Scriptwriter, artistic director, animated film director, artist, producer and university teacher. He was born on 14 January in Sołtysy near Wieluń. He earned his degree from the Painting and Graphic Arts Department of Krakow Academy of Fine Arts (1967). He was a student of the same Animated Film Studio that he began to run in 1981. Jerzy Kucia has taught at a number of film schools including those in Vancouver, London and Mumbai. He is also a graphic artist. Since 1970 he has been associated with the Animated Film Studio and in 1992 he started to produce his own films. Professor Kucia co-organizes and runs the International Animated Film Workshops in Krakow. In 1994 – 1997 he was the Vice-president of Association Internationale du Film d’Animation (ASIFA). Jerzy Kucia has won many awards, which include the First Prize of the Wiosna Opolska Festival (1970), the Award of the City of Krakow (1982), the First Degree Award of the Minister of Culture and Arts in Animation (1985), Krakow’s Governor Award for artistic achievement in animation and educational activity (1993), MTV Bronze Award (1994), the Prize of the Holland Animation Film Festival in Utrecht (1996), the Award of the City of Krakow for achievement in culture promotion (1996), the Special Golden Dinosaur for the ability to combine artistic and pedagogical activity awarded at the Etiuda International Film Festival in Krakow (2003) and numerous festival prizes.
Author: Linda Mayoux
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David Lynch
Six Figures Getting Sick (Six Times)[edit]
Main article: Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1966). Originally untitled, “Six Men Getting Sick” is a one-minute color animated film that consists of six loops shown on a sculptured screen of three human-shaped figures (based on casts of Lynch’s own head as done by Jack Fisk) that intentionally distorted the film[1]. Lynch’s animation depicted six people getting sick: their stomachs grew and their heads would catch fire.
Lynch made this film during his second year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. The school held an experimental painting and sculpture exhibit every year and Lynch entered his work in the Spring of 1966. The animated film was shown on “an Erector-set rig on top of the projector so that it would take the finished film through the projector, way up to the ceiling and then back down, so the film would keep going continuously in a loop. And then I hung the sculptured screen and moved the projector back till just what I wanted was on the screen and the rest fell back far enough to disappear” (Chris Rodley, editor of Lynch on Lynch). Lynch showed the whole thing with the sound of a siren as accompaniment. The film cost $200 and was not intended to have any successors. It was merely an experiment on Lynch’s part because he wanted to see his paintings move.
The Alphabet
The Alphabet (1968) combines animation and live action and goes for four minutes. It has a simple narrative structure relating a symbolically rendered expression of a fear of learning. The idea for The Alphabet came from Lynch’s wife, Peggy Lentz, a painter whose niece, according to Lynch in Chris Rodley’s Lynch on Lynch book, “was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. So that’s sort of what started The Alphabet going.” Based on the merits of this short film, Lynch was awarded an American Film Institute production grant and became a minor celebrity.
Ghost of Love
Moby ‘Shot in the Back of the Head’
I touch a Red Button Man
Six Figures Getting Sick 1966
The Grandmother (1970, 33 minutes).
The short film combines live action and animation. The story revolves around a boy who grows a grandmother to escape neglect and abuse from his parents. It is mostly silent with only occasional vocal outbursts of gibberish and soundtrack cues used to convey story.
The music in the film was provided by a local group known as Tractor, and marked the first time Lynch would work with Alan Splet, who was recommended to the filmmaker by the soundman of The Alphabet. Initially, Lynch and Splet intended to use a collection of sound effects records for the film, but after going through them all they found that none of them were useful. So, Lynch and Splet took sixty-three days to make and record their own sound effects.
The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988, 26 minutes)
Slapstick, made for French television as part of the series The French as Seen by… by French magazine Figaro. It stars Harry Dean Stanton, Frederic Golchan and Jack Nance.
Lumière: Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1996, 52 seconds)
Originally included as a segment in the 1995 film Lumière et compagnie. Forty acclaimed directors created works using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière brothers.
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Jonathon Hodgson
Jonathan Hodgson is an internationally renowned animation director based in London, he has twice won BAFTAs for Best Short British Animation in 2000 and 2019. He studied animation at Liverpool Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. After spending 25 years directing commercials he moved to academia, setting up and leading the Animation degree at Middlesex University where he combines teaching with making personal films. He is the animation director of Wonderland: The Trouble with Love and Sex, the first full length animated documentary on British TV.
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William Kentridge
William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds’ screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
See more information on Tate Gallery websiteAnimator William Kentridge animates with charcoal on paper, leaving traces of each drawing behind as the movement progresses. These traces lend a depth to the image as well as the time of the animation. They also serve a narrative purpose. Kentridge’s early animations were copied from early Soviet films, placed in the Apartheid, South African context. Apartheid was a system predicated on the exploitation of black South African labour in the interests of white South African society. Kentridge uses his animation to express his feelings of guilt for being a white male with inherited wealth and status as well as his personal fantasies of acceptance and forgiveness. The layered shadows of previous drawings that haunt his animations are ghostly reminders of the time that each drawing took to make. Animation here serves as a kind of penance.
Working process
Examples of charcoal animation
Evocative charcoal drawings of Johannesburg. Has detailed historical overview, but the images could speak for themselves. -
Synaesthesia
“Synaesthesia: From Greek syn (together) and aisthesis (perception). Meaning “joined perception.” Synesthesia is a condition in which one sense (for example, hearing) is
simultaneously perceived as if by one or more additional senses (such as sight). Another form of synesthesia joins objects such as letters, shapes, numbers or people’s names with a sensory perception such as smell, color or flavor. It can affect all of the senses. Four percent of the population, when seeing number five, also see color red. Or hear a C-sharp when seeing blue. Or even associate orange with Tuesdays. This neurologically-based condition is called synesthesia in which people involuntarily link one sensory perception
to another. “ Darya L. Zabelina Ph.D, Psychology Today (n.d)But the associations are fixed for any one person. And are automatic. Helps memory. But can it limit imagination and creativity through limiting flexibility of possible associations.
Synaesthetic associations vary between people. This variability offers interesting possibilities for widening human experience.
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Seasonal music
Spring
Summer
Autumn
Winter
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Research 2.4 Bouncing Balls
Types of Ball
Physics of Ball Motion
Animations
Bouncing Balls Adobe Animate Motion Tween
Jazza Adobe Animate motion tweened bouncing ball and curve path. Aaron Blaise TPPaint Frame by Frame. Exaggerated squash and stretch. Keeps straight line from impact. Redraws up bounce instead of duolicating and reversing to stop things being mechanical. Tv paint
Frame by FrameTV Paint Frame by Frame Simple UpdDown Bounce TVPaint FbF Horizontal Bounce TV Paint FbF Complex perspective bounce -
Principles 3
figure drawing
Animation principles
animation process
Animation is a process and the malleability of time is its primary material.
‘Time is what prevents everything from being present all at once’ Henri Bergson. The animator seeks to control at what pace, rhythm and direction things appear.
“What happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame” Norman McLaren, Computer Animation
It is not the image, drawing or shape of each frame that matters in animation, rather it is the difference between the frames that generates the illusion of movement in animation.It is the animator’s ability to control and play with these intervals between frames that matters. It is important to think in terms of intervals, rates of change and flux, rather than thinking in terms of still images or compositions.
Key Resources
- You Tube
- OCA Moving Image 1: Animation
- Howard Wimshurst YouTube channel and tutored courses on Animator Guild
- Proko – A channel which specializes in teaching observational figure drawing.
- FilmMaker IQ – So much of Animation is linked to Film Making. This channel is a fantastic resource for film makers of all kinds.
- Striving for animation – for those who are specifically focused at working in the Japanese Anime industry, this channel gives excellent advice and training.
BOOKS
- Animator’s survival kit – Widely considered to be the cornerstone book for animators
- The Illusion of Life – This covers the principles of animation in a lot of depth as well as being a valuable insight into classic Disney-style animation and drawing.
- Drawn to Life – Another good book for learning animation and drawing
- Framed Ink – A fantastic book on dynamic composition
- Framed Perspective – A lot of people get hung up on perspective. If you are one of them, this book explains it very well and gets pretty advanced in book 2.
- Force: Dynamic life drawing for animators – This book helps you to understand gesture – getting energy into your drawings!
- Directing the Story – Highly recommended. Explains very simply how to tell a story with drawings – it shows you that you don’t need to have mad drawing skills to be able to convey a compelling story.
- Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain – For breaking bad drawing habits and learning to draw what you see.
- Atlas of the Human Anatomy – contains good pictures and diagrams if you want a deep dive into anatomy and proportions.
- Color and Light – an inspiring book which teaches all about colour and lighting for artists.
Animation techniques
Boil
In traditional animation when an object, character or scene is at rest it is not still or motionless, it ‘boils’. Boiling is the term used to describe an animated effect in which the outlines or surface of an otherwise still character or object are made to wiggle or quiver in drawn animation. This is achieved by the looping together of several tracings of the same image (usually between 3 to 8 drawings). Boiling movement is used to sustain the illusion of movement in the animation overall and provide the impression of life or liveliness.
Questions about boil
- What ‘boil’ technique is used? Why do the lines move and what elements, if any are allowed to be still?
- Does the pace of the boil emanate throughout?
- What emotional or narrative purpose does the use of boiling serve? Does it make for a more lifelike effect or is the boil deployed humorously?
Frame rate
It is most common in animation to draw on twos, this is both because drawing on ones is double the amount of work and because working with twos lends a smoother appearance to slower actions, avoiding unnecessary jitter that can accompany shooting on ones. It is generally thought that working on twos adds a particular liveliness to a fast action rather than working on ones, which can make an action appear more leaden.
Cycle, loops and layers
Cycles can loop, oscillate, or even appear to be stationary. The use of cycles is often motivated by economy because it saves on drawing time. But the type of cycle that you use also make up the meaning of your film.
Looped cycles are most commonly employed on particular layers within a frame. Sergei Eisenstein described this layered looping within a frame as ‘vertical montage’:
“The simultaneous movement of a number of motifs advances through a succession of sequences, each motif having its own rate of compositional progressions, while being at the same time inseparable from the overall compositional progression as a whole” Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein Volume 2: Towards a Theory of Montage (London: BFI Publishing, 1991)- ‘Dumbland’ (2000), David Lynch purposely used cycles of animation to represent the breakdown of social structures depicted in his film.
- Francis Alÿs, Jordan Wolfson and Owen Land work extensively using loops to communicate meaning.
- Katie Dove’s Luna, 2013 https://vimeo.com/81492504
Eye trace
All animation is an exercise in applying the principle of ‘eye trace’. This is a principle of film- making in general but one that is essential for the illusion of animated movement to work. ‘In The Blink of an Eye’ by Walter Murch, (1995) sets out the principle that the viewer’s eyes will focus on a particular position on the screen and editors exploit this to allow less jarring edit when one shot follows another by ensuring that the action or image is located in the same part of the screen.This is also known as ‘registration’ in animation. A keen awareness of eye-trace allows the animator to play with the audience’s expectations and surprise them. The registration protocol was developed for hand-drawn animation to ensure that each subsequent drawing uses the same co-ordinates so that the illusion of movement between frames is not interrupted. In other animation the registration is looser and is intended as such to draw attention to the variation that ‘eye trace’ allows.
Do more research on using photographs
Technical note: resize and don’t overload software, particularly on iPad.
Animation Steps and Principles
Animation Steps
12 cel animation principles
from Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson:
1)squash/stretch
2) anticipation and leading attention, can have multiple levels
3) Staging/exaggeration/sequencing to make things clear
4) straightahead/pose to pose drawing
5) Follow through and overlapping action
6) slow in slow out
7) arcs
8) secondary action
9) timing
10) exaggeration
11) solid drawing
12) appealTiming
Norman McClaren
Smooth versus flow
Difference between fluid animation and smooth animation:
- Smooth is about the frame rate – how many new frames occur per second of animation.
- Flow is about the gesture of the drawings, the arcs, the drag and follow through of a movement.
To get smooth animation, you just need to draw plenty of in-betweens until all of your animation is on 1s
Flow is more complex to get right than smooth.Keyframing
Stick animation
See also Ross Bollinger: pencilmation
Howard Wimshurst
Animator Guild: https://www.animatorguild.com
Animator Guild: https://www.animatorguild.com