Researching for my presentation about the Brazilian film “Bob Spit – We Don’t Like People”, I made many interesting discoveries.

Brazilian animation never managed to become a big industry like in other countries like the UK and America, even though it started at the same time as in these countries. The market has similar problems as in other animation markets abroad, but also extra cultural and economical issues. It wasn’t a pleasant journey to remember certain issues of my country. Also this “underground” aspect makes it very difficult to find proper books to use as reference for research.

On the bright side, there are plenty of independent films to watch. It was also lovely to see again Angeli’s comics and see his political cartoons now on Facebook. “Bob Spit” is an interesting film, and I also want to watch former films on Angeli’s characters made in more traditional animation techniques, close to his original drawing style. Unfortunately so far I haven’t found a copy of “Bob Spit” with English subtitles, so I can’t share at the moment with people that doesn’t speak Portuguese.

Other interesting finding was another stop motion studio in Brazil, the “Janela Filmes”, situated in Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately I couldn’t find their website and it seems there is another completely different studio that shares the same name, but anybody can watch some of their films on Vimeo.

Firstly, the film “De Janela Para O Cinema” is an animation short about cinema having scenes and characters inspired in famous films and cinema artists. You can see it’s a film done before the other film “Cabeca Papelao”, as the techniques in animation, puppet construction and set construction were more advanced in the later film. As a fan of cinema and films about cinema like “Cinema Paradiso”, I had to check that. Similarly, if you watch “A Tempestade”, a former film of Cesar Cabral / Coala films, available on their website, and other films and commercials before “Bob Spit”, you can also see the evolution in technique and bigger confidence to approach a longer film story.

On the other hand, “Cabeca Papelao” is a much more impressive film. Not only in technique but also in better script. Based in a short story from Joao do Rio, it’s about a man that was always very sincere, honest and hardworking in a “sunny” country that can’t fit in society. The title was translated to English as “Daydreamer” which I consider a bad translation, though I understand the literal translation to “Cardboard Head” isn’t appealing for marketing purposes. He was convinced he was right and the others were wrong, until a day a new situation make him decide he needs to fix his head to fit in.

Needless to say this is still a relevant criticism to countries like Brazil. In a way it’s also sad that this short story was written more than 100 years ago (the author died in 1921) and the society never improved. I managed to find the original text and even some cultural comments are still valid and still reflects how some people think and live in Rio. It’s bittersweet entertainment.

On the bright side the design of the puppets and sets was based on the works of J. Carlos, a Brazilian cartoonist of international quality. He created Jose Carioca and seems to have been invited by Disney to work with him when Disney visited Brazil, but he declined. Lovely designs and also I really like the 2D set character. This idea of stop motion animation with a background hand drawn set is something that really pleases me and worth doing in the future. Also the sets are purposedly made as theatre sets, which I think it’s a fascinating idea too.

I’ve been helping with a graduate stop motion film from NFTS. It’s about a Biscuit factory.

At the moment we’re still doing the sets and props. I was asked to do a robot crane, that picks a biscuit from a conveyor belt, dips it in a river of tea and then puts in a testing table. I was initially given this:

The crane consisted initially of a polystyrene ball covered in wall filler, with a base of the same filler and a hole were you can put the arm made of twisted wires.

After some discussion, the design and colour palette was agreed. Firstly it was sanded. The base was not sanded much as it was always considered by me and my husband a weak point (too narrow), but the director didn’t want to make it wider. I avoided to sand it too much as the filler layer was too thin, in some small areas with sanding I reached the polystyrene which then I had to seal with more paint. Had to sand more after the second coat left too many deep brush marks.

One of the biggest challenges was that a round surface is much harder to stick things to than a flat one. I think this was one of the hardest things to build in the set because of that. The wire shapes for decoration needed some filler to fill gaps between the wires and the surface, slightly changing the design.

After the wire decoration (“piping”) was sorted, did the painting in other areas with other colours. Then sculpted the pointer of the dial in milliput, stick a round headed pin to it and let it set.

At that time my husband, that had helped me with the piping decoration and proposed design too, had covered the arms in heat shrink as suggested by the director and managed to put a claw in the end tested to be capable to hold a 5p coin (size of the biscuits in the factory). I had put an initial coat of paint on it:

With the pointer dry, I painted it bronze colour and let it dry. Then I went to sculpt the dial in milliput. I chose milliput as before it hardens completely it’s sticky and it can be sculpted, helping to do a dial that had to be fixed to a curved surface. The dial blue middle was the hardest bit to sculpt, when I managed to get the right shape and size the milliput was just starting to harden up! Didn’t leave me much time to smooth the surface, so when it completely dried I had to sand it more than I really wanted to.

It’s had to do sanding in thin surfaces, you have to go slowly so you don’t get through them.

Painting the dial was not that easy either as the sanded milliput seemed harder to have the paint stuck to it. These colours I made mixing acrylic paint for canvas. Didin’t see a point in buying relatively big pots of sample wall paint from B&Q for such small areas. Choosing the colours there isn’t easy either. The bronze I had to mix that way too as nobody sells bronze paint for walls (yet).

After that I had to insert the arms in the crane, fix them with milliput, create some nobs to hide the holes in the sphere and finish painting it.

The arms couldn’t be properly fixed with milliput. I made a mistake of moving the crane before this was set to try the varnish in the back, but to be honest maybe I needed polyglue to fix the arms to the polystyrene. That created the problem that the arms couldn’t at first hold many positions to be animated in stop frame. My husband sorted that putting some wood sticks in the hole of the sphere to fix the arms.

Other issue was that the base had a crack line all round as something seemed to be moving inside it when the crane was being moved around for the work. We tried to fill it and paint it more than once to sort it, but it didn’t work. Luckily it doesn’t appear in the camera positions it will be shot, and hopefully it should be sorted when it will be pinned to the set floor.

After the varnishing to a satin finish and sorting the arms, the crane looks like this:

We delivered it to Beaconsfield last Monday evening and hope it will be OK. Waiting for more instructions and preparing the expenses claim.

Yesterday we went to watch a double bill of silent films. First we saw “The General”, a comedy from Buster Keaton. Really good film, and great inspiration for animation. You can clearly actually see this film and other silent comedies inspired a lot in classic animation. Also the physical comedy ties with the theatre classes we had last week and 3 weeks ago. The music accompaniment was from the lovely Donald Mackenzie, organist of the famous Odeon Leicester Square cinema. Beautiful church accoustics and great organ sound for music and sound effects. Also subtle expressions and moves in Keaton’s performance are so interesting.

As said in the post before, it was a double bill, so we returned to the church in the evening for the second film. This time it was dark, which helped as churchs can be too full of light with their big abundant glass windows. Obviously too much light is not ideal for film screenings! Although the acoustic was perfect for the great performance of Aaron Hawthorne in the “Bloomsbury Beast” organ, especially in the climax scene with a surround effect from the organ with thousands of pipes. Beautiful sound effects too. I’ve seen the film “Nosferatu” before, but the setting and accompaniment weren’t this good. Now I was impressed with the film. Also we have to remember this was the first cinematic version of Dracula, before many of the comtemporary horror film cliches were used. A brilliant German Expressionist film. Lovely day with 2 great films, very inspirational for animation with the classic strong physical performance of silent films. Also met lovely people with love for films and animation.