Scratching on Film Supplies!

Well, some of you may ask,
"Hey Tim, what are the kinds of tools and techniques I can use to best work on a Scratch-On-Film animated piece?"

Well here ya go:

- FILM! I practiced on some color positive 16mm Tungsten film first which was fun and had a nice blue coloration. For Mirounga though, I used a Exposed Color Positive that allows me to scratch the film emulsion away at different pressures and get those greens and yellows you see in the final film.
- LIGHT BOX! I bought mine from Cartoon Color in Culver City, CA
- a clay-board or scratch-board tool (these tools are great for detail and for broad lines!) (sometimes art store will sell these nibs separately to go onto your calligraphy pen shaft)
- An fine etching needle! (this was my personal favorite tool because it was super sturdy, didnt bend, could do details of anything tiny and I felt like i could draw pretty fluidly with it) (Unfortunately I misplaced it or I would post of pic of it for you all to see)
-A Black Sharpie marker or color Sharpies if you like. I used the Black Sharpies to color over my mistakes and after a few coats on the film, you cant even tell you made a goofy scratch.
- White China Markers, good for drawing directly on the film before scratching.
- Black Micron Pens to draw with (more details on this to come below)
- A Magnifying Glass - To see what you are doing!
- A good lamp, dont screw up your eyes. you already have to squint to see these tiny images, dont do any more harm then you already are doing.
- Other sharp objects such as: Exacto knives, Push Pins, Wires, A Plexi-glass Scorer, Steel Wool, Shaving Razor Blades, Clay tools, Etc.
- ___________ <----- the best tool EVER! for Scratch-on-Film Registration! SEE BELOW!

MY SUPPLIES

MY LAMP/MAGNIFYING GLASS COMBO!

<- You Can see me holding a small frame from a scratched frame from Mirounga that was taken out.

<----Lamp and magnifying glass in one....GENIUS! :)




AND now my secret ingredient for success in REGISTRATION!: I used a couple techniques for registration since essentially what i am doing is character animation on 35 mm. I needed to be as precise as possible. So I tested out some things and used graph paper at times and film strip templates such as this one: BUT! The ultimate registration technique and SUPPLY!, which seems obvious but is amazing how well it is suited for this medium of 35mm Scratch-on-Film, is.....................SCOTCH TAPE!

Regular sized SCOTCH TAPE! First off its CLEAR, Secondly it is conveniently the size of 4 SPROCKET HOLES which is the EXACT height of the top to the bottom of one frame of 35mm film! WOWZA! (best piece of advice i can give anyone looking to register a scratch-on-film piece......trust me! you'll thank me later! the process is TEDIOUS, but works like a charm! I felt a moment of Enlightenment when I discovered this through experimentation hehe)

What I did:
- Scratch the 1st drawing or your key pose at the top of the film strip.
- Scratch the last drawing of the sequence (another key pose) at the bottom of the film strip.
- Use SCOTCH TAPE, trace the 1st drawing w/ a black fine point MICRON PEN
- Take the traced tape drawing from the 1st frame and place it over the 2nd drawing at the end of the sequence.
- Place another piece of SCOTCH TAPE over top, and draw the inbetween.
- Take the inbetween and find your spacing or timing to where it should be placed.
- Place it down and scratch through the tape to place your scratched drawing onto the frame
- Then work straight ahead between your drawings to make your sequence, using the SCOTCH TAPE along the way on every frame to make sure it is falling in the same registration.

HINT: If you take your SCOTCH TAPE with the MICRON PEN drawing of the last frame on it, and you move it down a frame on the FILMSTRIP, place it even with the 4 sprocket holes, and press down on your needle around the outer contour line of your figure or drawing on the tape to push little holes through your SCOTCH TAPE. Once you remove the scotch tape, you will have a series of little holes showing through on your film strip. DON'T JUST CONNECT THE DOTS! that is your last drawing, so you use those holes as reference for your last drawing to alter slightly, thus creating movement (sequential drawings = animation :) ).

DON'T BELIEVE ME? Have a look at the hundreds of tape drawings (that survived) I had to trace in the registration for this film (I felt wierd throwing them away since I devoted so much time to them, so I stuck them on bristol board and thought one day someone could get use of them hehe). There were hundreds more of these but tape does rip when you are putting holes and cuts into it, and therefore most of these tape drawings were lost, but the ones I did manage to save I think illustrates the point just fine:

Seeing is believing, eh? :)

Storyboards!

So as in any film, you got to make your mistakes earlier rather then later. So here are the first attempts at storyboards for the initial pitch for the film I was going to make. I believe these boards were due week 1 at our very first class, so we had to come in with an idea and be moving with it. These boards, although vague and awful, had the basic idea of the battle sequence but had alot of other stuff in there that was not to be (such as female seals looking on, a beach shot, etc.):

EARLY STORYBOARDS:

Basically, after pitching these boards and not fully doing justice to the idea or these animals, I decided to research them and draw, draw ,draw. I looked into the Blue Planet BBC series, A Seals Life by National Geographic, and a few other BBC videos on elephant seals. Then a friend told me if I wanted to do a fight scene, i should research how they are done in movies an studiy them. I thought to myself, "DOH!" that makes sense hehe. So I looked first at some Rocky films and just watched the shot composition and how it was staged in the boxing sequences. Then I looked into a few other movies but namely The Golden Compass, because of the intense fight/battle between two Polar Bears later into the movie, which is pretty well done. So I studied their shot composition and character choreography, all the while boarding out these 75+ storyboards:

INTELLIGENT STORYBOARDS:

After spending some hours studying these films and analyzing the behaviors of the animals. I photocopied, cut-out, and then pasted all them on my wall in my apartment, where i later shuffled them around and selected the ones i felt best expressed what i why trying to go for.

The thing with scratch-on-film as well is that if you are going to do an intense over the shoulder shot of one animal staring down the other, you have to realize that the animal way off in the distance is like trying to draw something smaller then an ant with unchanging detail at a rate of 24 fps. Pretty intense. So i tried to set a limit to the amount of these kinds of shots as much as possible. i also found that translating the animals back and forth in the Z-depth (x, y, z axis planes) would also be extremely difficult and hard to control on such a small 35mm film surface. So I boarded with all these ideas in mind. Here is a picture of my wall and the final storyboarded configuration i went with for the film:

MY APARTMENT WALL W/ BOARDS PINNED UP

PreViz and Character Design

To really get a feel for the characters and to understand what i am going to be portraying, it is important to work all the goodies before you jump into film-making. In some cases it may help to actually write out a character description (bear in mind that I was attempting to recreate a battle between two seals and not infuse an artificial character into them, so my approach is different then a character description for someone who is doing a serious character growth in say a drama), here is mine:

Character Description: Elephant Seal

The elephant seal is known to be one of the largest seals in the world. Seals can grow to lengths of over 16 feet and weigh in excess of 11.000 pounds. Male bulls are more than double the size of the females and are recognizable by their large elongated nose that overhangs their lower lip, almost trunk-like. The male bulls are extremely aggressive, foul tempered when aggravated, and demonstrate dominance by expressing large vocal displays and charging at each other to fight for control of breeding and territorial rights. Fights between males are usually brief but inflict large amounts of damage by trusting their large canines (that can grow up to 8 inches long) and colliding blubber with one another to inflict damage. Their bodies usually show the scars and deep wounds of past confrontations. The seals although large and seemingly immobile, have the ability to dive to depths of 5,000 feet below the surface to hunt for various fish and squid to sustain their dietary needs. They spend a lot of time at sea and during mating seasons they bask in enormous numbers along coastal shorelines.

The film will focus on the natural behaviors and aggressions of these mammals in particular. In describing their personality traits, I felt it appropriate to merely describe their physical features and behavioral patterns. The behavior and character of the animals will be true to their natural instinctive movements and not characterized in another fashion. Only characterization will be of the actual form of the character as interpreted by my stylizing of their forms. Smaller characters will also be introduced in the film but not important enough to describe the patterns of behaviors or physical characteristics, they will merely serve as secondary action.

After getting down the basics of the animal, it was time to explore it artistically. I personally enjoy to draw and sculpt, and therefore, took both avenues as a method of exploring the design of these animals to be in my stylization but still in their likeness. Having used scratchboard or clay-board before, i figured i would do some work on this material, since i would be scratching and would be able to get my technique down before jumping onto film with the designs. i also have done some maquette work in Sculpey before and thought it would be fun to model an elephant seal in clay as a reference and study to look back at for my film.

PREVISUALIZATION (Click Images To Enlarge)

Here are some scratchboard/clay-board studies:

Here is the maquette:

Choosing an Animation Medium: Scratch-On-Film

Ah, the medium!

As a film-maker, I feel the medium you choose to present your subject matter should still serve the purpose or artistic intention of the film. In this case, I knew from the observation of these animals that I wanted to use a medium that would allow me the opportunity to really get tactile and aggressive with. These animals display such dominant and violent behaviors towards one another that I felt was so very powerful that I had to choose a medium that could allow ME (the artists) to feel involved in the tearing, slashing, and aggression, so that in some way my film-making is informed by the behaviors I am depicted. Scratch-On-Film seemed like a perfect medium to do this with.

Of Course, with as any good animator should do, I researched a little on those who came before me. I have attached some links below of some famous artists and their films, which are super awesome in their own ways. Here are some Scratch-On-Film legends:

( a still from Two Sisters by Caroline Leaf......75mm....wowza)

Caroline Leaf (Check out: Two Sisters (75mm scratch-on-film)
Norm McLaren (Check out: Blinkity Blink)
Oskar Fischinger (Check out any of his studies)
Len Lye (Check out Free Radicals)

The next issue was to figure out what to work on, 16mm or 35mm. As you can see by the sheer size difference in drawing/scratching on a piece of 35mm in comparison to the 16mm, the 35mm was a "no brainer"! (Can you imagine working on 75mm life Caroline Leaf? awesome!) See Below:

After choosing to go with 35mm, I thought to myself "I want to achieve the colored look that Caroline Leaf got in her film Two Sisters. With some research and guidance, i found that scratching on black leader was not the only solution. I could use already fully exposed color film to achieve the coloration i was looking for. In film, the actual film is built up with layers of different colored emulsion. In my case Green and yellows were prominent. If you used a Tungsten film, you most likely would be scratching away at a blueish looking emulsion. If you scratched away at negative, you would have a red or orange coloration. There is a great diagram on the different colorings of film emulsion and some processing techniques in Maureen Furniss's book The Animation Bible: A Practical Guide to the Art of Animating from Flipbooks to Flash. There are some good summaries and tidbits of Scratch-on-Film artists and processes in there as well if you want to read more.

So we got the subject: Elephant Seals. We got the medium: Scratch-On-Film, 35mm Exposed Color Film, Now its time to make a film.......off to pre-viz and storyboards!

Planning, Preproduction, and RESEARCH!

(Lo and I with these amazing animals at Piedras Blancas)

Well, It all started when I was young kid. I always used to take trips to SeaWorld with my family and have been enfatuated with marine life and aquatic creatures ever since. The inspiration for this film inparticular spurred through a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway (HWY 1) between San Francisco and Los Angeles. There I found a small Rookery at Piedras Blancas which later I discovered was infact home of an organization known as "The Friends of the Elephant Seals". Through researching these animals and observing their motions for hours, I became infatuated with their sheer enormous size and the aggression and territorial acts of the male dominant seals in defending his herem of females. Here are some pictures and videos from visits I took to the rookery at Piedras Blancas (I wish there was sound on these videos because they are wonderful t ohear as they "roar/belch" at one another):




Shortly after these visits and much research and reading, I began production on the film. For reference I looked at alot of nature documentaries (really wonderful ones from BBC) and searched the net for pictured encounters with these facinating animals. Below are some collages of references I found via the internet to study for poses, look, etc.:













(Just a few examples, Reference!!!!)

Research and Preproduction may have been the most important part of the film-making for me. This is an opportunity to study and learn what these animals are capable of physically and how i can best represent them on a small little piece of film (35mm). I spent ALOT of time watching these animals and observing them, and did my best to convey them using a needle on a thin layer of film emulsion :)

PS: The name of the film is Mirounga.............Why?
Well, in case you didnt know already. Mirounga is the Genus name for descirbing elephant seals. Part of my research in observing these animals first hand and through reference videos were examing both Northern Elephant Seals (Mirounga angustirostris) and the Southern Elephant Seals (Mirounga leonina). So to avoid confusion, I just stuck with Mirounga, including both species in the title, because I appreciated both when working on this film.

Mirounga: The Process of making a Scratch-On-Film Character Animation

I decided it may be a good idea to post some information on how this film was created, since i have been getting some pretty positive and intriguing feedback from those interested or shocked that this kind of work can be achieved on scratch-on-film. I have been approached by multiple people whom have asked questions about the process involved in creating a registered character animation through scratch-on-film. SO, I thought this blog would be a great place for anyone who is interested about learning about the process or just to inquire more about the film. Thanks and Enjoy!