⤷ Animation Skillz ୭ ˚. ᵎᵎ

WEEK 1 -

objectives:

- research into Caroline Leaf

- do research into the animation principle squash and stretch

Caroline leaf ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧

Caroline leaf is a well known animator, film maker and director from America.

She started out animating in the 1960's, and back then it wasn't as digital and easy to create animation.

Technology for animation was just starting to flourish and become something that they used so in university'd and school it was still of taught traditionally.

Something that is really cool about her is that she directed and scripted and made all of her animations by her self, for the sound work and the voices they where different people who helped her. But to do everything else all by yourself is a very impressive feat.

As Caroline Leaf got older she started out animating in her own special way creating some techniques that are now used in animation. She used a Lightbox and sand for some of her first popular animations creating that technique of animation.

From her own words "My animated films are known for their story telling, emotional content, and graphic style" (*Caroline Leaf, 2017*) and after looking into her work and viewing what she does I would say, that when she does her own style of animation through the sand and light box, it is incredible. It must take ages considering from what I research knowing she does it like stop motion but contorts the sand with her hands to create each invidual frame. I really like stop motion and looking at her work makes me realise how much time I am going to have to spend on somethingI really do want to try and come good at.

Some of her work I actually coundlt access as it isn't available in the UK but from what I have seen, The animation style that she uses is really powerful for her work. Even though what she does is with sand and a light box it has this sketch feeling too it. When the sand moves it has an unsteady and not complete feeling but with the subjects that Caroline least animates I feel like it works well together after watching 4 of her animations "*The street*", "*two sisters*", "*The owl who married the goose: The eskimo legend*" and "*The Interview*". I realisedthat the way she uses the sandto create shadows is really cool and honestly quite effective.

My favourite animation she did that show cases I think the best use of shadows and the Lightbox working together would be "*two sisters*". I watched all of the animations I could and wit hall of the ones I watched this one I believe was the strognest out of them all.

Itt depicts a girl who is deformed and living in the dar land eventually going outside and her sister wants to keep hearsay from the world because she'sa "*Freak*" (6.01 minuets from the video I watched). I believe the way the sand was used and the different lightings creates a toxic affect as with the sisters it is a green looking colour giving it this sickly feeling. I think this animation tuck with me the most was because it shows that care sometimes affects the other person and not in a good way. My favourite part about this whole animation was when in the dark the sisters when interacting with things would show up but everything around them would still be dark, I think it shows how closed of from the world they are.

If I am going to be honest when researching into Caroline Leaf I didn't think her work would make that much of a impact for me but, I really, really, really like stop motion and knowing that she was the one who created the sand stop motion is really cool. Something she did with the sand stop motion that I really liken the animation "*two sisters*" is that when the door gets open to the light the animation is so much more brighter, the light box clearly seems to be at its full brightness to give it the effect of seeing the world for the first time. I really like it there is less sand used to just really create the silhouette's of the characters in the animation instead and it really is such a cool effect for her to use.

I also feel like her animations because they talk about man deep topics (some being death) I think her style of animation just fits it gives them this unsettling feeling as the images can't always be perfect the same as its sand, the way everything moves is really flowy and sort of natural. She uses a lot of stretched proportions and angles which I also think gives it a more unsettling feel because these characters can stretch their bodies and almost reach out the viewer, making the viewer themselves feel apart of the story.

Something else that I think is cool about her animation is the colours used within the animation most of the time there isn't really that much colour or if there is then the colour is just one colour as it is on the Lightbox but sometimes, for example "*The street*", when the mother character is cry thing there is redness under her eyes. It's really cool and gives a big impact to her work creating showing something that is important to the story line by making it a different colour.

'Two sisters' examples:

'The street' examples:

where I got the screenshots from !!

Another thing that Caroline Leaf is known for is her art/illustrations, she describes her self as "*an experimental art animator by training and profession working in various plastic mediums, sand, wet paint-on-glass, etched film emulsion*".

Not only did she invent a new way of animating with stop motion but, she also does these illustrations that are very abstract. It isn't like her animations where they are sort of easy(?) to understand what's going on (as there is people speaking and people moving and there is a story being placed in front of you) the illustration are more of like find the story yourself kind of vibe.

The one thing I do like about her illustrations is all of the different media she uses, I really do like different media in drawings/paintings because I feel like it just makes it look os much more interesting to look at and makes the art itself feel alive.

Now for me when researching into her paintings, therereally isn't much too look at (In my onion) many of her works all use the same colour palette over and over again and lots of the paintings she does are a bunch of shapes. Now with the animations, I can see that the work is ment to invoke strong emotions because of the way it is made and the way it looks but for the illustrations, I get that they also do and are ment to invoke strong emotionsbut to put it simply. To me it just looks like a bunch of shapes and colours on paper, it doesn't really do much for me. As I want to research further to understand what her paintings/illustration's are ment to be/Invoke I looked deeper into the website (that she made which is linked bellow). Now she did a series of onions drawings which honestly when I first looked at them, it is just a bit weird. But the purpose of them is to showcase the movements of brush strokes and lines all working tighter to keep the onion together. In my personal option I think she is much animator because of how successful she was with in creating a new technique but her illustrations are also pretty cool even if to me it doesn't really make any sense.

Where I got the information from !!

Something that I found to be really helpful for my research was this interview done by Harvard film archives, Caroline talks about her, films and how she made them. It was really interesting on how she explained how she made them. For one of the animations that I watched that I sort tofdidn't understand "*the Owl who Married a Goose*". I really didn't understand it when I Iwatche it but hearing her talk about it made it more understandable. I like how she just sued herenviorment at the time to inspire her, as wellas actually finding people who where of the ethnicity the story was based on to do the voices. I have realised from the interview that many of her storiesareall about love, even if it does have a darker them. The underlying plot of pretty much all of her stories are love. Whether it be toxic love or falling in love it is always to do with love.

She also explained how her animations do take a lot of time, but she has this sort of messy freedom with it. She plans out every Fram super carefully and roughly knows how long each scene will take, though because is with sand you can get a more organic feeling with the finger prints and some frames that she might accidentally mess up on could be used as in-between frames or frames that are able to showcase emotions better than something that is drawn perfectly.

Caroline Leaf has personal experiences with animation feeling like that within her animations she felt burnt out, spending hours in a dark room, taking frame by frame animation (direct movement animation) and taking years to do it. She doesn't say she hates it but you can tell through the interview that moving onto illustrations and paintings helped her a lot. She was able to try a new thing. She already felt brunt out from making normal animations then creating her won style eventually got too much and she had to take a break. I think its actually very noble of her too do that, creating you own animation style then having to take a break she knows her limits which I think is very admirable of her. Even though through out my research I much prefer her animations the illustrations it was quite nice too hear what she has too ay about her own work and everything is different for everyone!!

She describes her paintings and illustration as much are fun to create than the animations because well she can do it anywhere she isn't stuck in one room she is bale to do whatever she wants when she feels like it. There isn't always a plan for it and to be honest I agree.

For my uni course I have come from a college course and I know how to a little bit of animation, but I chose this course because it can help me decide if I want to do animation or illustration more because I enjoy both but the freedom illustration has over animation is such a different and strong feeling that I also much prefer.

Interview here!!

✮ ⋆ ˚｡𖦹 ⋆｡°✩

Squash and Stretch ヽ(°〇°)ﾉ

Squash and stretch is one of the 12 animation principles.

The other 11 is:

- Anticipation

- staging

- straight ahead action

- pose to pose

- follow through

- overlapping

- slow in and out

- arcs

- secondary actions

- timing

- exaggeration

- solid drawing

- appeal

Squash and stretch is one of the most important animation techniques. You learn the basics within a bouncing ball and it can be used for many other things (combined with other techniques for example if a character is surprised and stretches their face using anticipation with that and exaggeration can create for a strong and over the top cartoon like reaction , which makes the drawings feel much more alive.)

Something about squash and stretch is that when a object or a person the shouldn't loose their volume so when squishing a square the square should get fatter when it squishes down to keep the amount of volume it has. I really like when things have been stretched in animation I feel like it makes things feel so alive and very silly looking. When something stretches in an animation it feels like there is actually laws of physics with it. For example when something falls down seeing the object or person stretch makes it feel like there is speed and weight to what is falling.

I quite like it when something that has a lot of skin or many different loose clothing and it stretches with wind or different movement I just feel like it takesit so much more animated, it gives it that cartoon like feel but it also gives it a realistic feel giving the impression that the animation you are seeing is real and is a real universe or something that could happen in real life.

When references are taken of something moving, if something is moving fast then even in real life it has some sort of stretching and squashing feel because you would have to 'squash' your legs to run or push something and 'stretch' you body to move along with your joints and to get taller with your moving. It is something that happens all the time within everything that happens regardless in animation or normal era life movement.

In class I did my own version a squash and stretch to showcase what it looks like I did multiple versions, they might not look like much of a difference but there is by slight difference in anticipation and easing as well as the speed it is going at.

I then changed it into something, a little slime that bounces across a castle floor :D.

This task was really fun even though I have done it before I learnt it on a new software and I learnt new techniques to make it feel more alive I am super happy with the results !!!