Becky and Joe - From Tame Impala to Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

Tame Impala is a band well known among college students, and probably their most well-known song is Feels Like We Only Go Backwards. Aside from having that classic indie music sound and lyrics that are easy to sing along to, Feels Like We Only Go Backwards has an amazing, colorful, engaging and trippy music video. It wasn’t until recently, however, that I found out that the makers of the music video are the same people behind the popular YouTube videos “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared”.

Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is a five part video series that falls into the “WTF” category of YouTube videos. It’s nothing special in terms of animation, and is mostly just known for the dialogue/music in the videos. It was very surprising to me then that these same people were the brilliant animators behind the popular Tame Impala music video. Their website has this caption accompanying their upload of the music video: “Becky and Joe directed the new video for Tame Impala’s latest single ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’. The film is made up from over 100 separate plasticine collages all individually made by hand”. That’s what makes the music video so amazing - the fact that it wasn’t computer generated. They actually took the time to design all of this will plasticine clay - a process that is much more precise and time consuming than the computer-based alternative. Knowing what the animators at Becky and Joe are capable of makes me really wonder what made them decide to stick with the Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared videos…

The Efforts of Claymation

When was the last time you guys say claymation? Well I gave it a quick youtube search and it produced a whole assortment of videos, from amateur animators to a Wallace and Gromit ad. Like stop motion a lot goes into making a claymation and claymation characters feel and act as if they were real people. There're many different aspects that go into creating a claymation character, like the basic design and the execution of sculpting them. The precise motion that happens within each frame is both time consuming and necessary for the animator to get completely right. Below is both the amateur animation that I found (which is charming and short and kind of funny) as well as the Wallace and Gromit ad that aired sometime in the 2000’s.   For how time consuming claymation is, the efforts really do pay off in the end.

Mound (Claymation)

Mound by Allison Schulnik

A friend showed me this claymation by Allison Schulnik last semester and I thought I'd share it here. I really like how the artist managed to make an animation that was both creepy and beautiful at the same time. The characters are a bit disturbing, so they immediately bring a dark element into the mix. However, their ballet-like movements and reoccurring elements like blooming flowers create a huge contrast with the film's darker elements. The color palate seems to mix these contrasting themes, by combining lots of grays and with light, somewhat feminine, pastels. 

What's even more amazing is that the artist made all of the puppets herself. Dragonframe.com revealed that the animation took about eight months to make and that each frame requires around two hours to create.

image from dragonframe.com (http://www.dragonframe.com/blog/2011/11/mound-allison-schulnik/)

White Winter Hymnal, Beautiful Clay Animation

I stumbled across this animated music video a few years ago simply because I liked the song White Winter Hymnal by Fleet Foxes, however I couldn't be happier that I did. Every time I hear the song I think about this "simple" and beautiful animation, directed by Sean Pecknold. It is a claymation that was carefully constructed with gorgeous textures in the materials and also fittingly uses and animates all organic materials. The palette of the film adds to the atmospheric feeling that the animation and diffused sense of lighting provide, only to be complimented by the music.

There are great moments that have stayed with me, like the animated snow melting into puddles of water with the play of light reflecting as clay flowers sprout from the ground (starts at 1:19). The video tells a simple story about time that is whimsical, beautiful, saddening, and overall very cinematic.

Knox's Korner Klaymation

Even though since I last watched this series on YouTube, the creator, Knox aka Robert Benfer, has gotten into a little bit of trouble with fans, I think that Knox's Korner is a pretty hilarious claymation (klaymation to go with Knox's 'k' theme). It features human-like blobs, which started out as just practice for the 'klaymator,' who go through pretty extenuating circumstances, like getting stuck in the VCR,  or drowning in a glass of water. I've read that most of what we see is improvised as well, so the comedic tint to it is funnier and more clever (is clever the word? it's sort of childish, but fun to watch) because of that. He won 35 awards from Newgrounds from this series of shorts. 

Growing up Animated

I am pretty sure growing up; making animated films was always a goal of mine. Once I used up an entire post-it notebook to make a stick figure animation of a snowboarder. Stop motion interested me until I found out that it takes so much time to make a scene that lasts only for a couple of seconds. To resolve this, I used those little green GI-Joe men (like the ones in Toy Story) and move them with my finger while filming. Just enough so you wouldn’t see my finger but still making it look like there was action happening. 

Another thing when I was growing up was watching animation and more specifically Claymation films like Wallace and Gromet or The Miracle Maker. The Miracle Maker The Story of Jesus, by directors Derek Hayes and Stanislav Sokolov, is especially interesting to me because of the use of not only Claymation but also transitioning to cartoon animation to show flashbacks or stories being told by Jesus. Granted the animation of the characters are somewhat  rigid and are not as fluid as later films like Wallace and Gromet but still a great personal childhood memory.

Stop - Motion Animation

I have been a fan of animation for as long as I can remember. My parents were the first to notice my passion in it and suggest I look further into animating. This is when I took a drawing class where one of the projects was to create a charcoal animation; ie destructive animation where you erase and redrawn your frame every time. So far I haven't been able to devote a great deal of time to actual animating, but in my spare time all I do is watch and analyze animated films.

Animation has been around as long as film has been around. With early innovators like Méliès in 1896 already attempting stop - motion, the animation industry has evolved along with traditional narrative films.

While animation has gone through many phases, many pioneered by Walt Disney and his company, the type of animation that interests me the most is stop - motion animation. Many beloved films are produced through stop - motion including The Nightmare Before Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and Coraline.

Stop - motion animation is the process where an animator will move the figure by a small amount, take a picture, and repeat. When all of the photos are put together the figure now has the appearance of fluid motion. One of the best examples of this is The Nightmare Before Christmas with dance numbers and multiple characters in each scene. Even though most of the scenes were shot at 12fps, there are two exceptions.

My favorite studio, and a studio that only does stop - motion productions, is studio Laika. Laika is responsible for the stop - motion films of Coraline, ParaNorman, and their upcoming project Kubo and the Two Strings, just to name a few. Studio Laika has 10 years of experience producing stop - motion films, with several Academy Award nominations. Laika has put out stop - motion films that never cease to amaze me. From color dynamics in Coraline to the incredibly accurate representation of bullying in ParaNorman, Laika has been using stop - motion animation to create incredible pieces of art for 10 years, and I can't wait to see what their next 10 hold.

Many of my friends claim that stop - motion animation is weird or disturbing for them but that's almost the reason why I like it. It's physical objects that are manipulated into giving the appearance of smooth motion, and I think that's fascinating. Hopefully with Kubo coming out in August and Anomalisa already out in theaters, people will be more open to stop - motion animation come to understand and respect the incredible amount of work that goes into these beautiful films.

This commercial by PARABELLA for "Twinings Tea" reminded me of "The Adventures of Tom Thumb". Not the little claymation of Tom but the actors whose movements almost seemed like they were claymated. After doing some research I found that PARABELLA was heavily inspired by the Golden Era of musicals and multi-plane animation techniques which was pioneered by Walt Disney back in the 30's. The animation blends CG with pointilism, and includes 100,000 tea bags and 50 different paper folding styles to bring vivid and intricate movement throughout the piece. The heroine was also shot frame by frame, and several 3D models were shot on layered planes to captivate an amazing sense of depth and perspective.

Stop-Motion Animation

When someone mentions animation, the first ideas that come to mind are works by famous companies such as Pixar and DreamWorks. Movies like How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek, and Finding Nemo have illustrated the power of graphical animation by developing complicated and concise fictional worlds. But, animation doesn't just stop with cartoon movies. Stop-Motion Animation provides an alternative approach to animation that utilizes all forms of media to create a polished project: still images, sound, video, clay figures (actors), set modeling, and the story-boarding process. One of my favorite stop-motion films, as a child, was Aardman Animations' Wallace and Gromit. Not only did the British stop-motion comedy consist of four short films, but it also included one feature-length film. The academy-nominated relationship, of the two main characters, grows over the course of the series as Wallace's new ideas are constantly met with Gromit's "unimpressed" body language and humorous facial expressions.

                 

This stop-motion graphics artist (below) decided to take the "Wallace and Gromit approach" a step further. With the recent release of Warner Brothers' The Lego Movie, YouTube user, "cheesybricks," takes a stab at his own version of stop-motion animation with the Lego theme in mind. In this short video, watch as the artist "paints with lego."

                     Video Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxy1fkrXmCI#t=85

This video really opened my mind to the possibilities that one can achieve in animation as a field of study. Perhaps, it will be something that I will pursue in the future. But for now, I'm just going to enjoy its prestige!

Stop Motion in Robot Chicken

As we become more familiar with animation software like After Effects, it seems like computers have made animation ten times easier. With the class's limited understanding of basic functions of After Effects, we can create a ball that bounces for ever in a matter of minutes. Imagine what we would be able to do with deeper understanding of the software. Because the software seems to make animation so easy, one may assume that all big studios would utilize those programs rather than rely on older animation techniques. Of course, there are a number of shows that make use of older and much more difficult animation techniques, like stop motion. One such show is Cartoon Network's Robot Chicken.

Robot Chicken is a sketch comedy show that airs during Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" segment nightly segment. The show makes use of stop motion animation, where they move the figures in tiny increments, recording each new placement one frame at a time. The do make use of some computer generated graphics for explosions or mouth movements, but a majority of the show is done stop motion, a technique that can take hours to just get a couple of seconds of video, and that's not counting the time it takes to make each figure and setting. You may not like the crude humor that the show has, but you can appreciate the amount of work that the creators put into each ten second sketch.

Coraline: A Frame by Frame Process

With Halloween coming up, it’s fair to say that I’ve been celebrating in my own way by watching everything creepy and everything out of the ordinary. This being Coraline, produced by Henry Selick and Claire Jennings through Laika Entertainment (and Focus Features).

For those who are unfamiliar, Coraline (based on the title book by Neil Gaiman) is about a girl who hates her mundane life and finds herself being forced to move into this ancient old house by her parents. Inside, she finds a hidden door that transports her to a “perfect world,” where no one nags her and she can do as she pleases. Unfortunately, something sinister lurks in this fantasy and Coraline has to faces both her own and the physical demons that aim to harm her.

The reason I bring this movie up though, is for the sheer amount of work that went into making it. Every single frame is a stop-motion picture that captures three-dimensional puppets that are moved millimeter by millimeter so by the end of everything, a moving image is created. It’s a process that’s tedious and grueling, but exhibits a sense of refined mastery that could only be done through this type of claymation.
It's mind-boggling to see just how many people are dedicated to making the singular hairs move on one characters head, let alone the amount involved with crafting the universe. The fascinating thing about stop motion is that there are hardly any limits. With the power to manipulate anything and everything frame by frame, the animators have been given a means to do exactly what they want (and as they please). As Selick puts it, "the miracle of stop motion is it's an actual performance through the puppet by the animator."

"Jessica says Claymation is for Poor People!”

This week as I was brainstorming some blog-post ideas, I stumbled upon a UK site that I initially mistook for an entertainment news website. The article had a bubbly fun scrawl along the top that read: “Animation Trends 2012: Discover the hottest new forms and styles”. Wait. Can animation go out of style? “Mom I can’t watch Wallace and Gromit. Jessica says claymation is for poor people!”

I obviously continued reading the page and learned all sorts of knowledge.

For instance, California-based animator, Gabe Askew, is the Jessica of trendy animation. He explains— “The gloss of CG has become commonplace… characters tend to look beautifully rendered but to act as stiff as zombies when not animated in painstaking detail.” Sorry all you CG lovers out there. You’re just, well, you’re not very hip. Good luck trying to sit next to Gabe at the lunch table you big loser. Unless, of course, you like CG when it’s blended together with vintage animation styles…  “It’s not super-new,” Gabe admits, “but there definitely seems to be a trend in mixed-media animation…Animations are no longer stop motion, or 2D, or CG or puppetry; they are all these things blended together – and a small team or even one person can be proficient in all these mediums.” 

Ticktockrobot’s Me, Marionette is a good example of this new (but not super new) animation trend:

Me, Marionette from ticktockrobot on Vimeo.

Me, Marionette combines the stylistic look of marionettes using computer generated images. A.K.A. The epitome of trendiness. You go girl! Stay tuned for more animation updates, or, just check out the Digital Arts Online page.

Stop Motion Genius

Jan Švankmajer is a Czech filmmaker, who focuses most of his work on stop motion animation, particularly claymation. I remember back in Film Analysis and Aesthetics with Dr. Patricia Zimmerman we watched this short. At first, I saw as pure entertainment and quirky. As we discussed it more and more I realized a deeper meaning. It was crazy how so many perceptive ideas were tossed around, in a seemingly light-hearted piece. Aside from the subject of the short itself, the animation is amazing, done by Bedrich Glaser, who works with Švankmajer on most of his films. The approximately six minute short is made so realistically as each pieces of a man is composed through the senses. Have a look yourself!


As for some of Jan Švankmajer's other works, here is a short compilation.

Darkness Light Darkness: The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer from Cinefamily on Vimeo.
Saturday, September 8th. Selected shorts, part of our month long The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer series.

Art Clokey & Gumby

With the premiere of The Lego Movie this Friday and seeing several previews for it, this movie made me realize just how much I appreciate legos along with Stop-Motion animated features. In fact some of the earliest movies and shorts i think many of us that grew up in the 90s had some experience seeing stop motion of some kind. Whether it was those films from Aardman like Chicken Run, the Wallace and Gromitt shorts, the Rankin Bass Christmas Specials (Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer, Santa Clause is Coming to Town etc) and even Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas (and the short Vincent)

But one stop-motion feature that stood out the most to me growing up were the Art Clokey animations of  Gumby. Clokey started out with stop-motion with the musical short Gumbasia as a student film at the University of Southern California in 1953 under director Slavko Vorkapich.

 After showing this to Sam Engel of 20th Century Fox, Clokey was later asked to create a tv show using claymation figures. This eventually to creation of the famous Gumby show. One of my first exposures to this character was the movie base on this character from the 1990s. The thing about this series that I have come to enjoy over the years has been the countless shapes that Gumby and his friends take as well as comic to appreciate the countless frames it takes to animate a feature of this sort. 

A few years ago I attempted my own experiment in stop-motion and found that is difficult process processing hundreds of pictures to a simple few minute movie and have come to admire the stop motion artists who have made considerably longer works. 

Shaun the Sheep

Wallace and Gromit started as a short film series featuring the claymation figures of Wallace (left) and Gromit (right) This eventually led to the release of "Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-rabbit", a feature film released in 2005. A unique style of motion-graphics, "Wallace and Gromit" is one of the most famous claymation series ever made. It's brilliance was brought to us by Nick Park and Aardman Studios.

In one of the Wallace and Gromit short films, "A Close Shave", there's a fantastic sequence where Wallace and Gromit save a herd of stolen sheep. Check it out:

I just found out that the main sheep from this episode, "Shaun", has gotten his very own series called "Shaun the Sheep", also created by Nick Park. Each clip is only about a minute long but they've created several dozens of them and it's also a TV show that plays internationally. The generally light material is usually meant for kids, but I think older people can enjoy it just as much. 

Anyone familiar with the Wallace and Gromit series should love this spin-off. It's all the same stuff... but with more sheep. 

Check out the website here!

 

Grizzly Bear Music Video

A couple years ago, one of my favorite bands Grizzly Bear came out with a music video to their song Ready, Able. I know I posted a claymation video last week, but this one is really amazing too. The main character in this is a weird creature whose body is always moving. This goes as well for the other animals in the music video. This must have taken so long to make since little corners on them are constantly going up and down. They also show the creatures melting and being created, or getting bigger and smaller. This tedious claymation has an eery effect when they show a row of faces melting in and out as well. The colors of the clay also stand out and blend together really beautifully. I really want to make a music video using claymation, not to this extent but something similar. The claymation in this doesn’t have anything to do with the song, but creates a compelling effect. You almost start to pity this creature, who looks so helpless and lonely. 

Mark Twain Claymation

Before you watch this video, just know that this is some really creepy claymation. I personally find it really interesting but some people might get kind of bugged out from it. This 5 minute claymation is based off of Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger. It’s the story of three characters who meet a strange creature (satan?) who basically points out the flaws of human nature and our society in general. It’s a very dark piece but the animation is amazing. I can’t imagine how long this video took to make. I saw this video one night on adult swim really late at night once, and thought I was dreaming. “Life itself is only a vision, a dream, nothing exists  save empty space and you” is the closing line in this video and directly out of Mark Twains story. Check it out if you're into satan or claymation 

Bead Game / Afterlife

Here's some early pioneering stop motion animation from Ishu Patel, who worked for the National Film Board of Canada for over twenty-five years producing and directing animated short films while also working as an educator. He developed many animation techniques, including one that allowed thousands of tiny beads to move under a continuously zooming camera (which can be seen in Bead Game). He is known for his experimental style and focus on deep philosophical issues.

Bead Game (1977) was nominated for an Academy Award in 1978. He used beads as a medium and transformed them continuously, offering his vision of evolution from the smallest forms of ancient life to modern man.

Afterlife received an Outstanding Achievement Award at the London Film Festival in 1979. He placed clay shapes on top of glass and lit the animation from below, producing what you see here. This particular animation is considered one of his greatest.

While these videos are both pretty old, it's still important to understand how far we've come and how these animations have inspired artists today.

Penguins and Stop-Motion Animation

My roommate Alex does a lot of stop-motion animation, and for the past couple weeks or so he's been working on this clay-mation of a penguin character he created. He posted the video he made in its semi-completed state on YouTube, and I thought that even though it isn't done yet it still looks amazing and is really cool.
I'm posting the link to his video on his YouTube account, so give it a watch if you want! And if you're interested in this kind of motion graphics and animation, subscribe to his channel, he has a lot of really cool animation videos that are related to things we learn in class.
Have a great weekend, and see you all Tuesday!

When I was a kid...

...I loved Wallace and Gromit! My family owned A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, and A Close Shave in a VHS boxed set (I know, pretty shnazzy.) My favorite was A Grand Day Out because I loved the story- the idea of building a rocket ship in your house, traveling to the moon just to get a bit of cheese to go with some crackers, and encountering an old robot that loves to ski.

Wallace and Gromit enjoying cheese and crackers on the moon in A Grand Day Out

For those of you who might not know what the Wallace and Gromit movies are, they are a Claymation series of short films produced by Aardman Animations which is a British animation studio. There are two main characters: Wallace who is an inventor, but a little less than intelligent at times, and Gromit who is Wallace's pet dog. I envy the skills it took to create this because working with clay for animated movies must be one of the most tedious and challenging forms of stop-motion. If you haven't seen Wallace and Gromit before, it's definitely worth watching!