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MillimeterSlow Motion Heroes: Demand Is Steady for Cel, Stop Motion, and Mixed Media Animators
Mar 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
Nowhere is the medium more the message than in the world of TV commercials, where choosing the right creative technique can often make or break a campaign. While CGI is the most obvious agent of change in TV commercials, some artists and creatives report an anti-CGI backlash.
In this view, the most creative work is still being done with traditional methods, or through mixed media. As director John Lindauer, who works out of Pavlov Productions, Culver City, explains, "Computers can now completely take care of the reality stuff, and that means other techniques no longer have to. As a result, those of use who do mixed media work have more freedom."
That's not to say computers aren't infiltrating such projects-they are frequently used to touch up, composite, or manipulate the images. But there remains a healthy job market for "traditional animation stylists," in the words of pencil animator Bill Plympton, a hero in the world of animation festivals, who is repped for commercial work out of Acme Filmworks. Plympton is an unapologetic pen and paper animator, a gatekeeper for the "the old-fashioned way."
"There is no question we're getting more work than we've had in the past," says Ron Diamond, founder and president of Acme, a company with a strong cel, pencil, and mixed media niche. "We always have five or six commercials in production at any given time. There is plenty of demand for more traditional techniques, and often, ad agencies will come looking for a particular artist whose drawing style is unique or well known."
Much of the commercial work such directors are doing these days is experimental and sought by agencies specifically because it looks so "un-CGI-like," and because, unlike most CGI spots, the director is often the main artist. Some do use digital tools, but rarely to create images, only to manipulate them.
"In my case, I have an experimental film background, and that is true of many like me," says director Chel White of Curious Pictures, San Francisco. "That helps us when we create commercials, because we are continually seeking new techniques, new visual approaches. Those trained as computer animators tend not to experiment as much, and only within the computer's capabilities."
Here's a look at how and why these three animators-White, Lindauer and Plympton-continue to ply their craft through traditional means.
Bill Plympton, Acme Filmworks Plympton is a color-pencil specialist and well known filmmaker who creates three or four spots a year for Acme clients, some of whom request his services specifically after seeing one of his animated films. An Oregon State Lottery commercial he created a few years ago, for example, was conceptually taken directly from his short film One of Those Days, and that was hardly the first time.
"A lot of agencies want a warm, human look for the spot, and you can do that better with pencil than computer," he says. Indeed, agency McCann/Erickson, New York, on behalf of client AT&T, specifically requested Plympton last year for a hand-drawn series of spots. Alternating between his New York home and Acme's Los Angeles headquarters, Plympton can do the majority of such work at his kitchen table or a small Acme light table, lugging around only his pencils and a pad of paper. He recently finished two similar 15-second sponsor promos for 7-11 to air on PBS with the show Wishbone, which he finished in less than a month.
"The client sends me their rough version of storyboards for the promos, and I then redo the boards in my style," he explains. "Once that is approved, we create an animatic, which is simple because all we need to do is add sound to my simple versions of the drawings. We might make some changes at that point to improve timing, and when the animatic is approved, we do a rough pencil test, which is just the full animation without the color and as close to the finished sound as we can get; then, we'll do a color model. Sometimes, a second pencil test will follow to show changes. If that's O.K., we go ahead and do a finish."
Acme will often shoot Plympton's drawings and much of its cel work with its Oxberry camera onto 35mm film, although for some projects, including the 7-11 pieces, they have lately taken to scanning the artwork into a Macintosh G3 computer with a large, flatbed Umax scanner. In such cases, the company now assembles the images in the Mac, using Adobe After Effects, does the editing finish on an Avid, and transfers the file via Exabyte or Jaz drives to D-1. The piece can then be shipped to the client.
"We've taken to using the computer to finish work like Bill's lately because, with light backgrounds, it can balance the images better, avoiding hot or dark spots that you get with film," says Diamond. "Darker images, however, we still usually shoot with the camera and manipulate with telecine."
For more ambitious cel projects, such as the recent :30 "G-Police" Acme director Peter Chung created for Sony Playstation/Psygnosis, Acme creates the animation exactly the way traditional cel-animated TV shows are made: Either hand-drawing and painting cels at Acme's offices or overseas. In the case of the "G-Police" spot, Chung traveled to Korea and supervised the drawings, laid the commercial out and supervised the photography process, which was done conventionally at DR Movies in Seoul, Korea.
Chel White, Curious Pictures White is well known for the Xerography technique, which is essentially the art of using photocopied images collage-style on film. But he is adept at most mixed media forms, including cutout work and stop motion, and has also created commercials using image projections, including a 1995 Coors beer ad for which he talked the agency into letting him film real, giant projections of stick figures on real buildings, rather than creating a CGI, composite shot, as originally conceived.
"Except for some color correction at the end, almost that entire commercial was done in camera," he says. "It worked better than CGI because you got all the nuance that you would have to spend days trying to create in a computer, or doing without. I've done several things that appear to have a lot of compositing going on but are, in fact, done completely in camera." There are so few commercial artists adept at these forms, he says, that lately, "I usually find myself bidding for jobs against the same two or three guys."
White recently created three 30-second commercials for U.S. Postal Service priority mail, two of which included mixed media work. One involved projecting stock footage of familiar New York and L.A. landmarks on scratched film ("I actually ran the film over in my car to make it look worn out," he says) onto actual Federal Express, UPS and Post Office boxes stacked and shaped to vaguely resemble the city skylines. The piece did include some Quantel Henry composite work to make trucks from the three services drive through the scene, but the key to the commercial's effectiveness is the jumpy, old film projected onto the "box landscape."
A second version was done almost completely with paper, except for a computer-added shadow and puff of dust, showing those same landmarks on a moving map of the U.S. "We just made a big map and laid it out on a cylinder that was about six feet in diameter, and rotated it toward the camera to give the impression viewers were traveling across the landscape," he explains. "The idea was to create the look of an old '50s postcard, and this method did that better than a computer could."
After doing previous commercials for Ortho bug spray using paper and photo cutouts that were then composited digitally, White did another one last year, called "Lock and Load," that was done almost all in camera, using tabletop setups of various photographs, shot with a long lens to give them a feeling of depth and dimension. "We'd wiggle the picture every third frame or so to make it seem loose, as though it was moving around," he says. "Of all the Ortho spots I did, I like that one the best. It looked more organic."
John Lindauer, Pavlov Productions
As a child, Lindauer caught the mixed media bug watching simple, cutout animation done by Monty Python's Terry Gilliam. He's done stop motion, cel and pin screen animation, among other things, in recent years. He also paid homage to Gilliam with a 1996 anti-drug PSA using cutouts that exactly mimicked the Python animation, although he admits, unlike Gilliam, to manipulating them in a Macintosh 85100-180 computer: "The first time I ever used a computer myself for animation, rather than directing someone else to do it." But before scanning them into the Mac, he took photographs of "junk lying around my house and family photographs" and cut them by hand.
Although he was "uninterested" in using computers early in his career, Lindauer now says they "can play a role in mixed media," but suggests that role should be in manipulating images crafted by hand.
A recent example is a 20-second promo called "Night Fishing," in which a living fish hook creature dives off a bridge to catch a fish for a new MTV animation network called Loco-Motion. That piece combined cutout photo manipulation with computer composition to create what Lindauer calls "simulated stop motion."
"That piece is a real pastiche in terms of technique," he says. "There is a little metal guy in it that I animated the way one would do stop-motion, but instead of shooting it onto film, we shot onto a series of photographs I had taken: The background is the inside of my house, and there is also a photo of a beautiful sky. What we used the computer for was to layer the elements together and use tools found in After Effects to create an image that looks like real stop motion. Combining techniques allowed me to use textures that are only found in nature or hand-made, and yet, also have the ability to control the environment I was placing them in."
Lindauer points out that the technique also allowed him to avoid the cost of renting a motion-control camera, large crew, and telecine without sacrificing the organic, stop-motion look the piece required.
Lindauer is also one of a handful of artists to utilize pin screen techniques, and in fact, has a 600-pound pin screen apparatus at home that "a friend and I built a few years ago, made out of industrial steel, with 186,000 pins in it." Such animation, which he last used in 1996 for an award-winning cable commercial for AICPA, is "basically stop motion," he says. "It's just like moving clay, except you push pins instead."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
