Joel Fletcher

Joel Fletcher is a character animation and visual artists for feature films, commercials and video games. He is based in Los Angeles and also does photography, in particular he works with anaglyphs.

Fletcher started painting from an early age and had his goals set on becoming a book illustrator. For a school project Fletcher worked with Super 8 film where he found his passion for animation. After his college years Fletcher continued his painting and took up carpentering, picture framing and being a waiter to pay his bills and cover expenses. In 1981 Fletcher was given a grant from University of Wisconsin Board of Regents for film making after which he moved to LA to pursue a career in filmmaking where he managed to get work as a model maker, prop fabricator, set builder and eventually an animator. (Fletcher. J. 2014)

Joel Fletcher

What attracted me to Fletcher's work was his gallery on landscape anaglyphs as he was one of very few I have managed to find, if not the only. Looking through his website Fletcher has published a lot of work utilising stereo anaglyphs, he has several galleries dedicated to the art including landscape, nightmare, glamour, digital and movie related.

The majority of Fletcher's anaglyphic work is in black and white while he landscape work is in colour. Comparing the two I think the black and white work is much more effective and illustrates the 3D illusion much better than the colour work. There is a ghosting effect that can occur when making anaglyphs because of over layering colours and lines, this effect seems to appear a lot more in the colour images so the black and white images seems to be a lot higher quality, crisper and sharper, from other research I gathered this seems to be a general thing between black and white and colour anaglyphs no matter what the quality, the black and white version generally looks better.

Joel Fletcher

When comparing the above black and white images to the colour ones below its easy to see the quality appears to be better with the black and white images, perhaps this is the because of the nature of the subject, the geometry of the subjects, or because of the previously mentioned black and white and colour quality thing.

When looking at the images below I think the 3D effect struggles with the trees, in particular with trees in the background. The images with the trees as the foreground work well, but when they start to creep towards the background the image starts to become unclear and blurred.

Joel Fletcher

Joel Fletcher

Joel Fletcher

Joel Fletcher