Shot IN06

Stay Cool combines traditional animation techniques and styles with computer animation to create a very unique visual composite. The image above is a very rough version of one of the shots from an early part of the film. I am trusting that you are willing to forgive the crudity of the quick mock-up for a chance to imagine the final look of the film.

There is, however, plenty to talk about with this piece, despite its rough assembly. Obviously, I had certain goals in mind when creating this piece. The goals were not, however, to create a finished illustration and though this is not something I would normally show to anyone (at the most, I would have shown the bg by itself with no character) I think that you all need to see where I am attempting to go, visually, with the film.

FABRICATION :

The aim of this scene is to convey that Fritz is burning up in the summer heat and that he has nothing but this pathetic little electric fan to help. He is exasperated with the situation and so he’s gesticulating to the sky and to the fan in frustration. The scene should convey the highest point of his frustration – he’s throwing a fit. It has to feel like the temperature is extremely hot, and I don’t think that this feeling has yet been achieved.

I printed out a frame from the 3d animatic and used that as a guide for drawing the background. I then painted it in photoshop. The 3d animatic has a low-poly 3d environment to act a visual guide that helps with setting up the camera and composition of each shot, but most of that geometry will not appear in the film. Instead, we will render out the character (as well as any objects that he interacts with) on a separate render layer with an alpha channel and then composite the character into the painted 2d backgrounds, using 3d compositing for shots with a moving camera.

Since the composition was taken from the animatic, the character is not yet fully articulated, but good enough to get an idea of the overall feeling of the shot. Fritz also has a dark matte line around him, he is casting no shadow on the ground and the light source on the 3d character is not matched with the directional light conveyed in the background, creating the sense that the character is kind of just taped to the background plate. The lighting in the animatic is simply just a ring of overhead directional lights that don’t give much dramatic effect, but for the purposes of the animatic, they get the job done. These rough elements plus the dummy geometry that is standing in for his electric fan combine to qualify this piece as officially 'rough.'

For my next piece I will have to light the character more appropriately, re-render the frame and try to match the character more closely to the environment. This will hopefully give me a more accurate idea of the overall color balance of the shot (not to mention that it might make more accessible that elusive ‘heat’).

COLOR :

In designing this shot, I my goal was to face decisions about color, line, abstraction and composition. I have made several attempts at choosing an appropriate color palette for the film and though I really like those different schemes that I have come up with, I don’t think I have arrived at any that really help to tell the story the way I wish to tell it. I think I might be getting closer, but I am going to have to do much more exploration.

The wall color has been the biggest issue. I have been back and forth – neutral and chromatic. I have in my head a color scheme (the lime greens, oranges and browns) that I have pretty much finalized, but the implementation of that scheme is now the challenge. I desire to have a lot of bright color in the film, to achieve the visual balance with color relationships and to rely less heavily on neutrals to achieve that balance. The introduction of off-key colors like powder blue and pale yellow have provided some more neutral, pastel options, all of which I like, but they have left me wanting when it comes to the necessary intensity for conveying the extreme heat of the day.

Additionally, I tried painting the apartment in cool colors and bathed it in warm light, but that just neutralized everything, which created a boring image. Because of the warm greens in this scheme, a subtle overlay of bright orange-yellow gives a pleasant warmth to the whole picture, but pleasant is not exactly what I am going for, obviously. I also have the option of using all hot colors, but if I were the audience, I wouldn’t want to look at that much chromatic intensity for six minutes, since the heat never really lets up in the film. My only conclusion is that much more color experimentation is in order.

LINE :

Concerning the line work, I have drawn from influencse like the old Rocky and Bullwinkle backgrounds and the work of UPA layout artist Bill Hurtz in Robert Cannon’s Gerald McBoingBoing.

Even though the Rocky backgrounds were so cheaply made, there is something incredibly appealing about them. They have such an interesting simplicity and I love how the layout artists would rely so much on line to establish the environment. Sometimes, the backgrounds were nothing more than a brown piece of paper with nothing but lines to indicate the environment and a spot of white or grey for a window. The abstraction and stylization found in Rocky and Bullwinkle (no doubt influenced by the high-design of the UPA studio) is far more interesting to look at, in my opinion, than the more realistic stuff of the contemporary Disney features.

Those linear styles had a way of unleashing the artist, of encouraging them to allow the environments to visually align with the characters, with the personalities and with the design of the character. The character’s perception of the animated world could be reflected in the layouts, colors and the style of the backgrounds and thus the audience could have a more vivid experience while watching the film an empathetic experience not only arrived at through the character’s performance, but also through the visuals.

This idea is even more prevalent in Gerald McBoing Boing. The main difference In these two examples is that the UPA studio spent a significant amount of each film’s budget on the layouts and Jay Ward Productions (Rocky and Bullwinkle), was on a TV production schedule with a TV budget, which meant, in short, much less time to spend on the art in general. Though both studios produced visually compelling work, UPA was popularly and critically speaking, the standard by which all other stylized animation art was judged. When viewing Hurtz’s work on Gerald, one notices that the colors and line work change throughout the film in order to create a mood or emotional temperature for the film. Even the characters’ colors change to help to engage the audience, the merging of character and environment taken to an artistic and a philosophical zenith.

ABSTRACTION :

With Stay Cool, I have tried to create a visual style that hearkens back to the stylized design of those UPA and UPA-inspired cartoons without sacrificing believability. How do you limit detail or introduce abstraction into your character’s environment but manage not to sacrifice believability or the ability for the audience to relate to the character? In this specific case, in order for the situational humor to work, the audience must relate to the character. Who hasn’t been miserably and inescapably hot before? This is a fairly common experience, and is kind of automatically appealing, if not humorous, to the audience because they can relate to Fritz’s situation. However, if the backgrounds are so abstract that they fail to appeal to our innate discomfort with extreme temperatures, or are devoid of the appropriate colors necessary to convey the right feeling, then I am throwing away something I can get, in part, for free.

It’s a matter of efficient storytelling, something necessary in a short film. It is also good communication to use your audience’s knowledge to their own advantage. If done right, the viewing experience could be rather powerful. It could be powerfully funny or spark powerful introspection. A lot of it indeed subjective, but there is some common experience that humor and drama derive from – all of the great storytellers will tell you that.

So here I am. I am walking a rather thin line between driving the design of my film into a realm of vibrant, funky stylization in order to make the audience’s experience unique and interpretive, but at the same time, reigning in the stylization to keep it believable and appearing enough like the real world to maintain the inherent familiarity. (Issues of abstraction also enter in to the style of movement in the character’s animation, but this will be covered in later posts.)

COMPOSITION :

As I mentioned above, the composition of the shot was decided previously in the formation of the 3d animatic. This shot was taken almost directly from the storyboards and set up by me initially. My cinematographer and I created a number of different variations on this shot, worried that it would be a disruption to the narrative flow of the film, but I ended up choosing this angle for a number of reasons. This one decision has helped give a clarity and pace to the entire film, a voice, so to speak.

First, I must explain why this angle was an issue in the first place. The sequence begins with a wide establishing shot of the building. A series of medium shots follows, (they are actually two-shots of Fritz and the small fan) ending with an extreme close up of Fritz’s television broadcasting the weather report that precedes this shot, #IN06. The fact that we don’t really back away and get an establishing shot of the room until this point is a bit unconventional. I did this for a number of reasons. [more storyboards and even clips from the film and the animatics to come...]

Primarily, I just don’t like establishing shots. If I have to establish the setting, I like to do it in a way that is also telling the story. For some reason, I always feel like those run-of-the-mill establishing shots of the exterior of a house or courtroom building with the first line of character dialogue in the scene spoken over it is trite and simply boring. This is especially the case in TV sitcoms and dramas.

Secondly, I chose to back way out after going in close to the TV because of the need to show the character’s broad acting in this shot. He is sitting up and bending over dramatically, while waving his arms in several directions. One option to solve this would have been to go in closer with the camera and move it to frame Fritz in each pose, but that would have accentuated his mood too much. The point is not to display Fritz’s mood only. The point is to display Fritz’s mood as something. That is, being pathetic and helpless and his tantrum, albeit extreme, completely ineffective to change his situation. This is where the humor comes from, the contrast of his flailing with the uncompromisingly static camera.

Lastly, there is a tension throughout the scene that is achieved by suspending the viewer in a string of medium shots. This narrative idea does not culminate until Fritz decides to do something about it besides throwing a fit. His fit is not the release of tension, his creative decision to build his first invention is. This has to be followed by the camera, since the strategic use of the camera is one of the clearest ways to convey mood in a scene. Its effects on the viewer’s subconscious should be respected and not underestimated. If there is anything that I have heard the most debate over as of yet concerning the film, it is, no doubt, this matter.

I think that some people think that moving the camera is the solution for any story or design challenge when making a film. When this idea is applied, even once, what ends up is a voiceless film, or superfluous camera moves that create a caustic distraction from the story. At the very least, you have an inconsistency or a break in tone. I have no doubt that there is the option to move the camera too little, but I believe that the converse is most often the issue, considering the dramatic effect of camera movement on the audience’s subconscious relationship to the film and, more importantly, the characters.