Paperman

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SWillie!
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Post by SWillie! »

Signs is an amazing short, and while Paperman has its differences, the similarities are astounding - too much so for it to be a cooncidence, in my opinion. I'm sure the filmmakers on Paperman were influenced by it.

For what it's worth, i think the differences make Paperman the better short, story wise.
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Post by DC Fan »

SWillie! wrote:Signs is an amazing short, and while Paperman has its differences, the similarities are astounding - too much so for it to be a cooncidence, in my opinion. I'm sure the filmmakers on Paperman were influenced by it.

For what it's worth, i think the differences make Paperman the better short, story wise.
That´s the thing. Romantic comedies is a genre that you gove or take things but in escence is the same thing. The same can be said about the Disney formula.

However, one thing is that an another is to use almost the exact same thing of another short.
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Post by PatrickvD »

I think the 'missed connection' angle has been done to death in MANY romantic comedies. From the obviously similar Signs to the more recent The Adjustment Bureau.

It's just a thing. Paperman is about the visuals. The story itself being familiar is not that big an issue.
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Sotiris
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Post by Sotiris »

New interviews:

A Little More About Disney's "Paperman"
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/a-lit ... erman.html

411mania.com Interviews: Disney's Paperman
http://www.411mania.com/movies/columns/ ... perman.htm

A Cutting-Edge Valentine to a Gone-by Era
http://www.animationmagazine.net/featur ... ne-by-era/

SIGGRAPH 2012: Going Deeper Into Paperman
http://billdesowitz.com/siggraph-2012-g ... -paperman/
Last edited by Sotiris on Sun Aug 12, 2012 5:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Sotiris
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Post by Sotiris »

One of the comments on Cartoon Brew has me a bit concerned. Do these claims have any merit, SWillie!?
I too saw this in London and liked it. But this whole thing about it being about bringing the drawing back into animation only goes so far –
one of the questions at the London screening asked who had authorship over the animation? Who is the driving force behind the performance?

Although they wouldn’t come out and admit it, the answer is the CG animator. They are the ones animating the characters. The drawn side of it is glorified clean-up. They are working over the top of an existing pose already laid out by the CG animator. There is very little if any scope for them to really animate the scene as they would like to. One example shown afterwards where drawn animation enhanced the CG animation was where the 2D animator had gone in and embellished the hair movement and animated extra stuff on top of the CG animation, but this is a rare example of the 2D guys getting to do ‘animation’ and even then it’s a small one. It’s no different from being given a ruff drawing to work over with your 0.3 pencil.

Another thing that struck me watching the film was that it still felt CG’y. It was *too* smooth and lacked the imperfections that drawn animation has. A much vaunted ‘motion betweening’ tool (pfft) that smoothly inbetweened a line between two set points can be partly to blame. (And Disney – Flash has done this for years so I wasn’t sure why you were so excited about it…?) The chance to work over the top of CG animation with drawings is just like what a clean up artist would do – embellish, polish, push and enhance. It’s not 2D with CG. It’s CG animation since that’s where the performance is being driven from. Nothing wrong with that but this is all a bit of a red herring and not the breakthrough the Disney hype machine would have us believe. As said above – I enjoyed the film and it looked nice, but what’s wrong with pencils and paper?
I couldn’t be more agree… I saw it in Paris, it’s a beautiful movie, but no doubt about it, it’s a CG movie with some sort of 2D clean up on it.
Source: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/a-little ... erman.html
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Post by SWillie! »

Well, he's most certainly a cynic. Could things be looked at this way? Possibly. It is true that from examples that were shown, it seems that the CG animation most often came first. They did say that there were instances where they worked out keys in 2d first, though. Plus, the scenes go back and forth between the two, so it is not simply animated in CG and then drawn over. It's more than glorified clean up. Also, thy mentioned that some of the artists did BOTH the CG and the 2d animation.

The comments about it being too smooth and all that have no merit, as that is simply an opinion - a personal preference. I though that animation itself was gorgeous.

Also, the comment regarding the software leads me to believe that he didn't quite understand what he was seeing. Flash cannot do what Meander does. The difference being that Flash uses symbols (draw an object as a key frame, then move and transform that same objec on a different frame and flash will do the inbetweens), while Meander, from what I understand, interprets two separate lines and inbetweens them across a 3d space.

Also keep in mind that this isn't "the Disney hype machine." the hype regarding Paperman has come mostly from the audiences that have seen it. Disney has really not done all that much to hype it up - just the Facebook page and a few images, really.
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SWillie!
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Post by SWillie! »

Those are some really nice drawings. I wonder if they have looked at the animation in line-only format. Almost like looking at pencil tests. That would be really cool to see.
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Post by Kyle »

I'm still trying to grasp whats going on here technically speaking.

Hard to even guess without seeing the thing in motion, but is it possible the whole thing is animated traditionally, then color and shaded using cg wiremesh laid down underneath? Similar to however they brought beauty and the beast and the lion king into the 3rd dimension without losing the line work?
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Post by SWillie! »

No, definitely not. The CG animation is a critical part of this, as is the hand drawn line.
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Post by Kyle »

I don't see how that contradicts my concept though... the hand drawn line would be the foundation, and the CG is used to support it by handling what kinds of color, texture and lighting goes on inside the lines.
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Post by Sotiris »

SWillie!, will you be attending SIGGRAPH this year on August 05-09? If so, don't forget to snatch up "The Art of Paperman" (and then share with your friends on UD :P )
John Kahrs wrote:We are working on an 'Art of Paperman' book (more of a booklet, really), for Siggraph next month, a run of 6000.
Source: http://twitter.com/john_kahrs/status/225394550707986432
Last edited by Sotiris on Wed Jul 18, 2012 8:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by robster16 »

Sotiris wrote:SWillie!, will you be attending SIGGRAPH this year on August 05-09? If so, don't forget to snatch up "The Art of Paperman" (and then share with your friends at UD :P )
John Kahrs wrote:We are working on an 'Art of Paperman' book (more of a booklet, really), for Siggraph next month, a run of 6000.
Source: http://twitter.com/john_kahrs/status/225394550707986432
I'd SOOOOOOOO love to have one as well :)
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Post by SWillie! »

I won't be going to Siggraph :( I really wish I could, cuz I want one of those books. Hopefully it'll be available elsewhere.

And Kyle - the hand drawn line ISN'T the foundation, though. As we've discussed before, with the exception of maybe a few shots, the CG animation is done first, and afterwards the drawn lines are used to enhance it, and they they go back and forth to tweak the animation to the look they were going for.

While the lighting is technically done ON the CG model, the line really dictate where that lighting will go - for instance, to create an appealing shape of light on a characters face, the 2d artist would incorporate that shape into their line art, which would then be matched by the lighting.

Not that your idea is bad or anything - it would also be interesting to see something hand drawn that has later been colored and lit by a CG model. But that simply isn't how Paperman was done.
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Post by Maerj »

I tweeted John Kahrs about this a couple days ago and I was very suprised to see that he tweeted back. He seems like a pretty good guy and really wants to bring hand drawn animation to the forefront and show that it can be a relevant art form and can be pushed further. I wish him well in this endeavor.

I really like the character designs, which were done by Glen Keane before he retired from Disney. I will save my final judgement for when I actually get to see the short.
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Post by Sotiris »

There will be a 'Paperman' panel at SIGGRAPH this year:

The Art and Science Behind Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Paperman”
http://s2012.siggraph.org/attendees/sessions/100-174
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Post by Sotiris »

/Film Video Blog: Disney’s Hand-Drawn/CG Animated Short Film 'Paperman'
http://www.slashfilm.com/film-video-blo ... -paperman/
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Post by tweeb² »

In Paperman's Facebook page they posted that from today to the twenty-first of this month Paperman will be shown at El Capitan Theatre in southern california. has anyone been to the first shows? how is it? it looks cool and all that? man I want to see the short so bad, because, like Swillie! I think this is going to be the future just like it happend it the 90s with the CAPS system, and it would be a renaissance to 2D animation just as CAPS helped during the Disney Renaissance.
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