Animation's Idea People
By Ann Fisher
Clients should give animators an idea, or maybe just a word or two, and let them take it from there. The animators do this everyday; the client needs to put their trust in the artists.
Once we gained momentum as a studio that did the varied range of design, style, approach, attitude and sensibility - once that became our benchmark – then we started finding people coming to us early on," says J.J. Sedelmaier of J.J. Sedelmaier Productions (914-949-7979) in White Plains, NY. "They wanted to form their project with something that was going to be as fresh as possible. And we've always been fortunate and worked hard to keep that going. Sometimes they'll come to us with an idea to do something outrageous and just that sensibility allows me to bat things back and forth. So eventually we're doing what they weren't setting out to do in the beginning, but it's still something that's going to fit the bill with them.”
Sedelmaier, who has a stellar roster of animation clients including Saturday Night Live for whom the studio provided an ongoing series of animated shorts, is the micromanager of his own studio, always helping lay the creative foundation for a project and then letting individual animators run with their ideas. However, he tries to avoid being a heavy-handed manager and he expects the same attitude from his clients.
"I can't hold on to the people and talent and also inspire other people who want to work at the studio if all I'm doing is dictating," he says. "It's essentially what I expect from the people that come here – if you have parameters that you want me to follow, give them to me in general terms and let me go with it. Have some faith in it."
Sometimes he designs the initial concept and works on it himself. He was the co-creator and director on an offbeat :30 spot for the Baltimore-based Episcopal New Church Center of Maryland, created for The Richards Group agency in Dallas. The client wanted to attract more young people to church so with the tagline, "Gotta problem with church?" Sedelmaier envisioned a youth so upset with the idea of attending church that he went to stand in the middle of a road. The style is equally noticeable, with degraded color and an old-fashioned flat clip art quality, all hand drawn and painted on cels.
"We talked about it early and I was able to really sculpt the whole thing stylistically and scriptwise. That was really one of my favorite spots because people look at it and are thrown so off balance," he says. "Usually with fads and trends you have a lead in to something that's outrageous. Well this is just like a pail of cold water, it's so jarring." The spot aired this past summer.
WILD BRAIN PRECISION
Clients who want a fresh approach may instinctively be drawn to Wild Brain in San Francisco (www.wildbrain.com). "The name sort of indicates that you're going to get a high level of creative input if that's what you want," says director Carl Willat.
Ogilvy & Mather/Detroit wanted two :30 Lincoln Mercury spots to show dealers selling tires and other car parts directly to their customers. Previous campaigns had always used live action, showing people in the service area and the parts against white backgrounds. Willat's suggestion was to use blueprints for the background, to indicate precision. The spots were animated, with 2D blueprint backgrounds and 3D photoreal bouncing tires in front. Softimage 3D, rendered in Mental Ray and running on SGI Octanes, was used to animate. "It was a simple idea but the more we played around with it the more interesting graphic stuff there was to do with it," Willat says of the concept.
Around the same time, Willat and Julia Tortolani co-directed four :15 commercials for JWT/Chicago for Nabisco Ritz Crackers. These posed a different creative challenge. The animators suggested stop motion but the client demurred, insistent on real, not CG, crackers. They compromised with a hybrid approach. The animators built models, a local food photographer shot the crackers, then those were scanned into Softimage where additional textures were added. The final spots have those crackers in various situations, illustrated with 2D yellow lines against red backgrounds. They went on air in September.
"The nice thing about CG is it enabled us to combine all these textures until we came up with something that looked even better than just the models photographed," says Willat.
FLYING RHINO'S MOMENTUM
Sometimes animators insist on creative control. "In our shop we like to provide the creative because that way it assures we get something that we like also," says Tom McKeon, partner, animator and all-around creative at Flying Rhino in San Francisco (www.flying-rhino.com). "That was one of the things we mandated with [our client Momentum Telecom because his budget wasn't a lot. We told him that if we're going to work on this he had to let us handle the creative so we end up with a product that we feel good about representing. He had no problem with that." McKeon is referring to a trio of :30s he created directly for Momentum Telecom, a regional company, that aired this past summer. The client wanted a superhero character to right the wrongs of the phone company in animated spots that had very short turnaround times. Flying Rhino developed the character and the scenarios. This shop created the 2D character animation a little differently: McKeon drew straight into the computer, using Painter on a Power Mac G3 for image creation with Premiere and After Effects for animation. Flying Rhino is a turnkey shop, providing post production services in addition to 2D, 3D and now Web animation.
Of course it's easier to wrest creative control from a corporate rather than agency client, says McKeon, himself once agency staff. "When you're working directly with a client it's easier to do that because the agency guys are trying to get their mitts on it and do whatever they can to seem creative themselves. Coming from Leo Burnett I know that."
BLINKING AT THE LIGHT
Animators at Blinkfx, a Flame/special effects house in New York, certainly enjoy the additional creative responsibility that comes with corporate clients. (They can be found at their parent company Web site www.image-group.com). For Keyspan, an energy company, the animators were asked for ideas to illustrate energy in a :30 spot showing the various environments that the client had shot, like farm houses and stadiums whose lights would turn on at night.
Their 3D arcs evolved from a glass-type energy field that was thought to be too Terminator-like, a rainbow band of color that was too stylized and, finally, a simple band of light with activity within it. Animators Patricia Heard Greene and Peter Hamilton used Alias|Wavefront PowerAnimator v. 9.0 on an SGI Octane to do their work.
"Agencies pretty much come in with boards and have specific ideas about what they want. But with a client like Keyspan, we all had ideas about the arc and how it should act," says Heard Green, who notes that it is absolutely more fun to add her ideas to a project. Their client was Einson Freeman, a production company in New York City. The spot went on air in December.
THE IMPORTANCE OF STORYBOARDS
Green Rabbit Design (www.greenrabbit. com) animators put a lot of emphasis on the design process, to the point that they generally provide storyboards for free. This serves a couple of purposes: it shows the client the extent of their creativity and it minimizes problems during production.
"Somebody will come to us and they'll have a vague idea," says Tom Bonifield, creative director and animator of the Scottsdale, AZ, shop that provides 2D, 3D and now Web animation, as well as compositing - much of it for in-state clients. "They depend on us for creative input. Any kind of project we get we do a full-color storyboard that's exactly the way it's going to look. We create all the imagery - they're not animated, obviously - upfront, then we show it to the client. They get to see all the colors, all the layout, everything in storyboard form in little panels - and we try to sell them on, 'Look you're not taking a chance here. If you don't like it, let's change it here so we can save money down the line
and it won't cost you an extra penny.' When people buy off on that there are no surprises."
For the US Department of Agriculture, a repeat client, Green Rabbit recently created a :30 PSA about traveling with pets. The spot touted the USDA's Web site full of information. The animators chose a loose line style to show a dalmatian meeting a Scotty dog, in an airport, that gives travel tips. It should begin airing this month. The animation was hand drawn, scanned into the Linker Technologies Animation System, running on a Mac G3, for inking and painting, then composited with Chyron Liberty. Story- boards are often built the same way, then put into Quark Xpress with voiceover and camera moves noted under each panel. It makes an impressive presentation to clients.
On a sad note, Green Rabbit Design suffered a devastating fire in November that gutted their 2,000-square-foot facility, housed in an older building. The fire's origin is currently under investigation. All equipment was destroyed. However, the staff continued to work in temporary quarters. The company planned to be settled in its new Scottsdale location by early January. Since the fire, the staff has decided to replace its G3 with a G4, as well as switch from SGI workstations to NT-platform Dell T600 hardware. It will continue to composite with Liberty.
SAVING TIME WITH ANIMATION
LA's Classkey Chewpo Commercials (www.classkeychewpo.com) found some wiggle room for creative expression in a :30 open for the Fox network's "Together TV" programming block sponsored by toymaker Hasbro.
"Originally their idea was to do a live action spot but they realized the timeframe wasn't enough," says director Steven Dovas, who's been repped by Classkey Chewpo since 1998. "We had to think of ways to do it in that hyper timeframe that animation allows you, to go beyond what you can get away with realistically and have it still feel gentle and loving. That's where the idea came up for a line that was dancing."
Though the New York agency Posnick and Kolker had some definite ideas, like the continuous pan throughout the entire open, Classkey Chewpo developed the distinctive look. In the open, line drawn characters have photographic heads, and they weave their way through the living room. Even a dog jumps around in the action.
The animators shot greenscreen footage of the characters' heads against keyable backgrounds. Once the animation was drawn, the elements were composited in Flame at Betelgeuse. John Andrews and Liz Seidman were executive producers.
Excerpted from: http://postmagazine.com/
This article was acquired on the "fair use" basis.
We encourage You to visit the source website for more information on this topic.
|
|
|
