MEDIA ROLES - MY PRESENTATION SLIDES

This post is just me uploading my slides from the group presentation.

These slides are looking at the character design process, especially how important research is and how influences hand-in-hand with research can define a character's look. It's still on Maui, from Moana.

MEDIA ROLES - BILL SCHWAB

So... contacting Jeff Williams didn't work out.

He's abandoned his Tumblr after they made changes to their Terms of Service, so that means I've got to find a new Moana character design contact. But luckily, I found one in the Art of Moana book! His name is Bill Schwab, and he's the character art director for Moana.

(Schwab working at Walt Disney Animation Studios)

Schwab is an Annie award winning character designer and character art director, who started working on Disney animated productions with 2009's The Princess and the Frog. Since then, he's worked on films like Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen and shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force. He won Annies for his work on Prep and Landing as well as it's sequel, as well as an Emmy for the aforementioned sequel.

A lot of his art is shared in the Moana art book, especially his work on Moana, Tamatoa and, most relevant to this project, Maui. 

(Some of Schwab's concept art for Maui - credit: Bill Schwab, Walt Disney Animation Studios)

I'm attempting to contact him through Instagram, where he posts concept art and drawings relatively frequently. I'm just hoping he'll at least see the message, and a response would be great! Also hoping that he doesn't have a specific NDA where he can't say anything about his work. We'll see. Update coming if he responds!

MEDIA ROLES - RELEVANT ARTICLES

Instead of posting each of my articles used individually, I'm going to make a masterpost of all my articles, going into each one and why it's relevant. Links to each article will be in their titles.

EMPIRE - MOANA'S DIRECTORS ON HOW THEY CREATED DWAYNE JOHNSON'S MAUI

This article is where Empire talked to Moana's directors John Musker and Ron Clements about the elements that went into creating Maui. They break the character down into themes; the voice, the mythology, the tattoos, etc. Specifically, I looked into how they made the character hand-in-hand with an Oceanic trust to make sure they got the details down correctly.

"Very early on, probably in consultation with our Oceanic Story Trust, some of the feedback we got from them was that they recommended not to draw the movie in one specific culture. There were bits from different cultures that we wanted to wed together in this story. It took on its own life and grew differently. Obviously with the islands being separated at times by whatever, politics etc, the cultures evolved differently."

- John Musker

They also talk about how Maui's larger figure was decided upon in an attempt to make him more like a demi-god, who was able to accomplish the feats his myths claimed he could.

"He was short of stature because we'd read about that in some of the myths. When we designed him, we really felt that he was a demi-god. He's gotta pull up islands, he's gotta battle monsters. So we thought he was of superhero-like proportions, broad-shouldered and a big, solid man-mountain kind of a guy."

- John Musker

WASHINGTON POST - WHY "MOANA'S" MAIN DEMIGOD LOOKS SO MUCH - AND SO LITTLE - LIKE PEOPLE'S "SEXIEST MAN ALIVE"

This article is an interview with character art director Bill Schwab, and goes more in depth on some details the directors only lightly went over.

One of his main points was about how important research was to make Maui, and the entire world of Moana, to seem right.

"What shells did they have, what would have been available? What ancient dyes did they use? And what of their wood and woven materials?"

- Bill Schwab

The article elaborates on this further, claiming Schwab and his team thoroughly looked into the tattoos of Samoan chiefs. 

BUSTLE - ALL OF MAUI'S TATTOOS IN "MOANA" SHOW HOW CULTURALLY IMPORTANT THE DEMIGOD IS

This article delved into how Maui's tattoos all have significant meaning to the Maori people, since they all come from the actual Maui mythology. The tattoos are shown off in the "You're Welcome" sequence from the film, where every tale Maui tells are all true.

("You're Welcome" from Moana - credit: Walt Disney Animation Studios)

This would be a good way to show off the dedicated research the character designers did on the mythology of Maui, and how they translated it into his actual character design. I followed this up with a look at the Genius analysis of the You're Welcome, and they went more in depth into the actual stories.

VANITY FAIR - HOW PACIFIC ISLANDERS HELPED "MOANA" FIND ITS WAY

This article goes more in depth about the Oceanic Trust the filmmakers and character designers worked with on Moana. This trust was made up of Polynesian anthropologists, cultural practitioners, historians, linguists and choreographers, who all chipped in whenever the team needed their expertise, or when the Trust found incorrect details.

"Musker and Clements originally imagined that the scene would depict ancient sailors decked out in traditional Papua New Guinean face paint, ornamental headdresses, and jewelry—until the Trust shut that down, pointing out that those would be hilariously impractical outfits to wear to sea."

This trust helped out on even the most minute details, from the clothes down to what the curtains would look like in Moana's house. Scenes involving Moana kicking coconuts were shot down by the trust, since it was seen as "absolutely offensive". The trust's biggest influence to Moana was in Maui's design. 

"We have to put more hair on Maui’s head, because it’s very important. The mana is in the hair, the power of the demigod. It looked just like he was naked. For us, it was really important."

- Hinano Murphy

The relationship between the Trust and the character designers was vital to Maui's final look, and should absolutely be cited in the presentation.

NEW YORK TIMES - HOW (AND WHY) MAUI GOT SO BIG IN "MOANA"

The final article I found was on the deliberate choices made on Maui's design; most notably, his larger size. When the character was first revealed, there was some upset from Polynesian communities about how the demigod was designed.

"I have seen the trailer to this film, and I was astonished that anyone would depict Maui like this..."

- Gavin Bishop, Maori artist

This article also gives us an exact quote used to justify Maui's larger size, straight from the film's producer Osnat Shurer.

"Even in the myths where he’s small, he’s larger than life. And in animation, we’re not literal. You’re trying to find the essence of the character. We always felt that the audience needed to know right away, visually, that this guy is stronger than anybody else."

- Osnat Shurer

MEDIA ROLES AND RESEARCH - GROUP TUTORIAL PRESENTATION

In today's media roles session, me and my group had a Group Tutorial with Helen. It was essentially just a way to touch base and see how we're getting on. I prepared a small presentation just in case I needed to actually show anything... but didn't end up needing it at all.

So instead of wasting it, I thought it'd be good to post here as a way to show where I am and what my plan of action is.

MEDIA ROLES - MORE INFORMATION

Today, we presented our brief outline of what our group is looking at, and got some more information on what to do for our media roles and research task.

First is our presentation.

It's plain, simple, but gets the point across. 

For my part, I'm going to be going to be looking at the character design role in 3D pre-production, specifically on Disney's Moana. I'm debating on which character to focus on, Maui or Tamatoa. But the specific area I'm going to look at is the how a character is made; the process from idea to finalised character, inspirations, research, etc.

PRESENTATION STRUCTURE

We got an ideal presentation structure for our final slideshows we'll be showing at the end of the unit:

• Start with your title, subject matter and names of everyone in the group
• When delivering our slides, information should be in concise bullet points or small paragraphs
• Visuals, short films clips and key quotes to back up what you're saying
• A conclusion of what we've learnt from this unit
• A bibliography

Another key part of this unit is attempting to make contact with someone in the industry.

• We should do some research into a person; that way we won't make mistakes when contacting them.
• When making contact, stay formal; no "hi!"
• Address them by name
• Introduce yourself
• Stay enthusiastic
• If asking questions, make it no more than 3 short questions.
• Make the message short
• If no response is received after a week, try a follow up message.
• Try and contact more than one person
• At the end of it all, be polite and say "thank you!"

I have an idea of who I can contact: Jeff Williams, an animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios. I've spoken to him before through Tumblr in 2017, when I asked him what kind of things to do to try and break into animation. He worked on a number of Disney productions, including Inner Workings, Zootopia and, what I'm going to ask about, Moana! I'll put up a post on how industry contact goes!

MEDIA ROLES - INTRODUCTION

In this session, we were introduced to our new research project, about media roles. This research task is a different to the last two, in that the deliverable this time around is a group presentation, not an essay.

This is a 6 week project, in which we research into media roles & practices. This can involve looking at certain studios, productions, practitioners and/or techniques. Our blogwork for this will be solo (we'll all be marked for our individual work). This project involves attempting contact with a practitioner in the industry, and in the end showing our group's findings.

The deliverables include:

• A 10-minute presentation showing our group's findings
• Includes visual aid (images / videos) and vocal aid (actual speaking)
• Research portfolio
• Contains information on what types of roles we'd be interested in when studying or as a career
• 500 word summary

Thankfully, there are no weekly summaries for this project!

The presentations have to be visually appealing; make them look pretty! They should be no more than 20 slides, containing an intro, quotes from practitioners, a conclusion and a bibliography. Spelling and grammar are also important to consider.

So what's the aim of this project? It's mostly to familiarise us with the roles that are out there, and to make us think more about our own employability. We should be considering what we want to go into after graduation, and researching the roles out there is a good way of learning the intricacies of potential jobs.

We got put into our groups after this presentation; I'm with 4 people I don't know at all; Jacob, Tom, Tanje and Gareth. The set date for the presentations is the 30th of April, so that's just about 5 or 6 weeks away.

We got another presentation after learning who we were with, this time looking at the different animation disciplines and production types we can look at.

It started with "traditional" animation productions, that being animated films and television shows. There are three types of these features; 3D animated (e.g. Toy Story 3, Star Wars: The Clone Wars), 2D animated (e.g. Aladdin, Gravity Falls) and stop motion (e.g. Wallace and Gromit, Robot Chicken). We then looked further into that looking at the different age groups that watch specific productions.

(The trailer for Pixar's Toy Story 3 - credit: Pixar Animation Studios)

Then we delved into more specific animation types and productions, including TV idents and adverts.

(Channel 4's 2018 idents, involving a giant made up of the blocks from the channel's logo - credit: Channel 4)

There was also a brief look at Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, and how animated stories can be told with the viewer able to fully explore the world it's happening in. Related to this is video game animation, specifically in cutscenes.

(Cutscenes from Valve's Portal 2, pertaining to space - credit: Valve)

We finally looked at VFX, where animated characters and effects are applied on top of live action footage.

(Framestore's VFX reel for their work on Avengers: Infinity War - credit: Framestore, Marvel Studios)

For the final part of the presentation, we learnt more about the animation industry in the UK. The facts and figures are a lot more surprising than I expected; there are 10,000 people in the UK working in animation, with a 60:40 male to female ratio. 50% of animators are freelance, meaning they get a lot more freedom and choice in their work. But the most surprising thing to me was learning there's a skill shortage. Animators, storyboarders and production staff / management are in desperate need; shocking to me because I expected there to not be enough jobs.

We then split off into our groups, and decided what we'd look at for our presentations. To put it bluntly, our group's chemistry is non-existent at this point. None of us knew each other, so we didn't have any kind of reference point to go by in terms of what we know already. Eventually we settled on character design after deciding we all liked, and I quote, "character stuff".

We wrote down a list of potential subtopics from the character design angle we could look further into, as well as characters we'd want to look at.

Overall, I'm a little bit more enthusiastic about this research task than the other two, mostly because I hated doing the essays. This allows for a bit more creativity, even if it is just in a powerpoint form. But I'm not so sure about the group angle. I've known for a while I need to improve on working in a group, and I feel like I've achieved that for the most part in other animation tasks. But this group in particular has me a bit concerned. There doesn't seem to be anyone desperate to jump straight into the project, and it feels like we still need time to get to know each other. But only time will tell.