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‘Pig Tales’ Creative Translation questions

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‘Pig Tales’ Creative Translation questions

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These drawings were the most expressive in terms of line styles. I started with these as my first animations as they were very simple and relatively easy to animate on iPad. Selected also because of photos and video for rotoscoping and evocative sound track.

Narrative

Different possibilities of linear and/or non-linear narrative sequence eg starting with the women’s fight – explanation of woman on woman violence or picture of Tupa Tupa all alone, rejected by his family.

Earlier animation experiments simply animating the pig and goat line drawings on my iPad were another possibility, if I can make the animations longer and inject some tragic humour like 'Oh Sheep' by Gottfried Mentor.

Illusion of Life: realism/magic balance

This animation combines different styles to contrast the message. But how can I increase the contrast between:

the dreamy romanticism (eg adding more of the mistiness of Norstein's puppet animation, even adding vaseline diffuse overlay?)

the violence of the pig fight? (eg combining Jonathon Hodgson's varied rotoscoping in 'Dogs' with jagged line work and the camera work of the boar fight scenes in Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke?

the documentary envelope - should this have a colour overlay. I understand the Bengali discussion of plans for the shop, but how to make the meaning of the drawings visually clear to a non-Bengali speaker?

Future steps

This animation is still a draft, rotoscoping from the video in TVPaint is still rough, as are manipulating photographs in Procreate on my iPad and  final compositing in Adobe Premiere.

I am aiming on the one hand to showcase the raw artistic power of some of the drawings by women who never held a pen before, as well as the contrast between romantic views of outsiders and women's dreams for use of the grants - that they have costed - and the realities of vulnerability and food insecurity, even with grants, in an area with very few services and that has been neglected by government.

Technical quality:

Painterly section: Procreate was a good initial RSI-friendly software to start to develop the ideas, making cutting out the characters and draft backgrounds easy. For this short and simple clip, Procreate is probably a good option for further development with smooth in-betweens and cleaning up the artwork. But the animation is aiming to be romantically dreamy and does not need to be in sync with the audio.
Rotoscoping: The rotoscoping of the pig fight could be more dramatic using Disney techniques of squash and stretch, follow through etc. But is aiming to be fiercely poignant rather than cartoon -like. I could use camera moves to change the viewpoint, but this needs redrawing in TVPaint because it is pixel-based. Rotoscoping of the video of the singer needs to be redone to be in sync, but I like the way some elements are missed and the rotoscope fragments, adding to the romantic illusion overlay.

Fidelity to community voices and context? The narrative is constructed from my workshop notes, and shortens issues from my original workshop video.

Visual magic and creativity?
The painterly effects and pig fight are introduced for dramatic effect for a global audience, and well received by Western viewers if the technical issues are resolved. These would aim to be much more dramatic, drawing inspiration from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke.

In taking it further in response to audience feedback, I would consider a bigger range of narrative options and ways of intensifying dramatic impact. Continuing using puppet animation in Procreate and/or TVPaint, refining the rotoscoping with final compositing in Adobe Premiere. Possibly using creative effects in After Effects.

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Pig Tales Overview of animation draft September 2021

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Pig Tales Overview of animation draft September 2021

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'Poverty is no picnic' : concept

The animation narrative contrasts a rather romantic ideal of tribal Santhal life, with the realities of looking after livestock and poverty.

Santhal women work in the fields, forest and with livestock. Lives of 'tribals' are very much romanticised by upper caste Bengali culture - partly because Santhal communities are seen as a much freer/separate place for Bengali men to drink and mix/sleep with women. Tribal communities in Bengal and neighbouring Bihar are also very politicised by left wing movements on wages and communal rights to the forest.

But for the women themselves, issues of poverty, lack of access to education and income and sexual exploitation are key issues. So the stories they told about goats and pigs fighting are often for them life and death issues affecting food security and independence.

My translations aim to contrast this romanticism (evident also in my own photos) with the reality of loans for 'exotic' foreign goats and pigs that cost a lot to house, buy and feed, that get diseases, fight and die because of lack of veterinary services.

The drawings, photos and video are from a participatory business planning workshop for a US-based INGO giving grants for livestock development to very poor women in disadvantaged communities. The local NGO had had difficulties communicating with the women because staff do not speak Santhali, except for some volunteers from the community. The power relations were very evident from the body language and interactions during the workshop.

The nature of the participatory empowerment process whereby drawings are placed on a collective diagram for discussion and analysis meant that the names of individual artists is unknown.

The narrative is bound together by the beautiful Santhali song that one of the participants sung for us just before we left. Unfortunately leaving was rushed and there was no way  of finding out the meaning of the song, who wrote it (I think it was traditional) or the name of the singer.

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Padlet purpose:
This padlet provides an easy entry overview 'map' to the animations, there evolution through different styles and contributory community sources and inspiration.

Contents

Portfolio animation and supporting sketchlog and overview blogpost (in red centre top, larger file size version)

Community sources, overview blog post, key drawings used and sketchlog (in blue bottom left)

Creative translation questions and visual narrative inspiration of options for animation format (in purple top right).

Sequence of stylist experiments (in orange bottom from left to right. Inspiration sources for each in black)

To open the padlet:
Click on the square with arrow on the top right below.

To open the 'paddles':
Click on the paddle title or image, whichever shows a ‘hand’.
If no hand shows, click on three dots top right and expand.

To close, check whether or not the ‘paddle’ has opened in a separate window on your browser. Closing that will bring you back to the overview padlet.

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Participatory Action Learning: original workshop documentary video

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Participatory Action Learning: original workshop documentary video

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This is the original documentary video I produced from the workshop.

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Participatory Action Learning: Livelihood Planning by tribal women in West Bengal

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Related technical post: Rotoscoping styles and techniques

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Related technical post: Rotoscoping styles and techniques

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Rotoscoping Overview

History
Techniques

Contemporary Inspiration

1: Rotoscope as Reference: Mary's Story, Uganda: Cow Walk
2: Rotoscope as line animation and Effects: Pig Tales, West Bengal
3: Rotoscope as impression: Airplane, Pakistan

What is Rotoscoping?

'Rotoscoping' is the process of frame-by-frame tracing of recorded movements of actual humans or events. It involves drawing and painting on and manipulating video or photo sequences to produce animated frames.

This can be done using natural media on tracing paper or cinema film or digitally in any professional 2D animation software.

Rotoscoping is not an easy option to avoid drawing freehand. Producing dramatic animation requires in-depth understanding of keyframing and movement to select the frames, and good drawing/painting skills to select and reproduce elements on each frame. Drawing mechanically on top of photographs and video produces robotic and uninteresting animation - unless that is the effect required.

- rotoscoping limits possibilities for creating imagined worlds and narrative
- real actors and objects do not have line, so tracing often results in lines being too prominent and sharp, too flaccid or too stiff.

But it is possible to produce very beautiful work this way that also plays on distinctions between fantasy and reality. With good drawing skills and an understanding of 'boil', keyframes and dramatic abstraction, different degrees of replication and fidelity of line and/or shape can original produce a range of effects from mechanical to chaotic.

History of rotoscoping

Rotoscoping was developed in 1915 by animator Max Fleisher who used this technique as a way to create a seemingly more 'realistic' (or photorealistic) style of movement. Disney and other studios used this technique as one way of enhancing 'realism' in animation through the mimicry of live action.

The first software to do digital interpolated rotoscoping, 'Rotoshop Software', was developed by computer scientist Bob Sabiston in the 90's which he used to make his film " Snack and Drink ". Subsequently this software was used by director Richard Linklater for the production of his feature films Waking Life (2001) and Scanner Darkly (2006).

Rotoscoping techniques

Digital rotoscoping: Filmed or live media are used as a reference point for the creation of digital animated movement: motion capture, interpolated rotoscoping, mattes and frame by frame rotoscoping.

Motion capture: Uses live actors and the signals of their movement is interpreted by a computer.

Mattes/Masks/Stencils: Similar to motion capture but uses two dimensional sources to create a silhouette (called a matte) that can be used to extract that object's shape from a scene for use on a different background. This extraction is often aided by green screen technology, motion-tracking and/or digital onion-skinning. Then images are composited in layers these in much the same way as a stencil or cut out shape would work in analogue collage/layering. Digital rotoscoping plays a large role in the production of visual effects and animation.

Interpolated Rotoscoping: the digital equivalent to the pose-to-pose approach. The animator sets a particular style, line weight and colour. They then link key drawings to anchor points in the source footage. The computer then 'interpolates' all the in-between movements according to the action on screen.

Digital Frame By Frame Rotoscoping does the in-betweens by hand - either in physical or digital media. Each frame of the video footage is drawn or painted over, one by one. Done digitally the technique requires import of the source video, but can be done in most professional animation programmes. In physical media every source frame is printed out and manipulated before being rescanned and played in sequential order.

Zemni Examples

Mary's Cow: Rotoscoping as reference for line animation

Pig Lament, India: Rotoscoping as line and shape animation

!! To be done. The airplane, Pakistan: Rotoscoping as video effect.

Contemporary Inspiration

Jonathon Hodgson here uses video as references for very expressive line drawings.

Tommy Pallotta, Snack and Drink (1999)

Gianluigi Toccafondo mixes rotoscoped video footage with very expressive painted shapes and background.

Elizabeth Hobbes, Finding My Way (2014)

Zemni Rotoscope Experiments

Rotoscoping for reference: Experiment 1, The Cow, Uganda

7 Woman gets a cow

Woman Walking with Cow 3 with Stop Start animation. TVPaint

Woman Walking with Cow 4 Red Eyes
TVPaint. Refining the Stop Start animation with the cow running off the screen.

Cow Walk Cycle 3D animation video source from You Tube.

Cow Rotoscope 2 keyframes only TVpaint

Woman Walking with Cow 1 The different image planes were layered and used motion tween to move them at different rates across the screen TVPaint

Cow Walk Cycle 1 Rotoscope overlay with notes

Cow Walk Cycle 3 in-betweens

Woman Walking with Cow 2 Walk cycle overlaid on rotoscope with pose marks

Rotoscoping as animation: Experiment 2: Pig Fight, India

Rotoscope Pig Fight

Rotoscoping over an edited version of the Kadiri pig fight video in TVPaint. These are not so successful and not as dynamic as I would like them to be.

The line drawing would be better as a gesture drawing from live video. The coloured version would be more interesting painting into that digitally or on acetate using printouts from the line animation as underguide.

Pig fight 1: Line rotoscope of edited version of pig fight video. TVPaint. This would be more dynamic as a gesture drawing from live video.

Pig fight 2: Coloured version of line rotoscope. TVPaint. This would be more dramatic painting into the gesture line digitally or on acetate using printouts from the line animation as underguide.

Pig Fight Rotoscope 10 watercolour grunge 2 original colour

3: Rotoscoping as animation: Domestic Violence, Pakistan

Key Issues and Conclusions

https://viscom4dev.zemniimages.info/richard-linklater

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Rotoscoping Overview HistoryTechniques Contemporary Inspiration 1: Rotoscope as Reference: Mary's Story, Uganda: Cow Walk2: Rotoscope as line animation and Effects: Pig Tales, West Bengal3: Rotoscope as impression: Airplane, Pakistan What is Rotoscoping? 'Rotoscoping' is the process of frame-by-frame tracing of recorded movements of actual humans or events.

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Related technical post: Stop Motion Puppet animation

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Related technical post: Stop Motion Puppet animation

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Cutout animation is a form of stop-motion animation using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or photographs. The cut outs are used as puppets for stop motion. Cut-out animation puppets can be made with figures that have joints made with a rivet or pin or, when simulated on a computer, an anchor. These connections act as mechanical linkage, which have the effect of a specific, fixed motion.

The technique of most cut-out animation is comparable to that of shadow play, but with stop motion replacing the manual or mechanical manipulation of flat puppets. Flat, jointed puppets have been in use in shadow plays for many centuries, such as in the Indonesian wayang tradition and in the "ombres chinoises" that were especially popular in France in the 18th and 19th century. The subgenre of silhouette animation is more closely related to these shadow shows and to the silhouette cutting art that has been popular in Europe especially in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Cut-out techniques were relatively often used in animated films until cel animation became the standard method (at least in the United States). Before 1934, Japanese animation mostly used cut-out techniques rather than cel animation, because celluloid was too expensive.

While sometimes used as a relatively simple and cheap animation technique in children's programs (for instance in Ivor the Engine), cut-out animation has also often been used as a highly artistic medium that distinguishes itself more clearly from hand-drawn animation. Today, cut-out-style animation is frequently produced using computers, with scanned images or vector graphics taking the place of physically cut materials.

Of most relevance to my work here are:

- puppets manipulation of cut-out photographs, drawings and other flat materials.

- manipulation of drawings and paintings in natural media like charcoal and scraperboard to produce expressive lines

For other types of stop motion see my research and own work in:

My experiments January 2021

Animatic with digital manipulation of photograph cut-outs in Procreate on iPad. To be developed as Stop Motion photo-collage in Stop Motion Studio with final composite in After Effects.

Feeding the pigs sequence. Started with digital manipulation of photograph in Rough Animator on iPad. The version here was produced by drawing and watercolour painting from video, then photographing the puppets and manipulating in Procreate on the iPad. With final toning and tinting in After Effects. To be redone with smoother movement as cut-outs of the sketches and drawings and multiplane manipulation in After Effects.

Silhouette experiments for Mary's Story, Uganda and/or Pakistan 'The Airplane' are also envisaged.

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Cutout animation is a form of stop-motion animation using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or photographs. The cut outs are used as puppets for stop motion. Cut-out animation puppets can be made with figures that have joints made with a rivet or pin or, when simulated on a computer, an anchor.

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Pig Fight Effects 7: Watercolour Grunge neutral

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Pig Fight Effects 7: Watercolour Grunge neutral

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Pig Fight Effects 6: Watercolour Grunge colour

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Pig Fight Effects 6: Watercolour Grunge colour

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Pig Fight Drawn rotoscope animation using Creative FX templates

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Using CreativeFX templates in After Effects

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Animation Evolution: Supporting experiments and storyboard development: detailed blog post

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Animation Evolution: Supporting experiments and storyboard development: detailed blog post

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NOTE: this blog post has more detail of animation experiments to March 2021.

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'Poverty is no picnic': drawings, photos, sketches and video animated using 2D animation, cut-out puppet Stop Motion and rotoscoping techniques in Rough Animator, Procreate and/or TVPaint composited as a narrative in Adobe After Effects/Creative Effects and Premiere. Draft Animatic September 2021.

Pig Tales Overview

'Poverty is no picnic' : concept

The narrative contrasts a rather romantic ideal of tribal Santhal life, with the realities of looking after livestock and poverty.

Santhal women work in the fields, forest and with livestock. Lives of 'tribals' are very much romanticised by upper caste Bengali culture - partly because Santhal communities are seen as a much freer/separate place for Bengali men to drink and mix/sleep with women. Tribal communities in Bengal and neighbouring Bihar are also very politicised by left wing movements on wages and communal rights to the forest.

But for the women themselves, issues of poverty, lack of access to education and income and sexual exploitation are key issues. So the stories they told about goats and pigs fighting are often for them life and death issues affecting food security and independence. My translations aim to contrast this romanticism (evident also in my own photos) with the reality of loans for 'exotic' foreign goats and pigs that cost a lot to house, buy and feed, that get diseases, fight and die because of lack of veterinary services.

The drawings, photos and video are from a participatory business planning workshop for a US-based INGO giving grants for livestock development to very poor women in disadvantaged communities. The local NGO had had difficulties communicating with the women because staff do not speak Santhali, except for some volunteers from the community. The power relations were very evident from the body language and interactions during the workshop.

Part of my aim in the animation is on the one hand to showcase the raw artistic power of some of the drawings by women who never held a pen before, as well as the contrast between romantic views of outsiders and womens' dreams for use of the grants - that they have costed - and the realities of vulnerability and food insecurity, even with grants, in an area with very few services and that has been neglected by government.

Pig Tales: Experimental Vignettes

'Romantic visions'

Goat Idyl/Goats with Attitude. Cartoon-style narratives animating women's coloured line drawings with occasional goat/rural sound effects to add. Lighthearted/ colourful inspired by Gottfried Mentor's allegorical sheep and goat CGI animation.
(Jan 2021 draft iPad Rough Animator.)

Pig Mother.
Santhal women obviously like the nurturing 'maternal' role of caring for livestock - contrast with men's commercial role in on-line training. Romantic Stop Motion puppet cut-out from watercolour sketch from photos. Inspired by Nuri Yorstein. (Jan 2021 draft iPad Procreate. )

Pig Fight

Clash of Titans
Clashing shape animation makes the rotoscope more 'real' and dramatic.
Inspired by Peter Millard colours.
(Jan 2021 draft TVPaint animated line and shape rotoscope with After Effects Creative Effects added.

Pig Lament

Pig Lament 2: Watercolour Grunge. Inspired by Peter Millard colours.
(Jan 2021 draft TVPaint animated line and shape rotoscope with After Effects Creative Effects added.

Assessment of animatic so far

These drawings were the most expressive in terms of line styles. I started with these as my first animations as they were very simple and relatively easy to animate on iPad. Selected also because of photos and video for rotoscoping and evocative sound track.

Natural media and cut out stop motion. Cut out stop motion effects make it possible to use drawings and photographs. And they can seem more 'real' than drawn animation.

Rotoscoping is potentially a very effective means of animation is used well, with good drawing skills and an understanding of keyframes and dramatic abstraction. But it is not easy - different degrees of replication and fidelity of line to the original produce very different effects from mechanical to chaotic. Also questions of when and how to use colour and shape, and how this relates to line.

Procreate - TVPaint - Premiere or After Effects (smoother puppet animation with tweening?)

Key questions for further development
Narrative structure

single image vignettes or sequential narrative? One style or contrasting styles for each scene?

Natural media stop motion

Getting more fluid in-betweens? software

Need to look at camera moves and perspective

Rotoscoping: communicating narrative and emotion

How to achieve variation in amount of 'boil'

Use of different types of line

Use of colour and shape

Narrative structure

Translation

Creativity

Technique

Portfolio evolution

Jamghoria Sevabrata: Community Drawings

For these experimental animations I decided to focus on the distinctive use of line by tribal Santhal women in West Bengal who had never held a pen before. Although the community drawings from ANANDI were potentially more interesting in terms of the views of empowerment, they would take much longer than the time frame of this module to animate well - something planned for future. West Bengal, and Santhali culture, was part of the research for my PhD and so I felt more comfortable trying to 'translate'. I also had some photos, video and music I could use.

Unlike caste Hindu or Muslim women, they do not have such a strong tradition of handicrafts that give them an immediate facility for drawing. Like older women in ANANDI, they tended to use very abstracted stick figures but add symbolic elements and gestures. Some of the drawings were the most expressive drawings I have seen, in many ways more artistically interesting than the more figurative drawings of people with more education or the line drawings I have from Africa.

In addition to the drawings I also had photographs and some video footage (badly shot while I was facilitation or in a hurry in bad lighting).

Sketchbook

Pig Tales_Sketchlog page

Romantic Visions 1: Goat Idyll

My first translations were very early animation experiments with line on my iPad, for a very simple playful effect, inspired by sheep 3D animations by Mathias Klein from FilmBilder.

Inspiration: Gottfried Mentor, comic social parody

Oh Sheep: FilmBilder Directed by Gottfried Mentor with animation by Matthias Klein
https://youtu.be/sY5MmhLQBng
A tragi-comic political parody of two shepherds who do everything they can to distinguish and keep their two flocks of sheep apart. Every time the sheep manage to meet and mingle. When finally the shepherds think they have found the solution through branding, the sheep see themselves as different and fight to the death.

An amusing tale about youth rebelling and teaching old goats how to survive in a new world.

The lamb's parents are shocked, because their little lamb doesn't sound like the other sheep: It's making „moo" instead of „baa".

I used these line drawings to do a series of animations in Rough animator on my iPad, exploring effects of frame rate, duplicating and mirroring layers and creating quick story-lines.

Goat idyll 5: Goats with attitude. Rough animator. I started to make a story of flirting goats. Colouring the background. Duplicating the layers again but flipping vertically and altering opacity to create reflections. I like the general feel and pastel-type colours. I could develop this much further into a series of comic encounters - drawing more inspiration from the different Mathias animations.

Rural Idyll 1: Goat goes for a walk. 6FPS gives strobing. But for this animation I like the awkward, tentative child-like effect.

Goat idyll 3. Two goats passing. Rough animator doodle. Duplicate and flip layer than offset movement to create interaction between two goats. 24FPS focuses on the passing.

Goat idyll 2. When two goats meet. Rough animator doodle. Duplicate and flip layer than offset movement to create interaction between two goats. 12FPS. Slower frame focuses on the meeting.

Goat idyll 4: If goats could fly. Rough animator: Quick animated doodle replicating the style of the community line drawing and using cheap sketchbook background. Duplicates and mirrors the same goat, then adjusts the movement of one goat to make it jump over the other one. 12FPS.

Romantic Visions 2: Pig Mother

This second set of experimental animations aims to project a dreamy, romantic vision of happy caring women 'mothering pigs'. Very unlike the harsh, cold commercial realities of sterile concrete pig pens and sending pigs to slaughter.

I take a painterly approach, using texture, colour and shape as well as line.

Inspired by a mix of Japanese hand-painted watercolour animation, monochrome puppet stop motion of Nuri Yorstein, animated watercolour (based on rotoscope?) of Ryan Larkin and integration of the very varied whimsical 2D, rotoscoped and cut-out styles of Gasparovic's Satiemania.

clearly shows the mix of line styles for different moods. Colouring strategies from flat for characters to watercolour. And very sketchy fluid animation for dramatic flight and high emotion.

Ryan Larkin 'Walking' 1968. Uses a variety of techniques-line drawing, colour wash, etc.-to catch and reproduce the motion of people afoot.

'Tale of Tales' by Yuri Norstein uses Stop Motion puppet animation, drawn by his wife and very smoothly animated on a multiplane frame to produce a really evocative fairy-tale look about cycles of life.

"Satiemania' by Zdenkó Gasparovich 1978. The subject matter is somewhat inappropriate. But I am very inspired by the mix of a wide diversity of line and colour styles and mix of handrawn, rotoscoped and cutout images for different emotions and effects.

iPad photo to Procreate to Rough Animator

I start by manipulating one of photographs on my iPad.

I started with full colour overlay in Procreate, replicating the colours from the photograph. Then I took this into Rough Animator for a line, and then coloured crayon version. Much finer

iPad video to sketch to Procreate

I then used the video to get more realistic keyframes that I printed out as jpgs.

From these I made a series of sketches. Taking these into Procreate I cut out and recoloured the drawings, overlaying and compositing them into a picture.

I then manipulated these to make a short animation. The second version has more perspective and less saturation in the background to give more depth. This is still too jerky and needs more in-betweening.

But I think the style is quite effective and many possibilities for further development as a longer and somewhat smoother animation - depending on whether I am trying to copy Stop Motion or handdrawn watercolour. Puppet animation would be more professional using Photoshop to create the puppets, then using puppet animation in After Effects.

Pig Mother watercolour 4. Monochrome in the style of Nuri Yorstein, could potentially create a more romantic and distanced effect. Pig Mother1 adjusted using curves and pentatone filters in After Effects to blend the woman, pigs and background more as a cohesive image.. I think this approach has a lot of potential to take further. But the original file from iPad needs to be cleaned up with better tonal balance between the woman's face and the white pig. It would also be more interesting as a multiplane camera animation.

Realities: Pig Fight

Inspiration: aggressive 'boil'

This third animation 'Pig Lament' has a lot of creative potential - the furious purple pen drawing of pigs was what first attracted me to drawings from this workshop as a source for translation.

I wanted to animate the pig fight drawing, rotoscoping a real pig fight video clip, using aggressive line like the Santhal drawing. Drawing also some ideas about violence and final death scene from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. Adding either pig fight sounds and/or the haunting song.

This could either be a simple 'boiling line drawing' like Jonathon Hodgson's 'Dogs, or a bold colour animation like those of Peter Millard. Or I could use energetic coloured strokes like 'Layman, Shamam, Daydreaming'. This last would probably be best done in natural media painting onto acetate over printouts of the rotoscope.

In order to get a feel of the fight and possible keyframes, I selected video keyframes edited in Premiere. Then did some quick pencil gesture drawings from printouts. These were very useful, but it would be better next time to do these while watching the video, not just from photos.

'Dogs' from Jonathon Hodgson: partly rotoscoped animation in which all elements are constantly in motion but at different paces of boil to show different moods - energy, waiting and anticipation. Sometimes the colour shapes pulsate and shift more than the lines, sometimes figures, shapes and lines all move energetically and dissolve into chaos.

Princess Mononoke is a much more violent and dynamic animation, with very dramatic scenes of a wild boar (see right). The dead skeleton is something I could try to add as a ghost image at then end. But this might be too cliche.
Mononoke_screenshots

Rotoscope 'Kadiri Pig Fight' video and Creative Effects

Rotoscoping over an edited version of the Kadiri pig fight video in TVPaint. These are not so successful and not as dynamic as I would like them to be.

The line drawing would be better as a gesture drawing from live video. The coloured version would be more interesting painting into that digitally or on acetate using printouts from the line animation as underguide.

Developing Narrative

Narrative Format 1, song thread: Pig Lament

The song in the video I find really haunting. Though I have no idea what it means - maybe an interesting point about translation.

But I think that adding a rotoscope of the singer for at least part of any narrative would add a degree of realism. I like the way the line drawing in the version in the right dissolves because I accidentally omitted some lines towards the end. I am planning to experiment a lot more with different rotoscope effects like the variations in Jonathon Hodgson's animation.

I like the way the line drawing in the version in the right dissolves because I accidentally omitted some lines towards the end. I am planning to experiment a lot more with different rotoscope effects like the variations in Jonathon Hodgson's animation.

Animatic 1: Pig Lament

First attempt to composite as a narrative with sound. I need to redo the rotoscopes and rethink this - colours, line, style and technique. I was aiming for something much more expressive and emotive.

Adding Creative Effects goes some way towards this. I particularly like the charcoal version and the watercolour grunge version. But I need to experiment more with settings. And possibly layer with different elements eg singer and pigs in different but complementary styles to signify different roles in the video.

I could also experiment more with framing, again separating different layers.

Pig Lament 3 Watercolour Grunge natural colours

Pig Lament 4: Textile effect. Links the idea of Indian women's handicrafts as romanticisation and beautification by outsiders.

Pig Lament 5: Watercolour Grunge coloured. I like the angry flaming red colour effect on the pigs. But need to work out how to control the effect more. Inspired by Peter Millard colours. (Jan 2021 draft TVPaint animated line and shape rotoscope with After Effects Creative Effects added.

Format 2: Documentary envelope, Pig Tales

Could 'envelope' the animation between short 'reality context' introduction and ending using some video footage of women drawing and the workshop process, with examples of drawings.

This first version attempts to put the different styles together. But this does not flow. This was the version sent to my tutor i Assignment 5.

This first revised version just uses the goat clips with the song, As the most faithful rendering of some of the community line drawings. This could be further developed as a humorous narrative.

This final version focuses just on the pigs. Although it brings in more 'creative elements' and documentary from other sources, it reflects the community narrative and angry feel of the pig drawing better.

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'Poverty is no picnic' : concept The narrative contrasts a rather romantic ideal of tribal Santhal life, with the realities of looking after livestock and poverty. Santhal women work in the fields, forest and with livestock.

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Pencil and water colour sketches based on photographs and stills.
Aiming for a more painterly expressive style that communicated the idea of dreams and visions of what the women wanted.
For Stop Motion animation in Procreate on my iPad.

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Pencil sketches from stills of found You Tube video analysing movement as the basis for more expressive rotoscope animation.

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This third animation ‘Pig Fight’ has a lot of creative potential – the furious purple pen drawing of pigs was what first attracted me to drawings from this workshop as a source for translation.

I wanted to animate the pig fight drawing, rotoscoping a real pig fight video clip, using aggressive line like the Santhal drawing. Drawing also some ideas about violence and final death scene from Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. Adding either pig fight sounds and/or the haunting song.

This could either be a simple ‘boiling line drawing’ like Jonathon Hodgson’s ‘Dogs, or a bold colour animation like those of Peter Millard. Or I could use energetic coloured strokes like ‘Layman, Shamam, Daydreaming’. This last would probably be best done in natural media painting onto acetate over printouts of the rotoscope.

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This second set of experimental animations aims to project a dreamy, romantic vision of happy caring women ‘mothering pigs’. Very unlike the harsh, cold commercial realities of sterile concrete pig pens and sending pigs to slaughter.

I take a painterly approach, using texture, colour and shape as well as line.

Inspired by a mix of Japanese hand-painted watercolour animation, monochrome puppet stop motion of Nuri Yorstein, animated watercolour (based on rotoscope?) of Ryan Larkin and integration of the very varied whimsical 2D, rotoscoped and cut-out styles of Gasparovic’s Satiemania.

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My first translations were very early animation experiments with line on my iPad, for a very simple playful effect, inspired by sheep 3D animations by Mathias Klein from FilmBilder.

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Portfolio Animation 3: 'Pig Tales', India

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Portfolio Animation 3: 'Pig Tales', India

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Princess Mononoke is a much more violent and dynamic animation, with very dramatic scenes of a wild boar (see right). The dead skeleton is something I could try to add as a ghost image at then end. But this might be too cliche.

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Princess Mononoke Revealed: The Real Mythology & History Explained

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Dogs' from Jonathon Hodgson: partly rotoscoped animation in which all elements are constantly in motion but at different paces of boil to show different moods - energy, waiting and anticipation. Sometimes the colour shapes pulsate and shift more than the lines, sometimes figures, shapes and lines all move energetically and dissolve into chaos.

Link to blog post of videos by Jonathon Hodgson:

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A man takes his dog for a walk in the park where they encounter other dogs and their owners. The film explores the relationship between a man and his dog highlighting their contrasting approaches to life.

Original Format: 16mm
Year of production: 1981
Duration: 6mins 39secs

KEY CREDITS:
Director: Jonathan Hodgson
Producer: Jonathan Hodgson
Sound: Jonathan Hodgson
Production Company: Liverpool Polytechnic

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“Satiemania’ by Zdenkó Gasparovich 1978. The subject matter is somewhat inappropriate. But I am very inspired by the mix of a wide diversity of line and colour styles and mix of handrawn, rotoscoped and cutout images for different emotions and effects.

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"SATIEMANIA" by Zdenkó Gasparovich 1978 (FULL)

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‘Tale of Tales’ by Yuri Norstein uses Stop Motion puppet animation, drawn by his wife and very smoothly animated on a multiplane frame to produce a really evocative fairy-tale look about cycles of life.

Link to Blog post about Yuri Norstein

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Tale of Tales by Yuriy Norstein (ENGLISH SUBTITLES)

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The Tale of Princess Kaguya: Isao Takahata

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The Tale of Princess Kaguya: Isao Takahata

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One of my main inspirations were the expressive and varied watercolour animation styles in this video. But achieving this degree of visual magic requires a very high level of animation skill - and a large studio of animators.

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The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya - Official Trailer

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Indian development animations

Community versus External Voices?
Overview

I selected these drawings from participatory workshops in India 2003-2006 because they show the diversity of drawing styles. In the case of West Bengal and Gujarat I also had extensive background knowledge of the context from my own academic or participatory research.

The distinctive use of line by tribal women in West Bengal and Gujarat who had never held a pen before. Tribal women also work in the fields, forest and with livestock. They do not have such a strong tradition of handicrafts (unlike Pakistan for example) that give them an immediate facility for drawing. Particularly in the case of older women, they tend to use very abstracted stick figures but add symbolic elements and gestures. Certainly to a Western eye (eg my own) fascinated by the expressiveness of cave drawings and petroglyphs these abstracted drawings are in many ways more artistically interesting than the more figurative drawings of people with more education. I had earlier done short Flash videos of the workshops showing the context, drawing process and interpretation of the drawings.

The drawings from Chennai in South India are done by women and men who have some literacy. These attempt more figurative representation of women an men - hair, clothes and status distinctions. Some indicate very clearly the differences between women and men's perceptions of 'women's empowerment'. Others do not visually distinguish between different forms of empowerment and rely more on verbal/written explanation.

There are many professional Indian animators producing artistically creative animations, often based on traditional handicraft styles or drawn animation. I found them to generally lack the distinctive visual expressiveness/rawness of the community drawings. Moreover, the animations I found on-line all relied heavily on dialogue and/or text in local languages or English.
See post Indian animations on women's empowerment

Animation in English about benefits of women getting loans and training for handicrafts.

This has nice very simple white on black drawing. More arty than detailed concept. By Arcsoft Animation.

Artistic Sand Art on women's empowerment.

Cartoon of apparently random drawings of different aspects of women's position as a card for International Women's Day.

Jamghoria Sevabrata is an NGO in West Bengal - most of the women they work with are tribal Santal who speak little Bengali (at the time when this work was done) and most of the paid staff were Bengali men who did not speak Santali. This livelihood planning workshop - for women to plan how they would use a grant from Trickle Up in US to invest in and increase income from different livestock - using pictorial drawing was the first time they had really communicated. The staff also drew and said they had 'never felt so liberated'.

Most of these women had not held a pen before. I was facilitating 60 women in relays on 20, starting with the first batch for an hour then they taught the next batch and the next batch, with me catching up to take the first batch further to more advanced drawing once everyone was happy. From being very shy and not talking initially, within an hour they were confidently laughing, talking and teaching each other.

It was explained that everyone can draw and that all drawings are just different types of lines (straight, curves, wiggly etc) and circles (round, rectangular, squishy, loopy etc). With a bit of thought anything can be represented that way. The first woman below had quickly worked out a way of drawing lots of different types of goat - plain ones, stripy ones and foreign ones with bigger horns and needing to be tied with a rope on one leg. Others drew pigs of different types. The filled dots and circle lines represent different money to do their income calculations.

This shows that this type of mix of symbolism and figure abstraction comes easily. As can be seen from the video, some of the line drawing is also very expressive - Basquiat-like. That sort of 'attacking the paper' is less common when people try to draw 'artistically'.

Contextual Resources

For Jamghoria Sevabrata I have a range of contextual information: drawings and workshop photographs and video - including footage not used in the 2004 video above. I also had photographs of the landscape and village. Including women feeding pigs and a singer.

I also looked at some Bengali videos on livestock farming on You Tube to see how general the issues raised by the women were. And to see if there was any suitable material for rotoscoping.

As my anthrolopogy PhD was on women and gender inequality in West Bengal, including tribal women, I also have some understanding of power relations and economic issues. I also speak quite fluent Bengali to understand contextual resources on-line.

!! Insert pdf of discussion of translation issues raised by Mahasweta Devi.

One of the participants feeds her new foreign breed pig while her children and neighbours watch.

Santhali singer. A really beautiful song performed for us just before we left. But unfortunately I do not have translation.

On-line resources: Goat and pig farming issues

Main point is that goat raising is potentially very profitable with an expanding market. But it needs a lot of investment, medicines, vets etc. Or there are serious issues with disease. Although this can be done gradually, it is more risky. Particularly without training, credit and where vet services are not available.

Goat farming in Bengali (I understand it, but need to make detailed notes.) Main point is that goat raising is potentially very profitable with an expanding market. But it needs a lot of investment, medicines, vets etc. Or there are serious issues with disease.

Goat farming in Bengali (I understand it, but need to make detailed notes.) Advantages and disadvantages of different breeds.

Pig farming in Bengali (I understand it, but need to make detailed notes.) How to start: breeds, feed, disease, buildings.

On-Line resources: Pig Fight

ANANDI (Area Networking for Development Initiatives) is a women's empowerment organisation working with women in tribal, muslim and scheduled caste communities of Gujarat in Eastern India. These drawings were made as part of a 2003 participatory review on empowerment impact of their organisation, focusing particularly on response to the 2001 earthquake that devastated the area.

The drawings in biro on paper were part of an Empowerment Diamond exercise. As can be seen from the video, many of the women had never drawn before. Many are very expressive. Some can be more or less understood by an outsider eg goats (but what type?) a woman with a car (does she own it? drive it? woman carrying a bundle on her head (but is it a profitable bundle? is she carrying it for someone else?) etc. Other drawings are better understood by people who know more about the context (types of crops). Others are only understood by people in the process who are accustomed to common ways in which people draw things like rectangles for land. Others are symbolic and innovative eg use of a fan? for development.

They look quite 'scruffy' just doodles on very cheap paper. It would be interesting to see if they would be treated better if they were cut and framed as 'works of art' like Tracy Emin drawings with more Basquiat-style text.

They really need annotation to understand the full richness of expression. For example why is a stick woman with a red stomach 'healthy', what is the thinking behind that.

These drawings were done as part of an international gender training for micro-finance programmes, hosted by Hand in Hand in Chennai, South India. Hand in Hand worked with men and women, most of whom had some education, some were quite educated. They were not nearly so poor as the tribal women in JS or ANANDI above. Hand in Hand had not focused on women's empowerment, and the aim of the exercise was to get some community indicators of women's empowerment and happy families and see what differences there might be between women and men. The women had a strong handicraft tradition and so could draw quite easily.

The women's concepts when they explained them were clear - around owning property, being able to go where they wanted, having a sense of identity and respect. The drawings however were not clear without the explanatory text. There was some difference in drawing style between powerful (confident marker line) and powerless (wiggly pencil) but it is not clear whether this was intentional or just a difference between media and group. There is also some differentiation in clothing and appearance, but on the whole all the figure drawings look quite similar.

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Indian development animations I selected these drawings from participatory workshops in India 2003-2006 because they show the diversity of drawing styles. In the case of West Bengal and Gujarat I also had extensive background knowledge of the context from my own academic or participatory research.

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Link to Gottfried Mentor blog post

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The lamb's parents are shocked, because their little lamb doesn't sound like the other sheep: It's making „moo" instead of „baa".

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An amusing tale about youth rebelling and teaching old goats how to survive in a new world.

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A tragi-comic political parody of two shepherds who do everything they can to distinguish and keep their two flocks of sheep apart. Every time the sheep manage to meet and mingle. When finally the shepherds think they have found the solution through branding, the sheep see themselves as different and fight to the death.