Research - Traditional / Mixed Media in Animation

For this blog post I wanted to talk about the use of traditional media and its use in animation. In this era a huge amount of production work is done digitally whether it be through the use of 3D software or digital matte painting. However, having little experience with this compared to using traditional media to approach tasks I often find myself very dissatisfied when it comes to looking at the work I have produced through solely digital mediums. Of course having built up experience using traditional techniques I am going to be better at using them and it's probably fair to say that learning digital techniques is almost like starting from scratch and takes a while to build up experience and become comfortable using them. However, even in this era of animation a lot of traditional techniques can be combined with digital ones in order to produce something new and innovative in terms of its aesthetics.

A lot of the work I have produced this year where I was creating environments or characters I tried my best to combine traditional and digital media so as to retain the traditional and hand made aesthetics whilst maintaining the level of efficiency that working digitally gives the artist. An example of this would be right now I'm working on my animation for the PPP task, 'The Animated Self' and a lot of the backgrounds I have created have a mixture of scanned in textures and grains on them that have been produced by dry brush techniques or even graphite rubbings. This gives the art style a unique and very traditional feel, which I wanted to coincide with the story that I have included. Using traditional techniques in this way also means that I can more accurately translate my ideas onto paper because of my overall lack of experience with digital, I find it hard to create the types of marks or art styles that I want, but hopefully that will come with time.

Recently we had a visiting character artist from Pixar, Chris Sasaki. He spoke to us about his education and career and briefly about how he works. Someone asked him if he uses digital or traditional approaches when he is working in a studio environment and he answered stating that he tries to maintain and use traditional techniques wherever possible because of their unique look but ultimately when it comes down to studio time or being efficient with his working process, he will then transfer over to digital. Personally I find that working in a sketchbook is a great way to create loose and quick ideas through a range of different ways; pencil, pen, marker etc. Since the sketchbook briefs that were issued to us in the visual language module I have tried to remember the importance of sketchbooks and use it whenever I can both for personal work and for the initial period when starting a new project because of the level of accessibility it has in contrast to digital work where you have to be at a computer in order to work.