Author: Maria Beatriz Antunes Ribeiro

It’s been 9 days since the beginning of 2021. Looking back at 2020, I can stay it was both one of the best and worst years of my life. Not wanting to be a Negative Nancy, more inclined towards the negative side.

Of course Covid affected everyone’s lives severely and I can’t begin to say how thankful I am I still have a home, a warm bed to sleep on and food to eat. Everyone I love it still around and in good health, and I’m privileged enough to do what I love. I was fortunate enough to have had a job that helped me move to London and start the Masters of my dreams. Of course that’s good and there shouldn’t be any ‘buts’.

…But. Covid did happen is happening, I lost my job in the midst of moving to one of the most expensive cities in the world, I haven’t seen my family for more than half a year. As an independent individual, I’ve been struggling to spend the last few months begging for help. It’s hard to cope when you can’t even hug your family. I never know what tomorrow expects. I never knew what money saving was until now. Every penny matters if I want to stay in the U.K..

All this being said, Covid is probably here to stay for a few more years and so I’ve decided to face 2021 with a more positive perspective.

I did manage to find me a temporary job. It barely pays for the bills but it assures me a month or two more in this country. University is still happening…. online, but it is. As all of my colleagues are, I’m fuming that I have to be paying 11000£ to stay at home sitting at my tiny tiny desk. But as I said, we’re being positive here.
Each day that goes by is a day closer to things becoming reasonably normal again and this is what I’m trying to focus on.

Hopefully, one day I will be looking back at this post I wrote on my uni blog in January 2021 and have a laugh with my mates at Cartoon Network. Who knows… Stay safe everyone ♥

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/ . 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.

Key word: Unapologetic.

https://www.laurajaynehodkin.com

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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At the end of the day I had two ripped gloves, one open finger, one armature and one foam cloud head! What a day.

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Last Sunday, I felt terribly uninspired. I woke up bright and early, the sky was grey, the rain was banging against my window and I really felt like it was a lay-in day. I decided to fight that off by planing myself a date before lockdown would come and lock us all in. Looking at the list of museums available for students, I came across the Cartoon Museum which I hadn’t visited before. Before this visit, I didn’t consider myself a fan of British cartoons. With all due respect, I’ve always thought they were a bit dull, adopting the same sort of visual language and themes. This visit came to change my perception behind the history of British cartoon, specially in regards to Sequential Image.

“(…) THIS IS NOT BECAUSE THE JOKE HAS GONE STALE AND DISAPPEARED WITH AGE, SINCE IT WAS NEVER INTENDED TO AMUSE. THE CARTOON IS INTENDED TO DISTURB. THUS THE WORD ENTERED OUR LANGUAGE”
STEVE BELL

Located in Central London, the Cartoon Museum has re-opened its doors in July 2019. This registered charity dedicates it space to comic and cartoon art, conserving Britain’s comic art heritage.

As mentioned before, my exceptions from this visit weren’t too high: I imagined I would see some political art that you’d find in old newspapers from the 20th century which I’m personally not interested by. I was shocked to find our art from eighteen hundreds with such character! Predominant silhouettes, dynamic shapes, bold imagery, sharp brush strokes, geometric shapes-based character design, perception of depth, accentuation of body features to show different emotions and personalities.

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What I found particularly interesting in this illustration was the usage of geometrical shapes in the designing of the characters. Nowadays, studios such as Cartoon Network are very particular in the use of simplistic geometrical shapes in their characters for a slick, easy to read look and it’s interesting to see this method goes way back. An example of this is the show ‘The amazing World of Gumball’:

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The quality of line in this ink cartoon is just so graceful!

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During this exhibition, I stumbled upon various controversial political/ religious posters. The way the artists use satire as a form of communication is extremely powerful.

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This visit was an enriching experience. However, I do want to return since I couldn’t be inside the museum for too long due to Covid-19 restrictions. For my next visit, I’d love to sit down and have a read about each individual artist and their work.

My goal for these two years in London is to explore as many museums as possible and grow my knowledge on other cultures and art fields. Even though I’m taking up an Animation MA, I believe it’s important to be aware of what’s going on in other areas of study that can reconcile with Animation!

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On week 1, we were briefed with an Animation Theory presentation proposal. This presentation aimed the analysis of the work of an animator from our home country and its historical/ socio-political contextualisation, or the exploration of an area of animation theory or history.

I chose to speak about the work of Abi Feijó, a traditional experimental Portuguese animator. You can find the final presentation PDF on the link below.

I will start off this post by deconstructing one of the questions I wasn’t able to answer during the course of my presentation, this past Wednesday: what is Portugalidade?

Portugalidade

I mentioned Portugalidade as a theme portrayed by Abi Feijó in his work. However, as a Portuguese person, I am so familiarised with this concept that I’ve never really thought about the meaning behind it and I failed to explain it to my colleagues. The animation above, directed and animated by Abi Feijó, focuses on this word ‘Portugalidade’.

To compliment my answer, I’ve been looking at a few authors explaining this concept and I found these interesting perspectives on it:

‘Portugality exists, first and foremost, as a family of men and women. It has no firm meaning; its substance and definition vary from place to place, context to context, time to time. However, there are deep and structuring characters that give it a safe form; these characters, which constitute the essence of what Portugality is, often include the language, but do not have to be limited to it.‘- Rafael Pinto Borges for Nova Portugalidade, 2019.

Portugalidade, não Lusofonia

‘(…) a human heritage that encompasses almost three hundred million people‘ – Rafael Pinto Borges and Hugo Monteiro Dantas for Observador, 2017.

‘(…) from Amazonia to Timor, there is a community of men “whose political tradition, virtues, collective defects, experience and worldview are children of the encounter with Portugal” and thinks that the new national plan must pass by “breaking down barriers between men and embracing the ‘world that the Portuguese created’ to which Gilberto Freyre referred to.‘ – Rafael Pinto Borges for Observador, 2017.

O que é afinal a portugalidade? (A nova e a outra)

From what I’ve gathered, besides the feeling of being Portuguese, Portugalidade has a meaning of its own from Portuguese to Portuguese. It’s generally a set of hereditary characteristics such as our historical ancestry, our politics, our latin language, our conquests, our loss battles and how that reverberates to these days. I believe each and every country has their own word to describe the feeling of belonging to it and if they don’t, they should.

‘Portugalidade’ means to me the idea of family, strength, battle, culture but mainly community.

Abi Feijó

I chose to speak about animator Abi Feijó due to my admiration for his contribution to the Portuguese Animation industry.

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I was actually quite excited about this presentation. The reason why I moved to the U.K. was because I was never introduced to Portuguese Animation. I attended an Artistic High School (Escola Artística de Soares dos Reis, in Porto, Portugal) for three years and besides it being a top tier school, only Northern/ Western European/ North-American animation was taught to us. I’ve always been curious about animation in my own country but I confess I never got out of my way to research about it. Only when I had to decide which University I wanted to attend was when I realised Portugal had no undergraduate Animation programmes. It was either graphic novel based or generally graphic design and motion based. Sadly, I had to leave my beloved country to pursue a career in Animation but just like Abi Feijó, one of my life long goals is to return to Portugal with a fat CV and contribute to the Portuguese animation industry as much as I can!

Based on my personal issue, after spending days on end looking at Portuguese animation festivals, old Portuguese cinema and books about the history of Portuguese animation, I finally found an animator with enough background in Portuguese animation for me to speak about. Right off the bat, I was impressed with Abi’s career so far and wanted to look deeper into it. Here’s what I found:

I began by watching the documentary ‘The Art of Animating in Portugal’. It shows the history of Portuguese Animation. It’s in Portuguese but the imagery is phenomenal. It opened my eyes to a world I’d never known before.

Contamos a história da animação em Portugal

As I was watching this documentary, there was a section in the film talking about Cinanima Festival (which is on right now, go buy your tickets). That’s when I found animator Abi Feijó.

Abi was born in Braga, Portugal, 1956. He attended Porto Fine Art’s University in 1956 where he graduated in Design. He only became interested in Animation when the Cinanima festival debuted in the city of Espinho in 1976.

After attending workshops at Cinanima and also abroad (many in France), Abi had the opportunity to intern for 5 months at the Canada National Film Board in 1956. There, he made his first film ‘Oh que Calma’, which. translates to ‘How calm it is’, the film I analysed during. my presentation.

Upon his return to Portugal, Abi founded Estúdio Filmógrafo where he went on to produce many films with other talented animators.
All of his work produced during those times are shown in the documentary below. ‘The Animated World of Abi Feijó’ is a documentary that majorly helped me throughout this Research Project. Produced and directed by Sociologist Maria Helena Pinto in 2011, it touches the highs and lows of the animator’s career on a personal level. Unfortunately I couldn’t find it in English.

Besides that, Abi also founded the Casa da Animação. It is the most amazing place for animation lovers. I recommend all that visit my beautiful hometown of Porto to have a go at this institution.

casadaanimacao.pt

(I will be adding further research on here)

When presenting, I was extremely nervous. I was confident about the research I had put together, but because I hadn’t presented for about 4 years, even though I practiced the days before, I lost control of my anxiety. But I finished it and I’m proud of it, regardless. It was the first of many, I learnt with it and I genuinely can’t wait to do it again and improve my public speaking skills. I acquired so much new knowledge, both from my research and my colleague’s and I’m very much looking forward upcoming presentations.