Animation Brief 02 - Re-Invention in Storytelling
So I can't really lie about this one, I was in some kind of fugue state this whole brief. I was struggling a lot with insomnia and found it hard to engage with school at all. I actually didn't even show up for like two weeks and learned third hand I was in a group with Summer and Zu, a group for what? I took to Moodle to find out...
Okay I didn't really take to Moodle, I kinda glanced through the brief and surmised we had to make a three minute animation of a classic nursery rhyme. Sounds simple enough.
I'd been in contact with Zu and Summer over Instagram so I wasn't totally lost but I skipped the day where we were supposed to script our animation. This meant I turned up the next day for storyboarding with a script ... but no Summer or Zu. Did I mention our group was literally assembled from the people who didn't turn up the day they put the groups together?
So basically I sat down with pad and pencil and went through the script. My goal was to abstain from editing or embellishing the script and just draw each scene as I read it, keeping track of how many scenes, shots and backgrounds we would need for an animation. I figured once I had the script made visual, the editing and alteration would come naturally.
Now, what you might be wondering is; "Why are you showing the storyboard before telling us the nursery rhyme?" and I have a good reason for that. I didn't know either. Actually that's not entirely true, I could surmise from the name "Spoon" in the script that the rhyme was probably "Hey Diddle Diddle" but I was beyond confused as to how that became such a sobering tale of war and grief.
At about this time, Zu showed up and I had the answers to most of my questions. As it turned out, it wasn't just a nursery rhyme we were given for the brief but a time period and a genre. So being the lucky number (group) seven we were, we got 19th Century and War Movie in this lottery.
Hey Diddle Diddle is such a fun little rhyme, unlike the all the other groups rhymes, it's a genuine nonsense poem with no accepted origin. To me there's something liberating and anarchistic about that, the reader simply has to accept the mental image of partying animals and bipedal cutlery. I think had I scripted the animatic without knowledge of the genre or period, I would've focused on the fiddling cat and the cow leaving orbit. It writes itself in my opinion; a violin soundtrack to the sublime image of the cow achieving the impossible. But it wasn't to be.
Anyway, in my absence Zu and Summer had collaborated on the story with Summer writing the final script I had received over Instagram with zero context. And honestly, they did a better job than I would've thought possible. Highlighting the line "And the Dish ran away with the Spoon" and turning that into a refugee escape attempt as the impetus for a story was genius. I like to tinker with everything but other than streamlining the story for screen, I couldn't find anything I wanted to change.
Above is the nursery rhyme itself, the initial story treatment by Zu and Summer and the final script by Summer. To briefly explain the beats of the story:
Three competing empires (Dog, Cat and Bull) encroach on a peaceful land.
As the land becomes a battlefield, it's citizens flee.
Among them is our protagonist; Dish and his son; Spoon.
Spoon is tragically killed during their attempted escape as Dish watches helplessly.
Dish is overcome with grief, he formulates a crazy plan to bring down the three empires.
Dish travels to each empire, impersonating a messenger of another. He plays the three factions against each other through false alliances, culminating in mutual destruction.
Dish returns to the site of his son's death and lays down a bouquet of flowers.
If you compare my abbreviated story to the scripts above you can see how I edited them a little bit. I was mostly trying to simplify the story to it's essential elements, half because I think that makes for a better story and half because I wanted to cut our number of shots down to the minimum.
Anyway with both myself and Zu in school for once, we went through both our storyboards and combined them into one, having hashed out exactly how we wanted the story to flow on screen. Summer also did a pass on the storyboard but it wasn't til a couple of days later I got my hands on that version.
Although we still had yet to meet up all three in person, we were communicating the whole time through Instagram. Paul let us know the next step after the initial rough storyboard was make it into an animatic to figure out the timing and begin research for the final storyboard.
Zu did a quick pass on the first animatic in Adobe Animate, although I never actually saw it cause he sent it as an animate file and I couldn't open it lol. I knew from talking to him though that it was the storyboard with each frame lasting for about six seconds on screen to reach the three minute runtime. This gave me a helpful reference for later when I was timing the final storyboard.
Based on Paul's feedback we broke the research down into six(ish) categories:
Landscapes/Background Design
Mise-en-scène/Prop Design
There was talk of us dividing up the categories between the three of us ... but honestly we mostly just did whatever and pooled our research together in the end. In fairness to Zu and Summer they handled a lot more of this stuff than I did. Summer came up with great costume designs and decided on the cartoon Over the Garden Wall as our main Visual Design inspiration. Zu did lots of research on backgrounds and the 19th Century in general, and handled a lot of the boring work like pinning our stuff up on the wall.
During this I was mostly refining the story, creating the character designs and finalizing the storyboard.
Above: Summer's Storyboard ... Summerboard
Having Summer's board on hand was a great help when putting together the final version. One of the most fun parts of this project was synthesizing our ideas together, and in that sense Zu and Summer were great to work with. We each had our own distinct perspective but we were all willing to collaborate. We were truly a film making democracy...
Anyway before getting into the final storyboard I first have to go over the character designs. This was an area me and Summer collaborated on, although somewhat indirectly. We both designed the characters and their costumes separately and then I tried to mix and match the two in the final storyboard. Most of the conceptual work belongs to Summer and the actual drawings were me.
Above: Some of Summer's costume designs
Another interesting bit of this project was how often I found that the three us came to similar conclusions completely separately. Like in the above there's a lot of small details in Summer's designs which also appeared in mine, despite us working independently.
I actually just remembered the above designs which were drawn at the same time me and Zu worked on the storyboards. This was before Summer suggested the Over the Garden Wall aesthetic. At the time I was going for a semi-realistic Naoki Urasawa type design. I love Urasawa's work but honestly Summer had the right idea, simple designs made for quicker drawing which allowed to prototype more freely and really polish our ideas in a way we simply wouldn't have had time for with more complicated designs.
That's also not even mentioning the fact that I think the cartoony designs contrast the sombre tone of the story. If you make the characters too realistic, you run the risk of becoming melodramatic. Animation has a great disarming power and oftentimes stories like ours hit hardest when the audience isn't expecting them to. With this all in mind I set about creating the final character designs.
Above: Honse and friends :)
From left to right we have:
A four high stack of Dish heads for measuring proportions.
Dish from behind sans body.
Dish from the front after the death of Spoon.
I think the design sheet mostly speaks for itself. There are definitely a couple of things I'd like to have done given I had more time, like obviously drawing full turnarounds for the whole cast or settling on a colour design.
A couple of details I'd like to mention specifically; As seen in the older semi-realistic sketch, I really liked the idea of Dish having a distinct, separate design after the death of Spoon, as though he became a different person with the loss of his son. I tried to reinforce this with the gaunter appearance, stubbly facial hair, and the way his hair-swirl reversed direction (probably my favourite thing from the whole project). Spoon's shirt is oversized as it's a hand-me-down from his father. The Emperors have a full-beard split between them, as we decided to kind of code facial hair as evil in this project. The Emperor's designs are anachronistic in general, looking more similar to the 20th century Nazi Uniforms than contemporary 19th Century fashion. This was intended to be a bit of commentary on the nature of evil and how the progress of technology (or modernity) facilitates the horrors of war.
I'm running out of space here, so I'll finish this update in another post.
