Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Fall 2013 Blog Entry #10


Halloween is coming up! Time for some scares, everyone! Speaking of scares, I have just seen at least 2 of the "scariest" animated movies this week! Hint: Both are Disney-animated films!


The Nightmare Before Christmas
has the most impressive stop-motion animation that I have ever seen. Most of the character designs were amazingly quirky and weird-looking. An example of how even artists can come up with their own visions like Tim Burton has despite serving as the producer only for this 1993 flick. As for the stop-motion animation process, I am impressed with how this kind of technology really works. Initially, I never heard of the word "stop-motion" before when I first watched the original 3 short Wallace & Gromit films. But now I realize that there's more to it than just calling it "clay animation." Stop-motion animating also works for non-clay figures like the figures in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Never will I understand how long it would take to create every scene with a lot of camera shots and then convert them into a major flipbook-like sequence. I doubt that I might want to sign up practicing this type of animation. But I believe that while there are other stop-motion non-clay animated films like James and the Giant Peach and Corpse Bride, I think that the most beautifully stop-motion animated film is Coraline.



Onto the subject of CGI or Computer Graphic Imagery. For a while, I have been dreaming of working as an artist at an animation studio. Maybe an animation studio like Pixar, known for the brilliant masterpieces like Toy Story.
Having bought the new Blu-ray pack of Disney/Pixar's Monsters University on the day it was first released after it was in theaters this summer, I could never forget how impressed I am with not only the breathtaking CGI-animation, but the well-written story for this latest prequel to our highly-acclaimed Monsters, Inc. At first, I was little skeptical with the story and how the characters were animated, but I became surprised once I saw it on the big screen this summer. It's good that the texture in the CGI characters appear to be well-improved, thus remaining consistent with the animation in the other Pixar films and its predecessor Monsters, Inc. Though I felt that the texture in both Mike and Sulley were much better in the first film. Some of the monsters have been made loveable and enjoyable for the audience to grasp with thanks to their clever unique designs. For the story, it sure feels how it can be very challenging to come up with a decent story. But the storyboards are the most logical way in displaying out the ideas from the written script before the animation process would begin. Much like how I think up and design my own creative works to help display my artistic skills. The best option that I might suggest in order to avoid continuity issues is to keep track with the chronology in the number of films of the same franchise. Computer animation is something that I might like to sign up for, once I have completed my computer graphic arts class this semester. Some of the monster designs in both films reminded me that I could come up with my own designs, even if they are already taken no matter how I envision them. I might just even play around with the monster details to either make them funny or scary.

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