Beatriz Antunes | CSM MA Character Animation Research Journal
Someone recommended watching the Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, I just finished it and it was hands down one of the best series I’ve watched.
Synopsis: In a 1950s orphanage, a young girl reveals an astonishing talent for chess and begins an unlikely journey to stardom while grappling with addiction.
It’s quick-passed series with gorgeous visuals but a dark story of a young genius. The plot is fantastic, the characters are very well designed and written, I could not reccomend more!
I figured that at some point in this blog I wanted to talk about the work of Laura Jayne, and last Wednesday’s lecture with Laura-Beth was the moment I knew I had to. Laura-Beth prepared a lecture about Women in Animation, where she mentioned the work of Laura Jayne and other animators using the same kind of animation language.
Laura Jayne’s work became very important to me from the moment I discovered it during her Royal College of Art graduation show, in 2019. Amongst all the amazing films I watched that day, ‘Hot and Tasty’ was the moment I decided I wanted to be an animator and even more, an art director.
As described in First Showing, ‘The animation style in this is super funky and fresh, just a tad wacky, but it’s cool.’ –https://www.firstshowing.net/2019/watch-hilarious-hot-and-tasty-animated-short-about-drunk-friends/Â . This describes it perfectly. The energy in Laura’s film is so captivating and joyful. Even though it narrates a literal murder scene, the contrast between the horrid and the euphoric drunken girls turns this into such hilarious experience that ends up becoming quite endearing.
What amazes me the most about this animation is not only the storytelling and the amazing voice acting, but mainly the visuals. The animators’ aesthetic is quite consistent throughout all of her work. From illustrations to films, Laura Jayne’s work screams empowerment and recklessness. Although the animation technique is flawless, the animator pushes the movement to its limit giving it a careless look that makes you go ‘wow, she’s bold!’. I admire the effortlessly ‘agressive’ charm of her work.
I get myself caught in trying to achieve the most beautiful finished product I possibly can, and Laura’s work is a great example to how you can do so much with such little detail. In the frame above, you can clearly tell there’s a quite rough feel to her line. There hasn’t been particular attention to proportion and there’s emphasis on the use of geometrical shapes for clear translation of visual ideas.
Another animator I look up in this sense is Spanish animator Andi Concha, also from RCA.
In this making off, you can tell how Andi choses to focus on the expression of movement and not as much on being anatomically correct.
‘Her work sits within the field of experimental narrative animation. She likes to make her films using very minimal graphic language. She focuses on character design, crafting performances between the characters that allow them to communicate without the use of dialogue.’ -https://2020.rca.ac.uk/students/andrea-de-la-concha
I had the pleasure of watching her film 2.35m at LIAF, this year. Needless to say I was mesmerised by the usage of screen space in this.
Besides Andi and Laura, there are many animators out there adhering to this childish-like look (in the best way possible). #Flattenthecurve is a great example of that.
I aspire to give as little f*cks (pardon my French) as Laura does about making pretty pictures. Although her work is very pleasing to the eye, it’s also very organic and spontaneous. It takes great confidence to do so.
To achieve this, my plan is to learn animation technique as much as possible, become perfect at it and then throw it all to waste and draw what feels right.
As part of an workshop with Character Designer Bianca Ansems, I developed Lom.
From this, I’ve animated Lom’s turnaround and a few character sheets.
Lom’s character responds to the following questions:
Who am I? A big hearted anxious perfectionist.
Where am I? homesick in the cold and rainy UK.
What time is it? Winter. Nostalgia feels.
What do I want? To live in the past and to make people happy.
Why do I want it? Self-esteem and affirmation.
How? By being overly kind, likeable.
What must I overcome? Fear of failing, fear of being disliked.
Character Designing has always been something I’ve been interested about.
Since little, I’ve always been intrigued by how attached we get to some characters and how that works. Bianca answered all my questions in regards to that, without a doubt. Learning the different stages of constructing a character and where character designing stands in the animation pipeline was outstanding!
This is definitely a career path I’ll be looking into.
These past few weeks I’ve been super hands on with the puppet project. It’s been so much fun, and embracing the creative project has been a learning experience.
On my last post about the puppet project, I explained the process up until the foam+plaster coating.
These past few weeks, I’ve been dedicating my time to finishing up hands and feet, and also Cloudia’s (named by October) wardrobe + head. I’ve been spendings so much time at the studio I’ve even had the opportunity to meet some second year students and have a catch up every once in a while.
For Cloudia’s clothes, I started by drawing a mold for the overalls. From this, I measured and cut some old jeans I found at the studio, and hot glued it together because I can’t sew to save my life.
As for the head, I found white fluffy fabric, tore it apart and glued big chunks onto the clouds head. When I was happy with the volume of the fluff, I trimmed it down with scissors to give it a cleaner look.
Cloudia’s shoes are made from foam I carved into a shoe shape, and proceeded to carve out the electrical connectors shape so they could fit perfectly. To attach the front and back of the shoe, I used the same technique as I did for the arms and legs: glued nylon onto the foam and coated it with molding plaster.
Posteriorly, I added some small details here and there, such as a front pocket, two rose buttons I found, rope (both on the shoes and overalls), and finally painted a heart pattern on the overalls with acrylics, with help from a stencil I designed on a piece of cardboard. With the pink left from the hearts, I gave Cloudia a little tint on the cheeks and defined her eyes with a black marker.
Cloudia is almost finished and I can’t wait to animate her and see her in action!
Last Monday, I finally did stop motion animation. Throughout the morning I recorded some bits and bops of my process animating.
and here’s the final product!
Puppet making was an incredibly good surprise.
My peers and I had to pick a subject to study until the end of unit 1 between 2D, 3D or stop-motion animation. Before coming to CSM, I didn’t even consider puppet making or stop-motion animation as career paths. I made my decision based on what the subject had to offer and puppet making seemed like the most complete one in current Covid times. Online learning has been exhausting. Even though everyone is doing their best, staying at home staring at a computer the whole day with zero social interaction is terrible!
Following all Covid guidelines, Tuesday’s puppet making class was the most fun I’ve had in a good while! Even though I love working digitally, getting my hands dirty was something I didn’t know I needed.
We began a long but very productive day by analysing the character we designed previously for class and how its construction would go.
We began by twisting 3 pieces of soft wire for each leg and each arm. After placing them over the original character drawing, these were attached by screwing them in through electrical connectors. Glue was used to make sure these wouldn’t come off easily.
Thankfully, my armature could stand perfectly.
The next step was to mix miliput epoxy putty that would be moulded around where the limbs would be. Posteriorly, I cut two pieces of foam shaped as my character’s torso- one for the front and another one for the back. I glued them in without letting glue get to the electrical connectors so I could easily replace the arms and legs if these were to break.
The body structure was now complete and I proceeded to shape the head. Using a harder block of foam, I carved the shape of a cloud, using drawn reference of the front and side of my cloud character. Needless to say I spent more time cleaning up than I did carving.
At the end of the day I had two ripped gloves, one open finger, one armature and one foam cloud head! What a day.