still to animation
I don’t even try to replicate real motion in the few, short animated things I’ve worked on. Right now I’m sort of working on animating a piece of video I have, but animating isn’t even the right word. I’m isolating one figure in each frame and turning it into a silhouette. The goal of this process is to replicate realistic motion by literally tracing it. It’s as close as I’m going to get.
I started thinking about how difficult it is to take a drawing and animate it. The drawing itself can have a certain mood that changes completely after it is animated. I really liked the Sony Bravia commercial and the rabbits did seem vaguely familiar, but I like rabbits and didn’t think to try and pinpoint the one of hundreds of rabbit related things I’ve seen. I found this post today on the kozyndan blog about how they were approached by Passion Pictures and sent them some samples of their work. Looking at the similarities in some of the details in their panoramic city drawing and the commercial, it seems they could have a copyright case. Legalities aside, the jump from their drawing to the commercial is a good example of what I’m talking about. The illustration of rabbits menacingly invading a city drastically differs from those hopping around with people speeding by, barely taking notice (the effect enhanced by the nature of stop motion animation in a public space). Even if the illustration was the inspiration or concept behind the piece, that’s all it was. They didn’t try to animate the image.
I never really considered that an illustrator and an animator are often different people with different strengths. I haven’t watched it yet, but Illustrator James Jean recently created a treatment and character design for a Prada animation, Trembled Blossoms. In this case, the images were animated poorly according to a lot of the comments on his post. I really do need to watch it. Still, the expectations for the animation weren’t met by the mood and quality of Jean’s images for a lot of people.
What I’m working on can only exceed expectations because I cut out the need for both good illustration and animation skills.
Related: Sony’s Response
