Back to the first "Little Mermaid" entry
Hitting a Wall
The faithful, long-time reader of my blog (and you know who
you are, Dad) will probably recall my annual struggles to create animated
presentations of my illustrated stories for Gothtober.com, using Adobe Flash.
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I think Flash is just too complicated to
use without proper training
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Creating pieces for Gothtober during the past nine years has
led me to take advantage of what the Web can do by translating my story and
illustration ideas into art pieces with movement and sound. But as I taught
myself just enough Flash from online tutorials to get my more recent pieces
finished, I felt like I’d wandered into a little corner of the world of
animation somewhat by accident, and I started to wonder where I would go next.
Without any proper education in the program, I barely knew what I was doing,
and wasn’t even sure that this was the best tool for my purposes.
As I put together “The Buffalo Demon” last October,
repeatedly banging into the walls of my own ignorance and Flash’s quirks like a
Roomba trapped in a pantry closet, I solemnly promised myself (between
bone-jarring collisions) that I would find another way to animate my work.
A Break-through at
SFAI
On a rainy March night this spring, I sat down in a dim film
classroom at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) to start an adult
continuing education class in experimental animation. I felt like I was going
out on a limb — me, the goofy painter, taking a film class? — but when my
teachers, David Borengasser and Tiffany Doesken, reached their unit on 2-D stop
animation and showed us how we could set up a stage and camera, make our own
puppets, and animate them, I began to put these ideas together with my
illustrative work. For the final project, I chose 2-D stop animation as my
method, and started “The Little Mermaid.”
I think David and Tiffany may be the most patient and
encouraging art teachers I’ve ever had, and I have to stop and thank them here
for everything they taught me, and thank the ACE program at SFAI for running
their class. David and Tiffany’s experience, guidance, and support have
definitely pushed my work to the next level, and I’m truly grateful for the
opportunity to learn from them.
Inspiration from
“Surfer Girl”
Like most of my time-based pieces, I started this animation
with a script. This was based on some idle thoughts that I had while driving on I-580,
listening to The Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl.” The script developed my initial inspiration
and images into a continuous narrative, separated into scenes and shots that paralleled
the song lyrics while telling their own story. At this point I also started my
technical planning with lists of all the puppets, props, and backgrounds I
would have to paint and construct to shoot the animation.
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| Editing a list of the puppets needed to portray the surfer |
I see this story on a couple of different levels: as a sweet
and simple story about a lonely character, as a sort of laughable romance
fiction, and also as a story that alludes to the drama of self-discovery and
coming out as gay. Not to say that I was trying to write a commentary about being gay into the
story, but after a few months of work, one does draw some connections.
Hans Christian
Andersen’s “Little Mermaid”
Only after completing my script did I pause to consider the
similarity my mermaid story bore to Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy
tale, in which a mermaid trades her tail and her voice for legs in order to
pursue the human prince she has rescued and fallen in love with. In due
diligence, I read through a Wikipedia article on Andersen’s “Little Mermaid”
story, and reviewed several other animated interpretations of it, but only to
check how his plot compared to the one I had invented. I felt my story was
different enough to feel like a twist on the original, rather than a remake,
and decided, cheekily, to give it the same title. I then promptly buried my nose in my own project again. In fact, I was so focused on creating a coherent
narrative for my own story (without the benefit of expository dialogue, I might
add), and completing as many shots as possible before David and Tiffany’s class
ended, that I unthinkingly relegated my very own childhood copy of Andersen’s Fairy Tales to the bottom of a pile of
books assigned the menial task of holding up one of the lamps on my
animation stage.
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Andersen's Fairy Tales sat on my
worktable for five months... unopened.
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Imagine my surprise six months later as I read Julianna
Parr’s comments about my “Little Mermaid” in The Gothtober Blog, in which
Julianna, Gothtober’s creator, shares the results of her own research on Hans
Christian Andersen. Her readings revealed that the original “Little Mermaid” is
itself, as she puts it, “a
really really
really GAY STORY.” Once
I understood Andersen’s perspective, his familiar tale seemed to open up to me.
Now I do fully recognize a very gay experience in the original plot: the pain of invisibility and silence, and the hopeless vulnerability of an
attraction to someone who may as well inhabit a separate world that you just
don’t belong to.
Big Watercolors, Tiny
Actors
Painting large watercolor landscapes isn’t something I do
frequently, but I decided that the backgrounds for this ocean piece would look
best if painted in subtle, watery watercolor. Having done the necessary
research and experimentation, I have a few observations about watercoloring to
share with you.
- You can make lovely fluffy clouds in a wet wash
of sky by simply wiping some of the paint away with a paper towel.
- Despite the inherent delicacy of the medium,
painting a smooth wash over a large area is an almost athletic pursuit in which
you race against time and temperature as your paper mockingly dries before your
eyes.
- When thoroughly moistened, Arches watercolor
paper smells like a wet dog.
I now have greater respect for people who paint large
watercolors. In fact, I’ve come to suspect that the world’s most skilled and
successful watercolorists all live together with a pack of St. Bernards in an
eternally damp basement (possibly somewhere in England), where their paper stays
wet for a full hour, and nobody notices the way it smells.
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| Parts for my first set of mermaid puppets |
Designing and crafting the puppets for this piece was more
familiar territory for me, and it was amusing, if time consuming, to assemble
lifeless little pieces of painted paper (some of them as small as a fingernail)
into convincing-looking characters. My favorites in this piece are the shark (So grumpy! And he
never manages to bite anyone! Hee hee!) and the yellow tangs, which are so
silly-looking, and so easy to animate just by pivoting them on the single brads
that also serve as their eyes.
Deus ex machina
It’s remarkable that for all of my pieces requiring voices,
the opportunity to make a good-quality recording has come to me out of nowhere,
like a Venus in a Victorian play, descending on a flower-decked swing from the
catwalks above. This time was no exception; I had the good fortune to record in
SFAI’s recording studio, with professional David at the controls. The only
canker in the bud was that on the designated day, I came in with the dregs of a
cold that just wouldn’t clear out. As a result, I went home with excellent
recordings of a very snuffly performance. If you listen carefully to the
heavily altered version that accompanies the animation, you may detect that the
mermaid’s high and dreamy voice also sounds a little congested.
Making the Animation
I made my first attempt at animating my new puppets with
only a general idea of what needed to take place in the shot. When I brought my
spontaneously-shot frames to class and exported them to video, I dissolved in a fit of
giggles, discovering that motions I had imagined would look smooth and subtle
actually looked like a frenzied, erratic insect mating dance.
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Tiny physical props are a fun
aspect of stop animation
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After this amusing learning experience, I wrote out a
frame-by-frame plan for each shot that listed exactly the motions I wanted,
from start to finish, and the frames they should occur on. Writing the plan often
took as much time as it did to shoot the sequence, but, even though I’m still
learning, it gave much better results. However, I may return to exploring spontaneous
animation in my next project, a touching story in which true love overcomes
social and familial obstacles to unite two praying mantises.
After shooting all the frames for each shot, I exported the
photos into a video clip with Quicktime, and then compiled all the clips into
one iMovie file, added the soundtrack, and edited the clips to the right length
to match the sound. Though I am glossing over the compiling of the animation a
bit, it was honestly the shortest and simplest part of the process.
To compare my old and new animation processes, stop
animation is like fishing a pickle out of the pickle jar using a fork, whereas animating with my previous homegrown Flash methods was like trying to fish a
pickle out of the pickle jar using only the power of one’s mind. Not only does
stop animation afford me more possibility for motion, it’s easier. This means that I can create more meaning. And creating something — anything! — meaningful is certainly my goal.
Back to the first "Little Mermaid" entry
See the piece (click on Gothtober pumpkin #7)
Read The Gothtober Blog
