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Monday, October 21st, 2024

Theory: How To Get The Most Out Of Animation School

piano

Imagine you want to be a concert pianist and composer, and you go to Julliard to study. What would happen if you arrived at Julliard on the first day of class and you were barely able to play “Chopsticks”. What could Julliard teach you when you don’t even possess the most basic pianistic skills?

Hundreds of animation students do exactly this when they enroll in college before acquiring even the most basic drawing skills. What can you learn about animation without even the most basic drawing skills?

I hear people talk about the Preston Blair course as if it is what you need to learn to draw. THE PRESTON BLAIR COURSE IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF LEARNING TO DRAW. If you want to be an artist in animation, you really should have accomplished the basics of everything Blair before attending college.

You can’t even BEGIN to learn without the basics. Going to college not being able to draw well will only lead to having huge debt in student loans with absolutely nothing to show for it. Schools are a business. If we went to a car mechanic and said, “Here is $500. Fix whatever you think needs fixing and keep the rest” do you think we would get our money’s worth? Schooling is not a passive endeavor.

Students don’t want to hear this. But the ones I see succeed are consistently the ones that were prepared to learn before they even began to learn.

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Posted in member appreciation month, school, student, theory | Comments Off on Theory: How To Get The Most Out Of Animation School

Monday, September 23rd, 2024

Theory: WWI and WWII Propaganda

Back when I was in college, I was wandering through a junk shop and found a file folder that was stamped "Return To Louis Van Den Ecker, Technical Director". I peeked inside and found a pile of interesting clippings. It was a reference file dealing with propaganda posters from the First and Second World Wars. I bought the folder and brought it home and did some research on Louis Van Den Ecker. He turned out to have been an expert employed by the studios to insure that their depiction of particular times and places were accurate. He worked on the 1939 version of Hunchback of Notre Dame, Beau Geste, Adventures of Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo among many other films. I assembled his clippings into a logical order and mounted them into a scrapbook. Today, we scanned this book for our archive database.

The concept of propaganda is widely misunderstood. Many people automatically assume that it’s a negative thing. But propaganda is just a tool that can be used for either good or bad. Propaganda involves bypassing the intellect and appealing directly to emotion to motivate a group of people to action. During the World Wars, time was of the essence and masses of people needed to work together for the common goal of defending the nation. It would have been too slow to talk each and every move out with the whole population, so governments used powerful imagery to bring everyone together in the war effort.

I’m not sure if it’s just the bias of this particular collection, or if it was actually the case during WWI, but looking at these examples, one can see how inept the Germans were at using propaganda. The German posters in this collection seem to appeal to abstract concepts like national pride, flags and mythology; while the Allied propaganda goes straight for the heart with concepts like motherhood, security, and moral outrage. Look at the example above. The figure in the foreground represents the outrage of the nation at the sight of a sinking ocean liner and a sailor’s hand rising from the surf begging for help. Even after nearly a century, the powerful imagery still makes its point.

Contrast that impact with the poster above… Abstract concepts are stacked up on top of each other… It’s not a baby… it’s a statue of a baby. And it isn’t even a statue of a baby, it’s a statue of a cherub. There is no eye contact, just empty eye sockets. The emotional impact of the bullet hole in the helmet is totally negated by its similarity to the baby’s belly button! It’s hard to imagine this image motivating anyone to give money to the cause.

Early examples, like the one above, were created by renowned artists, and the subjects required close inspection, reflection and thought to grasp.

As time went by, the images became more graphic and direct…

Sketches of children orphaned by the war were potent images…

National and religious symbols seem to be much less effective, even when they are more interesting from an artistic standpoint…

These next two are interesting because they show how the two sides saw themselves. The German soldier is idealized in a kitsch way, while the French soldier seems more real and down to earth…

Which side would you rather be on?

When the nations of the world entered into World War I, the methods and techniques of propaganda were naiive and innocent. But by the end of the First World War, the techniques of waging war in the hearts and minds of the public had entered the modern era. Propaganda had become much more sophisticated and powerful.

The rapid growth in the sophistication and effectiveness of propaganda during WWI was largely due to the work of one man… a man who went from spending his life as a quiet landscape painter to being the most powerful cartoonist of his day, Louis Raemakers. His story is a fascinating one, and you can read about it and see examples of his work on our article titled…

Louis Raemaekers- The Cartoonist Who Helped Win The First World War

By WWII, leaders realized that battles could be fought and won on the homefront. Propaganda became an important part of motivating the population to work together toward the common goal of defeating the axis powers. Compare the WWI posters in this and the previous post to the examples from WWII presented here. Notice how the design and layout enhance the emotional impact of the concepts. Many of these posters still pack a wallop.

For more on this subject, see Alfred and Elizabeth Briant Lee’s excellent book The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin’s Speeches 1938.

Now you may be asking yourself, what does propaganda have to do with animation? Well… Think for a moment about the definition of propaganda, "bypassing the intellect and motivating an audience through a direct appeal to emotion" and then think about this image from an animated film I’m sure you’re familiar with…

Can you think of any other plot devices used in animated features that operate on this direct level?

Stephen Worth
Director
Animation Resources

This posting is part of a series of articles comprising an online exhibit entitled Theory.

This posting is part of a series of articles comprising an online exhibit spotlighting Illustration.

Posted in illustrtation, poster, propaganda, theory | Comments Off on Theory: WWI and WWII Propaganda

Friday, August 30th, 2024

Theory: Organic Shapes- Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature

Artforms in Nature Today, I hope you’ll bear with me as I get philosophical. (I promise not to get all “hippie college professor” on ya!) Think of this as one of Eddie Fitzgerald’s theory posts at Uncle Eddie’s Theory Corner.

When an artist sits down to draw something, he is focused on how the object he is drawing appears. But there are other aspects that can be caught in a drawing beyond just the likeness. Believe it or not, it’s possible to also capture the place that object holds in the universe.

We scanned an interesting and inspiring book today- Ernst Haeckel’s Die Natur als Kunstlerin (Nature as Artist). This paperback book from 1913 is a popular adaptation of Haeckel’s landmark book, Kunstformen von der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) originally published in 1904. Haeckel was a biologist and an artist, and he merged both disciplines into a study of natural forms, shapes, symmetries and patterns from every aspect of the natural world.

Natural history studies are beyond the scope of what we do here at Animation Resources, but this one is an exception. Haeckel didn’t just attempt to document lifeforms and their place in the environment… He documented the structures and shapes that are common to all plants and animals on this Earth. His drawings have no indication of scale or habitat of the various organisms he depicted. A jellyfish would appear right next to a single cell animal or the patterns of folds of skin on the face of a bat. The focus was on the form.

Biologists in Haeckel’s time thought of man’s place in nature much differently than we do today. Haeckel was a staunch Darwinist. He saw mankind as a part of evolution, and a vital part of nature. Today, when we turn on the TV to watch a nature show, we see jungles and tigers, or underwater coral reefs full of fish. There isn’t a human being in sight. Many people today look upon humans as "contaminants" to the natural world. But in Haeckel’s day, nature was seen in everything- Darwin’s Theory applied to the evolution of fish or birds just as much as it applied to the evolution of people. social organizations, business practices or creative processes.

Haeckel saw no contradiction in his role as scientist/artist. In fact, he considered his work to be an expression of his own natural place in the world he was attempting to represent. Instead of approaching the subject from an objective viewpoint, he subjectively and selectively edited what he saw to reduce it to a form that appealed to him on a basic level as an artist. Thus, the scales of a fish become arabesques, and microscopic diatoms become beautiful sculptural forms. Haeckel was using nature’s imagery to express his own inner nature.

At the turn of the century, when this book was published, Art Nouveau was popular. Natural forms were incorporated into everything from architecture and illustration to street signs and ornamental patterns on clothing or wallpaper. Today, we have nearly eliminated natural forms from our lives. We live in shoebox shaped houses and drive cars shaped like shoeboxes with rounded edges. We pave the landscape with geometric grids of asphalt and design characters for animation out of triangles, rectangles and circles. We have isolated ourselves from natural shapes; and in so doing, we have isolated ourselves from ourselves.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

Ernst Haeckel was a remarkable person. He straddled the seemingly contradictory disciplines of art and science and was able to reconcile them in a way that fully expressed the best attributes of both. The DVD documentary, Proteus presents an amazing look into Haeckel’s life and work. It includes eye bogglng animation based on his drawings of the remarkable single celled creature, the radiolarian. This is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen on any subject. It changed the way I think about the world around us. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The following three books comprise an encyclopedia of natural shapes for you to explore. Don’t copy from them- incorporate them into the way you think…

Art Forms In Nature by Ernst Haeckel

Art Forms From The Ocean: The Radiolarian Atlas Of 1862 by Ernst Haeckel

Cabinet of Natural Curiosities: The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765

I promise you, you won’t be disappointed by these books. They may just change your life!

UPDATE

Pita, a reader of this blog sends along this link to a page with all 100 images from Haeckel’s landmark book, as well as a downloadable PDF version.

Also, check out Pita’s great image blog, Agence Eureka. It’s at the top of my blogroll; and I bet once you see it, it’ll be at the top of yours too.

Stephen Worth
Director
Animation Resources

This posting is part of a series of articles comprising an online exhibit entitled Theory.

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