INSULT

Alexander Tullo - Director

Luan Kodra - Background Painter

Xing Ye - Character Rigger

Alan Wyatt - Pipeline Engineer

Overview

The first piece titled, "Insult", was created in May 2024 during an early experimental stage of the filter development. It is an animated portrayal of Claire, the female protagonist, in A Home for Swallows, expressing raw frustration and discourse. While its background was hand-painted by Luan Kodra, my filter focused on abstracting and stylizing the protagonist herself.

Artistic Intent

The painterly effect on Claire adds to the scene's emotion. Abstracting the textures with painterly strokes gives the filter a rawness that traditional 3D rendering techniques could not achieve. The smear caused by the filter emphasizes quick, energetic movements like when Claire's arm swipes down. This amplifies the dramatic gestures of the character by abstracting them so that the viewer is focused on the emotional exertion and not the technical details.

This artistic choice also reflects the protagonist's feeling of isolation and frustration to cut her off from the world visually. By making the painted texture contrast with the background near the end during the grayscale segment.

The filter's abstraction process involved distributing points over the character mesh and generating procedural nodes to represent brush strokes. This was necessary to give expressive support to the protagonist's physical performance. Each stroke was placed to respect to the characters movements to give life to her expressions/gestures. This variability created the illusion of a hand-painted animation, where the imperfection and inconsistency of each stroke made the emotional display seem more real.

Technical Challenges

One of the biggest problems I ran into when developing "Insult," was clipping around intersecting edges like in the mesh, body, clothing, and hair of the character. If these areas crossed, the line art produced by the filter would break, and the painting effect would be jittery. At this stage, the filter was in its early iteration, and the temporal coherence issues were not fully solved. Minor changes in the mesh produced inconsistent stroke behavior when textures overlapped or moved quickly. These issues became most apparent with the protagonist's clothing/facial expressions, where lines would jitter because of small changes in geometry.

To overcome these technical hurdles, you needed to understand the limitations of Blender geometry nodes and the nature of hand-drawn aesthetics. In traditional 2D animation, lines are intentionally imperfect in conveying motion and emotion; however, they become distracting when the jitter becomes too strong and the temporal coherence is lost. To address this issue, I experimented with various ways to stabilize the points from which brush strokes were produced. I reduced the jitteriness using a temporal smooth function that averaged each point position over several frames.

Another technical hurdle was keeping the same stroke density across the character regardless of her distance from the camera. Early filter versions made strokes more dense when the character was further from the camera and more sparse when close up. To fix this, I used a camera distance normalization algorithm that dynamically adjusted the density of points in the character's mesh. This helped to keep the character's painted appearance consistent throughout the scene.

These were mostly technical issues that affected the aesthetic result, and I overcame them only with further refinement of the filter's logic. In later versions of the filter, I managed to stabilize the temporal coherence, eliminating the jitteriness and significantly improving animated scenes' fluidity. However, "Insult" shows the filter at its earliest potential.

Conclusion

"Insult" is a proof of concept for the filter system and demonstrates painterly abstraction in 3D animation. It demonstrates how visual abstraction can convey emotional states by highlighting the protagonist's struggle with painterly effects, motion blur, and a dramatic greyscale transition. Technical challenges such as clipping, irregular stroke density, and temporal coherency informed the design improvements of the filter, opening the door to a refined tool for visual storytelling.

With "Insult," I showed how some basic animation principles, like imperfect lines or expressive brush strokes, could be adapted to a 3D context using modern digital techniques. Lessons learned from this first experimental phase laid the foundation for future developments, demonstrating that stylistic abstraction combined with procedural techniques can yield an emotionally resonant animated experience.