A while back I wrote an email to Don Bluth asking him about his work and creating films and I recently received a response! I found his advice on writing stories and designing characters very helpful along with the advice he gave. I am extremely thankful for the response, which you can read below. Evidence of email 1.How would you describe your style of art?
Don Answers: We refer to our style as “Classical Animation”, or “Traditional Animation”, though we have done some CG animation in our films. 2.What are important factors to include when designing a character or writing a story? Don Answers: For a character, number one is appeal. Will the audience like the look of the character. Do I like the character? Is the character interesting? Is the character a good character, a bad character or indecisive? Others include thoughts about: period or era, character’s size, simplicity for clarity, a costume or clothing that reflects the characters personality, status in society, age, flaws, is the character happy, crotchety, innocent, a bully, desperate, scholarly, a parent, a child, male or female. If a script is available the author will write descriptions of their characters including the way they dress and the way they talk describing their personalities. If an actor has been selected for the character, having full figure photos of the actor’s body and face will give the designer a start. However, the more you know about the character’s backstory, the more successful the visual character design. For writing a story, make it interesting and hook the reader within four or five pages into the story. It will definitely be about the characters and how they think and interact with the other characters, again, knowing their backstories, upbringing and how it affected their lives and personal philosophies. Is the character pro-active, a reactive, a recluse, outgoing and gregarious, angry, always pleasant, but hides her or his anger, etc., and many more thoughts about personalities. 3.What is your favourite piece of work? (of your own or perhaps by someone else)? Don Answers: Probably Walt Disney’s Bambi. Of our own, The Secret of N.I.M.H. 4.What type of work do you enjoy doing most? Don Answers: Writing, story, storyboarding and color & lighting. Though, I like to animate too. 5.Can you describe the time when you first realized that creating was something you absolutely had to do? Don Answers: I was attracted to animation after seeing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, when I was around four and a half years old. From then on I started drawing and dreamed of the day I would work for Walt Disney. Realizing that I wanted to create? It probably came to me in my mid-thirties, after I had worked in animation, musical theater, and had become an animation director during my second stint with Disney in the 1970s. Sometime you end up going down roads that lead nowhere. Just never stop trying to reach your goal. Shoot for the moon. 6.What advice would you give to an animator just starting out? Don Answers: Know your passion(s) and follow your heart. The better you get at whatever you choose to become, think about the questions you will ask when you have a chance to work with a master in a similar career, even if it is just to assist them and absorb the knowledge that they carry with them. I worked hard. I still do today to stay at the top of my skills. This applies to everyone, not just the artists in animation. Look around you, there are sports people, swimmers, baseball players, footballers, soccer, tennis, intellectuals, scholars in science etc. etc. They know their passion and have worked hard to reach their goals. It won’t be easy. Just be prepared to make sacrifices and recognize that to get really good at what you want to do is an uphill climb. Expect hard work, like practicing at the piano (or any musical instrument for that fact), if you really want it, you will have to pay for it, with your time and effort.
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Difference between plot and the storyStory: the chronological sequence of events. In a narrative film, the events that occur on screen and those that are assumed to have occurred, arranged in an order relative to the plot of the whole film. Plot: the causal and logical structure which connects events. The structure in which all the events are presented to us, i.e. their chronological order, duration, frequency, relationship. Plot can be considered as part of discourse, since it is part of HOW the story is presented. Example: Hunger Games
Timing Time and continuity can be used as tools in presenting the narrative. The use of time in storytelling is important in every aspect of production, from the outlining stage to the writing of the script to the production stage and through editing. There’s a saying in screenwriting that you should enter a scene after it begins and leave before it ends. You only want to show the audience what it needs to see in order to help keep them engaged in the story. While time is an abstract concept, objects associated with time are very concrete. From clocks and calendars to sunrises and sunsets to seasonal changes, the passage of time can be easily inferred from this symbolism. The Aging Process- When you’re looking for ways to compress time, you can show a character has aged years by altering their hair, makeup and wardrobe. When you are using babies or child actors that are then replaced by adult actors, you may have to incorporate the character’s name into the dialogue if the resemblance is not uncanny. Time-lapse- uses still shots of a fixed location over time; the stills are edited together to create this effect. The most common uses of time-lapse are sunset to sunrise, moon phases and seasonal changes; however, crowds assembling and dispersing to traffic patterns on the interstate to a storm rolling in are other good examples. Montage- is a sequence of rapid shots used to quickly show the passage of time.Usually set to music, they are often used in the beginning of a movie to establish characters, relationships, or story. Sound Sound is perhaps the most powerfully visceral and subtly influential aspect of film. There are three components of sound in film: dialogue, sound effects, and music. Music is the most evident and striking of the components. Sometimes a film’s soundtrack can become just as renown and remembered as the movie itself. Jaws, Star Wars, and James Bond all feature musical themes that are arguably more ingrained into popular culture than the actual films. More than any other element music has the power to shape the viewer’s feelings and perceptions of a scene. Dialogue and sound effects, while more subdued in effect than music, are essential in bringing us into the world of the film and suspending our belief.
References:
Vogler's Three Act Structure The three-act structure is a model used in screenwriting that divides a fictional narrative into three parts (acts), often called the Setup, the Confrontation and the Resolution. Vogler's Story Structure
Storyboards
What is the key to success in visual story-telling? A willingness to collaborate, the flexibility to evolve and an understanding of basic rules of cinematography Drawing & Composition for Visual Storytelling My storyboard test
In our lecture today we were looking at film grammar and what this means. Film grammar: (cinematic language) – the way the audience can automatically interpret visual information (invisible techniques).
In film, film grammar is defined as follows:
CinematographyWe also looked at how a camera may be positioned in a certain shot and what angle it's at. Camera shots are used to demonstrate different aspects of a film's setting, characters and themes. Camera angles are used to position the viewer so that they can understand the relationships between the characters. These are very important for shaping meaning in film as well as in other visual texts. Cinematography is a combination of these two along with camera movement and lighting. Cinematography is defined as “writing in movement” and depends largely on photography. The art of cinematography is concerned just as much with how something is being filmed as it is with what is being filmed. The cinematographer, or director of photography, adds to and enhances the narrative through control of the camera. The way in which a shot is framed, lit, toned, and coloured is a story of its own just as it is in photography. Unlike in photography or painting, in cinematography the framing of an image can move. A scene will often stretch on for minutes, which allows the camera to shape our perspective of what we are seeing through pans, tilts, and angles. Sometimes just the movement itself, or tracking of an image, can tell a story. I looked at cinematographers such as Emmanuel Lubezki and Roger Deakins and how they used different camera positions and angles to give meaning or set an atmosphere to the scene. References
narrative ˈnarətɪv/ noun 1. a spoken or written account of connected events; a story. "a gripping narrative" synonyms: account, story, tale, chronicle, history, description, record, portrayal, sketch, portrait, statement, report, rehearsal, recital, rendering "a chronological narrative of Stark's life" adjective
ObservationsToday we were looking at short clips or opening scenes to films in relation to narrative. The first short film we looked at was Boudin' (2003 Directors: Bud Luckey, Roger Gould). 'A sheep dances proudly in his southwestern landscape, until one day his wool is sheared and he is left naked. He's depressed and shy, until a cheerful jackalope comes along and shows him how to leap proudly and not to be ashamed.' (Source) We talked bout the underlying message in the film and how it's about basically learning to love yourself no matter appearance or what others may think of you. It's about being comfortable in your own skin and continuing to move forward even if something tries to stop you. It’s weird how we are able to relate to a character and their insecurities despite the character being a naked bouncing lamb
The final film we looked at was WALL.E (2008 Director: Andrew Stanton) 'In the distant future, a small waste-collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.' (Source) Like in Alien the opening scene gives us a sense of isolation, the camera follows our character around the entire time as he goes and his usual day to day life. From just a few minutes of the character being on the screen we can get a good understanding of his personality and what he does on the abandoned planet. NotesThere are always two sides to every story. Conánn talked about how history is always told by the victor, which instantly made me think of this song- The Count of Monte Cristo: The Musical~ A Story Told. Lyrics in the song are 'Because history is a story told by the winners of the fight.' 'Because history’s a story told by the men who make the laws.' 'History’s a story told by the people who survive'
Film: A story or event recorded by a camera as a set of moving images and shown in a cinema or on television. It's story telling, an art form, a narrative, a form of communication. Film making: Act of choice, design decision based off how different elements will affect the audience’s experience and engage viewers emotions. How viewers will react. Why do we watch films? Entertainment, criticise, nostalgia, fun, relax, immerse ourselves into a fantasy world, to feel something. Reading a movie: Want the audience to activity watch a movie rather than passively. Techniques and their potential. |