Animation/Live Action

Tim Burton is a director that shifted to each medium constantly and stayed relatively aesthetically consistent. The first appearance of his iconic art style is seen in his short film, Vincent. His use of characters with pale skin, big baggy eyes, either monochromatic or flamboyant colors and thin limbs in German expressionist inspired landscapes started in this short film and he would incorporate this into his animation and live action work.  Most of his animated works are done through stop motion, seen with his collaboration with animator Henry Sellick, “Nightmare Before Christmas” and his 2 features “Corpse Bride” and “Frankenweenie” (which was based off a live action short film). For his design work seen in another form of animation, he designed the characters in the Brad Bird directed short film, Family Dog. This design philosophy is prevalent in his aesthetically darker films such as Sleepy Hallow and Sweeny Todd, with main characters with pale skin and all dressed in black. His use of sets also adds to this, for example in Beetlejuice, when the main characters shrink down and enter a model cemetery and the grass is modelled to look obviously fake.

 

Seth Macfarlane is known for creating shows like Family Guy and American Dad. The way the framing of shots is drawn in those shows are similar to multi camera sitcoms, so it was easy for him to transition to live action sitcoms with shows like The Winner and Dads, which also evolved into him directing several movies such as the Ted movies (featuring a CGI animated main character). The same can be said for Mike Judge, known for creating the animated shows, Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill. The characters in his animated shows are known to be created through the observation of the quirks of people he has interacted with, as well as parodies of specific groups, through their exaggerated personalities and more true to life character designs. This led to him directing several comedy films, not just the Beavis and Butthead movie adaptation, but live action films such as Office Space and Idiocracy, which featured similar humour to his animated shows. The art collective PFFR are known for their absurdist dark comedy style and have produced various shows in different mediums. Their first project they created was the sketch comedy show, Wonder Showzen, a parody of children’s TV shows, for MTV. Through this, they could experiment with live action sketches, puppetry and 2d animated segments that were animated by Augenblick Studios. Their next projects were produced for Adult Swim, which allowed them to experiment with various mediums. They made several live action shows like The Heart, She Holler, but their next animated show for the channel would be Xavier Renegade Angel, which would be rendered in low poly CGI, resembling a game from the seventh generation of consoles (PS2,Xbox,Gamecube) and would later create The Shivering Truth, a stop motion series using 10 inch puppets to create the characters.

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