What is invention as opposed to design?

Concept designers are often asked to create creatures that might exist on another planet, or perhaps machines used by an alien civilisation. The artist needs to come up with something that looks like it could exist in reality but few people, if anyone, have ever thought of it before, or visualised it in a certain way. Increasingly in the entertainment world of books, comics, films and games, it's a tough job coming up with something that has never been done.

Designing effects is often the process of stylising or defining the look of an effect. For example, when you design fire effects for a scene or project, you are setting the style for how that fire looks and behaves, whether realistic, magical or a combination. If an art director says "stylise some fire for this dream sequence", you will take what you know of fire and attempt to make it look dreamlike in its design and/or movement.

Invention on the other hand is coming up with new phenomena that don't exist. This is well suited to imagination, fantasy or science fiction work where magical or otherworldly phenomena need to be invented. Rather than stylising fire for a magical effect, an art director might say "create a visualisation of a rage enchantment for a sword". Your creativity is tested here, and you'll first ask yourself, "what would rage look like if it was a visible phenomenon?"

In the animation above, Alexs was tasked with inventing a new, never-before-seen effect for this movie and I believe he absolutely nailed it. Not only to visualise the blasting cacophony like a sonic cannon but also the impacts and eventual dying gasps of the bad guy (spoilers, sorry).

Another fantastic example of visual invention is Michel Gagné's taste visualisation sequences in Pixar's Ratatouille.

"Synaesthesia" is a condition where the senses overlap. For example, upon looking at a colour, one may experience a distinct taste or smell. People afflicted with this condition often describe the taste or smell of a colour in strange ways to which most of us cannot relate, such as "that particular shade of orange-red tastes like dusty wood". Others may somehow experience a colour or smell when hearing a particular chord in a song.

I contacted Michel Gagné with the question of whether or not he actually has synaesthesia. His reply:

"I definitely have had synaesthetic episodes throughout my life. I even went to the eye doctor a few times when I was younger because I had no idea why I was seeing these type of visions. Since doing the work on Ratatouille, I've had several emails from people with the condition and some of the stories sound a lot more extreme than my own experiences, so I'd probably classify myself as a very light case."

Regardless of whether or not you yourself have synaesthesia, all this is excellent material to consider when coming up with FX inventions of your own.

Exercise - as with the earlier mention of a "rage enchantment" for a sword, try drawing a single frame of it. What colour is it? Does it take the form of flames, ice crystals, steam.. ? Try to make it unlike anything that you'd consider a cliché enchantment effect.

Some people find it easy to come up with never-before-seen concepts, while for others it's incredibly hard. An ability to think laterally gives you the edge, but additionally you can mix-and-match various aspects (colour, taste, shape) among your knowledge of elemental phenomena (fire, steam, water, etc). Whether you think all this sounds difficult or easy depends very much on how comfortable you are with designing and animating real world effects.

In my early FX animation days with Disney, my supervisor and mentor, Alexs Stadermann once asked me to invent a magical effect. Like all artists looking back on their early work, I'm embarrassed by this "tinny" effect and twelve years on, I would definitely change a lot if I could do it again. I'm mentioning it here though to outline how, at a fairly early stage in my FX career, I arrived at this effect. It was for a scene in The Little Mermaid 2. The evil under sea witch, Morgana was using a potion that would replace Melody's legs with a tail fin (Melody was The Little Mermaid's daughter - in true Disney sequel fashion). Melody stuck out her foot and the drop of potion (an ugly out-of-place 3D snowflake/head) fell onto it, which is where my job began.

Alexs said "..come up with something different". To me that ruled out magical sparkle-stars, spirally pink smoke explosions, glow-transitions or anything that came immediately to mind as a magical cliché. You can see below that I settled on a splash effect on her skin.

I was going for an idea that her skin was liquefied on contact, thrown up into a splash, like water. However, because of the high-lights and flat colour, it came out looking simply like a skin-coloured potion splash. As you can also see, I applied my knowledge of real world FX to a magical effect that I hadn't seen before.

Summary

I recommend you check out Michel Gagné's work at his website. There are a few other interesting pieces of his in which shapes and movement represent or correspond to sounds. In particular, check out Fixed Fragmented Fluid and Sensology (below).