Illustrator tutorial

I am familiar with Illustrator so I found the tasks set quite easy, I did learn however how to save it in other formats such as jpeg and png, by exporting the file instead of saving. But it was nice to have a catch up on using the program as I haven't used it in a while.

We then played around with how the stoke can be manipulated, this option was slightly new to me, and I liked all the effects and textures the different strokes gave the shapes. 

Our last task was to trace round an image of Totoro. I did this by drawing round the shapes, creating as little points as possible and filling it with colour. I put each section on a new layer so it was more organised and I could easily control what I doing.

  

And here is my finished Totoro

Pose to pose animation -

This task was done to help us explore and understand timing. I drew out a plan for the pendulum, making sure there were more frames either end of the swing so that it would ease in and out. I then drew out each frame on punch paper. I probably should have used a penny or something to draw round as the size of the ball increases and decreases and changes shape slightly. If I were to take this further I'd have got rid of the background using levels on photoshop and refined the animation so it looked more appealing.  

But to show my understanding of pose to pose, I think I've demonstrated my understanding of timing and easing in and out. 

I then created another demonstration some of the principles of animation. I probably could have drawn something a bit more exciting, but for showing my understanding, a portal works.  

Pixilation project

I jotted down some ideas for each of the 3 topics so I could pick form a variety of ideas rather than just going with my first idea. I went with an idea I had for prey and predator, using lego figures as the predators and a friend for the prey.

I drew up a plan to direct me when doing my project, including camera movements and expressions. 

I did some tests but probably not enough as I think the whole thing could have used more frames to make it flow slightly better. I did think the story maybe unclear to others, but when we showed them in class they seemed to understand that the lego figures had come to life, went to attack Katie, but she put them in a box and they couldn't get out. 

                         

Some things that were pointed out were that you can see the camera reflection in the photo frame, so I'd need to avoid reflective surfaces or angle the camera so it does not show. 

Photoshop timeline animation

Friday's lesson we were taught how to animate using timeline. We used the tablets to draw our frames at 12fps. We had to create an animation of approximately 5 seconds and include at least 1 of the 4 elements in our animation. I did a plan as to what I wanted my animation to be of. 

I planed to include all of the elements to test myself on whether I could animate them well or not. 

The first element you see if fire, this is the only bit in colour because I thought my animation need some vibrate in it, to make it slightly more fun. As it's coming up to halloween I made this my theme, I have the ufo crashing into the ground, which is where the next element comes in, and the surface cracks.

Next, it's not exactly water, but the fact that the ufo melts and turns into a liquid is the same thing. This is also the bit I like most, I think I animated that well, but there could be more frames before the ghost like creature rises up, I think it's too fast and unclear that the ghost creature has been created from the melted ufo. 

Wind is the next elements and even though I like the movement of the ghost being swept away, I think more frames could have been added at the end to make the animation smoother. 

I didn't really like animating in Photoshop mainly because I find it difficult to draw something decent with the tablets. I found adding a new layer for colour difficult, so for this I just added colour on the same layers making it so if I made a mistake I'd have to try and avoid the outline of the drawings.

Pixilation - research

To help me generate ideas for the task set, I looked at existing pixilation animation videos that have been created, I picked four that I enjoy watching, because to me they are innovative, not so much with the technique, but the idea behind them to create their final piece of work.  

T-shirt war by Rhett and LinK who I found on YouTube. They designed and had printed 222 individual t-shirt to use in this pixilation. As well as the humours story, I like that they use depth of field to focus on important parts, for example where he his going to throw the egg back. 

I feel like post-it note animation has been done quite a lot, but this one has been very well done, it reminds me of procrastination, when you have a lot of wrk to be doing yet you have other things in your head and I feel like the post-it notes could be a representation of that. 

Her morning elegance by Oren Lavie is a really nice stop motion, it's just really nice as she is acting out her dream in a way and it's quite a relaxing video to watch. 

PES is a favourite stop motion artist of mine. The way he creates his work is so smooth it makes those who have no idea what stop motion is, think it's some kind of magic. Clearly a lot of planning and preparation goes into making these and I would like to create something that make people really question how it was made. 

Photography induction

We were each given a DSLR camera and shown the basics of how to change the setting, clear images on the card and how to take certain types of photos.

I had had lessons in how to use a DSLR camera before and so was familiar with what I was being told. I had previous mainly used Nikon cameras in my Extended Diploma, but own a Canon so was fairly familiar with the set up.

We were taught about shutter speed, aperture and iSO and asked to take 6 photos to demonstrate our understanding of basic photography techniques.

Our task was to take 6 photos that demonstrated our understanding of: shutter speed, by taking a photo with a smaller shutter speed to create a blurred effect and a high shutter speed to capture a fast moving object. Aperture, to show how depth of field can be created, a low aperture will created a lower depth of field, for example the foreground will be in focus and the background blurred, with a higher aperture, more of the image will be in focus. ISO to show how lowering the iso will make the camera less sensitive to light, and to increase will be more sensitive to light but may also increase the noise of the image.

With this image I used a low aperture to create more of a focus on the alien in the foreground, causing Buzz Lightyear to be out of focus. 

With this image I raised the aperture to a higher f number so that more of the composition was in focus. The image is slightly darker, but I know it's because I forgot to adjust the shutter speed to balance it out. 

I spun a coin to help be demonstrate about shutter speed. I used a high shutter speed to capture or freeze, if you like, a fast moving object.







I then lowered the shutter speed to 1" so that the photo would be taken over 1 second to create this blurred effect.  

ISO is about light sensitivity, here in a relatively well lit room, I set the ISO to a higher number which is cause the image to be over exposed








Here in the same lighting, shutter speed and aperture as the previous image, I lowered the ISO to create a darker image with resulted in the image having noise. If I were to take an image where the environment was dimly lit, say at a gig, I would increase the ISO to allow to me increase my shutter speed to take a better photo. 

Animating using Photoshop

I had never used photoshop to animate before so the lesson I had and the things I learnt were all new to me.

Using the flip books I made last week, I scanned in each page of one of my flip books. I scanned them in at 300 dpi so I was working with an image larger than its original size, which is quite small. 

I then opened each image into photoshop to edit them. For each image, I used the crop tool to set the dimensions I wanted to work with (landscape A4) to crop down and rotate the image so that I was working with the same dimensions with each image. I then used levels to make the image backgrounds a clear white and make the ball outline darker so it could be seen clearer. 

I then resized the image, changing the dpi to 72 instead of 300. 

To begin animating, I opened the images in Birdge, where I could select all the images I wanted, go to 'tools' - 'Photoshop' - 'load files to Photoshop layers', which is a quicker way off adding all the images into Photoshop. To add them into a timeline, I went to 'window' - 'timeline' and selected create frame animation, from here I could either add a new frame or because I had images in my layers I could select 'make frames from layers' and 'reverse' to add them to the timeline. 

To add colour I simply used the brush tool and the blending mode 'multiply' to add a bit of colour to each frame. when I was happy with the animation I save it for web to create this looping gif. 

The animation does however need more of an arc motion as this pretty much in a zig zag motion. 

Matrix style flipbook animation

I found this flip book which I like because not only is the artist really talented, but the video also show how many frames per second are used to create different speeds. The more frames drawn in each scene the slower the animation will be. Like in this flip book they used the bullet time bit from the matrix to demonstrate how more frames will slow the whole thing down, so that something is clearer to the audience or for dramatic effect.

Flip Books

We were set the task of creating a flip book that would help us understand some essential animation skills. 

In the powerpoint before we we started to create the flip books we were told the 12 principles of animation. 

These principles are:

- squash and stretch 

- anticipation

- staging 

- pose to pose and straight ahead

- follow through and overlapping

- slow in and slow out

- arcs

- secondary action

- timing 

- exaggeration

- solid drawing

- appeal and personality

We focused on squash and stretch when creating our flip books, as this gives the illusion of weight and the object's material.

I first of all created a ball bouncing on the spot and then decided to change the weight of it so that it did not bounce. The first animation worked pretty well as the ball had character and the bounce sequence worked well to communicate that the ball was light and made of a material that would fall and bounce. 

In my next animation, I don't think this worked as well, even though it fell straight to the ground which would suggest that the ball is heavier, it just didn't look appealing, I think I would have to work from retrace to see how a heavier ball would react when hitting the ground. 

For my next flip book, I made the ball travel across the page.   

And for my third, I added a wall for the ball to bounce onto, this didn't flow as well as I'd like it to, it's fine bouncing towards the wall but I couldn't make it hitting the wall very realistic and it just didn't flow, again this could be because I needed something to reference from. 

Refining my storyboard

After receiving comments that my storyboard needed more dimension to it. I tried to add more dimension in my camera angles by adding shadow and by trying to make certain aspects look 3d but in my opinion I sill think it can be taken further. But looking at it story wise, people thought it was clear and easy to follow. In my first storyboard I thought that the story was slight unclear and needed a frame or two to show how Humpty fell off the wall, I added in 3 more frames and another character (the bird) which I think communicates better the actions before Humpty actually fell. 

When we had all finished our refined storyboards we took 10 minutes to have a look at each others work and give them comments. some of the critical comments I received were that; I could use more camera angles, more detail was needed, more colour was needed and that it was a little basic and should have added something more to the story to make it my own. 

If I were to refine it even more, I would try to add more detail in the background, I do this by changing the way I added colour because I thought I needed more of a range of colours to communicate what kind of era the story is set in, the bright colours I did use didn't give the impression of the story being set in the medieval era, so I would use duller colours to do this. I thought I did use a range of camera angles but obviously some are too similar to others, so I could go back and have a look at other ways I could draw the shots. I also didn't want to add too much detail, as some of the storyboards I did see that had a lot of shading and detail, were a bit confusing for me to follow as there was so much going on, but I do agree that my drawings are pretty basic and could use with just that bit more detail to form the characters and environment a bit more. I'd have to look back at some of the storyboard artists to see how they added detail, but so that it was still clear to understand. 

Storyboarding

To get an idea of professional storyboarding I looked online for some storyboards of well known animations. 

 http://jessicaandsarah.wordpress.com/advertisement-unit/storyboard-advertising/

This Peter Pan storyboard from Disney, is most likey an initial sketch, and is focusing on key frames of movement and camera angles.  

   

http://blogs.disney.com/insider/articles/2013/08/08/disney-animation-is-at-your-fingertips/

 Looking at a more detailed storyboard sketch, more frames are added to help tell the story better so that, I as the audience and the animator can understand it better. The way the storybook is presented is a good way of working, like the way I used sticky notes to create my rough draft, the artist can easily replace or remove a frame, if it is unclear or unnecessary. There's no written camera directions or arrows to show movement, that I can see in this image, however each frame does suggest the movement of the character.

http://laikaworld.tumblr.com/

To refine storyboards even more, like here with this ParaNorman storyboard, they can be taken further digitally, I think digital storyboards can be more clear to understand as even though it's still in black and white, the solid colours and line quality make the characters stand out from the background. There is also more detail to the storyboard, in the Disney storyboards there was no proper backgrounds. Here you get more of a sense about what is happening in the story by knowing where they are and what;s around the characters.

I then looked for some coloured storyboards. Here in this Aladdin storyboard, colour is used to give more detail about lighting and shading, in the second frame, darker colours are used which would suggest that he is now in a darker environment. Colour helps the communicate what kind of mood it is, what time of the day it is etc... It helps build the characters a bit more in my opinion. 

Photoshop Induction

In this Photoshop induction we were taught the basic tools of photoshop, how to create a new file, open and copy images into that file. Most of this was things I had already learnt, but it was useful to refresh my memory on some of the point covered.

The image I create was just layering images onto of each other to create something new and adjusting the hue to make the images work better together to create a more realistic scenery.

Some shortcuts mentioned were new to me, I knew the basics for zooming in and out, the short cut to transform an image and how to move the image using space bar. I did learn how to copy an image using alt and drag and will continue to practice using shortcut more often to speed up the process of my work.

We also went over how to use clipping mask so that we could hide parts of an image instead of erasing it completely. And we learnt how to use the marque tool to select areas, which we could then colour in without going over your desired section.

Introduction to storyboarding

In today's lesson we were asked to pick a nursary rhyme to create a storyboard of. I first picked out main bits of the rhyme to help me get an idea of what the key frames would be, then I started to ask myself; what kind of enviroment was the rhyme set in, what characters are there and what kind of shot I wanted to make the story clear to follow. I did this so I wasn't just jumping into drawing and had to actually think about what I was trying to tell my audience. 

I then began storyboarding, I read over my notes a couple of times to help me picture in my head the visual side of the story and get it onto paper. I tried to use a range of camera shots and different view points to keep the audience interested so they weren't just looking at the same angle or panning movement all the time. 

Comments I recieved were that my storyboard was 'nice and clear' and that it was 'easy to tell what story it is'. People liked that I had included envriomental settings but felt like it was too flat and 2D. So when we begin refineing our drafts in the next lesson I will try and add more dimention within my drawings.