Research Arril Johnson - Side Salad - Research
The contents of this page were originally hosted on another site, but it makes sense to shift them over here as part of the family....
Research is understood to be an expected aspect of university academic life, but it also occurs in any child’s life when they experiment to see ‘what happens if .....’ as it also naturally occurs in the working life of any artist/practitioner who feels the need to extend their aesthetic or technical range either out of personal curiosity or professional necessity.
Over the forty odd years that I’ve worked in animation, or freelanced in loosely related areas, it has been enjoyable and/or necessary to solve many problems. Very often the problems were ones that I created for myself as a refreshing diversion from the ones that were inevitable during any production of a film or other artwork.
Given similar technology and similar observations and intentions, people often converge on similar solutions.
In the early 1960’s I came across a photographic portrait of Salvador Dali taken by Philippe Halsman in 1948. This hard won, energetic, and evocative image was called ‘Dali Atomicus’ and it captured my imagination. By then I was already interested in
animation and so the aberrant combination of a frozen moment in a normally accessible space was intriguing. The space invited exploration. I wanted to move around in it. I wanted to explore the sculptural qualities of water stopped in mid air. Curiosity about the aesthetic possibilities of frozen fire was a natural extension of this. This concept developed from the viewing of a single photograph.
Later I learned that the image which inspired me was one of twenty-eight single shots taken during a six hour session when Dali jumped, cats and water were thrown, and props were hung on wires or hand held. Not hi-tech...but wonderful.
As a result, over forty years ago I wanted to generate a camera revolve for a frozen moment during the climax of a short film about a bomb courier called ‘The Delivery Man’. In order to shoot this scene for my film I wanted to arrange about fifty tilted SLR cameras in a circle and use a flash unit. At the time it wasn’t possible to borrow the cameras and the film was not shot, but my concept was derived through a shared human logic.
Creative logic is available to everyone and by 1980 a young painter named Tim Macmillan was experimenting with frozen time and plastic space while completing his Fine Arts BA at Bath Academy of Art. His approach grew out of a desire to combine Cubist theory with contemporary technology, but his conclusions were similar and because of his continued work in this area ‘Time-Slice’ has become a widely applied technique with commercials, television inserts, music videos, and feature films listed in the credits of Time-Slice Films Limited.
A further variation on the Time-Slice technique was used in the “Muck About!” Orange television commercials by Chris Cunningham at RSA Films. Not only did it allow spatial movement and some slow motion effects, but it used slow exposures to create sculptural effects with the resultant blurs.
This is what the human mind does. It develops and explores concepts. For a film to be made, it must also apply them.
Tim Macmillan and Chris Cunningham applied the concept .....
However, another aspect of filmed images that began to intrigue me in the early 60’s which I did manage to pursue and experiment with aesthetically and technically over the years was the natural blurring of a moving image on a live action frame and the more extreme blurring which occurred during a time exposure. As a young man in the years before major animation festivals were common and before the internet, I hadn’t yet seen this effect in the animated films of Whadislaw Starewicz from the early 1900’s. My earliest sequential tests date back to the late 1960’s or early 1970’s and were shot as two second time exposures with a 35mm SLR stills camera. The fact that digital stills cameras are being used to shoot jpegs as frames for contemporary animation is an interesting parallel. One of these early tests on Tri-X film is show below.
Over the forty odd years that I’ve worked in animation, or freelanced in loosely related areas, it has been enjoyable and/or necessary to solve many problems. Very often the problems were ones that I created for myself as a refreshing diversion from the ones that were inevitable during any production of a film or other artwork.
Given similar technology and similar observations and intentions, people often converge on similar solutions.
In the early 1960’s I came across a photographic portrait of Salvador Dali taken by Philippe Halsman in 1948. This hard won, energetic, and evocative image was called ‘Dali Atomicus’ and it captured my imagination. By then I was already interested in
animation and so the aberrant combination of a frozen moment in a normally accessible space was intriguing. The space invited exploration. I wanted to move around in it. I wanted to explore the sculptural qualities of water stopped in mid air. Curiosity about the aesthetic possibilities of frozen fire was a natural extension of this. This concept developed from the viewing of a single photograph.
Later I learned that the image which inspired me was one of twenty-eight single shots taken during a six hour session when Dali jumped, cats and water were thrown, and props were hung on wires or hand held. Not hi-tech...but wonderful.
As a result, over forty years ago I wanted to generate a camera revolve for a frozen moment during the climax of a short film about a bomb courier called ‘The Delivery Man’. In order to shoot this scene for my film I wanted to arrange about fifty tilted SLR cameras in a circle and use a flash unit. At the time it wasn’t possible to borrow the cameras and the film was not shot, but my concept was derived through a shared human logic.
Creative logic is available to everyone and by 1980 a young painter named Tim Macmillan was experimenting with frozen time and plastic space while completing his Fine Arts BA at Bath Academy of Art. His approach grew out of a desire to combine Cubist theory with contemporary technology, but his conclusions were similar and because of his continued work in this area ‘Time-Slice’ has become a widely applied technique with commercials, television inserts, music videos, and feature films listed in the credits of Time-Slice Films Limited.
A further variation on the Time-Slice technique was used in the “Muck About!” Orange television commercials by Chris Cunningham at RSA Films. Not only did it allow spatial movement and some slow motion effects, but it used slow exposures to create sculptural effects with the resultant blurs.
This is what the human mind does. It develops and explores concepts. For a film to be made, it must also apply them.
Tim Macmillan and Chris Cunningham applied the concept .....
However, another aspect of filmed images that began to intrigue me in the early 60’s which I did manage to pursue and experiment with aesthetically and technically over the years was the natural blurring of a moving image on a live action frame and the more extreme blurring which occurred during a time exposure. As a young man in the years before major animation festivals were common and before the internet, I hadn’t yet seen this effect in the animated films of Whadislaw Starewicz from the early 1900’s. My earliest sequential tests date back to the late 1960’s or early 1970’s and were shot as two second time exposures with a 35mm SLR stills camera. The fact that digital stills cameras are being used to shoot jpegs as frames for contemporary animation is an interesting parallel. One of these early tests on Tri-X film is show below.
Another example is shown in the following image from an animation made for the Tony Hart programmes on the BBC.
A painted white wire was stop-motion animated in front of a black background and rotated during exposures which ranged from .5 to 9.5 seconds in order to blur the single line into a form. The slightly erratic, shimmering quality of the morphing form is due to vibration in the wire and slippage in the motorised rig which was triggered to stop and start when the camera shutter opened.
This blurring effect was later applied either manually or with motors to another model animation project for Aardman Animations and the BBC Natural History Unit in 1984. In this case, the subject was the pterosaur, Dimorphodon, and the blurring was used to soften the edges of either the head, wing tips, or whole body depending on the needs of the scene. |
An image of the model, which I built and animated, appears below. What is apparent in this picture is another visual effect which appealed to me; shadows.
For several years before this project, I had been wanting to try out a technique which seemed both interesting and useful; projected shadows. Besides blurring the animal, it seemed desirable to add blurred shadows to this stopmotion subject in order to heighten the illusion.
To prepare for the shot used under the end credits, I loaded my Bolex with a spare reel of Ektachrome and filmed a convenient bush against a hazy bright sky while I shook it to compensate for the windless day. Although I had to double-frame the projection because an extra credit added to the creeper made the shot longer than my original shadow footage, the technique worked quite well and was subsequently adopted by other people. |
More recently, I've done tests with stop frame digital projections of live action shadows and these seem to work just as well. An example is included here using old sets and sculpts as a subject.
PROJECTED SHADOWS from Arril Johnson on Vimeo.
Another technique which could have been used in this context, but was developed for a different project, was the creation of a fog effect on a model set without smoke. There were variations on this effect, but the one demonstrated in the following images uses two exposures of the same scene, but with variable diffusion when either the foreground lighting or the background lighting was being exposed. Basically, foreground lights on without diffusion filters and then background lights on with diffusion filters. Instead double exposing on film, you can use 'screen' or a similar layering effect in Photoshop. The stick under water was photographed just like this Triceratops, but with lighting effects and three shots of a museum commissioned model pliosaur added as layers. The images of the T Rex below show the foreground pass without diffusion, the diffused background pass, and the resulting combination using the 'screen' layer setting in Photoshop, which is roughly equivalent to double-exposing film.
Although this technique won't provide the flickering shafts of light that you might see in a hazy woods or under water, those could be added later as a selective overlay using the projected shadow technique through smoke or milky water, which would probably do nicely.
As a footnote ..... the toy Triceratops was originally sculpted by Arthur Hayward, whom I met in 1973 and who sculpted several creatures for Ray Harryhausen's films while employed as head of the Model Making and Taxidermy-Exhibition Department at the BM(NS), now the Natural History Museum, in London. When I first met Arthur in his office in Cricklewood, the unfinished sculpt of this toy was still on his desk and was not much larger than the final casting.
In traditional drawn animation, which used to be traced and painted on to sheets of cellulose acetate, there were problems with static electricity, dust, Newton rings, reflections, cel shadow, and scratches. Fortunately, this last problem also turned out to be a solution in another context.
When a cel is scratched and dirt gets into that scratch the damage is more or less irretrievable. However, when I needed coloured lines that were as thin as a human hair but not easily damaged, cel scratches and china-markers were the answer. Scribing a shape on to an acetate cel allowed me to do two things; ply and crack through the scribed line to make a stencil if the shape was enclosed or rub china-markers across the scribed lines and then wipe off the excess with a tissue to produce coloured and even gradated lines as artwork.
I initially invented the technique to deal with complex botanical animation sequences for Aardman Animations and Oxford University Films, but also used the technique for elfin wings in a Madonna video for A Productions. The inset image below shows the basic tools and the background image shows how the technique was subsequently applied to a more abstract design.
The following image shows an example of the scribed, china-marker animation from the botanical films on the left and, on the right, the use of model animation shot with a stills camera and combined with the graphic animation in the same films.
The first time I used this model/graphic animation technique was on a commercial in the late sixties at Potterton Productions in Montreal, but I have found it useful since then and applied it to the generation of background artwork for a pilot S4C/BBC Wales musical television series. The Fleischer Brothers used similar techniques in their films, and TVC did the same on ‘When the Wind Blows’. My use of it grew out of the collaging of prints of engravings on to models which I was introduced to while working on a feature film at Potterton Productions.
When I had an opportunity to design pilot material for my 'Ruslan and Lyudmila' episode of the musical series I needed an art gallery environment that the camera could freely move around in while the drawn characters performed the farce and physical comedy which drove the story. The following images show the collage/drawn style and the 1:20 scale set.
Another editorial technique that grew out of a production budget/scheduling problem, and which satisfyingly mirrors what eventually happened in gaming, is a modular approach to animation. In the late 1980's I was asked to provide titles, credits and numerous interstitial animations of a doodle character for the BBC. Time and money are finite, so I not only designed the character, 'Doodle', but I also designed a system of action modules which could be combined in numerous ways to fill the necessary screen time with variations. Most were filmed over simulated paper textures, but some were shot on CSO blue for compositing with live action. I was was happy, the director was happy, although ... from what I understood ... people higher up wanted me to be slightly less solvent. It's a funny business ....
Anyway, the image below shows a small selection of animation drawings on the left and a complete listing of all the action modules on the right. The drawing of 'Doodle' marked with a red asterisk and facing the viewer was the master drawing or 'home' position. There were seven ways the character could enter the shot into this position, seven ways that he could exit from this position, and twenty-one reversible actions available to the character starting from or ending with the master pose. Because this master 'key drawing' was weighting the linking 'in-between' drawings, it often didn't need to be shown and one action module could just flow directly into the next.
As the actions needed to be reversible, all normal inertial effects of 'follow-through' and 'overlapping action' were eliminated, although normal acceleration and deceleration still occurred. The technique worked and allowed for a useful library of combinations.
All of the techniques mentioned so far were based on pre-computer technology. When that became an option for me, it altered and expanded the way I approached my personal and professional work, although it did not completely exclude the original techniques. Applications like Photoshop or Flash could be used to enhance the line quality of conventional drawn animation as shown in the following images.
Experimental textural effects could now be applied with greater freedom and control, even though the source material was still physical. For example, eye blinks or swarms of insects could be animated in a graphic application using the live action footage of my mechanical model, on the right, as a starting point. This Troodon example can be seen moving on Side Salad's short films page. The initial test image below employs a technique that relates to my current research interests; combining drawn and puppet animation in one character. The head of the hominid is sculpted and the body is drawn. In 1998 I was asked to sculpt a quasi-comic T'rex for the Puppet Factory when they were preparing a stop-motion model for a Dairylea Dunkers commercial. It was a relatively quick turnaround and had the usual level of problem solving along the way. I made special tools to speed up the replication of scutes and other body armour that can be seen in the shot of the clay model on the right, but a general sculpting tool that I've always had a fondness for is the texture pad. It's pretty standard in the industry and I was first introduced to them while in high-school when I read an article in the TV Guide. Dick Smith was creating prosthetic makeup for Hal Holbrook's television version of his successful play, 'Mark Twain Tonight'. |
Like a bas relief illustration technique that I invented several years ago, and which I would like to research further, this sculpted/drawn hominid animation was born out of curiosity pressured by necessity. As a freelance practitioner I need to function quickly, but as an artist I want to make work that is visually interesting. This tension is what frequently drives my innovating. The rest is just a child-like curiosity about possibilities. |
To create the texture of human skin, Smith painted a layer of latex on to citrus fruit, let it dry, peeled it off, and then pressed the pad onto the sculpted body parts. Very cool ....
Then I thought, why stop a citrus fruit? That got the ball rolling and various texture pads were included with my sculpting tools from that point on. One of my favourites is shown below; the Leather Leaf Viburnum.
The image below shows the leaf, which is then talced and coated to make the latex pad, an acrylic master used to generate replacement pads, and an inset showing details of the pad and its effect when cross grained into clay. It's a bit like impressionism and is very quick and organic .... especially if you need an elephant! There are variations and other issues, but that's basically it.
It might be that there are equivalent tools in Zbrush and Mudbox.
Then I thought, why stop a citrus fruit? That got the ball rolling and various texture pads were included with my sculpting tools from that point on. One of my favourites is shown below; the Leather Leaf Viburnum.
The image below shows the leaf, which is then talced and coated to make the latex pad, an acrylic master used to generate replacement pads, and an inset showing details of the pad and its effect when cross grained into clay. It's a bit like impressionism and is very quick and organic .... especially if you need an elephant! There are variations and other issues, but that's basically it.
It might be that there are equivalent tools in Zbrush and Mudbox.
My narrative script for 'The Ice Dragon' grew out of a short film idea, 'The Dragon and the Flowers', that crept up on me while commuting to Birmingham in the 1980’s. While writing it, I saw it as real; a live action film. Dreams are real while you’re dreaming them.
In practice, however, I realised that it would be better to stylise the visuals in order to let the story’s allegory work in the mind of the viewer. Initial tests were done using what was available to me at the time; film-based photography and photocopying. Even though hyper-realistic CGI techniques have now become an option, that editorial opinion about stylisation still holds, but my means have changed.
As things currently stand, the visuals for the project will probably combine three main techniques. Computer enhanced puppet animation, drawn animation, and one of my illustration techniques.
The title of this sample is ‘Chimera Study 1’ and it is part of my research into a hybrid animation technique combining model animation and bas relief with line and wash effects. There are other studies, of course, but this one features the illustration technique that I invented and refined while dealing with a difficult deadline and trying to help out a picture editor who had been let down by another illustrator.
Almost all of the drawing in this image was done on a bed of clay prior to scanning or photography and further refinement.
The image below left shows how the initial compositional sketch is scribed onto a clay bed about one centimetre thick before additional sculpting. The detail below right shows further experiments with a sketched line gradating into the fully textured and water colour washed image.
Almost all of the drawing in this image was done on a bed of clay prior to scanning or photography and further refinement.
The image below left shows how the initial compositional sketch is scribed onto a clay bed about one centimetre thick before additional sculpting. The detail below right shows further experiments with a sketched line gradating into the fully textured and water colour washed image.
Other more conventional techniques will be used, of course, involving masks, salt on water colour, and Photoshop vignetting to create gradated moving tableaux with the puppet animated images, like the one below left. Other visual treatments can be found on this site's 'writing' page, along with an early draft of the script. This variable editorial approach is meant to allow the viewer to either be caught up in the immediacy of events or, at other times, to be reminded that this is a story being told.
Another innovation that I might use is my design below right for a double collared joint in the shoulder armature of the main puppet in order to provide maximum mobility for the character's wing.
Another innovation that I might use is my design below right for a double collared joint in the shoulder armature of the main puppet in order to provide maximum mobility for the character's wing.
So far, that’s the plan.
I've often referred to animation (and the rest) as 'hard play'. I'm also aware that the balance between curiosity and necessity constantly shifts and that almost all 'creatives' .... that's what we've been called .... have more ideas than they could possibly realise. Personally, I like the idea of collaboration, but it often hasn't worked out that way. And yet .... and yet .... I have genuinely enjoyed chasing dreams and continue to do so, fully aware that life can hurt, life can be silly, and that I can be ridiculous without trying.
The characters on the panel below all live in one form or other .... they came into being. That makes me smile ....
The characters on the panel below all live in one form or other .... they came into being. That makes me smile ....
The character in one of my scripted scratchtracks is living through a very serious moment in his life, and yet .... and yet .... there is comedy. That makes me smile .....
LUNAR LANDING He felt strange. The moonlit valley was altering somehow, losing what little colour it had and rising. Low lying bushes loomed up around him. Then the realisation came; his eyes couldn’t see colour and were now only a few feet above the forest floor. It had happened. He was a werewolf... a werewolf with a sycamore sapling up his nose. He .... felt .... strange. LUNAR LANDING from Arril Johnson on Vimeo. |