Blog Post 12 April 21, 2010

Well, here it is. I am caving and finally writing a blog about Avatar. I didnt want to write about this topic due to the opinions that some people may have on the film, and the ability for those who love it or hate it to defend their reasoning for wayyy too long…but here I am. After watching this film twice and becoming fascinated by the entire production of the film, the amount of time and effort it took to create this masterpeice (yes, I said it) is amazing. Here is a preview

Director and Writer of the film James Cameron has stated that he first had the idea for this movie around 1994. He began working on a script shortly after Titanic was finished, and had originally intended for the movie to be shot with all computer generated characters. He put off production for a while however, to allow technology to grow and develop before he created another one of his masterpeices.

Nothing was held back when this movie was finally in the process of being made a reality. An impressive fact…he hired a man from a University in California to create a language for the Na’vi of Pandora! When it came to the visual effects, Cameron came up with a way to show the actor, in real time, what their character would look like. According to Wikipedia “he method allows the filmmakers to transfer 100% of the actors’ physical performances to their digital counterparts”. This new motion capture animation technology was what made the digital creation look so real. This method not only captured the facial expression accurately, but the amount of light that may be hitting a characters face for a particular scene. The only issue with this to the post production workers and animators of the present is that no scenery can be produced digitally until after the actors have played their part. Cameron goes on to say that this alleviates the process of script and lighting changes, and allows the possibility of digital scenery to be  in the producers hands. I believe this innovative technology will be used in future movies. It is one less step that the animators have to take in post production, and one less step that could possibly go wrong.

This new form of “animation” is amazing. The mixing of live actors and animation is a step towards the future of film, and with Cameron’s idea used in Avatar, the doors to other films have opened up.

COMIC-CON April 13, 2010

Ok so this may not pertain to animation directly, but it is a subject that can relate to it if nothing else. If you have not heard of Comic-con…you have pretty much been living under a rock. I have to admit that up until 2 years ago I knew nothing of this convention that celebrates all things “pop culture”, but upon hearing about the subject and looking into it further, I have to admit that this is pretty high on my list of things to do before I die. This four day celebration of Comics, Animation, television, movies and more allows viewers to take a more in-depth look at any and all characters they may love.

Comic-con was started in 1970 as a way of “showcasing comic books, science fiction/fantasy and film/television” according to wikipedia. Today the convention covers much more including animation, webcomics, and video games. It has grown to be the second largest convention in the world. It was filled to capacity last year with 125,000 people and more are expected to come this year.

In the walls of comic-con there are several events that take place. there are rooms devoted to anime, comic books and special toys and collectibles that are only distributed at that years event. On top of these special rooms, the floor is filled with exhibits showcasing all things Pop culture. There is even an exhibit called “Worst cartoons Ever”! I think what amuses me the most is the Masquerade section of the convention. Basically this portion of the event is a costume contest. A chance for animation enthusiast to dress up as their favorite character. It is like Halloween ALL OVER AGAIN….and it can get pretty serious. here are some pics

Basically this is a convention that I believe everyone has to see before they die.It allows the ordinary person to see the extraordinary measures that it takes to create these works of art that we just see as cartoons at times!  AND it’s just a short trip to san-diego and you will be in animation heaven!

The Simpsons (FINAL BLOG SPECIMEN ONE…UPDATED) April 6, 2010

Cartoons are not just for children anymore! I have been watching the Simpsons since I was about thirteen. While it may not be the first of its kind, it has sparked a new genre of cartoons for adults for prime time television.

The series created by Matt Groening portrays a dysfunctional family living in the suburbs. I guess dysfunctional isn’t really the right word since the characters are portrayed in a way that any family could relate to…so Ill use the word atypical. The show started as a short on the Tracy Ullman show in the 80s before moving over to a full television show. It is now the longest running  American sitcom ever. It has received numerous awards and recognition because of the talent that creates this show every week. The  show has gone through a series of changes over the years and the way that the animation has improved is amazing. Here are examples of the changes!

(I love the clip above!! )

The success of the Simpsons sparked a new genre of prime time entertainment for adults. With the sometimes crude humor, these shows are aimed towards teenagers and adults who laugh at fart jokes. Family guy and Futurama are two that come to mind. The amount of views that these shows produce weekly are high enough for FOX to bring back some that they drop off the air for no good reason at time (no im not bitter…at all). So these are not your typical disney, nickelodean cartoons that come to mind when someone says “oh its an animated series”. These are shows that adults can enjoy and take the time to laugh at. It is nice that people can still feel almost comforted by cartoons when they are older. The shows even poke fun at eachother and mirror the way that stories are told in episodes. Sometimes this has been criticized because Family guy for example was created after the simpsons, but I see these as compliments to eachother. Matt Groening created a phenomenon that will continue for years to come.

I figured for the specimen I would talk a little about the competition (if you could even call it that) that Matt Groening deals with from Family Guy, and maybe some fun interesting facts about this series. (Lucky for my, there has been a controversy with Family Guy recently).

Family guy was created by Seth MacFarlane FOR Fox in 1999. Like The Simpsons, it was designed to be aimed towards teenagers and older viewers. At first the show, which mimicked what I call the “joke-cut away to scene” structure that the Simpsons does, was a huge success. Unfortunately it was canceled after the first season. But, it came back after Fox saw its popularity on Adult Swim (the nighttime programing on cartoon network). It has remained popular since, and is contracted to air episodes until 2012.

The similarities of these two shows are amazing. The family structure itself is even the same. Mom who tries to be proper and nice, Dad who enjoys nights at the bar with his friends and is somewhat dumb, daughter who is nerdy, and very intelligent baby (except Stewie from Family guy talks). The difference in the families lie with the son and dog. In the Simpson’s, Bart is always getting into trouble and is sometimes the center point of the episode, whereas in Family guy Chris is not so smart, and is not usually the center point of episodes.These similarities have even been pointed out in videos by fans. Its quite apparent that these two share a lot of similar story lines.

If you check out this video, you can see the “stealing” that has happened.

http://fragg.me/video/family-guy-simpsons

Seth maintains that him and Matt have a good relationship and the feud is only fueled by fans and the  Fox network.

these cartoons occasionally get in trouble for their crude humor. Family guy has recently been under fire about their most recent episode. Both the FCC and PTC are accusing the show of violating legal rights. The article is below, and I must say that when I watched the episode, I really didnt see anything wrong with it.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/2010/05/05/2010-05-05_family_guy_creator_seth_macfarlane_slammed_by_parents_television_council_for_fec.html

But it is these shows that have always been seen as inappropriate to some. whether they are similar or not, these “adult humor” shows have opened up a world of animation to the older generations. The crude jokes and funny scenarios are sometimes taken too far, but people find things wrong with everything these days (including disney movies…which i find laughable…seriously why look so far into the way a castle looks?!). If someone  can spend an hour laughing at mindless jokes and being exposed to animation, then so be it!

Pivot Animation. April 6, 2010

A bad, bad friend!

72 slides made with Pivot

Kinda difficult to make a stick figure climb up a ladder in 36.

Blog Post 8- western spaghetti March 23, 2010

So I came across a video on youtube about a year ago when it was first posted, and I think I have watched it about 200 times since. Something about it makes it so interesting to me, and I hope it is interesting to you. For this blog post I decided to look more in-depth into this stop-motion animation. It is called Western Spaghetti by PES films.

According to Wikipedia; Adam Pesapane is the Director of PES films. He studied at UVA, and got into film because of his major, English. He uses stop-motion animation in his work, which to me is fascinating. Stop Motion animation has been used for many years, and some of the first films used this medium in the works. Usually clay is involved since it is easily formed in order to show the character or object moving on its own. Gumby is a classic example of that. But PES’s shorts are not like that. He takes ordinary everyday objects and creates something out of them.

In this film he is using such interesting objects to show the simple action of making the Western Spaghetti dish. I love watching the tomatoes, for instance, smash in the pan…or the rubiks cube, being used as garlic here, being cut into smaller pieces. His attention to detail is amazing, and the sound effects really help with understanding the animation. He even involves human hands and arms in this short which is difficult to do. and not one beat is missed. If you watch, there are no gaps in the sequence of pictures or obvious mistakes.

Western Spaghetti earned an award at the 2009 sundance film festival, an audience award and was voted TIME’s 2009 #2 most viral video.PESfilm is the  directors channel on youtube. He has uploaded 25 videos so far. Some of them have even become commercials on TV. Bacardi and coinstar are the most notable commercials he has made. I encourage everyone to go check out his channel and this video! He truely has mastered stop-motion animation in the modern day!

Blog Specimens (Midterm) March 23, 2010

I realized that while I revised the blog posts (3 and 5) and changed the Title, it may be easier to reference this action with a blog post. With each of those I added more information and took out some that I thought was a bit redundant to the post, also added a video

blog post 7 March 16, 2010

I have always been a Disney fanatic, and while I realize the majority of my posts are about Disney films, I have to admit…this one will be no different. I started thinking back to the first weeks of class when we discussed the villains of the Disney films. When I think of the villian that got to me the most when I was younger, it always goes back to the Queen in Snow White. Why was she so evil? In this blog post I want to attempt to answer that very question.

[The Queen: Pre-Apple Making] She is introduced to the Audience as a step-mother figure, which has a negative connotation to it to begin with. (in previous blog posts I discuss this a bit). Everything about her can give someone the creeps. Her look itself is dark, with dark clothes and a cape.  No hair is shown. She has long fingers and fingernails, and very heavy makeup. The eyes of the Queen are small and squinty, which are great for that evil look. Although her facial expressions are limited, the over-exaggeration of her features help with her look. And her voice is deep and haunting. But it is not only her appearance that makes her one of the scariest Queens that Disney has produced, her personality is also an extension of that terror. She exhibits two of the seven deadly sins…she is vain and jealous. Obsessed with her looks and those of her step daughter she plans to kill Snow White in order to be “The fairest in the land”. I believe that these traits are among the top reasons this woman scared so many. The lack of compassion is a characteristic that all of the “evil” women in Disney’s movies portray. They are on the extreme other side of their very compassionate counter-parts (the princesses) who generally love all things living and strive for true love with a prince.

[The Queen: Post Apple Making] The differences here are pretty obvious. She starts with the voice change, and the cackle of a laugh. Her eyes are now much larger and yellow. We see her white hair, showing her change in age appearance .She still wears dark colors and still has the long, and may I add, creepy fingernails. The whole wart and no teeth thing really add to the whole image I think. her facial expression and body movement also improve here. We see the eyes change shape as well as the brows moving. Some of these movements are choppy, and in no way compare to those Disney is capable of today, but they are classic, and the first of their kind for this feature length film. What is so ironic about this part of the film is that she leaves her vanity aside to try to seduce her step-daughter into eating an apple from a poor innocent women. Vanity and compassion apparently do not go hand in hand to this queen. She really shows her lack of compassion in these scenes. She does not believe in love, and makes that apparent after she reads how the spell will be un-done. She also succeeds in feeding the apple to Snow White after convincing her that all her Dreams would come true. It is scary to think that a  woman so evil could corrupt some one so pure, but that is what makes the Queen so frightening.

As this was Disney’s First feature length film there are some technical aspects that are left to be desired but on the whole the success of scaring little children with this evil woman is breath taking. She is the first of her kind, and she would later share some of the characteristics that the other evil women of Disney had.

Below there are two clips that I found on Youtube of the Queen’s Transformation.(I know they are longer, but I enjoyed watching them to write this)

Special Post March 14, 2010

So I realize that I have already made a post on a version of Alice in Wonderland, but I have to do another one. Over the break I went to see the new version of Alice In Wonderland. And I must say, It was amazing. But as I watched I thought “Hey I could do my special post on this! There is A LOT of animation”. I have to warn you…if you have not seen this film and care about spoilers…this post may upset you. If not, please keep reading!

When Tim Burton took on the task to re create this fantasy the world knew that it would be different than all the other versions of the tale. It is known that he stated  that this is not a sequel to the original Alice in Wonderland, or an adaptation of the original story, but something completly different and new…which I dont really believe. A lot of the same characters are in this film that appeared in either one or both of Carrolls original books, and he films previously made. There is more of an in-depth look at these characters, and explanations of why they are the way they are, which IMO is pretty great to see. The world that Lewis Carroll created in his books have always fascinated me. They are whimsical and dream like with characters that can be different depending on ones imagination. In the popular animated version of this film that Disney originally released, all of the characters were animated, and given life like qualities to the best of the animators ablilty at the time. As more time went on and other non-annimated versions of this story were released the made up characters were portrayed in many different ways. I have seen every version (I think) of these storys made so far, and each has a different take on certain charaters. The clip below, which is not one of my favorite versions, shows the different characters and the lack of animation used. These characters, like tweedle dee, are played by real people with great makeup.

Tim Burton did not use this technique and instead chose to use a lot of CGI and Motion Capture Technology. The majority of the film was shot on green screen. There were live actors in the few beginning scenes when Alice was not in “Underworld” and some characters while in the fantasy world that were real. The live actors in Underworld, such as Johnny Depp’s character The Mad Hatter (who was AMAZING by the way), were almost always enhanced with Motion Capture technology. IMDB states that Motion Capture Technology is “Motion capture technology is a type of CGI, that utilizes the ability to read a performer’s physical performance and create a fluid life-like wire frame and eventually a textured character”.  There were many different aspects of animation in this film that I noticed. I had thought that the real live characters that were ehnanced for theatrical purposes would look very…unreal. But I was pleasantly surprised that when I saw the Red Queens head, that was enlarged to be three times the size of a normal head, that it looked almost real and after watching for a while, it became almost normal to me. This was not the case however with the characters that were not played by real actors. The caterpillar, the march hare, tweedle dee and tweetle dumb for instance looked very unreal, unlike the hallmark version of this film above. I thought to myself, did Tim Burton do this on purpose? This land that Alice returned to was one of fantasy for us. It was a real place for her however. The characters that need to be created had fluid motions and all, but they looked obviously fake. In a time where films like Avatar and The Polar Express come out with AMAZING animations, why do some of the characters in Burton’s film seem lackluster to me? The detail on the characters were amazing, but as a while…they just seemed fake. I believe that the White Rabbit and the twins stood out to me. Others however, like the Jabberwokey were great and believable.   I was not able to find any information online that could explain this, but I figured that it has to do with the Fantasy part of the film. Underworld, as Alice finds, is a real place and not a dream. But to us it is something that is out of a story. In our world there are not magical talking and smoking caterpillars or monkeys that hold up tables and act as furniture. These things can exist in our mind, but they will never be as real as in real life. I was not overly upset with the animation. If my theory is correct, I would love the film even more. This story was never intended to be real, and if the animation were such that the differences between real and make believe were blurred, the amazing story may not have gotten across to the audience.

I really believe that Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass are timeless stories that are meant to evoke the imagination in everyone. The characters and emotions that manifest from this story are different for everyone, and that is the appealing part to me. The characters can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the person reading, or watching the story in this case. Tim Burton’s way of keeping some very real and some fake aspects of the film was a focal point of why I liked it so much. And while I don’t believe it when he states it is not a sequel to the original story, he does take this new part of the story and make it his own with these techniques. And to leave you…just one more clip…mainly because I love it so much!

Blog Post 5 (REVISED) February 23, 2010

I have had a hard time thinking of some topics to write on for this weeks blog post. This past weekend I watched UP! for about the 200th time, and realized…I have cried every time. SPOILER ALERT: there are sad portions to this movie. Call me a wimp, but I believe that with the movie UP! Pixar wanted to branch out and create a not so perfect story.

In all of the previews of UP! there were fun characters, a grumpy but adventurous old man and a boy who just wants to fit in. But it was what they didnt show the audience that made this film different than all the others that Pixar has created over the years. There was still the message of perseverance and believing in oneself, but the situations that the different characters faced in their every day life were what caught the attention of so many people.

The story of UP! is a generally happy one, but it is not what many thought it may be when they walked into the theater. It was not their usual movie. It was a story of two people who came together out of tragedy that happened to them. Carl, a man who had fallen in love as a child with a girl named Ellie, grew up and married her. Carl and Ellie spent a good portion of their lives together trying to fulfill their dreams. This is the first not so perfect part of this movie. The movie touches on the subject of Miscarriage when Ellie becomes pregnant, then we see her in a doctors office crying. This is something that cartoons for children do not normally touch on. It is a subject that most children do not even know about. Tragedy then hit the family when Ellie passed away and Carl was left alone. His life is turned upside down by this and other things. Then we are introduced to Russell, a small boy who lives only with his mother and is out looking for an adventure. He is desperate for his fathers attention who does not come around all that often. They accidentally end up on a journey that helps both of them become better people, and allows them to gain back something that they had lost in the friendships they discovered.

Pixar did something new and different with this movie. They touched on things that most animated movies had not touched on at that level. It was something that today’s audience needed to see, and could relate with, possibly on many levels. I can imagine that some were upset with the way that this was portrayed though. The question that comes to mind in this instance is: is this appropriate for the ages that this movie was geared towards? Or should animated movies be happy-go-lucky all the time. I think this goes back to the messages and jokes that many movies put out in order to appeal to the parents that take the kids to go see the film. This movie was not geared towards children, it was geared towards family. I wouldnt imagine that a child would understand the scene with Ellie at the doctors, but the parents would. It opens up a line of communication from the parents to the children. A topic that maybe some people are uncomfortable talking about could be brought up in a way that would make children understand that not everything always goes according to plan. While this film has its dark moments, it has the ability to touch almost everyone at some point.

Pixar certainly is not the safe animation studio, and with this film they proved that. I believe that this not so perfect story is exactly what the public needed to launch a new acceptance of a different kind of film. Hopefully in the future this trend will continue.

Blog Post 4 February 15, 2010

I think that almost every little girl has grown up watching some sort of Disney Princess movie. I watched all of them Im pretty sure. I would watch them and think about the perfect love story that each of these movies held within them. It has long been said that Disney creates unrealistic life expectations about love…which is probably true, but the fact that people still watch these love classics is the thing in which Disney capitalizes on, and they do it quite well.

There have been a number of Disney Princess movies made. Up until a while ago with the making of Mulan or Pochahontas (which i dont really consider “princess” films) the stories were generally the same. A beautiful princess had something bad happen to her in her life, she had to live with this issue for a while, she met a prince who instantly fell in love with her, and he took her away to live a better life in a large castle. The princess lived “happily ever after”. Little girls grew up dreaming that “someday her prince would come” and all would be right with the world. This message that Disney portrayed left little girls everywhere wanting more. More love stories, more heroic princes, and more evil women that wanted to destroy these girls. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not cynical when it comes to love, I was this little girl when I was younger, but now it is almost laughable when I see the amount of money spent on the Princess industry. Little girls are still growing up on these classic stories.

Disney did shy away from these films for a while, producing things like Aladdin (which did have a princess, but i don’t consider it a “Princess film”) and other movies with Pixar. But each film did have the undertone of love stories in it. Disney just couldn’t leave those out of any great story. Enchanted came along a few years ago, and now The Princess and the frog has debuted bringing back the Princess films. Disney knows what sells with these films…love. But could Disney make a film without any love story in it and have a hit? I believe that Disney needs these unfathomable love stories in their films to sell…And that is somewhat saddening to someone who grew up thinking someday a prince would come and sweep her off to a castle.