OVER-GAME

[Eric Scholl]

This is a short movie made by myself in 6 months at Supinfocom Valenciennes(France)
Voici mon court-métrage, réalisé seul en 6 mois à Supinfocom Valenciennes
It is a mix of 2D, CG and Pixel-Art animation

Softwares : TVPaint, 3ds Max, Photoshop, Nuke, Avid, Reaper

The Animatic : vimeo.com/71366649

More of my work can be found here :
cargocollective.com/Becquer
animetis.blogspot.fr/

Sound Design : Rémi AURIERES

Music : The Thunderclaps - Judgement Day (instrumental remix), Pac-Man Remix - Simon Andersson
Some Sounds that I've used can be found here : Freesound.org, Universal-soundbank.com

[Paul Fierlinger]

Interesting to compare the two executions, because in some strange way I found the animatic more dynamic than the final rendering in color. Maybe too many colors? I don't know exactly why, but it has something to do with visual clarity. I also found it interesting that someone else makes pretty extensive animatics; sometimes people (not that familiar with animation techniques) also think my animatics are the final film and I have to ask myself half-seriously, "why even bother finishing this?"

[schwarzgrau]

I share this impression. It's an very well done animatic, which could nearly stand for it's own and I guess it's looses something from it's loose animation style in the final film. Unfortunately in the second half I feel reminded to a short CRCR did all the time, cause they used the same beat.

https://vimeo.com/16051959

I didn't do a lot jobs, where I needed an animatic, but on my last film the client saw the animatic and expected me to be finished in less than a month, unfortunately I still had to do the whole film and so it took me 9 month from there.
( Here you can see the final film and the animatic, for anyone interested http://www.schwarzgrau.com/en/tungu/ )
I guess a lot of people doesn't know the term "animatic", so maybe it should become a standard to put an "NOT THE FINISHED FILM" overlay on top of it.

[Paul Fierlinger]

Too bad you hadn't entirely stayed with animation and spent more time actually animating your drawings. I think the reading was cumbersome in its length since the copy was never written as a film narration. It would have helped to trim much of the sentences out of the picture -- the result would have been a shorter, thus better film with more clarity in the storyline.

I happen to have had a few experiences of my own with the same challenge of book adaptation to animation, having made two feature films and several shorts using that concept. In all cases, I had to resort to rewriting some (much?) of the original text to make the film reflect the book; less always being more in all my experiences. After all, it's an adaptation process and no one has yet criticized me for treating the original books in such a drastic way. Actually, I will be speaking on this topic, Adaptation of Books to Animation, on June 23rd in Toronto as part of the Toronto Film Festival's year round program.

As for making salient that an animatic is WIP and nothing final, I always keep a time code readout running over the imagery -- it works. By the way, I greatly admire your drawings -- you shouldn't be afraid to animate them more. Have you ever tried it? In my experience, the inbetweening doesn't necessarily have to be as thorough and accurate as you might think. What has helped me discover this was when I once realized that even in live action film making, very few frames make good still photography either; there is much blurring and proportional distortions going on. As Norman McLaren famously said, animation is what happens between frames.

[schwarzgrau]

Absolutely! It started as a job, but became something like a collaboration between me and the author. Unfortunately the author didn't wanted me to cut the story, ignoring the fact, that his story wasn't written for a film.

But even if he had let me cut it down it had been a nightmare for me changing the creative work of somebody else. Especially the work of somebody like this author, which picks every word carefully. It already took me a few long emails to convince him about the subtitles. And even with all the troubles I got I'm happy I could do this film with the contribution of the author. If I should adapt the book of someone which isn't involved in the production, especially someone, whos work is fascinating for me, I would always bear the feeling my film will not cope his book.
I would love to see this speak, cause this theme interests me, as much as it scares me.
I really like this film and I got the impression he did a pretty good job in the adapting, but I can't free my head from the thought "What would Charles Bukowski think about it?"


Hehe I like the timecode idea. And thank you for the compliment, it really means a lot to me, especially from you, since you could call me a big fan of your drawings in "My dog Tulip". I started my graduation film, a few months ago, which will be fully animated in TVPaint (just some camera moves in After Effects). I've animated nearly every day, the last months and I've learned A LOT. Some things from reading Richard Williams Book a fourth time, but the most from just doing it.

[Paul Fierlinger]

You had me a bit confused... so you had no part in the Man with The Beautiful Eyes short, correct?

Very nice short written and drawn together. Words and images are nicely balanced, though I can see they had to reach for quite a few cheats to fill space, which is too bad.

My favorites were clearly where the animator shows the way kids meander around each other as they walk and talk; sometimes those gestures speak volumes of words that were left out and never had to be there..

I had the same thoughts you had when I was working on Tulip, "What would Ackerley have thought about it?" That was going through my head every day. Then someone showed the almost finished movie to Ackerley's former lover and the executor of his literary will and I was told he loved it and approved of it. That meant a lot to me.

I love making book adaptations because it's just like illustrating someone's book, that's all there is to it really. It helps break up the long road ahead into lots of short treks with many rest stops along the way. I divide my script into short chapters which I made up from the book. Actually Tulip was a small book and didn't have enough imagery to fill 80 minutes so I went for more chapters into Ackerley's other books -- all four of them were autobiographical in nature so that wasn't difficult.

I also had valuable help from Peter Parker, the author of Ackerley's biography and I got much valuable advice from him. Where I needed to make up sentences and entire passages Ackerley never wrote, Peter did that for us and wrote it brilliantly in Ackerley's voice. Peter was also our close adviser on everything British -- we became close friends over e-mails and have never met.

[schwarzgrau]

No I have nothing to do with "The man with the beautiful eyes" I just like how they told the story. But to be honest I never read something from Bukowski before. So I don't know how well it matches the original poem.

I had the same thoughts you had when I was working on Tulip, "What would Ackerley have thought about it?" That was going through my head every day. Then someone showed the almost finished movie to Ackerley's former lover and the executor of his literary will and I was told he loved it and approved of it. That meant a lot to me.

I can imagine that's really some kind of reward, if you always tried to do the book justice and never know how the creator would like it.

I love making book adaptations because it's just like illustrating someone's book, that's all there is to it really.

I imagined to be just this, but contrary to book illustrations you have to alter the original text, to avoid doublings. You always have to show one thing in the images and the other in the audio. And therefore you need to cut or change the text in some parts. It's really hard to decide which parts of the book need to stay the way they are.

But your dividing-technique seems to be a good start. Thank you for that.

[Paul Fierlinger]

A long time ago I used to be a book illustrator and I used to take the challenge with the same sort of mindset: not to merely illustrate exactly what the text describes but what the pages between the illustrations told me. I never had an author complain because basically, this is what a good writer should want the reader to become, an interpreter of the story's soul.

BTW, I just sent you a PM.