Animation: Isometric

So, what style? Worth looking around. Something generous in its design, value for money to produce and both original, stunning but inspired by the whole overall feel of the series.

Easy peasey. Where the frig to begin.

Isometric. Often used in graphic novels. First stop Rokysopp Video. Damn, can't embed. Fair enough. Some beautiful visuals in this. The isometric design creates a distance and space from the characters that gives the viewer a God like vantage point.


All the smallness makes you feel you're looking down from a height. For sequences requiring that more far away look, this style is, for my money, is interesting territory. It's also sharp, neat and suggests a controlling force somewhere at play.


http://youtu.be/lBvaHZIrt0o


The French company that produced it, H5, are here.


http://www.h5.fr/




A MILLION MILES AWAY


We have to think of  budget. No getting away from it. However, it is also nice to look at stuff that is mega gorgeous, lovely, provocative or new. 

This video by Edouard Salier has some of those. No story, well, a bit of a thing to knock about, but mostly just the gorgeous, nightmarish image. Lots of shatter, shatter. Like.


http://www.rsafilms.com/company/rsa-uk/rsa-animation/director/edouard-salier/massive-attack-atlas-air-2163 

And then, he went and did this.









ANYHOW, GETTING BACK TO IT


Big touchstone has to be the animated version of the gorgeous graphic novel, Persepolis. Perceptive, tragic, never sentimental (which it could've been in lesser hands) beautifully designed and drawn and in the end, funny and well animated too in the end. Although the translation lacked something, can't put my finger on it, maybe too winding a story that needed simplifying for the big slow moving image.

Uses a fair bit of isometric and lots of what feel like clever tricks to create the sense of 3-D space without ever engulfing the viewer in spectacle. Character comes first.

That should be a rule. Character first.





Here she is talking French on a French TV Channel. Gotta ask, how many TV Channels was a graphic novelist turned film maker on. Probably loads, but hey cynicism is a better mask.







MORE ISOMETRICS


I suppose the reason I'm starting here is because moving isometric graphics, via video games, blew into my child hood world via computer games for the C64 and Spectrum. They used Isometric parallel grids because it was a cheap, effective and stylistic way to render 2D space as 3D.


This guy wrote some interesting stuff.

For the uninitiated, drawing objects in perspective means using a system to mimic the way things appear to diminish in size as they get farther away. One, two, and three point perspectives use different numbers of vanishing points to help determine an object’s relative size based on perceived distance from the viewer. All this is a visual trick to represent three dimensions on a two dimensional sheet of paper or computer screen. Piccaso is quoted saying, “Art is lies that tell the truth.” Perspective is one of those lies.

Isometric perspective is different only in that it trades one lie for another. There are no vanishing points. Objects don’t diminish in size as they get further away in the scene, instead everything is locked on a parallel grid. This doesn’t match reality as we experience it, but it can prove useful in architectural renderings, or other applications where dimensions are critical. It turns out this false perspective is also useful in video games, and turns up everywhere on the web. Everything from casual games like Farmville, to the soon-to-be-released Starcraft II are built on these rules of projection.

It is easy to see the underlying grid in these screen caps:

Ref: http://www.otis-graphics.com/blog/archives/318


So, what about those games?





Vendetta:

Anyways, I get the point. But so what? What's in it for us? Is it cheaper to do? 

It'll definitely help to have action scenes done at this level and then when characters move and talk we go in for a more comic book feel.

GRAPHIC NOVEL TO MOVIE

Apart from Persepolis, what else has been rendered in animation well.

So, Marjane Satrapi comes to aid again. Nice interview in the Guardian, makes a couple of interesting points. Nothing to push us any further towards animation, but useful when thinking about adapting our little four panellers into something animated, to keep certain things in mind. Like rewriting.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jun/16/how-to-film-a-graphic-novel

Alright, I'm bored. I'll start again soon.