Shutter Island Emotion Study
This was the result of an art test given by the Digital media department from ETSU. The task for character animators was to create a scene that conveyed melancholy or sadness. This encouraged a refined sense of stillness and emotion I had not yet experienced recreating. My biggest challenge with this piece was keeping the figures animated but calm and almost still as well as maintaining a sense of acting and emotion in the faces. For this project, I did a study on a scene from the end of Shutter Island and tried to match the emotions and acting in a way that fit the style of character I was using.
Link Breath Of The Wild – Rigged Model by Christoph (The Stoff) Schoch found: https://thestoff.gumroad.com/l/lFnryq
Azari rig by Jonathan Cooper found: https://www.gameanim.com/product/azri-rig/
Stuff
This piece was a bit confusing for me, not so much in a technical sense but in an artistic sense. I like to use techniques reminiscent of rotoscoping, aka match animation or rotomation(not an accurate word but I’ve seen it here and there). So I started this piece in a similar way I didn’t do direct match camming due to time constraints, and a lack of pertinent information, but I still tried to follow the reference, as close as possible. At first, this confused everyone who critiqued it, “the characters aren’t interacting enough”, “they’re not quite expressing enough for the art style they’re in”, one professor even pointed out that some people wouldn’t take kindly to this because I didn’t show my acting choices but someone else’s.* So I pushed the motion a bit more and then presented it like an acting study to be safe for my final. While I was starting to appreciate the character on the right’s movement I had barely changed the character on the left or the reactionary character. This was still an issue because in the movie that character doesn’t actually react until the next scene for some reason, probably to emphasise the speaking character more. In this animation, we don’t have the next scene, so having the secondary character be stoic and wait their turn didn’t make sense. So I changed the motion from the ground up and made them react. This was one of the first times I’ve run into these issues so hope fully moving forward I’ll remember real-life acting doesn’t always translate to animated acting or characters, and my own choices are more important to show off than replicating others’ choices.
*This comment confused me so much. From what I’ve been told and seen most animators use references of some kind whether it be their own or external. This wasn’t exactly the point my professor was trying to make I realised but it still left me wondering where the line is drawn how much should you guess in the editor and how much should be referenced what type of reference is acceptable? Recently there was a PlayStation trailer that was animated and shown to have almost completely ripped the animation from other films and shows and the animator was fired when this became apparent. That makes some sense to me the animator blatantly ripped other people’s work and just reskinned it and cut them together, even the camera angles were the same. From what I’ve read since the animator clearly traced almost every shot to the point where some of the backgrounds were almost identical as well, making a clear case that the animator put little of their own skills or effort into the work. This example shows a clear extreme when it comes to fraudulent copying or referencing, but the proposed philosophy wasn’t as cut in dry still. For instance Mocap, that’s not an animator’s raw work they just touch it up or use it as a reference why isn’t that scrutinized the same way? I think my main issue is that I’m a copyleft open source kind of person I grew up on youtube animations that used other people’s audio, characters, and motions, to make all sorts of cool and original things. After all, nothing is that original we use archetypes, rules and our own limited information/perspectives to construct things as animators we use the 12 principles of animation so much that we can break an animation down into which and how the rules were applied to a specific scene. I just don’t easily accept this mentality because I don’t see a clearly defined line, and from what I’ve heard this ideology isn’t unanimously accepted either. For now, I do want to make my own work and use my own choices and skills, most of my pieces use references I made myself anyway. In a piece I have yet to add to my portfolio I even started creating my own audio. I’m not advocating for copying things, personally, I hate unnecessary sequels, and remakes/reboots, and I value new and original ideas this comment just threw me for a loop making me question what reference is morally wrong or right, and how deep copyright can go to control what can and can’t be made.
Also, rotomation is a weird term I’ve only seen it a few times, but I think one of those times was for a DreamWorks job posting. It doesn’t make sense to me because it almost implies that rotoscoping is separate from animation which is beyond inaccurate as rotoscoping only exist in the context of animation. Just a pet peeve of mine, it sounds dumb if you know and random if you don’t.