared up, as well.

I’ve tried to minimize spoilers with these thoughts, but if you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and go see it before reading this. Just see it. Trust me.

After the movie, my wife and I talked about we loved about this film. We ended up talking for probably close to an hour about the little moments and big ideas that the film explores and addresses through the plot. Both of us were very impressed at how much we were engaged by the characters and the story and why that was. What about this helped us to be totally engaged with the experience — so much so that when the little baby in the row behind us was bopping me on the head, I almost didn’t realize it?

I think part of the answer to this is that there really is something at stake here. Just about every character has something that they could lose, and I as a audience member recognized and wanted them to succeed. This is especially true with Bing Bong; I think he stands to lose the most out of everybody in the film, and the way they handled his progression, and how many of us reacted in the theater, shows how meaningful loss and how we deal with that is so crucial to get “right” in a story.

This is also evident in the story’s arc in Riley’s mind; as more of Riley’s personality lands are falling apart, the importance of getting back and fixing them becomes even more important. They have to get back! And the time became more urgent with the loss of each land, even more vital than the last.

Each of the emotions are awesomely designed and essential to the story in their own way. There was a great balance between each of them working together. Joy and Sadness, of course, are the main thrust of the story, but Anger, Fear and Disgust each have their own journey of growth and experience. And each of them have their scene-stealing moments, which are frequently hilarious.

I love that the story resolves not with a fairy-tale experience that restores everything back to what it was before; instead, the emotions recognize the vital importance of Sadness, and the Riley is finally able to express her emotions in the best way possible. It builds into such a cathartic conclusion. Not everything will be the same as it was before — but that’s okay, because all of our emotions help us to have a full, rich and meaningful life. And that is a beautiful and true message.

My wife and I talked about a lot of small and large decisions that Pixar made that add depth to the ideas in the film; using color for each emotion as symbolic cues is something that I love, and is a neat hint towards each scene. Notice the different colors of the memories in the background and how that conveys a different emotion.

(Interestingly, notice how a number of the images, has memories that are grouped in similar hues. That suggests to me that we have various memories associated with a single emotion, and we tend to have “arcs” of a particular emotion. Don’t know how scientifically accurate that is, but I think it’s interesting. Here’s an article from two of the psychologists that were consultants for the film.)

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: the teaser trailer to “Klaus”, a film being produced by Sergio Pablos Animation Studios. A postal service worker needs a miracle to build a post office in an unforgiving town... But who will help him?

This looks amazing. I don’t just mean the story, which looks intriguing - but the visuals!!

Cool use of framing the worker in this shot.

Notice how all of the buildings are leaning into the river, to show how much they’re oppressing this guy.

And look at the texture and lighting they got on everything! His blanket, the book, the quill... This has such a depth to it!

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: something I did, finally!

This is a test I put together to apply for a position at Telltale Games, a studio that emphasizes adventure, narrative-based games that change depending on the choices you make. This story comes from Telltale’s Walking Dead series, concerning Leeland and Dee, a couple, and a young woman they take in named Bonnie.

For this test, Telltale supplies the script and audio for the characters; we then get or make whatever we need, and we make a little movie!

This position at Telltale is for something that equates to previsualization/layout. This stage frequently translates storyboards that artists have drawn into a sort of “first pass” in 3D. Nothing in the set is finalized or looks super nice, and the characters are not fully animated, either. Instead, the characters and camera are placed in the scene (a term in film known as “blocking”) to produce good composition. This also helps those working further down the production process, like animators, texture artists and lighters, to know what to work on to make it look nice. The intention at layout phase is that you can understand the story and each shot, even without all of the visual polish.

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: “Taking the Plunge”, a thesis film from the School of Visual Arts. A young man must brave the deep so he can propose to his girlfriend.

This is a fun short, with some cute moments especially between the guy and the octopus. The filmmakers did an excellent job making the little octopus be cute and sweet without it becoming annoying or syrupy. Who couldn’t love a face like this!?

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: “The Girl Who Hated Books”, a Canadian short about a girl named Meena who... hates books, surprise surprise. A fun film about the importance of literacy and the joy of reading.

I don’t know much about layout for 2-D (since I don’t have much experience in art), but even though some of the shots have different perspective they still follow good composition techniques.

The images draw us exactly where we want our eye to go — in this case, at Meena reading the book.

I see a neat balance and near-symmetry in this image: the elephant, the soldiers, the kangaroo and bear, the birds and butterflies. But there’s still a few elements, like the couple, the mice, and the specific placement of the characters bring visual interest to the image. Plus the character designs are super fun and refreshingly different. I love the monkeys especially!

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: “The Ocean Maker”, a short from Martell Animation. A young woman trying to save the desert must fight off sky pirates to achieve her goal.

This is a beautiful film: lots of gorgeous landscapes and vistas.

With BYU’s new animated film, we are trying to pay more attention to mise-en-scene of our shots, and how we can design a set so that it provides the visual structure that we’re looking for. I don’t know if I want to imagine how long it must have taken to place each individual rock in the set — but everything clearly has a reason for being where it is.

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: “The Alchemist’s Letter”, a recently-released short film from Pixel Veil. A son comes to terms with his father’s powerful device that turns metal to gold, and finds a more precious gift.

This is a gorgeous film; the visuals really speak the most here. 

There’s a number of beautiful fluid camera movements here, as if we are taking the place of the man watching the memories in the vials and going on his own emotional journey.