There is a specific quality of attention that comes over an audience when a pencil test is screened: a leaning-forward, a held breath, a suspension of the critical faculty that is different in kind from the suspension that a finished film produces.
I love this. The idea of rough drawings reading as a person versus cel work reading as a people really clicked for me.
I’ve been stuck on a question for a while now (sorry if it gets a little dense): how much of the animator’s inner state, the “spirituality” of the hand, actually survives the process?
Even after cleanup and all the layers of production, do you think that interiority still transfers perceptually or somatically?
Not in a literal sense of authorship, but almost as a kind of metaphysical residue in the motion itself.
You know I do, I’ve worked as a digital animator and as a storyboard artist and you have more of a fingerprint on the structure of a scene, the animation’s timing as a board artist, because in effect you are functioning as the director’s right hand and placing the structure for the animation team.
As a character designer you are defining the boundaries of the physicality of the character for the animation team. As an animator, even digitally as opposed to hand-drawn, you are expressing the character creatively given the boundaries that have been set; so I think the dynamism of animation involves the soul or DNA imprint of numerous collaborators, and if the animation is really good, they blend seamlessly, but you can see numerous fingerprints when you carefully look. Just my opinion, but I think it holds water (and ink, where applicable.)
I love this. The idea of rough drawings reading as a person versus cel work reading as a people really clicked for me.
I’ve been stuck on a question for a while now (sorry if it gets a little dense): how much of the animator’s inner state, the “spirituality” of the hand, actually survives the process?
Even after cleanup and all the layers of production, do you think that interiority still transfers perceptually or somatically?
Not in a literal sense of authorship, but almost as a kind of metaphysical residue in the motion itself.
You know I do, I’ve worked as a digital animator and as a storyboard artist and you have more of a fingerprint on the structure of a scene, the animation’s timing as a board artist, because in effect you are functioning as the director’s right hand and placing the structure for the animation team.
As a character designer you are defining the boundaries of the physicality of the character for the animation team. As an animator, even digitally as opposed to hand-drawn, you are expressing the character creatively given the boundaries that have been set; so I think the dynamism of animation involves the soul or DNA imprint of numerous collaborators, and if the animation is really good, they blend seamlessly, but you can see numerous fingerprints when you carefully look. Just my opinion, but I think it holds water (and ink, where applicable.)