Research and Inspiration
For this project I wanted to practice my 2D animation because, growing up, I have always been fascinated by the art styles of shows such as Gravity Falls, The Amazing World of Gumball and Adventure Time among others. This fascination has continued into my adult life with shows such as Rick and Morty, Family Guy and Bob’s Burgers. 2D animation can seem simplistic but I think there’s something satisfying about watching the progression of hand-drawn frames.
My chosen audio is one I found on TikTok, wherein a voice says “Some people even think it’s fun to…smash pumpkins.” Following this line of dialogue, the song ‘1979’ by The Smashing Pumpkins plays, and ever since first hearing that audio, I’ve always thought about what a montage-style animation would look like to visualise it.
Because the song itself was released in the early 90s with the dialogue at the start of the clip filtered with a crackly stereo-like sound, I wanted to explore the art style of the music videos by Jack Stauber, which conveys a similar aesthetic.
Jack Stauber is a musician, content creator and animator whose videos I came across during lockdown, after his song ‘Buttercup’ went viral. Upon researching his eclectic music videos, I found that he animates them all himself, using both 2D software including Microsoft Paint, and 3D software as well as mixed media, such as stop-start motion using modelling clay. He also runs the finished Premiere sequences through a VHS tape in order to create a granular, saturated appearance. His illustration style often features pale-skinned characters (sometimes with distorted features) with flushed noses contrasting against their light complexion, known to some as ‘Stauber faces’.
I tend to draw round-faced characters with small noses contrasting with larger eyes and mouths which I believe is partially influenced by the television shows I grew up watching. I would also say that my art style for this animation was influenced by Cartoon Saloon’s ‘Wolfwalkers’, whose concept artists utilised simple mouth and face shapes and a combination of sharp and rounded hand-drawn line art throughout the character design process.
After researching these art styles, I began to plan out my own character design for this assignment;
References, Process and Feedback
After my research, I made a storyboard and animatic to reference during the animation process.
While making my animatic, I planned to have a body mechanic and spoken dialogue as part of my final outcome, and I began to research poses and videos for reference. For my scene depicting the body mechanic function of swinging a bat, I researched step-by-step breakdowns of how a baseball player would swing their bat starting from over their shoulder to across their body and back over the opposite shoulder.
To study how other animators have approached this mechanic, I made a frame-by-frame playback of a clip from Family Guy wherein Stewie Griffin takes a hard swing with his baseball bat. The speed of the swing in this clip was much more fast paced than the one I wanted to depict, and I think this was because of the minimalistic animation style of family guy, where fast-paced actions are depicted in very few frames. While I decided I wanted to add more frames to slow my swing, I did notice the use of ghost frames in the family guy clip which I wanted to experiment with. I believe this helped me convey the point at which the baseball bat was moving at its fastest in the animation by combining three, previously separate frames of varying opacity and/or focus into the one frame.
During our feedback sessions, my lecturer suggested I replace the ghost frames with an ordinary sequence of frames which depicted the progression of a blurred trail of motion left behind the bat. I did experiment with this, but ultimately decided that the ghost frames maintained more clarity in the scene rather than obscuring the character with a blur, but it’s something I would definitely like to explore further in my future animations. I also felt that re-tracing the line art between each frame would be more in keeping with the influence of the Wolfwalkers and Jack Stauber art styles, highlighting the subtle differences through the frame progression.
For animating the dialogue at the beginning of the audio, I also did some research in to how different mouth shapes are used to depict different sounds, vowels, plosive speech, fricative speech etc.At first, I found it difficult to plan out the mouth shapes to coincide with the dialogue in the audio, as well as planning out how those mouth shapes would transition into one another, but as I drew more of them, it became more manageable. I found it helpful to try saying the words of the dialogue out loud in front of a mirror so I could see the mouth shapes I made for different sounds.
For the clip of the pumpkin heading towards the ground as it smashed, I applied some squash and stretch effects between the frames to enhance the movement a little more; stretching out the pumpkin slightly as it travelled downward, and widening it at the point of contact with the ground. For the insides of the pumpkin spilling out, I also used a reference from Gravity Falls, wherein a monster made of all of the neighbourhoods rejected candy collapses. I didn’t intend the result to be as detailed as that, but thought it would help to study the movement of the shapes in that scene.
Reflection
Overall, I’m fairly happy with how this animation turned out. I’d love to go into the character design or 2D animation sector one day and I really appreciated that this assignment gave me the time to start building my 2D animation portfolio. I think if I were to do this project again, I’d use a higher value of fps to convey both more detail in the movement of my character and allow more scope for manipulating frames to convey the appearance of varying speeds of motion and speech. I’d also like to create more 2D animations following a similar brief, but experimenting with things like vector art or stop motion so I can find a technique that suits me best.