So when I said I'd be back soon, I meant that I'd be back eventually. Eventually starts now...many months later. I apologize. I'm still working things out with my life. Moving on! Just thought I'd start with a little fun one here by talking about mixing animation with live action. If there's anything more in the world I would love to do, it'd be to star in a movie like the image above, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and had to have an animated character interact with me. That would be the dream for me. Until then, however, I'll just stick behind a desk and draw.
I was surprised to see how many movies had a mixture of live action and animation. The movie I posted was the only one I only thought of considering it was a large part of my childhood, but there are so many more! And not all of them have both animation and live action interacting with each other. The Pagemaster is only a fourth live action and the rest is animated. Mary Poppins has non animated people interacting with two dimensional characters as well as Space Jam. There's hundreds of movies that have CGI animation in it like movies that may have talking animals (Narnia series), but I'm just going to focus on those that have actual cartoon characters in them.
It's freaking amazing how much effort is put into making something like this...and so incredibly interesting. If you ever watch the documentary they did for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, then you'd have a pretty clear idea. The actors for the film are fed lines from people off screen (since the cartoon characters aren't really there) and they have to physically act out the scene as if there was someone there. If that character were physically interacting with the actor/actress, then that actor/actress has to pretend it's really happening to them. Talk about acting dedication. For real objects that were being handled from those cartoon figures, the crew would need to think of ways to get the object to move on its own as if it were really being used. They would use a mixture of puppeteers and mechanical robots to help get that movement.
I think Who Framed Roger Rabbit is my favorite live action/animated feature because of how real it looks and the story behind it. It's interesting to know that everything was hand drawn for this movie and the animators would pencil in the characters on top of each key frame of the movie one by one. My hand is already cramping from the sound of that. Then they'd send in the pencil work to the painters who would color in the characters and then they would go through lighting, shading, and shooting each frame with these elements. You can't really beat the spark that traditional animation has, and I'd like to know if there will be any future movies like Roger Rabbit that'll be demonstrating the beauty of that kind of animation.
I would love to work on something that deals with both animation and live action. I've only drawn cartoons in photographs and that's as close as I can get for now. Still, it's so magical to know that we can broaden our imagination to show that the real world and the cartoon world can coincide with one another. I'd live it every day, and I'm hoping to show everyone what it'd be like to live in the shoes of a cartoon character.
I'll talk about rigging next as well as a movie review for one of my favorite Disney movies! (It's a surprise).
