8 Mixed media

I picked the paper aeroplane to draw for my mixed media because, I liked the biro sketches I had done and could work from observation. I made a paper aeroplane (the pink plane above) and drew it from different perspectives. I used some media I would normally use to draw with such as the oil pastel and charcoal. But I like that they gave a different texture and feel to them. The charcoal drawing looks very dark like it belongs in something with a horror theme compared to the pen ones where the lines are clean and has colour to them.

Visual language - 32 sketches for flight

I picked the word flight because I thought I would be able to get a range or different things drawn. I did a mind map to write down words that came into my head which I thought of flight, then used a dictionary and thesaurus to find other words I may not have thought of. 

I tried to draw from observation as much as I could or used photos I had taken previously to work from. I drew the stairs, bullet and birds from observation and drew, I mainly drew the insects from photos and had to resort to Google to help me get reference for the other drawings. 

I drew in biro because I am comfortable drawing in this media, so I was able to draw, especially from observation, a lot quicker to catch movement if there was any.

Interim Crit

For today's interim crit, we got into out little groups and presented our powerpoints, I know it's not the usual way we do powerpoints, but I did feel like i could comment on others work more than I would have in a larger group. I also felt more confident about presenting my own ideas too.

I presented both my ideas, the paper aeroplane and the Minecraft audio ideas, and my group like the idea with the Minecraft gameplay audio because it's humorous and fit within the 20 second time limit. 

The comments I received were pretty predicable as I knew I needed to think more about character and environmental design. Emma suggested that I look at other animation where they have worked from existing audio, to get a feel for the fast paced movements and cuts. 

I wanted to work on paper but my group suggested digital because, it's easier and to get me to work with different materials.

So for the next bit of the project I'm going to focus on my character design, and environmental design. Also improve on the depth of the environmental design so my animation isn't flat. I'm going to look at others work for influence and try out creating characters with different media; so digial, pencil, marker pens etc...    

Animatic

Character design

I first of all started looking at what other people had done involving the people I am and with Minecraft. They were al fairly similar, so to make mine look different, I looked at other character from films and games I liked to get some different character styles. 

I like the one's with limited colours and that aren't as neat as, say, Disney's characters are. If I were to use colour it would be very limited and just block fills to give the characters more character. 

I'm not going to make my characters too detailed, because I think I'd like to draw my animation instead of doing ti digitally. I thought about doing a stop motion, but I think it would take too long to do, making the characters and settings. So I'm sticking to drawing. 

Visual referencing

I collected some imagery from the internet and that I had taken to help  me understand more about how the elements look in different environments. 

New storyboard

Okay so for this, I've avoided watching the gameplay I've taken the audio from so I come up with my own visual story and character.

In this story, Ryan acusses Gavin of killing his wolf, which Gavin denies. Ryan chases Gavin with a flamed torch resulting in setting himself on fire. But he still continues to try and burn Gavin. Gavin jumps into a pond and challenges Ryan to try burning him in there.

This is just a rough storyboard for now as I need to think about camera movements as well as camera angles.

Change of idea.

I felt like the idea with the paper aeroplane didn't really show much or the air element, and the story I had would be a lot longer than the 20 we were set to animate, I did try to cut down the story but I didn't think it made any sence any more when I did. 

Then after watching A Let's play Minecraft video, I found a bit that I wanted to animate using the audio. This bit includes both fire and water elements and I think would be a lot more interesting as it would have proper audio. 

I cut the audio down to get the parts of speech I wanted.

Paperman

When I had the idea for my story then first think that came into my mind, as a source of research, was Pixar's Paperman. This could be seen that my idea is too similar, because it involves a paper aeroplane and is a kind of love story. So I need to make sure it's different to this. I'm going to use Paperman as a source of reference to how the paper plane is animated,

I like the use of colour in Paper man. Everything is in black and white apart from the lip stick mark, this is effect as it's then the main focus as you and the characters easily identify the piece of paper. The woman recognises the lip stick mark and follows the paper plane. The story itself is quite beautiful and romantic and the use of colour reminds you of one of those old silent films.

Storyboard

Generating ideas - The classical elements

To help get me started with the project, I did some word generating to get a range of words relating to each of the elements so that I could then pick out some of the words I liked and could get a story out of.

After picking some words, I then thought of a story for each element. I then decided to go with my idea for air, I think I'll enjoy creating this animation as it's based off something personal. 

Magic water - Guldies

I've been watching this guy's video for a while and I find them really entertaining. I don't think there's a specific audience, apart from those who are interested in stop motion. He does create small stories I suppose, and sometimes gives the little play-doh shapes characteristics, to make them seem alive. he's purely created these stop motion because he enjoys dong them, and people enjoy watching them. 

Morph

Morph is still around, with new episodes on YouTube. Morph is a show aimed at children, but I'd say adults enjoy it just as much. Morph was on tv as part of a kids art program when I was younger. 

It's simple characters who have there own little language if you like, are always getting up to mischief, which makes the show humorous which appeals to kids.

Gulp. The world's largest stop-motion animation

Not only is this awesome because it's the world largest stop motion, but because it was shot on a Nokia N8. This isn't an advertisements as such, but a creative way to show off how good the camera and storage on the phone is. It's communicating that you can be really creative with a phone, some space and a number of people, but on an exaggerated level. 

It appeals to creative people and those who have a love of technology. I know my first thought when I watched this was 'no way was is shot on a phone'. 

Lloyds TSB

This advertisement effectively uses animation to make their bank seem a lot less confusing and simpler than other banks. It's got a happy little tune, with happy little characters and everything just looks nice. They describe all the things they do to help people in hope that people will choose to bank with them. I think the animation does help a bit, because people like their advert and I've heard people talk about it, but whether it would make them choose their bank, I don't know. It doesn't make me want to switch banks.   

Nike Football: The Last Game

I picked this animated advertisement because it's aimed at a male audience, there' the slogan throughout the entire advert, whether that being written or spoken, encouraging it's audience to 'risk everything' and after you've watched the whole story it's telling you to buy 'the latest gear to risk everything'. I do think the advertisement does its job, you get intrigued by the whole story and it makes you want to have same boots as the professionals. Nike always have great, make you want to go out and do something, adverts, but I like this because there's a whole story to it and the caricatures of the footballers are quite humorous too.     

Evaluation

Over this project we have explored a number of animation techniques: storyboarding, flip books, pixilation, pose to pose.

I think my skills, to say this is the first real practice of animation, have improved. I’ve learnt how to refine and do a storyboard and I now know how to create a storyboard that I, and the people I’d be working with, will understand. I also got better at working in thirds and staging and also tried to make each scene have different view point and include camera action so that the shots in the animation wouldn’t be the same. My drawing skill may need to improve more, but I think I just need to get back into drawing more often which the OUAN404 will help me with.

I enjoyed the flip book task, I think for them to be better I need to work on my arching, I think I got the hang of easing in and out, the more frames you have the slower the animation will be. Also got the hang of squashing and stretching, I think I should have explored further with other shapes rather than just with the ball, But I understand to exaggerated the squash and stretch to make it look good and give it some character.

We also did pose to pose, which was kind of carrying on from the flip books but working on punch paper and planning out the key frames before we started. This was more effective as when doing the flip books, I did a quick plan then jumped straight into it, with pose to pose, I planned out the key frames then those in between, and used punch paper to trace over and it was a lot more accurate. I think my pendulum worked well, it had an arc, it had easing in and out and it was planned.

Next we did pixilation, as much as I love doing this, I need to plan out what I’m doing a lot better. I always end up with less frames than I had planned, so in future I’m going to plan, plan, plan. I thought I planned well in the Apply pixilation, as I tested the whole thing first, then went back knowing I needed more frames. For some parts especially in the beginning of the pixilation and end, it worked well, but in the middle it all goes too fast to understand. I also think I just need to plan my time better and do more testing. Even though I spend a morning testing and an afternoon doing the final thing, this still wasn’t enough time for me, as I wanted to go back and refine things, but my actor had gone home and it was now dark so the lighting will have changed, making the pixilation a bit mixed matched. I’m going to sick will it though, because I do like the process of stop motion, I just think I need to learn from my mistakes and practice more.

We also had a number of tutorials I was already familiar with illustrator, after effects and Photoshop. But learning how to actually animate was new, but I feel like I picked it up all pretty quick and can use it in the future. Flash was something new and I didn’t think I really got the hang of using it, but if I want to work mainly with stop motion, I may not even need to use it again.

Overall, I learnt a lot about the basics of animation, and feel confident abut creating future animations using the techniques I have used.

Apply - Pixilation

I tested my pixilation to see how it would work and to see if I need to change anything about. As you can see this video runs really fast and I think it was due to the lack of frames I had. So I'm going to go back and do it again, have Katie move in smaller steps, so I get a nice fluid motion, and so you can actually see what the hell is going on.  

I used card to add the faces and arms onto the lamp, these were quick to make so I had more time to do the pixilation and simple taped them to the lamp the change and add them onto the lamp

Okay, so I did the pixilation again, this video is a lot better than the above. There's still some bits that need more frames to make it slower. I'm still not entirely happy with and I want to go back and redo the part where the lamp grows arms, because I think that that bit went way too quickly. The only problem I have now, is that it's got dark outside and therefore the lighting will be different. Also the video is only 11 second when the brief said 20-30 seconds for a pixilation. 

A I has picked 'surprise' and 'fear' to based my animation off, the story for my pixilation was that, a girl would go and turn on her lamp, the lamp would have a face, to which she was surprised at. The lamp then turned evil and would chase after her, so for that she would fear the lamp.

The pixilation had to be at 12fps, which my pixilation is, but the target of making a 20-30 second pixilation didm't quite work as my end pixilation is only 11 seconds.

I'd really like to go back and amend my pixilation but I don't really have the time. I think for some bits I just need to plan better at how long I want each scene and make sure I take the right amount of photos for it. I think I got the effect of Katie gliding across the floor done okay and the time for this turned out how I'd planned, but the bits I wanted as faster motion, are too fast to understand what's going on really.

Also there could have been more of the principles of animation in there. I had planned to include arcs, with the reaching to the lamp, but I don't like that had come across in the pixilation. I think that the facial expressions were over exaggerated, but there could have included obvious easing in and out, which I don't think I did very well.

ParaNorman

Ah ParaNorman, words cannot describe how much I love this film, but I'll try. 
First of all, it's apparently the first stop-motion film to have used 3D printing technology to help create their puppets, this would have probably sped up their creating process slightly, as they didn't have to produce mould and casts for each expression. 

The story helps it's viewers understand that people can act cruel because they were scared, Norman helps Agatha to see that the zombie judges were scared of what she could do and so they acted cruel. Because Norman has been bullied himself for being different he can sympathise with Agatha to help her understand why the judges did what they did, and she does and can finally rest. 

The film is a PG so aimed at a young audience, but at 18 years old, I love this film so much. I love it for the story (the message and the horror kind of theme), the stop motion, the production process, it's just great.     

Story boarding - Apply

Human Movement - Eadweard Muybridge

For my pixilation, I wanted to do some research to see how the principles of animation can be done using people. I looked at Eadward Muybridge as he studied and photographed movement. There's some principles such as arcs and squash and stretch. He basically took these motion pictures to prove a point that all four hooves of a horse leave the ground at some point in the gallop, but this technique of capturing motion helped us understand more on the way animals and people more in more detail.   

Flash tutorial

First time using Flash and similarly to Photoshop, I didn't really like using it. I found it easier to use than Photoshop, but I don't think I really like animating digitally, it does create better line quality and better colour, makes it look a lot more professional, but maybe I just need to spend more time to get used to the program. I played around with the shapes and the options that help create animation, but I don't think I could use it to animate something good. 

I demonstrated some principles of animating to show that I'd attempted to use the program, by adding easing in and out and squash and stretch by 'skew'ing the shape so make it appear that the square was sliding to a stop. 

Word/idea generating

The Wolf Among Us

This video game is based off the comic book series Fables by Bill Willingham. I love that they kept the comic book styled drawings, this one one of the things that lead me to buy the games. The game for me is like watching a cartoon (especially in the cutscenes) that you can interact with and depending on how you make the characters in the game, the story changes with your decisions, I just love it. 

The game is obviously for entertainment purposes, as it's a video game. It's not a comic or game aimed at young children, but for young adults, who have maybe read the comics or people who like the character style and the fact that your decisions have an impact on how the game goes.