I am currently studying for a BA (Hons) in Animation Arts at the University for the Creative Arts in Maidstone, England.
I am starting this blog to keep a record of my work, to show a few of the projects I am working on, and to show my progress as I improve throughout the course.
This is the most recent test of our character sitting up in bed. I need to shoot it again on the nicer cameras and include the duvet, which I forgot last time.
I think the actual animation of this one went wrong at the top of her sitting up. I will try and fix that when I shoot it again.
I have made a test to try and make my own version of the flickery stereograph animated .gifs I linked to in my previous post. This is what I came up with, unfortunately wordpress doesn’t seem to like animated .gifs so you’ll have to click it:
I only used one camera, which I moved slightly for the different angles. I think it works well for giving a sense of depth, but I think I moved the camera too much. I might have another go later on. In future I intend to try and make an animation in a similar style. I think I will have to wait for when I go home over christmas and borrow my mums camera, which is quite similar to mine and use them both to shoot something moving. I don’t know how I can make the lenses close enough together as the rest of the camera’s will get in the way. Perhaps I just have to aim them at something further away so that it doesn’t matter.
If I were to try and make a stop motion animation using this stereograph style effect to give a sense of depth I think I will have to pan with any movement as I think the foreground object needs to have both camera’s facing it in order for the effect to work. Whether or not any animation I make in this way would be extremely hard to look at I think it would be an interesting effect.
For our project “The Individual Voice” I am working with Justine, Amer and Naomi. We were asked to make a one minute animation where we each animated at least fifteen seconds based on events in our lives. We decided to look at childhood fears. Justine said she was always afraid that there was a man living in her garden with a rabbits head. Amer said that he was afraid of prawns defrosting humans, and that if he was a prawn he would have been called ‘Alex’, I still do not know how he came to this conclusion.
We decided that we would use these ideas in our animation, and started working on a storyboard, which we then made into an animatic. This is the section of the animatic that I worked on:
We then started working on a section of animation earlier on in the piece. We wanted to work with cut outs as we felt this would be a good way of including some texture and colour in our film. It also meant our time would be arranged slightly differently so that we were spending less time drawing and more time cutting. We thought it might be quicker, but I think overall it takes about the same time as if we had drawn it.
Our first test at having the girl sit up in bed went horribly wrong and failed completely:
We then decided we needed to replace different cutouts during the movement in order to get it slightly smoother. We decided the best way to do this for her sitting up was to hand draw the animation and make the cut outs based on that. This is our first test:
I decided this one was too slow, so I took out some frames and made this version:
This one slows down when she is halfway up, which I thought looked wrong, so I took out another couple of frames and came up with this:
I felt that this was the perfect speed for her sitting up, as she slows down just as she reaches the top of the movement. From this point I made a series of cut outs which I used to make a further test animation, which I shall upload shortly. I think I might go to sleep now, as my lovely flatmates have just gone out, so it may be the only chance to sleep I get in the next few days.
This is the storyboard that my group came up with for the adaptation project.
Storyboard Adaptation
We were asked to adapt a piece of text and make it into a storyboard. I was working with Naomi, Tom, and Katharina. We took a vote on the text we should use and decided to go for this one, which is based on “Star and Chain” by Steve Lacheen. We decided that we would divide up the work and then have just one person ink over the others drawings in order to make it look uniform and consistent.
I think this method of working worked well. If it hadn’t been for a slight miscommunication I think our project could have been much better.
In one of our workshop’s with Lewis we had to draw simple shapes in order to make up an image. For example we had to draw a dog using just squares circles and triangles.
We were also asked to draw a silhouetted figure who was flushing their goldfish down the toilet as it had died. We had to draw the character at different levels of emotion, so not that bothered, quite upset, very upset and so on.
These are some of the practice storyboards we did in classes with Lewis. He told us to draw odd shapes on our page and make a storyboard inside those shapes. The idea of the excercise was to make us think about the space and the composition differently.
It is difficult to see this storyboard in such a small image, but it is of two people reaching an island, and disagreeing on which way to go to find the treasure.
We also did an excercise where we had to show emotion through a series of storyboard frames. This is ginger Matt being angry and opening the door:
I thought the excercise with the different shaped storyboard frames was useful as I felt that it helped me to think more about the composition rather than just drawing everything in a rectangular box all the time.
A few weeks ago Grant Orchard came to talk to us about his work at Studio aka.
He showed us a video that he worked on called Paintballing:
He talked to us about the way they made some of their animations and talked to us about the importance of storyboarding and animatics. He then looked at the work we had been doing in our groups and gave us some advice on improving our animatics. I thought this visit by a working animator was very useful.
I found these!
I think they are really cool. They are two frames played in a loop very quickly. The two frames are from a stereograph, which takes two images from slightly different angles to simulate the depth we see as our eyes are in slightly different positions. Originally they would have been seen through a special viewer that allows you to see one picture in each eye, creating the illusion of depth. Here they have just been looped as animated .gif files. I particularly like the one of the ammunitions wagon exploding. It is very dramatic. I think the effect does create an illusion of depth in quite an unusual and eerie way. I would like to try and make a test animation using a similar technique.
If I were to take a series of images using two cameras in slightly different positions, I could play them back so that the frames were interspersed with each other: The 1st photo taken on camera A followed by the corresponding one on camera B- then the 2nd from camera A and so on. I could animate something moving within the series of stereoscopic images. It would be a bit crude and probably be impossible to make out what was happening, but I think it would be an interesting thing to try.
I finished my essay!!!
I tend to struggle with essays, but I think this one has turned out alright. The problem is I always think that and it usually seems to turn out not to be, so I actually have no idea how good it is whatsoever.
I can now get back to doing some of my other work for the other project. We are making a one minute animation/ animatic where we have to animate at least 15 seconds each, and the rest of the story must be shown as an animatic with sound. My group had originally planned to try and get the vast majority of the work done before christmas as it is not possible for us to meet up, or shoot our work while we are all at home for the christmas break. As we only have one more week after this one before we break up for christmas and we haven’t started shooting yet it looks like we won’t have time to be finished before then, which may well mean we struggle to meet the final deadline. We might be able to meet the deadline, but our work may not be to as high a standard as we were hoping.
Last week on Thursday I went to a lecture by Claire Kitson.
She used to work for Channel Four, when they used to give lots of funding to experimental animation projects. She was mainly here to try and sell copies of her books, but she spoke about the direction in which she felt the animation industry was heading. I thought it was quite depressing, as she basically said that now Channel 4 is not so keen on animation that it is very hard to find funding for animation projects. I think that there will always be a place for animation though, even if it’s just in TV and internet advertising.
There is a website run by Channel 4 and Aardman called 4mations, where you can watch animations, which I think is a good idea. I will add the link to that to my ‘Interesting Websites’ list at the top.
mattanimation.wordpress.com 