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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here is my production schedule.
