Last Lesson

Last lesson we had to catch up on pixilation animation, because the redland students weren't in the week before, so we made a quick pixilaion animation, so that we could try out lots of different methods of animation.

After that we had to continue with our group flash animation, so while Katie is busy trying out the running sequence on her tablet, Jess and I work out some of the backgrounds, and shots from the flashbacks.

Pixilation

We didn't have very long to do this, because all the redland students were out last week when we should have done it, but today, we made a pixilation animation. It's a bit like stop-motion, but instead of trying to make inanimate objects look real, you have to try and make animate objects look distorted or unrealistic, bby making they do things that they wouldn't normally be able to do.

First we set the tripod up inside, and just practised the basics (people walking around, and passing each other). but then we went outside, and we decided to be more creative, for example making people look as if they are walking through things, or gliding over objects.

If you want to show someone walking forward, like in the beginning of this animation. You have to start someone from far away, and take a picture of them, then they have to walk forward a small amount, being careful to stay in the same position, and then you take another picture, and so on and so forth.

We then came back upstairs, and each edited our own version of the animation using premier elements, and added music (sorry its really annoying after a while). This is my edit:

Video

This is our stop motion test video, we used a special camera, specifically designed for stop motion,and linked it to our computer. Once we had created our characters, and props for them to use, we would place them in their starting positions, and took a picture of them, then we moved them a tiny bit, so it didn't look too sudden of a movement. We then took another photo of it, and so on and so forth.

In the film, a ball flies around the set, we did this by attaching the ball to a piece of string, and just taking the photos much faster, because it is hard to control the ball, when its dangling from your hands.

Stop Motion

Today, for our stop motion workshop, we had to create an animation in our groups, that was similar to the kids T.V show ''Trap Door''. our characters needed to be simple, otherwise they wouldn't fit the brief, and would be extremely difficult to manoeuvre.

We used Plasticine that started out very cold, and difficult to mold, so we warmed it with our hands, and eventually, were able to create our desired characters.

We also used wire in our models, because if we didn't use it, then our models would have fallen apart half way through making the animation. Luckily, this didn't happen to us, so we finished quickly.

Then came the laborious task of shooting our animation, we had to set up our windows live cam on the tripod, and set up our characters. when we had to move a character, we could only move them a small amount, then take a picture using the ''Stop Motion Pro'' software, this took an incredibly long time, but eventually we completed it, and the results were very satisfying.

However, we are not going to use Stop Motion for our adaptation of ''The Bovine Histories'', because the characters that we need are far too complicated to mould, and Flash animation can present the required results.

Today's session

In today's session, we had to storyboard ideas for our individual flash animation. It could be on anything, so I was a bit stuck at first, but eventually I came up with an idea where two people are playing on some swings, and one of them falls of and starts rolling down a hill.

I finished all my planning, I did my initial ideas mind map, my storyboard, my character descriptions, and the short summary of my animation in word. After that, I started to create my animation, I havent really used flash berfore, and I found drawing even the background hard... but eventually I got the hang of it, and finished the first shot.

Animation Review

http://vimeo.com/16381483

 I thought that the animation above was really well made, the fact alone that it was really long was amazing, but it must have taken ages to create, considering that it was stop-motion.

 When I first saw the shaddows of the people making it in the film, I thought that they could have edited that out, but then I realised that they add to the story and make the character seem more real, it also gives the audience a taste of how the animation was made.

 Below the animation on the website, there is a list of everything they used to create the animation, and i think that is really nice, because people feel they know more abut the video, rather than just watching it on a screan.

Last Session

 Last session we had two different workshops; one from Ben, the head of The Bristol Short Story Prize, he was with Ian, author of 'The Bovine Histories'. They were there to go over our initial animation ideas, it was Ian's first time meeting us, so we got to ask him any questions about the story, and the style or theme of our animations.

 The second workshop was with Sam, a proffesional animator. He started by showing us some clips from films with different genres, so we could see how storys can be told in different ways, and how the style of film can change everything about it. We then got into our animating groups, and he gave us all the same scene, but each group had to storyboard it to a different genre, so they all ended up being very different. Our group had comedy, and it was atually alot harder than I thought it would be, because it's very hard to be funny on purpose.