Sunday, February 07, 2010

Madame Tutli Putli

Madame Tutli-Putli is a visually striking stop-mo short film. Very moody. I love the eye work in this. They used an interesting technique of compositing photographed human actor eyes onto the puppets. But it's not  just a straight up projection of filmed eyes. The film is loaded with very solid choices about what to use and what not to use. The attention to the important details they have is amazing. A lot is made of attention to details in animation these days- mainly because the advent of CG allows us the bandwidth to explore such high frequency detail data where before we were limited by the medium of choice. But it's attention to important details that is key. If you don't differentiate between important and unimportant details you end up with a lot of useless, technical fluff. Like empty calories, empty detail in an animated film drags things down. Anyhow, this was nominated for an Oscar in 2007, I believe.

10 comments:

David Beer said...

yeah, this is a good example of how the eyes are the place we look to judge the character's emotion, incredible detail in this short, but where it matters. very dark too, shook me up....

Anonymous said...

I live in Canada and the NFB of Canada blocked me from seeing it. Odd.

Unknown said...

wooow very nice eye work ha ? its good as CG I think :)

オテモヤン said...
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Anonymous said...

Some parts feel like they are traced over video reference. I don't say its a bad thing; you get a more alive and fluid motion but I think it limits the acting choices and expressiveness in animation. It could be more interesting if more thought and creativity (manuel keyframing) put into the acting. Story and cinematography are very well handled though.

jriggity said...

Yeah man....this artistically was Excellent work!

jriggity

Anonymous said...

Thanks Keith for showing this work. It's one of the best stop motion animations I have ever seen.

I'm Canadian too, and I went to the NFB website and found the full Madame Tutli-Putli Film! It's quite amazing and beautiful to begin with, but it's something else in High Definition quality.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/madame_tutli_putli_en/

I'm very proud of my Canadian heritage because of all the wonderfully creative animators that have contributed to animation history.

Colin said...

Hey Keith, I was in Bryan Ballinger's class and heard you speak. Thank you, it was very helpful!

I love Madame Tutli Putli. The eyes are well done, but make it kind of creepy in a good way.

ArchDragon said...

Saw this at the Melbourne International Animation Festival a couple of years back. Won film of the festival.

For all the credit this film has got for the eye work I thought it was terrible (the eyes, not the film). It was the first time I'd truly experienced the uncanny valley. The dead, clay characters with these eerily human eyes just gave me the creeps from beginning to end.

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