Computer animation-- the marriage of digital technology and human creativity-- has lived through rocky periods of adjustment.
Richard Feynman wrote that “The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad.” This power often led to imbalances and mismatches in early computer animation. For example, it created distracting levels of detail and insanely sharp focus.
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Even worse, the intoxicating new tool often became a substitute for imagination. Computers have been put to use simulating the natural world, often to questionable effect. They capsized the proportion, balance, harmony that are crucial to good art. Plots have warped and distorted around the digital contribution.
But animators have become better and better at understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the digital medium, using it to invent new worlds, give new faces to fantasy, stretch the use of color, combine images with movement, all in integrated ways.
I was dazzled by the way these elements joined together in Strange World. Imaginative creatures, plants, and other life forms continued to cascade forward throughout the movie, as did geologic formations and meteorological conditions. There is no shortage of creativity in Strange World.
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This is an artistic accomplishment that could never have been achieved with live action or hand drawn animation or any other previously known medium. It was a joy to see a movie where human creativity was able to keep up with, make excellent use of, and blend seamlessly with, digital technology.
25 comments:
Digital tools definitely make some aspects of creation easier. For films, games, comics, and any other digitally distributed medium it is especially necessary now. Focused creativity, imagination, and especially originality, remain as elusive and hard-won as ever. Maybe originality is even more difficult now given that digital tools are like funnels.
Worth noting in these images the clear Roger Dean influence. (Who, one might say, is the living Maxfield Parrish of Key Neilsens)
Tableau in Green with Violet.
Pink and Blue curves and hovering shapes
Leaning Red and Rusty with sky holes
Globularity with Cyan and Gold
Curvy structures
Basic Mushroom Mountain with Sky Holes-in-the-roots Concept
Kev Ferrara-- An excellent point. Your examples are convincing and right on target.
I confess that I cut short my education about Roger Dean after reviewing a monograph of his work several years ago. I know he has a following, and he seems to have done some interesting things, but I found his colors to be a little cheesy and artificial, and his forms seemed flat and unconvincing in that Rowena kind of way. I gather from your examples that you've paid closer attention to Dean's work than I, and that you've reached a different conclusion. Is there anything you'd like to share about your reaction to his work?
Roger Dean had a vision for his artistic dream-world, pursued it with diligence and integrity, and made it happen. It is impressive that it became recognizable worldwide without (in my opinion) it being kitsch.
I enjoyed his work as a teen. Then became disenchanted with slick and smooth rendering (pretty much anything done with an airbrush).
Perusing his pieces today, it now feels handmade and gritty to me when compared to most professional photoshop work.
His forms are interesting to discuss. For contrast, study Maynard Dixon’s geometrics , where it is clear there was homework done from direct observation. Dixon was abstracting from the world.
With Dean, it is clear he thought more like a manufacturing designer. Rather than abstract from the world, he came up with a schematic graphic design first, and then would retrofit a reality into it. There’s no word for this process, which entails re-imagining a graphic design (pure visual whimsy) as an actual abstraction (a suggestive summary of something real). And then figuring out what that abstraction could be of, how it could be identified concretely, and then going forward with that realization.
It is something like prototyping.
Awesome.
Where do you guys think Simon Stålenhag work fits into this conversation.
It seems to me that Dean, Stalenhag and this film take different positions on the same continuum: if you’re going to make up a world from scratch, how many rules can you break, how many new rules can you invent, without making the new world less effective?
Mort Drucker used to say that he made his backgrounds more realistic and recognizable because it gave him a longer leash to play games with the faces and expressive bodies. Stalenhag has certainly taken that to an extreme, placing one alien object in an otherwise perfectly ordinary landscape. He uses that same approach to good dramatic effect again and again.
And video game artists say that they might invent alien worlds with alien creatures, but they still try to give the creatures a gait and limbs that make sense to the viewer. Strange World tries to make the same compromise. It’s distant shapes have muted colors, for example, because that’s how we’d perceive them in a planet with atmosphere.
On the other hand, I don’t care for Steven Spielberg’s aliens in E.T. Or Close Encounters because they have big heads off center on scrawny necks that look like they would snap on a planet with gravity. I have the same problem with a number of Arthur Rackham’s elves and other creatures.
For me, Dean sometimes fall into the same category. He ignores gravity and the laws of distant colors and other rules of physics that might make his invented worlds more believable. When Frazetta paints an imaginary sea monster jumping out of the water, he makes it more powerful by using perspective and the known laws of fluids. When Dean paints an imaginary sea monster jumping out of the water, he makes up his own laws and the painting suffers.
Why is a naturalistic physics of gravity sacrosanct in art, but colors can look like a pastel candyland explosion?
As far as I can tell – and this principle can be found in many iterations in all the arts, in many books on theory - what matters at core is unity. Consistency is essential.
Which is to say, whatever rules one sets up from the start, those rules must obtain throughout. The Genre is a kind of rule, the tone, the conventions, the conceits, the palette, the style, the medium, the pattern of accident or coincidence, etc. And the wildness or sobriety of the rules have no impact on their legitimacy.
If pigs can fly in your art, they should fly throughout. If Dracula needs to be invited in to do his evil in the first act, he can’t just waltz over thresholds unbidden in the third act. If a form of radiation causes super-powers in one character, it shouldn’t cause cancer in another.
In fact, the physics of the same event changes according to tone and genre. In a drama, Grandfather gets up from breakfast, slips on the floor and ends up in the hospital with a broken hip. In slapstick when he slips he flies out the window. In a crime movie, when he slips he dies from a heart attack because his meal was secretly poisoned.
Roger Dean tried to sue James Cameron over similarities between the film Avatar (2009) and his own work. He was unsuccessful, although I think the similarities are obvious.
Re this film; I'm sure Roger Dean was on the art director's mood board, but I don't think the finished landscapes are enough like his work to claim plagiarism.
Kev Ferrara-- I agree with you that consistency is the primary governing rule, but in that sense adhering to a "naturalistic physics" can help to keep artists honest. If Dean wants to paint a sea monster coming out of the water but the water doesn't act the way we'd expect, or if he wants to paint a creature in a dark environment but the colors of the creature seem bright and out of context... well, it can be done but it's just more heavy lifting for the painting.
Compare:
https://www.rogerdean.com/product/asia-dragon-2/ with https://www.frazettagirls.com/products/carson-of-venus-print?_pos=8&_sid=eec618555&_ss=r
Or compare:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/200058408422947506/ with https://www.frazettagirls.com/products/sea-monster-print?_pos=3&_sid=eec618555&_ss=r
If an artist is going to make things harder for the viewer, and give the viewer inconsistencies to overcome, you'd better have something to gain from it.
Laurence John-- I concur that there's nothing here that rises to the level of plagiarism. Of course, the US Supreme Court has just undertaken to "clarify" the law of copyright in connection with Andy Warhol's use of someone else's photographs. Who knows what kind of mischief they will do?
> "Computer animation-- the marriage of digital technology and human creativity-- has lived through rocky periods of adjustment. "
Although the quality of computer animation has improved a little, I don't think that's the main driver. If we compare the pre-production Other Worlds artwork to the final product, we can still see that a lot was lost in translation. The handful of pieces from Wu's team are better than what ended up in the film. The original concept art is just so good now that some of the magic is retained in the final product.
If the films get better, it's the art dev. I've noticed that in the past ten years, entertainment artists have vastly improved. I'm not sure what change exactly, but it's night and day. If you compare the portfolios that would get you hired at major animation and game studios 10 to 15 years ago with those today, it's astonishing how much better folks have gotten. Not just in terms of their mastery of the art form, but also their taste has become much more refined.
Still, some of the art directors can barely draw or paint at all. I recently interviewed with a lead Art Director for an Activision game, and it was hard to take seriously because he could barely draw! But Larry Wu can paint, and it's great he was given the chance to make this movie.
Roger Dean tried to sue James Cameron over similarities between the film Avatar (2009) and his own work. He was unsuccessful, although I think the similarities are obvious.
Re this film; I'm sure Roger Dean was on the art director's mood board, but I don't think the finished landscapes are enough like his work to claim plagiarism.
I think there is enough obvious similarity to make the claim that Roger Dean was the 'originator' of these concepts.
Apropos of almost nothing: I was at Berni Wrightson's Halloween party in the 90s when the production team of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (1994, DeNiro, Branagh) stopped by. They lavished Berni with praise, told him they were all hugely influenced by him, not just for the film (they said they had his books on set), but also for their artistic selves. They merrily had him sign books, prints and posters, took photos with him, etc.
Some time later Berni confided in me how irritated he was with all that when they didn't offer him a dime in compensation and no credit.
If Dean wants to paint a sea monster coming out of the water but the water doesn't act the way we'd expect, or if he wants to paint a creature in a dark environment but the colors of the creature seem bright and out of context...
Again, you are critiquing his work from a naturalistic standpoint. But they are works of design first. The Asia cover is practically a logo, like a Celtic Knot reified as monster fantasy.
On Dean's butterfly dragon; what Dean is doing is somewhere between what Kupka is doing here and what Mucha is doing here.
If that's not your cup of tea, okay. But I do think it holds to its own design rule set as to how it uses naturalism to justify its abstractioning.
Richard-- I haven't seen the pre-production art for Strange World (is it posted somewhere?) but I do recognize the name Larry Wu because at the end of the screening I viewed, I waited patiently through the credits to see who was responsible for this artistic accomplishment. Larry Wu's name stood out and I said to myself, "There's an artist worth watching out for."
Kev Ferrara-- It's a very squishy area, trying to calculate how much influence is sufficient to create a moral obligation to acknowledge credit, a financial obligation to share profits, or a legal obligation to abide by the copyright laws. Unfortunately that squishy area has been made far squishier by the blind acceptance of master thieves such as Koons, Prince and Warhol. If people are going to accept grand larceny on that scale, how could Wrightson ever expect acknowledgement or payment for what the Frankenstein movie did?
Unfortunately that squishy area has been made far squishier by the blind acceptance of master thieves such as Koons, Prince and Warhol. If people are going to accept grand larceny on that scale, how could Wrightson ever expect acknowledgement or payment for what the Frankenstein movie did?
Who exactly 'accepted' Koons, Prince and Warhol?
Not the independent thinkers I know. Not the talented. Not the circumspect.
Most of the people I know who go along with that booshwah want to seem smart and sophisticated. And readily accept what they are told by the correct and 'authoritative' sources; which then become the passcodes for entry into the lower regions of the statusphere.
There is an industry of fraud that weaves through the affluent class that has yet to meet its reckoning. But maybe soon.
Hope everybody had a great thanksgiving.
Kev, I agree that the 'mushroom mountains' look swiped from Dean, however my point is that the entirety of the landscape / environments have too much other non-Dean stuff going on to resemble an entire 'in the style of' Roger Dean landscape swipe.
Which raises the question of at what point an artist can claim ownership of a 'form' forever once it's released into the public realm / vernacular (a 'form' being separable from all of the various unified elements which make up a personal 'style').
For example too many cartoonists and illustrators to name have been inspired by the spindly-gothic forms of Ronald Searle, but very few -I would argue- would constitute a rip off of his style-universe in its entirety.
Kev, I agree that the 'mushroom mountains' look swiped from Dean, however my point is that the entirety of the landscape / environments have too much other non-Dean stuff going on to resemble an entire 'in the style of' Roger Dean landscape swipe. (...) For example too many cartoonists and illustrators to name have been inspired by the spindly-gothic forms of Ronald Searle, but very few -I would argue- would constitute a rip off of his style-universe in its entirety.
If you are building a machine that requires a whole bunch of mechanistic sub-assembly parts each of which is patented, business law requires payment for each. In recognition of each IP being an essential sub-contribution to the whole.
Part of the problem in the arts is that most pilfering goes into inept work. Comic books are notorious for 'swipes' of panels and figures. It wouldn't be worth it now, and it was never worth it to pursue litigation against somebody making 30 bucks a page who stole a panel idea or figure.
To some degree artists, especially the great ones, are defining new symbols for the wider culture's visual lexicon. So one expects a great artist's influence to filter out. Because symbolic meanings about shared experience are public goods.
In a sense, if an artist's personal symbols don't become public property to some degree - where the artist effectively loses control of his own creations - they weren't sufficiently resonant to begin with. Which is a kind of artistic failure.
I could name a hundred artists right off the bat who still have enough purchase on the culture to get name-checked when their influence is recognized. And I would say they get that recognition because good and informed people feel a kind of moral or ethical obligation to publicly give credit where it is due.
Money, one might say, is adult praise. Credit is nice, but true appreciation includes affording an artist a living for his contributions.
Ultimately I think it is an ethics problem...
The great question then - it seems to me - is just how ethics get into a artistic scene or milieu or out to the public. And then, later, how do a set of ethics that allowed for the achievement of a scene become old hat to be ignored. Or how do they get expunged, leaving a scene open for louses and snakes to take over? (Back to my old 'multipolar trap'/race-to-the-bottom of a market with quick and cheap tricks hobby horse.)
It's improving in so far as the incongruities in it are less jarring, but I can't say this looks any good.
There is a very deep response to things created by hand - Works so made feel like they are born out of the same moving spirit as the natural world, even the weaker stuff.
And, as far as I'm concerned, only a nauseous, narcotic feeling from all this cg stuff. It's like an AI designed a halucinogen or something. Same goes for still cg work, opening something like Spectrum is just depressing. It's not ludditism - there's just an animated morbidity built into digital media, feels like a deadening spell to participate in it. Midas-like.
Just another note - the 'digitalisation' of real life film/tape has the same effect. 'Re-mastered' old movies and so on. It just feels something in the medium that transforms things living - or its 'yang' in 'dead' matter such as repros, or shadows or reflections of things living such as analogue photography or film - into something that is not just it's opposite partner that defines it (as death to life, autumn to spring and so on) but an utter negation to which it holds no such relation or partnership.
The human creative work that does go into it seems lost and corrupted inside it to the extent it's subservient
Just wondered if you were familiar with the work of Pascal Blanche which seems to combine many of the themes being discussed here - and thanks for the great blog, always something new to see!
Kev: "Because symbolic meanings about shared experience are public goods"... "In a sense, if an artist's personal symbols don't become public property to some degree - where the artist effectively loses control of his own creations - they weren't sufficiently resonant to begin with"
I agree. So back to the question above: can an artist claim copyright of a form such as Dean's 'mushroom mountains' or Ronald Searle's spindly legs, or does a form pass into the public vernacular and cease to be their's ?
To reiterate: I see 'form' as just one ingredient in the totality of the particular 'style' of any given artist, and I agree that ripping off another artist's entire style is bad (including training an AI to do it, as previously discussed).
Another of my posts was removed. Though I remembered to copy it, there's absolutely nothing in it that is objectionable.
This is getting obnoxious.
Kev, did your previous post that you said was missing (11/25/2022 9:27 AM) return on its own ?
I'm assuming you didn't re-post manually it since it's before the post where you said it had gone missing (11/25/2022 10:43 AM)
Kev, did your previous post that you said was missing
David retrieved that from the blog's spam folder. I'm going to break this post up to see if it is a length issue that is triggering the trashing of posts.
can an artist claim copyright of a form such as Dean's 'mushroom mountains' or Ronald Searle's spindly legs, or does a form pass into the public vernacular and cease to be their's
The differences between proper artistic influence, too much artistic influence, and outright artistic theft are far too subtle for the law to parse.
So we are left dealing with ethics alone. ('Copyright' isn't an ethical term.)
Those with ethics will give credit where it is due. If there is an ethical community in the arts to testify to an artist's merit or original creations, public credit redounds back to the artist in the form of work and renown, and the cycle of renown-->work--->renown begins.
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The grave issue with the punk Modernist revolution, and all its follow on devolutions and their fake aesthetic philosophers, and all the con men hyping and selling visual outrage and basic graphic design work as High Art for use as tax havens for the wealthy... is the destruction of the ethical base for establishing artistic reputations.
Every artist begins by steeping himself in the work of those who have gone before. Influence is inescapable; at first. At last, good artists find their own way, their own forms and style. When that happens there should be an ethical cultural community there to lend support through renown and commissions.
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