Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about how our comics, and especially our animated shorts, are going to look. I don’t mean the look they will have when they are rendered. I mean how are they going to look when they move.
To the average person, all animated movies are pretty much in the same category of animation. Animation is my job, so it’s my duty to tell them that… well they’re wrong. Every animated television show and feature film has an animation technical director that informs the animators about how things should move. Think of the movie Beowulf or Avatar. Those movies were heavily animated using a lot of motion capture so that the characters moved in a realistic way. Adventure Time uses iconic noodle arms to set them apart from other shows.
Our team discussed what animation style we would like to emulate for our project. Pixar animation is outstanding and is kind of the gold standard of 3D animation. However, we feel that Pixar’s style of imaginary realism doesn’t quite fit the project. This is a comic strip after all. Our team has decided to emulate the animation style of Sony Animation Studios, especially the animation style of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
With it’s over-the-top body movement and hyper-exaggerated faces, we feel that it would be a perfect style to fit a comic strip. Check out these clips to see what I am talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qMSrzT4ZrQ&hd=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttbFw_r5jIM&hd=1 (his face arount 0:42 is what I’m talking about)
All the movement is snappy and full of bounce. Every pose is pushed to it’s most extreme. We hope to emulate this style of hyper exaggeration because we feel that it is conducive to our overarching thesis of bringing the newspaper funnies to a new level.
Comic strips are not all about telling jokes through text. That is half of it, the other half is telling an interesting story or telling a joke visually. A lot of times the best comic strip jokes are the ones with little to no words at all.
http://theinnerdoor.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/sc003cec15.jpg
We hope that using this animation technique of over-exaggeration, that we can bridge the gap between animation and comic strip to form the ultimate form of entertainment.
