Proposal Form

There has been an issue in gaining the picture of my proposal form. Even though I cannot show you a picture of it I can explain what was on it.

My character was to be called an 'Oopee' and it was going to be a round fluffy ball character which had an orange body and a yellow bow on the top of it's head.

The method I choose to make this character is 'Clay-mation'.

The idea for the storyline is that the Oopee will begin to bounce and then be caught by a human hand, then the hand will squeeze the Oopee and squirt out of the hand and fall to the ground and splat.

Why Things Changed

In the process of planning and creating my animation many ideas were discarded for multiple reasons.

The main thing I departed from was my original character.

The reason for this was that although my test animation was a success, when it came to using that character in my real animation I encountered difficulties. I didn't consider that what I wanted to do in my final animation was different to that in my test animation. Different shapes and movements tested my character until the point where it was no longer like it's original form. With me realising that it wasn't going well I began to lose my patience and quickly discarded it.

I then realised I had to come up with another idea, with a storyline that allowed the character to do everything needed. Previously when I did my test shoot after completing it, in my spare time I made another character because I thought it looked cool and I had time. Remembering this my cool looking character 'Ralph' came into use as I decided to use his super hero look to fit a super hero situation. I thought about it carefully this time and established that what I needed to do was going to work.

Even though I departed from my plans I found that my final animation far exceeded the original idea and that it was more beneficial for me to make a mistake and learn from it.

Production Schedule

Here is my production schedule.

What this did was allow me to structure my time so I completed certain tasks by a certain date. The benefit of this is that I am able complete my animation by a set dead line as each week I have certain tasks which are able to be completed.

Each week I set myself different tasks, some weeks have more than others. This is because I thought about how easy and time consuming each task was. After taking this into consideration I then structured my production schedule to reasonable weekly goals.

Storyboard and Initial Ideas

Here is my storyboard split into 6 sections.

Initial Ideas

This planning was essential so that we were able to explore different movements with different characters. This way we were able to establish what was possible and what would be the most effective in our animation.

You can see my final idea for my character in the bottom images down below. It is the coloured in image, coloured orange.

Recent Developments in Animation

Ellie mitchell

View more presentations from gdsteacher.

Food by Jan Svankmajer

This pixilation animation was made in 1992 by Jan Svankmajer. In this animation other techniques are used less such as line action and claymation. Predominantly this is 'Pixilation'. Pixilation us taking lots of still photos of something living and then putting it all together so when you play it through each photo follows into the next. Its an animation technique which makes living objects including people appear as puppets.

The plot of this animation starts off with a man who uses another man as a human vending machine. Who then himself becomes a human vending machine after eating the food and drinking the drink. Once he changes to the vending machine the other one becomes human again and leaves. As every new person comes in the cycle continues.

This plot and whole film makes me feel a bit unsettled and slightly disturbed. However because it was strange and surreal it kept me interested throughout. It leaves you in awe not knowing quite what to make of it with its originality its hard to distinguish amusement from disgust.

The style of this animation is strange, disgusting , surreal and intriguing. Usually if this style were for something else your reaction would be not to watch it but how it's been cleverly used in this animation it has the opposite effect making you want to continue watching it.

Another 'Pixilation' animation I like is 'Human Tetris'. It is different to 'Food' because it doesn't disgust the audience to attract them and keep their attention. It uses human noises and people in the animation which makes it intriguing.

I think pixilation is a good animation technique every animator should try :)

Websites used: www.youtube.com

Vincent by Tim Burton

Tim Burton considered one of the greatest animators of today, born 25th August 1985 Burbank California; has contributed too many films in his career with his unique style added to many great, well known movies and animations.
His particular style seems to be somewhat twisted and surreal specialising in dark and quirky. Tim’s work is always engaging with its freaky abnormal edge to the storyline. Often his plots focus around a misunderstood outcast.
In his career he has worked as a producer, director, writer, animator and other various roles within the industry more recently he seems to find his comfort in producing and directing.
To name just a few films he has worked on there is “The Nightmare before Christmas”, “Corpse Bride”, “Beetle Juice” and “Vincent”.
Vincent was the first thing Tim Burton made in the year 1982. The topic of this was about a young boy who is just seven years old who lives his life as any other normal person. However he has a passion for the charismatic horror actor Vincent Price. The boy wants to be someone he’s not and goes mad with the feeling of loneliness and the want to have a life he would rather live than his own. It’s almost like a living nightmare trapped between the life he lives and the life he wants to live.
Tim has incorporated his style and his own life into this, his work is very autobiographical as he expresses himself through his animation. The feeling of loneliness and going mad is similar to how Tim felt when he worked as an animator for Disney, he got bored as it wasn’t him. The thirst to be something greater caused him to leave that job to pursue what he really wanted to do.
The animation itself consisted of three things, stop motion, clay-mation and drawing. It was all featured in black and white with narration by Vincent Price throughout the six minutes.
The theme of all this and what it’s trying to say is that people have the life they live and one they want to live. The feeling of being on your own, lonely stuck as who you are is what many people feel and what Tim Burton was trying to portray as well as representing his life through the twisted animation Vincent (1982).
Tim Burtons “Vincent” was never released along with some of his other projects which Disney let him have the free will to work on; the reason was that they were judged unsuitable for children. The critics at Disney did not wish to show “Vincent”.
My personal opinion about “Vincent (1982)” is that it’s highly engaging as you are never quite sure of what is happening as it’s influenced by the creepy, freaky and brilliant mind of Tim Burton. At parts of it I felt sad towards the main character Vincent Malloy as you could feel his frustration. There is a definite twisted style to the story which kept my attention. The narration helped me set the scene for what may be ahead even though I was never quite sure what to think, as the story developed so did my mind with all the possibilities of what could happen next. Throughout the majority of the animation you had creepy music playing such as the sound of church organs and the clap of thunder. All of this created an atmosphere which made me intrigued to watch it again and again.
Reviews by other people including critics often have similar views about “Vincent (1982)”. They all point in the direction that Tim Burton is a genius and imaginative with his individual style for creepy and surreal things.
“TIM BURTON IS A Genius!"Vincent" was one of Tim's first films. Actually, first ideas. He has a very interesting imagination when it comes to this film.”
(IMBD)
This is a very spooky stop motion short that makes you think a great deal.
(IMBD)
This video is really creepy, but it's that’s kind of creepy that makes you want towatch again and again!
(YouTube User)
The key things that appear in many of the reviews are that it’s creepy, admirable, a masterpiece, pure genius, amazing, imaginative, dark, and twisted. It’s been described to leave people speechless and be people’s favorites.
Considering this was Tim Burtons first real animation he has done a great job incorporating all that is needed to make it a hit. Even though it did not get shown because it was unsuitable, even today people still admire the masterpiece that is “Vincent (1982)”. Vincent Price is a big role model to Tim Burton and he has done a great respect to Vincent by producing this and achieved the honor of working with him as well. His choice in animation techniques was probably best suited as he could show to an extent the idea he had in mind.
Overall “Vincent (1982)”is a well made animation by a well respected mastermind Tim Burton.

Final Animation!! :D LOG

Well this is my FINAL animation!! It was a very long process and required a lot of effort but it was worth it in the end.

Originally I was going to go with the character I designed called 'Oopee' however due to me getting so stressed with the test animation I decided to discard it. This was due to the difficulty of not being to create the smoothness of the jump i required of my character. The character was unable to return to the original shape after i had made it appear to be jumping. I found this frustrating as it was hard to keep to a time scale.

Before I did this while I was waiting for something I decided to make a little character called 'Ralph' who was a blue blob similar to an Oopee and it wore Y-fronts and a red cape. The idea was that it was like a super hero.

After I discarded my Oopee idea I thought back to Ralph and thought he would make an excellent character and it would be different since I could use the image to make up a plot.
It started off with Ralph coming into a city and thinking something was wrong. He spots that there is no colour in the world!! Ralph decides he must do something about this and he decides that paint is the best option. Cans of paint appear on screen next to him and then Ralph goes off the screen and comes back on with a mallet, moves towards the paint can and then the mallet swings and squishes the paint cans so that they explode covering the screen in a colourful mess. As the mess of paint goes off the screen behind it is revealed a colourful city. Ralph celebrates, says his job is done then flies away and flies into the camera and it goes black finishing it.

When it came to taking the pictures I sometimes had the difficulty of the position of the camera as each lesson it seemed that it didn't want to behave and be the same height. Also the zoom kept changing when you viewed any pictures I'd took before. For the speech of Ralph I made speech bubbles out of paper and stuck them to the side of him giving the illusion that they were floating in mid air. As Ralph spoke I wrote each individual letter and took a picture of each letter. When the paint cans appear I make each one come up at different times. The mallet was made out of paper and reinforced with sugar paper since before it kept bending, again I stuck the mallet to the side of Ralph so it looked like he was carrying it. The paint splat involved getting 3 colours of plasticine and building up a mess bit by bit by adding different colours on top of each other making a sculpture which on camera look like a paint splat. To reveal the colourful city I removed each bit of plasticine one bit at a time. I coloured in the background with felt tip colours. When Ralph celebrates I use the speech bubbles again and he says 'Yey Colour' and I wrote each letter of colour in different colours to show the meaning of the word visually. Ralph comes close to the screen and speaks, I added on the text of the speech when I came to editing my animation. When Ralph flies away I use sellotape wrapped round him as this was the best media I could use at the time.

I had to upload the photo's onto the computer and open them in Adobe Premier Elements. From there I was able to sort out the speed of the speech by either increasing or decreasing the frame length. The only things left to do were put in the titles, credits and record the sounds. I used the help of Ashley Popay to do the voice used to read the Title, intro and outro credits. I did the voice for Ralph and the sound effect for the paint cans.

The last steps were putting music into the background whilst Ralph spoke and things happened. For the first half before the paint splat I used the song'In this City' by Iglu & Hartly because Ralph was in a city which I thought was appropriate. In the second half I used the song 'Mr Blue Sky' by E.L.O because it's cheery and upbeat which represented the new colourful city.
When I did the title I needed a name for my city and asking Mr Seal he suggested it end in 'Oppolis' and so I took his inspiration and came up with 'Sealoppolis'.
Once all the sound had been put in the right place, the speech frame rate sorted and the titles and credits I then exported it.

The skills I developed were my claymation abilities and character design. I found that another skill I developed was the use of mixed media to give added effect to the animation.

I personally think the strength of my animation was the originality I used for the character and plot. The use of plasticine and paper added effect. I liked the paint splat and thought that it was well done and the use of the speech bubbles proved to be affective. The weaknesses would be that its not as smooth as it could be and the timing of the speech in some parts. I'm glad I chose claymation as I think if I were to use any other technique it wouldn't be as effective. If I had to re-do it I would take more pictures and be more careful with the timing of speech. Overall I'm happy with what I've done and would do it again if I had the chance.

Trial/Test Animation

When it came to doing our own personal animation of our choice before we could do it we had to do a test animation. This didn't have to be long as it was only used to test whether our animation would be able to succeed. I used my character 'Oopee'and did a simple test of it jumping up and down. I used claymation for the test animation. I made it appear like it was jumping by squishing and stretching the body of my character. The benefit of this was that once I had taken all the pictures to show it could jump I could just loop the jump to make it jump as many times as I want. In my test animation I did not do this but it's always an idea for the future.
Because I had done claymation before I didn't gain any new skills, however I learnt how to make writing look like its being written on my animation. The good thing was that since the technique was not new I could do this without any problems.
A strength of my animation would be its smooth when it jumps. A weakness would be that it's too short and I could of changed that by looping the jump.
If I had to redo this I would loop the movement and take more pictures of the writing so its smoother.

Claymation Experiment

This was my first attempt at 'Claymation' a form of Stop Motion in clay; quite commonly used by Aardman for 'Wallace & Gromit', you could argue that Wallace & Gromit are the most famous claymation characters. I partnered up with Ashley Popay as we'd worked together previously. We wanted something simple to do and not like the rest of the class. We came up with an idea based on the Loch ness Monster. The idea was to be kept simple because more often than not the best animations are the most simple. I made the Loch ness monster character and Ashley made the lake and trees to set the scene. We started taking pictures moving the monster a little bit each time so it would give the illusion it was moving in the water. After it had swam round to the front we made it dive into the water by bending the shape of it and cutting it into pieces to give the appearance it was disappearing in the water. For added affect we used a clay tool to draw ripples in the water. As an extra idea we decided we would get rid of the trees, I removed the first tree by grabbing it and pulling it off so it could no longer be seen by the camera. To get rid of the other two trees we gave the illusion that Ashley's hand hit one of the trees and caused it to roll and knock the other one and itself off screen.
We then uploaded the pictures onto the computer and used Adobe Premier Elements to edit the frames and include titles. We found that the movement was really smooth and the ripples in the water worked out really well showing a strength we had in movement. The weakness of our animation was that watching it through you could spot that it flickered with the lighting. Next time if we were to do it again I'd make sure that flash was on for all photos and that the lighting was kept the same. Personally I found this animation a success and an improvement upon our last animation using a whiteboard.

Whiteboard Experiment

Here is an animation I worked on with my partner Ashley Popay. This was our first ever animation technique we learnt and although it seemed simple enough we did have difficulties. One of the main things you must not do is move the whiteboard! So when it came to drawing you had to be in an awkward position so the white board wouldn't move. Our character ideas went out the window as soon as we realised the reality of doing something complex on something you weren't allowed to move. Then I came up with the idea of doing a Pokemon and we came to the decision to do 'Diglett, this was mostly because it is one of the least complex looking.


Then we had to decide what to do with it, we came up with the idea of having two Diglett's and moving them up and down at different times. During the process of creating this whiteboard animation we did have to restart it because the whiteboard moved which caused frustration. Many things can go wrong with a whiteboard animation as we found out such as the board moving, the pen running out, the character slowly changing into something different because there is limited movement you have to draw. However we continued on and completed it. For the editing stages we used Adobe Premier Elements to sort out the frame rate and include a title and credits. At the beginning of the animation we had the title and who it was by and then it was followed by 'Do you dig the Diglett? At the end of the animation we put 'So do you ?' After everything was done we exported it and then we had finished. Whiteboard animation is simple enough to do and allows you to do various things and any mistake can be easily rubbed out. However it does have its down side of being unable to move the board so it can become awkward if not set up properly. Considering it was our first animation we weren't expecting it to be that good but actually it turned out alright :)
The skills I gained were drawing in a restricted space and learning to be a bit more patient as repeating the same thing over and over again can become tedious and frustrating. Personally if I had to redo it I would use the new techniques and abilities I have gained from doing more animations to make the movement of the Diglett's smoother.

Pixilation Experiment

Here is the first 'Pixilation' animation we did as a group. Pixilation is taking lots of still photos or images and putting them all together to make an animation, its a technique where people are used as puppets.. For the planning I was not their as I had an exam however I found the idea very good. The idea was to do human tennis. The reason why we couldn't do real tennis is because its impossible to take all the pictures of a moving tennis ball. Instead we used Lauren as the ball, she was hit between Ashley and Chloe. The difficulties with this were that each person could only move a little and if they moved too much you had to start again. Also the location chosen for our animation wasn't the best since it was an area that people could and did walk through. I think despite this the animation was still good. We learnt to think creatively and to solve situations. A strength was the unique idea of human tennis, the use of Lauren as the ball and the greetings at the beginning and end which were entertaining. The weaknesses would have to be the location of the animation and the smoothness of the movements. If we were to re do this then I would choose a new sensible location and make sure the movements the people took were smaller and more pictures would be taken.

For the Birds by Pixar

Made in 2001 by Pixar 'For the birds' is funny,upbeat and simple to understand animation.
'For the birds' is a CGI animation, this stands for computer generated imagery. How its done is different to most other animation techniques compared to others this is all done on a computer and not done by the hand. It's less hands in comparison to Whiteboard or Claymation. I think that the use of CGI is the best choice as it allowed the animator to give the birds personalities of their own. The sound used would seem awkward and not of fit another type of animation technique.

The animation starts with the screen moving along electric lines with the title following the movement and then it slowly fades out. Once the looping background has stopped you see a single bird land on the electric wire getting comfy, trying to keep warm. It has its own personality you can see from its behaviour and eye movement.Then another bird lands followed by another until there are several birds each having a different personality. Initially they look cute and fluffy but their personalities make them quite devious. So along comes a big bird, he acts dopey &clumsy and isn't perhaps the brightest but his intentions are just to be friendly. However when the big bird comes along the little birds are not happy and so their individual personalities become one. The big bird sits right in between all the little birds and causes the wire to drop to a V shape. The small birds want him off and so the closest birds to the dopey one decide to peck at his feet which causes the big birds toes to let go one by one. When they get down to the last toe one bird realises the situation they're in that if the big bird lets go the wire will go back up and they'll go high in the sky. He alerts the others but its too late. The birds shoot into the sky but the feathers are left in the same spot the birds were. On the ground the big bird sits laughing and is intrigued by the feathers. One by one a naked bird falls down from the sky and hits the ground embarrassed all the birds hide behind him. Then the end credits come on to finish the animation.

The effect the animation tries to achieve is humour and feeling. You feel sorry for the big dopey bird because he doesn't know any better and only has the best intentions. So when he starts to get picked on by the other birds you feel for him. The little birds make it funny by having individual characters then becoming one. They all think they are better than the big bird. I found this animation funny and it kept my attention and interest. I like the use of character design and the plot of the animation.

You could compare this C.G.I animation to another also done by Pixar 'Partly Cloudy'



This is similar to for the birds as it provokes different emotions for the characters. It has a not so successful character who you feel sorry for just like in for the birds.

Overall For the birds is an amusing animation which provokes emotions for the characters causing you to pay attention the whole way through. I enjoyed watching this :)

A Short Love Story in Stop Motion by Carlos Lascano

'A Short Love Story in Stop Motion' by Carlos Lascano uses four types of animation.
In this animation he uses
. Live Action
. Clay Mation
. Digital Animation
. 2D Stop motion

Not many animators use more than one or two techniques which shows you how different and unique Carlos Lascano's work is. Carlos incorporates real life footage for example the eyes of the characters are real eyes that have been recorded and added in also this is the same for the leaves.

The storyline in this animation starts with a young girl in her classroom fantasising about a boy in her class who she's fallen in love with. The fantasy starts from a drawing on a piece of paper and showing how they fall in love with each other, become married and then have a child together who they bring up.Then it ends with them being an old married couple leading back to the girl sitting at her desk where she started off in the beginning.

Although this scenario is not likely to happen since the girl is only young, the whole concept and fantasy is sweet and lovely. It captures the essence of love and portrays it in a young girls school crush.


I think that the style has been suited well with the music. The music determines the mood of each scene and creates an atmosphere.

I find that the animation achieves captivation of the audience as they all know what its like to crush on someone and imagine what it would be like if they were together. It's a really sweet and cute animation.

I love this animation for the use of different animation techniques because they compliment each other so well. Also the use of music makes you feel like you're part of the fantasy.

With the amount of animation techniques used I cant really say that I've come across any other animation quite like this. This shows that the genius mind of Carlos Lascano is a unique one too, it shows what talents he really has.

Overall I love this animation for the use of the fantasy and how he's complimented it with different animation techniques.

If I had to pick one thing that I could use myself it would have to be the use of sound in this animation as it set the mood for each scene and made it seem like a fantasy.

Harvie Krumpet by Adam Elliot

Directed by Adam Elliot 'Harvie Krumpet' is a short claymation film, about a strange man with tourettes. As he grew up he got bullied at school for his tourettes which always gave him the urge to touch people on the nose. His mum decided to home school him and teach him 'Fakts', as this was all she knew. Tied around his neck he kept a book of 'Fakts' which he took with him wherever he went.

All the sets and characters you can tell are made out of clay,plasticine and wood.
With the characters these were almost human looking but not quite. They don't appear to have eye sockets as their eyes are so big. The main thing about them is that they have exaggerated features making them unique.

The style of Adam Elliot is unique by providing drama and humour together which is unusual in an animation of this sort. An example of this would be when Harvie returns home to find his house burnt down and then he see's his parents both frozen to death on a tandem NAKED!! Normally if someone died you'd feel upset but this scenario make
it so you could apply humour.

I think the effect that this animation is trying to achieve is humour in realistic and unreal scenarios. Adam Elliot has a mind full of weird and wonderful things, which has been portrayed as he won best animation (short) oscar in 2003 !

I do like this animation, I wouldn't say it's one of my favourites as its not my type of thing, however I do admire Adam Elliot's take on trying to use drama and humour together.

An animation that uses claymation similar to 'Harvie Krumpet' would be 'Wallace & Gromit' , who I consider some of the most famous claymation icons. There is even a film based on the animation characters.
Here is just a little bit to show you who they are.

Minilogue by Kristofer Strom

This medium used in this animation is 'Whiteboard' animation. This is where you use a whiteboard to draw on for example a character and then you would take a picture of each movement you wanted to make. A benefit for using whiteboard animation is that its easy to do as you don't have to be an expert and you can demonstrate illusions and have total control on what you do. However it is easy enough to accidentally wipe away some of your work when you are trying to draw something new.

In this particular animation there is not one set character as its on going morphing characters into another. The majority of the animation didn't make sense but that's what kept it interesting. However after a while it did get a bit boring and the random changing. The style initially starts off as interesting and captivating by the randomness but then it gets lost as the animation goes on for a while.

At some points during the animation Kristofer Strom decided to include his hand making it look like the pen was coming from his finger tips and he used his whole hand to give the illusion that he was moving or getting rid of something. This is used in whiteboard animation often and you can use other objects other than your hand to give illusions.

It was very cleverly made and most likely took him a very long time to make. The music adds a sense of fun whilst its played in the background.

Personally I think that the odd and random constant character change is what made this a great animation. It really keeps your attention with the music and variety of characters and drawings. Overall I would recommend this to any animator so they can get an inspiration and give it a try.

Kristofer Strom has also done adverts for the 'Carphone Warehouse'. This is different as it has a purpose to sell unlike minilogue which is purely done for fun.

Project Log 14/5/10

Since last time I have produced a production schedule for my animation telling me when i have to have certain things done by.
I have made the character models for my animation successfully.
I did a test animation to make sure my animation could work.

The test animation was a success and the models I used in the test animation were a sucess too. :)

My character was successful as it was how I desired it and it was able to complete the tasks needed for the test animation. In my test animation the smoothness of the characters' jump was very good and the use of writing was as effective as hoped. What I learnt from the test animation is that I need to consider what movements and actions my character is able to do and still look how it did originally.

Project Log :)

In this animation unit we have to come up with a project using whichever animation technique we choose.
My animation choice is claymation.
I will be animating an "Oopee", a character I have designed. In the animation the Oopee will begin to bounce and then be caught by a hand, following this the hand will squeeze the Oopee so it shoots out of the hand and then falls to the floor and gets squished.

The planning which has been done so far involved at the beginning trying to incorporate a key word into our animation. I chose bounce, squeeze and then squish. Originally we just drew ideas that came into our heads to see whether it would be good to use. I eventually chose to have an Oopee as my character. I began to work on a storyboard showing drawings to represent each part of the animation. Then we had to fill in a proposal form which meant we had to explain our animation, why we'd chosen to do what we are going to do and what the character is like.

I need to finalise ideas and storyboard next and begin to think what techniques, colours of clay etc will be used.

The skills i'll need to work on are clay sculpting and camera techniques.

N.U.C.A Trip :)

On Friday 26th February we went out on a trip to Norwich University College of the Arts.
When we were there we took part in an animation master class led by one of the main tutors in BA(Hons)Animation called Jodie.
Jodie showed us some clips of different animation techniques and explained roughly about the course and then we got straight into our first task which was to make a group "Metamorphosis" animation.
Each person was given a word which they had to draw and then the person next to them gave their word to them.

To do all of this we started out with a pegbar which was used as a support to hold all our pages together keeping them still for when we were drawing so it gave the best results for tracing. The paper we used was semi transparent and was called "Layout Paper". When we were drawing we drew our images originally with pencil and then went over it in pen. We traced over some images so we could see what we were transforming it from each time we drew a new image.

You had to draw a minimum of 12 frames to change one of the objects into the other. It worked out to be 24 fps as we did what is called " shooting twos". What this meant was that we used two frames of the same image to make it a smoother transformation.

My original image was an apple and I had to transform that into a telephone. I drew 18 individual drawings to show the transformation bit by bit.
Once everyone had drawn the images each person went over to the "Rostrum Camera" and there they took two pictures of each drawing. They took two pictures of each drawing so that when it was played through the images didnt just disappear in a split second. As each frame was played through it gave the appearance of each object transforming into the next smoothly.



Our second task we were faced with was to make an 18 frame "Zoetrope" sequence.
We drew 18 individual pictures to demonstrate a simple short animation sequence, the best way to produce a successful one was to make it simple and distinctive. Also it was best to use the majority of the space on the paper. With my drawings i coloured them in to make them bold and stand out. The paper we drew on was 9.5cm x 8cm. My sequence consisted of a fluffy potato shaped cute animal which was listening to music moving about and dancing to it.
The way we made this into an animation and work was placing the images in a long line and sticking them together to make a strip of drawings. We then placed it into the round barrel of the zoetrope.
The zoetrope its self was a spinning barrel with slits in body equally its spaced around it. When you spun the zoetrope you had to try and look through the slits and keep focus to see inside to view the animation. When you watched the sequence it gave the appearance of it coming to life. Even though it was a short sequence it was effective.

At the end of our day we were shown our group metamorphosis which turned out well and recapped on what we had learnt. The day gave us an insight to what we could in the future be able to do and accomplish in different areas of the Creative and Media Industry.

Monty Python

Monty Python is a group formed by comedians which inludes an animator.
The animator Terry Gilliam converted the comedians ideas into a still image, stop motion animation.
All of Monty Pythons animations are done whitout greater technology such as computers.
Each animation is made by taking lots of photos and putting them together and as you play them through it will appear that the objects ar creating motion. The only way to edit the film was by using a razor and literally cutting the film up.

The style of the animations could be considered

• Surreal
• Victorian
• Comic
• Distinctly British/ English
• Faded/ De Saturated
• Bizzare
• Unique

They use un co-ordinated limb movements often giving the characters unproportionate figures. When they used this in their characters it would appear that they have deformities. It was very much 2D for all of the productions. When they wanted to move the characters it would be so simple as to make the limbs appear as if they were swinging. Being a 2D production there was a limit on how many ways you could show movement. Incorporated in their animations the characters movements may be such as the eyes moving but nothing else, limbs swinging round all ways, moving the mouth on a character and keeping the rest of it still. They use background layers which stay still throughout the animation. Randomness was a key thing to keep their success going. There was never anything that made sense.

The animation technique that Terry Gilliam used was : STOP MOTION ANIMATION

Stop-motion is an animation technique to make a un animate object appear to move on its own. The object is moved a fraction at a time between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence.


Below are two videos showing how he used movement in 2D and the whole concept of his animations being random.