Animation Unlimited: Innovative Short Films since 1940 (2004) - Liz Faber and Helen Walters
Lev Yilmaz: Tales of Mere Existence: Protégé (2000): "The idea was to tell these seemingly simple stories as matter of factly as I could...explains how our unidentified hero used to copy people he admired as he grew up. So he 'became' the skate boarder Mike, the metal-head Ken, and Dave from art college before finally becoming himself. 'I suppose I kind of like the thought of just being myself, but I'm still afraid I'm going to find out I'm a dick,' he concludes wryly" (p.146)
Richard Kenworthy/Shynola: The Littlest Robo (1999)
Perspective of characters - e.g. driving towards sunPassing of time - e.g. clouds; sky; night to day
Pull focus - e.g. Waking up in the morning
Camera angles; perspectives - e.g. hammering; reaching hand
Use/creation of shadows - e.g. man walking
Robot = giving life to the inanimate; object - e.g. creating of emotions - love; nurturing 'mother' figure
Video game - affection, "your father"/"your mother" - backwards and forwards
Creation of suspense
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| Above and below: Stills from Kenworthy's The Littlest Robo (1999) |
Insert Silence (Amit Pitaru & James Paterson): Aug 16th (2001); to "play animation as if it were music"
Music: Just Plain Scared - The Big Lazy (Stephen Ulrich, Paul Dugan, Tamir Muskat)
Tomioka Satoshi: Sink (1999); Colour; timing of movement to music; music; camera angles and perspectives (e.g. shot of divers before fall - camera moves along row)
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| A still from Satoshi's Sink (1999) |
Jan Svankmajer - The Complete short Films: (1964-1992) - BFI (2007):
Objects shaped into human like figure (side on view) - kitchen utensils/stationary/food - fighting; demolishing; eating and regurgitating each other; mashing; chopping; etc...Figures become more and more human like as they are broken down to smaller parts - eventually to clay; "...sublime and ridiculous allegory through making a man, a figure out of the objects the man uses...So you have this play between the inanimate world; the objects; and the natural world too"
"In my films people are often replaced by objects - which have always seemed more permanent and more exciting through their latent content; their memory. In the films I've always tried to uncover this content, to listen to the objects and decipher their narration...to let objects speak for themselves"
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Above and below; stills from Svankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue Part I (1982) |
The Last Trick (1964); Jabberwocky (1971);
"...discredit the things of reality"
"...restricted himself to fairly obvious accessible kitchen objects, to make the marvelous out of them by bringing them together in unusual combinations - the surrealist magic lies within reach"
Use of natural objects e.g. objects from first century natural historians cabinets; stones, butterflies, skeletons, etc.
Encyclopedic collecting - alphabetical organisation, and therefore many differing types of species within a single alphabetical category (drawer)
Dialectical thinking - the world is a total flux; always moving; interpenetration of opposites; change; the shifting between and crossing over of dreams and reality
"...dualism...a philosophical proposition...Is man a machine? Is man to be understood scientifically as a construct of different bits...can we take out a heart and replace it, or a kidney...is man to be assembled in that way...or on the other hand isn't man something integral, harmonious, organic?..."
"...and in the film I think it's done most lyrically with the two figures, the male and female, meshing together and forming eventually in their violent contact a...very exhilarating, thrilling mass of pure clay. Which is in a sense the most negative, the least inspiring substance; but is also implicitly the ground of everything, the coming together of all opposites..."
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Above and below; stills from Svankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue II (1982) |
Jabberwocky (1971); "...closest to surrealism...very close to the surrealist idea about the peculiar value and properties of childhood...and how in childhood, the imagination has full reign; it doesn't actually know any boundaries...there may be material boundaries...but he has complete freedom to imagine another existence, another world, another life".
"I don't actually animate objects, I coerce their inner life out of them".
"The sense of touch perceives only form, the toucher interprets the form according to their desires. Despite all our efforts to identify an object by touch, we are at the service of our imagination"
Dimensions of Dialogue - Part III Exhausting (1983); Sound effects; Background sound; Extreme close-ups; Robust, vigorous, violent editing
"I have given up trying to recreate a real reflection of life in my films. In the end, I've trod the path of objective description and optical analogy as a way of presenting ones mobile swamp of memories"
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Above and below; stills from Svankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue III (1983) |
The Quay Brothers:
A Reader in Animation Studies - Jayne Pilling (ed.)
This Unnameable Little Broom (Epic of Gilgamesh) (1985):
- Camera movement; jerky, fast paced etc; while also slowed pauses.
- Close up shots - often not even of full figure, just a section or of a movement e.g. bike wheel getting caught; hand reaching into bag, hands reaching for ice, etc.
- Shadows of fluttering wings - seen (and heard) first before full figure is seen [interesting way to introduce a character/object to a scene] (See clip 2:40 - 3:20)
- Camera pans, while also moving in a separate direction
- Fading in/out
- Pull focus
- Materials used, e.g. fabric
- Camera angles; shallow depth of field (e.g. among 'trees' + another example of an interesting use of materials)
"Low lighting created night by the film convention of shadowed upper walls. Black velvet created a pure midnight at both ends of a three-sides set made to appear in the film as a tunnel-box. The set, about three-feet long, three-feet high, two-feet deep was constructed to shoot close-ups from different angles. the film became, in the words of the Quays, 'an entirely hermetic universe literally suspended out of time in a black void...a cruel fairy tale feel'" (p. 28) (Gilgamesh, 1985)
Influences: European puppet theatre; European folklore
"The original Epic of Gilgamesh...The work's planes, of reality clothed in the appearance of primitive geography...'vivid and sophisticated indirections', 'narrative compulsions' and 'subtle notions of time' became part-tales that 'alternated between grotesque and banal' It was these elements of the folklore to which the Quays gravitated" (p. 29)
[style, notions, themes] "...sources that had re-defined post-war European art animation. The Quays' style - 'orthopedic baroque' in their words - was a combination of opposites; lyric/grotesque, crude/elegant, and banal/ethereal (a hybrid principle worked out by earlier polish graphic artists)" (p. 33)
[cinematography; camera angles, movement, etc] Svankmajer's Punch and Judy - "Fairground music, extreme camera angles, aggressive pace, nails that pierce the body and bloody flesh juxtaposed with old textured toys, reappeared in Gilgamesh with disjointing techniques: extreme camera angles, 180-degree reversals, impossible camera positions, whip-pans, extreme close ups, the camera sideways on the floor then rotated up" (p. 33)
[choice and type of use and portrayal of objects] "Sex and power in Gilgamesh are not, however, played out along a female/male axis, but along a child/adult axis. A mixed-size scale suspends Gilgamesh between child and adult. Dandelion, scissors, an ice-cube, tongs, cricket and a tape-measure show Gilgamesh to be a miniature. But his quadricycle, red vest and feathered hat, blanket, cutlery...are to scale so that with his over-sized head, he looks like a toddler. However the woman-table, tennis rackets, wires and trap door are miniaturized, which makes him look like an adult" (p. 33)
The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984):
- Music as narrative
- Camera zooms quickly (jerkily) in, then pans slowly down to scene
- Playing with disappearance and reappearance of objects (notion of off-screen space)
- Illusions; pictures; background; patters; textures
- Reflections; e.g. in glass ball. Light and dark
- Shadows; multiple and from multiple angles (2, 3?) e.g. blocks, pins, ball in play room, objects protruding from walls.
- Camera angles; e.g. shot from above - contained spider.
- movements both smooth and jerky; long pauses effective.
- Sound effects alongside music e.g. tram ('ding', moving tram) + only seeing top of tram move through 'windows' in scene
- Lighting e.g. flickering of light on face of doll (on clay ball?)
- Use of text; e.g. when guessing object
Street of Crocodiles (1986):
- A criss-cross of string and wire
- 'Explorer' of 'zone'
- Rubber band, dust, screws; "...all those things that would be sort of passed by but which we wanted to give a kind of poetic ascendancy to the everyday"
- Camera moving past objects in scene
- Use of shadow
- Use of lighting
- Setting - industrial, piping, wires, strings, dirty glass, dust, wood, antique objects, etc.
