The Animated Self: Idea Refinement

Whilst gathering the reference videos I needed in order to create my animation, I realised that there was actually quite a bit of work to be done and I couldn't help but feel that there was a much easier way to do this than how I was going about it. Then it dawned on me that there was. Other than the throwing sequence, all of the other sequences are elements that appear in dance. So it made me think I should probably just do a dance sequence instead, as this will include the majority of the motions I wanted to animate, whilst allowing for a very smooth transition into each different element. It will also allow me to use more of the space and in a much more imaginative way.

Rather than doing what I originally had planned, I'm going to create a 30 second animation of a dance sequence using a range of different media rather than 5 separate sequences.

The Animated Self: Storyboard

Whilst thinking about my storyboard I was also thinking about how I wanted all of my separate sequences to merge together. I realised that I wasn't too thrilled about the idea of all of my sequences being separate and just simply switching from one to the other, as I thought this would look kind of boring and it wouldn't flow as nicely as if the sequences were somehow integrated with each other and lead off from one another. And obviously because I'd already noticed how much better it would look if the sequences were all one big sequence, I couldn't go back to having separate sequences so I started to think about how I could effectively create this without creating too much extra work for myself. This is what I came up with.

I feel satisfied with what I have managed to produce for this brief and I feel that I have come up with something that is quite manageable. Whilst it looks like it could be difficult in parts, such as creating work in ink, I don't feel as though there is too much work there to be done and I feel that I can handle this work load on top of my other briefs. I also feel that I have managed to successfully think of a way to make the sequences flow together in a creative way, rather than just having them as separate sequences, which makes me happy because I wouldn't have been happy otherwise. 

Wallace and Gromit

Wallace and Gromit is one of those animations that I grew up with as a child and have adored all through my life. Stop motion is something that I feel I will always enjoy because I really love that the models are all hand crafted and are unique and I sometimes feel that it is more satisfying to watch knowing that the characters are actual solid objects that are being manipulated rather than digital creations.

The thing that I really like about Wallace and Gromit is the creativity that goes into the sets of film. Whilst I like the characters and how they are designed, I feel that I am more drawn to the sets because of the amount of detail and craftsmanship that goes into them. The fact that the sets are hand-made and that the props are had made too just astonishes me and it makes me realise just what can be achieved within animation if you put your mind to it. But most of all I think it is simply the aesthetic and the style of Wallace and Gromit that pulls me in the most, I just love that hand-crafted style and the way fingerprints can be seen in the models from where the animators have manipulated the Plasticine. It makes me appreciate the time and effort that goes into making animations such as these all the more. 

The Animated Self: Choosing the Methods

Before I started to animate the 5 motions I had chosen, I needed to think about which methods/ techniques I wanted to use for each of the sequences, as I wanted to use a range of different methods to get across that I am interested in all methods of animation at the moment. However, I do feel that 3D animation may be a problem, as we haven't learnt how to create a human figure in Maya and it may take longer than I have to learn how to use it for this purpose so I have decided to miss that one out for this project. That does leave me with a few others though.
Because I want to demonstrate my strengths as well as areas I need to improve upon, I feel that it is safe to say I will be using traditional animation and digital animation for at least 1 of the sequences and because I am so familiar with these methods I feel that it may be a good idea to use these for the more difficult motions to help balance out the difficulty of the task. Therefore, I will do the dancing motion in traditional animation and the jumping motion in digital animation.

Thinking about what software I am good at using, I'm confident in using Photoshop however, I'm not too familiar with Illustrator and for that reason, I feel it would be a good opportunity to experiment with using the software to create images to be used in animation and I've deiced to create the trowing action in Illustrator, as I feel as though I'd be comfortable with creating this motion using this software.

This leaves me with stop motion animation to explore, which in itself has a large variety of techniques to choose from. To start with I eliminated puppet animation, as I feel that it would take too long to create a puppet to use for the animation and the puppet I made earlier in the year isn't actually fully finished yet and I feel that it would be too much of a strain to get it finished in time to animate with. I also don't want to work with Plasticine, as I find using the medium extremely frustrating. Paper, however, is something that I feel I'd like to try, as it is something I've briefly tried to animate with before and I'd like to see what I could achieve by using this material for the walking motion.
For the last motion, running, I'm not quite sure what I want to use, but I really want to try and create a stop motion piece using ink and water. However, this may be a little too ambitious for the time scale I have. I think I will experiment with it and if it doesn't work, I will fall back on a technique I am familiar with to create the running sequence.

Braford Animation Festival: Peter Lord of Aardman Studios

At the Bradford Animation Festival I was lucky enough to meet THE Peter Lord of Aardman Studios, the birth place of Morph, Shaun the Sheep and Wallace and Gromit. It was a great experience that I'm never going to forget. The novelty aside, I learnt a lot about the animation industry that day and how it all worked and how work was done in a successful animation studio other than Disney.

I was really excited when I found out that we'd be having a talk and then a Q&A session with Peter Lord whilst at BAF because his animations are something I have grown up with as a child and it is his work that first got me in interested in animation so it was great to hear what tips and advice he had to give to all us hopeful animators out there. 

Peter Lord spoke about how he worked in his studio and how things were done, for instance Morph is still shot 'blind' today and they still use Plasticine to make him despite having all this fancy equipment around them that could achieve the same effect. He also went on to talk about the amount of time, effort and patience that goes into animation, which was great to hear because even the professionals still get frustrated with it. He also stressed the importance of collaboration within an animation company and encouraged us to put as much time and effort as we can into the parts of animation that we are good at, and excel at it, because we will never have to do all the things that make an animation by ourselves and we are more likely to be hired if we are better at one aspect or element than if we are good at all of them. 

Overall, I found Peter Lord's talk really useful and despite the fact that he made animating sound like the most difficult job world, it actually peaked my interest in the subject even more. 

The Animated Self: Choosing the Motions

Thinking about what kind of motions I want to animate, I've been considering what kind of motion I can actually do. I've realised I've never actually done any kind of motion other than a pendulum, a ball bouncing and a squishy toy jumping. So it made sense to me to start at the beginning and animate a walk cycle and a run cycle, as these seem pretty important. It will also allow me to work on my drawing skills, as I will be focusing upon the human form in motion.

That's the first two sequences sorted. To challenge myself I have been thinking of animating someone dancing, as they move around a lot and there's a huge opportunity to develop a number of the 12 principles of animation including ones such as overlapping action and follow through, which I have ha very little practice in. Having said this, I could focus one of my sequences solely on overlapping action and follow through. Why do I have so many choices to make?

Because I was struggling to come up with the remaining 2 motions I made a list of all the motions that I felt would benefit me the most when I came to animate them. I also tried to think of motions that weren't overly difficult, as I already have a lot of work to do with my other projects. And I came up with this.

After thinking about it for more time than I'd like to admit, I managed to come up with 5 different motions that I'd like to animate, 4 being 5 seconds long and 1 being 10 seconds long, as it would be a dance so I'd like to animate the motion for longer. I think I have made a good selection here that will allow me to explore motion in a number of ways and I will also be able to experiment with methods and materials and techniques as well. Now all I need are the reference videos. 

Reflect: Idea Generation

As part of our PPP brief we have to create a presentation that reflects upon our experiences of the year. Within the presentation we must have some visual elements that demonstrate the range skills that we have learnt over the period of the course. Although I'm really looking forward to this task because it will allow me to look at back at what I've learnt and how far I've come in such a short period of time, I'm not too sure what I actually want to talk about.

I thought the best plan of action would be to write down a list of the most important things I have done this year and see where it leads me.

So I did and I have come up with a few ideas of what I want to talk about but more importantly which topics I want to create a visual of. I thought it'd be a good idea to create a visual for the main points I want to talk about and use them as a prompt of what I want to say. This way I will be fulfilling the task of demonstrating my skills whilst also giving a presentation. 

The Animated Self: Idea Generation

When I first received this brief I recall mentioning how I was really looking forward to this, as it allowed me to focus on my strengths within animation and what I would like to improve on and whilst I still feel that this is a really good opportunity for me to do all of those things I really struggled to get the ball rolling with ideas. So I turned to the best way I know of dealing with a mind block like this, very messy brainstorms.

After getting the felt tips out, I began to think about what skills I had learnt over the course of this year and which of these skills I was good at and which skills I needed to improve on, as I thought that I could create an animation that was skill based rather than story based because I don't need to add to my mountain of a work load. Once I had thought briefly about the skills/ methods, techniques that was good at, I then thought it'd be a good idea to think about what I need to work upon within animation that I could also use to my advantage for my current project. 

Timing and spacing, movement and drawing seemed to be aspects of animation that were popping up in my 'improvement' sections of all of my evaluations so far so I decided to make a note of these and then realised that all three of these elements fit nicely together and I could possibly do something with them. 

So thinking about all of those elements I finally came to the conclusion that I should create a series (3/ 4) of short (5 seconds each) animations that explore movement of the human (and possible animal) form in motion. This would nicely incorporate all three of the things I feel I need to improve upon within animation, as well as help me with my current project, as I haven't yet moved onto the movement element yet. Thinking on what emerging interests I have in animation, it's fair to say that I don't think I have any particular interest as of yet, so I feel that the best course of action would be to try using a different method or technique for each of the different motion sequences. However, I need to bear in mind that some methods I am unfamiliar with, so they may be more time consuming, as I would have to learn them first. I also need to bear in mind that each method will take a different amount of time regardless of how familiar I am with it too. However, I do want to get a range of methods in there including ones I am not so confident with, such as stop motion so I feel it is worth exploring at least one method I am not familiar with within this brief. 

In short, I intend to create a series of short animations that depict motion using a range of familiar and unfamiliar techniques and processes. Bring it on!

The Bear and The Hare

The Bear and The Hare is a great example of how animation (stop motion animation in this case) can be used as something other than just entertainment. This animation shows how effective animation can be used as a tool for advertising.

https://vimeo.com/78740926

The link for the video.

The Bear and The Hare was created for John Lewis to be used as their 2013 Christmas advert and is by far the best Christmas advert they have had so far. However, I don't just like this animation because it demonstrates other uses for animation. 

I find this to be a beautiful and very successful piece of animation. The aesthetic, style, story and method all come together beautifully to create a very emotional, well animated video. The animation also combines CGI and stop motion together really well, which I feel adds to the overall style and feel of the animation. Another thing that stands out to me in this animation is the environments used. Done with a combination of set and CGI, I feel that you get a really good sense of the atmosphere and the environment that the characters are in, again adding to the kind of experience the audience has when watching this advert. 

I don't often say this, but I also really like the post production work that has been done to this animation, the added skies and details such as the steam coming from the bears nose and the reflection in the water. They have been done in a very subtle way and it is these very subtle things that make this animation so much more enjoyable to watch, as they are often things that are missed out within an animation, as they are seen as less important. However, this animation is a great example of how effective small subtle things can effect the overall result of an animation.

Bradford Animation Festival: Laika - Boxtrolls Behind The Scenes

Like I mentioned in my earlier post of the Boxtrolls, it is a great film that I feel successfully combines stop motion with CG animation to create a beautiful story that captivates us and transports us to a different world. However, whilst at Bradford Animation Festival, I was lucky enough to experience the making of Boxtrolls (I know right!). There is actually a LOT more work that goes into creating films like this than I expected.

For a start this film was 10 years in the making! That's just an insane amount of years to even begin to consider for a film. I know I'm going off on a tangent (sorry). So back to the time and effort that actually went into this film...

The animation was created using 24 fps and the studio was creating 2.5 - 3 seconds of animation per week. This alone shocked me, as it is a lot of work to be completing in a single week when there's so many different scenes being created at the same time, but I'm glad I found this out, as it has given me an insight into how hard it is to be an animator and how much work is expected of you and how much effort has to go into even the smallest amount of work. Not only is there a lot of effort put into films created this way but there's also a lot of creativity thrown in too.

But it's not just the animating element that you have to put so much effort into. In The Boxtrolls there were approximately 30 puppets made for each main character, and each puppet was hand made, from the armature to the wire hair on their heads. And for the majority of the puppets there were a number of detachable faces to go along with them in order to create the wonderful expressions created within the film.

I really enjoyed attending this talk, as it has given me a huge insight into one of the ways the animation industry works. It has opened my eyes to the amount of work and effort that needs to be put into an animation in order to make it successful and enjoyable to watch, which has inspired me to put as much effort into my own animations.

Bradford Animation Festival: The Boxtrolls

Whilst at the Bradford Animation Festival I got the chance to watch the stop motion animation The Boxtrolls (which was a treat by the way). First off, the entire aesthetic of the film is just beautiful. I really loved the atmospheres throughout the film and the whole style of the animation, you could really see that so much time, love and effort went into creating each and every one of the beautifully crafted puppets and sets.

Stop motion animation is something that I have always been interested in and is one of the reasons I first became interested in animation, so it was really nice to see another amazing piece of stop motion being so successful. It was also nice to be reminded of what can actually be achieved with stop motion animation. 

However, these aren't the only reasons I find The Boxtrolls so fascinating to watch. Personally, I feel that the film demonstrates great use of appeal. Despite the fact that the Boxtrolls themselves are actually quite ugly little things in reality, I couldn't help but fall in love with them more than the main protagonist. Laika have managed to create appeal through the characters personalities and I find that they have done a really good job at giving each character their own personality, which also helps the audience to feel a stronger connection to them. Another reason I enjoyed this film was because of the aesthetic, I really liked that grungy, dingy feel everything seemed to have and I found the underground area where the Boxtrolls lived to be the most interesting environment within the film simply because of the imagination used within the space. 

Overall, I feel that The Boxtrolls is a beautifully crafted film that is really enjoyable to watch and demonstrates a great use of stop motion animation. 

Bradford Animation Festival: Mute

Mute is another animated short that I experienced whilst at the Bradford Animation Festival earlier this year. It is a 3D animation about a tow of people who have no mouths yet insist on trying to talk and do other activities that require a mouth, until an accident provides them with the answer they need.

I really like this animation simply because it made me laugh so much. The story is a great little story that isn't complicated and doesn't take a lot of effort to follow, but the result is hilarious. I also find the design of the characters quite amusing and find that this helps to add to the humour of the animation. I also like this animation because of its simple aesthetic, which goes to show that sometimes less is more. Mute demonstrates what can be achieved through effective storytelling and what can be achieved through uncomplicated and simple designs really well and reminds me that things don't have to be complicated to be effective. 

Anikey Studios' Fallin' Floyd

This little animated short is an animation that I have looked at time and time again and for good reason. Fallin' Floyd is a wonderful little animation that contains so many great qualities. To start with the camera movements within this animation are great. There is a lot of variety of camera angles and the scenes transition in a number of creative ways, which I feel help to make the animation a lot more interesting to watch. I also find that the camera movements lead you through the animation in a really smooth action. They also compliment the mood of the animation; the camera moves a relatively quick pace when the animation is portraying a happy atmosphere and it moves a little slower when the animation takes a more sullen, dismal turn.

Another aspect of the animation I really like is the use of colour to help demonstrate and accentuate the mood and atmosphere of the animation. I feel that it has a really strong effect on how the animation is perceived and I find that it really helps to exaggerate the characters state of emotion. I also really love the aesthetic of Fallin' Floyd, as it's quite simple, yet very effective and it all works really well together to capture the tone and mood of the story.

Avatar

Avatar may not have the best story line out there but, it is safe to say that the use of CGI went beyond limits and expectations when they made this film. All you have to do is look at the painstakingly detailed world the Avatar's live in and you realise the full potential of CGI and the limitless possibilities that come along with using it.

Not only does the film have amazing environments that transport you to another world and make you feel as though something like that could really exist because it all looks so real, but the film also contains some beautifully designed and animated creatures too that only add to the beauty of this tremendous feat. 

Although I don't actually enjoy watching the film and I struggle to sit through the whole 3 hours of it, it, I do find myself being captured within the environments within the film and the amazing visual effects that have been achieved. This film is an inspiration because it goes to show just what can be achieved with the technology and software that is readily available to me (I mean I know I'm not going to create anything like this any time soon or maybe ever for that matter) and it reminds me that almost anything is possible within animation. 

Brave

Brave has to be my all time favourite animated film. It is an amazing little piece of entertainment for so many reasons. I think the most drawing part of the film for me is a toss between the character designs and the environments, it might even be safe to say they are on a par because I think both are created with such attention to detail and with such imagination.

So lets start with character design. The character designs within Brave are just little pieces of art that are beautifully thought out and that hold so much personality. What I like most about the characters within this film is the diverse range of body shape and size. No one character is the same and I feel that this helps to make the film all the more enjoyable to watch, as each character has its own appeal for different reasons. However, although I do like all of the characters, I feel that the characters that stand out the most to me are Merida and the old witch. For Merida I do feel that it's the hair that makes me love this character, as the rest of her design is actually quite simple whereas the old witch has a very distinctive face and body shape.
Having said that, I do feel that the appeal also comes from the character's personalities, and again, I feel as that Merida and the old witch have such vibrant, strong, distinctive personalities that help to boost their appeal and make them really enjoyable to watch.

The environments within Brave are just as enjoyable to look at. In particular I love the forest environments throughout the film because they have so much detail. I really love how the trees and the leaves look very realistic and I like the texture that has been captured within the surface of tree bark and the rocks. I also really like the colours used with this environment and how the atmosphere of the environment changes throughout the film, which demonstrates the importance of colours and how they can be used to change the mood and tone of an environment. I also feel that the environments within Brave are also really good at leading the story and taking the audience through the story. 

Basically Brave is an amazing piece of animation that uses all of the basic principles to their full potential to create an animation that is extremely enjoyable to watch and demonstrates just how far you can take animation and the wonderful things that can be created with animation.