Lang of animation: Mise-en-scene

Mise-en-scene: Everything in the visual scene. Explained:

• Settings and props.
• Costume, hair, makeup.
• Facial expressions and body language.
• Lighting.
• Colour.
• Positioning of character / objects within the frame.

Settings and Props

Settings and location plays an important part in film and animation. Sets are either built from scratch or a great deal of time is spent to find a setting which already exists. Settings can manipulate an audience by building certain expectations and then taking a different turn.

Costume

Costume, hair and makeup are all instant indicators of the character’s job, status, background, wealth, cleanliness, time period and the current situation of narrative.

e.g. Woody’s outfit in Toy Story or Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmatians, both costumes give information about the character.

Facial Expressions and Body Language

Facial expressions provide a clear indicator of how someone is feeling. Body language may also indicate how a character feels towards another character or may reflect the state of their relationship.

Facial expressions give you a clear idea about her character.

Positioning of Characters and Objects within a Frame

Positioning within a frame can draw our attention to an important character or object. An animator can use positioning to indicate relationships between people.

In the image above, there is an imbalance between the characters. The balance is shifted so that the Prince is in the first third and she looks like she is advancing towards him, he is getting squashed with no where to go. Anna look nervous or perhaps eager, as though she is about to make a move to reach out to him. The prince looks like he is apprehensive, as though he is backing away, despite the supposedly lovely and polite, ‘possibility of romance’, scene.

Lighting

Lighting can be used to achieve a variety of effects:

• To highlight important characters or objects within the frame.
• To make characters look mysterious by shading sections of the face and body.
• To reflect a character’s mental state or hidden emotions.

Low-key lighting – Created by using only key and backlights. Produces sharp contrasts of light and dark areas. Deep, distinct shadows/silhouettes are formed. Black and white films usually had a high contrast. Sharp lights and harsh shadows.

In old black and white movies it was harder to distinct objects with the limited palleted do to the lack of colour. The lighting could cause problems here. They used lighting as a way to frame the image, for example the opening of a door would let in light and a character would stand in the doorway as a silhouette.

The lighting was used for framing often. E.g. opening a door- the light floods in.

High-key lighting – More filler lights are used. Lighting is natural and realistic to our eyes. produces brightly lit sets or sunny days.

Natural lighting

Must maintain lighting and physics, it cant move mid-way.

Natural lighting effect in Paperman: clear scene but foggy appearance. The light haze makes the foreground in focus and the background look attention.

Colour in Film:

Colour choice or colour grading helps to set the mood.

Depth of Feild

Depth of field: what is in focus. The distance from the near to the farthest that objects are in focus.

Extreme close-ups: focus will be on the character. The rest will not be in focus usually. e.g.

Thirds: usually slightly off centre, unless it HAS to be for your purpose.

Off centre weighted objects:

Try not to have your character in the very center unless it is intentionally like that, e.g. to add symmetry. If you don’t want this but still want your subject in the center then you can add weighted objects to offset the character and the frame such as in the image above. You just need something to create an imbalance, asymmetry.

Further Class transcriptions

Animation Art or Cinema

– How Art Effects Film.

I was influenced by the ‘new vision’ of the new century; a sea of social change and political revolution and it was shaped film, theatre, music, technology and the visual arts. The writer’s philosophers, film critics, poets, artists and musicians strived to define, categories and utilize its potential while its innovators drifted in the shadowy and often tenuous role between cinema and art.

Look at high culture (e.g. classical music)/ popular culture and mass culture.

The Cartoon Movies

James Stuart Blackton, born in Sheffield moved to the USA as a chid by 1906 he produced animated photo-films, lightening sketches appeared on the screen, the artists hands visible in works such as the ‘Enchanted Drawing’, 1906. But the drawings in ‘Humorous Phases of a Funny Face’, 1907 had an autonomy with only a suggestion of the artists presence.

• By 1909 the first French animated films is attributed to Emile Cohl Fantasmagorie, 1908. A 2-minute drawn animation the film follows transitions and interactions of characters often violent, at odds with each other.
• Cohl and Jules Levy were prominent members of artists and journalists movement called the ‘Incoherents;, the avant-garde since the 1880’s. The were exponents of ‘laughter and ludicrousness’.

The Art of Animation

Animation was starting to catch the eye of the modernist movements who stated; “cartoons which rebuff so ferociously painterly realism and filmic naturalism are set in a universe of transformation, overturning and provisionally.”

In a time when anarchy was exploding into the cultural scene the Modernists and Dadaists questioned divisions in high and popular culture. The intellects became interested in the debate of high and mass culture. Art is envisaged as central to social and political change.

Animation developed in the midst of these polemic arguments. It softened the edges between high and mass forms of culture and crossed social and cultural divisions.

The elitists, the mass producers and everyone in between expounded its virtues not only intellectually or conceptually but also technologically.

From the outset, animation was destined to be a multi-cultural, multi0functional medium fueled by technological change.

Hollywood and Avant-Garde

By 1913 Raoul Barre, a French, Canadian painter, had invented the peg system providing a universal registration system.

1915 saw the introduction of Cel animation, clear acetate that could be drawn on without having to redraw the background in every frame.

Both of these transforming production possibilities and facilitating assembly line production.

America is a land of immigration displacement from social reform in Europe. Mass communication was at the top of the agenda and therefore mass production was a priority.

European culture is abandoned in favour of American technilogy, Chapin, Key Stone Cops, amusement rides.

John Randolph Bray states animation was for profit and pioneered the organizing of labor and rapid production, introducing the printed background and releasing the first animated colour film The Debut of Thomas Cat, 1920.

Max Fleischer the dominant figure to be in the American aniamtion industry first introduces his famous Koko the Clown in his film Out of the Inkwell, 1915.

For individuals such as Windsor McCay the process was more laborious , establishes himself as one of the pioneers of animation with his first film Little Nemo, 1910, and Sinking of the Lusitania, 1918.

The Avant-Garde

The ‘cartoon’ provides the experimental artists with a new realm to explore abstraction, geometric forms, flatness and space, non-linear time, login and the illogical, many dropping their paintbrushes in favor of animation (Malovich geo over figure).

Walter Ruttmann was one of them. Along with Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter he saw animation as paintings successor and as such an extension of painting rather than film. In 1912, he oriduced Lichtspiel Opus1, 1921. Describing animation as ‘midway between painting and music’. The film was described as “eye magic”.

The avant-garde movement grated against artistic ideologies of traditional arts later fueling the fauvists and Cubists.

Futurism declared itself an art movement with ideological and political stance and paved the way for Dada and surrealism which embraced cinema and forged an affinity between art and film.

The avant-garde interest, in part, focused upon the formal aesthetic potentials of film and animation, line and form, movement and rhythm, colour and light.

Arnaldo Ginna is noted for producing possibly the first abstract painting in the western world and who, frustrated by the absence of a movie camera capable of single frame control, drew images related to sound, directly onto film stock, Neurasthenia, 1906.

Vocabulary

Elements of Art: The visual components of colour, form, line, shape, space, texture, and value.

Line – An element of art defined by a point moving in space. Line may be two-or-three-dimensional, destructive, implied, or abstract.

Shape – An element of art that is two-dimensional, flat, or limited to height and width.

Form – An element of art that is three-dimensional and encloses volume; includes height, width and depth (includes depth because of a cube, a sphere, a pyramid, or a cylinder). Form may also be free flowing.

Value – The lightness or darkness of tones or colours. White is the lightest value; black is the darkest. The value halfway between these extremes is called middle gray.

Space – An element of art by which positive and negative areas are defined or a sense of depth achieved in a work of art.

Colour – An element of art made up of three properties: hue, value, and intensity.

• Hue: name and colour
• Value: hue’s lightness and darkness (a colour’s value changes when white or black is added).
• Intensity: quality of brightness and purity (high intensity= colour is strong and bright; low intensity= colour is faint and dull).

Texture – An element of art that refers to the way things feel, or look as if they might feel if touched.