Saturday, 28 March 2015

Task 3.

Tim Walter Burton, born in 1958, is a film director and producer. His short film "Stalk Of The Celery Monster" was the holy grail that made his road to fame and the film gained attention from Walt Disney's Animation Productions. Walt Disney offered him an apprenticeship for three years. While he was working for Walt Disney he worked on films like Tron and also The Fox and the Hound. After a while he grew tired of working with Walt Disney and began to work on solo projects due to his style clashing with their style of animation. One of early his films was a six minute stop motion animation called 'Vincent'. Walt Disney were extremely fond of this short clip, they gave him funding to remake this little film. He then had enough money to have his favourite voice actor feature 'Vincent Price' this is why he had named the animation Vincent. 





One of his most recent animations was inspired by Vincent and is a remake of Frankenweenie (2012). The original version of Frankenweenie in 1984 was said to be "to quirky and scary for a mainstream appeal", due to this reason, the original wasn't a successful film. 28 years later the same film is being re-made and re-released; the second time around the film was very successful and became one of the "best kids films of the twenty first century". This film really shows the expanding process of animation, that in this context, Walt Disney didn't allow scary or quirky because people didn't know about horror or jump scares at the time. His second major film was The Nightmare Before Christmas which Tim Burton write and produced the film. It was said that this film helped generate a new interest in stop motion animation. 



The film was in production for three years because each character had over 7,000 clay animated faces created for the movie. In my opinion.  it was a move well thought out that the film was in production for so long because it was such a nice piece of work and I think it set the bar high for everyone involved in stop motion animation. Using clay is a very slow process because when clay is used, it melts under certain temperatures, so this made it hard for Tim because he would have to remodel it if a problem occurred during it, this was very time consuming for him. 

By using clay, you could show a lot of facial expressions because you can handle it to hold its shape, the negative side to this is that for every slight movement of the face or the body you would have to create a new model for the expression. So you can end up with a lot of clay heads. Tim Burton created all of the figures himself and it took over 8 months just to make three main characters. Its a lot easier to create a new head instead of moving the expression on the existing clay model and also there's a possibility  you may have to re-film that expression again and it's merely impossible to get the same expression twice.



Burton also used puppets in Mars Attacks, he used puppets to make the film look real while using real life actors. He created the puppets from a mixture of plastic, wood and whatever he had at his disposal. So it was a lot like The Nightmare Before Christmas, as he had a series of alien heads in his workshop with different expressions. George Pal had also used this technique in his 1940's cartoon Puppetoons. This inspired Tim Burton in the making of Mars Attacks because George Pal was also very fond in dinosaurs, monsters, and aliens, as shown in his films The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. 

Tim Burton wasn't only inspired by George Pal, but he was also Influenced by Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen mainly used a lot of dark subjects in his films, they were always monsters and dinosaurs and if you look at Tim Burtons work today there are a lot similarities in there because Burton also uses dark storylines and characters; Corpse Bride is an example of this. The setting and the mood of the film is quite dark but Burton did it in such a masterful way that we become to like the characters he invented.



Sources:

No comments:

Post a Comment