I mentioned in a previous post that I wanted to tell my story through illustrations about the time my view on sexual harassment was changed. Touching someone without their consent should never be normalized and today I’ll happily be the one slapping someone’s face if they touch, grope or stroke me without my consent.
I decided to take part in the 48 hour drawing challenge that Cardiff Animation Festival held one week ago with three other animators. I only knew Christina, my tutor, beforehand and the other two team members were someone who is going to study at the Character Animation MA next year and the other someone who already graduated.
The reason to why I decided to take part in this competition is first and foremost that I and super competitive and love pushing myself but also because Christina was the one asking people if they wanted to join and I thought I could learn a lot from being on her team.
Brainstorming the story before going off to storyboards we came to the conclusion that the story was an essential key in this story and that we would keep that in mind throughout the film, possibly compromising other elements in order to be able to tell the story. We then all proceeded onto making storyboards with the intend of merging elements of the story later on.
Together with one other group member, I did character design for the story. My characters eded up too uniform as seen in the third image below but on the other hand I had a strong design of the main character. The other group member on the other hand had versatile side characters, so we merged our characters together, which was also a really good experience using elements of both of our work.
Before starting the competition we wrote down our expectations of we all wanted out of the experience, how much we each planned on working and which areas we excelled in and which areas we didn’t have much experience in. I put down that I wasn’t strong in clean-up and coloring, which were actually two things I ended up doing a lot of as it was a very time consuming activity so I learned incredibly much from the others who showed me the most effective way of doing so.
Christina showed me rather than manually coloring in every frame with a pencil, it would actually be more effective and precise to use the Filled Stroke as seen below. This made so much sense when I started using it but wasn’t something I would initially have thought of myself.
As a team we decided on not cleaning up our rough animation lines but instead coloring the characters with shapes and only drawing inside the shapes to create some definition in the character.
Towards the end we saw that we fell short of time and as a means of problem solving, we decided on now doing the inside lines of some of the shots as we simply wouldn’t be able to finish if we did so. Instead we overlaid the rough animation lines onto the colored shapes as seen below with the two different approaches:
We decided on doing this as we determined beforehand that the story was the most important factor of this animation and as long as we were still able to tell the story, this was the right solution as a means of time saving.
The festival will be held in two days time so I won’t yet be able to upload the film. We did finish roughly in time but decided to spend a couple of additional days cleaning up the inside of the shapes and adding some keyframes where we had to compromise them as well due to the lack of time. We were all very happy about how the film turned out and certainly keeping in mind that we only had 48 hours, we were able to produce a 2 minute film in such a short amount of time.
This subject is something I have throughout the years been so ignorant about as I haven’t been taught about it from school, parents or peers. It is a subject that’s not talked about because there is so much victim blaming and shame behind using the the words “assaults” and “harassmentt” because what if you just overreacted? What if they won’t take you seriously. In the light of Sarah Everard’s disappearance in Clapham, South London, who was just walking home from a friend’s house and was most likely sexually assaulted and murdered. It has encouraged so many women on social media to speak up about the subject of sexual assault and the precautions women has to make when walking alone compared to what a man needs to watch out for. Here are some examples:
It made me think about an incredible graphic novel I bought over summer, where I also wrote a story about my personal experience with sexual harassment. It’s called Drawing Power and tells stories of women’s sexual harassment and violence. It is amazing and contains loads of stories on subjects that are not talked about a lot and it really put everything into perspective for me. Here are some of the stories with their respective illustrations, that really impacted me:
I have many friends who have opened up to me about being touched without consent, even some who experienced sexual intercourse without consent. When I told them “What you experienced is rape”, they brush it off saying “No it probably wasn’t what they meant”, “No it wasn’t that serious, I don’t want to overreact” or even “I don’t know if I actually told him to stop so it’s my own fault”. WHY!!! WHY are women blaming themselves for being sexually molested, touched inappropriately or given unwanted sexual attention?
It made me so sad and angry at the same time that my female friends wouldn’t admit to being raped regardless of telling me that they didn’t consent to sexual intercourse and was physically held down when the male inserted their penis into them. Apologies for being so blunt but I feel it’s necessary to get the point across. Every time I open up about my experiences with unwanted sexual attention or groping, the female I open up to always have a story of their own to share. This saddens me deeply and I want to share my story to encourage others to share theirs as well.
I want to share my own personal experience, which I’m planning on making into a short graphic novel later on. It’s a piece of text I wrote last summer right after having read Drawing Power.
When I was younger
I had trouble defining what was right and what was wrong when it came to guys
I wanted attention from them, I wanted them to like me and think I was beautiful
A night out wouldn’t be complete without being groped a few times
I didn’t second guess it, I was so used to it
Until one day when my friend slapped a guy out of the blue and yelled:
“FUCK YOU!!! He grabbed my ass!!!” The guy ran off, yelling “Bitch!”
Thinking that she overreacted slightly, I sheepishly replied “that happens to me all the time, don’t worry about it”
“Marie, that’s sexual assault” I didn’t know at the time…
Is was a group of guys who thought it was funny how she stood up for herself angrily shouting at them. They came back for more, laughing at her, trying to grope her ass and breasts. She cried and we ended up leaving the club.
Today I’ll happily be the one slapping someone’s face if they grope me. This has to be vocalised way more as it’s still happening so often.
Touching someone without their consent should never be normalised.
Cat walking is called “Direct registering”
Unlike dogs, cats are not biologically build for long distance walking and their stealthy strides are ultimately ineffective for long distance walking as they are meant for a different purpose. They walk slowly so to not attract attention by letting their prey know about their presence. Their hind paws fall inside the place of their forepaws to minimize noise and visible tracks while ensuring a more stable footing when navigating through terrain.
Direct registering also serves a useful purpose — animals that stalk their prey can see where they place their front feet, so they don’t break twigs or make other noises. Then they place their hind feet in the exact spot, so they can move silently from place to place.
They are designed so they can crawl and dug making them very flexible. This is shown through their flexible spine and flexible front legs. If their head can fit through something, so can the rest of their body.
Compared to dogs, the cats are in general more flexible so when animating a dog, the stiffness of the body is shown through the entire body bouncing more up and down whereas for the cat their body says more from side to side due to their flexibility.
The front legs are very flexible compared to their back-feet, which can be shown through how my the foot slaps back and bends forwards for each stride. They also don’t lift their paws a lot when walking in order to conserve energy.
The head stays relatively still to focus on their prey.
Their tail is always up when happy and down when displaying a negative emotion, relaxing or planning to attack their prey.
Observation of gait1: the foot that is being put weight on shoot the respective shoulder or hip upwards whereas the foot reaching for the next step has the shoulder or hip lowered.
Observation of gait2: Their front paws when lifted off the ground and moved forward bends slightly inwards like bigger felines such as lions, with a cat the movement is merely less significant.
Inspiration from another student’s walk cycle using 10 drawings for 1 cycle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hkUeuyCsJY
https://medium.com/100-naked-words/how-do-cats-move-so-stealthily-c604c710e3d3
This is a work in progress for the mood change walk. The first feedback I got was similar to previous feedback with adding more emphasis on the reaction and improving timing. These are things I will try and improve going forward with the shot.
I got feedback from Christina and Kevin on this one and they mentioned that I will need to rethink timing adding more time at the beginning, middle and end to convey the movement better. They also mentioned, that I could add a bit of acting in the beginning to portray his his thoughts better, maybe even showing him contemplating whether or not to lift the ball.
At first I started with the easiest exercise of pushing a block and growing more confident I moved onto lifting and at last pulling.
Basic walk cycle test with focus on legs only
I contacted Jørgen Klubien and did an interview with him to fully understand his creative approach and career. I found that doing the interview I received a lot of answers and was able to better connect parts about his career and and life in the final presentation I did last week. The interview was originally done in Danish but I have translated the text to English below.
As a boy from Copenhagen in the 60s, pretty much everything that was exciting culturally came into my ears and eyes derived from the USA. (Or at least all I liked was the English language. Both on TV, on records and on film.) At first as a Beatles fan I was preoccupied with England and London, but then later, through my love of Carl Bark’s Donald Duck stories and through that Disney animation’s movies that one could buy on cinefilm, my curiosity about the United States and especially California developed.
But also through the American soul music that I cultivated, it was always the United States that took over the first place in my mind. I was especially preoccupied with Motown and Stevie Wonder. I had a lively imagination and imagined that there was a bridge from Denmark to the USA so you could drive over there. I wanted to go over there and see it, experience it and feel it.
At the age of 16, I was in the US for the first time, alone with a Greyhound Bus card and my cinefilm camera. On the 2 month summer trip, I had the opportunity to visit the Disney Studios through a family acquaintance who knew someone who worked there. “And the rest is history” as they say… for me. The studios exchanged letters with me about getting over there at their film/animation school and as a 19 year old I went to CalArts at the “Character Animation” studio and then I got a permanent job at the Disney Studios.
After many years in the industry (mostly at Disney Studios), I had learned that there was a lot of “politics” in committing to a large company with many employees. It was not just about being good, but also about who liked you. From the mid-80s and into the 90s at Disney, the management was pretty femininely oriented. They preferred to make the new films as musicals and decided on how and what stories they thought we should make. Management split from us artists and we didn’t have a voice or a say over what kind of film we made. I was quite frustrated about not sharing the same taste with the management and therefore I applied away from the studio as soon as I had obtained my permanent residence permit and US Citizenship. I guarded up north on and worked on 2 puppet movies (Nightmare Before Christmas and James and The Giant Peach) before heading to Pixar where my old buddy John Lasseter had now become creative director. They were working on their first film (Toy Story) when I joined and I was one of the first cartoonists/story artists but was set to develop their next film A Bugs Life.
But also at Pixar I was unfortunately greeted by a wall, a culture that surrounded John Lasseter, where everyone looked up to him, which he used to isolate himself with… against artists who wanted to advance and even be allowed one day to direct their own movie. I had those ambitions, of course, but it took me a long time to realize that unfortunately there was that wall. That “glass ceiling” that you were not allowed to go through. I tried to come up with original ideas for movies, but was put off on a siding anyway. Even though Pixar (John Lasseter) used my stuff.
The Little Wooden Boy was a break from studio work… I took a year off from Pixar… exhaled and waited to see if John Lasseter would make my movie idea with cars.
That year, I made The Little Wooden Boy, as a commentary on my experiences working for the major animation studios. It was a dream come true, but I also realized now that I had probably been a bit naive. When I got back to Pixar, I started working on CARS with John Lasseter, who then ended up firing me before the movie premiered so he could take all the credit for it.
My inspiration comes from a mix of what I have read (Donald Duck), the movies I have seen and the life I live. I pull down from all the shelves as best I can. There is a lot of community between writing stories and songs.
It was simple enough, thinking of who in world history had been a power-hungry and fantastically evil egoist with an army of dumb people around him. Hitler’s ideology is so full of powerful designs and stagings (think of how Star Wars is also inspired by it) that it is a good source of “evil”. I remembered Leni Riefensthal’s film and sat down and took notes from it. So I storyboarded the “Be Prepared” song for that idea because the script writers couldn’t come up with anything themselves. Jeff Katzenberg, who was the top creative director of Disney Animation at the time, had himself as a young boy worked in politics in New York for a governor, and was crazy about what I had done. He ordered it to come in the finished film without the director changing anything at my boards. Otherwise they were pretty unsure if it was a good idea… Anyway, it was nice for me and fun to see it on the screen as one of the few times my ideas have been allowed to come out without many other “chefs” having to interfere.
Well, it’s hard to say, but I really think it’s about entertaining myself … in life that has to be lived and filled with something. It’s fun to be creative and do something. I love the same things I did as a boy: movies – music – art – comics – animation. I have been lucky so far to deal with the things that interests me. There have been ups and downs, but such is life and I love it. I want to be a part of it all!
I also basically believe that I am a person who “feels” a lot. And I like to express my feelings… sometimes it can be a problem… one can become too expressive, in a meeting for example… not pay enough attention to the feelings of others… it’s difficult being an artist and having to “conform” to everyone else. But overall, I think I have been lucky to have had more good experiences than bad ones.
I wanted to create a piece portraying my experience with self-isolation. I have been self-isolating for two weeks and have been going through a series of emotions, spiralling thoughts and had different encounters with people as I usually would have. I want to make a piece exploring some of the feelings, thoughts and interactions or lack of interactions with other people I have had over the past couple of days to gain a better understanding of the whole situation of which I have found myself.
I will start by collecting my thoughts through a brainstorming mindmap to be able to analyse and collect the most important points of my experiences with self-isolation.
I then highlighted the things that repeated itself throughout the mindmap and the feelings that had been more predominant than others. This was especially the feelings of loneliness, sadness, feeling trapped and a lack of connection and I want to apply these to the final piece.
I wanted to find a cinematographic efficient way to portray loneliness so I sought to movies looking up loneliness and isolation as a theme in movies. I found Lost in Translation, watched it and identified so strongly with Charlotte, the female lead. A recent graduate who traveled to Tokyo with her detached husband hoping to find something. The husband is never around so she is left to herself. She now finds herself in a different country, feeling trapped in a luxurious hotel room, alone and feels alienated from her surroundings, unable to properly communicate with anyone outside the hotel. I have found myself trapped in my hall room, sharing a flat with someone I have never met, communicating through handwritten notes or group messages on a mobile app. Even though I live with these people, I cannot properly communicate with them I I would normally, I’m not allowed in the kitchen or public areas when other people are around. Having the maintenance guy knock on my door but refusing to touch anything inside my room made me feel alienated, foreign, like I was seriously dirty and hadn’t washed in months. I feel trapped, alone, wanting and seeking a connection like Charlotte in Lost in Translation.
What particularly struck me about cinematic choices made in the film was the minimalistic approach to cinematography, muted colors and the subtle it, his choice to use as little artificial lighting as possible giving the entire film a quietly naturalistic feeling. The cinematographic element of placing a character inside a frame to emphasize a feeling of loneliness, alienates the character to the rest of the story within the bigger frame. This is why I am also going to place my character within a frame, also to emphasize the urge to go outside by looking outside a window. The character is also often shown in the mirror or window as a reflection of themselves, which I want to apply as well enhancing the feeling of them being alone.
I also wanted to gain a better understanding of how loneliness and sadness had been portrayed previously in art, so I looked toward the Danish female painter Anna Ancher. What I found incredibly interesting with Anna Ancher, not only is she one of the only female painters from her time where an art education was not allowed for women, but she sought ways to capture immediate and fleeting impressions in her painting by light. Lighting being the actual motif for the painting, she often had still composition with only one character to predict their inner life. Their inner life is told through the lighting, colours and their surroundings in the room. Anna Ancher mostly depicted women portraying their role they had in a family of being a woman waiting for her man to come home but not required outside of the house as the man. The women in question are never looking at the audience but always looking down, showing and depicting an introverted side to them. Back then it was not looked well upon if women would be present in the public without a male companion. What is also super interesting is that being a part of the movement Skagensmalerne, Anna was one of the only painters depicting, showing and painting her characters inside whereas men of the movement mostly painted their characters outside again underlining the gender roles of society around 1900. What I take with me by studying her paintings are the depiction of the characters inside being trapped and how light can show the inner state of the person in the painting.
First I drew my room below to take inspiration from that in creating thumbnails. Applying the idea of a frame within a frame, the importance of light and the loneliness aspect, I created thumbnails from various compositions to see which worked the best.
First I drew my room below to take inspiration from that in creating thumbnails. Applying the idea of a frame within a frame, the importance of light and the loneliness aspect, I created thumbnails from various compositions to see which worked the best.
Whereas Lost In Translation uses the bare minimun of colours, I wanted to put emphasis on the light as in Anna Ancher’s paintings. This is why I made a mood board to gain a better understanding of the colours I’m interested and both inspired my the colour choices from Lost in Translation and my mood board, I’m choosing colours from these. The mood board overall consists of very cold colours with warm colours from where the light sources are placed. The cold colours gives the sense of loneliness. I want to apply the limited source of light as candlelight.
I knew that I did not have much experience with candlelight, I sought to James Gurney’s book “Color and Light” and read about how the warm light can be enhanced by having muted backgrounds and colours.
Having picked 3 thumbnails of the sheet above, I picked the colours from the moodboard and applied these to the thumbnails to both gain a better understanding of which composition worked the best but also which type of lighting. Applying the same colours to every composition, I found out a nighttime scene would work the best with the first composition, which I then continued working on.
I furthermore, with the composition chosen, add elements of an urge to go outside but being forced to stay in. I added a longboard, which I was dying to use, and used cider bottles. I also came up with the idea of making the piece into a GIF in the forms of a cinemagraph, meaning that I keep elements in the GIF still whereas other elements move and repeats itself over and over again. This will add the feeling of a moment happening over and over again and the stillness will represent the feeling of being trapped and frozen in place.
Now applying the elements of a reflection like Lost in Translation and having the light as in Anna Ancher play the essential role of light showing the inner world of the person in focus, I add further elements of showing loneliness and sadness.
Below is the final piece. It is originally a GIF but as the file is too large, I had to import it to Vimeo as a non-GIF to be able to paste it. In the video sequence below it does repeat itself 3 times though a a GIF.