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More from LiimLsan
Another piece of concept art and color experiments from my project, adapting stuff out of Janáček's "Příhody lišky Bystroušky," the Cunning Little Vixen, for animation purposes. At this point, it's in the middle of act 1, with her trying to convince the hens to revolt against their chauvinist oppressor, the Rooster, as the hens wait nervously outside the limits of the rope, intrigued but paralyzed by stockholm syndrome.
(I've had to amend the script here, because it doesn't make sense... See, Sharp-ears, she's been sheltered and doesn't know the terms for anything, she learned language and culture from the bowdlerized gossip of the songbirds. So here she has to be a crude-speaking radfem, so later in the film she can evolve into a truly strong and eloquent feminist who knows things from actual experience. It's a tough line; but the patriarchy is a bit too adult of a concept for her to know just yet. She'd call it something like the 'phallic dictatorship," which is just as accurate, but more in character and much more fun to animate. That sort of thing.)
Watercolor and watercolor pencils, 3"x4"
(I've had to amend the script here, because it doesn't make sense... See, Sharp-ears, she's been sheltered and doesn't know the terms for anything, she learned language and culture from the bowdlerized gossip of the songbirds. So here she has to be a crude-speaking radfem, so later in the film she can evolve into a truly strong and eloquent feminist who knows things from actual experience. It's a tough line; but the patriarchy is a bit too adult of a concept for her to know just yet. She'd call it something like the 'phallic dictatorship," which is just as accurate, but more in character and much more fun to animate. That sort of thing.)
Watercolor and watercolor pencils, 3"x4"
Category Artwork (Traditional) / Scenery
Species Vulpine (Other)
Size 1280 x 989px
File Size 246.3 kB
The Cunning Little Vixen (movie) is such an odd mix of opera and innocent-looking animation. A perfect example of how not all animation isn't quite suitable for children (though my mother still isn't aware of this).
I rather like the ground-and-up angle of this, and I find the dynamic lines used on Sharpears wuite pleasing. Oh, and the chicken faces are bloody great!
I rather like the ground-and-up angle of this, and I find the dynamic lines used on Sharpears wuite pleasing. Oh, and the chicken faces are bloody great!
My "big hairy audacious goal" as an animator is to animate another version of this. I have no illusions about completing it during the next 30 years, so I try to avoid putting most of it online (designs get stolen).
But I've the storyboards 80% completed (okay, scribbled, but I've at least 50 minutes worth of a 65 minute fim), all main and incidental characters cast, three financial backers, and rough scripts, color scripts, shape scripts, and trial animation being continually remolded, plus a preliminary orchestral outline somewhere in my papers, and my summer project is to paint some quality pitch art. Next step after that is clean storyboards, scene layouts, voice actors... And counting the films I'm making besides this, arranged in order to teach myself, yeah, 30 years ^^
After all, one of the best things about opera is that no one does a show the same way twice. Geoff Dunbar has freed me from having to be literal with the dialogue, story, or character design.
So I'm redoing this in a Czech storybook aesthetic, writing sprechsgesang in Czech patois and a gumbo of Scouse-American vernacular (basically, where Moravia corresponds to in the Anglophone world), and kneading the story dough into a feminist reinterpretation - it's not as much the 'eternal' conflict between human and animal, as it is a woman trying to regain her identity after childhood trauma and a gamekeeper trying to affirm his masculinity with revenge.
I love the movie, though. I just want to explore the territory it shied away from. ^u^
Show her some Bakshi, that'll wake her up. ^^
Chicken heads are strange things. They're like they have teeny robot masks glued to the top of their necks. Fun to animate, I'll say...
One benefit to a film you intend to do most of the work on yourself is that you can do a layout like this and know how you want it to move. If I did this in a studio, the animator would collapse.
I'ma redo this pic soon anyway, I've their proportions all wrong and the composition too imbalanced (and not in a "momentum" way, in a "stalled roller coaster" way).
But I've the storyboards 80% completed (okay, scribbled, but I've at least 50 minutes worth of a 65 minute fim), all main and incidental characters cast, three financial backers, and rough scripts, color scripts, shape scripts, and trial animation being continually remolded, plus a preliminary orchestral outline somewhere in my papers, and my summer project is to paint some quality pitch art. Next step after that is clean storyboards, scene layouts, voice actors... And counting the films I'm making besides this, arranged in order to teach myself, yeah, 30 years ^^
After all, one of the best things about opera is that no one does a show the same way twice. Geoff Dunbar has freed me from having to be literal with the dialogue, story, or character design.
So I'm redoing this in a Czech storybook aesthetic, writing sprechsgesang in Czech patois and a gumbo of Scouse-American vernacular (basically, where Moravia corresponds to in the Anglophone world), and kneading the story dough into a feminist reinterpretation - it's not as much the 'eternal' conflict between human and animal, as it is a woman trying to regain her identity after childhood trauma and a gamekeeper trying to affirm his masculinity with revenge.
I love the movie, though. I just want to explore the territory it shied away from. ^u^
Show her some Bakshi, that'll wake her up. ^^
Chicken heads are strange things. They're like they have teeny robot masks glued to the top of their necks. Fun to animate, I'll say...
One benefit to a film you intend to do most of the work on yourself is that you can do a layout like this and know how you want it to move. If I did this in a studio, the animator would collapse.
I'ma redo this pic soon anyway, I've their proportions all wrong and the composition too imbalanced (and not in a "momentum" way, in a "stalled roller coaster" way).
Also — I really like the feminist interpretation.
Are you going to base it directly on the opera, or are you going to add in stuff from the book that was missing? I ask because, as much as I love Janáček's version, there were some scenes in the book that were sadly missing, like the time when Bartoš (i.e. the Forester) tries to shoot Sharp-Ears, but misses completely, and the bullet ricochets about until embedding it in the heart of family's prized pig — and meanwhile, Bartoš has fallen into a half-frozen heap of manure!
Are you going to base it directly on the opera, or are you going to add in stuff from the book that was missing? I ask because, as much as I love Janáček's version, there were some scenes in the book that were sadly missing, like the time when Bartoš (i.e. the Forester) tries to shoot Sharp-Ears, but misses completely, and the bullet ricochets about until embedding it in the heart of family's prized pig — and meanwhile, Bartoš has fallen into a half-frozen heap of manure!
Thanks! I keep worrying that it's going to work against me, but feminist films? People won't be able to actually complain about it if they're anti-feminist, they'll just call her shrill or whiny or bitchy and say the film is about male guilt.
I drafted out some of the scenes from the book, but they actually upset the flow of the story. Perhaps I'll paint those scenes and give them as extras to my financial backers?
If Bartoš was to be the deuteragonist of the film, I found that I had to cut out a lot of his stuff, to keep him simple and clear to the audience. Even giving him a name makes them stop thinking of him as an allegorical figure. If he is to be the essence of insecurity, I can't have him fail too often, I need the audience wondering how exactly he's going to
In a group of montages I added to the end of act 2 (which I needed to shape the character arcs), I plan to have him imagine the pig scene in a daydream as "Oh god, she'll humiliate me again" - it's such a wacky episode the way he'd imagine it, humiliating, easy to animate, with slapstick and cartoony motion, that it fits better as a thought. She retells her escape from him to Goldmane (rather proud of how well that name rolls off the tongue) in the same daydreamy terms earlier, so it helps tie the two characters together.
But I can't have him DO an awful lot, the conflict between him and Sharp-ears is like Scarpia vs. Tosca, it's a conflict of inner nature. It's much more pregnant with meaning when I show him stewing in his angry juices than showing him lash out.
In the script, Harasta addresses him by name exactly once, and nobody else in the film does. Because, of course, our main character doesn't know his name. It works better like this, and I'ma put him in the credits as "Bartoš (the Forester)," anyways.
Janacek made the sprawling book into a perfect three act structure, why would I pass that up? It's based on the opera, and I've added scenes to it and changed the meanings of basically all of them - because the more I adhere to the familiar story from the opera, the more impact it'll have when I deviate into the book.
I drafted out some of the scenes from the book, but they actually upset the flow of the story. Perhaps I'll paint those scenes and give them as extras to my financial backers?
If Bartoš was to be the deuteragonist of the film, I found that I had to cut out a lot of his stuff, to keep him simple and clear to the audience. Even giving him a name makes them stop thinking of him as an allegorical figure. If he is to be the essence of insecurity, I can't have him fail too often, I need the audience wondering how exactly he's going to
In a group of montages I added to the end of act 2 (which I needed to shape the character arcs), I plan to have him imagine the pig scene in a daydream as "Oh god, she'll humiliate me again" - it's such a wacky episode the way he'd imagine it, humiliating, easy to animate, with slapstick and cartoony motion, that it fits better as a thought. She retells her escape from him to Goldmane (rather proud of how well that name rolls off the tongue) in the same daydreamy terms earlier, so it helps tie the two characters together.
But I can't have him DO an awful lot, the conflict between him and Sharp-ears is like Scarpia vs. Tosca, it's a conflict of inner nature. It's much more pregnant with meaning when I show him stewing in his angry juices than showing him lash out.
In the script, Harasta addresses him by name exactly once, and nobody else in the film does. Because, of course, our main character doesn't know his name. It works better like this, and I'ma put him in the credits as "Bartoš (the Forester)," anyways.
Janacek made the sprawling book into a perfect three act structure, why would I pass that up? It's based on the opera, and I've added scenes to it and changed the meanings of basically all of them - because the more I adhere to the familiar story from the opera, the more impact it'll have when I deviate into the book.
Another idea I had to mirror the book - the film, sort of like the opera, should detail how much she suffers in the yard; that's much more interesting to animate and watch than how much she's spoiled in the house, like in the book. You can only get away with that if you have a narrator. But I do want to insert wee title screen cards of just little images out of the book from her kithood, hiding under the cupboard and stealing ducks and all that. Too good to leave out.
(It's much more exciting, and the music parallels it, to have the forester capture her during her grand escape, than it is to just have her trip and be too modest to keep running. To say nothing of the challenge of animating "modesty.")
But lots of little things I've been adding make for a better film image than the book. In the film, one of her nervous tics is scratching into the ground - we establish that she's terrible at it, because who was there to teach her? We at one point see her working on a tunnel under the fence, like in those movies where one guy tunnels out of the prison with a spoon... and it's kinda obvious that she's been working on it for a few months and dug like three inches deep. With that in mind, I don't have her bury herself alive, she just starts on the grave and gets about an inch down before collapsing. X3 Just for the visual image, she's stolen linen off the laundry line and blackened it in the firepit, and she whips it around and uses it as a charcoaly mourning shawl during her speech - so when she finally collapses I can have it flutter over most of her face to feel dead.
It all builds up, though, to the wintertime, when she tries to dig out a snowbank and fails miserably at it - which makes the audience sort of go, "Gosh, I do hope she can figure out a way to wrangle into this Badger's house, because she really has no alternative." Winter is post-apocalyptic time for these animals, no?
(It's much more exciting, and the music parallels it, to have the forester capture her during her grand escape, than it is to just have her trip and be too modest to keep running. To say nothing of the challenge of animating "modesty.")
But lots of little things I've been adding make for a better film image than the book. In the film, one of her nervous tics is scratching into the ground - we establish that she's terrible at it, because who was there to teach her? We at one point see her working on a tunnel under the fence, like in those movies where one guy tunnels out of the prison with a spoon... and it's kinda obvious that she's been working on it for a few months and dug like three inches deep. With that in mind, I don't have her bury herself alive, she just starts on the grave and gets about an inch down before collapsing. X3 Just for the visual image, she's stolen linen off the laundry line and blackened it in the firepit, and she whips it around and uses it as a charcoaly mourning shawl during her speech - so when she finally collapses I can have it flutter over most of her face to feel dead.
It all builds up, though, to the wintertime, when she tries to dig out a snowbank and fails miserably at it - which makes the audience sort of go, "Gosh, I do hope she can figure out a way to wrangle into this Badger's house, because she really has no alternative." Winter is post-apocalyptic time for these animals, no?
Ooooohhh... I don't know how to tell you this...
I rearranged that scene. I'm an American, and our children's films have too much scatological humor in them as it is. I'm remembering the fate of Sheldon Cohen when he made "Pies."
The badger is now a human-worshipper and species denialist (not otherkin, just a really terrible weeaboo towards humans). His den is cluttered with human artifacts he's filched, and she sheds her coat all over those (she's designed to be malnourished from act 1, so her coat is sparse and crackly). It's her acidic recollection of how her treatment was at the hands of the humans that send him into a nervous breakdown ("This is no place for sane folk!") and prompt his departure.
But it's too perfect a scenario to leave be, so that'll be a limited edition print or something to raise money, is her pissing the den... not sure how well it'll sell, though.
(I don't want to raise your hopes on this project - it's my big hairy audacious goal, my motivation to become good enough an animator to do this, it's just that a work this size requires a VERY long planning stage.)
I rearranged that scene. I'm an American, and our children's films have too much scatological humor in them as it is. I'm remembering the fate of Sheldon Cohen when he made "Pies."
The badger is now a human-worshipper and species denialist (not otherkin, just a really terrible weeaboo towards humans). His den is cluttered with human artifacts he's filched, and she sheds her coat all over those (she's designed to be malnourished from act 1, so her coat is sparse and crackly). It's her acidic recollection of how her treatment was at the hands of the humans that send him into a nervous breakdown ("This is no place for sane folk!") and prompt his departure.
But it's too perfect a scenario to leave be, so that'll be a limited edition print or something to raise money, is her pissing the den... not sure how well it'll sell, though.
(I don't want to raise your hopes on this project - it's my big hairy audacious goal, my motivation to become good enough an animator to do this, it's just that a work this size requires a VERY long planning stage.)
Nova Scotia Duck Toller; one of the happiest dog species around. Built to retrieve ducks, their fur was built to be long and thick and sheddable. If you spend five minutes outside in Nova Scotia, you'll understand the need for the hair to fall off before it can mildew X3
Mmm... ^^"
Mmm... ^^"
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13191097/ Here's the badger's den design... filled to the gills with a horror vacui of human objects.
I don't have a lot of art from this project on the internet, most of it exists in my sketchbooks. http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13121844/ This is one of the only other bits I think I've put up (I'm still working on the Cock's design, man, he's tough!)
I don't have a lot of art from this project on the internet, most of it exists in my sketchbooks. http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13121844/ This is one of the only other bits I think I've put up (I'm still working on the Cock's design, man, he's tough!)
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