Excerpt from a D&AD feature about storytelling in animation:
Marc Craste is a partner in StudioAKA. He is the recipient of two Baftas and the Cartoon D’or among others, and once came within spitting distance of an Oscar. He is currently working on his first feature.
Here he discusses the creation of large, intimidating worlds and the small characters that inhabit them.
BBC Sport – Winter Olympics Storyboard
Silent characters
There are many challenges in commercials, the greatest of which is conveying information that is engaging, entertaining and memorable, in a very short space of time.
The commercial work we do often features voiceless characters, and as a result there is a reliance on other visual elements to fill the gaps. All the information on the screen counts.
Oddly enough, when making a short film free of commercial considerations, the first thing we did was populate it with silent characters. Jojo in the Stars confirmed the importance of design and staging in the telling of a story, proving that the setting can often be as much a part of conveying the narrative as the character’s performance.
A real face with its infinite subtleties can absorb an audience and tell them all they need to know. It’s not so easy with animated characters, which often need help from whatever else is filling the screen.
Sometimes the character and the world they inhabit become so inextricably linked it’s hard to differentiate between the two. Jojo is an example where the world was integral to the story. Soon after we completed that film a commercial followed similar in spirit.
