Context
In classic fashion, most old 1930′s cartoons have a title screen at the beginning to show the audience who created it, what characters are involved and what the title of the episode is. I took heavy inspiration from the old title cards for “Mickey Mouse”
As you can see I have presented it in a very similar way as to kind of be an Easter egg for fans of the animation style. I feel like they add a kind of nostalgia to the cartoons because they were a feature of many. Another more recent popular example is “Tom and Jerry” which is a very long running kids cartoon and probably one of the last of rubber hose era animation.
One of the things I wanted to do for my FMP was compose an animated 2D character into a live action setting. This would involve filming first and then animating over the top of the live footage. I’m not the first to try this. There are some popular mainstream movies and TV shows that actually have used this technique. For example a very famous movie, especially in the USA, is “Space Jam”. This film was released in 1997 and so its effects with compositing the people into the animated setting wasn’t entirely convincing but it was inventive.
It involved classic animated characters form the Looney Tunes series. The most important thing that I can see from compositing like this is getting the lighting correct. If a character is put into an environment with little light and the character is vibrant and bright it will stand out like a sore thumb and won’t make the world believable for viewers.
Another example of a film that did this is the film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, this film was released in 1988, so before Space Jam. However I think it did it much better and more similar to the effect I want to create with my FMP. This is because rather than a real person entering an entirely animated world, the animated character is placed in real life. The lighting they did just right in most scenes, and most scenes in the film had quite dynamic lighting. They worked hard to make the set that they were filming in looked appropriate also. This is why in my animation I want to use an old house to compliment the old style of animation I’m using.
The oldest form of this kind of animation crossing over to reality I could find is the 1925 rubber hose style cartoon “Alice Rattled by Rats” this was a series of a few shorts by Walt Disney that had a cat like cartoon character and a real girl called Alice that was (poorly) edited into the cartoon world to interact with it. It was an idea that Disney tried however it was so odd and not very believable and the technique mast very well incorporated as the people couldn’t move in the environment and interact with it. Obviously this was because of their technical lacking and it was beyond them to do it believable, however it is very interesting that they tried this kind of thing even back then. This is why it interests me so much to do this for my FMP.
Mind Map
A mind map of things that inspired me to choose my FMP idea.
A video I made for showing Contextual Knowledge