Commercial Spots - Sept/Oct 2006
Friday, September 22nd, 2006Have been doing some preparation work for the cell phone commercial spots that I’ll be animating for Handcranked Films outside of Boston.
I built a little test elf puppet with wire and stretch fabric, put hot glue on the bottom of his feet so I could stick him down with wax. The head is just flat cutout paper, with stick-on mouths and eye parts.
Taking the audio from the studio animatic quicktimes, I animated some very short tests, to see if I could replicate the look of it… making it stuttery without it looking just plain bad, by maintaining the overall quality - having a planned ahead sense of motivation and movement and specific poses. So it’s like good animation, but with a “jerkiness” filter on top of it? Can’t spend too much time analyzing this, but it’s interesting to try to think how it was animating in 1964, without the basic principles that I was shown from the start - that I incorporated into my methods and tend to take for granted. Ideas about the hierarchy of body part movements, natural looking eye movements and blinks, easing in and out of moves (which I actually have a problem with taking to the extreme to obtain smoothness, so this analysis might be helpful and freeing in a way! Animation doesn’t have to look super smooth to be effective and appealing to an audience. Sometimes it’s the other way around).
