Major Project: Film research

After looking into cave paintings a little more, I decided to look at some films that include them. Two of which I picked up on were Disney's "Brother Bear", Blue Sky Studio's "Ice Age" and Dreamwork's "The Croods".

These two films in particular stood out for me and looked very stunning. I especially love the use of colours that are used, even due to the limitations for the cave men at that time.

I especially like the style used in Brother Bear, because it is very basic yet bold and makes a statment. These images and paintings tell a story, even if they are not being animated. Their poses and shear rawness of style conveys movement all on their own. If I were to use this style I would have to depend a lot on body language and maybe also sound and music depending on whether I choose to incorporate one or the other, or even both. I am still unsure of the plot but I deffinitely want to do a few test shots for this style and am very interested in the outcome. I am looking into using stop motion with fabrics for the animals, maybe even watercolour. I also want to buy a slate or some sort of tile to animate onto, giving it a more authentic feel of an actual cave painting.

This next example was from Blue Sky's Ice Age. This cave painting scene is actually animated which is really nice to see visually. Even though the story is animated this time as apposed to the Brother Bear example, as an audience we are still left to assume some parts due to some use of montage and also the lack os speech, only sounds. Rather than animating fluidly aswell, there seems to be more still images that have been given a fading effect or transition to give the effect of slow motion movement, most likely due to the fact that this is a memory or flashback scene. I do not really like this effect as such and will probably not work for my idea in using materials. I want there to be a rough and gritty look to this project because of the antiquity of cave paintings and their origins, but also because it will be a nice change from todays animations that are perfect and so lifelike.

#md6002