The LumberJack

[Sewie]

I found this one on Lineboil.
On Vimeo it's tagged with (a.o.) TV-Paint...



(edit: added a link to Lineboil.)

[Paul Fierlinger]

une alliacée excellente pour la santé (et haleine de cowboy garantie)

...and what are your thoughts on it?

[Sewie]

Pardon...?

[Paul Fierlinger]

Well, if you present something you would like to share with the community, I thought you might have some opinions about the piece to share as well.

[Sewie]

Oh, but I don't understand the quote about the cowboy in your post above.

It's not very elegantly done, I find...
Technically it's pretty rude (I see many jitters) and I don't like the designs much. But I the like the animation and backgrounds in some sequences. Overall nice enough to post a link on this forum, I thought.

Your thoughts...?

[Paul Fierlinger]

I grabbed the wrong line! This is the one I thought I was quoting:

I found this one on Lineboil.

I agree; not elegantly executed and very uneven design. Is it because this is a school exercise and more than one person was involved with the design, or is it an unhappy attempt to create an unusual look? The meat of the story is predictable and the ending leaves me mystified. But as a student film I thought it was O.K. because it got completed.

I think one of the mistakes coming through is that the film was treated like a comic strip in motion. Even the backgrounds are drawn the same way as the characters; I believe that it helps to keep backgrounds in the background. They should be muted or drawn with thinner lines, sketchier and with fewer details than the characters.

The animation is often jittery, as you say, and that is something the students should have dealt with when it first showed up. If I had been their instructor, I would have suggested a change in design.

[Sewie]

...Even the backgrounds are drawn the same way as the characters; I believe that it helps to keep backgrounds in the background. They should be muted or drawn with thinner lines, sketchier and with fewer details than the characters.

It's always hard to get that contrast just right, isn't it? It's more of a design issue (color, composition, lines, staging) is this case, I believe.
I love how Chomet seems to blends his characters with the backgrounds, but still have enough contrast to keep them readable in a pleasing way. Even though the lines in the background are of the same quality as those in the animation drawings:

[Paul Fierlinger]

It's hard to judge without seeing the film and the choice of colors plays a big role as well. In the Lumberjack above, the woods are more salient than the characters, just in the hue of colors. The woman sweeping the staircase is a nice balance but here is an example of the background being treated as a background; somewhat blurry and muted. The woman feeding the pigeons has lovely colors which makes the whole scene sparkle like a clear morning. So there is no universal way other than to be sensitive to the issue and what is staged. The Lumberjack wasn't taking any of this into account and now I'd like to have someone from that production tell us how much the question of background colors are discussed in their class.