Cut-Out Animation

And this is my final animation for this assignment....

Overall I am very pleased with the outcome. I love the style of this and my favourite scene is the Paris scene as I feel it gives it a little humour! I feel that there's something not quite right about the sitting room background, maybe its a little empty... 

I was very pleased with the lip syncing however if I was to 'touch it up' I would put more energy into Mary's movement and expression in her body when she is speaking as it is a little static for most of it. The trousers scene was a little mad, I think I would tone it down a little..make it simpler so that the eye can understand what is going on a little better rather than just seeing an explosion of colourful movement. Although I haven't shown it on here, the second part of which my partner did was also very good and the transition between the two worked well and smoothly (she animated a short chat show on the TV). 

If done again I would get into the character and 'skin' of Mary a lot more and get to know her personality much more than I did. 

I loved using the 'cut-out' technique and would use it again any day as it was highly enjoyable!! 

Cut-Out

This is a new assignment we have been given and it is the first assignment of our third module! 

It goes as follows...

Working within a team you are required to create a short sound track (no more than one minute) and produce a synchronised animated film using appropriate techniques. 

To start off we had a record voice tracks from a radio, cut them up and reform them so that they made up completely different sentences. After that we analysed them to form dope sheets, which is how we worked out the lip syncing for our animation....from the recordings we then created characters. Each team mate then chose a character and section of voice recording to animate. The technique we used to create the animation was 'cut-out' hence the title of the assignment. 

This is what my final voice recording said..."I have been thinking of great many thing and I will always think of great many things.  I was thinking I love being bear in Paris. Imagine a waistcoat as an angel in London smiling. I sometimes act like made trousers thinking quickly in the moment of great many things."

This is a woman's voice and so the next thing I did was create a female character. This is my first draft..

Meet Mary, the typical housewife...or so you may think at the beginning.

I brainstormed a little with expressions.

These weren't too successful but they gave me an idea of different expressions and mouth shapes.

This is the final Mary and different heads with the different mouth shapes for the lip sync...

This is Mary's neutral face

'O'

'A'

'I,E,Y,NG' (And many more)

'V,F'

'M,B,P'

'G,H,K' with 'I,EA'

'TH'

'N,R'

'L'

'A'

The Scenes

I then made a rough storyboard based on the voice recording

This is basically showing each scene that will be in the animation. I have decided to set the first scene with Mary in her home...husband in the background in his chair facing the television. Then the other scenes are set in the places she mentions, I will show the main objects that are associated with those places so that it is easy for the audience to know where she is. 

These are the final scenes I came up with...

I enjoyed making these...Just like Mary and her many heads I drew all the different objects out on paper, scanned them into my computer, rendered them on Macromedia Fireworks, cut them up and put them together to create the background.

I then have to make some more obejects for the Paris and London Scene as well as the last scene which goes back to the sitting room at Mary's house. For the Paris scene I had to do a new body for Mary without any clothes on, for the London scene I had to make a waistcoat, some angel wings and a halo and for the last scene I had to make some trousers. 

I will make a new post for the actual animation and will share my thoughts on it....

Life Drawing Session Three

This is my third life drawing session and these are the sketches I came out with...

Character Development

"Select a character in period costumes that can be from your earlier assignments. You are required to develop drawing and knowledge of animation principles over three A3 sheets to express the characters personality in still images."

For this project I have to produce a written profile to establish the characters personality, do a series of studies that show a variety of expression and produce a turnaround of the character by rotating it 90 degrees at a time from front to back. 

So I started of by doing some research into different time periods ..from Mesopotamia (3500-559 BC) right the way through to the nineties! I ended up looked at the 'Space Age' in the 1960's...particularly around when the first man landed on the moon. This gave me an idea for an American astronaut in the 60's. i then did a few sketches of astronauts that I found on google images..

From these I came up with this character...

I will add the rest of my work on here soon (character profile, turnaround and emotion sheet)

Overlapping Action and Follow Through

"You are required to produce a line drawn sequence of at least five seconds of animation that demonstrates overlapping action. Basically when an object or a character stops suddenly , anything flexible will carry on moving. The greater the flexibility, the further it will continue. This can apply to parts of the character themselves e.g. cheeks and hair and of course to their  clothes and anything they happen to be carrying. Follow through enables the viewer to in the full consequences of a particular action."

For Christmas I got the book 'The Animators Survival Kit' and in this it has an example of a whip. I started off by exploring this and see how it works. I will try out the movement of the whip first and if it goes well I may add in a character using it. This is the animation I made from it....

This was ok, but didn't particularly interest me and there wasn't a whole lot going on. I felt that the 'snap' bit wasn't quite right either.

I then had another idea, I was going through some videos on my phone and found some of some friends jumping on a trampoline. I saw how their hair floated around freely and their clothes. 

So I decided to look up people jumping on trampolines on 'YouTube' to find a clearer video to work from and possibly someone doing flips to make it more exciting than someone just jumping up and down. 

From some videos I found I then sketched a few sequences of them jumping...

I the decided on a sequence...and animated it. Here is the video..

Half way through animating I became ill and so was unable to do as much as I had liked to. Then when I did animate it I found that I didn't need half as many frames as I had drawn and so there for instead of having a 5 second animation I was left with a 2 second one. However I felt I did the best I could under my circumstance at the time. I am very happy with the effect and very pleased with how real the bounce on the trampoline looks.  I the came up with another idea.. I decided to make another animation the same but when the person jumps on the trampoline and is about to do the flip I would zoom in and show it in slow motion and then cut back to being zoomed out to finish when he lands. This way you can see the overlapping and follow through of the hair etc and its a little longer...

I wasn't too sure about how the video is cut but I was pleased with the slow motion of the flip. 

Overall I found this a successful piece of work.

Materials

For this brief I had to produce an animated sequence demonstrating the principles of animation and use of character in relation to the physical properties of materials.

I had to choose one object/material from a list and work in a team with the other 2 animators - each person had to choose something different. One of my team members chose a bucket of water and the other a lump of clay. I wasn't too sure what I was going to choose and got a bit stuck...

"Rather like the game of rock paper scissors, consider what would happen when one object/material meets another. Devise a short scenario for your object meeting another persons object. Animate the sequence. Don't worry about scale. For this assignment Blackpool tower can be the same height as a milk bottle. think about the actual materials involved and how they would affect each other. Your group should aim to produce a continuous piece of animation with each persons object animating to the next persons. As one object disappears another takes it place."

Each person should animate at least 5 seconds.

Still not knowing what object I was going to do I experimented...i took a few object from the list and played around with them, seeing how I could manipulate them and make them move to give them a character and to portray different emotions. These are some sketches I came up with...

In the end I decided to do the steel girder..

This is my part of the animation...

At the beginning of the project it was hard to get going as no one in the group knew exactly what we needed to do. However after a while and after being shown some examples we were fine. There were some communication problems as we had all gone home for christmas. My animation was last and so was the last one to do my part and didn't have very long to do it.

Despite that I managed to finish it and overall was quite happy with it!