The Future of Storytelling

At 2022NQ in Manchester this week the Eskimo Creative agency set up a talk/panel on Monday with other events there that ended on Thursday. It’s a part of the Kopparberg  Unestablishment festival That I believe is still on in Manchester until the 25^th. I was not able to attend them all since it was deadline week but I did go on Monday where Steve Layton chaired  a few speakers, instead of going through their biographies I’ll just put this link that describes them here: http://eskimocreative.com/unestablishment/

As the link says, I attended the event to gain insight into “The Future of Storytelling”.  The gist of it all is simple, the talk was about where storytelling counts in this day of age compared to the past, Steve Layton commented on the information age, as people handle our information and record a census they unwittingly may not realise that they hold the key to real and honest stories. Information of all kinds when you done the math on it can have a story extrapolated from it. I recently found this enlightening video on Narrative, it’s from a series of podcast interviews from film maker Kevin Smith, this excerpt here tells us about how human it is for us to want to puzzle together stories.

Mike Ryan, who has one of the rarest jobs in the world as a “futurist”, says stories are still important and will be more so important in an age of robotics and information high since they are a strong component for our humanity. We are also in a world where we are bombarded with Nostalgia products that are capitalised on in response to our collective conscience, one that could be born as the last century has had rapid change in technological advances and one that could be a consequence of a fear of losing ourselves within a scary machine dominated future where personal and intellectual achievement is lost as gadgets become a quick fix for our base desires. These are same gadgets that can be our tools as well as weapons.

My feelings towards the future of storytelling is that we have habits as a human race and it is these that can make us vulnerable to consumerism, when we exploit those vulnerabilities we have the option to respect the audience and thus as an author we must serve their persona without being a slave to it. To be a slave to it means we are just churning out nostalgia products for a quick buck, the intelligent will not be as keen to us with such methods.

There were two intelligent questions that was asked and answered by the speakers when I was there, both deserving of thought and debate:

1.)    What tool has recently advanced/changed the way we make stories?

2.)    How much input and control should we give consumers?

They all gave obvious answers more about the venues and forums we have available to tell stories in this age as well as give examples of how not to work as a creative. My answer to this is easily informed by a great story teller, Hideo Kojima. Not having the ability to make movies he settled on the interactive media of videogames, as a Games Master you play in his stories, you dance with the author as he leads you into a simulation. My answer is this analytical commentary video in its entire context, as is. The Video as comment inside fiction explains our need to make stories. See the intro and understand how this moment is of a videogame commenting on you as a person but fast forward to 3:50 to watch until 10:50 to see what informs me on this subject as well as the state of art in our world:

Consequential Art Practice 2

Finally able to show the summer project work, which I wrote about in august here: http://artofjimfitton.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/consequential-art-practice-time-for.html It has dawned on me that I should be showing more of my art since I did after all name this blog "Art of Jim Fitton". Deadline week will be the most obvious time where I can show my work on this site.

So now the main point of this post, I wanted to try and do a scene from 'Night of the Hunter' as a whole noirish manga style comic because I do actually love those comics and wanted to practice and deep my feet into the technical aspects of producing that style of work. I bought one of those How to Draw Manga books by Go Office and Graphic-Sha. One book I now have is 'Enhancing a Character's Sense of Presence'. I have this because black and white print is actually very limiting for an artist to work in, depth can't be acheived through colour and tones will rely on how you do hatching or stippling so this is a good area for me to practice in before I delve into using colour. There are specific tricks to learn so to enhance a figure's presence in such a limiting format and anyone who makes manga and comics like that need to know how best to render and light their figures. Since I was looking at film shots I still had to adapt the photography to what looks best on flat paper.

I didn't rely too much on the book since I prefer to learn by doing but I did find that working with those tones became a deep learning curve. Size of the tone sheets must stay consistent and layering the tone sheets can create a variety of effects, some desired and some not so much for the beginner. After realising this I may aswell buy other books that explore the tone side of this art from the 'How to Draw Manga' range, they tend to have alluring anime women on the covers which even I scoff at. The books that explore the technical side of things are the most informative in my opinion.

I was not going to go too heavy in to this small portion of the summer project by using actual pre manufactured manga tones, instead I downloaded PNG files and worked from my scanned images in photoshop (inked beforehand just like they do in comicbook making). I would like to use the real and tangible thing just to see what I learn but that's one for another day. The tones I got was through the generous users of Deviant Art. I'll be sure to post links on where you can find these tones in the near future.

The things I learned in practice are annotated well in page 28 of the book I bought, local comic shops and Amazon will have them. This here is from Vol 3: Enhancing A Character's Sense of Presence. You can tell immediately how I have made mistakes in my summer project by this photo alone and I have still got plenty to learn and master in this area. A future Consequential Art Practice 3 post? You bet!

David Shrigley

I recently visited the Cornerhouse in Manchester to have a look at David Shrigley’s ‘How Are You Feeling?’ exhibit which lasts until Sunday 6^th of January. Cornerhouse also has an interview with the man in regards to the exhibit on their website, found here: http://www.cornerhouse.org/art/art-news/an-interview-with-david-shrigley  and his website here: http://www.davidshrigley.com/

 What I really like about his images is how raw and rough it all is, very much like the man’s work is made in a sketchbook before it’s ported straight to the gallery wall. It has less to do about good draftsmanship and more to do with just communicating ideas and it’s because of this that his illustrations are plentiful and can gather as a large library, being at the exhibition on Saturday I almost got lost in his illustrations, also it shows that his illustrations do come from the heart, there’s something cathartic behind them.

His work as a finished product works like the whole meme generators you see on a google image search, not taking any power away from his work with that comparison but just so you know, that simple line of text accompanied with a straight up drawing just gets to the point in terms of illustrative quality.  I am very much concerned about the whole appeal of Shrigley’s illustrations. Its outsider art and looks rather naive, although I do find his vehement creativity and his hands on attitude to being a creative mind inspiring.

However the lack of draftmanship skill opens itself up to something more expressive and impressionistic, some of the figures I can only describe as the opposite of anthropomorphism in how they look and that’s rarely seen in my opinion. I recall Scott Mcloud brought up the issue on illustrating ideas using symbolic means in his book ‘Understand Comics: The Invisible Art’, Shrigley’s very much the same in his sensibilities, he’s makes cartoons that have a basis on clever and humorous ideas and thus such a roughly drawn, freehand style of his is very appropriate to what he communicates. This also raises further questions for me on what constitutes as a signifier within an image and also how much does the balance between conveying idea and conveying aesthetical skill outweigh each other?

The State of Illustration Today

After recently hearing hearing one of Adrian Shaughnessy's podcasts on the current state of illustration it's really had me thinking about where illustrators stand in this world and my future work. You can listen to Adrian's podcast here: http://www.shaughnessyworks.com/ Currently the man runs Shaugnessy works, a consultancy combining design and editorial direction, he's a co-founder of the london based design company Intro, aswell as being a co-founder for Unit Editions, a publishing company producing books on design and visual culture.

The State of Illumination:

Taking part in a small forum in response to the above podcast, I learned that illustration's effectiveness in this world is based on the commentary the image has, it can illuminate text, decorate articles but then again so can a lot of art do that. Social and political commentary, that's where I think illustration is strongest. A progenetive and early example would be Francisco Goya, a historical painter who infuses this responsiveness and story telling to his era within his work. And we can see an evolution of this responsive, satirical style within the works of Gerald Scarfe and many modern illustrators, especially of the political cartoonist variety. These are people who are not only highlghting something in an image but they do so in their own prefered colour, like a movie director, they adapted an existing text in their own way. And like a newspaper story, they can easily paint who we should feel apathy for.

The State of Commisions:

Personally for me, establishing your own presence, visual world and language would be the best way to form a portfolio; where as a weak portfolio is too full of commissions, it has no flavour. I believe illustrators thrive on self promotion more than photography as it’s easy to imagine what an end product of a photo will look like. Illustration is purposefully made to "illustrate" and "decorate" an existing state of text or media however an illustrator should never have to wait around for the next commision. They need to find their own voice and establish their presence, thanks to the internet this has become far more eaier for us. Also thanks to the internet, opinions are easily exchangeable, and I welcome any one who wishes to comment or argue with the points alluded to here.

Aya Suzuki and World Animation

I found an interesting article on animator Aya Suzuki who originally began her career in the UK before she went on to work on films like Belleville Rendezvous, found here: http://www.mangauk.com/?p=aya-suzuki There's something inspirational to me about working across the world and reaching an audience that covers a wide variety of culture, especially in comparison to people like Amano Yoshitaka who once went to his local animation studio to show his portfolio before he landed the job. In previous years studios never had such easily established ties to other countries but it's now considered the standard in business thanks to current technology and the internet. The article linked also puts light upon the working methods that Aya has used since there is a notable eastern and western style of making animated feature length movies.

Varieties of Animation

As the hardcore gamer may know, The decennial release of Tekken Tag 2 occured this month. My brother is a big fan of the series since 1997 and I play with him as a new release comes out as per the "bro-time". The tag titles being a subsidiary to the series, it acts as a megamix for prior games that are first released as arcade cabinets before they are ported to home game consoles. The best thing about these home ports, and the topic of this post, is that as gamers win enough rounds they are rewarded with a short cinematic movie relating to the character they choose to play as their avatar, since there are over 40 playable characters then there are over 40 movies. In the past these movies would build upon the same graphics and art direction as the rest of the game however in the newly released Tekken Tag 2 there are a few movies that have their very own, specific art direction and unique animation style. Take a look:

Just the sort of thing I've been wanting to see! The movies are distinct enough in their own style and methods that it gives me the opportunity to think about how to do my own animation.

How to Make Choppy Animation Look Good?

The next project I have to do is an extension of the summer project, based around consequential art, the whole idea around the brief is to build a world and test out story making skills visually. The end product that I am going to be doing is a “narrative sequence”; in the form of a short animation.

I’m no animator and so I thought about what would be a feasible and good looking aesthetic to set off the whole look of the animation, I instantly thought of the Japanese anime intros of ‘Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei’, translated in roughly in English to ‘So Long Mr. Despair’. Simply the look of these openings to the cartoon series looks spectacular and hypnotic as it forms this cut out like collage style. To have such a look seemed to make up for the lack of smooth and fluid animation and I figured that it’s an approach that I should consider. The next clip here shows a whole episode known as “Mystery Train” done in the look of these openings (which is rare for the series). I’m not sure how hard it was to make the episode but it certainly looks like the animators had a lot of fun on this one! If anyone is into animation I implore you to watch the video below.

I am not expecting to animate anything better than a South Park cartoon but the Zetsubou Sensei series certainly intrigues me with its use of lighting and textures in these rare moments. I haven’t shown any spoils for my work just yet, so I’ll be getting into practice as soon as I can and we’ll see just how much this has influenced me later. Hopefully I'll see more animation that empthasises look and texture over motion.