Here’s an animation that’s been recommended a lot the last few weeks.
It’s called Diamond Jack.
Link below.
Honestly what really struck me about the entire cartoon is the music.
I thought it was an already published song animator Rachel Kim used, but it’s actually
an original composition by another CalArts student, Connor Spiotto, made specifically
for this animation.
I’m really impressed.
It sounds exactly like the grand old days of big band music.
The song is a nice descriptive backing for what is happening in the cartoon, of course.
There aren’t any animation techniques in Diamond Jack that I haven’t talked about
before, but the art style of the animation is quite different from what we usually see.
Actually now that I think of it most animations around here are visually unique.
Most of Rachel Kim’s animations feature very loose sketchy linework with lines of
even thickness throughout.
Initially it struck me as something you would animate in Adobe Animate.
It’s doable.
But I suspect it’s not that, because Kim’s earlier works have linework reminiscent of
a program like TV Paint or Toon Boom.
The great thing about these loose lines is it allows you to focus more on character animation
rather than cleanup.
In animation, the cleanup phase is once all your drawings are done, you have to go through
each one and erase lines, close line gaps, look for any glitches, la la la.
There’s less cleanup with this animation style.
You can leave construction lines and overshot lines if you like.
The characters in Diamond Jack seem so strikingly familiar to me.
I wondered if it was a fan animation, but it’s not.
A lot of people write the character designs are like a combination of Astroboy and Lupin
the Third.
Yeah.
You can get a little album of character test sketches from Rachel Kim for free.
They show a tiny bit of the behind-the-scenes tests of how Jack should look, what she should
be wearing, and her attitude.
A feature Diamond Jack has that’s really nice are the painted backgrounds.
They are deceptively simple.
In reality there’s a lot of careful planning of colors and elements and point of view.
Even though they’re simple in composition, they have a lot of texture to them; they’re
not plain flat colors.
The few colors that exist in each shot are very bold and there isn’t blending or soft
shading between colors.
The backgrounds also use an interesting technique I’ve seen a few times, mostly in TV cartoons,
where items are sometimes only lines and the fill color from items that should be hidden
shows anyway.
Here’s some invisible people.
Invisible chairs.
It’s really interesting because the style is not necessarily consistent even within
the same background.
These chairs are colored and these aren’t.
The slot machine line shows here, but not here.
The results can be kind of funny.
Here’s Jack rolling, somehow, in front of a woman who should be in the foreground.
Haha.
While we’re talking about style I may as well point out the choice to only make the
two main character’s eyes have white fill.
Nobody else gets whites.
The point of doing this is to emphasize the main characters.
It’s also great the diamond has hinges on it in the beginning.
They’re right there, hidden in plain sight.
Did you notice them?
I sure didn’t.
I think I’m going to keep it simple for this one.
It’s an animation that focuses heavily on character animation, with plenty of expressive
faces and poses, and a classic cartoon approach to backgrounds.
Thanks for watching, and I look forward to hunting down some more new animations!