Artistic Influences - Paul Pope

Another artist who has been an influence on the direction of my work is the Paul Pope, an American comic artist. I love his use of line weight in brush work to convey movement, tone and emotion. His work has an inherent kinetic energy.

Artistic Influences - Jean Giraud

As an illustrator I have had a few influences on my style and it will be interesting to see how this translates from still imagery to images in motion.

I am a big fan of the French artist Jean Giraud, aka Moebius. The aspects which I like to draw from his work include a real sense of weight and volume communicated in an expressive manner; attention to detail; and a potent sense of otherworldliness.

Background inspiration

One of my favourite production design styles was employed on the Disney feature 101 Dalmatians. I really admire the sketchy line work that they used and the blocks of colour overlapping the outlines of objects. For me it contributed hugely to the sense of energy in the film and I hope that my backgrounds can be as effective in communicating, in this instance, a sense of otherworldliness to high energy to calm.

Background Reference Board

Clawing Hands

In the middle conflict of my film, my protagonist is pulled down into darkness by grasping hands. The inspiration for this comes from many places. First I'd have to mention The Black Cauldron’s villain, The Horned King. The Black Cauldron was the first animated film I went to see in the cinema and myself and my family enjoyed it so much we stayed in our seats for the next showing! It was the villains clawed hands which really stuck out for me as sinister.

I also have to reference the boiler man character from Spirited Away, Kamaji, with his extremely long arms which stretch across the boiler room. I think the idea of outsized limbs really contribute to the creation of an other worldly feel. I also took inspiration from this device for the arms pulling up the carpet in scene three of the film.

Visual Reference - Tone

Visual Reference - Character

McVerry Trust Visual Development

Photo Album Cover 

Summer Album Page 

Autumn Album Page 

Spring Album Page

McVerry Trust Visual Reference

I've looked at a number of videos for inspiration in creating the short animation for the McVerry Trust with a focus on paper cut-out style animation.

Firstly I watched the short film The Thomas Beale Cipher. Which I found to be a great example of the use of texture, strong shapes and silhouettes in a cut out style. The characters are rotoscoped though which I wouldn't be interested in exploring at this stage.

These have included the opening sequence to the motion picture version of A Series of Unfortunate Events.

For the action of turning the album pages, the end credit scene from the movie Up.

The opening sequence to the French film Le Petit Nicolas sparked the idea of creating cut out animation using a book/photo album as the stage.

McVerry Trust Visual Reference

A selection of stills from the opening sequences of projects utilising a form of paper cut-out style animation. I found the research of opening sequences to be beneficial because often they are tasked with telling a story in a short amount of time. 

McVerry Trust Visual Reference

Professional Project - Visual Reference Part One

McVerry Trust Dwayne - Home for Good

This is the video of Dwayne and we've been asked to create a short animation from his dialogue, specifically from the twenty-second mark to the fifty second mark, excluding Christmas.

I wrote out a transcript from the video to get a greater sense of the meaning attendant to the words. Dwayne's repetition of the phrase 'having (someone) over (to visit)' was very strong, which gave me the idea of trying to visually represent a form of overcoming, travelling over an obstacle.

A narrative thread emerged for me beginning in a hostel then moving to his home with his family then returning to a memory of isolation in the hostel then returning home but this time just with his daughter which to Dwayne 'means everything'.

Visual Research

As the bulk of the action in my film occurs in an imagined dreamscape that represents the protagonists inner world I am interested in exploring experimental and unusual transitions. I would like to utilise the backgrounds to create a sense of organic flow from one scene to the next in the hope of evoking an amorphous space. A space that is responding to the narrative. 

As part of my research I have been looking at the Catch Me If You Can opening credits and its use of strong graphic shapes that can represent a door one moment then a chair leg the next through the creative use of scale. The characters move in, through and across these shapes. The shapes themselves become wipes, like the airplane flyover transitioning to a freeway.

Another aspect of the work that requires research is the balance between abstract and figurative, the level of accessibility in the film as it must represent the protagonists individual world while remaining relatable to the viewer. One of the films I've watched in relation to this aspect is A is for Autism by Tim Webb. This film does a powerful job of visually representing the participants world while also maintaining a narrative thread for the viewer to follow. As a person on the autistic spectrum myself it also serves me personally as a confidence boost to trust my own visual language and how I see the world as represented through my film.

Another film I've used for research is A Different Perspective by Chris O'Hara for its inventive use of scale and movement of the characters through the foreground, middle ground and back ground planes. It plays with the conceit that though the layout may conventionally represent a three dimensional world, it is still also a flat drawing and the characters can interact with it on both levels. I'd like to try investigate using these techniques for my film especially in the wooden floor sequence with the transition from the foot stomp echoing down to the Melancholic Wife.

Visual Reference

For visual reference from existing film my first port of call is Persepolis, it being an adaptation from a comic and using a black and white aesthetic that mirrors my own source material. I'm interested particularly in the use of texture for atmosphere and backgrounds. The action of my own story not being situated in a particular location, I want to find a visually appropriate way to represent the space my character is inhabiting. I also want to explore composition in terms of the balance between black and white to support the depiction of the characters struggle.

    

Visual Reference - Comic Source Material

The full comic I'm adapting for my short film as originally presented.

My intention is to follow the black and white aesthetic of the comic in the production of the film and as I progress in the adaptation process I would like to explore using colour in a controlled way and it's potential to support the narrative. With regard to the character design, I am going to use the storyboard process to find out what will be required of the character in terms of movement. This will help me to understand what adaptation to make to the hair, clothes and body design.

Visual Reference - Source Material Overview

The source material for my film comes from a comic that I co-created with my partner, artist Sadhbh Lawlor. It's from a series called The Melancholic Wife and her Perpetrating Husband, Sadhbh wrote the stories for the series and I illustrated them. Briefly, the artistic aim of the series is to explore narratives in a short story form and examine the use/misuse of simplistic labels to try describe the complexity of a whole person. There was a conscious decision made to not show either of the main characters faces in the comic so that the reader was encountering them through the words of the narrative, the label that is their names and the actions of the characters in response to situations.

The Melancholic Wife has been the focus of four episodes of the series.


This is her first appearance in episode one.

 
Episode three.


An appearance in episode six, a Perpetrating Husband story.

  
Episode seven.