The Narrative Arc

 This is perhaps a topic that most animators myself included do not want to involve ourselves in. Most of the time we consider our work to be technical and want to leave issues about the story in itself to others. But in the recent weeks and especially on some of the work I've been required to do, thinking about the narrative has become more important. Even in very short stories such as the ones I have been involved in, thinking about how stories start and how they end and how these two parts links have become critical.

The basic narrative arc can be depicted with a pyramid shaped linear path drawn on a graph. The bottom line represents the chronological progression of a story while the vertical plane represent the rising height of complexity in a story. The rising part of the pyramid describes the initial crisis that characters are introduced to in establishing the story. This represents the Exposition stage. The complexity in the story must then rise until an apex is reached. In terms of complexity, early literature involved Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, and Man vs. Self . In more recent times however, the kinds of complexity and conflicts possible have increased to include Man vs. Society, Man vs. Technology,and Man vs. Alter Ego, Man vs. Alien Society, Man vs. Biotechnology, and Man vs. Cloned Self.

The final descending slope on the pyramid describes the stage of resolution, as the answers that have been asked are answered. A few types have been culled from a fairly descriptive article at the Sandhill.edu website here linked. They are:

1. Comic resolution: The conflict is resolved favorably for the protagonist; he or she is better off than when the tale began.  
2. Tragic resolution: The conflict is one in which the protagonist loses ground. He or she is worse off than when the tale began. 
3. Linear resolution: Despite the ensuing complications and conflicts, the protagonist is largely unchanged by the events of the story. 
4. Dénouement: In some tales, a portion of the story at the end is devoted to tying up the loose ends. Think of Murder, She Wrote, in which each episode includes a segment at the end during which Jessica Fletcher fills in her audience on how she figured out the identity of the real killer.[1]

For me, paying a bit more attention to these details have become essential especially as I realize that there is a more aware audience who will judge the quality of a film however short, based among other things, on the plot and cohesive links in a story.


References

Sandhills.edu, 2009. Plot, Theme, the Narrative Arc, and Narrative Patterns. [online] Available at: <http://www.sandhills.edu/academic-departments/english/film/narrativearc.html> [Accessed 28 December 2011 ].

Animated Shorts Inspiration

Of late, I've been posting a lot on this blog about inspiration. where and how I get them. I decided to post some of my most favorite short animated feature. The choices however cannot be exhaustive because new things come out almost everyday and to cover all the possible pieces that might have made it onto this list would take forever. My selections however, are governed by those same aesthetic principles of good animation namely use of great narrative arcs, stylistic lighting or color grading techniques like cell shading and creative animation techniques be it in stop-motion or full CG animation.

Big Bucks Bunny by The Blender Foundation
A funny story of a giant rabbit with a heart bigger than himself and how the crafty tricks of three rodents make something snaps inside him and the rabbit isn't a bunny anymore! I really liked the way the story unfolds and the general animation of the environment.



Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Mac 'N' Cheese by Colorbleed
A crazy and energetic chase by two guys that spills into desert territory leaving a huge trail of destruction in its wake until they are out of places to run all over a game of tag. There use of cell shading has inspired me to want to use this technique in my work as it gives that stylistic feel to it that makes colors richer and more vibrant.



Mac 'n' Cheese from Mac 'N' Cheese on Vimeo.


The Tale of Three brothers by Stateless Films
First seen in the Harry Porter Movie, the tale of the three brothers highlights the story of three brothers and the decisions they made to acquire and use power and the repercussions of their actions.
The overall contrasted color style really worked and helped serve the mood and animatics of the story.



Harry Potter - The Deathly Hallows from Michael Blackshore on Vimeo.

Bridge by Ting Chian Tey
The story of four animal characters trying to cross a bridge, but ending up as obstacles to one another and the decisions they make. For me the most interesting thing was the way the animator uses a cartoon-like animation to communicate some life lessons about the many disagreements or competing paths in life people face, and the possible results of pride, obstination, and compromise.



Bridge from Ting on Vimeo.

Swing of Change by Harmony Bouchard, Andy Le Cocq, Joakim Riedinger, Raphael Cenzi for ESMA (Ecole Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques) in France
The story about how Harry, a racist barber changes his mind at the arrival of a magical trumpet in his barber shop! I loved the animation in itself and the brilliant balance of weight and detail. Finally, the ability to use animation to challenge a moral issue is also well displayed again in this piece.


Swing of Change from Swing of Change on Vimeo

Oktapodi by Gobelin

The struggle of two octopus to free themselves from their persistent owner. The detail in the animation is astounding and the overall humor in the piece was balanced by the narrative path it employed. Very good work.

Oktapodi from Mauro Flamig on Vimeo.

The Edges OF Reality

(Hyper-Realistic Characters From The Movie Tekken: Blood Vengeance)

Seeing the new Namco Bandai's Tekken: Blood Vengeance (Yoichi Mori, 2011) movie and the high level of realism employed in the character's looks and performance, it brought home again the sheer amount of work that must go into creating that quality of work. And perhaps by extension the debate between hyper-realistic animated characters of Japanese animations and the more cartoon-like characters of  Pixar and DreamWorks Studios. However, it is not my aim to make this a comparison between Japanese and American animation, but instead to reflect on the unexplored notions of the uncanny valley that almost always arises in academic circles when the topic of hyper-realism in animation is visited.

It is no longer news that high levels of realism can be achieved in animation. With the use of motion capture data technology becoming main stay in most of the major studios, almost life-like performances can be captured from live actors and retargeted to CG characters. The higher processing power and memory available in computers mean that high level facial and muscle detail can be scultped and rendered quickly. The first attempts at realism are found in the Disney animated features, one notable one being Bambi (James Algar and Samuel Armstrong, 1942). In Jurassic park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), the first use of photo-realistic characters for CG were seen. Motion capture data was first used on the Gollum character for the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002) movie while The Polar Express (Robert Zemeckis, 2004) took the technology one step further by using motion capture for all the character performances in the movie.

Most of the debate over realism have always concluded that realism was against the very purpose of animation which was to not be 'real'. In Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film  he posited that “achievements within a particular medium are all the more satisfying aesthetically if they build from the specific properties of that medium.” and in this quote:

What holds true of the photographic film does of course not apply to animated cartoons. Unlike the former, they are called upon to picture the unreal – that which never happens. In the light of this assumption, Walt Disney’s increasing attempts to express fantasy in realistic terms are aesthetically questionable precisely because they comply with the cinematic approach… There is a growing tendency toward camera-reality in his later full length films. Peopled with the counterparts of real landscapes and real human beings, they are not so much “drawings brought to life” as life reproduced in drawings… In these cartoons false devotion to the cinematic approach inexorably stifles the draftsman’s imagination.[1]

However, in the paper titled Life Reproduced in Drawings: Realism in Animation (Steve Rowley, 2005) claims this analysis avoids the complicated relationships underpinning audience's notions of realism or the ways in which one form of reality might be prioritised over another, or one type of realism might serve to reinforce another. An attempt to breakup the levels of animation possible is made and it is divided into 5 kinds of realism. They are:

• Visual Realism: The extent to which the animated environment and characters are understood by the audience as looking like environments and characters from the actual physical world.

• Aural Realism: The extent to which the sounds of animated environment and characters are understood by the audience as resembling the sounds of environments and characters from the actual physical world.

• Realism of Motion: The extent to which characters move in a fashion that is understood by the audience as resembling the way characters move in the actual physical world.

• Narrative and Character Realism: The extent to which the fictitious events and characters of the animated film are constructed to make the audience believe they are viewing events and characters that actually exist.

• Social Realism: The extent to which the animated film is constructed to make the audience believe that the fictitious world in which the events take place is as complex and varied as the real world.

Pixar's animation  which makes use of cartoon-like characters has always been made to appear better than the hyper-realistic look and feel of Japanese animated features like Final Fantasy and Tekken. This is mainly because they don't have the clearly formed narrative arc of more American animated features. But with this deconstruction of realism, it is easier to see why if the intent is to achieve audience interest and identification in the character’s personality and situation (narrative and character realism), having the character move and behave realistically (realism of motion) is more important than having the character look real (visual realism) which is what one might associate with Pixar's animated feature. While if the intent is to accentuate technological brilliance in a production, Visual realism becomes more important than Narrative and Character Realism or Social Realism which would be the case in a movie like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Realism in one of its forms will always be the point to attain because it is such a difficult feat to achieve.

In conclusion, it is not the form of realism that creates the uncanny valley effect but the fact that the 'realistic' aim of the animated feature is not communicated through out the piece so that audiences can follow. This is a topic that requires much more in-dept research and I hope to delve deeper into how the notions of reality affect our perceptions of animation and how audiences might receive work that I do.

References

Tekken: Blood Vengeance, 2011. [Animated Film]. Directed by Yoichi Mori. USA: Digital Frontier

Bambi ,1942. [Animted Film]. Directed by James Algar and Samuel Armstrong. USA: Walt Disney Productions 

Jurassic park, 1993. [Film]. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Universal Pictures

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 2001. [Film]. Directed by Peter Jackson. USA: New Line Cinema

The Polar Express, 2004. [Animated Film]. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. USA: Castle Rock Entertainment

[1] Kracauer, 89-90. A similar discussion of animation in the realist context can be found in Armes R. 1974, Film and Reality, Harmondsworth: Penguin, chapters 16 and 25.

Steve Rowley, 2005. Life Reproduced in Drawings: Realism in Animation. Animation Journal, Volume 13, Available at:< http://www.sterow.com/?p=797 > [Accessed 24 December 2011].

 

The One Man Animation Pipeline

In the first few weeks of the semester, I have been pushed to submit assignments that have required a somewhat tricky workflow capable of producing and delivering work within a one-week timeline. I in this article I reflect and share some of the compromises and creative streamlining techniques that it has taken to produce these projects on time and how my workflow would compare against that of a proper studio pipeline or environment.

Concept development\Previsualization.
One phrase which I have heard my instructor use a lot in the past few weeks is "If you had more time". Time is the first and perhaps greatest difference between the process that I have used to deliver most of my assignments in the last few weeks and perhaps what would apply in a studio environment. Since the whole project has to be completed in one week, most of the previsualization and concept development is mostly an internal mental process rather than a one requiring a lot of drawings and sketches. Most of my story boards have had to be mental storyboards. This would not be the case in a studio environment. I tend to create a rough sketch of the animatics more as a written script rather than a drwan storyboard. Within a proper production studio and timeframe, adequate sketches of the main scenes and shots would be drawn by a dedicated art department that would layout possible angles and cloth and material textures for the set and its props. Rough or more polished previsualization shots would be done to see and narrow down what works.

Modelling
Apart from my first assignment project, most of the others were done with free pre-rigged characters downloaded from the web. This was also another attempt to speed up the time it would take modelling characters, rigging and skinning them. In a proper studio house, 3d artists will be tasked with this process, for highly detailed characters, powerful 3rd-party software such as Zbrush would have to be added to the pipeline. Rigging in itself is a whole different process that could take from a whole day to possibly weeks, depending on the scale of character flexibility needed by the animators.

Animation, Framing, Texturing and Lighting
The process of animation for me takes the greatest time within that one week spell. Typically around 3 to 5 days could be spent fiddling with controls and key frames. Like in most genres of design, a sequence of animation can always look better so there exists that temptation to continuously refine. In my case as is the case in most projects, the schedule intrinsicly limits how far fine tuning can go since the scenes need to be ready for lighting and texturing. I have labelled this stage as Animation, Framing, Texturing and Lighting because most of these processes take place at the same time interchangeably. As soon as I map in textures, I immediately check to see the ligting and ensure that it works while still continuing with animation. Once I get proper motion and timing, I set up the framing of the shot and get it ready for render. Ofcourse in a production environment, this would not be the case. Animation, texturing and lighting are all seperate processes handled by different departments and one process has to end before another can begins. Animation first and then interchangeably texturing before lighting. In even more advanced pipelines, a special effects stage is needed before texturing and lighting.

Rendering
Both the 2GB file storage limit available in school and the large file sizes of EXR files have continuously conspired to make rendering a challenging stage of the one week projects. I have at times had to resort to jpeg, png, targa renders just to save on file space and rendering time. Technically, rendering times should not be different when comparing EXR to other file types but with the added processing of Ambient Occlusion passes, raytracing, 4 x 32bit channels, rendering times can go way out the window. A work around that I recently began to use required rendering the normal beauty, diffuse, shadow, reflection and specularity passes at once and then redoing the AO pass as a seperate render layer. This way the AO pass took less time and reduced rendering times by at least 2 times. This process takes about 1 to 3 days. One option I may look at for later renders will be to bake the ambient occlusion into the textures before mapping textures back in maya so that there is no need for another AO pass during rendering. In a studio environment, since there is ample time, there is no need to compromise on quality hence render farms with thousands of nodes are used with as many passes as needed being rendered as EXR files since adequate storage is available in the form of multiple terrabites of external hard drives.

Compositing
Although Nuke can be used for linear editing, the node based workflow works best when there are effect heavy shots or where CG is being comped with live action footage. I didn't find Nuke to be applicable for my one week projects because it still required another pass of rendering before I brought the shots into After-effect for final editing and rendering. In a big studio scenario, with multiple passes, the Nuke process is integral to producing quality output with its superior tracking, grading and 3d world space. Final editing would be completed in packages such as Avid or Premiere. My workflow utilized mostly After-Effects, since I didn't usually have many shots per sequence or that many passes to work with per shot and the shots were never effects heavy. For me, this effectively saved on time and I was able to add and edit all the shots, colour correct and add sound fx and soundtracks in a quick and intuituve way in layers which are the things incidentally that After-Effects excels at. This final process usually took a day at most to complete.

In summary, my workflow made use of quick compromises and shortcuts which though would seem to have worked for a one week assignment, but would be unacceptable or grossly inadequate in a Big studio pipeline. I will continue to strive to improve the process to meet up with frontline industry standards as more time is made available.

Art Inspiration Sources

Finding inspiration and ideas as an artist is critical. Every once in a while when we run out of ideas there are those places we go to refill our visual and creative reservoirs. In an industry as fast growing as ours, keeping up to date with new techniques and practices is just as important. I have ccreated a list of some of the major websites that help me develop and learn as well as build new ideas as an artist. Although this list is not by any means exhaustive, they have formed the foundation upon which I build when in search of new ideas or techniques. 

Fxguide.com

A site dedicated to visual effects and production news for film, with in-depth articles and podcasts covering topics such as camera choices, effects breakdowns, 3D conversion for film, the latests plugins to improve studio workflow and pipeline integration etc. The site is divided into further sections such as fxinsider and fxphd featuring even more in depth analysis and interview with artists, designers. technical directors and vfx supervisors who are at the forefront of the technological andvances and creative leaps in the industry.


Cgsociety.org

From a site that began simply as a forum, it has grown over the years into a hub for CG artists that are seeking advice, inside knowledge and a place to show off their work. With broad articles and interviews featuring current artists doing great work in CG and VFX and how they do it, it is a site I visit everyday. It is also a great place to see work from various artists around the world who showoff their work and to get inspired in my work.




3D World

A magazine style site that features news, tutorials, reviews and forums for 3d artists. It is an all in one place for artist showcasing their work, reviewing the latest animated short films being produced and offering competitions to artist through out the year. It also publishes an offline magazine that features breakdowns, tutorials and the latest news from around the cg world.






Evermotion.org

It is a website agregator for recent news, tutorials, breakdowns, movie and short film trailers and work showcase from the CG and VFX industry. The site offers free and charged 3d and arch-viz models and textures that are ready for production. It also offers news on new and recently releases tools and plugins for artist who want to improve their workflow with new technology and software.




Videocopilot.net

This is the website of Andrew Kramer who is perhaps one of the most talented trainers in After-effects history. His site features indepth After-effects video tutorials suitable for beginners, intermediate and advanced users. He also offers stock footage packs, presets and plugins specifically prepared for motion graphics and VFX artist looking to speed-up their workflow. Some of them are Optical Flares Lens Flares Plug-in, Action Essentials II, Twitch Chaos, Evolution and the much anticipated Videocopilot Element 3d.



Other notable mentions include cgtuts, aetuts, 3d total, cgtalk and many others. I will limit the list to this five for now. I will probably add other websites to it at another time.

The Art of the In-joke

More recently, I have been taking note of the way in which films and animation in particular reference elements, dialogue or sequences from other films or animations. In films, one can find a producer who references a shot from a famous film in the past and remakes it almost like for like in their own production. Sometimes a dialogue from a scene in a movie can be recreated in another movie as an tribute or homage to the earlier movie or its actor or a telling performance.

One visible example of this is how a certain sequence in one of the original Planet of The Ape (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968) movies is recreated in the animated feature Madagascar (Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath, 2005). This scene is where Alex the lion is building a Statue of Liberty. When Melman his giraffe friend sets it on fire, Alex jumps off and says. "DARN YOU, DARN YOU ALL TO HECK!!!!". This referenced a scene in the movie Planet of the Apes when the main character says "DAMN YOU, DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!!!" Another is when Mason and Phil (the two monkeys) come to the plane with a thousand other monkeys to help fix it. As the other monkeys are working on the plane, Skipper says to Mason (the monkey that talks), "I could kiss you, monkey man." Then Mason says, "Well, okay, but you're so darn ugly." Then he kisses Skipper. This is also a scene from the movie, Planet of the Apes.

In the recent movie Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011), the producers included numerous references and reenacted remakes from famous film sequences from the past; some of these include the actual Paris skyline in the movie which match exactly the skyline of famous films of the period, most particularly from Rene Clare’s Under The Rooftops of Paris (1938), The ‘poster shot’ for the movie was an homage to Harold Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock high above the street in Safety Last! (
Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1923). One such major noticeable reenactment according to an article published on www.fxguide.com website, states, 

The train in the film shown by the Lumière Brothers is the sequence from Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat – L’Arrivée d’un Train à la Ciotat (1895). Not only was there a shot recreation in the circus tent scene when Georges Méliès first sees a projected film, Grossmann also points out they went much further. “There are two other scenes in the film where we exactly matched that same shot,” he says. The same lensing and camera angle were used of two completely different shots in the actual station shown in the film. In each case the separate and seemingly unrelated shots had all the extras, lines of sight, and train position perfectly matched by the effects team to the original 1895 film.[1]

There are many other tributes to techniques of the past like hand tinting film, stop motion animation and numerous other shot matches to classic films; one of which is The Human Beast / La bête humaine (1938) by Jean Renoir with its unusual depth of field.

Moving on to animated features, one studio that has continued a tradition of self reference in their own work is Pixar. In each film a reference to a character or element from an older film or an upcoming one can be noticed. Some of the easily notable ones include the Boo’s fish toy in Monsters Inc ending up being the title character of Finding Nemo, the "Incredibles" manga that the little boy is reading at the dentist's office in "Finding Nemo, the Pizza Planet truck, the yellow ball with the blue strip and red star, even the lamp from their logo has made appearances in their movies at different times. The title of this animation studio's very first short (i.e. "The Adventures of André and Wally B") which was also the name inspiration for Wall-e and indeed many other animated titles at that time end up being printed on the spine of the storybooks that you see behind Woody in Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995).



This wholehearted pursuit of self referencing is why the Dinoco gas station that Andy's Mom pulls into in "Toy Story" became the racing sponsor that Lightning McQueen was lusting after in Pixar's "Cars. There are multiple references to Apple and the number A113, which was a reference to the classroom number that was used by Animation students at CalArts which the likes of John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton attended. In fact, there are so many of these in-jokes in their feature films that I even managed to find a blog post dedicated to and describing almost obsessively every known in-joke ever seen in work produced by Pixar studios. It can be found here.

This culture of the in-joke, the self-reference, tribute or homage to previous work is something that i have found highly interesting. Not just as a technique in itself or for the humor factor that it invariably creates, but as a way of weaving a deeper thread of meaning and connection not just to the narrative of a film but to the very progress of the industry as a whole. It is a way a of celebrating the many breakthroughs of technology and the creative process over the years. It can also be a way of reminding ourselves of the pedigree of design and ingenuity that has brought the trade of the cinema thus far. To the audience, the inside joke and subtle humor it it represents can only bring a smile to the face when one notices one of these references. It is all the more so when they are not made obvious and are only noticeable by the keen observer or ardent movie historian or critic. I find most importantly, that it is also a way of creating with the audience a sense of connection by the artist,producer or animator, almost as if embedding a puzzle or message within a film that only the true fan or admirer will be able to see, decode or decrypt.

While this is not a technique of creating work in itself, the concept of creating a deeper connection with the viewer on that level  as an animator and 3d artist is one that I find interesting and worthy of more focused research. Most importantly, it is one that I am going to seek to exploit in greater measure in work I produce and I'm indeed already doing, as seen in some of my upcoming work.

 (Work in Progress - the table lamp and the poster on the wall pay homage to 

the inspiration that Pixar Animation is to the work I produce)

References

Planet of The Ape, 1968. [Film]. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. USA: 20th Century Fox Ranch

Madagascar, 2005. [Film]. Directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath. USA: DreamWorks [United States]

Hugo, 2011. [Film]. Directed by Martin Scorsese. USA: Paramount Pictures

Under The Rooftops of Paris, 1938. [Film]. Directed by Rene Clare. France: Films Sonores Tobis

Safety Last!, 1923. [Film]. Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor. USA: Hal Roach Studios 

[1] Fxguide.com, 2011. Hugo: a study of modern inventive visual effects. [online] Available at: <http://www.fxguide.com/featured/hugo-a-study-of-modern-inventive-visual-effects/> [Accessed 20 December 2011 ]. 

The Human Beast / La bête humaine, 1938. [Film]. Directed by Jean Renoir. France: Paris Film
 

Toy Story, 1995. [Film]. Directed by John Lasseter. USA: Pixar Animation Studios