Bill Plympton
Bill Plympton is an animator that I came across on the web.
He works 100% by hand, drawing every frame of his animations, and piecing them
together in stop-motion style. His 2008 feature “Idiots & Angels” took
25,000 drawings to complete. He says when he’s working on a project he’ll do
100 drawings a day, which is around 10 an hour.
Plympton
grew up in Portland in the 50s and 60s, and in ’68 he transferred from Portland
State College to the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He’s done numerous
comic strips that have been printed in nationally syndicated publications
including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone among others. Since then he’s been commissioned to do
multiple shows, music videos, and has done feature length films of his own.
Plympton
relates to my own work because of his medium of hand drawn, stop motion
animation. I really like his drawing style as well, and in some places I do think
that it mirrors my own. Right now I can’t even imagine doing the amount of work
that he does, but hopefully one day I’ll be able to master an animation
technique that works for me and I will be able to sit down for long periods of
time and concentrate like he does and still produce high quality and highly
stylized work.
With
both his drawing style and his stop motion method Plympton is afforded the
luxury of surrealism which goes well with the stories that he creates. “Idiots
& Angels” is a full length film with no dialogue, but it is still able to
captivate the viewer through a trippy series of surrealist experiences that his
style is tailor made to produce.
Tinman Creative (Brett Jubinville)
I discovered this group after a ridiculous amount of
fruitless web surfing in search of an animator who is doing the same things
that I’m interested in. At first I landed on a lot of big animation companies
with teams of professional animators but couldn’t find much or anything about
the artists themselves. The Tinman Creative is a company run by Morghan
Fortier, who is the executive producer, and Brett Jubinville, who is the
creative director. The first thing that caught my eye was the style of the art.
It came across to me as very soft and inviting but with an underlying sense of unease,
almost like a false peace. The cartoonish quality enables for less of an eerie,
foreboding feeling than if it were a more realistic style, and instead produces
a dry and deadpan mood with a hint of a joking smile. A lot of their work
reminds me of some 90s and early 2000s Nickelodeon cartoons such as Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Ren & Stimpy, and
Samurai Jack, the latter two of which
Jubinville actually alludes to on his blog http://brettjubinville.blogspot.com/
as being influences.
Jubinville,
as it turns out, is a very highly regarded artist in the animation field. He
has worked in animation for the past 10 years, and some of his jobs include:
lead character designer for the television miniseries The Future is Wild, animation director for Canadian and Australian
children’s series Dirtgirlworld, and
technical director for Comedy Central’s Ugly
Americans, among many others.
Jubinville
is a very talented artist and has the ability to work in multiple different
styles based on the disposition of the show. Some of his characters are more
kid friendly, with less details, brighter colors and more forgiving features.
Some are geared towards an older crowd, with darker colors, more details and a
more grim or realistic appearance. Still he can also construct his characters
in the fashion of extreme exaggeration, embellishing and amplifying their features
in order to portray a trait more obviously.
Jubinville’s
work definitely relates to mine, especially his work with the Tinman Creative.
They animate in a number of different ways, including traditional 2D, Flash,
stop-motion, CG, and live-action. I’m very interested in learning how to use
different programs to animate, which I have already started doing and is the
main reason I took this class. I also really like the art style that appears on
their homepage, and could see doing something like that for a future project.
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