Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Sharing Animation - The Band Concert (Walt Disney Studios - Wilfred Jackson, 1935)

Hello again dear fellow animation lovers!

Finally my longe holidays are over and I'm finally back on studying! And what excitement it is to be in one of the top schools of animation in the world! That's right, yesterday I started my fantastic one and a half year animation learning at Animation Mentor! The happiness I'm feeling right now is quite incredible and indescribable!

But enough about that! Since I'm back to work, I thought it would be a perfect time to get back with the animation sharing in my blog!

So to get back from this long absense, I'm here to show you one of the most powerful short animations I've ever seen and certainly my favorite from that studio!

The fantastic studio, as we all know it, is the Disney Animation Studios, and the wonderful short is the 1935 The Band Concert, directed by Wilfred Jackson.

Starting with the well known "Silly Symphonies" was the goal of achieving a great relationship between music and animation. In the book "The Illusion of Life", chapter 11: The Disney Sounds, there's a paragraph I would like to quote about this short.


<< In those first symphonies, the actions had been simple, staying with dance steps and runs that easily could be made to follow the beat of the music. But with Walt's insistance on humor and personality, the films built quickly into stories that demanded the acting match the tempo, too. This reached a peak in 1935 with the Band Concert, which combined well-known music with strong personalities and a situation played entirely in pantomime. It was rare combination, reflecting still another use of music as language. As one producer said, "Who else would take a band concert out of Walt's boyhood, mix in 'William Tell' and 'Turkey in the Straw' and a Kansas cyclone, and come out with a performance that would enchant Toscanini?" (Tipical of Walt, he did not stop there but began thinking of an ever bigger use of the same principle. He called that one Fantasia.) >>


This short for me is the perfect demonstration of in which levels can music and animation come close together. This is a highly inspirational short, as far as I'm concerned.

Enjoy The Band Concert by Wilfred Jackson and the fantastic Walt Disney crew!




Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!


See you next week (when I'll be in week 2 in animation mentor!) for another awesome animation!


No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

My Animations - Pepe Le Moko Intro

Alright! After this long holidays (maybe my last) that are about to end, I've put myself together to update my blog, finally! Yes, they're about to end because I'm in the countdown for the most expected learning experience of my life! Well, if you're tuned you'll be hearing a lot from it in the next 18 months!

For this post I wanted to talk a little about my latest and last work for university, and the one that I'm most proud of, and yes, this one is completly finished. I've added a whole page for the process of creation of this animation, but it was all in Portuguese, because it was a follow up of an exhibition I had the pleasure to make with this animation. But still if you visit the tab "Exibição" there's some images to be looked at, scenario designs, character designs and lettering choices. Also there's a video with animation tests, the animation side by side with the animatic (in motion storyboard, sort of).

So this animation is a intro shot for the movie Pepe Le Moko (Link to IMDB), a movie about a gangster that is imprisoned in his own tries to scape from the police. He is a wanted criminal that lives in a labirinthic city where the police can't reach, but he wants much more to his life than just be a fugitive in that overcrowded city. So one day when he meets a beautiful woman from Paris, he can't stop thinking about his old days of liberty and running away with the woman.


For this animation I decided to use the wonderful style created by the Master animator Dudok de Wit in his beautiful animation called "The Aroma of Tea". With the style I tried to create a narrative told only with little balls moving around in a painted (with China Ink) claustrophobic city. In the whole intro shot there are 21 painted scenarios.

There were two main concerns to me in this short, first was how to have different characters when every single one of them are little balls. And the second, how to tell a story using only those circles. It was not my intention for the narrative to be completely understandable, there was much of an abstract feeling in it, but still the main drama was to be told and understood, and I hope that goal was achieved because it took me long hours to animate all those little balls and to make it mean something.

With this project I won a funding to make an exhibition with the animation and the artistic pieces created in the production. It was a huge honor to me and I hope I was able to pass along a little of my passion for animation.

Finally, I proudly present the title sequence for Pépé Le Moko.




I'll be posting in the next days other works that I made in my last year in university! See you soon!