Research + reference

Designing the yeti was much more enjoyable for me, although there wasnt much we could research on, we could still grasp on it from our imagination, a yeti is and animal that is portrayed differently by many people. Some view it as a big animal with short legs and ape looking, others view it as a wild beast with sharp teeth basically a vicious creature. We began sketching and bringing ideas together and eventually came up with our final design, but as we started to create the armiture we moved aaway from the initial idea we had and it turned in to a much more human looking creature, its body took human form, apart from having very big hands the shape had changed but we were happy with the outcome.

When we started designing the characters i wasnt sure where to begin, i think designin for stop motion means extra care needs to go in to every aspect of your drawing, can he stand on his legs ?, are his arms long enough to balance his body?, how big must his head be able to customize his expressions easily? all these questions kept entering my mind, so i started looking at the work of Tim Burton as he is one of the main inspirations for my interest in animation. I watched many of his documentaries and image reference to help me understand the use of armitures and how to bring your character to life by using the right materials, of course as students we wont be able to afford things such as silicone and strong armitures but i learnt a lot from watching his work.

A main problem i had with designing was, i had never designed a middle aged man before, this was definetley a challenge for me, i didnt know what to do with his face, how to style his hair or what he would wear. To make a middle aged man an animation that will make people laugh is not easy, and as i was a little stuck i started surfing the net, looking for images that would spark and idea. As a group we then started discussing the size and weight of the characters, coming to a conclusion that teh main charcter would be 6.5" and the Yeti would be 8.5"

Inspiring videos.

 

 

Task 5 (Choosing a Script)

Our group 

Charlean
Sarah
Catherine
Katie
Sally (me)

Choosing a script
Our final decision was to go for the Neighbour script. At first we were enlightened and exited about the scientist script but we then changed our minds after realizing most of the class was also interested in going forth with the scientist script, as a group we then decided to go threw each script again and discuss which script we would all be happy working on. This being the neughbour script we the started brainstorming each of our visions on the script and how we wanted to move from there. After discussing the change, we were a little upset because we fell in love with the yeti character in the scientist script, and we were so exited to get started and work on this character but we had changed our idea. A couple of us then suggested why not have the neighbour be a yeti. It sounds absurd but we were quite happy to play around with the script and bring in some unexpected entertainment to the film.

Characters

Middle aged man (6inches tall)
Yeti (8 1/2 inches tall)
Materials - Plastercine, Armature, Fabric for Clothing
Clothing made specially to fit models
Replacement heads

Sets

Bathroom
Living Room
Materials - Wire, Mulli putty, Camera, Lights, Cardboard for sets, Objects for sets.


Week 1 Schedule


-Work on character design as a group
-Make armatures in shape of character and measure for clothing to be made
-Figure out measurements for set building
-Blog

Week 2 Schedule


-Make clothes for Main character and Yeti
-Start building sets
-Make animatic
-Finish dope sheet
-Create video reference.
-Book lights for filming
-Blog


Week 3 Schedule


-Set up animation
-Sart filming
-Work from video ref
-Editing to be done for final film
-Blog

Week 4 Schedule 

-Evaluation
-Prepare for Assessment

Group task, Stop motion

This was a very enjoyable task for me, as a group we were able to work very creative and feed of each others ideas. Although it took us a while to get to the end, i am very pleased with the final outcome. On the first couple of days, we had so many ideas but everytime we approached one further, it turned out to be something we werent happy in continuing with and so this idea came about and we decided to go for it and spend the entire day planning and filming. Altogether it was fun, and again, a new experience. It was quite fiddly because when working with paper it's hard to keep in place and get a good angled shot. The genre we went for was horror/violence humour. I like the way we portrayed it in our film because its so unexpected, there is no sign or clue of any type of horror as you may see in tom and jerry for instance, you know from the beginning of the epi that it's a violence genre, also the aniticipation before his head spurts, this comes from the music, it makes you feel like somethings coming, i think this is a great part of the film and we were so happy that the music worked so well with the film, thanks to Luisa.
Areas i think we could have improved on are things such as more preperation time and better materials, i think what we did is at a good standard but because this was a last minute idea, it kind of stood in the way of preperation time.
Over all im happy with the feedback we've recieved, i showed this to many of my friends and family, and they seem to be dying of laughter, so its nice to know our horror genre was effective.

Plastercine replacement heads

I enjoyed this task very much, it was a very last minute idea to go for a lion, i researched many things but in the end i liked working with animal ideas. Not for any particular reasons but i like giving animals human characteristics, i think it brings a warm and comfortable feeling to viewers, especially children. They also bring plenty of humour, anyway i enjoyed this task because im usually drawing with pencil or working on photoshop and it was nice to get hands on and experiencing a different type of animation. I neevr thought i would enjoy stop motion so much! i have really had so much fun and learnt a great deal about working with plastercine and lighting and detail! especially detail! It is so important to pay attention to every detail, to give your character as much personality and charachter as possible! being hands on means you need to mould your charachter to perfection yourself. Every nook and cranny, painting, sculpting, smoothing, shaping. everything! 
Im happy with my final outcome but it started to get a little sloppy towards the end. At first my lion didnt have any eyebrows, this took away a lot of the life teh character could have had, he was epressionless even though his mouth was widely egsaturated, it didnt matter because the top half of his head had nothing. After i added eyebrows, its slowly helped build the expression, i think it looks much better but there are still areas for improvent. 
After being satifsfied with the final result, i played aorund with light and tecture to gain some dramatic photo’s.

Stikfas group work / Walking a dog

This is the walk cycle i did before working on our final piece. it was a quick practice to get the gist of it, but it is deffinetley not as easy as i thought it would be! when you start to think of He looks like he’s sliding across teh floor rather than walking. i learnt a lot from this test and understood the structure of it, also i think i needed more frames for it to run smoother.
(this is a gif file, if you drag it to a new tab, it should work.)

Final video 

I’m pleased with the final outcome, but there are many areas we could improve on. i think the part where he turns around to look at the dog needs to be a little longer or maybe a little more egaturated because its not very noticable. Also the right side of the screen hasnt beem used and so making the set look empty, if teh man could have walked a little longer or fallen forwards instead then it would have showed good use of space. Another aspect to point out is that the dog shoul have been our of plastercine, because being made with white tack, even though it has wire inside, it still kept falling over, it was very fiddly to work with.

Making a Stickfas

11 Sec Animation Evaluation

11sec Animation Evaluation

getting to the last stage was quite a journey, like i said earlier i had problems with the length of the animation, but this still ran all the way till the end, i cut the entire openeing and it was still long, so i cut out scene two where the fox appears outside the window and it was still quite long, 19 secs to be exact, i thought of cutting out more but that was just ridiculous, if i took away anymore of the animation, it would be left without a story, so i decided to leave it at 19 secs. im not 100% pleased with the final outcome because it has some glitches, firstly when the fox is imagning he is about to eat the pie, i think i made a mistake by drawing both there reactions to this on the same paper. Because the eye only concentrates on the fox and doesnt have enough time to even realise the pie is there, i should have drawn teh speech bubble alone on sepertate pages, with a close up camera angle, then gone back to the fox, this way it would be easier to understand.
i pretty much focused on the one camera angle through out the animation, just straight head on wide shot of the scenes. No close up’s or anything, just simple, i think this helped smoothly bring one scene in to another, while maintaining the same feel and atmoshpehere for the audience.

another problem i encountered was while capturing, i stacked all the paper and it got closer and closer to the camera, changing the line and colour balance of some of the animation, you can see as your watching it, the lines begin to fade and the paper gets very bright. this took away from what my animation had to offer and made it look quite tacky and confusing because you cant see the face expressions most of the time.
Through this process i learnt many properties such as working with an animal, rather than humansm and trying to give that animal, human like actions and facial expressions, but keeping him very cartoony at the same time, this was a fun challenge because it gave me the chance to realise where i was going wrong and what aspects i needed to improve on. I also learnt more about eggsaturation, and how to make it work well with your audience, not making it look un natural, also anticipation was another, it was exiting experimanting and taking these principles further by applying them to a storyline.
Over all im happy with the outcome because i feel i’ve learnt a great deal from the mistakes i made and i wouldnt have done it any other way. Although my animation runs longer than the soundtrack, i am proud of it as it took me to the first steps of being an animator.

11 Sec animation final video

11 sec Animation test shots

11 sec Animation research + references

So through the designing process, i started firstly by thinking about my fox. I wanted him to look sly and skinny (this just makes him look more humorous to the audience). I sketched a few foxes, all shapes and sized and watched videos showing how they act and what there instincts where like, to get a better understanding of them. The first fox i drew was quite dopey looking and sketched out very loose, he didn't have much shape, i went out for feedback and most feedback i got was that it didn't look like a fox, i made him to dopey and simple that his features got lost in the line. things like his nose needed to be smaller and thinner and and his furry face needed to be smaller and more structured, so i took this feedback in to account and re-sketched my fox, after that i was happy with the outcome. i gave him one eye bigger than the other to keep his dopey element but made him look a little manlier and fox like by giving him human characteristics as well as animal instincts.

i also looked at films such sword in the stone and robin hood for refrenves of animated foxes/wolves, this help me understand better the movements of a fox and it helped me think about his facial expressions, i could imagine how egsaturated his expression should be by watching these.

Anticipation task

i watched a few videos to better my knowledge on anticipation. i thought this video was quite interesting because it showed a humourous side to using anticipation.

anticipation was a tricky one for me because i was afraid of perfecting spacing, in the final outcome i managed to get an almost natural flow of him running, it looks a little lifless and i think thats the main point i would like to improve on, also when he went for the jump there was quite a big leap and i think i needed to add another drawing of him above the hurdle before almost hitting the ground. over all im pleased with the outcome because i think i used the techniques quite well, not perfect but well.

i also watched videos of olympic hurdle runs so i could see how every muscle works in the body to create a realistic feel, but the task is to keep it simple of course and this really helped to get the feel of how it works and how ti experiment with timing and spacing. it helped me a lot to see where i had gone wrong after capturing and i understood on which aspects i needed to improve on to bring the images to life.

Bouncy Ball Task

the bouncy ball task for me was fun, although it looked simple once i understood the basics of making this ball come to life i thought "aha" this wont take a lot of time, but actually its a lot fiddlier than i thought it would be, i think my final outcome is good considering the concept of the ball bouncing a few times and then rolling of but what i realised when i filmed it is that i actually didnt compress the ball enough when it hit the ground to make it feel alive, it stayed very 2D and unrealistic, this is something i have to improve on as it gave the animation a lack of life. My idea for the bouncy ball came from this video - Wall E meets bouncy balls, instead of doing a big heavy bootball or anthing, i wanted something lighter and airy like a ping pong ball and so when i found this video, i studied the bouncing ball very carefully over and over again untill i got the gist of how it should look and feel to the audience and went from there, as i said i am not 100% pleased with the outcome but i learnt more than i ever could making these mistakes than being afraid of just going for it and thinking too much about it.

Exaggeration Task

the exaggerated task was really fun, i really enjoyed the research as much as making the animation itself, i started by looking at exaggerated facial features and well this got my imagination going, so after that i started thinking of the face i was going to use ad thought why not just use my own, i photographed my face and started using elements of a cartoon face and playing with scale and proportion, i made the eyes bigger, the lips big and plump, the neck very skinny, and the hair almost unmoving like block of clay. in the end i think it was a good outcome because it represented a sense of fun play with scale but it stool looked like something that was a moving, full of emotion, human being which is important because of course your character needs personality. now all that was left was to decide on the expressions i was going to use, i tried to think of 3 expressions that would easily fall in to eachother for a natural feel, so i went for happy to sad back to happy, instead of using more paper to take her back to happy i captured the images of her smiling again but backwards so it went happy, sad then reversed back to happy. im satisfied with the final outcome but if there was something i wish i did better, it would to to add more movement to the animation, maybe make her head move some more for a more dramatic feel.

1920 - 1930 Animation

The Golden Age of US animation is a period in the United States animation history that began with the advent of sound cartoons in 1928 and continued into the early 1960s when theatrical animated shorts slowly began losing to the new medium of television animation.
Many memorable characters emerged from this period including Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Daffy Duck, Goofy, Popeye, Tom and Jerry, Betty Boop, Mr. Magoo, Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse and a popular adaptation of Superman. Feature length animation also began during this period, most notably with Walt Disney's first films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.

I will be looking at Fleischer Studios. 

One of Disney's main competitors was Max Fleischer, the head of Fleischer Studios. The Fleischers scored successful hits with the Betty Boop cartoons and the Popeye the Sailor series. Popeye's popularity during the 1930s rivaled Mickey Mouse at times, and Popeye fan clubs sprang up across the country in imitation of Mickey's fan clubs; in 1935, polls showed that Popeye was even more popular than Mickey Mouse.