Pictoplasma in Isolation

This year, Pictoplasma in Berlin was cancelled due to the pandemic, however the festival was held online over the course of two days in November instead, which meant that anyone could now buy tickets to attend and watch along. Although this was definitely the correct deicison to keep everyone safe, the virtual conference didn't really live up to the expectations of the real thing—the usually week-long festival was crammed into only two days, so a lot of creators and content had to be cut due to the circumstances. It's a shame we were unable to go to Berlin itself seen I've been once and have been itching to return since, however I'll hopefully get another chance to attend in-person in the coming years!

The virtual conference featured two channels that you could choose to swap between at any time, both showing different animation screenings, workshops and talks at different times. My classmates and I spent the morning penciling in which artist talks and animation screenings we we wanted to see before the conference started so we didn't miss anything we were particularly interested in watching.

Trends in the animations at Pictoplasma 2020

Throughout Pictoplasma's virtual conference, there was a huge variety of animations screened. After watching a number of these, I noticed some trends within the designs, colours and themes of the animations.

1. Thick women/body positivity - A big trend I've noticed recently is character designs which show the body in a positive light, especially that of women.

2. Bright, bold colours - Many of the animations featured simple colour palettes, or with only a few select colours or tones/hues, making them very eye-catching.

3. Grainy textures - A number of animations had grainy textures to them, either as a sort of overlay or in places like shadows on objects and characters.

4. Mixed media - A bigger trend I noticed was different mediums of animation being combined together, such as 2D with 3D animation, or live-action footage with stop-motion. Oftetimes, the 3D would feature in the backgrounds or in places where it would be difficult or time consuming to draw in 2D animation, but stylised so that it didn't seem out of place and fit in well with the 2D animation.

5. Simple character designs - Blocky, round and simple character designs seemed to dominate a lot of the animations we saw this year. I think maybe because, unless your character need complex movements or facial expressions, it can be easier to create these kinds of characters, while still being able to follow along with messages or narratives presented.

6. Use of vocoders and non-human speech - Another trend I noticed was the use, or lackthereof, or real speech. Although many still included human speech/dialogue, a few of the animations either used edited speech, or other sounds to form language, like the Animalese used in Animal Crossing. I think this sort of communication really gives a cute personality to the characters, as you still understand the story (or conversation if there are subtitles) and can change the pitch for different characters to make them individually unique.

7. Stop-motion emulation - It was interesting to see that quite a few of the 3D animations had a lower, choppier sort of framerate, not as smooth, that kind of emulated a stop-motion sort of style. I think this may be because now there is a lot of digital work, it's important to still retain a sort of hand-crafted feel.

Key influences: political, geographical etc.

A few of the participants this year talked about their influences for their animations, lots of people mentioned that they take inspiration from what's around them and that inpriation can really come from just about anywhere. Knowing this really reinforces that you need to look for inspiration in places other than just animation: books, movies, video games, the environment, the news etc. If you stick to only taking inspiration from animation, then you're going to become stifled and never develop interesting ideas or visuals or concepts from outside influences.

How has working remote influenced animation

Simón Wilches-Castro - talks about how the individual jobs of people in the studio became

One of the panels hosted at Pictoplasma this year was “A New Horizon for Characters in Animation”. The panel had a variety of animators and artists, and included some good discussion from the participants about how Covid has affected the animation industry.

One creator was stop-motion independent animator Kirsten Lepore, creator of Hi Stranger and animator and director of the Adventure Time episode Bad Jubies. On this panel she discussed the impact that the current COVID-19 pandemic had been having on her workflow, mentioning about how it had become very difficult to work on her projects during lockdown since stop-motion is very hands-on. A team is usually needed for a lot of bigger stop-motion animations and this obviously meant that it was “near impossible” to be in the studio to actually work due to the lockdown restrictions. Even if a small group was allowed to work in the studio, having to social distance made the process a lot more difficult, again, due to the very hands-on nature of this area of animation.

This contrasts with what most of the other animators mentioned on the panel; Philip Hunt from Studio AKA mentioned that many live action projects during 2020, like adverts, for exmaple, turned into animated projects since the actors and locations couldn't be used during social distancing rules. He also said that he expects this to carry on, even after the pandemic and social distancing has stopped. Amy Winfrey noted that the current climate isn't really that different for lots of freelance artists and animators as they are used to working independently from home anyway. Simón Wilches-Castro mentioned that

They noted how, since they are working virtually and their animations are digital, it is very easy to switch to working from home as production is able to continue, although the speakers did note that not being in physical contact with their teams was of slight hindrance. Being able to work digitally and virtually by yourself at home streamlines and speeds up the pipeline in comparison to stop-motion.

Areas of the industry I want to move into

It's almost virutally impossible (see what I did there) to come away from Pictoplasma and not be inspired by at least something. I loved many of the 2D frame-by-frame animations, and they were a particular source of inspiration for me, especially the styles of Sereoh Oh and Russ Etheridge. I also loved all of the stop-motion I was able to see, specifically the work of Niki Lindroth Von Bahr and the animation where the lady dies; the styles are very endearing and all of the tiny props and sets like cans of food or clothing add so much personality to the scenes, but I imagine would take a long time to create.

From this, I know that 2D frame-by-frame animation and stop-motion are the areas of animation that I am most particualrly interested in and would like to focus on. The animations I have seen over the past two days have been a great source of inspiration for what is possible with these mediums of animation, and I am very excited to develop my skills further to be able to create content such as this in the future.

Eight animations I particularly enjoyed from Pictoplasma 2020:

1. Facing It - Sam Gainsborough

2. Armstrong - Russ Etheridge

3. Funeral - Thinh Nguyen

4. Clown Suit - The Brothers McLeod

5. Something to Remember - Niki Lindroth Von Bahr

6. (OO) and Afternoon Class - Seoro Oh

7. Protocole Sandwich - Valérie Bousquie, Joséphine Meis, Côme Roy, Antoine Vignon, Benjamin Warnitz

8. Versus - Guillermo Daldovo