Animation Blog

Time is running away and I am trying to figure in which point I am standing here with my short film. The beginning of my original idea for the script came with excitement and lots of ideas. “Golden Revenge” was called “Golden Joke” at that time so was my enthusiasm to hard work.
All the plans were running through my head, even imagining myself working and finishing of the film, but none of it was translating onto paper as fast as I wanted it.
I have changed the title for one reason. “Golden Joke” was my joke, it was funny for me, and it would make me laugh obviously. But, would it make everyone else laugh or at least smile? I was not sure of that? So I changed it to “Golden Revenge” and if people want to see a comedy, they will, if they want to see a brutal story, there you go, if they want to look for a drama and a bit of action, here it is, waiting for them.
Personally, I was going to make a comedy, dark comedy that leads the audience to the ending scene where the real evil fails and gets punished in an unpalatable way.
With the goal of avoiding possible questions directed to me in the future like, “Is that ending bit meant to be funny?” or “Is that it?” I decided to back up my idea through bunch of situation happening in the middle of the story.
I am talking characters actions and interactions, their personalities and attitude against the environment they are in, dialogue and a sound game that switches between moods and shots.
So for example, we have this skinny, tall fisherman who is a complete retard and listens to everything what fatty says. Fatty, fat, small fisherman is a type of angry screamer, cruel and soaking greed in his nature. Another interesting character is Fluffy, cat that looks like it has taken some steroids but only worked out his back muscles, wild assassin of the mouse slave. Both animals are actually slaves on the fish boat, poor creatures trapped in some weird mechanisms designed to keep them still. Last characters will be the biggest trouble as it is George Clooney, a deviant with a whip, wearing mankini , a punisher and also some random idea to the story.
As you see, all of that has to at least keep everyone away from getting bored and I know for the fact that if I get the timing and a sound right, I shall achieve my goal. Well, you don’t have to be a winner of “Millionaires” game to know that. Well done Andrzej.
First months I spent on changing few bits in my script because some of it was not needed to tell the story, designing characters, and story board. I also did some sound work (which I am happy about) with a help of Chris Napier, UWE technician, very helpful man. Sound for this story is quite hard to do as it doesn’t have its continuity; I mean it doesn’t have one melody playing through the whole film. Music switches between actions, behaviours of characters, there is many background sounds and dialogues what makes the project more complex.
When I did my sound recording, I started from dialogues. I made a little mistake at that time. I have written down my made up language for characters in a script and thought that this is going to work out well. The problem was that when I finished, most of it didn’t seem to be funny enough as it was planned before in the script and became some kind of boring group of sentences forced to be spoken. What I have learned is that if you want to make up the language for characters, it is much better to improvise and try to make it as you go along with a process. Luckily I managed to record some voices that were not in the script and few of them are ready to use for the film. By the way the whole session in the studio turn to be a great laugh especially for Chris who sat by with Adobe Audition pressing the record button and listened to my “toilet sounds” as he described.
My film has hand drawn base so I am doing all the animations with light box, pencil and a paper like our old school “animation masters”. It is a great challenge for me to do hundreds of drawings that will build the film and a great lesson of the patience that I have never fully owned.
What I struggle with, sometimes, when I don’t focus properly is keeping the same size of an animated object. It is so important; otherwise, even if the animation is good, it looks like the camera is zooming in and out. I don’t want to use a field chart because in my opinion it is cheating. I don’t think Richard Williams was using it either.
So, where is my point in time of the production? Well, I have got over 20 seconds of animation done so far, I have got characters designs, turns done and one of them is fully coloured, few background designs, script and story board is sorted, I could say that Animatic is done but only because I have done all the story board drawings and edited them with music. I don’t think I am going anywhere further with it due to the lack of time. My main focus now is animation.
What about my style? Originally it was going to be a coloured, old time cartoon, like all the ones I watched when I was a kid. Most of them came from the very popular studio in Bielsko-Biala, in Poland. I remember “Reksio”, great story about the funny dog living his life in a village, “Bolek i Lolek”, about two brothers, loons who look for new adventures or “Podroze Kapitana Klipera”, about a funny pirate.
I thought it would be nice to come back to old style and use it in the modern cartoon. Now I see that the time is ticking away, I have not got all the drawings done yet and when I think of colouring all of those 2 weeks before the screening, it make me feel nervous.
I decided that it will be black and white with some parts coloured, the ones that are crucial for the story, like for example the character of golden fish or red mankini of George. The rest would just like in “Czy to byl sen?” by Zdzislaw Lachur, (see the picture below).

(Bielsko Biala Studios, 1948)

I think this is the only way to finish my film. There is too much going on in my film to colour everything if it is an individual production. There is so much to think about already. Lets make it happened. I think black and white will make it more interesting anyway. The wishes of fat one can be coloured as well because they are stills.
I am happy I made some steps to the music itself. I have paid my friend to record a guitar in a recording studio in Cracow, and he promised he will be sending me a CD shortly. I heard some of the samples he prepared for my story and all of them where pretty good. He is a talented man, his name is Damian Skóra, and his is a good friend of both, my brother and mine. There is another friend that is helping me out, DJ, and music maker, Joe Cannon. I am seeing him in the next few days.
This is it. This is where I am at the moment. I think it is all achievable.
I ask myself a question, almost every single day, if I am good at what I am doing? Well, even after 2,5 years I don’t know the answer. If I’m not, I can’t think of anything else I could do and enjoy at the same time. This is all great, for real, I have never had so much fun with education.
I always try to remember about the words that artist, Adam Ostrowski said:

“If you want to be good at something, do that one thing, otherwise you won’t be good at any of these things that you do.”

This label is practically all work I have done for the University module "Exploring and Developing Practise in Animation". The chosen subject is "Fight in Animation".
This project gave me the big opportunity to explore and study what I am interested in for most of the time, outside the campus. I realised that instead of watching all sorts of fights online for no reason, I could watch and analyse them as a subject of the anatomy, science of the movement in animation. It means entertainment and studies done at the same time.
So I have made the decision to explore the fight in animation and take as much information as possible out of it. I have mainly focused on the battle between two characters without a use of weapons.
Researching for this module I looked at various kinds of images from media representing scenes of the clash of two characters. So I looked at stills from boxing actions of Mike Tyson, Jake Lamotta, Muhamad Ali versus Frazier, (which was incredible by the way) and few other remarkable boxing scenes. After that I looked in MMA cage fighting, which is the most popular entertainment in the world of martial arts these days, interesting in fighters like Emelianenko, Liddel or Silva- three of the best performers in the ring. I also went through some cartoons and comic books, for example: “Popey”, “Tom and Jerry”, “Incredibles”, “Hulk”, “Spiderman” or “Thor”. Last two series of images were from mythology and science-fiction areas but they appeared not to be very useful because most of them presented two characters fighting each other with weapons. It is not that I totally rejected them. It just I haven't taken them as on of the prior things to look at.
To extend the range of my studies I have practised my drawing skills using the book of Eadweard Muybridge, “Muybridges Complete Human and Animal Locomotion” to see the exact picture of an anatomy of a fight of two male postures in different camera angles. I am talking here about muscle movements that go with changing positions of those parts of the body that are responsible for the fight motion like punch, kick or wrestling grip. It is a good lesson of drawing based on looking and remembering.

The aims of my studies are not only the analysis of the fight in animation itself but also the application of translation the life action into an animated cartoon, translation of two real life action figures into two animated fighting characters.