Character Loop Task Evaluation

After I decided on my character I drew my frames by hand. Once I had the frames together I then had to scan them onto the computer in order to place them into photoshop.

Once in photoshop I had to adjust each frame and “clean” it. Meaning get rid of any accidental pencil marks, turn the background into a solid white and make sure the outline was crystal clear.

I only had 8 frames In my animation, which made the skipping noticeable to the eye and the drawings were out of sync with each other. It is because of this I decided to redo the animation but not draw it by hand. I decided to use the Bamboo Wacom drawing tablets in order to recreate the animation entirely in photoshop. This one lasted 14 frames but the process was slightly different. Instead of drawing each frame I just kept on adjusting the components of the first frame in order to make it look like my character was moving.

I wasn’t particularly satisfied with this animation either, although it definitely looks better than the hand drawn attempt. I’ve come to the conclusion that for my first loop animation I should have stuck to something simple, like walking or jumping. Keeping my characters wings in sync whilst having his arms moving was no easy task.

If I were to attempt this again I would definitely change my idea to something more reasonable and doable.

Finished Limerick Video + Evaluation

After many still photos of paper cut outs we finally pieced our limerick animation together. One thing that we did forget to add however was credits. We didn’t remember this until quite late into the process and did not have time to create animated credits.

One thing I was definitely pleased about from the animation was how it all went according to plan. The ideas we came up with were realistic and doable, and they all worked just as we expected them too. I think we should have taken more fluent still photos as you can definitely see the frame skip in the animation.

We did not plan ahead on the sound so when the time came to record it, we simply improvised. It was my idea to not recorded dialogue but to imply that the characters are making noises, very similar to the style of “Mr Bean” I think this worked quite well in terms of being comical. The footsteps we recorded however were not realistic, although the sound heavily implied footsteps they were really out of sync and the volume of them was not controlled.

Limerick animation task

Our latest assignment was to create a cut-out animation on Istopmotion. As we were introduced to the task we were shown a previous students cut-out animation for their music video. We were to create an animation of the same style but for a limerick. Here is the students music video we were shown.

We were also in groups for this task and each group was given a limerick. The limerick our group was given was

“There once was a man from Peru,

Who wanted to live in a shoe,

A size 6 was too small,

So he went to the mall,

And found a size 12 with a view”

As we had to make our own sets/backgrounds, the first step was to plan them, the two setting we chose were the mans house and the mall. We intended the animation to show that he couldn’t fit in the first shoe, we then showed him buying a new one from the mall and sitting in that.

Here is me and another member of the group planning the storyboard.

Practitioner 3: Sumo Science

Sumo Science are a company that specialize in animation. It was formed by Ed Patterson and Will Studd, an award winning directing duo who specialize in different forms of animation. They intend to create a “fresh mix” of animation styles using stop motion, puppetry, 2D and live-action.

The biggest success for Sumo Science as of 2011 is the film ‘Dot.’ Made for Nokia this film went on to win 15 major advertisement awards as well as claiming the Guinness world record for the smallest stop-motion character in a film. It holds nearly three million hits online.

The duo have only recently worked with nokia again to make another short film called ‘Gulp.’ The film is ever growing online and also holds a world record for largest animation set. Nokia hired the duo to promote their new phone and the entire ‘Gulp.’ Animation was composed of still photos from the phones camera.

Box Animation

We attempted to create an animation in the style of Jan Svankmajer, this meant using stop motion and props. In this task we worked in groups, our group was given a deck of cards and the tin they were in to create a stop motion animation.

We planned to have the cards leave the tin and turn face up as they were doing so, the cards would slide out, pile up into three piles and once the cards were out the tin would close. We then had the tin re open and have the cards slide and flip back into the tin, here is how the animation turned out.

Once we had captured each frame and put them together, we then had to record the sound to our animation as it was shot in still frames. To imitate the cards sliding out we simply flipped the cards constantly, as in the animation they were moving too quickly to match individual sounds. We imitated the tin sounds by opening and closing the tin the same times it occurred in the animation.

Practitioner 2: Jan Švankmajer

Jan Švankmajer is a Czech filmmaker and artists who participates in a variety of work. He has labelled himself a surrealist due to the style of his unique animations. Which have influenced many other well known artists. Jan Švankmajer learned about art in the 1950s. He created his first film in 1964 and he is responsible for many unique animated movies. Many of his movies are stop motion based such as this one released in 1989 entitled “Darkness/Light/Darkness” Jan Švankmajer often worked with clay to create his animations.

Švankmajer won the feature film award when attending the 1989 Annecy International Animated film festival. Švankmajers uses of sounds were often recognized due to their unique use. His projects take an incredible amount of effort to see through and he is currently working on one due for release in 2015.

Practitioner 1: BLU

BLU is an Argentine street artist who conceals his real identity from the public. He lives in Bologna and has been working in Street art since 1999. BLU has travelled around the world performing his unique street art. He was first known for his work with spray paint. In 2001 BLU began to make his work bigger, better and more noticeable and managed to stand out enough to make him known to street artists around the world.

In 2008 the Tate Modern building hosted a celebration of street art, BLU was asked to paint on the Tate Modern building for this event as a respected street artist. BLU creates incredible animations on streets which add up to millions of online views. BLU uses walls and pavements as his canvas and is capable of creating minutes of animation on one wall. This is one of BLUs most famous and innovative videos, it is named MUTO and is a wall-painted animation created by BLU.

Looping Character Task

This task was similar to the bouncing ball exercise, we were to use the same number of frames or less to create a short, hand drawn animation. The only difference is it had to loop, meaning the animation could repeat over and over and the end of the animation re connects with the beginning.

We had to design our own character for this task, so the first step was creating the character. This task was inspired by BLU, a famous street artist. So our character was to be in the style of street art.

I’m happy to admit that drawing is not my greatest strength, if I combined this with the fact that this character had to be drawn 32 times, I decided I need to keep it simple. The animation I chose was a flying-square shaped character smoking a cigarette.

The animation was of him flying and taking a drag on his cigarette.

Bouncing Ball Excerise

The bouncing ball exercise is essentially my first animation. We started with 32 blank pages and numbered them accordingly. The first step was to draw a horizon line in the same location on each page, this ensured continuity. I then drew keyframes spaced out in the pages, usually whenever the ball bounced I would draw it’s location. This helped to make the frames between bounces accurate. My horizon line was not very steady as I did not use a ruler, I thought as it’s my first animation it should be freehand.

I pieced the animation together using the software Istopmotion. To do this I set a camera up above my 32 pages and took a photo of each frame. Once each photo was taken and pressed together in Istopmotion, I exported the clip to the video editing software Final Cut. I did this so I could repeat it five times over and add s soundtrack. I feel I could have improved on my animation by adding a background that worked with the ball.