DeVry University animation films discussion

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summarize reading focusing on Animation, Rotoscope, Fleisher, Disney, Cel animation, Renoir, poetic realism

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Reading Week 6 OTHER DEVELOPMENTS - ANIMATION ANIMATION The Animated Film Most fiction and documentary films photograph people and objects in full-sized, three dimensional spaces. As we have seen, the standard shooting speed for such live-action filmmaking is typically 24 frames per second. “Animation is not a genre, it’s a medium. And it can express any genre. I think people often sell it short. But ‘because it’s animated, it must be for kids.’ You can’t name another medium where people do.” — Brad Bird, director, The Incredibles Animated films are distinguished from live-action ones by the unusual kinds of work done at the production stage. Instead of continuously filming an ongoing action in real time, animators create a series of images by shooting one frame at a time. Between the exposure of each frame, the animator changes the subject being photographed. Daffy Duck does not exist to be filmed, but a carefully planned and executed series of slightly different drawings of Daffy can be filmed as single frames. When projected, the images create illusory motion comparable to that of live-action filmmaking. Anything in the world—or indeed the universe—that the filmmaker can manipulate can be animated by means of two-dimensional drawings, three-dimensional objects, or digital information stored in a computer. Because animation is the counterpart to live action, any sort of film that can be filmed live can be made using animation. There are animated fiction films, both short and feature-length. There can also be animated documentaries, usually instructional ones. Animation provides a convenient way of showing things that are normally not visible, such as the internal workings of machines or the extremely slow changes of geological formations. Ari Folman took this idea further in his documentary Waltz with Bashir. After interviewing Israeli army veterans, he sought to represent their dreams and recollections in hallucinatory animated imagery. A recurring memory image in Waltz with Bashir shows soldiers wading toward an eerily beautiful bombardment. With its potential for distortion and pure design, animation lends itself readily to experimental filmmaking as well. Many classic experimental animated films employ either abstract or associational form. For example, both Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren made films by choosing a piece of music and arranging abstract shapes to move in rhythm to the sound track. There are several distinct types of animation. The most familiar is drawn animation. From almost the start of cinema, animators drew and photographed long series of cartoon images. At first, they drew on paper, but copying the entire image, including the setting, over and over proved too time-consuming. During the 1910s, studio animators introduced clear rectangular sheets of celluloid, nicknamed cels. Characters and objects could be drawn on different cels, and these could then be layered like a sandwich on top of an opaque painted setting. The whole stack of cels would then be photographed. New cels showing the characters and objects in slightly different positions could then be placed over the same background, creating the illusion of movement The cel process allowed animators to save time and to split up the labor among assembly lines of people doing drawing, coloring, photography, and other jobs. The most famous cartoon shorts made during the 1930s to the 1950s were made with cels. Warner Bros. created characters such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Tweety Bird; Paramount had Betty Boop and Popeye; Disney made both shorts (Mickey Mouse, Pluto, Goofy) and, beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, feature-length cartoons. Cel animation continued well into the 1990s, with big-budget studio cartoons employing full animation. This approach renders figures in fine detail and supplies them with tiny, nonrepetitive movements. Cheaper productions use limited animation, with only small sections of the image moving from frame to frame. Limited animation is mainly used on television, although Japanese theatrical features exploited it to Reading Week 6 create flat, poster like images. Some independent animators have continued to draw on paper. Robert Breer, for example, uses ordinary white index cards for his witty, quasi-abstract animated films. . Cels and drawings are photographed, but an animator can work without a camera as well. He or she can draw directly on the film, scratch on it, and attach flat objects to it. Stan Brakhage taped moths’ wings to film stock in order to create Mothlight. Another type of animation that works with two-dimensional images involves cut-outs. Sometimes filmmakers make flat puppets with movable joints. Lotte Reiniger specialized in lighting her cut-outs in silhouette to create delicate, intricate fairy tales. Animators can also manipulate cut-out images frame by frame to create moving collages; A very simple form of cutout animation involves combining flat shapes of paper or other materials to create pictures or patterns. The rudimentary shapes and unshaded colors of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (as well as the television series from which it derives) flaunt deliberately crude cut-out animation. Three-dimensional objects can also be shifted and twisted frame by frame to create apparent movement. Animation of objects falls into three closely related categories: clay, model, and pixillation. Clay animation, often termed claymation, sometimes actually does involve modeling clay. But more often, Plasticine is used, since it is less messy and is available in a wider range of colors. Sculptors create objects and characters of Plasticine, and the animator then presses the flexible material to change it slightly between exposures. “Wallace and Gromit” series contain extraordinarily complex lighting and camera movement. One of the most famous feature-length puppet films of recent years is Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. In The Nightmare Before Christmas, an attempt to combine Halloween and Christmas ends disastrously. Pixillation is a term applied to frame-by-frame movement of people and ordinary objects. For example, in 1908, Arthur Melbourne-Cooper animated toys in a miniature set to create dense layers of movement in Dreams of Toyland. Although actors ordinarily move freely and are filmed in real time, occasionally an animator pixillates them. That is, the actor freezes in a pose for the exposure of one frame, then moves slightly and freezes again for another frame, and so on. The result is a jerky, unnatural motion quite different from ordinary acting. Computer imaging has revolutionized animation. On a mundane level, the computer can perform the repetitive task of making the many slightly altered images needed to give a sense of movement. On a creative level, software can be devised that enables filmmakers to create images of things that could not be filmed in the real world. The earliest computer animation depended on intensive hand labor and could not create convincing three-dimensional compositions. James Whitney used analog computer to generate the elaborate and precise abstract patterns for his Lapis. It was not until the 1980s that computer technology advanced far enough to be used extensively in feature production. Graphic manipulation of frame-by-frame images requires enormous amounts of computer memory, and the first feature film to include computer animation, Disney’s TRON (1982), contained only 15 minutes of partially computer-generated imagery out of its running length of 96 minutes. In the 1990s, George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, Steve Jobs’s Pixar Animation, and other firms developed banks of powerful computers and complex programs for creating animated imagery. Images generated on computers are transferred to film either by filming directly off a highresolution monitor or by using a laser to imprint individual pixels of the images onto each frame. In 1995, Pixar’s Toy Story, the first animated feature created entirely via computer, was released through Disney. It presented an illusion of a three-dimensional world peopled by figures that somewhat resembled Plasticine models. By 2000, Pixar’s programs had improved computer animation’s ability to render surface textures like fur, as demonstrated in Monsters, Inc. Computer animation can also be used to simulate the look of traditional cel animation. Working on a computer can make the processes of painting colors onto the cel or of joining the various layers of the Reading Week 6 image more efficient and consistent. For example, Japan’s master cel animator Hayao Miyazaki adopted computer techniques for some images of his 1997 film Princess Mononoke. Miyazaki used morphing, multilayer compositing, and painting for about 100 of the film’s total of around 1600 shots, yet the difference from traditional cel animation is virtually undetectable on the screen In Princess Mononoke, five portions of the image (the grass and forest, the path and motion lines, the body of the Demon God, the shading of the Demon God, and Ashitaka riding away) were joined by computer, giving smoother, more complex motions than regular cel animation could achieve. In 1989, James Cameron’s thriller The Abyss popularized computer animation in live-action features by creating a shimmering water creature. Since then, computer animation has created dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, and the realistic, humanlike creature Gollum in The Lord of the Rings Disney and Warner Bros. were rivals. Disney animators had far greater resources at their disposal, and their animation was more elaborate and detailed than the simpler style of the Warner product. Warner cartoonists, despite their limited budgets, fought back by exploiting the comic fantasy possible in animated films and playing with the medium in imaginative ways. In Warner Bros. cartoons, characters often spoke to the audience or referred to the animators and studio executives. For example, the Warner unit’s producer Leon Schlesinger appeared in You Ought to Be in Pictures, letting Porky Pig out of his contract so that he could try to move up to live-action features. The tone of the Warner cartoons distinguished them sharply from the Disney product. The action was faster and more violent. The main characters, such as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, were wisecracking cynics rather than innocent altruists like Mickey Mouse. The Warner animators tried many experiments over the years, but perhaps none was so extreme as Duck Amuck, directed by Charles M. (Chuck) Jones in 1953. It is now recognized as one of the masterpieces of American animation. Although it was made within the Hollywood system and uses narrative form, it has an experimental feel because it asks the audience to take part in an exploration of techniques of cel animation. As the film begins, it seems to be a swashbuckler of the sort Daffy Duck had appeared in before, such as The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1950)—itself a parody of one of Errol Flynn’s Recommended Sikov Ch 6
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Running head: READING SUMMARY

Reading Summary
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READING SUMMARY

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This paper provides a reading summary focusing on Animation, Rotoscope, Fleisher,
Disney, Cel animation, Renoir, and poetic realism. Animation, according to week 6 reading, is a
medium rather than a genre. As a medium, it can be utilized to express any genre. This aspect of
animation contradicts to the notion held by many people that animations are meant for kids
because even adult-focused genre can be communicated through animation. Animation differs
from action or documentary films in that images are manipulated to look like moving images.
Rotoscope entails the transfer of motion pictures, fram...


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