Anatomy of a Shot: 'Spirited Away'; Staging of the balcony meal and use of 'Ma!'

A big part of my teaching work is trying to get students to break down the animation, composition and timing of well known, and not so well known, performance animation from around the world. Whether it is a short cartoon, in-game or a feature film, you can learn so much from studying the work of others.

This post breaks down a shot to show the rhythm created by combining thoughtful staging, production design, strong key-frames and character performance. It uses the environment as a method of framing parts of the scene and also as a way to bring the characters together.

The example is Studio Ghibli's 2001 film 'Spirited Away', directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

The scene is a peaceful interaction between sen and Lin after a crazy day at the bath house.

Exterior Wide Establishing shot

Long shot

...Lin walks in carrying steamed buns...

Top railing follows rule of thirds

Lin's face framed by railings

Lighting & doorway also frame Lin

Sen is constricted into a corner of a frame...

However, Sen is now part of Lin's silhouette...a sign that they are growing closer together...

Lin passes food to Sen THROUGH the railings...

Rather than being a passive object throughout the scene the railings become an integral part of the performance from this point; the characters reaching through, rest arms on them and even dangling their legs through them.

This makes a visually mundane scene way more appealing and dynamic, without compromising the pace of the performance to accomplish this.

shows reaching out & a desire to give comfort.

As Sen joins in…

They strike new poses..

Ma! Lin is inclined towards Sen, Sen is more relaxed…

Miyazaki

‘…non-stop action … it's just busyness. but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension.’

‘We have a word for that in Japanese. It's called ma. Emptiness.’

Sen now commands the negative space…The scene becomes hers again…

(This towel exists to fill this gap, not distracting)

Reverse angle, double lighting change and more Ma!

The lighting change here is particularly interesting as it puts the audience in the scene. As the lights go out behind us; our eyes adjust to the night scene and the view over the water becomes visible.

The rest of the scene plays out...

Scenes like this make my day!

Character Mash-up - Silhouettes, Mark Making and the power of blind ink-blot creation.

Epiphany; looking at a sketchbook belonging to Joanna Quinn and realising that every mark made on the paper was actually quite beautiful.

Joanna Quinn mark making.

Problem; how to get a room full of students to have that moment. Everyone hears the principles of character design; silhouettes, shape hierarchy, variance, reinforcement, negative space, forceful shapes (Mike Mattesi), etc. But the power of a good mark over a bad one can make a drawing powerful and lift it above the weaker ones; even if they are all using these principles.

The point of the following exercise was to give them marks; ink blots scanned into Photoshop, and have them create characters from them. That way they CANNOT draw flat, boring lines of regular thickness and NO energy. Dynamic marks are built into the workshop. Interesting marks >> interesting character.

Get this; when making several sheets of ink marks I found that I got much better results if I worked with my eyes shut and thought about the brush pressure.

Most of my workshops are designed to channel students towards creating characters that they would never consider creating, using shapes forms and marks that they have never used before.

Getting a creative out of their comfort zone is a major part of this job and success at that usually leads to a much stronger ideas. With an understanding of dynamic shapes and forms students will create much more visually dynamic characters.

Supremely satisfying moment with the mouse character above. One student wanted to bail out at the start and go home to draw the characters using a Cintiq. HaHaHa...no chance!

His resulting characters came as a massive (positive) surprise to him. I love moments like that! 

My own example to kick of the workshop.

It is important to remember as well that these workshops are for mixed classes of traditional animation, digital animation, stop motion and CGI games students. Some of the have a real resistance to 'arty' techniques so combining ink blots and Photoshop this way is a very effective technique to break down any walls of resistance.

The following weeks workshop allowed the class to detail each others designs using the principles of volumetric curves to create form.

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

Next up; animation for these silhouettes as well...

Exquisite Corpse Animation preparation with After Effects and the Duik plug-in.

Next up for the Exquisite Corpse characters is Animation.

Not too surprising for an animation lecturer really.

I am getting ready to make an animated version of one of my own characters. I'm going for After Effects and a plug-in called Duik;  https://rainboxprod.coop/en/tools/duik/ to make the rigging quicker.

I'll post results as they happen but for now here is the character tidied up ready to be rigged...

When this is up and running it will form the basis of some hopefully-simple instructions for the students to follow. Then we can make GIF's of future workshop characters.

Exquisite Corpse character workshops continues...

After the success of my Exquisite Corpse workshop for Intervention Day on Halloween 2017; I have used the same workshop for Offer Holder Days, Open Days and Time-to-Connect Days here at Staffordshire University Animation Dept. Basically its a collage character creation task using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Bridge and four and a half Gigabytes of images. Most of the images come from the Flickr account of The Biodiversity Heritage Library.

 https://www.flickr.com/people/biodivlibrary/

Ages of participants vary; most were around 18 but some of the visitors were as young as 12. Everyone got to grips with the concept pretty quickly, had fun with the workshop and these are some examples of the work produced...