Presentation
Transcript of the Presentation
I’m going to give a talk about the fusion of comic-book visual language in 3D animation which will focus on the case of Spider Man: Into the Spider Verse. I thought it would be useful to divide my talk into 4 parts. I’m going to first discuss the definition of comic book film as well as the brief introduction of Spider Verse. Secondly, I’ll talk about the background of comic-book Style. Thirdly, I plan to analyze the visual expression in animation, involving the approach of changing frame rate, abandoning motion blur, using chromatic dispersion to create depth of field, adding ink lines, Hand-painted special effects and comic panel shots. The forth part will focus on the visual effects , which is associated with the picture skills including Kirby Dots, Halftone, Glitch Art, Pop Art, Cyberpunk and exaggerated perspective.
Comic book film is one of the performance styles of a film in which the story is science fiction, fantasy, dark, and the picture style is obvious and colorful, like the comic world, with strong contrast and visual impact. However, with the development of comic films today, the audience is used to the special effects stacking and narrative mode in comic films. The form of comic films tends to be the same, and the situation of storyline routines is becoming more serious. In this case, some filmmakers with keen sense of innovative spirit try to make a breakthrough in form and explore new ways of expression for the creation of comic book films.
Spider Man: Into the Spider Verse, shown at the end of 2018, has proved to be one of the most groundbreaking animation released in recent times which uses 3D technology combined with more of a 2D visual language to bring the story of the latest Spider-Man, Miles, to life. It not only breaks the limitations of the film screen in form, but also strives to restore the scene and atmosphere of the comics, so as to be more unprecedented. With Into the Spider-Verse, the filmmakers are looking to directly reference comic panels in telling their story. Instead of realism, the film presents a highly designed comic book language where the effects looked artistically designed to fit within the overall comic book aesthetic.
Next I want to state the background of comic-book style with four ages. The first is the Golden Age, during which time though printed in booklet form, comics did not deviate far from their newspaper ancestors, telling a straightforward story through basic sequential images. Panels were laid out in basic square grids, often full of more dialogue than imagery. The second is the Silver Age when Comic books found true artistic expression for the first time in the Pop Art movement, which appropriated commercial objects such as product labels, magazine ads and comics for the purpose of fine art. The third is the Dark Age and night was the prominent setting for virtually all stories of this age, leading to an art style that favored lighting and long shadows. The last is the Ageless Age, from 1993 to present day. The line between film and comic is now so thin that some series are adapted into motion comics, adding voice actors and animation to the panels with no change to the art itself.
With regard to the visual expression, the first one is the purposeful change of frame rate, enabling the animation characters to present a sense of discontinuity in action movement, which causes the transient visual impact and increase the comic-book effect of the animation. Ones, twos, refer to how long a single image holds on camera in relationship to frames per second. Ones mean every single frame is different, so at 24 frames per second it’ll have 24 individual and unique drawings with that second. Twos means that something holds for two frames. So, if we want to animate one second on twos, it means every other frame will be different and we will have a total of 12 individual drawings. In spider verse , the movement of the characters is on twos while the background, lens animation and other displacement animation keep ones, so as to maintain the unique advantage of smooth lens of 3D animation. Look at this scene, When they’re swinging through the forest, Miles is on twos because he is clumsy while Peter Parker is on ones because he is more skilled. This subtly helped illustrate how Miles was slowly becoming more comfortable with his powers.
Next is abandoning motion blur which helps to restore the visual experience of comics. Motion blur is the smearing of rapidly moving objects in a still image or a sequence of images. In film, this happens when objects move too fast to be captured clearly because of a slow shutter speed. It is a CGI trick which most animations use to soften a movement and make it seem more real. The directors of spider verse want every picture in animation to be like a 2d illustration when it is frozen, which is more in line with the style of comic books, hence it eliminates the motion blur. Instead, the team adopted a variety of solutions to make up for the effect including using line tools to let artists connect shapes while drawing blurred lines; using camera shutter technology; quickly panning the camera on the background, trying to avoid any smooth gradient or blurred objects. Besides, An old-school technique is used called a smear. This was used a lot in early animations to create the sense of motion. If you look at a single frame, you’ll notice things like multiple arms to create the of movement.
And then making use of chromatic dispersion from printing defects to create depth of field pushes the comic-book feel cleverly and increases the arrangement of ideas after approaching to the 2D style. In optics, dispersion is the phenomenon in which the phase velocity of a wave depends on its frequency. The effect of dispersion is to play the role of virtualization and blurring. If you look at a comic book, you may notice a common error where the ink is misprinted and the poor printing situation often appeared in the printing industry in the 20th century. The director take inspiration from old comic books then they split and offset the image in a way similar to misprinted comic pages and an “error” that became a trademark in comic book art styles: “printing error” dots. Animators used these dots to shift focus, completely avoiding the need for simulated camera focus and motion blur. On some shots, you can see these dots used to separate foreground from background, or to attract attention to the focus of the shot. This choice to avoid motion blur subsequently gives the film a unique trait.
Next is the ink lines. A key ingredient to the comic book look is line drawings on the characters, also known as ‘ink lines.’ When we read comic books, we notice that the facial lines of characters can give them emotion. This inspired Sony’s idea of drawing lines on a character’s face and they layered 2D ink lines on top of the 3D art to give the characters more of a hand-drawn look. Finally, the production team decided to divide the lines into three categories. The first is the line fixed on the model, which does not produce any expression, such as the side line depicting the ear. The second is added from the perspective of painting which is aimed to separate the chin and neck of the same color while the third is made to express emotion, like facial line. However, because the animation is in 3D, it can’t just rely on 2D solutions to draw these lines. Therefore, these lines must exist in 3d geometry that can move around. One way is for the production team to embed ink lines into the binding, and the other is for the animator to add them manually with various tools.
Then I want to talk about the part I like most — the hand-painted special effects and graffiti. The pronounced and stylized hand-drawn method with regard to explosion effect with 2D shape, hand-painted shadow structure, pop-up subtitle dialog box, graffiti and onomatopoeia emphasizes the focus and depth of comic-book style animation. In the movie, we can see a lot of techniques and effects commonly used in American comics which are constantly let us review the feeling of reading comic books. For special effect , there are several moments in the film that involve explosions or particle effects, all of which have the mix of a 3D and 2D feel. For text descriptions, the animation uses many comic book expressions. They used words on the image to frequently represent sounds and motion. Text descriptions appear directly on the screen, and these text boxes follow the camera as part of its movement. And signature Onomatopoeia, Many shots have added onomatopoeia often used in comics, such as: Bang ~ brake sound and so on. And also hand-drawn symbol, the spider’s buzzing signal makes us watch a movie like holding a comic book. Even the light beam of the car lamp is a comic-book technique.
And the last one is shots and scene-switching effect with comic panel. In the movie, there are many places to use “comic panel”, which is the most commonly used narrative form in comic books. For instance , we often see the “four panel comics”. But from the perspective of film lens, because the animation changes with time, the production becomes quite complicated. It means that it should not only ensure that the actions in each frame remain independent, but also integrate into a whole, so it needs to arrange the animation sequence of multiple actions to work together. In addition, animators need to adjust the grid shape or aspect ratio to better tell the story. Comic panels made out of webbing show montages and background actions.
The following part is the visual effect and the first one is Kirby Dots and Halftone. The film adopts the 4-color printing mode of the digital version of the old comic book, which increases texture and visual interest by mixing cross ink shadow lines and halftone dots. This mode runs through the whole picture of the animation. The film references and uses the effect multiple times, when the portal opens and when Miles is spray-painting. Kirby Dots is an artistic convention in superhero and science fiction comic books and similar illustrations, in which a field of black is used to represent negative space around unspecified kinds of energy. They are typically used in illustrations of explosions, smoke, the blasts from ray guns, “comic” energy, and outer space phenomena. They also used a technique called halftone, which uses dots to create colors and gradients. Halftone is the reprographic technique that simulates continuous-tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size or in spacing, thus generating a gradient-like effect. On one hand, the combination of these two filters simulates the situation of using a small amount of primary colors to get different bold colors and gradients and on the other hand, imitating the imperfection of color shift.
The next one is the Glitch Art effect , which produced by the combination of hand-painted pattern and multi-layer effect, showing great visual beauty and creative stimulation for animation. As an art form, it comes from some common details in our life – the failure of data and digital equipment. Visually, the picture becomes a broken, defective image and distorted color. Computer images are made up of pixels, and when several of those pixels misfire, it will end up with a glitch. The effect of pixilation is most productive when attempting to anonymize an aspect of the design, leaving the exterior and abstract views of the space within. It visualizes technology as having a combination of textures and patterns but without perfection. Glitch Art has become a unique visual language, which is gradually accepted by artists. In spider verse the glitch effect splits the screen into cell patterns and assigned an alternative camera to each cell. One cell could be a zoomed in version of the character’s eyes, the next one could be the character’s face seen from a 90 degree angle shift. This created a fractured look of the character. They not only represent imperfection, but also mean accidents and changes. Every failure is like a recreation breaking the convention.
Next is Pop Art. It is a kind of art style mainly derived from commercial art forms, which is characterized by magnifying and copying some details of popular culture, such as comic strips, fast food and packaging printed with trademarks. Pop art developed in New York in the late 1950s, when its opposition to abstract expression was in its final boom. The film highly restores the viewing experience of comics. The use of Ben day dot in the rendering of the picture makes us feel the texture of reading paper comic books.
And Cyberpunk is a subtype of science fiction, which constructs an anti-utopian future with advanced science and technology, but only on one side. On the other hand, illegal trade, underground gangs and social unrest coexist at the same time. In the film, the night scene of New York City is brilliant and dazzling. Relying on animation technology, it creates a cyberpunk wind city which is in line with the concept of parallel universe and has a strong sense of science and technology.
The last one is exaggerated perspective. In comic books, the use of it in the image processing technique is very common. But in 3D images, using exaggeration is more difficult to deal with. Because it means that this not only increases the difficulty of processing the lens, but also distorts the structure of the actual geometry. In the animation, when Miles jumps out of the building, all the buildings are actually guided by a character centered ring.
To conclude, there are many breakthroughs in the visual effect and expression of this film. The creative team is very bold to mix a variety of characters with different styles, rationalize the concept of spider verse, and achieve a high degree of unity by combining the visual language with the theme of the whole film through graphic comic. The whole film reveals a sense of contradiction which is unstable everywhere. Instead of weakening the contradiction, the creative team shows them all. This experimental picture effect breaks the experience of previous comic film and makes an exploration and innovation for the presentation of comic-book style 3d animation.
This is my article, video and book reference which is refer to my research and they are mentioned and presented in by blog too. Thank you.
