Reading & Writing
So far, while reading Liz Blazer’s Animated Storytelling, I have learned the various steps and practices that make up Pre-Production, Storytelling, Unlocking Your Story, and Storyboarding. This week’s chapter readings covered Color Sense and Weird Science.
Color Sense
Enhance your story with the right palette
In chapter 5, Blazer shares that color is a significant and powerful component of animation, housing the capability to “express emotion, clarify motivation, and enhance the entire meaning of your piece.” She opens the chapter by clarifying a few color-related vocabulary words that we are all familiar with but may use interchangeably. Here are Blazer’s definitions:
- Hue: the common color name in the spectrum, like red, blue, or orange.
- Saturation: the intensity or purity of a color.
- Value: the relative lightness or darkness of a color. How much light the color is exposed to determines its value. High value color is closer to white, while low value is closer to black.
- Tone: reflects the overall brightness or darkness of an entire shot or scene, regardless of the colors used.
Blazer continues by guiding the reader through creating a color script and a pre-color script.
- Color script: a sequential visual outline of how you intend to use color in your animated film.
- Pre-color script: your storyboard represented by a series of rectangular color bars that match your most essential story beats.
Once the hue, saturation, and value throughout the storyline have been identified, the rest of the color palette can be determined. While determining the color palette, it is imperative to never let the color of the surrounding scenery outshine the characters. After finalizing the pre-color script, the selected colors can be integrated into the entire storyboard. Finally, colors are selected for supporting characters, backgrounds, and props within every shot.
In the final section of this chapter, Blazer shares some of her most important tips regarding utilizing color within animation:
- Design for Movement
- Limit Your Palette
- Use Saturation Mindfully
- Support (Don’t Upstage) Your Subject
- Use Surprise Color for Punctuation
- Select One Thematic and One Accent Color
- Make Your Own Rules
Weird Science
Experiment with animation
To start off this chapter, Blazer reminds us that, by nature, animation is one of the most experimental film mediums. She explains that “experimentation is an essential step in getting the most out of the animated process and may even help you to discover the defining moment in your story. Sometimes stories are even born from the process of animation itself.” Blazer encourages her audience to find their own weird science by creating “bad” art and working on the edge of their skill set.
Next, Blazer shares two scenarios in which experimentation can be beneficial in the long run.
- Making the Work You Want to Be Hired to Do: To avoid being pigeonholed within the industry, animators can experiment with creating work that interests them. Displaying this work alongside the work they are recognized for could open the door to new work opportunities involving the animation style they desire to be hired to create.
- Working on Personal Projects Pays Off in Unexpected Ways: Challenging yourself to experiment in your craft can get you further than you think. Not only will you learn new techniques and grow in your skillset, but your personal work may also be recognized and appreciated by others too!
In the last section of this chapter, Blazer encourages her audience to create an experimentation list by supplying her audience with different areas to experiment with within each storyboard scene. Some of these areas include technique, design, movement transitions, sources, and sound. She concludes the chapter by highlighting two areas of experimentation that animators must explore: transitions and movement.
Research to Inform
This week, I gained more exposure to stop motion. Stop motion is an animation filmmaking technique involving photographed frames. Within each frame, objects are manipulated in small increments. The frames are pieced together in video format to create the illusion that the objects are exhibiting independent motion.
Since the 1840s, stop motion has been used to create groundbreaking films and animations. To this day, stop motion is seen in music videos, advertisements, movies, independent animations, and more.
Music Videos
Music videos contain some of the most engaging stop motion work I have come across. A number of the songs I have grown to love throughout the years incorporate stop motion to convey a story in an impactful way.
Lettuce With a Perm
This stop motion creator utilizes audio to bring their work to life. Although the animation is distinct and intriguing when watched without audio, the audio serves as a huge cherry on top, captivating the viewer all the more.
Coco Peri
Coco Peri is a multi-disciplinary creator, widely recognized for her stop-motion animations. She creates vibrant and colorful ads for various brands we all know and love. You can find some of her work on her website or in her reel below.
Short Films
Stop motion films astound me. I can’t imagine the amount of time and patience required to create a stop motion film, especially the ones that contain hand-crafted and manipulated materials. Although they may be a pain to create, these films are impressive works of art, containing multiples scenes and highly detailed elements.
Expedia Commercials
Finally, Expedia’s recent trip commercials combine playful music and whimsical movement across a large set that continuously catches my eye during commercial breaks. These stop motion ads make everything look fun and simple. However, working with multiple scenes and animate and inanimate objects all at once is no small feat.
Create
In preparation for creating my own stop-motion animation, this week I worked through pre-production for two stop-motion storylines. Each pre-production summary includes a general idea, creative brief, and storyboard.
Non-Linear Storyline: The Greenhouse Cabinet
My first storyline involves a barren greenhouse cabinet. The goal is to use The Beaded Necklace storyline format to animate the process of the greenhouse cabinet becoming the home of various plants to the beat/tune of an uplifting soundtrack.
Although this storyline is my top choice, my cabinet contains a lot of plants which means there will be tons of moving elements within this stop motion. This may present a challenge, as well as keeping the soundtrack in mind while shooting and timing the stop motion to the music.
To view the details of this storyline including my inspiration, creative brief, and storyboard, check out the pdf below.
Linear Storyline: Mug Buddies
This storyline contains a beginning middle and end:
- Beginning / Exposition: Two mugs (friends) journey side by side across the dining table
- Middle / Complication: The black mug collides with a spoon and cracks into pieces
- End / Resolution: The white mug moves the spoon away and circles around the black mug to mend it. Once the black mug is restored, the two mugs continue their journey across the dining table.
“Mug Buddies,” as I’ve dubbed it for now, will tell a story of help and companionship. The goal is to illustrate the value of friendship, even amongst contrasting individuals, in a unique and creative way.
Should I chose to pursue this storyline, I am excited to experiment with the breaking and mending of the black mug. I have two identical black mugs that I glazed at a pottery shop. One is broken and one is not. My main concern with this storyline is creating a mending scene that is seamless. The broken mug may require some sort of adhesive to hold some pieces in place.
Find out more about this storyline below.
Experimenting with Uno
Recently, my husband and I have started playing Uno together during our downtime. To get my feet wet, we worked together to shoot a quick stop motion using the Uno cards spread out across our old coffee table. Using a scissor arm phone holder to assist with sustaining our shots, I moved the cards while my husband snapped the photos.
It’s not my best work, (as my tripod has recently been occupied while I shoot a timelapse of a new leaf unfurling on a plant) but this was a great opportunity to experiment with a new form of animation and manipulate various objects within one scene. Additionally, this was my first time utilizing premiere pro to convert images into a sequence.
Moving forward, I am excited to be intentional about the staging and framing of the objects within my final stop motion. No matter which storyline I decide to bring to life, I hope to cover all aspects, areas, and details within the piece, including the objects, movements, lighting, sounds, angles, etc.
Sola's Thoughts 