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Some time ago, my friend Joey asked me if I’d like to write an article somehow relating design to animation. Back then I had just finished working on a pencil-test sequence for my animation class at SVA, so I could easily use it an example. Easily? Not quite.
The easy thing would be to bore the hell out of everybody by writing a subjective harangue on character design. But that’s just the shortsighted way of understanding design in terms of visual storytelling. Designing a character isn’t even an inherent step within the process of filmmaking. It can be applied to anything from mascots for the FIFA World Cup to LARPing. Therefore, I’m going to talk about editing and storyboarding; or how making choices about angles, shot composition and duration of frames can determine the meaning and set the mood of a movie despite the fact that most people take these things for granted. Because that is what designing a film is all about in the end.
Take a look at the sequence above. Nothing too fancy, we didn’t even have time to add some backgrounds and polish a few animations. There isn’t much of a story either; just two kids playing cowboys and Indians. Yet nothing is there by accident. That sequence is a minute long series of choices.
Think about the way it starts, a sudden cut that comes out of nowhere. Many movies have that sort of opening, like Oldboy or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It takes you right into the action and works especially well if your scene depicts something very dramatic or physically intense. It’s unexpected, it takes the audience off-guard, so they have to process the information really quickly. With Cowkids, we wanted to exaggerate everything about our main characters’ game, so a blunt opening was the way to go.
We also chose to start the movie with a traditional hip-level shot of our character’s hand reaching for his gun to establish that we were about to witness a duel. From there, a series of mirrored shots emphasize even more this particular scenario at the same time they present our characters. One thing we realized when going for the mirrored shots formula is that the girl would have to be a leftie if we wanted to repeat the first shot from a reverse angle. Directors like Sergio Leone avoided this problem on classics like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly by filming the gunbelt from the front. However, we wanted to keep both characters on frame, so the leftie choice won over new camera angle option.
Soon, both characters get separated and we show them performing ridiculous acrobatics. First, we see the boy jumping and rolling. Second, we see the girl completing a full circle on a swing before brandishing her weapon. And lastly, both run around the playground to avoid each other. By doing this we accomplish two goals: we hint that the girl is better than the boy, as her dodging tactics are more spectacular and creative. The audience will probably want her to win after that and, in fact, she does win the fight in the end. The second goal is to establish the playground as the setting, which is merely suggested at first and eventually confirmed with a wide shot of both characters running in circles within a limited space.
Later on, the boy tries to top the girl’s latest move by going down a slide to surprise her. She answers by jumping on a merry-go-round to become a moving target. We decided to show how close the boy was from actually hitting the girl by drawing her feet in the foreground, framing the figure of the boy as he opens fire. This is another traditional composition that you can find, although fitting entirely different situations, in movies like To Catch a Thief or Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The slow motion simulated during the merry-go-round sequence emphasizes the girl’s advantage at this point, focusing on how she pulls out her pistol to deliver what may be the final shot. Slow motion can work in two ways: it draws attention and gives the moment a certain degree of magnificence. However, it only works if used scarcely, otherwise it becomes vulgar and redundant. For that reason we made sure it was seen just that one time.
Zoom ins and outs normally are a disgusting choice in live-action, but for some reason, they work just fine in animation. We used them a couple of times to emulate the more elegant tracking shots, most notably in the scene with the boy running towards the bouncing pony. Here, first we show the boy running alone and then we zoom out to reveal the pony. This gives some motion to the shot, something necessary to keep the pace in an action piece, while avoiding excessive cutting, which tends to be confusing.
The tire swing jump and collision between the two characters is something that evolved through time. Originally it was going to be shown in one shot, again, to avoid too many cuts. Unfortunately, the complexity of such shot proved to be too time consuming and it had to be divided into three. Even though the result looks fine in terms of animation, this was one of our most frustrating decisions because in the final movie is hard to tell that the girl loses her gun in the clash. That particular piece of information was relevant because it set up the outcome of the fight, when the girl is briefly at the mercy of the boy right before getting miraculously saved by the Indian toddler.
In terms of choices, the final destiny of the boy had more to do with sound than angles, composition or elaborate animations. We wanted him to fall in a dog park and make it look as if he was being eaten alive by the animals without showing it. Therefore, we just animated a few dogs pouncing over the fence and then played around with sound. As with the rest of the movie, the goal was to exaggerate, so instead of some recording of actual dog barks we resorted to Jaguars roaring. That way, our dogs sounded fierce enough and anyone would think that the poor kid never made it alive after his villainies.
As a closing note, I apologize if anyone thought that this post had nothing to do with design and felt misled. However, I still think that design is a very broad term and professionals from many fields use it in very different ways. Would a car designer think in the way a company logo designer thinks? And what about a videogame designer? What I offered here is what I see as the way filmmakers think whenever they face the challenge of designing a motion picture, no matter how big or small.
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