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.
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