Drawn Animation! Looks Great, Takes Forever.

I've always been a huge fan of drawn animation and have wanted to take a stab at it for a long time. The process has always been fascinating to me. I remember watching some animation features from Disney films when I was younger that almost made me want to go into animating (I love it but I'm not sure I'm up to the task of having it as a career).

For some reason I never thought to look at modern cartoons and shorts and their process! From rough drafts to final animation. Here are a few that I found that emphasize the effort and labor that goes into creating even a couple seconds of hand drawn animation.




Niko animation process from studionx on Vimeo.

Taking inspiration from video games

I've been working on my title sequence project a little bit everyday and so far I've found there are a few extracurricular sources that have really helped me in working out the finer aesthetic details. As I mentioned last week I'm going to be doing a cut out title sequence to the critically acclaimed animated miniseries "Over the Garden Wall". The greatest challenge I've faced so far, beside the laborious never ending tedium that is fiddling with the after effects interface, is combining my onscreen elements in a way that looks and feels like the real show.

In researching this I turned to one of my favorite video games of all time: Paper Mario 2:

Now if you're like me then the very mention of this game is enough to fill you to the brim with excitement and nostalgia. This game stands alone in it's excellence because it masterfully combines fun gameplay with a timeless art style and wraps the whole thing up in a unforgettable sound track. While there are so many things I love about this game, on my most recent play through I tried to focus more on it's paper aesthetics in hopes that I might me able to glean so insight for my own project.

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Among many other elements I noticed that it was the perspective of the world that really brought it off of the page. Any time you move the background moves with you in a sort of layered paralax that really draws you in. Also the way that many of  these set pieces are shaded really adds to the illusion. Overall I'm really exited to keep working on this project and if any of you have any game or tutorial recommendations please don't hesitate to drop me a line!  

Pop Up Paper Look

Hey everybody! So for my title sequence I'm thinking that I'll transform the beautiful landscapes of over the garden wall into a series of paper cut outs, and them have them move across the screen in 3d to give a cool parallax effect. Now I only really know as much photoshop as I've needed to know in order to get by here, so I was wondering if any of you out there might be able to offer me some advice.

Just so you guys can get a sense of what I'm trying to do here's a landscape that I'm halfway through paperizing.

It looks a little flat right now, and I'm thinking that I might stay from the original color scheme a bit since it's currently very hard to see the paper texture that I'm trying to put across. I also feel like it might be good to add a sort of vignette filter over the top of things to add a little extra visual intrigue. I'd love to know if you guys have any insights on how I might make this puppy pop. It's a real challenge trying to boil down these visually brilliant landscapes into their rawest form, but I'm confident that it can be done, and done it a way that doesn't make it look like a reject south park background. 

Animation and Atmosphere

For my title sequence I thought that it would be an interesting challenge to create an intro sequence for the critically acclaimed cartoon mini series "Over the Garden Wall".

For those of you who haven't seen Over the Garden Wall, the story follows the journey of two brothers lost in the woods, who with the help of a magical bluebird, traverse the land of the unknown. I enjoy watching a lot of the cartoons that are currently running on cartoon network (Steven Universe, Adventure Time), but I've not seen anything in recent years that has captured my imagination quite like OTGW. The show itself oozes with atmosphere, each background is an original water painting and every bit of music composed for the show is an original orchestra performed composition.

I feel as though this would be a really interesting piece to create a title sequence for. I look forward to dissecting the show further to better understand all the moving pieces that work together to create it's unique atmosphere. A lot of the show's music has been published online as well , so it'll be really interesting to see if I can find some sounds that'll resonate with the world of OTGW in a cohesive way. All in all I'm really excited to start working with such an intricate and interesting piece of media, I hope I can put something together that'll at least capture a bit of the show's timeless magic.

Title Sequence Project

For our next project I am in between ideas. Earlier this week I was reeling through different movies like "Sherlock Holmes", "Fight Club", "Pan's Labyrinth"; all movies that have a certain aesthetic that would be relatively simple to convey in a title sequence, but decided against them because I didn't want to recreate already made titles or felt that I could make one that fit the movies tone.

My mind immediately went to this stained and drawing look from "Sherlock Holmes"

Now I am between two very different ideas. One would be Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel". His greatest strengths in his movies are the stylized vintage-pastel aesthetic, which I feel could easily translate to a simple title sequence. 

My other idea would be for "Over the Garden Wall", a twisted cartoon that follows two brothers into the dangerous "Unknown" woods. I feel that a 2D animation of the brothers walking through different significant scenes would be a good start for the title project. 

Over the Garden Wall

Over Thanksgiving break I got a chance to binge-watch a couple of shows. One of those shows happened to be an animated short series on Cartoon Network called Over the Garden Wall. It tells the tale of two brothers, Wirt (voiced by Elijah Wood) and Greg who become lost in "The Unknown", a dark forest that is filled with all sorts of mysteries. They must find their way home, but they are completely lost. Through their journey back home, they befriend a frog that sings show tunes and a blue bird with an attitude. The four of them make an unlikely and often argumentative group, but they have to stick together to make it out of the forest.

The show has a overall dark tone to it, which is atypical for a kids show, but it still is filled with laughs, smart dialogue, and intrigue. This short was the first miniseries that Cartoon Network has developed and as far as I would say, it was a great success. Patrick McHale, the creator of the show, put together a show that appeals to a wide variety of people. Once I started watching it, I couldn't stop. In fact I loved it so much that I made my friends watch it as well. The show is has only 10 minute episodes so it is definitely binge-worthy. Over the Garden Wall is definitely a show that I would recommend 

Over the Garden Wall: A Dark Sort of Animation

   
    You know those series that you kind of snap out of watching in a fumbling, blurry mess, not knowing where you are or what time it is? It's kind of like getting drunk, but then having the hangover happen almost immediately. You love it but you hate it, you question your life over it but you'll do it again. And for me, this (the binge-watching daze not the drunk one) happened late one night when I was looking around for something to distract me from doing actual work.
     And luckily I happened to stumble across this little series, Over the Garden Wall, by Cartoon Network. The little eight year old within me perked up at seeing something that resembled the cartoons I had grown up loving fondly. And so I thought, why not, and plunged into the abyss. And so I found myself awake at 4am, desperately wanting to tell someone to experience roller coaster of emotions I had just been thrown on.
     This was everything that I love about cartoons because it's not something that can be explained completely in one sentence. Like I said, it also felt like a throwback to my childhood: a strangely dark and oddly twisted sort of storytelling.
      Written by Patrick McHale, it started off as an award-winning short called Tome of the Unknown that was picked up and produced as a full-length, ten-episode mini-series. Gathering some well known talent such as Elijah Wood and Christopher Lloyd, they've put life into these characters that is realistic in style and performance. Every single actor put life into their characters and they certainly wouldn't have been nearly as interesting had they not had the right voices.
    Over the Garden Wall follows two brothers (Greg and Wirt) who finds themselves lost in the woods, trying to find a way home. Their journey takes them across many lands and into many people, all of whom they effect in different ways. But while their journey seems whimsical on the surface, there's a darker tale that follows them like an ominous shadow. It's as if Alice in Wonderland and Courage the Cowardly Dog had a lovechild that was into musicals. It's a crazy sort of storytelling that you can't keep your eyes off of.
    And the aesthetic is something that made this a truly outstanding thing to see. It's a dark sort of animation in both context and illustration, one that only helps to express the tone of the series better than anything. It's as if we too are lost in these imposing woods, surrounded by an ominous feeling of being watched.
    Seeing the credits roll after the final episode, I was left feeling unsatisfied. Not in a bad way, but in a way that makes you question the universe. Because it was a story about two brothers more than it was a story about two brothers being lost in the woods. There's a sense of astute realness to their conversations and their actions (without the rigid confines of a writer trying to be too serious and prolific). And while it may have been non-sensical at times, there was still something about it that made sense in a linear fashion. Looking back, you can almost piece together what would happen next, given the many hints and clues that allude to what exactly is in "The Unknown."
     It's definitely a series to check out: if not for the aesthetic, for the story (and vice versa). It'll suck you in and it won't let you go until you've long since passed the urge to turn away. It'll leave you with more questions than answers, but you'll be okay with it. Because in the end it's just about two brothers. Two brothers who went over the garden wall.