Inspirations: March 2014

Dreamworks Animation

The studio: DreamWorks Animation

DreamWorks Animation has always produced beautiful films with awesome designs, fantastic characters and very deep underlying themes in stories such as Shrek, Kunfu Panda, Puss in Boots, MegaMind and Madagascar. The very first films from DreamWorks that I absolutely love are The Prince of Egypt and The Road to Eldorado and of course Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

The post is once again spoiler free so don't worry and carry on.

Madagascar 3

Before I watched Madagascar 3 for the first time I had been thinking about what is the real purpose of animation and why do we use animation to tell certain stories. I had felt for a while that sometimes the use of animation hasn't been clear enough in some films and the animation and the story had not been pushed to the area where the story could've been only told by animation and thus the use of animation justified.

Whilst watching Madagascar 3 though, I had a great epiphany and realised they had done exactly what I had been thinking about earlier - taking an average heist story and taking normal scenes to the next level by really understanding the limitlessness of CG animation and creating something that couldn't be done with any other medium. This scene in particular demostrates what I'm talking about and I think it's one of the best sequences in the film.

The Artists: Jason Schleifer

I want to mention Jason Shleifer - he is the head of character animation at Dreamworks and before he joined the feature animation studio in 2003 he used to work at Weta for the Lord of The Rings trilogy. I love his passion for animation and rigging and how he shares his knowledge through Internet and his masterclasses. He's also a lecturer at this year Anomalia and will teach about High-end Animation Polish. I'd love to go there! Here' is his great TED talk about character arch and motivation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LLpxRnPlRE

Weta Digital

The Studio: Weta Digital

New Zealand's bride Weta Digital has produced some of the most believable characters in film history and thus I want to discuss how their character creation and animation have influenced me as an artist.

There are no spoilers (if you don't count the fact that I say Gollum does an appearance in The Hobbit) in this post so carry on without worry.

Gollum

(The LoTR trilogy and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)

Gollum is one of the best CG characters ever created and the detail and believability of his movements and facial expressions is phenomenal. Most of his facial animation is hand-keyed which may come as a surprise to majority because all the credit of the performance is often credited to Andy Serkis. I'm not trying to diminish his part in Gollum's creation but underline that some of the greatest scenes with Gollum had much more hand-keying that you'd think and all the credit for those go to the incredibly talented animators.

For example the most memorable scene from LoTR where Gollum talks to himself - the final version of the shot is often shown next to Andy's performance and people don't realise it was down to an animator, whose name I unfortunately cannot recall right now, to interpret all Andy's subtle facial expressions and animate them onto Gollum. The following is the best ever scene of Gollum in my opinion and I bet it involves a lot of keyframe animation as the studio said that they had to add a lot of extra eye darts to keep Gollum real and believable - the riddle scene from The Hobbit:

Caesar

(Rise of The Planet of The Apes and Dawn of The Planet of The Apes)

Caesar is my favourite CG character created for VFX films to this day. No wonder he is as amazing as Gollum - Weta is behind both of them! I'm very excited to see how far Weta has pushed their animation and mocap since The Rise of The Planet of The Apes. I was slightly disappointed with the trailer of Dawn of The Planet of The Apes but only after the film I can say my final thoughts.

Until then stay tooned, stare at awesome animations and animate life into characters!