The Manufactured Image: Something different (part 2)

cont'd from part 1...

As if the clear silhouette weren’t enough all of the vanishing points here draw you right in. Even with the crowd all a mish-mash of colors it still works.

Dark character on light bgrd, then light character on dark character. It seems so simple.

This one is particularly genius. The screen right waitress and mom are almost at the same exact place in the world. Same depth from camera, literally within 3 feet of each other in the same room and presumably under the same fluorescent light. But check out the shading on the other waitress. They made her dark to go over the light background, then put the lighter mom on the dark background, letting that high contrast pull you right where you need to go. Even with all the details, they’re pushed back using color harmony to pull the characters. And then you add the vanishing lines of the background push your eye screen left. Superb. If you lit this the ‘right’ way physically it would be a mess. But this thing totally violates the rule of consistent spatial lighting that throttles CG like a death grip - and it sings! Man that’s awesome.

Another amazing one. The entire background, all of the elements in it, are of one color theme. Characters, walls, windows, blinds, decorations- all of it a variant of that sea green hue. It pushes it all back, lets all the detail there fill in the space and keep the scene interesting without overpowering it. Anybody who has built, textured and lit an environment in CG knows that this is not typical at all. No way would anyone texture a complete portion of an asset (the diner set) to be ruled by one hue for one camera angle. And this is especially true for characters.

But not all is roses. It wasn’t as easy, but I did find some klunkers in the IG mix.

This one could have been something if they hadn’t shaded the background characters and trucks the same tone as Mansfield in the foreground.

But that’s all the klunky ones I could find online.

Some folks in recent comments have said that I’m being a bit too nitpicky about the layouts and compositional choices in my Accidents example. The argument is that the motion of animation is what carries the scene so it’s not fair to use image composition as a metric for artistic success. Yet TIG has motion- lots of it. It’s a high action film. Yet the artists who made that film didn’t shrug their shoulders at the value of integrated composition of motion and background.
So why does this stuff work better? Is it because it’s all hand drawn? Actually, it’s not. The giant and many mechnical elements in this film are CG. So something else is at work here. I do think it’s the pipeline. What about this production system made it easier to think in terms of complete imagery? All animated feature films need some kind of production structure of economy or else they’d never get done on time or on budget. Animated feature films need some kind of factory based pipeline. Pipelines are not all bad and we do not need to overthrow them in some kind of artistic bolshevik revolution. But some pipelines are better than others at doing certain things. The traditionally animated film pipeline (if one is to believe the visual product) seem to be geared towards allowing people to create more integrated artistic imagery. I believe that there are some things about the way the tasks are done- their order and the way they’re thought about- that hold back scenes artistically in typical manufacture/assemble Cg systems. No, we don’t need to throw the whole thing out. But like so many areas of Cg we could benefit from seeing how it was done before there ever was a thing called CG. We need to investigate and see how much of what we currently do is merely a result of the inertia of ignorance.
Next post- What are the key differences between Cg pipes and traditional pipes?

The Manufactured Image: Something different

Just for giggles I searched online for images of The Iron Giant. I was amazed at how consistently good they were. Image after image proved to be so well crafted I was really taken aback. Check these out….

Look at how the tones of the background characters is pushed back. The staging of the characters lead your eye right to the middle, especially by putting the taller characters bracketing Dean and then using those taller characters as mini backgrounds for the shorter Hogarth & mom.

Here we have tonal harmony without going monochromatic. The trees are pretty much just black silhouettes. The interior of the CG car is plain to allow the facial details to rule the scene.

Clear staging and simple color schemes with no textures? What a bargain.

The layout and background colors give a stage for the actors.

Crazy color schemes can work if used right.

I love the harmony in this one. Vanishing lines draw your eye, colors work well together, tone and contrast force a priority on the imagery and staging is superb.

Who says every scene in a forest has to be lost in a sea of leaves? The sweep of the treeline frames the character brilliantly. Clouds are pushed back into the sky color to give your eyes room to breathe.

Clear staging and breathing space can offset high details. Then use non-sensical lighting to frame the action.

more in part 2....

The Manufactured Image: Successes

Just so you guys don’t think I’m a hater or anything, here are some scenes that I think work pretty well. They may not all be styles or color themes that everybody loves, but in general they’re quite sound and you can make compelling arguments that they have a structure that works.

See? I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom. Scenes can come out looking quite nice. Perhaps they were key scenes for the sequence and thus got a bit more attention? Maybe they’re just happy accidents? I do think some of them had a clear strong sense of design right from the start and thus the elements just worked. Some of them were finished relatively early in the production schedule to make them fit into trailers, thus they may have had the time and freedom to go over them and make some adjustments, a luxury that could not be afforded when the other 1200 scenes needed to get done under a crunch. Whatever the case, good art does happen under the current paradigm. It can’t be helped, there is a ton of talent and skill in every one of these studios. You can’t keep that from sneaking through.

The Manufactured Image: 25 Assembly Accidents

Continuing our discussion of the manufactured image, I’m not willing to go the easy road and say the artists, animators, technicians, designers or whomever just suck and that’s that. It’s not that simple, and more so, it’s not true. For me this is a discussion about what I think are some core problems with how stuff gets made in the manufacture/assemble paradigm. Personally if I’m going to be ballsy enough to call out a whole system then I need to do better than pick on one image. Thus in an effort to back up my ideas I want to show that the problem isn’t limited to just Shrek 3.
I’m sure on this point many will disagree with me, but here are some stills from various recent CG animated films that I think are good examples of what I call assembly accidents. I just grabbed these off the net after doing some quick searches. In doing this I am not trying to say that I think these films are bad, nor am I saying I could do anything in them any better. And it isn’t my intention to call out any individual artists or TD’s. For the most part the individual artists did very fine jobs on their specific task or element. In some examples I actually know some of the people involved and I know they did their level best they could and made some nice parts- they just weren’t responsible for the whole. I doubt anybody really was- thus the accidents.
No, these images are merely examples of the kind of visual accidents that are bound to happen under the current manufacture/assemble production paradigm that rules big budget Cg films. And this is not to say that these images aren’t good, either. Some of them still work pretty well. It’s just they have a few things that aren’t clear due to the accidents of assembly.

Check out the examples after the jump…

1) Where does the squirrel end and the rocks begin?

2) The bgrd directly behind the characters is unfortunately the most visually complex part of the bgrd. The lines all muddle the performance. Shift the characters to the screen left a bit on top of the quieter visual space there and this would be better.

3) Too many competing lines. Try the “Squint Test” (clear images work on a macro level even when viewed all blurry)

4) Color similarities between characters and background makes reading this a bit tricky.

5) Ditto, especially for the boy and the paper.

6) Top of image is ok, but the ant emerges from the boy’s gut like “Alien” due to tonal similarities of armor and ant color.

7) When saturation and tonal hegemony ruled the land

8) No comment.

9) Not bad, really. It’s a nice image. But how about if you put the yellow character over the blue bgrd and the blue character over the yellow bgrd to help them separate better? Plus the smaller character in front of the tire sculpture would be clearer. Right now it looks like there are tires stacked on top of the yellow car.

10) The crowd overpowers the scene, making it difficult to read the ball in the player’s hand. Tinting the whole crowd a similar hue to push them back and unify them into a single idea of a crowd would help.

11) Another case of a nice layout that could have been a little stronger. Put the darkly dressed boy on the left where the bgrd is light and the brightly dressed girl over the dark bgrd to the right. Just to add balance and separation from the bgrd a bit.

12) A little hard to read what’s what. Squint test.

13) Under the squint test Dory almost disappears.

14) I gots me the blues, baby. (foreground and background mush)

15) I generally love the look of the Ice Age films, but even they suffer their share of assembly accidents. In a lot of ways this shot works well, but the foreground character disappears into the mammoth. Silhouette on the armadillo character is nicely done, though.

16) Foreground works very well, but the darker shading lines in the background compete and disrupt the flow.

17) Trees behind E compete with her dark silhouette. Tree behind Bob crowds his face and breaks the staging space between the characters. Great pose on Bob, tho.

18) Another one so close. Mr. Incredible? Great! Syndrome? Lost.

19) Visual overload.

20) TMI.

21) Where does Rodney end and the machine begin?

22) The disappearance of RJ. AKA: Put the SUV in the garage.

23) Another close one. I like the facial expressions here- very appealing. But the brown squirrel over the brown log when you had a bright oppossum to put there instead? Assembly Accident.

24) Foreground is background part 2. The color tones flatten this one.

25) The Mother of All Accidents. There’s some really fun stuff going on here. You just have to find it.

I’ll stop there since (I hope) the point is made. Again, this isn’t a slam on anybody (although I am sure some will feel that it is). There’s some really great craftsmanship in just about every individual element shown here. It’s just that once all the elements were assembled they just don’t work together quite so well. Some images work as is, but could have been just a leeeeeetle bit better. So no death threats, please. I’m just trying to point out a flaw in the system.