I looked at a previous Fedrigoni Brief to see what had been previously done for the company, and what kind of level of work they would be expecting this year. Their task was to desgin a new marketing tool to promote their new Sirio Ultra Black paper. For what I can see from the winners, the element of 3d was used a lot, creating depth to the work, making it stand out.
With this brief the artist created a world made up of the different sheets of paper, inviting the viewer to look closer at the text.
After we had had a little play with the plasticine, working purley from the designs, I researched into guides of plasticine characters, and thought these tutorials really help with what tools to use and how to create the sections of the body, and how to add that little bit of detail to make them unique. I also looked at some of the people I follow on Instagram who are amazing with plasticine.
Stefano Colfrerai, creates these cute looking characters, they have an Aardman style to them, which is one of the reasons I like them. They're bright and colourful and are usually involve a funny senario. I thought this would be a good influnece for us with our characters.
Rich Webber works fore Aardman, but is always looking for new characters to create. most involve a monster/ alien creature of some kind or odd but cute looking birds. I also took inspiration from him to look for new ways to created a stylised character.
Now we had a storyboard and charcter designs, our next step was to experiment with plasticine to figure out how where going to turn Ciara's drawings into 3d characters. This is something I really enjoy doing so was really excited to start.
We first of all picked a character (the sheep) and decided to both individually create this character based on the design.
We both went for a similar approach to creating white balls and building it up to make the body, however with mine, I began to merge mine together and then used my jumper to add more of a wooly texture.
We put them beside eachother and picked out what we thought would work to finalise a design. I liked how bulky Ciara had made the eyes on her sheep, I thought they stood out more and that it really worked with the character, I also like the squareness of her sheeps face, as I had done mine more pointed, but I think the body of my sheep works better, as it's bigger and the design doesn't topple over as it also had 4 sturdy legs.
Annabeth suggessted adding a next, so it's not all squished together and so you can move it's head around if needed. I think the sheep now looked better, and if we do need to move its head around, we can.
These are the 3 sheep we made that session, the last sheep is a combonation of all the things we thought worked from the other two sheep, I do however think the boddy needs to be slightly bigger, and we need to work on the texture as it may be a little too fine.
Mike then suggested to buy some eye beads for the characters, then we can easily move them around with a pin, and that using vasiline will hold them to the modle, but allowes you to move them around.
He also said to do some camera tests to make sure you can capture the detail, if it doesn't pick up exaggerate it more.
We also need to think about scale, as there are quite tiny.
I think our next job will be to create some mouth so we know what size we need to work at and what mouth look best with the characters.
While Ciara was creating the 3rd sheep, I begain creating another character, the newt. I worked from the design, the design was two colours, grey with green underneith, but I though with him being on his bell, the green wouldn't be shown, so I made him in the closest plasticine colour to the design. when I had finished, I thought he looked a bit boring so I looked up on Google images for some inspiration of different newts. I found this image and loved the spots on his back, and wanted to create a similar pattern on my character.
I mixed the grey I used witch some white to make it lighter, the rolled out a thin black strip to go round it.
I still need to consider where his mouth will go and if I'll need to change anything when we get to this point.
I also thought about how the farmer would come to be. I thought long about how I'd do his beard, i began by sticking on rolled out plasticine, but this really didn't look right, so I begain creating texture with my scalple and I really loved how it looked. i had to be so careful went handling as I didn't want to squash the texture, and that make me think if it was too much, but I've recieve nothing but good comments on it, so I think the texture will stay.
Again I need to consider his mouth, and how he will speak. I did think out the short film La Luna from Pixar, because when the dad and grandfather speak in this, only there mustaches move, and I quite liked the idea of this, as I think a bulky mouth might ruin his look.
I put together an animatic to show the timings of the animation we plan to do. I tried to add in any parts where the camera pans and zooms. I think I needed to add in some camera directions from the script, so it's not just on shot for 10 seconds of the character talking, adding bits like: 'Cutting back to the farmer, camera
zooms into his posture. Whilst he is talking there are multiple close up of his
mundane actions, for example rubbing his hands together, scratching his head.
This scene is to be as natural as possible, but still illustrating his concern
for his farm and business.' should make it more interesting to watch.
Taking on board the feedback I got from the crit, I changed the text on the back to white so it was easier to read. Happy with my final design, I have now submitted it into the competition. I made sure I followed the submission requirements, So I had to save my file so it was less than 5MB and made sure it was submitted in PDF
Fedrigoni The problems I aim to solve are... - to promote new the new individual paper space - to create engaging, appealing content In order to solve these problems I will.... - research into existing Fedrigoni promotions - come up with engaging ideas - promote the new range I will be aiming to communicate (3 specific messages,ideas,moods etc)... - the new space for individually sold paper - engaging visual outcomes To an audience of... - existing customors of Fedrigoni - new customers of creative backgrounds
The brief I chose to work on is Fedrigoni, as I love creating with paper. The brief tells me that the company want to promote their new single sheets which will be available at The London Graphic Centre.
The company don't want 'just a leaflet' to be created, so my first thoughts were to create something like a cut out, create something 3d or even produce a short animation of some kind. It needs to be engaging, something that will attract attention using paper.
In lesson, me and Ciara discussed our research and started to pick out bits we liked and were informative, and started to put together a story. Ciara then went of and wrote this up into a script. Using the script, Ciara's character designs and some sketches I made when planning the story together, I created a storyboard.
Beacuse we're aiming to create an interview type of documentoary, I used the rule of thirds and made sure the min focus and foreground was the character who is speaking. The camera will be mostly still while the characters are speacking, but I plan for some panning in the begining while the interviewer is speaking, so it won't be a boring start. and also if something is being refered to we can cut to or pan across crops for example. I spoke each piece of text and timed myself so I knew how long each section would be, and I discovered that with the script we have now, we run over 2 minutes, so in the crit I'll ask which bits our peers think don't work. I did already pick out some bits I thought we could cut, but I'll discuss further with Ciara after we've had feedback from the crit. I now plan to draw up some set designs based on what I created in the storyboard, and consider more about colour and materials.
To help me further with set design, I collected a few photos I'd taken previously when out and about, and some recent ones relevant to the animals we are using. from the photos, I looked at what kind of fencing is used, mostly is wooden and wire fencing, but I really the dry stone walls you see on larger farms. considering whats easier for us to do, and what kind of camera angles I created in the storyboard, I think all wooden fencing will probably work best for us and do the job when it comes to close ups. I also looked at plants around puddles formed due to heavy rain.mostly it is muddy around the water and plants that were ther before peak through, or where you could see the water had been there was some debre, especially in heavly flooded places.
To help me get ideas on what kind of sets we want, I research into existing stop motion animations to see how they did their backgrounds.
I like the idea of having a simple brackgrounds, and really admired how Fantastic Mr. Fox has done theirs. they've added little bits of 3D foreground props similar to how Creature Comforts have done theirs, and to me this then makes you focus more on the characters not the busy backgrounds. Plus it would take a lot of effot to create a big setting. I'd like to have a background sky painted behinds, maybe adding a bit of depth with some hills, but only create little bits in the foreground to create the surroundings, make it look 3D.
To help us form a gorup we each had 3 create 3 slides that inculed, 4 of my best work and I like working in the best, 4 professional artists who I like, and a couple of biref I'd like to work on. All these will helpfully put me in a group with other of similar interest.
I'm in a group now with an illustration student and a graphic design students, so I think with all our different skills , we'll learn alot from eachother and contribute in different ways.
I did research into existing plasticine animations, this was just to generally see how they created their characters, how they made them move, how the story was carried out etc. What I liked with the Rabbit and Deer is that they used mixed media, and it worked really well. this was down to the story and how the character interatcted with eactother. I also really liked the set design here, it's so smiple, and it's really enjoyable to watch.
In this short, the character are made to look like toys, its humerous and I think hat using plasticine and moving the characters in the way you'd imagine them to, quite stiff and would have to rock on the base to walk, it adds to the comical story. and with plastine, it's easy on the eye, the horse does daily human things, you accept that, it it were live action you've think, bit weird. House exploding, fine. it's not meant to be realistic and creating it in stop motion, allows you to get away with more.
Similar to what I talked about with the perivious video, things like animals talking is more acceptable in cartoons. but I think if this kind of idea was done using realistic looking animals, it's have looks really creepy, so i think depending on on who your audience is and what you 're trying to communicate, depends of the style of your characters. Creature Comforts is menat to be a funny family friendly animation. and using plasticine helps to do that.
Pingu is another simple set stop motion, and it's also able to be understood by anyone in the world, as Pingu does not speak. And beacuse the environment penguins live, this made set design easier as they just needed a blue sky background and an snowy floor. and again you accept this from the start, Pingu is off to school, all he has to do is walk out his igloo and sit down at his desk which is outside. it's minilaistic, and I like that and would like to try and create a similar thing for our animation.
We had our first crit with the illustration students, and I really enjoyed walking round to see what everyone had done. However when walking round and seeing how the illustation students had presented their work, I saterted to worry that they wouldn't understand my outcomes (as this was the only thing I had printed off) Learning for the illustasion students, in future I will print: a quick summary of the breif I had, some of my process designs and then the final outcome. As this is how I understood some of their work better Most of the feed back I got was really good and helpful, such as: - 'The blurb would be easier to make out if it was white' - 'maybe experiment with shaddow'
it was mentioned that the quialty of the quilling images weren't that great, but this was beacuse of the printer, that made grey look green and i really wasn't happy with how they looked printed. but the people who gave feed back, really like that I'd working in paper, and that I'd created texture and a 3d look in both of my briefs. I did go back and changed the blurb text to white and think it looks more legible now.
To help me learn more about how a short documentary should be done, I research online for some videos. I thought theses were good examples as
I really liked this animation, because of it's simplisty, it had no commentary and was purely visual but still got its message across in the 1 minute period, showing us that new technologies will help with new power and water resources, how using public transport will reduce fumes etc. there were also only 3 colours used. black, red (negative) and green (positive) and that was really important, because red meaning: anger, danger, stop might emphasie to people more that some things we do are bad for the environment.
In this video from 'JacksGap' the main audience is young adults, and gives us lots of information without dragging on. It's quite direct and fun, they've explained their aim, gone and found research which professionals and discussed how our generation can help, and the main thing is just to care about the situation. There's also some animation in the film which helps to explain things visually that they couldn't do with film, so animation is usefull for doing that.
I also looked as some longer documentaries to see how we could go about interviews and getting the information across. Because I'm creating a animation, I can't really fill the time up with clips people have recorded and commentate over it, so I'll need to look further at informative animations to help us with putting something together.
We found some endangered animals that were affected by climate change, and each took half to go off and research. I found out lots of interesting facts about why the animals we chose were endangered, that I didn't previously know. I made sure I got my information off of a realiable sourse such as WWF. We then came togther in class and discuss what research we found and which animals we would look further into for our animation. A huge problem for animals is sea leavels rising due to warmer weather. Ice melts, there is less land, some animals need to move more inland for fresher drinking water. So this could be a main topic for us to look further at.
Some other problems are pest increase, also due to higher temperature and longer summer, crops aren't able to grow or are destroyed by pests. Some animals like Gorillas and parrots, are captured at a young age and sold illegally as pets. which could course a generation to wipe out.
We then had a discussing with Mike who suggesting looking at smaller issues, not the typical 'save the polar bears' kind of thing we see on tv. We've just had recent flood, so we could now also look at how climate change is affecting local animals on farms for example.
Between Us, we worked out what roles we wanted to do within the project, then did a quick draft timetable of what we aim to do each week.
I then created a timetable for my roles and lessons, to plan around everything I have on at uni.
This week I plan to get all the research we need done, so we can quickly move onto geting our idea sorted and create a script so we know what kind of characters/set/voice overs we need.
Today we were given a new brief to create an Animated documentory. There were 4 topics to choose from and the theme 'Environment' appealed to me most. To help us decided on groups, we each put our name on a folder piece of paper and placed them on the topic we wanted to work in. We then took it in turns to say what technique we wanted to work in, and what ideas we already had for the topic so groups could be narrowed down more. I want to work in stop motion as I really enjoy it and think this is where my strengths lie, with model making, I particularly want to work with Plasticine because I really admire Aardman and would love to work for them one day. 4 of us had a similar idea of looking at endangered animals and working in stop motion, but groups were decided and I am working with Ciara again. I think working together on the last project we had out ups and down, but I feel we worked really well together, the problems were cause when we clashed in character design, and me not being as great with Maya, but with this, we can choose our roles, so Ciara will be primarily doing character design as I think this is one or her strong points, and I will be primary doing the model making and set design, as this is one of my strong points. I've practiced with plasticine models before, and been shown tips on how to model make by a friend who worked on Creature Comforts. So to teach Ciara some things too and help her with this process will be really fun, as she helped me a lot with Maya in our last project. For this animation we need to do lots of research on reliable sources about Climate Change, as this is a theme we have decided. What it is?, What causes it?, What's affected? I'll also be producing a time scedual to help me manage my time better, and work to deadline as this was an issue in my last project, sometimes I fell behind, mostly due to not really understanding the program and getting stuck, so I'd be a little behind Ciara, making us not at the same point. So by stick to a plan, we should be at the same points.
I looked at a previous Fedrigoni Brief to see what had been previously done for the company, and what kind of level of work they would be expecting this year.
For what I can see from the winners, the element of 3d was used a lot, creating depth to the work, making it stand out. 
