In today's lesson, we learned how to configure a clay character. In this task we were meant to construct our claymations to look like the "morph" character by the Aardman Company. Above is my morph-like person crossing his arms in a very posh manner.
Evaluation:
After we made our morph characters, we were set out a task to group up and create any narrative for a short film. I worked with Ousama and Zek and our main general feel for our short was a mixture of different activities. First few seconds we introduced my main character, Jerry, and had him get on a "sled", but before he could even use it, the rival character (Zek's character) had thrown a rectangular object to Jerry's head causing injury. Though our story progressed, in my my opinion it had a massive turn around at the end (when the camera zooms into the character's face) and the dramatic music plays.
What is Claymation:
Claymation is a type of stop-motion animation using made with a type of substance called Plasticine Clay. Producing a stop-motion animation using clay is very time consuming. Normal film runs at 24 frames per second (frame/s). With the standard practice of "doubles" or "twos", 12 changes are usually made for one second of film movement. For a 30-minute movie, there would be approximately 21,600 stops to change the figures for the frames.
PERSONAL EVALUATION:
For this exercise we have to get in groups of 3 (or 4) and come up with a narrative for a Stop Motion video. In my group was Zeinab and Ousama and our initial idea was to be snakes outside in the park. However we did not shoot this because of the poor weather conditions! It was too cold to shoot outside so instead we changed the location of our narrative and set it to be inside. We then found a quiet staircase and began shooting our Stop Motion piece. The strengths for this project were that our photographer (Zeinab) didn't take long shooting the project, so we didn't have to wait a few seconds before the next photograph was taken. In fact, it was us (Ousama & I) making tiny movements every second and Zeinab's quick burst-shooting which made our process a lot more faster. The only negative about this is that our production was quite short because we didn't really do much but travel down one flight of stairs. In total it was 10 seconds but it post production we extended the total runtime to 28 seconds!
If I were to change one thing about this production, again I would extend the narrative so there's more to tell.
WHAT IS PIXILATION ANIMATION?
Pixilation Animation is similar to stop motion but instead requires people to be in the shots, rather than pictures, cut-outs, cardboard, etc. One thing that may go wrong sometimes with Pixel (as well as other animations) is the lighting. The lighting must stay the same to avoid any errors.
PROS & CONS:
The good thing about pixilation animation is that you can be very creative when producing a pixilation short film. Though you can be creative in other sources of animation, pixilation is an even more affective way because it involves people therefore it's most likely harder to be more creative than if it was another stop motion. A negative thing about pixilation animation is that it is very time consuming, just like other types of animation.
HISTORY:
Pixilation has existed since the early days of filmmaking, with the oldest known use of it in the short Spanish film El hotel eléctrico in 1908. Since then, it's been an extremely popular form of animation that has appeared in film, television commercials and music videos.
COMPARISON VIDEO:
This is probably the most creative and smart pixilation video I've seen so far. Not only is it a professional video, but the narrative that this displays is a very clever narrative. In comparison to our Pixilation Animation video, both videos are creativity in some way and they both have a story a tell. Things that are different are, of course, the video above (Coldplay - Strawberry Swing) had a much larger crew and their idea was fully developed in terms of storyboards, production schedules, art designs, etc. whilst our animation didn't need that much planning since our time was about 1 minute in length or less.
Cutout animation is a technique for producing animations using flat props, characters, images, backgrounds, designs cut out from resourceful material such as paper, card, fabric or even photographs. The world's first known animated feature films were cutout animations made in Argentina by a guy named Quirino Cristiani; as is the world's earliest surviving animated feature.
Lotte Reinger is a famous animator around the times of the 1900s. She made a load of different animations on her time. In fact, her first animation was in 1919 called The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart. She directed various other short film animations after this. Her last film was the 1979The Rose and the Ring.
Terry Gilliam is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator and actor. Gilliam has also directed several films. Gilliam started his career as an animator and strip cartoonist. One of his early photographic strips for Help!.
- Ability to easily create your own "worlds" - in terms of location, characters, designs, etc
- Make creative projects with little or no budget
Limitations with Cutout Animation:
- Copyright Issues - in terms of Music
- Time Consuming (compared to other animations)
- Only operates on 2D Planes (cannot rotate)
--- Evaluation on Cutout Animation ---
I was quite pleased at the end result of our animation. The sound effects and the very decently low soundtrack that was added later on really did kick our animation a big notch. One thing we done was slowed down the sequence, otherwise it would've moved too fast for the viewer and wouldn't have been as funny. The making of this project: we gathered pictures of houses and guardian's from a real estate magazine and cut out characters and people from gaming magazines. After that, we used the real estate pictures and animated them to make it seem like the background was moving as the character was walking (changing scenes). Sometimes the backgrounds would stop, this is to mark out key moments. For example, when the chinese ambassador get's taken by a bunch of "rebels."
The things I would do differently are to capture two frames per animation change instead of the ordinary one frame. This would make the overall production a lot slower and not too fast for the viewers to watch. I believe this could make a significant impact on the final video. If I were to change a thing in the animation, I would make sure the main character says in the middle of all the scenes. By analyzing the animation above, you may notice that at one point it looks as if the character "magically disappears" at one point, but in fact he didn't but instead just moved to the right of the screen.
In another lesson we continued on our animation unit but this time using an online application we haven't used before. This application is called GifNinja. For this we had to take several pictures (CMD + SHIFT + 4) and upload them to GifNinja. It will then make the images into a gif and you can adjust the speed of the animation. Once we're satisfied we press the "Looks good, Built It" button located at the bottom of the page. It will then build the image and once finished, we can download it or embedded onto our blogs. Above this paragraph are my two attempts of using GifNinkja.
Eadweard Muybridge:
Eadweard was a photographer who was famous for "The Horse in Motion" using a dozen cameras in a line he took photos of a horse as it passed by proving that when a horse is in motion there are moments when no legs are touching the ground.
In today's lesson, we learnt about the Zoetrope, how it works and what it was used for.
We also made two Zoetrope strips (mine are above) and watched them using the Zoetrope.
How it works:
The Zoetrope is a circular cylinder with tiny slits every inch or so. (This is throughout the circumference of the wheel). You place a long slit of paper with a drawing (12 frames) inside the Zoetrope and spin it. By looking for the slits in the Zoetrope, it will appear as if the image is moving. This was earlier called "The Devil's Wheel."
The Zoe was created in 1834 by a person called William Bourner(?)
Phi Phenomenom:
The Phi Phenomenom is an "optical illusion" for humans to be aware of continuous motion between objects that are viewed rapidly.
Persistance of Vision:
The persistance of vision allows us to retain an image for a brief amount of time, although in reality it may have disappeared. The persistance of vision allows humans to not trip over or bump into things because of this feature.
