Aaron Hartline - Blue Sky

A half dozen vid ref to final comparisons over at Aaron Hartline's blog. One, two, three, four, five, six.








*found by Jeff Cooperman

Future is Coming

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Take that sanity

Story Treatmenting

Reading that Miyazaki book, he talks about basically he writes the treatment, then goes to story boards from there. From what I've heard of Brad Bird, he works similarly, getting into storyboards quickly since animation is inherently visual and we do our editing up front instead of aftwerwards.

Me being the noob that I am, I didn't really know what a treatment is.

Wiki says a treatment's between index cards and an actual script. Basically a quick description of every scene and beat in the story (a beat outline being just a list of beats without descriptions of them), so you have a roadmap of where you need to go when you write the script (or are making the boards).

One way of writing them is to put a big header at the top of each scene, describing the director beats. So it's easy to skim just the headers and get the flow of the story. Here's quick advice on writing one, and here's an article with examples of a prose style treatment vs a header style (skip way to the bottom, the majority of it is satyrical filler about writing treatments)


I also recently came across the idea of director beats. The idea that the director has an overall meaning for each scene. (IE. This scene is about them having to work together despite their animosity, this scene is about the audience getting tense because they see the bomb is running down but the passengers are oblivious.) Which is a pretty useful perspective if you are plotting the course through your movie, knowing what each scene needs to mean for the storytelling reasons.

And just to be thorough, wiki says a scene is an action in a continous time. And a sequence is a series of scenes which form a distinct narrative unit, usually connected either by unity of location or unity of time. So acts built of sequences, sequences built of scenes, scenes built of shots (if you're thinking camera wise) or beats (if your thinking acting wise.)

Kate Brehm - Puppeteering

I was tracking down these videos by Paul Louis about how to make a muppet style hand puppets (good videos, simple and easy to follow, you can also find them on youtube, but either place I watched them an ad was played in front of it)

Anyway, I ran across these bunraku puppet performing videos by Kate Brehm (they're all about a minute each, again youtube or expertvillage). She has some really interesting things to share that apply directly to animation. If Marc Craste was making appealing characters who are very simple and only have eye expressions, Kate Brehm is making appealing characters without even that, based solely on timing and movement. She breaks down ways of thinking about movement, she made it clearer to me how Laban movement theory can be used to shape character (which Ed Hooks talks about) and makes it simpler to understand in a kind of power center/gravity/personality way. She also talks about body mechanics and thought process stuff that helps the audience believe your character is an actual living creature.

definitely click through and watch the rest, well worth it!







One interesting thing she does is that the puppet breaks the 4th wall to acknowledge the audience, as a way of creating more empathy with the puppet, kind of like the puppet and the audience are in on a joke, which seems typical of puppeteering and I wonder if it's just a acting choice common in puppeteering or if it's necessary because of the lack of facial expressions.