I recently attended ‘The
Animator’, a conference held this June in Toronto at Corus
Entertainment and Sheridan College, which threw up some interesting
recurring themes and motifs across the various keynotes, panel
presentations and screenings (as will be the case in any good
conference) and I thought I'd take the opportunity of this post to
reflect on some of these ideas. Don't expect anything tremendously
conclusive, however. The event was a convergence point between
several institutions and events at once; the aforementioned Sheridan
College and Corus Entertainment, TAAFI (the Toronto Animation Arts
Festival International), the centenary of Norman McLaren (the
National Film Board of Canada’s most important animation figure)
and the Society for Animation Studies’ annual conference.
As a child of the VHS
generation I have no problem admitting to a collector mentality.
Although many of the students I teach (and one or two people my own
age) experience film and animation almost exclusively through
streaming or downloading, I just can't help feeling a desperate
desire to own something if I really like it or find it
interesting. Just having access to it through the internet
isn't enough – I can even be struck by a kind of OCD ‘collector
anxiety’ if I find something that, for one reason or other, I just
can’t own in some way. I actually avoid watching some online
material through fear that I’ll like it, but be unable to buy it.
And so one of the themes that ran through the conference, the loss
and/or preservation of material, struck a definite chord for me. The
inimitable Paul Wells discussed the sheer amount of production
material that animation studios/companies simply throw out or destroy
as a result of space limitations. This includes preproduction
sketches, character concept art, storyboards and even maquettes and
sets in stop-motion productions. Wells and his colleagues have taken
it upon themselves – within the UK at least – to gather up and
preserve as much of this material as possible.
The theme of preservation
continued through to the end of the conference, where we were lucky
enough to be shown the ‘pre-world premier’ screening of Norman
McLaren's stereoscopic films. The films were highly impressive works
of early 3D animation but, amazingly, the images were hand drawn and,
as with many McLaren works, actually drawn directly on to the
celluloid. How one sits down in 1951 and works out how to draw lines
on a tiny cel the size of a postage stamp and make them
three-dimensional in projection is beyond me. These short animations
had long since slipped into obscurity and were even feared lost
altogether, but thanks to the wonders of digital media, the
restoration and preservation of this incredible material was
possible.
Despite the ability of
digital technology to rescue these films, another tendency that ran
through the conference was a trepidation about just what gets lost in
the new digital world. Vera Brosgol, a very lovely storyboard artist
for Laika, stores her material (sketches and complete storyboards)
digitally but admitted that much of the work that she produced for
Coraline had drifted into obscurity, because she needed the
room on her hard drive. While on the one hand, this seems exactly the
same situation as with the physical materials that companies feel
they must throw out for the sake of space, the difference is that
there is no digital equivalent of Paul Wells to turn up and take it
away to a safe haven. Digital material, once deleted, stays deleted.
Another, slightly more
aggressive, attitude towards digital – and the changes it brings –
also became apparent through the conference. Although there were
several borderline vitriolic opinions expressed, most relevant for
this discussion were the thoughts on how digital impacts upon
storyboards and another similar art-form, the comic. David Sweeney
argued that the problem with a digital comic is that the defining
quality of sequential art (the fact that the images co-exist
on the page and don't simply replace one another in a continuous
stream), is lost in the process of adapting them into the
partially-animated Motion Comic format. Chris Pallant mentioned a
similar development in the way in which storyboards are used within
the production process. While in the days of paper storyboards, the
images were posted up on the wall and could be rearranged as story
meeting progressed and, most importantly, seen at the same time,
allowing for a better understanding of story flow. But now, at some
studios at least, the storyboard has become an entirely digital
process. Images are drawn directly into the computer by hand and then
discussed one at a time, eliminating the dynamic flow between
the images that the analogue process allows.
Thus, on one hand the
risk of material taking up too much room and being destroyed or
discarded is greatly reduced through the digital production process,
yet at the same time, the way in which this material is used in
production becomes altered and the risk of art being deleted
forever is increased.
Listening to Vera Brosgol
and speak and show us some of her artwork also heightened my
collector anxiety. The material that we were shown (both her own and
that of others) was fascinating but, even in the era of DVD and
Blu-Ray extras, would mostly sit in obscurity seen only by a very
tiny minority. One of my (many) fascinations with animation as a
medium is the fact that – moreso than live-action film – every
piece of work produced during the production process can be seen as a
work of art in its own right. Every character concept, used and
unused, each storyboard page, each colour chart, every piece of
background art, not to mention the huge amount of hand-drawings,
maquettes, real and virtual models and armatures, etc., that actually
produce the moving character on screen can all be regarded as works
with their own artistic merit (as far as I'm concerned). And for me,
the tragedy is that you can't own this stuff! Even when
'Making of' featurettes on DVDs or 'Art of' books can give you a lot
of material, it is impossible to get it all.
Of course, arguably, you
could have access to it all, if a digital archive of it all
were to be made. I was happy to find (albeit in low-quality) Vera
Brosgol's graduation short Snow-bo on youtube, as well as many
other graduate films from Toronto's Sheridan College and the
world-famous Disney-founded CalArts. The earliest work of people like
Tim Burton or Chris Sanders is available to see online even if it is
nearly impossible to find a physical copy. This is the benefit of
digital media like the internet, and I have to grudgingly admit the
superiority of the internet to physical artefacts like discs and
books; the sheer amount of material that one can find – if one
knows where to look.
Most academic work
focuses its energy on analysing and unpacking 'professional' work.
Film and Animation Studies are concerned with texts that are
available to most people, not least of all because your brilliant
insights into a particular film will be lost on everyone if you're
the only person who has seen the film in question. But does this mean
that the vast mountain of work produced by amateurs and students –
a lot of which is accessible to all – shouldn't be studied? If I
want to tell my students about the importance of metamorphosis to
animation, do I have to limit my examples to the Fleischer Brothers'
masterpieces, or can I demonstrate the exact same principles by
showing some of the brilliant student work that was screened for us
at Sheridan College? On one level, the answer to the question is:
stick with the Fleischers. Partly, this is because it is very easy
for me to find many articles on the Fleischer cartoons that I can
support my claims with.
Academia is, of course, a
reliant activity – doubly so for Film and Animation Studies. We
have to draw upon the insights of other academics in order to ground
our own thoughts, but we also require artists to produce work in
order for us to have anything to talk about. Paul Wells (who gets in
everywhere) also suggested that the relationship between theory and
practice in animation studies was one of dismissiveness and
superiority. While theory regards itself as an intellectual pursuit,
it also regards the actual practice of animation making as somehow a
lesser activity, something that doesn't require the same kind of
critical thinking or evaluative understanding. This, Wells says, is
nonsense. The act of creativity is by its very nature one of
self-reflexive consideration, of critical evaluation of its own
processes. Theory needs to better understand its relationship to, and
evaluation of, the practical processes of animation. Another reason
my hands are tied in showing the Sheridan students' work is because,
unless the student has uploaded their work online and (even more
importantly) I can remember the student's name, how will I access the
material to show my own students?
'Professionalism'
functions a little like a gatekeeper – if a work has been produced
by a studio, we can at least assume confidently that the work will
possess certain levels of competence and artistic merit (when looking
at the craft of animation, I mean – the finished film might be
pretty bad). And work produced professionally is more likely to exist
as a ‘product’ that can be owned. Work produced by an individual
in their bedroom or as part of an educational institution does not
come with the same kind of guarantees. How do we as consumers (not
just academics but anyone interested in animation) trawl through the
average and forgettable in order to reach the gold that some artists
are able to produce? At the moment, there is no particularly workable
answer. There is no online system that allows for the hierarchical
arrangement of students' work. You cannot type 'best cartoons to come
out of Sheridan' into youtube and hope for a legitimate result. And
so it seems unlikely that any animation scholar will write a piece
analysing any of the great pieces of animation that I saw while in
Toronto.
On the final day of the
conference I had the good fortune to begin talking with a group of
the conference volunteers, who were all animation students at
Sheridan. Although there were several more panels during the course
of the day, I ended up missing them in favour of spending time with
these Animators of Tomorrow. I was struck even more so than before at
the sheer amount of creativity and material that these animators
produced all of the time, from sketches, to paintings, from character
design to full animation. My collector anxiety went into meltdown as
we toured the College and saw all of the material produced by
students of all ages and stages of development. Though I did take a
couple of (poor quality) photos, the fact is that I saw many, many
images that were beautiful and I'm absolutely certain I will never
see again. Not just because I can't own them, but because I also have
no method of accessing it online even if it is up on
deviantart or youtube. The tragic ephemeral nature of animation is
that 95% of the art that goes into it disappears, if not deleted
forever, and then gets lost in the vast ocean of amateur material on
the internet.
Probably the most
memorable of these Sheridan students was Coco Cheung, not least of
all because she spent the final day, for no discernible reason,
dressed as a totem pole. I spent much of my time with her, discussing
her desire to make character maquettes for stop-motion animation (and
being told, in no uncertain terms, that having a PhD does not make me
a “real” doctor), and it is from her I will take the totem pole
analogy that will form my conclusion. Or, more accurately, my
“conclusion”.
 |
| Coco Cheung (by Coco Cheung) flying through the internet on her totem pole trainers |
Academia functions as the
top figure on a totem pole; not only does this nicely reflect the
‘ivory tower’ mentality that we all slip into at some time or
another, but it also demonstrates the reliance that we have on the
work of others. Below academia sits the professional finished
products – shorts and feature films by Dreamworks, Laika, Disney
and so on – that are our bread and butter, without which we would
just fall down to the ground. Below this is the development and
production materials; the concept art, storyboards, maquettes and
cels, which exist as distinct artworks from the films that they
ultimately produce. Below this is the personal or amateur work of
individuals within the animation institution (both the business and
education sectors) – here we find Brosgol’s Snow-bo, the
caricatures produced by Disney animators during slow days, the
maquettes and sketches that we glimpsed while touring Sheridan. While
in a perfect world we would be able to see all of this totem pole and
appreciate each of its figures on their own merits and in relation to
one another, at this exact moment in time it has sunk down into the
mud, almost to the halfway point. Academia and professionally
produced animation are still sitting pretty without much problem, but
the production materials are slowly sinking out of sight, only
glimpsed in DVD extras, and the personal material has completely
vanished below. The internet has led to the creation of small
tunnels, allowing access to tiny portions of this bottom figure, but
the mud keeps obscuring our view (yes, the mud is an analogy for all
of the mediocre amateur animation on the web – sorry). What we need
is a serious excavation project – something akin to Wells’
efforts on a global scale – that can reveal the entirety of the
totem pole for all to see. If the majority of audiences are only
interested in the second figure down, so be it, but we should have
the option to explore the bottom figures and – maybe one day
– create a link between the top and foundational figures, between
academia and the personal material produced by highly talented
individuals.
For the interested, here are some links to the work of the students that I met:
Coco 'the Human Totem Pole' Cheung: http://cy1115.blogspot.co.uk/
Her sister Crystal Cheung: http://liyuconberma.deviantart.com/
Arthur Lim Banes: http://arthurbanes.tumblr.com/
Anna Starkova: http://annathegallant.blogspot.ca/
And to cover all of those whom I met but didn't retain their names, here's the general link to Sheridan College's students: http://sheridananimation.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/links-to-student-work.html
- P.S.
