a whole long list of animated documentaries

My last project—abstract animation set to music—is still in progress, but seeing as it is taking longer than I anticipated to complete, and my computer is having a hard time managing the size of the Photoshop file, and, like an obese athlete, pants and heaves and considers suicide every time I force it to run the file…my mind has begun drifting, and I’ve fixated on the specific genre of animated documentaries.

(I WILL finish it, of course, though maybe not this week. Seriously, it’s destroying my computer.)

This case for animated documentaries can be made with this single fact: there exists a Wikipedia page on the topic. (Experimental animation, on the other hand, floats in digital limbo, for though there exists physical literature on the topic, its place in history has not yet been indelibly marked by way of a Wiki page and thus could be argued to be nonexistent.) The first animated documentary was Winsor McCay’s 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania, which retells 1915 sinking of the ship Lusitania.

I really love this film. There is a certain simple power in the animation of a tragedy. It feels both metaphorical and matter-of-fact. I hope that makes sense.

In any case. I have always been fascinated with art that feels informational. “It’s info-tainment!” I used to screech, trying to make myself sound as quirky as possible to people who deemed me irrelevant. But this is my Internet blog, and no one has to read or listen if they don’t want to. (Except you, Tom.)

Animated documentaries are truly a wonderful mix of two things I love: art and education. And, on that tangent, animated documentaries easily unpack difficult, abstract concepts by way of illustrating and transmuting images. Most of us are babies who need constant stimulation, and whereas textbooks are eternally boring, animated documentaries have colors and sounds and moving things that can hold our attention for longer than 10 seconds, even when discussing typically boring subjects.

There’s also much more freedom to experiment visually, considering the concrete/realistic nature of documentaries. There is already something there for the audience to hold onto, something recognizable, and so we allow for much greater experimentation to accompany the sound. Because that’s what animated documentaries are: visual accompaniments to a recorded sound. (Except in Lusitania, I guess. But that was before sound.) This differs from most animation where image is determined first and foremost, and sound is subsequent and supportive.

Aside from educational documentaries, I also love storytelling documentaries and podcasts. At this point in my life, I end up spending a lot of time alone on the bus with my headphones in, and I’ve listened to every single Radiolab episode in existence and am making my way through the This American Life oeuvre, slowly and sporadically. I also listen, on occasion, to 99% Invisible, Savage Lovecast, The Moth, and Welcome to Night Vale (which is fictional but still super gr8). I like telling stories about my own life, and I love hearing other people’s stories.

For these reasons—the freedom to visually experiment, the ability to entertainingly transmit information, the and the joy I get from IRL storytelling—I am interested in making a short animated documentary.

For this project, I think I will focus on a story with a narrative as told to me by another person. I would love to make an educational animation sometime in the future, but this week I will stick with the story.

I really, really, really love animation where the dialogue is spontaneous and the animator includes all the pauses and false starts people have when speaking. Often it’s done humorously, and physical mannerisms not audible in the recording are added for characterization. I’m thinking in particular of Nate Milton’s animation using recorded sound from a This American Life episode on middle schoolers:

MIDDLE SCHOOL from Nate Milton on Vimeo.

RCA also makes its students do lip sync animation to archival sounds, which I find really fascinating.

lip sync RCA 2012 from Sophie Koko Gate on Vimeo.

Twins- Lipsynch Project from Sijia Ke on Vimeo.

Oh Aye! from Marcus Armitage on Vimeo.

And some other examples of this:

Chocolate Bacon (2012) from asavari kumar on Vimeo.

FOOD from SIQI SONG on Vimeo.

YOO WANA NOWAT IYEE DIDD from Joseph Bennett on Vimeo.

There also seems to be a genre of animated documentary where people animate to drunk people recounting stories.

“Two Chips” / An Animated Short from Adam Patch on Vimeo.

48HR Film: Drunk History – Babe Didrickson from Ena Kim on Vimeo.

I think I most enjoy story-based animated documentaries where the narrator’s personality is taken into account, particularly in a humorous way.

If The Cuckoo Don’t Crow from Steve Kirby on Vimeo.

Animator Joseph Bennett does this especially well, and his animations—whether recorded himself or taken from another source—are always subtly mocking of the speaker.

A Birthday Card from Joseph Bennett on Vimeo.

Kate Berlant Promo from Joseph Bennett on Vimeo.

Bedtime Stories with Abraham Willosby from Joseph Bennett on Vimeo.

philistine test from Joseph Bennett on Vimeo.

Some other animated documentaries that focus more on drama and animation than humor:

Marcel, King of Tervuren (english) from Tom Schroeder on Vimeo.

Mother from Christoph Steger on Vimeo.

One Nice Family Photo from tom senior on Vimeo.

Finally, two other people I want to highlight are Marcus Armitage (animator) and Bianca Giaever (filmmaker).

I love the oil pastel style that Marcus Armitage animates in. And I love how fun he can make dark or complex subjects be.

What is Literature for? from Marcus Armitage on Vimeo.

My Dad from Marcus Armitage on Vimeo.

Bianca Giaever’s work is touching and humanizing, and I love how she embraces non-linear storytelling methods. She often includes her own voice and opinion, so her work feels very autobiographical and introspective. They are funny and sad—two of my favorite things.

This American Life Videos 4 U: Tattoos from This American Life on Vimeo.

Holy Cow Lisa from Bianca Giaever on Vimeo.

the Scared is scared from Bianca Giaever on Vimeo.

I think this weekend I will try and gather as many field recordings as possible. I’m hoping to get something funny from my mom, who is foreign and often tells stories nonsensically, but if not, I’ll try to squeeze something out from a few of my friends. If that doesn’t work (though I don’t see why it wouldn’t), I’ll comb through Prelinger Archives for an interesting interview that I can animate to. Visually, I’m thinking that I will have two different-ish styles: for the story retelling visuals, they will be illustrated in oil pastel or some other thick, colored medium; and for the character lip sync of the narrator, they will be animated digitally with simpler outlines, like in digital pen or pencil or ink.

And for a post-script, I’d like to include Jonathan Hodgson’s “Feeling My Way,” which is sort of an experimental animated documentary. Not necessarily pertaining to what I want to do for this project, but it’s certainly something I admire and may try to imitate in the future.

Feeling My Way from Jonathan Hodgson on Vimeo.

image music text

This is a pretentious title that alludes to nothing because I haven’t actually read Roland Barthes (though I did try to read “Mythologies” a few months ago but fell asleep, alas), but I swear to GOD that the PDF of that book is downloaded in one of my 300 tabs on Chrome and I definitely plan on reading him someday, ok??

Anyway. For my next assignment, I will be creating an animation timed to music. Well, timed makes it sound formulaic. It will be an animation created in tandem with music, a holy union, where one cannot exist without the other, lest the reality of art itself crumble into an existential heap of nonsense and treachery.

I spent several hours this weekend searching and searching and searching for the perfect song I could animate to. After doing some research (which I will post down below) I realized that music was most typically specifically composed for the explicit purpose of being animated to, either by the animator himself (it’s always “him,” UNTIL NOW) or by a close friend. I don’t really have any tools on hand to create music (though I’d certainly like to one day), and I’ve already exhausted all my music friend resources (they’re all tired of me asking them to MAKE MUSIC FOR ME RIGHT NOW because I’m going to make #SWEET ART), so I had to search Prelinger Archives for some tunes.

This search failed. I was exposed to a lot of different resources that I starred to my Favorites, but I will probably never use any of it. The recordings are too scratchy and muffled! They’re all blues! Or…they’re just bad!

Ultimately, I decided to dig through known favorites. This was initially difficult because though I listen to many different genres and know a lot of different bands (I’m really cool and knowledgeable), everything I listen to is sad. Yes, it’s all sad music. Chopin’s Nocturnes. Del Rey’s “Videogames.” Radiohead’s everything. It’s all sad(core). But I knew that for this animation, I wanted something exciting and textured and silly, because no one wants to watch a sad, abstract animation.

Eventually, I found a song by a new favorite artist, Jean-Jacques Perrey. Naturally, my favorite songs by him are his sad love songs, but he has an extensive experimental repertoire. I will be animating to his song “The Little Ships.”

audio visualizer: jean jacques-perrey’s “the little ships” from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.

Anyway. This is getting long-winded and aimless. Here are the animations that I will draw inspiration from this week:

Full video here


A lot of fine art, including experimental animation, can feel inaccessible or boring, but music is a universal language that can open non-artists and animators to receiving fine art. And whereas fine art can have an obscured intent, ambiguous to viewers without knowledge or interest in context, music intrinsically contains an inexpressible clarity of emotion and intent—it transcends language and knowledge and burrows straight into the heart.

Visually, I really love how ecstatic and frenetic the animations are, and how they are so wonderfully colorful and textural and abstract. “cNote,” in particular, is especially beautiful to me. On some level, nearly everyone has some form of synesthesia, and these animations really fulfill that primal desire for objective representation of abstraction—and in this case, that is between music/color/form.

I think what 17-year-old Virginia Woolf once said about music really captures why these films are so effective, why this combination of abstraction and music resonates so well with so many people:

After all we are a world of imitations; all the Arts that is to say imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see. Such is the eternal instinct in the human beast, to try & reproduce something of that majesty in paint marble or ink. Somehow ink tonight seems to me the least effectual method of all — & music the nearest to truth.

random thoughts about narrative in (stop motion) animation

I’m currently in my first ever stop motion class, and out of 15 weeks allotted for the class, 10 of them are devoted to the production of one final project.

That means that, at least two weeks from now, I will have to have a completed script and storyboard to put forth into action. And then I’ll work on the film for 10 weeks.

So far, I have found this to be a very daunting experience. I feel pressure from all aspects of creation—pressure to create an interesting narrative, pressure to make an interesting character, pressure to have the dexterity, nimbleness, and patience to create the sets and characters that will star in my hilarious, tragic, life-affirming stop-motion animation. And, on top of it all, there is the pressure to actually learn how to stop-motion animate.

I knew that if I didn’t start brainstorming early, I would inevitably descend into catatonia under the (admittedly self-imposed) stress. Over winter break, I took it upon myself to watch as many Vimeo Staff Pick and Short of the Week-featured stop motion films, trying to gather ideas for my upcoming film. This was ultimately fruitless on the idea front, though I was very entertained for a few weeks. I also collected a few favorite stop motion films and animators, which I will now share with all of you (and Tom) on the Internet, because my IRL friends don’t like to listen to me talk about this stuff.

The first film I fell in love with was “Benigni,” an eight-minute student film about a man’s friendship with his tumor. The narrative structure is nothing terribly special—the events are almost predictable—but wimhat makes the story so memorable are the characters and the oddly-specific details (like how the protagonist is a xylophone player). It’s a story told without dialogue, a tragic and funny film about friendship and loneliness. I think I’ve seen it five times so far.

Benigni from Elli Vuorinen on Vimeo.

Another film I loved was “Oh, Willy” by stop motion duo Marc and Emma. It’s 20 minutes long…and I actually only recently watched it all the way through. Aesthetically, it’s stunning—the film feels like a series of carefully-planned mise-en-scenes, a delicate and puffy world inhabited by delicate and puffy characters. I read in an interview that they made it all out of wool, and I’m considering doing that for my characters as well. The lighting is gorgeous and feels very filmic. Honestly, I almost feel like the story is secondary—there is so much emphasis on detail that I become visually enthralled by what’s on screen, forgetting to pay attention to the plot.

But the story is told without dialogue anyway, so I don’t really feel bogged down by plot-related details.

Oh Willy… from Marc and Emma on Vimeo.

Most of the films I watched contained no dialogue, relying instead on music, sound, and character animation to convey emotion and tell the story. And as an animation student, this was a particularly exciting revelation, because stop motion lip-sync seems incredibly hard to do.

But I began thinking about “Mary and Max,” a claymation film by Adam Elliot and a (comparatively) old favorite. What I love about Elliot’s film is his attention to idiosyncracies, like in “Benigni.” I really love films about weird people, and I really love weird details that describe weird people.

I started researching Adam Elliot and came across a few of his short films. His film “Harvie Krumpet” won the Oscar in 2004 and is delightful to watch. What I love most about this film (and “Mary and Max”) is the narration. It feels childlike, storybook-like, but it explores pretty dark and morbid events and emotions. And he gets around lip sync by having the narrator describe what is happening in the minds of the characters on screen as it relates to the narrator himself (like in “Uncle,” “Cousin,” or “Brother”). I sort of like the idea of an unobjective narrator.

I envy Elliot because he seems to have it all figured out. From his earliest shorts to his most recent feature film, there is a cohesive line of thought and visual style, a clear theme he explores in all his films. And I envy him because I’m still trying to figure it all out (can you tell?).

Finally, my latest inspiration is actually a 2D animation by Don Hertzfeldt. I saw his Oscar-nominated animation “World of Tomorrow” in theaters this past week, and, were I not with school acquaintances but rather alone in my bed in the dark at 3 am, I could have cried hot, heavy tears. It’s a beautiful, tragic, funny, life-affirming film—indeed, it’s everything I’d love to make in life. This film (and the interviews with Don Hertzfeldt I subsequently devoured) is what fully convinced me of my love for narrative structure within experimental animation.

The animation itself is simplistic. They are stick characters. There is no clear ground, no clear dimensionality. And there are no elaborate sets, unique angles, delicious details. Whereas “Oh, Willy” felt carefully beautiful, “World of Tomorrow” in its animated state felt more like a vessel for the story.

Hertzfeldt said in an interview that above all is story. He refines and refines the story and creates the animation based around the story. I know that sometimes when I’m animating or creating something, I find myself distracted by the visuals and, at the end, regretting my lack of interest in refining the story. My indecisiveness prevents me from ever creating anything too specific (because I can never figure it all out by the due date), and on top of that, I am enchanted by the visually nebulous. But I always regret it in the end, and I really admire what Hertzfeldt does, so I think I will try out his way of doing things.

WORLD OF TOMORROW from don hertzfeldt on Vimeo.

In all aspects of my life, I find myself frequently flitting back and forth from one camp of thought to another, unable to decidedly place my foot in one argument without envying the presumed resolution of other side. Lately, what I thought was my preference for abstract animation has come into competition with a preference for story, a realization that beauty without narrative or meaning feels hollow. But, I don’t know. I’m starting to think that my definition of “narrative” needs to expand, and that abstraction and narrative do not have to be mutually exclusive.

The other day, my internship supervisor said to me—after showing us interns a series of highly experimental films (Maya Deren, anyone?)—that a narrative is simply the repetition of a character. So, you can indeed have experimental narrative films. If there is something that the audience can identify, then it is a narrative.

This seems like a pretty intuitive concept, but I really hadn’t consciously realized this until my supervisor offhandedly made that comment. So what separates narrative from experimental, then? Is it purely aesthetics? Abstraction? Is there a difference at all?

I’m still not sure, and I don’t think I really care anymore.

I think I am most drawn to experimental animation because it’s different. When I first started exploring experimental animation, I found myself calling anything different or weird-looking experimental. And I felt cooler for telling people that my primary focus at school was in “experimental animation—you know, animation as a fine art.” And I rejected popular animations on TV in favor of independently-produced animations on Vimeo.

But I’m beginning to realize that the “surprise” factor can manifest in either the visual style or the narrative. It’s just harder, I think, to write a surprising story. And I’ve begun to realize that my natural aversion to anything remotely cliche has paralyzed me from creating what I really want to create.

But I’m trying to make amends. I’ve been dipping in and out of Robert McKee’s “Story” for the last month or so, and it’s been immensely helpful at putting into words what nearly all movie-goers intuitively understand but cannot apply themselves. He focuses on feature films, though, and I think my preferences are more tailored towards short films.

I don’t necessarily have a specific project in mind that I can complete as a result of this analysis/incoherent blob of words, but I think that these thoughts could be applicable to my final film. I’m interested in how narrative can function within experimental art and animation, to see how they may detract from or augment one another.

W/r/t my stop motion animation, yes I’ve written an outline, yes I’ve created a character, no I haven’t done a storyboard/script yet. But it’s coming along.

手水 (a 16mm film)

Using 16mm clear leader film and a couple of sharpies, I attempted to do some drawn on film animation! The actual drawing was pretty fun, though my sharpies were too fat to do any serious detail. The filming portion was difficult and took a far longer than I thought it would…because I hadn’t left any space at the beginning and end of the film and had to splice more on top of it. (Well, a classmate did it for me, so I guess I’m deeply indebted to him and his nimble fingers.)

I captured the film with a digital camera as it was running through a projector. The camera was set on a tripod aimed up at the screen, so the original footage is warped. Also, I’m not entirely sure the film is in focus. I tried to fix the warped effect in post, but it looks a little glitchy. Ah, well.

I wanted to incorporate some recognizable figures/forms, just because the nature of this medium is so abstract, and I tried to augment the recognizability of these objects with sound. So the Chinese character 手 means “hand,” and the character 水 means “water.” I was sort of going for the idea of “stream of consciousness,” without doing a direct translation, but I just looked up if 手水 together meant anything in Chinese, and apparently it’s an archaic form of “latrine.” So that’s fun, and totally intentional.

Anyway! I had fun with this, and I may try to do a scratch test in the future. (Though, again, capturing it all digitally was kind of a hassle. We shall see!)

手水 (16mm film) from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.

drawn on film

For my very first assignment, I wanted to explore drawn-on-film animation. A peer gave me a bunch of 16mm film, both clear and black (don’t know the proper terms), and I’m going to have a go with it.

I was introduced to drawn-on-film animation through Norman McLaren. Though, at the time, I wasn’t aware of his technique.

Dots from National Film Board of Canada on Vimeo.

Serenal from National Film Board of Canada on Vimeo.

After researching Norman McLaren a bit, I came across a few contemporary animators who are using the same drawn-on-film technique. One of my favorites is Steven Woloshen’s “Crossing Victoria.”

Crossing Victoria from steven Woloshen on Vimeo.

I really love how, in both Woloshen and McLaren’s animation, the visuals are intrinsically tied with the music or sound, and both heighten the effect of the other. I particularly love how improvisational and playful they feel. And I’m excited to see what sorts of sound or music I can use in tandem with whatever the resulting animation looks like.

Another favorite is Koji Yamamura’s animation created with NFB’s Norman McLaren app. It’s not strictly drawn-on-film but rather drawn-on-iPad. I really love how there are recognizable objects rendered abstract, and I love how he used words (five/fire/fish) that looked visually similar but are meaningfully unrelated. I think he wanted to use something concrete, something recognizable as a jumping-point for more abstract animation. After all, it can be difficult for viewers to enjoy something that has absolutely no root in objective reality. (Or, at least, that’s something I’ve read in an essay, I think.)

Five Fire Fish by Koji Yamamura – McLaren’s Workshop App from National Film Board of Canada on Vimeo.

Finally, a contemporary example of drawn-on-film is this music video, first shot on 16mm then physically painted over. I really love all the colors in this film and how the animation enhances the original film.

Strange Babes – Come Back Around from Kristofski on Vimeo.

I’m still not sure what I’m gonna do with my animation, but I think I will start with the clear leader and see where it takes me!

introduction

I intend for this blog to act as a digital notebook to accompany my research in the art of experimental animation. I want to have a place to record my thoughts and document my process, and I also want to be able to post videos that support my ideas. (And you can’t do that in a lonely Word doc.) Thus, this blog is born!

I got the book “Experimental Animation” by Robert Russett and Cecile Starr from the library, so I guess I’ll be using that as a guidebook for my explorations.

 

COOL.