Week 9_Response_Julianna Tillman

"Bird Karma"

Full Length Short Film: vimeo.com/340593835

Production Process: youtube.com/watch?v=Zc39IZxL56U

The animation I chose to review is "Bird Karma" by William Salazar. The short film was created for DreamWorks and uses a hand-drawn stop-motion form of animation to create scenes that imitate movement. Similar to three-dimensional stop-motion, the rough movements of the character are hand-drawn on paper before being transferred onto the computer and inked. One thing I love about this piece is it's ability to use expressions to give the character's life. Though the main character is very abstracted from an average bird, the audience can easily see and image what the artists are trying to create. The main feature of the bird, it's eyes, are always moving and expressive. William Salazar created the original conception of the idea in the early 1980s before he began working at DreamWorks on projects such as Sinbad, El Dorado, and the Prince of Egypt. The first few drawings were pencil tests of the bird that were then given to a small team and turned into the final animation released in 2018. The character was intentionally left in a rougher style and the clean up on individual frames was done by the artists themselves. This choice creates a natural, gestural touch to the piece that heightens the animated elements of the characters. The stop-motion aspect of this animation is created through the line-by-line drawings made on transparency paper, which were then photographed and inked to create the final animation. For my own work, I would like to study these traditional animation techniques.