It was exciting to see these two work together. Jim started by sending us thumbnail layouts, which Tim used as a guide for his animation:

When Tim was done with animation, we sent Jim the character layout showing the key poses and he drew the final layout. It was really important for him to get great line quality with his pencil, because we used his drawings as final art for the screen:

We did a very small amount of cleanup (pushing contrast and levels around, erasing stray marks and smudges) and passed the final layouts to Bill Wray. We wanted to be sure the animation had a hand-made feel, so Bill painted both traditionally and digitally. Sometimes he would combine hand-painted elements with digital painting in the same BG:

Other times, he decided to go all hand-painted:

We gave both artists as much freedom and latitude as possible. As a result, we got artwork back that was better than anything we had imagined, and hopefully they felt a stronger sense of pride and ownership of the work they did. These cartoons would not have been the same without their brilliant contributions.

Above is a piece of pre-production artwork from a work-in-progress. It’s a love story told by an unlikely romantic and his wife. The story follows them from their first date together to the last week before the husband dies of pancreatic cancer.

People generally want to be kind and encouraging. So when presented with something that’s at least moderately acceptable, they’ll probably give mostly positive comments. If those comments are your gauge, than it will be easy to evaluate most of your work as good. Most likely it’s ok. It’s unlikely that it’s outstanding though. And it’s a pretty sure bet that there’s something that can be improved.

One of the most honest, and memorable criticisms I ever got came from a 14-year-old. It was Joshua, the subject of “Q&A”. Tim and I had invited him and his mother over to see character designs and storyboards. We were excited and incredibly nervous about sharing the work with them (mostly because we feared possible criticism!). The storyboard seemed to get a pretty good response. But the first thing Joshua said when he saw the character designs was, “My hair isn’t blond!” We had a picture, we knew it was brown. Why had we designed him with blond hair? I’m really not sure.

We ended up giving Joshua blue hair. Still not true to life, but it worked great for the design of the film. And it’s dark, the way Joshua’s hair is. I don’t think we would have arrived there without his criticism. And it’s made me conscious of not designing everybody like me and Tim on subsequent projects— white male, blue eyes, and blond hair. The experience has also helped me anticipate criticism with eagerness and excitement because I know it will only improve the project. In fact, I find that the earlier on the criticism comes, the better. Of course, if I don’t agree with the input, I’m free to ignore it too.

The good news is that if you look forward to criticism, your personal work will improve. But I’ve found that this outlook is equally helpful professionally. We did a short spot for a client recently, and they commented that they were very pleased with our attitude and response to notes throughout the creative process. Being complimented on our ability to take criticism was equally as rewarding as any compliment we could have gotten about the quality of the finished work. And I’ll bet it will go a long way to increasing our chances of repeat business.

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t graciously accept praise, and take pride and joy in receiving it. That’s part of the fuel for creative fire too. But if you want to do great work, and improve creatively, it’s important to seek criticism. It helps to remember that criticism is not necessarily a judgment that the work is bad. It’s just an observation of a weakness. We’ve all got them, so there’s no need to dread hearing it. Instead, we should embrace the opportunity to receive honest, critical feedback.

Rauch Bros. work inspired by W. H. Johnson

As mentioned here last week, the above image is from a new Rauch Brothers project for which we are using William H. Johnson’s work as our visual inspiration. Looking forward to diving in on this one!

A little festival news. As noted before on our Twitter page, “Q&A” will be playing at this year’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival (June 8-13). Mike and I are thrilled to be showing at this prestigious annual event and will definitely be in attendance along with many of our great NYC animation friends (Signe Baumane, Alex Budokovsky and PES are three other NYers screening this year).

We created a Rauch Brothers Flickr page to share screen shots and concept art from our films with you. The slideshow above is concept art from Germans in the Woods. Check out our other Flickr sets and our photostream to see more. Check back often. We’ll be adding new work all the time.

Besides “Brewer’s Bell Museum”, which Mike mentioned last week, we’ve been working on character designs for a series of new pieces that use the recorded stories of real people again. Below are a few early character designs for that project.

About a month back I had the opportunity to meet Brett Thompson, the energetic and extremely friendly president of ASIFA Atlanta. I was able to show Brett our film “Germans in the Woods” and began exchanging emails Having just finished the film, it was a great opportunity to share about the process and try to make sense of it for myself. In previous posts I’ve gone into detail about the design of the film but I hope this post will offer a broader view of the whole process:  please enjoy an edited version of that conversation.

Brett-

You ask how long did it take to animate, so let me describe our process.

We started with a piece of pre-edited sound (approximately a 2 minute clip cut from a 40 minute StoryCorps interview in which a World War II veteran recalls his “saddest memory”…read about the sound here). This piece had aired on NPR and was included in the recent StoryCorps book. Like many of the SC pieces, this story brought me to tears. There was incredibly strong emotion in the voice and yet we knew there had to be something we could add with animation. I started by listening to the piece on a loop for hours, trying to really get the rhythm of the sound and the emotion of the language stuck in my head. The recording began to break down into passages and I made thumbnails of possible shots to use.

storyboard roughs for the “Levitation Sequence”:
a discarded idea in which the dead soldier would be lifted by angels

When considering how to draw the characters I had to think how much should they look like the real people: what is essential to the story and emotion versus what is essential for historical accuracy. My brother went to the New York Public Library Picture Collection and brought back a stack of photos from the specific battle talked about in the story. Those photos inspired the tall and forbidding look of the forest, the thick blanket of snow, and the soldier’s heavy face.

research photo of the Ardennes forest; finished background design

research photo, concept art, production still

I draw sort of cleanly, evenly shaped characters, and felt we needed to get backgrounds they would sit comfortably on that could also provide the rich texture missing in the character design. That led to designing backgrounds that had a kind of subtlety in value and texture yet were still abstract enough to act more as shapes supporting the composition of the movement. Looking at Willem Den Ouden’s etchings of the Dutch countryside helped establish that look. The film’s events took place in Belgium but the terrain is similar and the mood they set with enormous, dramatic clouds and gracefully passing light was just perfect.

etching by Willem Den Ouden

finished background design

“Germans In The Woods” was being visually designed constantly over the course of its creation, but the basic work for that was done in June, July and August 2007. I had never made a film before, so frequently I would make a speculative “production-still” in Photoshop and say, okay, that’s what I’m doing, but really have no idea how to actually execute it.

In August, I did the majority of the animation, working furiously to do about two minutes worth of work and not always being sure exactly how the drawings would fit into the final shot. The speed I wanted was determined very early on: much of the film is in slow motion to match the drooping, warm voice and hold out the inevitable, painful conclusion in all its tragedy. Still, how I would ink and paint and combine the drawings with special effects and background was not yet settled.

Concept art, final image

Also in August, Tom Witte created the special effects animation of the snow and did some drawings of the forest. His sketches made me determined to get strong atmosphere into the film. A big part of achieving that was a series of ink-wash paintings created by my friend Iandry Randriamandroso. Iandry’s paintings were commissioned with specific sequences in mind but were never used strictly as painted. Instead, they formed the foundation of Photoshop paintings I created by combining scans of flour, eraser bits and pencil shavings with his paintings on top of penciled layouts. This process was something that I had to experiment with and nailed about 6 weeks before the film was finished. We were playing with it right up to the end, constantly throwing out old backgrounds and trying new ones.

Iandry’s painting

production still showing the above painting being used in a final background design

(Read more about the process of creating the backgrounds here, here, and here.)

In the end, we felt confident about what we had created. The emotional toll some of the work took on me came as a bit of a surprise, especially the crying sequence in which the narrator talks about “waking up at night crying over this kid”. I tried to identify with the extraordinary emotional weight he was carrying and felt my own face and shoulders being stretched with his sadness. This feeling was drawn out over the week it took to animate the sequence and was by far the most intense experience I had while making the film.

concept art and production still from crying sequence

Hopefully the emotional quality of the recording has been matched in the animation and the narrator’s message, about the tragedy of this individual death, comes through in the film.

(Read more about animating the crying sequence and see a pencil test here.

The first film from Rauch Brothers Animation is “Germans in the Woods”. See a teaser here.

Our collaborator on the film is StoryCorps, the national oral history project.  In their own words:

By recording the stories of our lives with the people we care about, we experience our history, hopes, and humanity. Since 2003, tens of thousands of everyday people have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to take home and share, and is archived for generations to come at the Library of Congress. Millions listen to our award-winning broadcasts on public radio and the Internet. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, creating a growing portrait of who we really are as Americans.

Heavily influenced by Aardman’s Lip-Sync series and films like “Creature Comforts” and “Going Equipped”, Mike and I had been thinking about doing documentary animation for years. During an internship at StoryCorps, Mike was encouraged by Dave Isay, SC founder, to try adapting the recordings into animation. Two months later we brought him a pair of animatics, one of which would become “Germans in the Woods”. In GITW, World War II veteran Joseph Robertson recalls shooting a young German soldier at The Battle of the Bulge, his “saddest memory”.

The recording is so packed with emotion that we always felt if we did a halfway decent job on the design and animation we’d have a pretty good film. Still, the idea of translating such a raw and personal story was daunting. How could we translate this man’s memory without getting in the way of his message? How could we tell the story with respect and dignity for Joseph Robertson and the young man he was forced to kill? The story tells us that each death in every war is a unique and sacred event of profound tragedy, not only for the dead but also for his killer. Robertson says “I still see him in my dreams and I don’t know how to get him off my mind”, 60 years later.

Who was the soldier he shot?  A member of the Hitler Youth. To prepare for the film, I read “A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika” by Alfons Heck. In this memoir, Heck describes his life in a German town during Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power. Reading this book it becomes clear how enticing the Hitler Youth would have been to a young German boy: it offered comradery, purpose, a ticket to higher education, the facade of authority and, most of all, the seductively fiery rhetoric of Nazism. If an entire nation was brought under the sway of such madness, how could impressionable boys and girls fair any better? Toward the end of the war, with the “regular” German army nearing defeat, Hitler and his commanders cynically called on the teenage boys of the Hitler Youth to defend against the advancing Allies. The soldier Robertson was forced to shoot was one of these young kids.

I won’t bother to get into the design of the film here, you can check the studio site and previous posts to read about that, but I would like to talk about the responses we’ve been getting. When you work on something like this for six months, it’s easy to forget how strong your first emotional response was. All of that has been brought back to me in watching the film with others: their eyes open wide, mouths part and gasp, and we frequently see people break into tears. My cousin sobbed for half an hour after watching the film. We are humbled at this kind of response and feel extremely indebted to Joseph Robertson for his service, his sacrifice, and his willingness to share this story with us. If the film has any power, it comes from that man’s voice.

You can see a teaser for the film at our website here.

The video posted below is an interview with Dave Isay in which he describes the StoryCorps project and his goal of making us into “a nation of oral historians”. There is also a longer, maybe more complete video from ABC News that profiles Dave and the StoryCorps project available here. 

Dave Levy recently posted on his blog about the 3 main categories he sees in modern animation design. He calls them ”Appealing Design, Grotesque Design, and Appealingly Grotesque Design”. About “Appealing Design”, Dave writes: ”it’s a simple design, rooted in classic appeal but with just enough modern quirks to give it a little edge”. Dave also writes that he sees an emphasis on “moving characters in interesting ways” and “playfulness in story construction”, though he wonders if that “maybe reveals an attempt to overcompensate for simplistic graphics”. I was flattered to be called one of “this movement’s artists”, and I did recognize some of the strengths and weaknesses I see in my own work in what Dave had to say and would like to respond to it here.

As I mentioned previously on my blog, the designs for one of the films I am currently working on were inspired by Owen Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament (see the original post). In the book, Jones talks a lot about bringing everything to a perfect balance of shapes. The focus is on pleasing proportions, symmetry, and repetition.

Plate XLIII, “Moorish Ornament”
The Grammar of Ornament (Owen Jones)

I applied these design principles to my characters as you see here:

Plate X, detail “Egyptian Ornament” (Jones) and The Son from “The Parkbench”

This approach was helpful for several reasons. The film is about seven individuals whose paths cross and some walk away winners and some walk away losers. The Father and Son, The Balloonseller, The Birds, The Man on the Bench, The Other. No one speaks and everybody’s costume is fairly nondescript, and since I was going to move the camera around, showing every character from extreme close up to extreme wide, sometimes even in the same shot, they would have to look as unique close up as they did from a distance just based on shape. To demonstrate this, I’ve posted two different shots of the birds here:

Close up on one bird and overhead shot of both birds surrounded by other characters

So that the viewer will never be confused, each character has a distinct hand, distinct nose, distinct leg; but that hand, nose and leg all make sense on the same body by being somehow similar to one another and expressive of a personality.  For instance, the design of the boy emphasized circles… notice, even his knees are circular:

The boy’s face is dominated by perfectly circular lenses, repeating the large circles of his head and body.  His shirt cuffs and pant legs are circular; even his hands have rather circular fingertips and palms.  By comparison, his Father has a more grotesque, dripping body with long, jointed, fingers and a large nose falling over a large chin. We still know they are related because their postures match and they both wear glasses. 

That makes shots like this work:

The hand that comes on is immediately identifiable, there are only two hands with long bony fingers in the film and they both belong to the Father.

This kind of quick recognition was needed throughout the film as most cuts are jump cuts, you are suddenly thrust beneath a smoker’s chin, between two eyes and a giant nose, staring out from under a pigeon’s belly.  Whose chin?  Whose eyes?  Whose belly?  They all need answers

The Ballon Seller’s Chin; color concept

Man’s Face; pencil test

The Bird’s Belly ; pencil test

The designs had to be simple enough to draw the six minute film by myself, to create instantaneous character recognition in every shot, and to allow for playfulness in pantomime given the lack of dialogue.  Sound effects will come in later and further separate the characters by giving each one a unique library of sound: the falling of their feet, the tapping of their fingertips, the drag of their cigarette, the swing of their hips will all be unique.

Their body language was just as important to establishing character.  The Man on the Bench is totally normal, his walk is just an averaging out of Every Walk.  The father has a big stride to match his overall bigness, but stays low to the ground for balance.  The birds are clumsy, their feet slap the ground as they go, and one can be identified as easy going, the other touchy, all with the body language of their walk.  I’ve posted pencil test animation of them both:

The Pleasant Bird

The Touchy Bird

And while I generally wanted my characters to have “appeal”, there were some I wanted to be more appealing than others.  I had a special interest in designing the birds and the balloon seller as sympathetic characters: they are going to lose the most in the film, and those losses should be felt.  They have eyeballs and mouths to show their emotions, a big leg up on the other guys, as it turns out. The Father and Son are meant to be more emotionally removed: they are entirely non-sentimental, staring out blankly from behind large glasses.

The Balloonseller and his very unemotional counterpart, The Father

And what about the story?  The version currently up on YouTube is incomplete, but I hope the finished film will indeed have what Dave calls “playfulness in story construction”.  Still, the story has been fixed for some time now and its consideration has admittedly become secondary to considerations of the way I wanted to tell it.  I don’t know how wide an audience this film will have, and it is not really for a wide audience.  I made it for me.  It continues to be an extremely pleasant process, working on it is a meditation for me.  Every part of each character and each movement is so controlled and predetermined, it becomes very easy to luxuriate in the process and really dig in.  I hope what’s left at the end can still make a mark, but that is not as important to me as what I’ve learned in doing the film.

Moving ahead, I am beginning to work on what will hopefully be a series of films much more capable of finding a wide audience.  The stories for the series, which I can not currently announce by name, are told by people from all over the country, of all ages, races and genders.  For this series, I will be taking a lot of the lessons I learned in designing “The Parkbench” forward to apply to more specifically characterized personalities.  Their universe will hopefully still have appeal but will have the other foot solidly in reality.  I look forward to sharing more with you about this, but in the mean time let me present a few of the characters designed for that project.