I watched part of the "Iron Giant" last night. I know, 'half measures avail us nothing' however, it's not so much the plot I was interested in but the effects-how the drawings were made. They look hand drawn, but they're not, entriely. I am sure for an animation savvy individual this would come as no surprise, but for someone like me who is currently caught in between worlds of the creator and the wide-eyed willing audience- the 'hand drawn' look is generally pulled off. I began to wonder about the (for lack of a better word) seamless 'plane changes' in the objects and the robot. In one of the initial scenes, Hogarth rides his red bike past the camera and away. There is a high level of perspective change, in the bike-it was almost flawless in how it turned. But it was the robot that gave it away for me-nearly perfect and fast moving I couldn't conceptualize how that would be achieved by hand. When I wonder about whether or not computers were involved in the production, I always turn my memory to 'The Jungle Book' there is a flatness to a lot of hand worked imagery. It's not stiff, but the characters are not moving in a dymamic and fast paced way.
Brad Bird, the director states in an interview with Animation World Magazine online 'Well, we just tried to remove all the things that separate hand-drawn stuff from CGI. Rather than trying to make the hand-drawn stuff have the look of CGI, we thought we should try to make the CGI look hand-drawn.
"We even created a software program to wobble the lines of the Giant just a little bit. Not enough to make them look like they're badly-drawn, but to make them a little less perfect than they would normally be. It's a very subtle effect. You can't see it a lot. A lot of people don't know that the Giant is computer-animated, and that, to me, says that we did our job. If we did our job, you won't feel that there's any difference."
C'est super-cool. Programs and hands- this is definitly one in a million, watch it.
is there a purity to something entirely hand-drawn? i think so. i wanted to call it Aria which once was an anagram for something but now i dont recall. maybe the hand drawn perspective changes give us insight into how our minds percieve depth, in the ways we attempt to reconstruct it.
ReplyDeleteI think that there is a 'purity' in that we draw what we understand. Back in the Middle Ages perspective wasn't understood as it is today, therefore you see that 'stacked' look to a lot of drawings. But, I would not say that because it's hand-drawn means it's more pure. I think that CGI is another tool, to inform and perhaps broaden our sense of space(depth). There are many points in that movie that would have been compromised if it was all done by hand. I generally don't like to think of traditional methods as better or somehow refined, or able to bring us closer to our sense of what it means to be human. Brunelleschi's experiments in perspective during the 15th century changed the way we understood space. I dunno maybe CGI is a step in a similar direction. Surely, just for the sake of the ideas that it brings, could make it an even more 'pure' form of expression. Whatever that means...
ReplyDeleteHere's a link for Mr. Brunelleschi: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit11/unit11.html#perspective
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