John Lewis - The Bear and the Hare
The 'Bear and the Hare' was the 2013 christmas advert for retailer John Lewis. The reason I've chosen to look at it is because firstly, they used a range of techniques that I'm interested in applying to our own piece. Most notably, the way the characters were animated was that each frame was drawn on animation paper and then coloured and printed using a laser cutter onto quite a thick card so that they were able to stand up on their own. The cutout was then placed into each frame and replaced almost like stop motion except instead of moving a model the cutout was just replaced. This is something we've considered and are hopefully going to go ahead with on our piece. It came up in discussion around the time we decided to make the entire documentary using paper and thus thought about how to animate specific aspects such as animals or natural elements. We decided it would be good to laser cut individual frames of the flying sequence of a bird, and after testing it on after effects, it worked quite well. The set design in the production 'The Bear and the Hare' is also a very high level of achievement and made me look carefully at the backgrounds I'm using along with the composition of different scenes. I particularly liked how even though the animals are 2D, through the method used look like they are three-dimensional. Another thing I liked about this was the camera shots that were used. Various tracking and panning shots were used at climatic moments and to bring certain details into view, such as near the end when the bear comes over the hill. There was a short feature made explaining the processes used to create the advert and the level of communication and collaboration that's evident in the production is inspiring and something I want to incorporate into our process, as well as time management through the use of time tables and schedules. The use of elements and environment is also something I feel like I took away from this after watching it a few times over. There is an emphasis on elements such as snow, rain, wind and the changing of seasons from spring to autumn and to winter etc. The seasons are an aspect of our animation that we wanted to include in some form and the way it was done in the advert is a good starting point as a reference on what can be done.
Gravity Falls
Early on in the project the art style from Gravity Falls was mentioned because of it's simplistic but universal appeal style combined with the use of colour and lighting to add a dramatic effect to the imagery and scenes that are used within it. After this I went away and watched several episodes of the series to get a feel for what the backgrounds added to the overall production and if we could in any way draw inspiration from it. The first thing I liked about the style was the consistency when it came to natural objects such as rocks, trees, leaves etc in that they all had the same style, and had a relatively high level of detail on them but the actual shapes were quite simple. The shapes of things became important when we decided to make the documentary out of paper cutouts because it was the shape and outline of objects that was the only relevant thing left when they shapes were cut out. In terms of colour, the colours used in Gravity Falls are quite natural with a slight cartoon feel but everything looks right. On top of this the use of light and shadow makes certain scenes and backgrounds look a lot more impactful because of the dramatic aspect they bring to a scene. This has encouraged me to look at and make sure we have good lighting in the scenes throughout our production, despite the difference in mediums. This will probably be achieved in After Effects. Something else that I really liked in the Gravity Falls scenes that I picked up and thought worked really well was the use of depth of field. The illusion in creating a depth of field on the 2D image to make it look almost as if you could walk into it, and added a sense of realism despite the unrealistic art style. Since we will be using paper trees and paper cutouts in general in our animation by layering them up in 3D layers, adding a depth of field would work well to create the illusion that the scene has a depth to it that would otherwise only be present if we shot it physically on a physical set. Overall, although we aren't using 2D drawing techniques in our documentary animation, there is a range of aspects including colour, depth of field, and shape of objects or style that have heavily influenced me at this early stage already and given me things that I plan to implement into various scenes later on in the project, when we are at the production stage of the process.
In a Nutshell - Kurzgesagt
The 'In a Nutshell' series by Kurzgesagt has been one of the more influential things I've looked at as research for this particular project. It's essentially a series of short documentaries that are produced by a small team covering a range of topics such as biology, cosmology, history and lots of other things. I discovered them a while ago and regularly watch any new material they produce and released online. The reason I've chosen to look at them for research for this module is firstly their approach to documentary making. They're quite straight forward in their approach, they make their videos to inform and entertain using a combination of interesting material and solid script writing, a good narrator, an appealing visual style and keeping their videos relatively short. Some of their videos are around three minutes in length whereas others are up to ten minutes or so. In comparison to what we're hoping to achieve, we are aiming for two minutes in length so quite similar to a shorter video by Kurzgesagt. The videos they make could easily appeal to a wide audience of all ages, from children to young adults and older people that enjoy educational videos whilst having that element of entertainment also factored in. The narrator that does the voice over for all of the pieces they've produced has an incredibly likeable voice, and sounds quite enthusiastic whilst also being quite calming. The script is easy to digest and isn't to heavy despite the subject matter being occasionally quite heavy, in that it's explained in a very eloquent and interesting way, sometimes even having humour included. This is the style of script I'm hoping to write for our documentary on deforestation, informative and interesting without getting to heavy or flooded with statistics. I think we're going to attempt to keep the script quite conversational in regards to this. Next, the art style is very graphic. I suppose in a way it will also have a certain influence on us because of our approach to the animation and using paper cutting as a medium, it will be inherently quite graphic and a little bit more simple than some other approaches we could have chosen to take. They use a lot of smooth animation and creative transitions throughout their documentary pieces to bring new scenes into the audiences view and this again adds to the dynamic feel of the animation. They have developed their own unique art style over the videos they have produced and it's quite recognisable by this point. Overall, the way they assemble and layer the different graphics without subtle music and a solid narration makes for a truly successful way of both informing and entertaining. I think what I want to take from their approach aside from the things previously mentioned such as script writing and editing are the level of detail and effort that's funnelled into each aspect of the animation, and I really want ours to be of a good standard too so that the people who watch it can enjoy it but also learn something through the information we are relaying to them through the narration that runs over the entire visual aspect of the animated documentary.
Maude White
Maude White is a papercutting artist that I've been following on social media for a while now. The reason I've chosen to look into some of her work as research is because I think she has demonstrated some of the amazing possibilities and outcomes that can be achieved by the technique of paper cutting. Of course hers are a lot more detailed and refined than the assets we create for this particular animation but it's great to see what kind of things she's managed to achieve through the various approaches that she has undergone. For example, one thing that I find quite interesting is looked at the way she plays around with positive and negative space to create different scenes and manages to tell subtle stories in just a single still image or frame. This is definitely something I want to be able to take away from her work since we will be telling a story and informing the audience in a visual way just as she does with her work. I'm happy that I looked into her work because it has made visible to me the potential in paper and paper cutting as a medium for storytelling and animation in general. Maude White creates all of her paper cuts by hand using a scalpel, however I'll be cutting ours using the laser cutter for practical and timing reasons, essentially so we can get things cut efficiently. She has a great range of scenes and imagery depicted in her work, which again reiterates to me the diverse uses that paper cutting can be applied to. This has given me confidence in the technique we have chosen and I'm looking forward to seeing how far we can take it, and how the production looks at the end with the amount of detail that we could incorporate and the room for visual storytelling through paper that we will be trying.
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