BDM 125, BDM126 Animation reviews 21 June

Pixar's Up



I saw Inside Out on Friday, which made me want to revist Pixar's Up, another movie that never fails to make me cry.  In this case, it was only 5-8 minutes long.  Once Ellie's gone, the emotion goes, too.  It's a fun adventure for the now Elderly Carl, helpful Kenny the Wilderness Explorer, and the animals they meet on their way to Paradise Falls.  The animal characters, Dug and Kevin the rare bird, were well animated.  Kevin just squawks, but they get a lot of acting out of her, nonetheless, and Dug is a great dog.  It just isn't consistently gripping like Inside Out, but that felt like a more personally relevant story to me, the viewer.  I wondered what my dad thinks about Up.  He has a lifetime of experience behind him and 3 active grandchildren always grabbing at him.  He might find Inside Out ok but Up speaking to him.  That's the beauty of Pixar's body of work: something for everyone.  And as they keep going, they'll keep fleshing it out in a way that Disney never has, and probably never will.  Disney makes princess stories and Pixar makes everybody's story as worthy of telling as a princess'.

Psycho-Pass, episode 1
exciting shots, changed frequently so excitement level was kept up, standard high pitched girl/woman character who goes weak at the knees.  poker faced men.  Halfway through, I thought, "If this was really Japan, we'd have a mascot." And boom!  We've got mascots interacting with the public on the behalf of the police department.  Classic!  What's also classic, but not in a fun way, is  Inspector Akane Tsunemori's constant meltdowns.  She actually fires a gun from a knock-kneed position.  Get a hold of yourself, Inspector!  You went through the Academy, right?  You were trained for this, right?  I don't think I'll go back to find out. I guess every culture has trouble showing strong, realistic female characters who don't give in to cultural gender stereotypes.      


Sometimes I feel bad because everybody around me is drawing manga and cool-looking sword fighting stuff and I'm drawing cute little people.  Then I think, stick it!  Because Japan is also home to My Neighbour Totoro and more cute Kawaii mascots than you handle.  Yin and Yang, living side by side.  There's a place for everybody.

Puss in Boots
Very inspiring in terms of shots, camera angles and putting together an exciting sequence.  The Tuesday night Dance Fight that Puss gets into with Kitty Soft Paws is worth watching again and again.  The Shrek movies, of which this is a spin-off, have really "ugly" humans.  They're getting better and better, but I've never liked the look of them as much as Pixar's people.  I give them credit, though, Dreamworks has really improved the movement of the people characters.  They can be subtle and show thought in slight movements and facial expressions.  This is really evident anytime Jack and Jill are on screen discussing Jack's plans for starting a family.  Funny stuff.








Watching this gave me an idea:  Puss sweeps his hat off to the camera, we cut to black and then the next scene.  It made me think about doing some hat work in Monkey Saves the Daypaint.  Can my Monkey be as cool as Puss in Boots?

BDM125: Monkey Saves the Daypaint audio work, 23 June

I've spent 5 hours over two days listening to audio clips of sound effects, film scores and recording myself making noises for Monkey, Graffiti Girl, Madame Le Snob and Museum Director.  I'm having a little bit of trouble staying awake now... so I should find a few more key noises and just start plugging stuff into my animatic.  SIT's production office gave us the opportunity to record on their equipment downstairs.  It took the whole class for my movie to export, a lesson in itself about timing things, but they were still going at 4 and I was able to get in then.  I did two takes of just watching the short play out and making a series of sounds as the ideas or the scenes came up.  The "scratch track" can be cut and pasted, so it wasn't important that I get it "right" as much as get it "done".  The final take focused on me doing Madame Le Snob's cackling laugh.  Jamie the engineer said it needed to be recorded on a lower level.  Hopefully I've recorded something in there for all the characters.  Once the pitch is taken up or down, the noises will work for Monkey and the Museum Director and it won't sound like me grunting and cackling to myself for 3 minutes.  Fingers crossed! 

BDM125: Monkey Saves the Daypaint! animatic, no audio, 22 June

Monkey Saves the DayPaint! animatic

Selected scenes from Monkey Saves the Daypaint.  If I want to complete this as a short next semester, I will have to peel out the scenes that don't matter that much so it's a minute and a half.  I've spent the last two weeks trying to get it over the 3 minute mark, so haha! can I do the reverse?  Looking through these shots, yes.  I've chosen my favourite framed shots, but also ones that tell the story most economically.  This shows me that the scenes of the Teenager creating Graffiti Girl can go, as can the other paintings in the museum.  I'll give some thought as to how I can trim down the fire in the cafe scene which establishes the use of the fire hydrant and introduces Madame Le Snob.

BDM125, BDM126 Animation Reviews 3 June

Requiem for Romance

We watched this in class.  It was a really interesting short.  The action male ninja v. female ninja, fighting across rooftops. But the audio is an Asian Canadian woman trying to break up with her Asian Canadian boyfriend.  (I say Canadian based on the funding from sources in Quebec)  And this "disjointed" pairing of audio and visual really works.  The timing was expertly matched up so as the boyfriend goes on the verbal attack, so does his animated counterpart, and vice versa until the two end up quietly sitting at the end of a dock, just talking to each other.  Will they be able to get past parental prejudices and stay together?

The backgrounds look like watercolor being dripped onto the camera.  I wondered if this was stop motion, or live with black figures animated in a new layer.  It's making me think about the stop motion project next semester.

Mood is driven by pacing but also by the change of colour as the argument heats up, then cools down, and the changing weapons as the breakup conversation grows more pleading in tone.  

Then we watched Road Runner cartoons.  Meep meep!  I grew up with these and I've never seen them spliced together with 10 minutes of Wil E. Coyote getting his head knocked in when his  harebrained schemes went wrong.  Pacing, matching audio to mood and timing are to be observed and borrowed from.  There's that all-important pause as Wil E. considers what is just about to happen to him...

Road Runner cartoon

BDM125, BDM126, Animation Review: Pixar's Inside Out, 19 June

Inside Out trailer
What a beautiful film!  I went to see it this afternoon when I was feeling low on inspiration or the desire to go on with my projects.  Nobody will be in the computer lab after 6, so why waste the afternoon trying to work on a lap tablet?

Pixar blew me away when they covered Sully with fur  in Monsters Inc.  The Emotions (Joy, Disgust, Sadness, Anger and Fear) are all covered in soft peach fuzz and this gorgeous glistening hair/fur/feather hybrid and they look just as incredible.  It'll be interesting to see if the tie-in toys can live up to the beauty of their animated counterparts.  I also watched the fabric work on the costumes with great interest.  Sadness' sweater has teensy weensy little fibers sticking off in all directions, so you know what she's wearing is soft, maybe cashmere.  And how great is THAT attention to detail?

Two distinct, but equally interesting worlds have been created in the film.  The inside of 11-year-old Riley's mind is filled with the Emotions, their control rooms, the labyrinthine memory centers, the dump where faded memories go, Imagination Land (complete with a Dream Productions studio), memories... Outside in the real world, the locations and people were so REAL.  I kept being surprised by how lifelike the human's looked and moved.  And they're just as interesting as the interior workings of her mind.  There was never a drag when the movie showed what was happening in Riley's life that made me wish they'd hurry up and get back to the real story.  Inside and Out worked together.

Because I'm working on an animatic, I tried to pay attention to how long each shot lasted, how much movement there was, but I couldn't keep it up.  I think the lesson is 3 seconds, no more, then move on.  I watched for chase scenes and I think that mine will need more movement and changes in camera angle before I'm done.

There were two children under 5 in the audience, and I wonder if they enjoyed the movie.  This may be the first kid's movie that should be handed out to pre-teens and teens.  Or to adults.  I CRIED and CRIED and CRIED, the whole way through.  It was an incredibly moving script.  Good for you, Pixar.  Let's see more animation that tackles hard topics.  

BDM106, Film History and Criticism: My Favourite Film Essay: Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" (1982)

I come from a family of cinephiles: we watch and collect a broad range of genres but Science Fiction is King.  Starting with going to the movies to see “Star Wars” and “The Wizard of Oz”, our movie education took off with the VCR.  We rented everything we could get our hands on: “Buck Rogers”, “Battlestar Galactica” and “Flash Gordon”.  Television re-entered our lives after a six-year hiatus and with it a show called “Star Trek”.  The future was brightly coloured, exciting and groovily optimistic.  Humans would form a utopian society that peacefully explored the galaxy seeking friendship.

The cultural zeitgeist of late 20^th century America was one of unease; general and persistent unease.  It was a time of extreme paranoia about nuclear war with the Soviet Union.  The national narrative of the “melting pot” that had room for everybody, as long as the majority was comfortably white, Anglo Saxon and Protestant, was starting to shift to other races, other ethnicities, other religions.  At the expense of local jobs, consumers couldn’t get enough cheap and cheerful electronics from Asia.  Environments in cities like Los Angeles were infamous for their smoggy skies filled with emissions from cars and industrial polluters alike.  After a promising start, the space agencies of both the United States and the Soviet Union were stuck in a rut of up and down from the atmosphere, out and back from the moon.  Humanity wasn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. 

With those intertextual influences, “Blade Runner” (1982) was a revelation; it depicted a future world that was not a wish-fulfilling fantasy but one that seemed to be based on fact, precedent and a keen attention to the detail and direction of the late 20^th century.  It was Fear made manifest: all the nightmares were going to come true.  Globalisation, over-reaching corporations, environmental decay, and a police state, even bigger and badder than it was possible to believe.  Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a cop in Los Angeles 2019, skulking about in a labyrinth of gargantuan skyscrapers, multi-cultures and commercialism.  The people speak a hybrid language of Spanish, English and Japanese.  Everything is dirty, it is constantly raining, and the sky never clears.  Everybody is so poor, and only the lucky, the so-called 1%, are living out of the filth in the Off World colonies or in colossal penthouses.  (Scott, 1982) (Kempley, 1992) (Hermansson, 2015)

“Blade Runner” is a fully-formed world; no detail of this future dystopia goes unimagined by Douglas Trumbull and David Dryer on special effects.  Homes for rich and poor, streets, corporations, advertising on giant screen televisions plastered to the sides of 400-story buildings, food, clothes and flying cars for this world are all finely detailed.  Semantically and syntactically, it’s a mix of science fiction and film noir tropes.  From science fiction, the megatropolis and suggestion of Off World colonies, flying cars and Replicants who are “More Human Than Human”.  From Film Noir, the stock character-types of  Hard-Boiled Detective, Femme Fatale, and Sleazy Boss and props of guns, cigarettes and blinds.  The locations, props and characters of both genres blend and reinforce the narrative device of a traditional voice-over with a narrator’s world weary translation of the action as it progresses from the clash of one pair of opposites to another: rich v. poor, future dystopia v. nostalgic reverie, human v. Replicant. (Rowley, 2015)

The source text for “Blade Runner”’ is “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick.  Dick imagines a future where life is under such threat that people are incapable of producing their own emotions and owning a living animal is a status symbol.  Rick Deckard here spends considerably less time chasing Replicants for forcible “retirement” and more time trying to keep up with the Joneses by pretending to own a sheep, which is itself a Replicant.  In the early pages of the novel, Deckard and his wife argue and he considers turning his personal mood-enhancing machine (created for a population so numb it needs assistance in suppressing or stimulating it’s emotions) up a few notches so he can win the fight.  These non-diegetic details, and many others, are only lightly touched on by the movie (the Replicant Zohra is tracked down thanks to the maker’s tags on the scales of her synthetic boa constrictor and every human we meet seems to be perpetually depressed), but we notice them all the same in the elaborate tapestry of the film.  The textual features that resonated with Ridley Scott were the Replicants and their struggle to extend life.  (East, 2012) (Boucher, 2010)

One of the pleasures of “Blade Runner” is the long-running debate, enhanced by the re-releases in 1992 of the “Director’s Cut” and in 2007 “The Final Cut”, is the nature of the intelligent android and Deckard’s true identity: is he, himself, a Replicant?  In the original film, Gaff (Edward James Olmos) leaves a series of origami animals behind as each Replicant is “retired”.  At Deckard’s apartment, he leaves a unicorn.  Not until “The Director’s Cut” and the addition of Deckard dreaming about a unicorn do the hermeneutics of his true nature and relationship to his love interest Rachel (Sean Young) come clear.  How did Gaff know about the dream?  Is Gaff letting Deckard leave with a Replicant, Rachel, or is Gaff letting Deckard, a Replicant himself, leave? The Replicants, as created by the Tyrell Corporation (motto/promise/threat? “More Human Than Human”) have been programmed with the memories of others in order to enhance their four year life spans.  It is a function that was supposed to make them better slaves to their human masters, but in the case of all living things, it gave them a desire for more life. After all, how could you accept death when life has been so full and rich?  And doesn’t memory make, shape, mold the person?  This makes the Replicants indistinguishable from Humans, and they know it.  The film quietly offers the unicorns and a brief flash of Deckard’s eyes, flashing yellow in the light like the other Replicants, but doesn’t shout about it; it is left to the viewer to decide.  (TheBruce, 2012) (Blade Runner; The Most Influential Science Fiction Movie of the 1980's, 2007)

Ridley Scott once said, “Why watch a film seven times?  Because someone’s done it right and transported you to its world.” 

  Word Count 1050

Blade Runner; The Most Influential Science Fiction Movie of the 1980's. (2007). Retrieved from www.cinemaddicts.org: http://cinemaddicts.org/blog/2007/11/23/blade-runner-the-most-influential-science-fiction-movie-of-the-1980s/

Boucher, G. (2010, June 6). Ridley Scott: ‘Blade Runner’ has ‘echoed through pop culture in a very special way’. Retrieved from Hero Complex: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/ridley-scott-blade-runner/

East, B. (2012, April 29). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: by Philip K Dick- review. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/29/do-androids-dream-electric-dick-review

Hermansson, N. (2015). The World 2019- A Worn Down Hell. Retrieved from Blade Runner Insight: http://www.br-insight.com/worn-down-hell

Kempley, R. (1992, September 11). Blade Runner. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/bladerunnerrkempley_a0a2e1.htm

Kermode, M. (2015, April 5). Blade Runner: The Final Cut review- a timeless sci-fi classic. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/05/blade-runner-final-cut-timeless-sci-fi-classic-review

Rowley, S. (2015). The Least Scary Option. Retrieved from Blade Runner Insight: http://www.br-insight.com/least-scary-option

Scott, R. (Director). (1982). Blade Runner [Motion Picture].

The Least Scary Option. (n.d.). Retrieved from Blade Runner Insight: www.br-insight.com/least-scary-option

TheBruce. (2012, December 31). Thirty Years Later- Blade Runner (1982). Retrieved from www.theshadowzone.wordpress.com: https://theshadowzone.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/thirty-years-later-blade-runner-1982/

BDM126: Mad Mozart walk cycle, front, 18 June

Working from the "strut" reference guide I found yesterday, I've given Mad Mozart a walk with some personality.  It's choppy, though.  I think I need to go back in and add a new frame between the 7 frames I have now.  Then I should get smoother movement and I'll be able to speed him up without it looking like he's marching.