Collaboration: Robot Chicken

For example in the That's Bane clip (below) they've nitpicked that Batman talks a lot before he takes any action giving Bane plenty enough time to break Batman's back very dramatically multiple times - plus they've made a joke out of the Rule of Three concept which we are using in the Harry Potter skit - we return to it three times to exaggerate time.

This skit makes fun of Darth Vader's parenting skills - not exactly the best Dad going, holding his daughter prisoner and threatening her.

This skit they make fun of the possibilities the Terminator could create by changing the past altering the future.

Video on how Robot Chicken makes their animations

Collaboration: Research - Scrat Comedy and Storytelling Techniques

Scrat

Page 158 from: 'Ideas for the Animated Short' (First Edition) by Karen Sullivan, Gary Schumer and Kate Alexander. 
Interview extract from the makers of the Scrat shorts on what makes Scrat comedic.

Scanned pages (112 and 113) from: '3D Animation Essentials' by Andy Beane.

I meant to post these a lot earlier but here are some scanned pages from books that I found relevant to our research. The Scrat interview extract is us researching a pre-existing comedic 3D animation short that communicates comedy without any words. The story telling techniques emphasises the techniques used in the Scrat films, mainly to show the audience comedy and why it's funny rather than simply tell them. The rule of three concept that is said to be used in comedy was also relevant info to our animation, we will use this for example for the Harry Potter spectators skit, we will come back to this skit three times throughout, mainly because the base of that joke is time. - Paris

Collaboration: Research - Acting for Animators; Interviews with Ed Hooks

Listening to some interviews with Ed Hooks, I made some notes below each video of some key things.

• The difference between actors and animators is, animators don’t work in the present moment like actors do. 

• Actors are told to stay away from acting in the mirror because for them it’s like being on the stage and in the audience at the same time and it’s an impossible thing. Animators use mirrors and video references, but they are too aware, they’re aware of the scene and the movements and of themselves, Hooks reckons it would be better to see Animators use their friends more than themselves to act and reference. 

• He talks about how in Frozen there is fault in their storytelling and acting, there’s confusion over who the protagonist is, is it the character we follow throughout the story, who has no development (Anna) or is it Elsa, the Queen who has gone through character development by the end of the story and without her there’d be no plot. 

• Another fault is the villain in the story - Hans, throughout the story there is no foreshadowing that he’s the antagonist. When Elsa freezes the town his face doesn’t falter considering something totally unplanned has potentially sabotaged his plans; plus we don’t get the reveal until the third act close to the end. 

• Humans learn survival skills indirectly through story telling.

• The most important rule of acting is emotion tends to lead to action, the audience empathise with a character. They see what the character is doing and with empathy look underneath the action and identify with the emotion, that is how you get an audience to care. 

• The actor is the character on the screen, the animator is not the actor, an animator learns to see the world through the eyes of the character. The actor is the personality of the character. 

• Theatrical reality is for telling a story so you only show the parts of reality that are essential for informing an audience, you compress time and space and it has structure. You need conflict and obstacle where regular reality doesn’t have that all the time. 

• Acting is… behaving believably in pretend circumstances for a theatrical purpose. 

• Shakespeare said the actor should hold a mirror up against nature, you need to see nature and understand all the connections thinking, emotions and physical actions. An animator and actor needs to see more - why are people doing what they’re doing. 

• Everyone is the hero in their own life - even villains, we all star in our own movie and think about how are we presenting ourselves to the world. 

• Power centres are where we move from, you can move a power centre around, the higher the power centre the quicker the rhythm - anxiety is high power centre, tight and uncertain feeling like you’re going to fly away. Confidence is a low power centre - manifests in relaxed, centred, grounded, weight. This stops characters moving the same way. 

• The Iron Giant is a good example of good acting in animation, original toy story, Coraline and Up (first hour or it, mainly Carl and Ellie). That’s an example of how acting has nothing to do with words. 

• Up violates the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ principle, paradise valley where they meet Doug the talking dog via his magic collar, the audience is not ready for that as it was not set up in the first act. Same with Walle - you’re in space and not prepared for all the fat people.

Collaboration: Research - Acting for Animators; Comedy

Whilst reading acting for animators, I found a section on comedy that explains: what comedy is, why we find it funny, who professionals looked to. Here are some notes I made, it mentions a few times about Charlie Chaplin especially the Little Tramp so below the notes is Chaplin video. - Paris

Comedy

"... the animator should know wat creates laughter - why d things appeal to people as being funny?" (Disney, 1935)

If what you're doing is funny, you don't have to be funny doing it. (Charlie Chaplin).

There is only one way of making comedy richer - and paradoxically, funnier - and that is by making it more serious. (Walter Kerr; The Silent Clowns - 1975).

• Comedy is the celebration of life, thats’ the reason we will laugh more in a group of people than on our own. Laughter is our way of saying to one another, “I'm still alive. You still alive? Great! We are both still alive!” 
• Charlie Chaplin is the person to study if you want to understand how comedy works. 
• Comedy is directly related to drama, in fact comedy is dependent on drama, comedy is drama steroids. Drama has to do with the most potential, and comedy has to do with its limitations. Comedy is about limitations. 
• The ultimate limitation is life, everyone knows life is finite no exceptions, so when people laugh at jokes they acknowledge to each other they’re still alive. 
• Comedy is drama exaggerated, heightened and enriched. 
• The big challenge for actors and animators who want to be funny is this: in order to be funny, you must be truthful. If you try to be funny, I guarantee that you will not be funny. This is what is wrong with so many animated feature films that contain “gags”. 
• Comedy is not like hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree. It's the stuff of life, and it needs to merge organically from the situation in order to work. 
• We laugh at what we identify with. We are all - for better or for worse - caught up in this thing called life, and we have to do the best we can with it. When our best efforts to bellyflop, it is funny. 
• Animation is a better medium for comedy, you can get cars to crash harder, toss characters from great heights, even have them get shot through with a shot gun pellet - and still survive. 
• Farce - a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterisation and ludicrously improbable situations. (Slapstick). 
• Farce is about mechanics, mechanical things gone wrong, timing, and the element of surprise.

Collaboration: Research - Acting for Animators

Since we have our first acting class Monday I decided to start reading Acting for Animators by Ed Hooks (Third Edition) which talks about how we use acting in animations, here are some notes I made. - Paris

Seven Essential Acting Principles

1. Thinking tends to lead to conclusions and emotions tends to lead to action. (“The mind is the pilot” - Disney, 1935 - when it comes to characters) emotion feels like they exist independently from thought unless we make a conscious effort to analyse it. Emotions begin and ends with the thinking brain - “I think therefore I am” - René Descartes, 1637. 
2. We humans empathise only with emotion. Your job as a character animator is to create in the audience a sense of empathy with your character. 
3. Theatrical reality it's not the same as regular reality. 
4. Acting is doing; acting is also reacting. 
5. Your character should play action until something happens to make him play a different action. (Obstacle). 
6. Scenes begin in the middle not at the beginning. 
7. A scene is a negotiation. Negotiations you have to be able to win or lose, there are three types of conflict when it comes to negotiation: self, environment or situation. 

• Every scenes needs conflict, objective and obstacle for it to be theatrical. 
• Emotion - An automatic value response. Our emotions depend on how much we value something and the mental associations we hold. 
• Empathy - Feeling into. Empathy is we feel into the same thing as a character. Psychotic people cannot empathise which is what makes them psychopaths, they could kill a family at dinner then finish their dinner with no remorse because they cannot feel into anything. 
• Sympathise - Feeling for. Sympathy is we feel for our character, but we don’t want an audience to sympathise for our character for too long as they will emotionally disconnect with our character. Human nature is survival so when a character wallows too long in negatives and can’t get it together they pursue death over life and we are hardwired to respond negatively to that behaviour. 
• Anticipation is different for actors than it is animators. For animators it means to anticipate a movement like a baseball player throwing a ball. For actors it's an error to anticipate something before it actually happens, i.e. answering a phone before it rings.

Insight Perspectives and Suggestions

• Acting is more about what is underneath the words. When we have a thought, it is not the word that emerges first; it is head and eye movement, shoulder and neck movement. 
• The higher the power centre, the quicker the rhythm of the character. Anxiety is a high and heady power center. Confidence, on the other hand, manifest itself in a feeling of weight, a low power centre. 
• Goofy’s power centre was underneath his feet, pushing him straight up. When he walked it was as if he was on bedsprings because he was moving forward by the power center was pushing up. 
• Our sense of sight is a lot more powerful than our sense of hearing so what you show is going to count for more than what you tell it. 
• Do not put a gesture and with every word. The impulse to communicate comes from within and just gestures are a primary a form of expression as words are. Think of them as a form of truth telling for a character. Get inside and connect with his feelings and let that be the motivation for gesture. 
• Psychological gestures are gesture we do that we don’t realise we do like fiddling with a ring or bring a hand to the mouth a lot whilst talking etc. 
• Humans often contradictory messages. It is normal but unconscious behaviour for the words to say one thing and our body to say another.

Collaboration: Research and Ideas

After a 1:1 with Alan, our ideas have shifted from adding lots to the existing films, to making fun of the stuff already there. Perhaps mocking the writing and/or things that are never explained. For example, wouldn't the Triwizard Tournament have been incredibly boring to watch?

We have been looking at the youtube channel CinemaSins as they analyse all of the problems and unanswered questions in almost every movie, helping us develop ideas for our final animated short. 

- Polly

Collaboration: David Attenborough Skit Influence Idea

For one of our +7 more films to make deleted scenes and outtakes of, we've chose David Attenborough narrated documentaries. Because we'd have to dress Moom up to look like an animal like in the documentaries we though't it'd be funny for the intentional idea to be Attenborough to narrate people dressed like animals. Below is a good example of what we're going for but a lot shorter.

- Paris

Collaboration: Titanic Character Research Sheets

From Polly's research on comedy, we know comedy is a sense of "false violation" and because the film is based on a true, tragic story, we do not want to violate (even falsely) any of the characters that really did die. James Cameron (director) created Jack, Rose, Cal, Lovejoy and Ruth for the purpose of his film. They were not real people even though there may have been people on the ship that may share the same name; so out of respect we are only going to mock the fictional characters. The American actress who plays old Rose, (Gloria Stuart born 1910) was not a passenger on the Titanic and would have been 4 years old the year the Titanic sank, not the age Rose is portrayed to be by Kate Winslet.

Reading Tom Bancroft's book 'Creating Characters with Personality' says that when you design a character you need to know them in your mind and your design needs to reflect the personality traits, so below I have made two character research sheets. We know what sort of art direction we want and we are going to start translating live action characters into animation to fit our art direction.

- Paris

Collaboration: Research - Comedy

Collaboration: James Bond Research and Ideas

- Paris

Collaboration: Harry Potter Research

- Paris

Collaboration: Titanic Film Research

After Ruth's research on camera and composition techniques and Polly's research on art directions and 2.5D, I decided to take a look at behind the scenes making of and actual deleted scenes from Titanic, James Bond and Harry Potter see if I could get some idea influences there. This will help me as the CG Modeller making the sets if I can actually see the original ones, this will also be essential when making thumbnails and concept art as a group. - Paris

Collaboration: Deleted Scenes or Bloopers of....? Mind Map 1

Collaboration: Mood Board - Art Direction

If possible, we would like to head in this slightly vintage cartoon style for our animated short. When moving forward we need to experiment to see if this will work with the pre-made rigged character we have received. - Polly

Collaboration: Pre-Existing Comical Animations / Videos

- Ruth

Collaboration: Research - Film & Photography Composition Techniques

- Ruth

Collaboration: Research - 2.5D

- Polly