Life with Herman H. Rott

Trailer - Life with Herman H. Rott from Chintis Lundgren on Vimeo.

   Herman H. Rott is a rat. He prowls the streets, drinks and pukes his way through life. One day when he has hit rock bottom, he attracts the attention of a cat that spontaneously decides to move in with him and help him straighten out his life. In a first step, the cat replaces Herman's metal sounds from the record player by classical music – only to be kicked out of the house by Herman. But the cat doesn't give up and reappears the next morning, serving fresh espresso instead of red wine. The apartment, too, is tidied up beyond recognition. It is inevitable that all this leads to further conflict. Chintis Lundgren’s animated cat-and-rat film about opposites attracting each other has won several awards. It also shows that no alcohol is no solution either.

   Chintis Lundgren is an Independent animator and painter originally from Estonia but is at the moment residing in Croatia. Animals are normally featured in most of her animations and illustrations and are usually placed in absurd if not hilarious situations. And based on what I have seen from her animations, I believe that Chintis favours traditionally hand drawn animation (When considering how the lines of each frame are always in constant motion, even the backgrounds themselves). It is still amazing however to see how fluid her character animations are despite such a choice in animation style. Chintis also tends to use a very warm looking colour palette in her works (With a lot of red, brown, pink, yellow and cream). 

  While it might seem like the typical odd couple tale, this animation was hilariously done in its execution and elicited more than its fair share of laughs from the audience. And after going back to her past works, it is interesting to see some of the running gags that she places in her works, such as the trio of bunnies that abruptly begin singing christmas carols, be they on or offscreen. It is also lovely to see that their stories actually continue outside of these individual animations and are actually featured in illustrations and other animations (As little cameos). 

   

   Chintis clearly loves all her characters and enjoys reusing them and expanding upon their stories whenever she can.

Guida

Rosana Urbes: Guida from Animation Libation Studios on Vimeo.

   During this period when it would seem that edgy, dark, if not ''controversial" animations are the 'IN' thing to submit into these sort of animation festivals, I was pleasantly surprised to see an animation such as this, let alone one that would actually win an award! (I have been yelling over this for months now, to be quite honest, just ask Anna!)

   Guida, a sweet lady who has been working as an archivist at a Courthouse for 30 years, has her routine changed when she sees a newspaper ad about life drawing classes in a cultural centre of the city. Through the main character's creative sensibility, the short film offers a reflection about the artistic inspiration recovery process, art as a transformation agent and the concept of beauty.

   From the moment I saw the opening to this animation and the sweet music that played along with it, I just knew that this was going to be one of my most favourite animations from the festival (And the more I think about, the more sad I am knowing that I won't be able to attend next year's festival...). This truly was the epitome of character animation, bringing out the beauty of a character such as Guida. From her sweet, dreamy expressions (It would notably change at certain times, from a more haggard look to a more youthful one) to her elderly but still willowy if not graceful frame. I absolutely adored the various depictions of the character that were contributed by other artists, that were shown in the opening and closing sequences.

   And to think that the entire animation itself was traditionally hand drawn just further adds to its overall appeal. Some compositing was obviously done (And by Iara Guedes), but other than that, each frame was lovingly hand drawn by Rosana Urbes. Each squiggle giving loving life to the character herself that makes my heart swell with warmth the longer I look at her. Speaking of the creator herself, Rosana Urbes has actually worked as an assistant clean-up animator on Mulan (1998), an assistant animator for Kuzco Llama in The Emperor's New Groove (2000) and an assistant clean-up animator for Nani in Lilo and Stitch (2002). Come to think, a tiny bit of "Disney" quality can be seen from the animation short itself, the more I think about, albeit of course, with a much more personal touch from Rosana herself. Based on her more personal works, very much like Guida, Rosana has a considerably loose looking art style, which especially suits the animation itself, especially during the life drawing scene. 

   There is just so much life placed into this character that it's incredible. And it really goes to show you that a simpler story can outdo one that attempt to be too deep in their meanings.

We Can't Live Without Cosmos

We Can’t Live Without Cosmos from Iñaki Bonel on Vimeo.

   We Can't Live Without Cosmos was Directed by Kostantin Bronzit and featured in last year's first Manchester Animation Festival. Two dorky cosmonaut buddies do their absolute best every single training day to make their common dream a reality. However, this story is not only about that dream alone... but friendship.

   A Russian animator and animation film director, Konstantin Eduardovich Bronzit is a graduate of the St Petersburg Repin Institute of Fine Art in 1983. He worked as an artist-animator at the animated film studio Lennauchfilm (Studio of Popular Science Films), which created educational animations (Which is not surprising considering this animation's setting). It was there there he completed his first ever film, Merry-Go-Round in 1988. Since 1999, he has worked at Melnitsa Animation Studio where he served as a director on several projects.

   Alongside Guida (Which will be written about after this), I was absolutely overjoyed that this animation was placed as runner up (As well as nominated for a 2016 Oscar in the animated-short category). With an adorable if not clean and wholesome looking art style (That reminded me so much of Calvin and Hobbes), this works incredibly well for the hilarious if not heartwarming scenes that unfold between these two best friends as they bond and support one another through the space program that they are participating in. The second half of the film however takes a mediative, even mystical turn... exploring into feelings and experiences that are much harder to name than what took place in the first half of this animation. As cliche is it may be, a series of emotions was truly experienced whilst watching this film, their almost kiddy happiness and exuberance infectious to even the audience themselves, to the despair and loneliness that is felt by one of the poor guys during the second half as he mourns for his friend...

   This was truly one of my most favourite animations from the festival and is certainly one of very few works that have stayed in the back of my head since. I found the animation's visual style to be incredibly endearing and absolutely adored the focus on the adorable bromance friendship that these two astronauts had. For a film that had no talking whatsoever, it was all effectively portrayed through their expressions and body language alone, eliciting many laughs and held back breaths as the story progressed.

The Violin

   

   The Violin was a Singapore short animation directed by Ervin Han and was featured at the Rewind/Remind Film Festival, organised by the Singapore Memory Project as part of the country's 50th year of independence celebrations. It depicts the journey of a violin in tandem with the progress of the nation. Originally presented as a gift to a young Singaporean boy by a foreign trader, the violin weathers war and crisis, and lies forgotten for quite some time. It however eventually enters another home, where it inspires two generations of passionate musicians.

   The animation features no voice acting and relies on a rich film score (Centring around the titular instrument itself), the music being the very thing narrating the story itself. and is done mainly in hand-drawn 2D animation to recreate the emotional highs and lows of the nations history. Many of Singapore's iconic landmarks- which are now gone- are featured in this animation. Ervin's goal was to create an animation that different generations can enjoy, and evoke their own meanings and memories from, based on their life experiences.

   While a majority of the character animation is hand drawn, I have noticed some inclusion of After Effects when it came to the camera movements and some CGI for certain effects such as fire and explosions. It is very possible that several of the vehicles featured in the animation are 3D renders, the violin especially was confirmed by Ervin to have some 3D elements to it. The 2D animation seems to change at certain times as well, some a little more stiff if not less fluid than others. But what is certainly caught my eye is the fact that the 2D animations were actually hand-drawn and animated on paper, before digitally scanned in for clean-up and colouring. Not many local productions still do this (Another aspect that I really love), but the idea was always to adopt a more classic look, especially as 80 years of history is being retold.

   As there wasn't an actual script written for this save for a detailed story treatment (A similar thing I did for my Extended Practice animation), Ervin had to work very closely with the storyboard artist while also giving him some room to explore and visualise. The storyboards changed many times and the production backgrounds had to be delivered even before the story was locked. Thankfully, however, only one background design was left unused. Making a silent film was both liberating and restricting. On one hand, time was saved on crafting dialogue and exposition, but on the other hand, it had to be pure visual storytelling- using action, performance, staging and cinematography to convey the story.

   Ervin from here on out aims to produce another short animated film for next year, and is starting to sound out potential partners and sponsors. His aim is to actually produce one animation a year around National Day and over time, develop an anthology of high quality, animated shorts about Singapore. The fact that Ervin's heavy emphasis and appealing to a local target audience feels like a rarity during this period, and in fact resonates something in me. As one who has closely followed LeSean Thomas' journey as an animator and his deep love for anime and more traditionally done 2D animations, I am pleased to know that someone like Ervin Han resides in Singapore and I will definitely be keeping a closer eye on him, especially when I return to Singapore after graduation. 

Meanwhile

   Meanwhile follows 4 different characters that traverse a city, each lost in their own little worlds, trapped in their memories, regress and frustrations. It is a blend of 3D and 2D drawn animation techniques done in an incredibly stylistic manner.

   There were a lot of things that had drawn me into this animation in particular, from the visual style that was used (And I am always a sucker for 2D looking 3D animations) to how the story was actually told. I believe I found myself swallowing down a huge lump in my throat by the time I reached the ending for this animation. I loved the colour schemes that were used for each character and what they could each possibly symbolise for each of them. 

   Blue represents depression and sadness, which most definitely suits the angry cyclist, tired of his life and hold drab it has seemingly become (Despite having a job, wife and child). While yellow tends to symbolise joy and delight, chances are that this is the female character's waning hope and optimism, especially once she loses her beloved mother. Green is a more challenging colour to figure out, symbolising many things such as stability, masculine power and independence. Which could pertain to the character's stubbornness, arrogance and obliviousness as he struggles to come to terms with what he has done in the first place to cause his wife to leave him. And finally, red, represents anger. Light red especially, normally represents sexuality, which does suit the youngest character in this short as he struggles with puberty (Especially with his growing curiosity of the female body) and being bullied and pushed around by nearly everyone around him. 

   

   The final scene at the very end, while brief, is especially gorgeous when all 4 characters do come together, all four worlds clash as reality sets back in as all their focus is instead placed on someone else other than themselves...

  

   Creator Stephen McNally is an Irish Animation director and a Masters student of Animation at the Royal College of Art. His other works include a promotional videos, music videos and other original shorts. After looking through his other works, it is clear that he has an incredibly distinct art style, especially when it comes to his character designs (Big eyes with really defined if not detailed noses). I honestly hadn't expected to like his works as much as I do now, but I really do find his hybrid animations to be incredibly appealing and would like to look more into the 3D aspects of his works.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture - Game Changers

   Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a first-person adventure video game developed by The Chinese Room and SCE Santa Monica Studio and was released in August 2015. It is a story-based game, taking place in a small English village whose inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared. It is considered a spiritual successor to Dear Esther. The game tells the story of the inhabitants of a remote English village in the moments leading up to a cataclysmic event and the end of the world. There was a lot of technical stuff discussed about during this talk and so being someone that doesn't necessarily have any knowledge in video game design, it was a little unfortunate that I couldn't understand a lot that was talked about near the end.

   As described by its creators, the game is a story driven science fiction set after the apocalypse. At the time of development, the company was already working on Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. And during the development of Dear Esther, the team wanted to introduce interactive elements within that game and when that proved to be impractical, the concept of this very game was born. During its development, there were certainly numerous times when this small team had to make more than one attempt before they were actually happy with the finished product itself, having scrapped many ideas before going with the one they had released. While certainly a small team that consisted of just 2 artists, a music designer and a part-time coder, they were nonetheless a very ambitious bunch.

 Development actually started with the recording of the narration and music, and so the music especially was ready by the time they had gone through several trial versions of this game. Their goal was to create an open world explorative game without a linear narrative, something no one has really done just yet. Initially, the gameplay was for the character to interact with one object from another before events actually triggers. Symbolism of some kind was reinforced to each character and their story. Silhouettes provided a form of storytelling for the lack of actual visual characters in the game.

   Sony had fortunately already liked the idea that had been pitched to them and were much more interested in knowing how they would go about making it. And again, it was normal to reach dead ends during the process of game development.

Character Design Challenge 2 - Heavy Metal

   Taking what I have learnt from my previous submission, I took the opportunity to rehash an old character design of mine that I did a couple of years back. While originally a fandom OC for an existing game series, Shi Xiang became so heavily developed in terms of her backstory and character that I decided to eventually place her into an original series (Which I am slowly still writing up). But the main thing is, I felt that I learnt a lot from my previous submission in terms of presentation and attempted to do a better job for this one.

    I decided to go back to a more comfortable style of drawing and painting for this one, and so there is notably huge difference in terms of the art style used for this one as compared to my Princess of Zelda piece (Where I actually attempted to copy one of the styles normally used for Disney concept art). And while this piece took two days (A rough sketch on the first day before I finished it up about a week later), I felt that the process didn't necessarily drag on as much as it did with the last piece. I also made sure that there was a stronger contrast in terms of colours, lighting and shading for this piece (A huge issue that I saw with my previous submission). I suppose the few problems I ended up facing was the fact that the lightning took away a lot of details, making it less noticeable that she is a decaying undead, and so more details had to be added in there in hopes that it would be made to clearer to the viewer, aside from the short description that would go with it, of course.

   I was really pleased to see that this piece was much more well received than my Zelda piece, and while it didn't actually go over 20 likes, I am still really happy that there were some folks that took notice of my first submission. Coming up next, my final character design submission for this module (Seeing as we will be submitting everything by this month), with the theme being "Mermaids and Mermen", it's definitely going to take me sometime to figure out something a little more original for this theme, as fun as it is... and there really isn't much time left.
   
   So stay tuned.