Birdcall

Alexander Tullo - Director, Background Painter

Xing Ye - Character Rigger

Alan Wyatt - Pipeline Engineer

Overview

"Bird Call" is a scene starring Maurice, the male protagonist of "A Home for Swallows". The director, Tullo, originally made this scene and animation last year and used an older version of my paint filter available on Gumroad to give it a painterly look. Well since we had refined our techniques and the filter since that time, we decided to give this piece a bit of an update with the new filter. The new filter created more emotional depth and visual consistency within the animation which helped remove a lot of the jarring jitter effects that would initially take the viewer out of the animation. In the scene, Maurice experiences a series of emotions, which the updated filter amplifies with some stylistic choices.

In revisiting "Bird Call", I drew on the work of James Holliday, who emphasizes the importance of visual rhythm and emotional timing in creating impactful animations. Specifically, Holliday's insights on how pacing can shape an audience's emotional experience led Tullo and me to refine the filter's timing to enhance Maurice's emotional connection to the audience. So, every hue and stylistic shift added to a cohesive story arc. This ability of the filter to tune itself to different emotional beats of the scene is an essential quality of animation: the technical tools are seamlessly integrated into the emotional resonance of characters.

Artistic Intent

One of the most significant changes in the new version of *Bird Call* is the hue shifting on Maurice's face during emotionally intense or unsettling moments. In these cases, the filter turns golden, showing the picture's emotional weight. This color shift emphasizes the character's turmoil, highlighting Maurice's internal struggle and making the scene more emotionally charged and impactful for the audience.

We varied the hues dynamically to give Maurice texture and make his struggles more apparent to the eye. The color shifts also correspond to Gregory Garvey's thoughts about how abstraction in animation can convey emotion better than literal representations. The animation makes Maurice feel more vulnerable by playing with his color tone more than usual.

The filter application here is seamless, blending with the 3D animation by maintaining consistent color tones and stroke coherence, which helped create a unified visual style. The transition was smooth. all we had to do was import the new filter, adjust a few of the settings, and render things out. Although, updating an older animation that did not have the same qualities as some of the past versions presented challenges, particularly in maintaining consistent visual quality across frames due to clipping. Nonetheless, we were able to make all corrections and render out the remainder of the scene without any technical hurdles. This ease of use is essential to my filter system. The filter's adaptability also points to Tina O'Hailey's focus on hybrid animation workflows that use digital tools so artists can iterate quickly without losing creative control of the process.

"Bird Call" underwent several refinements to achieve the intended visual and emotional impact. The technical workflow concerned stroke density enhancement, hue-shifting, and temporal coherence across the scene. The workflow also required fine-tuning the stroke temporal coherence to ensure consistency across frames. Informed by Lee Jung-Ho's work on reducing the uncanny valley effect by stylistic abstraction, I used temporal smoothing to achieve visual stability while preserving each stroke's expressive, hand-drawn quality. This allowed Maurice to express his emotions more effectively as the filter adapted to his emotional state.

Artistically, "Bird Call" shows how deliberately stylistic choices can make a character more emotional. Hue shifts, stroke density, and painterly abstraction create a visual language for Maurice's inner turmoil. Dynamic brush strokes on Maurice's character are meant to evoke his highs and lows, drawing viewers into his emotional journey. For example, during moments of heightened tension, the strokes become more erratic and pronounced, effectively conveying his turmoil.

Color as a narrative device can also increase the viewer's emotional involvement. The filter changes the hues during emotional high points to show Maurice is vulnerable. This approach builds on how color theory can be used in animated films to elicit specific emotional responses in audiences. The golden tones used during Maurice's most intense moments emphasize his intense emotion and bring the viewer closer to the character.

Its adaptability also allowed more subtle changes, like varying the stroke density depending on Maurice's emotion, giving the animation a more tactile, hand-drawn feel. Incorporating principles from Holliday and O'Hailey, the final version of "Bird Call" is proof of concept that digital tools can elevate traditional animation aesthetics in a way that audiences can relate to and appreciate.

Conclusion

"Bird Call" is an example of the way the filter system has evolved and how it has been able to employ stylistic abstraction to improve emotional storytelling. The scene combines technical advances with artistic choices to show how procedural tools can be used to produce emotionally resonant animated films. Iterative development under the principles of researchers Holliday, Shannon, Jung-Ho, and Luft allowed the filter to be refined technically and artistically.

The success of "Bird Call" is the seamless integration of visual aesthetics and emotional narrative for viewers. The scene demonstrates how non-photorealistic rendering techniques can bridge the technology-artistry divide to produce visually arresting and emotionally charged animations. Like other pieces in "A Home for Swallows", "Bird Call" demonstrates how traditional animation principles can be combined with new digital tools to create a more impactful storytelling experience.