Just what I was looking for. IMHO Arcane marks a milestone progress in Animation technology.
Also glad that the article confirmed that they don't use MoCap. It was such a great choice. I recently watched another visually exquisite animation movie on Netflix (the one in the Bright universe). There they used completely flat shading to achieve toon look for characters and environment, but made the characters move with MoCap animations. It looked very eerie.
There's nothing new about the tech. It was just the willingness to go that far artistically. (am a 3d artist working in the industry)
Mitchell's vs the Machines and Into the Spider Verse are good examples of how the industry is slowly moving into allowing different styles of animation than the Pixar Standard.
God, it's been said a thousand and one times, but in case even one person reading this hasn't seen it: you have to watch Into the Spider-Verse. I remember my mouth literally falling open at some of those scenes, and I'm not even, like, particularly "into" animation or anything. Such a visually astounding movie (aside from everything else to love about it).
I agree. His character in the comics had a different design and was more noting imo. For example, in the movie when he’s complaining about his new school, he says “I’m only going here because I won that stupid lottery”, and his dad replies “you passed that entrance exam just like everybody else”. The comics also have the lottery but IIRC make no mention of an entrance exam. Lots of subtle changes like that added up to make him a much more sympathetic hero IMO
It's very surprising that in the 30 years of computer animation the sources of actual experimentation with the style come from ... Marvel and Riot Games.
Sony Animation ( who you misattributed to marvel) were already pushing animation style heavily. Just go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
There's also tons of animation variety from outside America. The issue is that in America, a lot of the style was defined by Pixar. Which was probably the biggest experiment of them all.
But even among the major studios, there's a lot of variety in style. Trolls is incredibly stylized and DreamWorks really pushed style far in Kung Fu Panda 2.
Even Pixar are now experimenting more with style with Luca and Turning Red.
This is also only considering feature film work. If you pay attention to shorts, there's a huge variety.
It comes down to Art Direction. Arcane and Spiderverse are expensive and require an insane amount of per shot bespoke work. A lot of people also tend to find hyper stylized content not as compelling. So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.
> Just go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
It's the same plasticky "Pixar style" as any other computer animated movie in the past 30 years. And I'm saying that as someone who enjoys the movie immensely.
> There's also tons of animation variety from outside America.
This is true, and it's my mistake not to mention this.
> So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.
Indeed. And that's why it's surprising to see experimentation to come from these two sources (Sony Animation may have made it, but it was Marvel who agreed to it: they guard their properties like hawks)
Are you simply talking about the shading style? Because otherwise there's nothing similar in style between Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and any Pixar film of that generation.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was very much pushing animation style dramatically at the time and brought a lot of Fleischer, UPA and Looney Tunes animation into 3D for the first time.
Regarding your point of Marvel agreeing to it: Sony still owns the rights to Spider-Man for a lot of domains. That was purely a Sony film with little to no Marvel input. Source: I worked on it.
The source of experimentation have been Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have been pushing for experimentation ever since they directed the extremely successful Lego Movie.
They also did Cloudy with Meatballs.
They were producers in both Into the Spider Verse and Mitchell’s vs the Machines. They are the reason why this “willingness to do experiment” has happened - they succeeded beyond everyone’s dreams with Lego Movie and have taken a producer role in films that want to push the artistic envelope in 3D animation.
Lord and Miller definitely like to push the style of their films, but a lot of the technology used to achieve that style from Sony is from trying to closely adapt the rubber hose animation style of Fleischer cartoons in an attempt for Sony to differentiate themselves as a studio.
They really pushed it in Hotel Transylvania, their next feature film, where they were bringing Genndy Tratakovsky's style to 3D.
The source of experimentation have been Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have been pushing for experimentation ever since they directed the extremely successful Lego Movie.
They were producers in both Into the Spider Verse and Mitchell’s vs the Machines. They are the reason why this “willingness to do experiment” has happened - they succeeded beyond everyone’s dreams with Lego Movie and have taken a producer role in films that want to push the artistic envelope in 3D animation.
It’s now part of their MO to push the envelope and have each of these films “be their own thing”.
Fortiche has no relationship with them, but they would have never been allowed to do what they did here without those films having been produced IMO.
If you’re interested to know more I recommend you listen to the Roger Deakins’ podcast with them.
Fortiche have been working on Arcane for almost seven years now. That predates Spider-verse being publicly known.
Additionally there have been tons of very stylized content pieces before that. Look at anything by Robert Valley, Alberto Mielgo or just look further out into European or Japanese animated work.
Certainly Spider-Verse helped prove the viability of a heavily stylized film, but Arcane would have existed without it.
A lot of what they did was being done in Gobelins films before (and I suspect Fortiche employs many Gobelins students)
Lord and Miller are fantastic and certainly push style. But I think you're attributing too much to them.
Before Chris and Phil did what they did, there was nothing but the Pixar Standard in Western CG studio animation.
The artists you cite are not part of the industry, and the whole point is how Chris+Phil changed attitudes in the industry. The overall world always knew other styles were possible. But the industry needed a jolt.
I won’t push it any further, but they pretty much changed the industry attitude on this. I am aware of Fortiche’s previous work, but it’s a long way from a few million dollars in cinematics to this.
Even the style that Fortiche ie using in Arcane only seems to have fully developed in their other work in the past 2/3 years.
Anyway sort of a meaningless discussion. Not trying to prove anything, just saying they were leaders in this space.
Both Robert and Alberto are fairly well regarded art directors. You're clearly not familiar with the industry, which is fine, but at least refrain from making statements like that.
The fact that you can credit them with it all and dismiss Alberto as not being part of the industry is depressing. I suggest actually seeing who the initial art director they hired for Spiderverse was.
Even before Lord and Miller, Shrek is a completely different style of film than Pixar was putting out.
There were tons of CG films even around the early 2000s and 2010s that were experimenting in style. They just failed to reach critical success or weren't as in your face about it,
Lord and Miller certainly made the best films that also embraced style, but you're entirely too dismissive of the other people in the space, while laying too much at the feet of Lord and Miller.
They're certainly amazing directors and pushed style in their films, but saying they gave the industry a jolt is retconning things. Spiderverse definitely moved the needle a ton, but it's more than just them.
I'm glad we have cars because sometimes I just want to get from A to B fast. (Maybe someone just wants to enjoy making some light music through a fake book or light up keys.)
Other times, I enjoy hiking half a day because you see a lot of interesting things along the way, and the experience itself is rewarding for other reasons. (Like, conquering a challenging etude works my brain in a certain way and is satisfying.)
Tons of people will opt to make music via the easier option. But many will still try the difficult path, because it is rewarding and your skills compound over time.
And sometimes, a person who first does it the easy way decides that he/she wants to do it the harder way. People like to learn!
You can make getting from A to B easier (and faster), by replacing walking with cycling. You make it even easier with a bus, and easier still with a car. In some circumstances, this is valuable and should be welcomed. But it's a mistake to think that moving from A to B in a car is actually the same experience as doing so on foot.
I'm suggesting that this might be true of making music also.
>I'm suggesting that this might be true of making music also.
No, it isn't, because unlike with getting from point A to point B, the end result isn't always the same with music making.
Music, in that aspect, is more like writing code or visual arts. Printing and photography becoming widely available didn't make visual arts worse, they did the opposite, because instead of focusing on just technical proficiency, the art was forced to move in a more creative direction.
With programming, us not punching cards with code and not using assembly as the primary language didn't make things worse, it just allowed us to go on a higher level and create things that would be unthinkable without that.
Same with music making. Being able to record a virtual orchestra in your bedroom studio doesn't make music as art worse, it opens up way more room for things that weren't even possible before. Just by definition, when it becomes much easier and really accessible to record something in your bedroom, which previously only a few extremely rich people in the world with tons of experienced staff could do, it allows for art to evolve faster and move forward just by the sheer drive of all the people who now have access to contribute to it.
One of my go-to examples in this domain is to look back at the career of the composer Steve Reich. Living in NYC, it wasn't so difficult for him to find performers to realize the (then radical) musical ideas he was experimenting with in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If Reich had been living in Smalltownsville, SomeState it could have been much, much more challenging (arguably close to impossible). So in this sense, the accessibility of contemporary digital audio workstation technology [0] makes it more feasible for anyone with musical ideas to explore them, and we should celebrate this.
However, the path that Reich did actually follow underscores the senses in which making music is so often a social activity, and there is no doubt based on interviews with Reich that having/choosing to work with other human musicians changed the evolution of his music. Not everyone likes his music, and of those who do, some might have preferred the direction it might have gone had Reich been an Ableton Live user. Nevertheless, I continue to believe that music as a social activity is critical to almost all good-to-great music, and that contemporary technology frequently undermines that.
[0] perhaps paradoxically, I am the author of just such a piece of technology.
>I continue to believe that music as a social activity is critical to almost all good-to-great music, and that contemporary technology frequently undermines that.
Agreed on it being a social activity, but disagreed on contemporary approaches undermining the social aspect of it. Sure, it gives you an option to be more asocial when it comes to making music, but it also gives you ability to be more social than ever before.
Ableton Live has a remote collaboration feature now, so you can work on music together with people who are thousands of miles away from you. Quite a bunch of software solutions are available that make jamming together and recording music with people separated from you (by distance) easy and fun. Something like Splice Studio[0] is a godsend for remote DAW sync and collaboration.
I can agree that this is a differet experience than other ways of composing, but I think that's a good thing. Walking from A-B let's you experience the travel in detail, driving let's you visit more places in the same time. Both have their benefits, but you can't say one is better than the other without a specific use case in mind. In a more literal view, LudoTune offers a set of conviences and constraints that aren't had with other systems. Combined, those changes will encourage exploration and the growth of new ideas.
While it was before my time, I'm sure the development of synthesizers and sampling audio tracks were considered by some to be shortening the travel-time between A and B, but those became influential in modern music. Maybe this isn't the next big thing in music, but it could be, and I'm curious to see how far it can be taken.
An aside from my own life that I found interesting: for a long time I thought "surely there's a way, electronically or otherwise, to have an easier more ergonomic interface to making guitar-like music than a guitar". Then I learned to actually play the guitar and realised just how much control over the sound you have and how expressive it is and realised that replacing that with something easier would actually be pretty damn hard.
I disagree with you. One of the unusual, perhaps unique features of Western civilization is the great hunger for direct knowledge of other societies and other parts of the natural world outside the West. Think for instance of Herodotus.
Good read. America today looks like the crumpling world described by Ayn Rand in `Atlass Shrugged`. Ironically the reason of this downfall is the adoption of naive form of capitalism that Ayn Rand popularized.
A general rule of thumb is the older the written word, more valuable it is. Accordingly, the books that have been around for a while and are still well-known they give highest value from the time you invest in reading them. The content on Internet is mostly about current events and it lacks the depth that old books have. News or opinions on current events will most likely become irrelevant and obsolete. The stuff worth reading will survive the test of time and you can read it in future. Staying up-to-date with current happenings is overrated, because most of those things don't happen our daily life. Therefore best invest your time reading meaningful books.
There is a more serious impact of downgrading if you were hosting a static website from a private repository on github with a pro account. Apparently that's not supported with free account. My personal website went down as soon as I downgraded to free. I didn't mind making the repo public, so it was an easy fix, but may not be same for others.
