AO1 Artist and Designers

Raoul Servais

Raoul Servais is a Belgian filmmaker born in Ostend, Belgium, in 1928. His parents owned a chinaware and cristalstore on the ground floor of an old 18th century hotel. Raoul led a quite life until May 10th 1940, when his house in Ostend was bombed, it was the day the Wehrmacht launched its division to attack Belgium and Ostend was within the bombing. Raoul, now a 12 year old boy here learns about bombs, horror and death and loses his childhood innocence. When there house is bombed his father had to go out begging and getting loans from people just to stop his family being arrested. When in secondary school Raoul was beaten for not paying attention in maths and focusing on the arts. When he turns 16, Raoul gets a job as an assistant director at ‘the innovation’ in Ghent. He then moves away again because he wants a through education and diploma. Servias enters the academy of fine arts in Ghent and takes a course on the decorative arts. In 1960, after getting his diploma, he is asked to teach the decorative arts at the academy of fine arts. Servias then created his first animation called ‘the false note’ after working on it for 3 years beforehand and it is finally finished in 1963. In 1965, Raoul creates probably his most famous animation, Chromophobia, this animation has had wide acclaim after being presented at the 1966 Venice international film festival. After a few more films and a healthy life he is still alive today.

Chromophobia

Chromophobia was released in 1966 and was met with wide acclaim. It won many awards and has gone on to be known as Servais most famous work. It starts of as a group of what seem like robotic soldiers go into a town and terrorize the whole town. They overpower the town and then take control, standing on guard 24/7. the prisoners are held hostage and in the actual video the soldiers change everything from being all colourful to being just black and white, not just changing the town but changing the people in the town aswell. They start to fight back about half way through the animation when a flower turns into some kind of what seems like a human cockerel. They turn the tables on the chromophobic soldiers and end up driving them out of the town, giving control back to them again. I think the whole plot is represented to do with the Second World War, the robotic soldiers represent the Nazi’s and the townsfolk represent the Jewish community. The Nazi’s march into town and take all the life out of it, killing people and trying to turn people into them but the community then tries and fights back. The animation itself was made as a cell animation, it uses layers which are drawn on paper, then copied onto cell and painted over. Everything needed to move needs its own cell and all of these different cells are put together and layered on top of one another to move and are filmed from above. I would use such elements of this animation to help me get an understanding of different types of animation and experiment with each. I could maybe use cell animation in my final animation. The use of sound in this animation is very striking and gives an unpleasant feeling to the audience such as in the scene where the old woman screams. I really like chromophobia, elements I could use in my own work is maybe visual symbolism. Using this would give greater layers of meaning towards my work insteadn of just a simple animation.

Ryan Larkin

Ryan Larkin was born the 31st July 1943 and passed away on February 14th 2007, he was Canadian born in Montreal. He rose to fame for his 1969 oscar nominated film walking. It was a small animation based on different styles of walking and the different characters you find in everyday life. He then became even more famous for creating another animation called street musique 3 years later in 1972. Ryan Larking was educated in the Montreal museum of fine arts where he studied under his tutor Arthur Lismer before working art the national Canadian film board. He became involved with drugs and died of lung cancer in 2007. He is the subject of the oscar winning animated film – Ryan.

Walking is an experimental animated film which in my mind represented around different people’s lifestyle and the diversity and discrimination which is shown towards each other. It’s basically just people walking around in different ways. There’s the main guy who is just seen walking on his own, a shade of black and grey. In my opinion considering he was walking on his own I thought it represented him being lonely and an individual. The animation itself is made using a variety of techniques including line-drawing and colour wash. The animation was a good example of how good animation and an eye for detail can give the characters there own personality.

Street Musique is an experimental animated film which I think represents all the different styles of music and how people enjoy what they do. It is a mixture of animation and real life footage in which it plays lots of different types of music. It’s based around these 3 people who stand on streets and just play music to get money. You have the two music players and then a woman who collects all the money in the hat. The illustration is an animator who sees life with an amused and imaginative eye. The starting point is the music but the animator then develops that and creates a quicker beat for the music and produces several different shapes in the animation.