Author: Ryan Collett

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A few West End notes

After what felt like a prolonged theater drought, I’ve been SEEING SOME STUFF finally. Just two plays, though. But I feel like it’s been more, but I think that’s only because they’re both blockbuster plays that feel like more than just two. 

The first I saw was All My Sons, which was sadly not anything worth writing home about apart from Sally Field who was expertly being the kind of Sally Field she’s become an icon for. Kudos for that. Otherwise, it’s another kitchen table drama—yes, one of the original kitchen table dramas, but what does that mean in 2019? 

Characters stare wistfully out into the audience and comment on the weather in metaphorical terms. There are weary mothers and brutish men. The American Dream is shown, very heavy handedly, to be futile and horrific—a daring idea back in the 40s when the play was first put on, but come on, take a look around. Obviously we still, ~as a society~ need to be told these things today, but the production of this play doesn’t even try to put a new spin on anything. It opens and closes with a kind of zoom-in, zoom-out, world-weary, “This Is America,” in-your-face ploy that comes off with all the subtlety of a high school PowerPoint presentation, and it’s just not a good idea to make me roll my eyes in the first two minutes of the curtain rising.

Gosh I’m being a bit mean. (And there’s no actual curtain in this play—when did these theaters just collectively decide to get rid of curtains? It’s been ages since I’ve seen a show with an actual curtain. Anyway.)  

But Sally Field was great! But also, what else could she possibly be? That’s her baseline. Ok, I’ll stop now. 

I also saw Rosmersholm, another classic play (maybe lesser known, but by a classic playwright), which was first put on historically even earlier than All My Sons, and explores even darker, more tumultuous themes with more grace. Rosmersholm skips the wambulance (rude again, sorry) of the American Dream (Norwegian in this case?) and cuts right into the essential questions of humanity, religion, politics, and particularly female politics. 

Hayley Atwell stars and gives one of the greatest performances I’ve personally ever seen (right up there with Imelda Staunton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). She has a scene at the beginning of act two where she absolutely goes for broke and provoked in me that kind of bubbling, visceral reaction only theater can. She completely floored me and to that I say, go get that Marvel/Disney money sis, as long as it lets you keep doing work like this. 

The play itself is bleak—bleaker than A Doll’s House, which I remember reading in college and feeling equal feelings of ooph. Things do threaten to get a bit too melodramatic near the end, but the actors throw themselves so willingly into each probing monologue and existential wail that you can’t help but allow yourself to be carried away with them.

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The Natural Order of Things

Another day, another animation project. Actually, it’s more like “another few months” as these things take time! And I work on them on and off, not at all consistently. They’re like long-term sketch pads for little doodles, eventually coming together in some way or another. I get an idea and play with it, then another idea comes along and I play with it, and try to string everything together in a way that can be showcased. They’re drawing lessons more than anything.

I treated this one more like a sketchpad than anything else and decided to keep it that way. It all started with this painting at the Tate. It isn’t much to write home about—it’s very dark and murky and kept in an even darker and murkier room—but for some reason it caught my eye and wanted to use it as the basis for an animation project.

This is literally as bright and blown out possible.

I thought the woman in the painting would make for a great animation mostly because her dress covers up nearly all of her body, which would be forgiving enough for animating. After biting off a bit more than I could chew on my last project, I was more non-committal with this one. I kept the rough pencil lines unpolished and the layers uncomplicated so I could focus on just the animation and letting it go where it wanted to go. Sometimes the coloring and cleaning-up lines can take longer than nailing down the actual flow of the animation. Actually, they always take longer.

Cut to my morning routine: swinging through the Waitrose self-checkout queue with whatever I’ve grabbed for breakfast before work, squeezing through the pure concentrated capitalism of fifty self-checkout machines all talking over each other in that insane, disembodied, sub-human voice. I was really struck by the wall of sound one morning and spent the next few days making different recordings of it, holding up my phone and little microphone trying not to look completely out-of-step with all the other 9 to 5ers.

I became obsessed with the different self-checkout voices. I went into deeply weird corners of YouTube to find clearer sound samples. I read about the voice actors who get hired to provide the voices—they remain anonymous because of course. At this point, all I had in terms of the animation was this woman from the painting that I had been playing around with, and now these sound recordings, nothing else. Absolutely no through line, just two things that I had been struck by recently, so I combined them in honestly the most literal, unimaginative way possible: turn the woman into a self-checkout machine! Obviously! And honestly, everything else that happens in the animation is the natural course of events.

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My feet

Here’s a little animation test for a knitting video I’m working on. Those are my feet with socks magically ravelling and unravelling on them. Oo-la-la!

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My Not-the-Oscars Oscars

And the not-the-Oscars Oscars go to… (winners in bold)

Best Supporting Actor:
Steven Yeun, Burning 
Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me
Jake Johnson, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Best Supporting Actress:
Rachel Weisz, The Favourite
Tilda Swinton, Suspiria
Christine Baranski, Mama Mia! Here We Go Again
Jennifer Garner, Love Simon

Best Cat:
Jersey the cat, Can You Ever Forgive Me
Boil the cat, Burning

Best performance by an actress who already won an Oscar for La La Land but shouldn’t have and so they’ve finally earned their Oscar now:
Emma Stone, The Favourite 

Best Actor:
Ben Foster, Leave No Trace
Yoo Ah-in, Burning
Ethan Hawk, First Reformed 

Best Actress:
Olivia Colman, The Favourite
Toni Collette, Hereditary
Dakota Johnson, Suspiria
Lady Gaga, A Star Is Born
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me

Best performance by an actress doing exactly what she’s supposed to be doing so expertly it’s more akin to watching an operatic drag performance:
Bryce Dallas Howard, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Best Picture:
Mama Mia! Here We Go Again
Suspiria
The Favourite
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Movies really kicked into gear last year and did what they were supposed to do, namely confront or comfort. Some of my favorite films of 2018 were the most confrontational (Suspiria and Burning). They demanded something from me as a viewer and were shocking with what they did with it once they had it, though some were less successful than others (Roma and First Reformed). But more importantly, movies were really MOVIES this year. They entertained with with a zest and a joy as if they knew it was 2018 and thus, for as truly grim as parts of the year were, their distractions needed to be tenfold.

Surprisingly, the year’s big requisite Star Panther Wars Super Mary Poppins Avengers bonanzas were empty calories, and the popcorn flicks no one really expected to swoop in really swooped with mathematically perfected pizzazz. I walked out of Mama Mia 2 on a cloud, plain and simple. That was a movie just as calculated and honed as Suspiria and The Favourite in being exactly what it wanted to be, completely assured. That was a movie that was almost confrontationally absurd in the way it yanked me out of 2018’s dastard headlines for two hours of unselfconscious, snark-free singing and dancing and NOTHING ELSE. The bravery of NOTHING ELSE. Bravo.

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The Bad and the Bad of 2018

Netflix is going to pay AT&T $100 million to keep the TV show Friends on Netflix for another year. To me, this encapsulates the theme of the year 2018: that this whole situation isn’t going to last forever, people! Twenty-eighteen was the year of we collectively realized (or at least, should have realized) that everything “good” (so to speak) cannot be acquired or maintained or appreciated by flippant means; that if it was easy to get a thing, it will be just as easy to lose that thing; that these free-for-all avenues of the internet are about as reliable as a cardboard box lost and found at an old church closed for the afternoon; that all these monolithic companies you can count across your fingers running the whole dang thing actually are not run by good people with your best interests in mind.

(You can probably buy the entire series of Friends on DVD for $2 at a yard sale if you look hard enough. Does Netflix know that?)

I’ll try not to sound too much like an anarchist here (burn the whole thing down!), so I digress. My flat is cold. Sometimes I have to work from home and the table I sit at has a metal base that I rest my feet on and the metal gets cold. The other day I went on Amazon and searched for “fuzzy socks” because just “socks” is going to give you, well, socks, and something “thermal” or “extra warm” is going to give you those thick sort of mountain-man socks I don’t want. The first result for “fuzzy socks” I get is this:

The official name for this sponsored item is “WYTartist Women Fuzzy Winter Socks Super Soft Warm Microfiber Slipper Socks Home Socks Boot Socks”. The item description brokenly says, “It’s so comfortable that make you feel you are walking on the cotton.” Well, I would hope so! The tirade of SEO’d-to-hell sentences ends with this sign-off: “Warm feet, warm hearts. Wish you have a good mood from sole everyday!”

The next highest, non-sponsored listing is for a chunky knit set of socks, advertised with moderately better English, and a customer review that says, “We also use them on our four donkeys, to keep their lower legs warm in the winter.”

I still haven’t decided on a pair, so my feet remain cold. The guy who runs this website is the richest human being on the planet.

We used to treat these things as novelty. Oh, how weird that I can order a book, a humidifier, and a back scratcher, and have them all arrive together on my doorstep the next day. Oh, how weird that I can watch basically any movie in existence at any moment. Oh, how weird that the host of the Apprentice and his pornstar wife might end up running the country. All without remembering that how we treat things determines how we are treated by them. If you are flippant with it, it will be flippant with you. The catastrophe reached its peak this year.

Everything feels like it exists on a shoestring. I’d say more than half of the conversations I have with people have their genesis in a condensed headline someone read in a tweet. I can’t click the full article because of the NYT paywall or WP paywall or the LA Times just flat-out blocking their site for everyone in the EU and if I do manage a way to actually read the whole thing (usually it involves banging Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C before the paywall comes up, then pasting the whole janky text into a Word doc and reading it from there… tips of the trade), there’s a fifty-fifty chance it’s an article that’s already out of date, been better reported elsewhere, or turns out to be just a puffy opinion piece with as much factual information as what I’m writing now; or it’s about MUELLER. Oh jeez, not Mueller. Where, what, and when is Mueller? Is it Mueller like “mule her” or “molar”? Why is he in a perpetual state of coming?

It was as if this year all the “platforms” came alive with a midlife crisis zombie energy and decided they didn’t want to be just the platforms like this anymore. I remember I used to have whole conversations in the comment threads of photos posted to Facebook back in silly high school days, before it became invaded by Brexit Trumps Bezos Rodham Rohingya memes in all their pixelated terror. Suddenly Facebook and Twitter took the liberty of telling us what was news and what wasn’t, and what was news turned out to be whatever someone could finagle out of the system with enough money. And in 2018, they finally had the capital and leverage to do it completely unabated.

Did they not know they were always going to be just the platform? A bulletin board is always going to exist, whether it be on a Facebook or a telephone pole. A marketplace is always just a marketplace. Blockbuster never really went away. The Amazon, however is rapidly being deforested.

Permanence, or at least the sensation of permanence is important. If you create something, whether it be a novel or a note to a friend or a knitting tutorial, you want to see it existing. I used to be so confident in all the advances made in sharing, streaming, ordering, and friending that I took basic communication for granted. So much so that whenever the rug got gently tugged out from under me—YouTube tweaking its algorithm or every computer program switching to monthly subscription models or my US bank account being virtually inaccessible because I don’t have a US phone number which is ridiculous by the way—it feels like a violation, and then an embarrassment on top of that because how could I invest even an iota of feeling into what a billionaire half-heartedly thought up one day in the 90s? (Yes, half-heartedly. It only takes hubris, not genius to put a grocery store or a telephone pole or a radio or a taxi on the internet. Nothing else. We should only treat these things as revolutionary in how much they have hindered, negated, and prevented human connection; how much they have made life less.)

So one of my goals for the next year is to be less of all that. I don’t mean doing some grand tech-free disconnect, no, not quite, but at least an elimination of its grandeur. I want to limit my support of these companies intent on hooking me with their good intent, their determination to determine what is good for me in the first place.

I want to say I’ll be reading physical newspapers or sending letters to friends, something very twee, but that’s not quite right either, is it? Maybe it’s figuring out a careful balance between those extremes of feeling. Maybe it’s not seeing connection or disconnection as something so polarized. Maybe I’ll let you know.

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Guadagnino vs. Kusama, or not

I went and saw Suspiria at 9:45 in the morning at an empty movie theatre on a cold, sunless Friday, which proved to be optimal viewing conditions for the film. Luckily three more people (all of them on their own, like me) trickled into the theatre by the time the movie started so I wasn’t completely alone while being terrorized for the next two and a half hours.

Suspiria is about a lot of things. Small town girl comes to divided Berlin to join a modern dance troupe led by sinister, bloody witches. The original, whose plot it loosely follows, is more concerned with keeping an electric tone and gonzo style, while this homage, directed by Luca Guadagnino, feels more concerned with where and how those elements fit in the world today, or if they fit at all. It’s not a horror film in the traditional sense, where gray and dread harbor thrilling menace, instead, it’s a quieter, growing sense of permanent doom. The classic thrills are there, but they’re less high voltage and more so a worsening, neverending mania.

It gives you a lot to chew on—and any moment of reflection is sharply interrupted by a new horrific turn of the plot, leaving you permanently unsettled. It made me think about ritual and rebirth; reinvention and how it, for all its bloody tax and strain, can sometimes be a setback rather than a step forward. Madame Le Blanc, played by Tilda Swinton, is expertly precise and a commander of the occult for nearly the entire film, until a single lingering doubt brings about her demise. No one can be so completely sure of their self, we’re told.

After the movie, I wandered around London, which looks like the actual end of the world in November, and ended up at the Victoria Miro gallery in Shoreditch. I went inside and stumbled into a Yayoi Kusama exhibit—which, the more I think about it, the more I realize I think I accidentally snuck into? Checking the gallery’s website now I see that they were issuing timed entry tickets, which I definitely did not have, and I kind of ended up entering the building via a backdoor because I couldn’t figure out where the front door was?

Anyway, that’s besides the point. The point is that I had unwittingly wandered into a veritable Instagram hive. I saw the dot paintings and saw the pumpkins and thought the same “I could have made that” thoughts that everyone else thinks while looking at them and tried to break past that into the greater messaging Kusama’s trying to say about proliferation, narcissism, and commerce and whether she’s tearing them down or merely perpetuating them—but I couldn’t.

Suddenly these giant pumpkins were monoliths of dread—something I wanted to shun out of defiance, but knew I wouldn’t be able to get away from or justify my own theory against them. I felt like Susie in Suspria—in over my head against a powerful authority figure, but also completely absorbed by it.

I went to the exit (which was actually the entrance because I had done the whole show in reverse!) but not before I made one last stop at one of Kusama’s signature infinity rooms they had jerry-rigged (and I mean jerry-rigged) upstairs in an attic space above the main floor.

This was the pièce de résistance of the exhibit and of my own personal experience with the show, even though I never actually went in the infinity room. I went up the creaky stairs to the dim attic and was met with a line of about a hundred people—most of them around my age, the Shoreditch-set, slightly vampiric in energy—and I turned right back around. On my way out of the gallery I bumped into a mildly D-list YouTube celebrity and the mark the whole experience had made on my was solidified. Like a polka dot.

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Notes on Stoner

I finished reading Stoner by John Williams the other day. It’s been having a prolonged renaissance in publishing lately—it’s been reissued several times since its was first published in 1965, it’s been called a “perfect novel” by the New York Times, its author was made the subject of a book literally called The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel, it’s been blurbed by Tom Hanks for some reason. All of these things both attract and repel me, of course, because how could you not read a “perfect novel”? And a blurb from Tom Hanks is basically a blurb from the Goodyear blimp.

And it’s not a Goodyear blimp novel, I’m happy to report—whatever that would mean. It’s not in over its head, it’s not syrupy, it’s not inflated. It’s a strange little book that’s not really sitting with me the way I want it to sit with me and I can’t quite make my mind up about it.

On one hand, it’s a classic campus novel that illustrates a slice of post-war American life in the sort of quiet, effortless style of William Maxwell (one of my all time favorite writers). But then on the other hand, it’s a classic campus novel in the worst sense—it trips on its own sense of entitlement, narrow worldview, treatment of women, etc. It’s both a very modern, but also very 60s novel, cancelling itself out, making me just want to read William Maxwell instead. Still, it’s a moving book.

Stoner is about the life of the fictional William Stoner, a mediocre professor at the University of Missouri and that’s about it. His entire life spans the course of the novel and therein lies one of its biggest foibles. Near the end of the book and of his life I stopped recognizing the Stoner from earlier chapters, and I would be fine with that if Williams had somehow made note of that in the text, but he doesn’t. Stoner simply evolves—from quiet farmboy to quiet student to quiet teacher—without much introspection, and every time he’s given the chance to really come alive on the page, he comes off feeling like a completely different person from the last iteration.

The thing that makes this book stand out the most is its examination of a life in education. I’ve never read a book that so perfectly captures the feeling of the joy of learning—and a special kind of learning at that, not for the purposes of creating something, not for gain, but simply for the sake of learning. The first few chapters cover this brilliantly as they describe Stoner’s bleak family history, their eternal servitude in manual labor, and then the lucky break that whisks Stoner away to university and his position between those two worlds.

Perfect novel? Stoner has moments of perfection, sure, but I don’t think such a thing as a perfect novel exists—and I’m sure Stoner would be the first to agree.

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Notes on Company at the Gielgud Theatre

Company has blown every other show I’ve seen this year out of the water. I didn’t expect it to! It’s a blockbuster musical with championship pedigree running through its cast, director, and history, and somehow, through a confluence of hype and burnout, something like that can work against a show, but not at all in this case.

Company is an abstract musical with a fluid structure and virtual plotlessness. On the night of her 30th birthday, Bobbie (not Bobby due to a timely gender swap for this revival) navigates a cavalcade of her closest friends, all of whom are coupled up and personify different facets of marriage in all its ups and downs. With hysteria, cynicism, detachment, and over-attachment, each couple interrogates Bobbie on her singledom, leaving her to step aside and analyze the company she keeps.

Something special happened on the night I saw it, one week into previews. The superstar director Marianne Elliott got up on stage before the start to give a slight disclaimer about them still being in previews and that due to illness, the lead actress would be replaced for the night by Jennifer Saayeng, a cast member who already plays the role of Jenny, and that the role of Jenny would be covered by another actress. The curtain rises and Saayeng, who has had literally only hours of rehearsal for the lead role of the biggest new show on the West End, takes the stage.

First staged in 1970, Company is an interesting time capsule of a play. With the institution of marriage as its centerpiece, and adjoining dissections of divorce, drug use, and career ambition, a lesser production would run the risk of feeling dated. Here, the topics are more current and vital than ever, used as tools to uncover the greater ills of modern life. A joint shared between a couple is less about paranoia and legality than about uncovering a new dimension to how much they thought they knew about each other. A riff on pre-marriage jitters (played with expert, cartoonish precision by Jonathan Bailey) becomes a hilariously apt disassembly of gay marriage. Ultimately Company isn’t about these trappings of modern life, but about what life still manages to be in spite of them. It’s about loneliness in a crowded room.

Enter Saayeng, who takes the stage as Bobbie with that singular fear etched into her face. Theater is magical because it’s a live wire for empathy. Automatically, the audience is latched onto her performance, reading into and feeding off of every wince of insecurity she exhibits throughout—it’s a rare moment where character and actor merge into one. Race brings a startling new dimension to the show. Saayeng is Black and spends large portions of the show pushing her way through riotous crowds of mostly Whites. Even in this bonkers, off-the-wall musical comedy, the reality of what we see is palpable and current. Whether Bobbie is standing on her own in defiance or in dismay, we believe her and we feel it too.

At the end of the night, there were standing ovations, as would be expected. Crowds shot up for Jonathan Bailey’s hilarious turn. Even more shot up for Patti Lupone because well, Patti Lupone. But the entire theater shot up and absolutely erupted for Jennifer Saayeng, who burst into tears along with many in the audience. She nailed every beat of the performance against insane expectations.

Rarely does a play totally transport me—at least not in the way a movie or a book does. The obvious, inherent artifice of a stage can both serve its purpose of delivering a message and alienate its own audience, sometimes at the same time. With Saayeng’s vulnerability laid bare, there was a very real throughline that sucked me right into it, crushing me with the musical’s themes and ideas like nothing else ever has.

So… it was great! Incredible! Complete bliss. I wonder if it would have had the same power over me had the actress swapping not occurred. It probably would have, but definitely not as easily. Either way, what I thought was just going to be a night out at another blockbuster West End production actually ended up being exactly and perfectly that.

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Halfway to an Olivier

This year my relationship with London theater has evolved into what can only be described as picky. I used to be fine with oohing and aahing at whatever the basic hook of a show was (an ambitious set, flashy dancing, a famous person, etc.) but now I’ve become picky! Quicker to criticize than to applaud.

(Tangent: I went to see Aladdin because the tickets were free and it was worse than I thought it could possibly be. I was expecting something akin to the Lion King where it would be a blockbuster, machine of a show, but it was a disaster. The Aladdin was not the Aladdin on the posters, the Jasmine sang through her nose, and there was no giant snake at the end! I’ve read reviews that likened it to a pantomime and I couldn’t agree more. It felt like Aladdin charades. Anyway, the best part of it was the audience because it was a Las Vegas audience—tired tourists that had been wandering London all day and just wanted to be entertained. They hooped and hollered at everything, the magic carpet ride was a euphoric experience. People lost their minds. At the very end of the show, there was no standing ovation because why would there be, save for ONE person. An older man in one of the front rows shot right to his feet and clapped like the biggest fan in the world for the whole length of the curtain call. I could see the smile he was giving the cast even though his back was turned to me. At one point he gave a big thumbs up. It was cute and made me wonder if I’ve become too jaded. Anyway.)

I saw the second half of The Inheritance finally, and I wasn’t as moved by it as I had been by Part I. Everything came to its inevitable Vanessa Redgrave conclusion and felt somewhat hollow compared to the ending of Part I, which did an amazing job of weaving the past and the present together to create this sense of unity and shared direction for the future. Part II felt too obvious with the notes it was trying to hit and none of them felt as vital as the first half. Acting-wise it felt stiffer than before and dare I say straighter.

The best play I’ve seen this year so far has been Home, I’m Darling at the National Theatre. It’s a brilliant send-up to our fetishization of nostalgia—in this case nostalgia for the 50s—where the biggest plot twist happens in the first ten minutes of the show. Katherine Parkinson plays the perfect lead as a sort of self-induced bored housewife. She’s imprisoned herself to domesticity on her own volition and you can feel the horrors of that kind of life catching up with her like viruses.

Her mother, played by Sian Thomas, delivers the play’s standout monologue—a critique of her daughter’s brand of feminism and how it fits and doesn’t fit with ~the state of the world~ today. Laura Wade, the writer of the play, does the expert feat of towing the line between soap-box and soap opera, crafting a play that both hooks you with its inventive premise and challenges your natural assumptions, creating an elevated conversation you don’t realize you’re a part of until it’s over.

On the musical side of things, I saw Hamilton, which I guess is a big deal. But I think the window for having your jaw dropped by Hamilton has closed by now. I mean, it lived up to the hype and was outstanding (though I have to admit, right before the intermission I was worried there wasn’t going to be an intermission, and then I felt ashamed at having worried about that in the first place and then I said screw it and embraced the fact that yes, I WAS KIND OF BORED BY HAMILTON). Especially in the current world, it felt like an Obama-era relic from when optimism was shamelessly abundant, bordering on naive. It felt strong and empowering, defiant and unbeatable, but vague; singing (rapping) to an empty room. Maybe I’m projecting!

The best musical I’ve seen this year so far has been Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I should probably call out my hypocrisy here because where Hamilton is inventive and original and fresh, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is maybe just fresh, being practically a connect-the-dots rehash of Billy Elliot with shades of Kinky Boots. That being said, it does what it does masterfully, with the music being the real standout. I guess where Hamilton has the weight of the world on its politics, Jamie doesn’t, so it’s free to run wild and have a fun time. Unfair to both? Probably.

And those are just about all the highlights! Long Day’s Journey Into Night was excellent but I was too overloaded on kitchen-table dramas to appreciate it in the moment. Julie had potential to rise above its angry high school sentiment, but didn’t, and wasted Vanessa Kirby. Killer Joe was an absolute dud that couldn’t even be saved by Orlando Bloom’s butt.

So, again, pickiness.

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You Are What You Eat

Oh boy, here’s a big one. I would say I have advanced in my understanding of TVPaint, meaning I’ve learned a few things but I’ve still got an eternally long way to go before I know all the ins and outs. This project started out with one goal and then spiralled into a whole host of other experiments and now here we are with whatever this is. At the start of everything, I didn’t care for a story necessarily, I just wanted to have as detailed and clean a sequence as possible. I wanted to avoid line jitter, I wanted the movement to be smooth and believable, I wanted the sequence to look interesting, with lots of moving pieces. I love animation where the entire screen is filled with movement, not going fast or all over the place, but with smooth, seamless movement.

On this, I grade myself a… pat on the back.

I mean, I am proud of myself. This is the most complex project I’ve done on TVPaint so far—there are sequences here (the clothes coming together, the makeup, the burger) that took weeks to do. But when I watch it back, I see all the areas for improvement: The shadows could be more logical, the human figure gets a little wobbly here and there and lacks a sense of solidity. BUT, I also love it. I’m particularly proud of the tomatoes. And the hair.

My first thought was burgers

I wanted an interesting animation with detail and movement, so my mind went to a cheeseburger. Maybe I was just really hungry, but I thought about all the different shapes and colors that it would require and went with it.

I did a little test animation of a pair of hands unwrapping a burger and liked how it turned out. This test one was rotoscoped, technically, which I guess is kind of looked down on in animation the same way tracing would be looked down on in a drawing. I used the main poses from this animation in my final animation, but shortened the movement and added some changes to the drawing to make it feel closer to animation than rotoscope.

Once I had my burger down, I moved on to other things that could interact with it. Hands were one, but I didn’t want to commit to doing a human figure and the complexity that would add, so I did one but covered most of it in a big dress, and had it spend half its time as a blob. You can’t go wrong with blobs. Make your blob a balloon and you have sophistication!

Balloons, burger, repeat

Everything in the final version has at least 1 additional version as a sketch. I worked out the movements at the sketch level, then went over those frames with clean lines. At the beginning, I was naive enough to think I could maybe do just the keyframes as sketches, go over them with lines, and figure out the inbetweens at the clean line level. Anytime there’s an awkward bit in the final sequence it’s because I was lazy and didn’t work out my sketch first! Lesson learned.

Once the lines are down, coloring in TVPaint is a breeze (but sometimes not!). The software also has an automatic shadow/cell shading function, but I’ve never been completely pleased with it, so I did my own manually, which was often mind-numbing. Backgrounds were relatively simple and only required a few tricky experiments to nail down the zooms and pans.

I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, really. I just wanted a fun little project to tryout some techniques and ended up with this behemoth (relative behemoth, OK). The final sequence is just a chain reaction from blob to human, to hair and makeup, and what better way to wrap it all up than literally wrapping it all up in paper in the end.