TEACH YOURSELF | How To Add Feeling Through Composition

Artistic know-how does not need to be expensive or attained at a school like CalArts. That's why I research free online advice on drawing and encourage my readers to do the same. You can take your education into your own hands.

For this post, I explore the relationship between composition and feeling -- which is, of course, essential to understand for filmmakers. Conveying emotions through visuals is part of what makes filmmaking so exciting and creative!

My hope is that these handouts and videos, which I share below, can inspire students to learn the fundamentals of composition and feeling -- without paying a fortune!

Lines represent feelings

Here is a handout that was shared by Mark Kennedy on his blog Temple of the Seven Golden Camels. These illustrations, originally from the book Creative Illustration, show how different shapes connote different feelings. For instance, horizontals and verticals are calm, whereas diagonals are full of motion and tension.

(Source: sevencamels)

So depending on the mood of the piece you are working on, different lines and how they divide the canvas will aid in conveying that feeling you’re going for.

Brad Bird did a handout on how to add depth to your storyboards/compositions.

Pace and staging characters 

Here is also a video that analyzes the pacing of the camera moves in Brad Bird's movies and how such adds to the story of each film, respectively. Toward the end, there is a brief mentioning of symmetric vs. dynamic filmmaking.

Brad Bird- Playful Cinema from The Royal Ocean Film Society on Vimeo.

As this video highlights, how you make cuts and stage your characters has a great effect on the ‘feel’ of the movie.

Tony Zhou has made a similar video that explains why Edgar Wright’s filmmaking works so well – namely, because he takes advantage of the film medium and shows visuals that are funny, even without dialogue.

Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.

I recommend taking a look at some (or all) of the videos Zhou has posted!

Characters and how they fit into the overall composition likewise connotes a lot about the feeling of a scene. For instance, a character can be visually depicted as taking up a large portion of a shot and we will sense that she or he is more important or powerful than any other given character.

This video, by Zachery Ramos-Tayolor, gives an example from the movie Steve Jobs. It highlights how the characters’ movement indicates who is in power.

Steve Jobs - Blocking & Realist Acting from Zackery Ramos-Taylor on Vimeo.

Similarly, Mark Kennedy did a blog post that analyzes the movements of characters and how such symbolize the power dynamics within a scene in Paths of Glory.

(Source: sevencamels)

The camera angle can also aid in power dynamics. When I was studying How to Train Your Dragon, I noticed that in scenes when Stoick was imposing, the camera angle was always placed up toward him and down toward Hiccup. This established a power relationship – Stoick seems authoritative, whereas hiccup is small and unsure.

Thanks for reading along! And as always, a thousand thanks to the artists who shared their advice online!

Good luck studying.

Why Tulipop Challenges Gender Stereotypes

Children’s books and films are ripe with gender stereotypes. Female characters are underrepresented, simplified, and typically hold back their anger to appear like ‘good girls.’ Meanwhile, male characters generally seem strong, domineering, and entitled.

Signý Kolbeinsdóttir, co-founder and creator of award-winning Icelandic design brand Tulipop, sees that these stereotypes have no basis in reality. Humans are complex and act in ways that transgress traditional ideas of gender. She wants her stories to portray such characters so that children may relate to them and find inspiration to be themselves.

Girls are not just pretty
Signý remarks that most children’s TV shows and books do not display girls in an interesting way. “I see stereotypes on TV that don’t exist in the real world,” she says. “I see girls who are fragile-looking flowers, who don’t dare to speak their minds and are just there to look pretty.”

As a little girl, the only books Signý related to were created by Scandinavian writers and illustrators such as the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. She explains that these stories did not limit the scope of the characters’ humanity.

“Astrid Lindgren didn’t simplify what girls ‘like to do’ to mean only one thing,” Signý says. “Her female characters were brave and adventurous, but they could also be girly girls. Her stories didn’t make assumptions about what it means to be a girl.”

Relatable characters
For Signý, such depictions are essential because they are reflections of real human beings.

“No one is just their gender,” she says. “Human beings are far more complex. Not just adults; children are also complex. I want to create something that children can relate to. I do not want to create an ideal they think they have to aspire to in order to act their gender and please our world’s understanding of what it means to be a boy or a girl.”

Signý Kolbeinsdóttir the co-founder and creator of Tulipop

Kids learn from TV
Without a focus on creating multidimensional characters, Signý  believes that children’s TV shows and books may harm how children perceive themselves. “The fictional worlds we create for children become their reality. They learn how to behave, they learn what it means to be a boy or a girl, in part, from the stories we tell.”

“When a boy sees Spiderman, he might think masculinity means being physically strong and protective,” she continues. “We don’t have a representational balance whereby we show little boys that it’s also ok to show emotions, to read books or play with dolls if that’s who you are and what you like to do.”

Storytelling as healing
As children observe characters in books and films that challenge gender stereotypes, Signý hopes each child will find characters they can relate to – characters who freely express themselves and who can help children feel free to be who they are.

“TV shows that use gender stereotypes don’t help kids figure out how they feel,” she says. “For me, that’s a big part of storytelling – helping children process their own feelings. That’s why I like to create stories.”

Instead of telling children how to behave through stereotypical portrayals of gender roles, Signý is cognizant that her stories could help children question such roles. Confident that fictional characters can support children as they process the world and their feelings, Signý stands by Tulipop’s aim to transform limiting perceptions of gender.


This article first appeared on Tulipop's blog 

TEACH YOURSELF | Character Design

Can anything be appealing?

In animation, the answer is typically "yes." Character designers can make any design appear appealing based on the attitude and personality of the character. Even a villain needs some form of appeal, something that communicates who that character is -- else, the audience will be distracted by the design. 

If you'd like to study appeal, I'll share some advice and links to blogs online so that you can 'teach yourself' and use the knowledge available on the internet.

Defining "appeal"

As I hint above, appeal is not necessarily "beauty" – it’s a conscious design choice to make different forms and proportions stand out in a character, based on who that character is and what the designer wants the onlooker to feel. 

Appeal can take many different forms -- in Disney's Bambi, the designers chose to make the appeal apparent through contrasts; the head is big, compared to a small body. The legs are long, compared to the small body. The eyes are huge, compared to the rest of the head. These contrasts make the proportions 'appealing' to the eye because they give the eye various shapes to look at. 

The importance of negative space

In contrast, a design that has the same proportions might not be as interesting to look at or give the eye periods of "rests." The negative space (the places where not a lot of things are going on) in Bambi's design functions as a type of break for the eye. If you give the eye too much "sameness," the eye won't know where to look and you might automatically find the design 'unappealing' without consciously putting a finger on it.

Glen Keane put this concept very simply -- three shapes put right next to each other is not as 'appealing' as three shapes where two of them are closer to each other than they are to the third.

Coming back to Bambi, the designers also chose to make Bambi appealing through round shapes, which connote softness and typically 'cutifies' anything (whether or not it is appropriate to "cutify" in animation is a topic worthy of its own post).

As Bambi grows up, these proportions change. His head is smaller than his body and his legs appear shorter. However, his design is still made of varying, round shapes that make for an appealing design.

Advice on the web

Griz and Norm share a lot of tips about appealing design on their Instagram, Griz & Norm. Here is an example:

Mark Kennedy also has many posts devoted to appeal on his blog, The Temple of the Seven Golden Camels.

I hope you'll find helpful tips on these sites and that my explanation of appeal has made sense to you. Enjoy studying these concepts! 

You can read more of my Teach Yourself tips here

Academia Glosses Over The Artistry of Bambi

When I took my course on Ecocritical Approaches to Filmmaking at university, the texts we read on animation often focused on critiquing the films of Disney. Bambi (1942) was repeatedly one of the films that was met with heavy criticism due to its idealized portrayal of nature. For one of my readings that focused on Bambi, I noticed that the artistry that went into the film was simply glossed over.

Although I recognize that academic texts such as these must have a focus and that this focus was on the portrayal of nature, I find it sad that academia in general does not seem to refer to animation with the awe of the medium that I believe is due.

So, in this post, I want to elaborate a bit on the pre-production work that animators undertook for Bambi and share some deer studies from the film—as a type of tribute to the amazing artistry of the animation.

In the reading I mention above, the author explains how the animators took life-drawing courses on fawns to understand their anatomy and mannerisms. As he writes, Walt Disney wanted the animals in Bambi to be as realistic as possible (while still fitting into the “appeal” aspect of the animation medium. For more information on appeal, please see this post by storyartist Mark Kennedy).

When we compare drawings of deer from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, made just a few years earlier, with drawings from Bambi, we can see what a huge difference these classes made in making the deer more believable and anatomically correct.

The legendary animator Andreas Deja, the supervising animator on characters such as Gaston, Scar and Hercules, has a blog, Deja View, where he posts various drawings he inherited from some of Disney’s Nine Old Men (a series of animators known for their incredible skill and who were the ones to discover the principles of animation during Disney’s Golden Age).

He has done a few blog posts in which he shares some of these drawings, as well as photos from the life-drawing sessions during the making of Bambi. You can find these posts here and here.

I have shared some of these drawings below:

When academia refers to Bambi, it’s important not to overlook the incredible skill and hard work that went into the film. At the time of its making, animation was still a new and unexplored medium. The filmmakers had no way of knowing whether animation could sustain the level of realism Walt sought. Yet the animators took on the challenge and created Bambi -- a film with realistically drawn deer as had never been seen before (and perhaps not since). From an animation perspective, Bambi is a masterful showcase of artistry.

Animator Milt Kahl's pencil test of Bambi

TEACH YOURSELF | How To Lead The Eye

Recently, I made about 1800 thumbnail studies from How to Train Your Dragon. Every time there was a cut or a camera move, I would hit pause and draw the shot. I got the idea to do so from a CalArts classmate, who in turn got the idea from a post by Emma Coats. While I did the sketches, I paid close attention to the composition of each frame. As Coats instructed in her post, I asked myself a series of questions about the shots, such as, where are the characters positioned? Why was there a cut? How is the frame divided? How are the angles and lines positioned in the shot? What do they lead the eye to? Where is the camera positioned?

I did this exercise to study what makes up a ‘good’ composition. I had come to accept that to learn about composition from movies, it is not enough to simply watch a lot of movies. In fact, when a composition is well made in a movie, it is often difficult for the audience to notice it – it flows into the storyline so well that that the audience gets carried away into that world.

To many people, myself included, composition can therefore be a bit of a mystery.

The first time I heard about composition was in my Art History classes during high school. In these classes, we would analyze paintings from around the world and how they reflected the thought pattern of a given society during a specific time period. When we got to the Renaissance and Venetian art, we learned that these artists used shapes, such as converging lines and figural pyramids, to purposefully guide the eye through the painting and convey the ‘mood’ of the time. We learned that Renaissance artists used composition as a tool for creating visual depth and figurative meaning.

(Source: Marsha Russell)

Still, I wasn’t sure what makes a ‘good’ composition. If composition is the arrangement of shapes within an image, then at what point does it become a ‘bad’ combination?

To settle the ins and outs of composition, I took a class at CalArts that covered composition. I found that composition is really just about making art that looks good to you while being mindful of the purpose behind the composition. 

In a nutshell, composition is about not settling before you’ve reached a point at which you’re happy with the ‘flow’ of the piece.

That being said, there are a few basic ‘rules’ to keep in mind.

To reinforce and remind myself what I have been taught, I have started analyzing movies on my own, like I did How to Train Your Dragon. On top of that, I like to scout online to find any resonating insight. In this post, I’m going to share some of the handouts and videos that have been helpful in understanding how to lead the eye through a composition. Most of these sources agree that good composition is about clarity, i.e. leading the eye to a point of interest, while being mindful of what you’re trying to communicate story-wise.

Advice

Artist Rad Sechrist thinks about the relationships between shapes as he makes compositions. He has made a handout on his site Rad How To that analyzes a painting and how the artist guides the onlooker through it.

(Source: radhowto)

Another example of leading the eye is to point everything toward a single center of interest:

(Source: andreasdeja)

Having the perspective lines converge where you want the audience to look is another way to guide the eye.

(Source: Marsha Russell)

Yet more ways you can guide the eye through a composition is by contrast. You can create contrast though lighting, colors and/or patterns. Whichever element stands out the most (creates the greatest level of contrast to the rest of the elements) in a given composition will be where the eye looks. So for instance, if you have a composition with a majority of circular shapes and then one triangular shape, the audience will be attracted to the triangle.

(By Loui del Carmen, source: theartcenter)

Here is a video by Ahmed Aldoori that analyzes some paintings by Paul Felix. Aldoori explains how Felix uses some of the principles I have mentioned above to create his compositions.

I hope these links and explanations help!

As always, thanks to all the artists who shared this advice online!

-Christine-

TEACH YOURSELF | How To Do Gesture

Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people

Leo Burnett, quoted in #Girlboss

As part of my Teach Yourself series, I’ve been wanting to do a post about advice on gesture drawing. After having searched online for tips for a while now, I realize it is hard to locate any blogs that focus specifically on gesture drawing. As a result, I have decided to compile specific advice in the form of videos and handouts as I have been able to find them. These tips all come from different corners of the Internet, as opposed to a few specific blogs.

Defining 'gesture'

Gesture is about capturing the essence of what you’re drawing.

It is arguably the single most important part of making a lifelike figure. Without it, a drawing will seem stiff. When I decided I wanted to go for CalArts, I made it a goal to really hone in on my gesture skills. 

Gesture is about feeling the action and making mental observations before you ever put the pen down to the paper. This way, you’ll communicate clearly and guide the eye of the onlooker through an appealing flow of lines.

Advice

Here is a handout by Griz and Norm on gesture drawing:

(Source: grizandnorm)

When you’re drawing a gesture, the essence of the pose should be captured within a minute or so – perhaps even sooner. Instead of focusing your attention on each little part of the body, you should focus on getting the whole figure down, without too much detail. This way, you have everything you need, should you decide to finish the drawing at a later point in time.

(Source: drawingsfromamexican)

Rad Sechrist shares some very good advice on his blog, Rad How To, about gesture:

In one of these handouts, Sechrist points to the fact you need to ‘push’ the pose. This is something I think a lot about, too, as I draw. It can be very easy to fall into the trap of  “straightening up” a pose and making it more symmetrical. But when a drawing looses its angles and tilts, it also looses its power and life. If this is something you struggle with, you have to make a conscious effort to overcome this tendency by exaggerating the pose.

(Source: grizandnorm)

On a final note, I want to thank all these artists for sharing their advice on gesture drawing!  

-Christine-

  

TEACH YOURSELF | How To Do Solid Drawing

Solidity is the key to creating believable, three-dimensional characters out of your imagination.

I wanted to learn more about solidity during my studies at CalArts, so one of my teachers recommended I take a look at this video:

Seems simple enough! Solidity is just about imagining a 3D space, being conscious of overlap and avoiding twinning.

But in practice, I am finding this stuff doesn’t necessarily come easy if I don’t make a conscious effort – which is why I’ve been focusing so much on it. It’s not enough that I know about solidity – my drawings have to really show that I understand how to use it.

Glenn Vilppu’s Drawing Manual and Walt Stanchfield’s Drawn to Life are two books that have really helped in this regard. With these books, I am starting to better grasp how to easily visualize 3D space on a blank 2D piece of paper without reference. It truly is a basic skill needed in drawing from the imagination. Sometimes I get so frustrated with myself when I can’t draw what I intended in my mind! But maybe that's a good thing -- because it spurs me to want to become better.

As well as these books, I have also found a few online resources that I check back on regularly to better understand solidity and structure in drawing. As part of my Teach Yourself posts, I have shared these below. The idea behind this series is to use the internet to educate yourself about drawing.

Rad Sechrist – Rad How To

(Source: radhowto)

Sechrist is a story-board artist at Dreamworks. His blog focuses a lot on teaching you to see the structure underneath what you’re drawing. On his blog, he has also shared some amazing video recordings from his online classes (radhowtoschool.com)

Toby Shelton

(Source: tobyshelton)

A story artist at Disney, Toby shares some advice on structure of, in particular, hands (as well as some awesome storyboards from various films!)

Kirk Shinmoto – An Intro to Robutics

(Source: robutic)

Shinmoto has a post on his blog called “The Secret to Drawing” that is very inspirational. I have linked it above

Will Weston Studio

(Source: willwestonstudio)

A good website for advice on structure, volume and anatomy

Animation Meat – “Drawing for Animation”

This PDF file is a transcript of one of Eric Larson’s lectures on Entertainment. In the notes, Larson goes over the principles that make up a good, solid drawing

Also, here are some youtube videos that explain the things that make up solidity, such as volume, foreshortening, overlap and perspective.

Then in this video, Ahmed Aldoori explains how you can draw cubes to help you draw poses from the imagination (similar to Vilppu's approach).

Finally, these are some notes from Glen Keane that I've hung up on my wall:

(Source: lindadornart)

If you find yourself struggling with solidity as well, I hope these links might be of some help to you!

-Christine-