It's Vacuum Sealed! (08)
Last Updated (Friday, 29 July 2011 23:04) Written by Administrator Wednesday, 27 July 2011 00:00
No Han, Don't Wait!
"Don't wait? Righty-oh..." BRAAP!
It's very important to be clear - unambiguous - in situations like these. Though, on the other hand - some people just hear what they want to hear and shoot, regardless.
Art Notes
I really like that onomatopoeic"BRAAP!" from Solo's blaster. Though it'd probably suit a machine gun better.
Star Wars Uncut
Neil Baker reminded me of this project in his comment on Monday's strip. Star Wars Uncut (Star Wars Even More Cut-up would be more apt) is a project in which filmmakers select from hundreds of 15 second segment cuts of the film and recreate them in any way they like. Our Neil - who's an animator - did a rotoscope version with his Trash Compactor segment. For those of you not familiar with the term, rotoscoping is (put simply) tracing or painting over photographed movie film footage. You'll have seen this in the 80's in Aha and Dire Straits' videos and the like.
Rotoscoping's been around for yonks of course. And not just used by arty filmmakers at the National Film Board of Canada and the like. (whisper) Disney did it too - though they'd prefer you didn't know that. Traditional or Classical animators are quite up their own bottoms about this sort of thing. Insisting that they do 24 drawings-per-second of screen time and only use live action footage - like Prince Charming on his horse in Cinderella for example - as a reference. Yeah - as a reference. God it's so hard to convey caustic sarcasm in text. Anyhoo - check out Neil's bit here. He said he spent about 30 hours on the repainting. His colour is spot on and the audio is very funny!
I haven't watched the rest of the project yet - but I'm looking forward to it.
Thanks for reading! Care to comment?
Comments
Nice history lesson too - Disney swore until his dying breath that Snow White wasn't rotoscoped - yeeeaaahhh, riiiight, Walt.
To their credit, the animators were pushed - and pushed themselves to be actual artists in the early days of Disney. Rather than copying the work of their idols, they actually attended life drawing classes and sketched at the zoo. This enthusiasm for excellence was probably helped by unionised work conditions. Later, animation studios - in my experience - became sweat shops.
I heard however, that cuddly Uncle Walt did try to break strikes by getting the Mob to threaten the workers.
He would often regale us with brilliant anecdotes, most of which centered on Walt's 'arse-centric' humour.
I'm torn when I show Disney to my kids - on one hand, there's some gorgeous animation to behold, on the other, some of the worst gender and racial stereotyping around. I'll stop now, as a comments section can't do justice to the conversation we could have.
My impression of the animation business 20+ years ago was that it was often very sexist. The 'men' got to do all the cool stuff and be ANIMATORS and the 'girls' did the cell painting (and inbetweening if they were lucky).
Often it was a load of immature idiots laughing at each others jokes and copying their idols.
Bitter? Moi? Never!
I found it so unusual when I first saw US comics as a kid that there were characters saying all sorts of Goddy stuff like 'Holy Hannah', 'Holy Jehosaphat! (?)', 'Oh my Lord!' etc etc.
RSS feed for comments to this post