Navone

Victor Navone does an interview over at Animated-views

I actually have Victor Navone to thank for my getting into animation, it was his short Alien Song that made me realize that I could mess around with animation on my own, on a personal computer, without needing to be able to draw perfect anatomy frame after frame, which led to a discovery of a passion that I'm still chasing today.)



AV: How did you express WALL•E’s personality via pantomime?

VN: That’s easier to explain by showing than by saying it, but I’ll try! With a limited character like WALL•E or EVE you have to rely a lot more on subtle changes and timing because you don’t have complex limbs or facial expressions to help the audience know what their attitude is. You can roughly suggest WALL•E’s attitude by the tilt of his head, the slump of his neck and the position of his shoulders, but movement is what really helps sell the idea. Seeing the change between two poses is as important as the pose itself. The Muppets are a great example of this; they don’t have complex facial expressions - usually just a mouth that opens and closes -and often they don’t have expressive hands. But based simply on how fast they move, the angle of the body, and the angle of their heads relative to their bodies we can tell how they are feeling, even with the sound turned off.


AV: What was the most challenging sequence you did on WALL•E?

VN: The most difficult sequence was where EVE revives WALL•E only to find that he has no memory. WALL•E himself was easy - he just had to be a machine without character. EVE was much more difficult. I had to plan out the entire sequence of her emotions and how they would progress over about 13 shots. I made a map of the whole sequence and plotted out her emotional state for every shot, and then tried to figure out how to communicate that through her body language and eye shapes. I worked back and forth with the director a lot on this, and made many revisions. He had a very specific idea of how he wanted the sequence to progress, and I had to try to match that vision. Often he would tell me to pull back, so that she didn’t get too frustrated or sad too soon. He wanted to make sure that she had somewhere to go emotionally, and that she went through all the appropriate states before she arrived at grief. It was a difficult balance to find. In the end, the sequence seems to go by so fast that I don’t even notice all the work I did!






AM: For BURN•E, communicating his thought process to the audience was the biggest challenge. He is a fairly limited character, which is appealing, but more work must be done in the story process to communicate his intentions. With BURN•E, and with WALL•E, if the audience can’t tell what the character is thinking or what is going on, then they loose interest very quickly.

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