6/9/2006 - Steve Irwin - adding to the mix
A lot has been said about Steve's personality in the aftermath of the unbelievable event of his death this week. Oddly, my experience with the man was an intimate one even though I never met him personally.
I was once asked to supervise a pilot for a proposed animated TV series for the Croc Hunter (not the proposed title ) and it was to be done in cut-out style ( e.g. 'Southpark' as well as the titles for the live action series of the same name). To be honest I hadn't been a big fan of Steve - more like 'indifference' really - but of course I agreed to take on the job.
So the task for the animation was to define the style of his image and the rest of the Croc Hunter family and design how it was to be animated. To research it I was given a couple of long doco tapes to familiarise myself with the characters and to establish how to achieve a variety of facial expressions and lip synch with mouth shapes. I dived into as much of the footage as I could to examine his range of expressions. I had to do this by very closely studying every detail of his face, analysing it frame-by-frame, so I had a good idea of how to design a library of expressions, stored digitally, that could be called on for whatever the dialogue would say in each of the episodes.
After this process I felt that I became so familiar with his personality and his features that I had his 'animated' character under my belt so to speak.
Two things came out of this:
First, I became a Steve Irwin fan. He really IS what you see - yep the WYSIWYG effect. Utterly and totally committed to what he does. It is not an act. He gets over-excited maybe but the passion he has for his work is infectious.
Second, how can you caricature a person who is already a living caricature!? The job was already done - and the animation would just be recreating his live action persona. (OK, the TV animation series, to justify itself would have to explore places and themes that live action couldn't.)
When looking for the animation angle on anything you always look for all the exaggeration opportunities - to get the humour out of the caricature - to push it well beyond reality. This is what gives animation its appeal. But when I paused the VCR on the 'extremes' of his live action expressions I often recoiled from the screen, gob-smacked, asking myself, 'How can I plus this!?'
Has anyone noticed the tragic symbolism of his death? His Heart. His heart that has been so spoken of in awe - a heart that was so dedicated to animal conservation and environmentalism - was pierced by one of the subjects of his life's work.
He was a living caricature.
| 
