Final project: Research: Jacob Frey and Markus Kranzler
Jacob Frey and Markus Kranzler are a great inspiration for young animators. These artists have created an award winning animation called "The Present". I have already discussed the storyline of "The Present" in a post where I focused on creating a storyline (click here to access that post).
In this post I decided to look at the animation "The Present" even more in depth and look at the creators themselves.
Jacob Frey is a young character animator from Germany who has worked on Disney's "Moana" and "Zootopia" and Illumination Entertainmnet's "Secret Life of Pets" (Frey, 2020). Jacob is an inspiration for me because he is a young creator who has already found his way to the Disney studio and that is where I would like to end up as well.
Markus Kranzler is a German shading and lighting technical director. (Kranzler, 2014) I think it is really interesting to look at both, a character animator and someone more responsible for the rendering process. Both of those artists are very young and they have directed a great project called "The Present".
"The Present" is a great and meaningful animation, that is one of my inspiration for this particular project. It is my inspiration for a few reasons, first: it is created by two fairly young animators, second: it carries a great message and third: it is an animation about a dog.
This animation informed my work in one particular way, about which I will talk about in this blog post. This post should have been on my blog some time ago, however I left it unfinished and unpublished for a long time by accident.
As mentioned at the beginning, I have already looked at the storyline of this piece and how it applies to a storyline graph. This time I decided to focus on something else these creators managed to do and it also helped me establish my animation process. By that I mean, the camera shots.
Here I am going to put the video of "The Present":
Generally this animation is based on a simple idea. The setting is not complicated either, however it is very interesting, thanks too many different camera shots. The shots are changing quite dynamically and that keeps the audience interested. For example, looking at 0:35 minutes in this film, there is a very short scene of the mom uncovering the window. Based on this scene I decided to create the scene of someone filling in the dog's bowl. I needed to be a quick scene that would keep the audience interested.
At 0:52 minutes, there is a scene from a completely new perspective. It is a view from the boy's eyes. It kind of puts the viewer in the character's shoes and I think that is very interesting. To achieve something like that, I decided to incorporate similar shots in my animation. Shots from above the dog's head were based on this kind of idea. I do not know if I achieved it well enough, however I wanted to experiment with camera movements and I am proud of myself for that.
Throughout the entire animation, there are long shots, medium shots and close-ups. I think the mixture of different approaches to different scenes, keeps people interested and engaged. I have also tried to mix the shots and make the visuals interesting.
Another I think is very interesting and I tried to use in my own work was a zoom. At 0:17 minutes, it is possible to see a very mild and slow zoom to the boy's head. I think here the creators did a fantastic job with keeping the viewer's eye on what they wanted to make the most important. The zoom made me focus and lock my vision on the boy's eyes and I thought it was great. I have tried using those zooming tools in IMovie to also keep the viewer more interested in my visuals.
Overall I think I have taken quite a lot from this Jacob Frey and Markus Kranzler creation and it definitely helped me to inform my work a lot.
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