Cobbling The Cobblers

Since the beginning of the week I’ve been working on a second lip synch animation, using some dialogue from Harry Langdon, a character from the days of silent films (and unfortunately a somewhat obscure name today), who was the live action inspiration for Richard Williams’ cobbler character of The Thief and the Cobbler.

So much of Langdon’s dialogue is charming and personality-filled here I genuinely wanted to use the entire two minutes of him speaking, but two minutes of animation is thousands of frames, and I only have a week or two to get this done! I begrudgingly settled with a single line, using a guinea pig character.

The drawings are almost done, but I’ll soon need some inbetweens and thereafter will need to shoot and export the lot, but I’m keen to see just how it turns out.

No, this unfortunately isn’t a post about the keystone Aardman short with plasticine animals talking about living conditions; our most recent work involves doing lip synch and voice acting of our own, figuring out which exact frames correspond with speech.

For the first lip synch animation I used a sample of Bette Davis’ dialogue from the 1950 film All About Eve with a swan character.

It’s more enjoyable than I imagined it would be and I’m semi-pleased with at least the first half of the result. As I write this I’ve moved on to a second piece of animation with a sample of dialogue from Harry Langdon – a sample that I was able to find online. I look foward to finishing the result and posting it here!

January has been a thoroughly eventful, stressful, yet fairly productive month, which, for personal reasons, I’m sad to see come to an end. Here are some recent short animation exercises done in that month.

The first was an exercise in mood change acting; a character encounters a wind-up toy mouse and reacts to it’s presence. My chubbier version of Tack, who is more playful kitten than cobbler, wakes up, inspects the toy with curiosity, then looks bewildered at the camera as it leaves. One touch I am pleased with is the way the flaps of his trademark hat behave like ears; flapping lazily before he wakes and lifting as he hears the mouse scuttle into frame.

Not so much as part of an assigned exercise as something of a ‘vent’ animation. I’ve been experiencing another depressive, almost manic episode in the previous week and felt that animating some of those feelings through my favourite little cobbler might help. I aim to polish this later, extending some shots and held poses, as well as later colouring it with cels and paint. I like to imagine that this may have been Tack’s reaction to Dick Williams’ shocking death last year.

Yesterday, January 8th, we were treated to a day trip to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, the trip lead by one of our life drawing teachers, Maryclare. We were all given two basic tasks, the first of which was to sketch some of the exhibits, be it fossils, taxidermised birds or dinosaur skulls, with the added challenge of including the museum setting in each sketch; in other words, to make it look like each sketch was done in a museum. ‘Setting changes the story.’

The second task was to create a storyboard of five panels inspired by the museum and its exhibits. I was taken with the capybara and jerboa, and how their general builds and appearances contrasted to one another – the capybara is a chunky, tail-less rodent with a rather chill disposition that constantly looks as if they’re falling asleep. The jerboa is quick, nimble and small with a tail longer than their body. What would happen if the two encountered each other?

A somewhat crude, wordless comic where the capybara simply wants to relax and eat grass, and is suddenly interrupted by the jerboa jumping on and off his snout. Rudimentary Tom and Jerry-esque stuff, though I was told that the expressions were very charming, which I do agree with to some point. The jerboa could have been drawn better, on the other hand.

It’s incredible what you can find in a second hand bookstore in Hastings. A while ago I picked up an old copy of the 1966 Internation Film Guide from one of these bookshops (it’s so old you can see on the cover that it was published back in the days of shillings and pounds before British currency was decimalised in 1971.)

It wasn’t until fairly recently that I got around to scanning the animation sections of the guide, which is an interesting window to the British animation scene of the 1960s, featuring a showcase of work from Halas and Batchelor, Richard Williams and Bob Godfrey.

I haven’t written here for a while, but now that it’s that strange period between Christmas and New Year I don’t have much of an excuse to not post some art here, starting with some life drawings done on December 5th, the last Thursday of the semester.

Sketches done in brush pen of one of our regular male models Adrian.

Quick Christmas doodle posted to the Facebook group for all of my friends and tutors, featuring Tack the cobbler, Nudnik, Foo Foo and Roger Rabbit.

Caribou pen sketch

A couple of gag drawings; Tack the Santa Cobbler finding the thief stowing away in the sack of gifts and a caricature of Richard Williams animatimg with his feet.

Two months ago, give our take, we were given our first taste of performance/acting classes. The entire thing toom me back to my school days of ‘Drama’ and ‘Dance’ periods. At the end of that class we were asked to go and study an animal, the way a certain species moves, behaves etc. and come back on the very last week of the semester and emulate these movements so that people can guess what animal you are.

Deer are some of my favourite animals, so naturally I picked them. It’s just as well that there’s an entire 1942 animated movie dedicated to the naturalistic movements of these creatures, so much so that the movie’s release date was moved from 1938 to 1942 as animators strived to study and capture the movement of real deer. Look at the deer in Snow White and then go and watch Bambi. It’s incredible what a difference five years of studying deer in the wild will do for your drawing.

The scene where Bambi’s mother creeps out onto the meadow to check that it’s safe enough is of particular interest to me. Much of the acting and movement of the character comes from her ears and the slow turning of her head. She doesn’t move especially quickly for the most part, and tends to keep her entire body still while scanning the area as her ears rotate in various directions.

Antlers are an appendage that humans sadly lack, but in a mime class can be substituted with outsplayed hands on top of one’s head. The same goes for ears, which don’t move in humans as they do with deer.

Stags locking antlers in combat have a particular energy that differs greatly from a cautious doe.

The fawn Bambi of course, is a clumsy and spindly character; a lot of his movements and emotions come from his legs.

And then there’s the walk cycles etc.

I’m still having trouble deciding whether I’m going to do my presentation (due 27th November) on British animation 1950s-1990s or on Richard Williams and development of The Thief and the Cobbler, but this weekend I’m managed to put together a minute-long animation reel, should I choose the latter.

I’m rather pleased with the results. The music used here is the instrumental part of Glenn Miller’s Fine Feathered Friend (1937) and the clips used range from a number of Richard Williams’ animated commercials, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Prologue (2015), Return of the Pink Panther (1976), Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977) , Ziggy’s Gift (1982), Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) and of course, The Thief and the Cobbler (1993).

If the reception this reel had on Facebook is anything to go by, I’m optimistically assuming that it’ll be well recieved on the big day of the presentation.

I thought I’d post some of the most recent life drawings I’ve done during the Wednesday afternoon classes at CSM. I was rather chuffed that our tutor Vannessa said that all of us had improved in our drawing ability since the previous week.

These were all completed 30/10/2019. The emphasis that lesson was on sequential movement and capturing movement in stages of five or six, harking back to Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase or the earlier studies of Eadward Muybridge.