Experimental Endings!

1 lamp,
1 screen,
1 camera,
1 tripod,
3 blocks of wood & a mobile phone,
4 bits of wire,
7 or 8 cereal boxes,
3 nights filming,
1 night compositing
and 138 cut-out shapes later...

MY EXPERIMENTAL IS FINISHED:

The end is in sight...

All the photographs for the experimental are complete, going to stick them all in After Effects tonight, 80% of the production report is typed up and the 11 Second Club makes me want to kill myself.

Roughin' it up.

After effectively losing 3 days to work I'm powering on ahead and I'm determined to get things finished. I took some experimental work home and managed to crack on with a fair bit: I sat in the car outside the hotel cutting cardboard rabbits out while the rest of my family helped set up balloons and other party paraphernalia... and starting to write my production report on the train yesterday (I went to Wales and back, Sunday trains are crazy).
My Dad has provided me with some garden wire so I can make something similar to a wire photo holder to hold my carboard animals in place (animation paper is far too flimsy) and I don't want to have my glass frame moving in everyframe (also it'd probably fall over, I don't have a stand for it, so i'm propping it up with massive Diet Coke bottles).

So, this morning, I have finished my rough version of the 11 Second clip. I'm aiming to have a neater rough done by the end of the week.

Walking assignment and general experimental fail.

This week our assignment is to draw a character walking across the screen. My first idea was to practice using a model made out of paper, (I'm tempted to use cutout for some of our other projects), but it epically failed. My figure was too small and fiddly to use well and with no ghost image I was making it up (horrendously) as I went along... which resulted in a very wobbly, unrealistic and down right rage-inducing less than a second of pure fail.


After giving up on that idea rather swiftly I tried using the armature option in Flash, the video below is a simple test...


...Which led to this:

Both arms and legs are animated using Flash's armature tool, then converted into frame by frame to delete the terrible inbetweens it added. 12fps. No reference material other than an old walk cycle plan I did last year.

Experimental Research

For one of our projects this term we have to create an experimental animation (without the aid of a computer) to some music. As Derek hasn't put up or played any of the music options I haven't really had any ideas for animating yet. So I sifted through YouTube and backwards through my blog and came across a few favourites and some new interesting ones that you may be interested in too...

My Green Crocodile (I came across it in Foundation and I simply love it, I'm sure I've shared it on my blog before, but it's realy worth a watch).


Loof & Let Dime (from Bradford Animation Festival last year, I think it'd be harder to try and replicate something like this without the aid of a computer, but ink and cutout may produce similar results).


Photograph of Jesus (another Bradford find, but could be fun using photographs from real-life in real-life!).


My Paper Mind (a video that Hugh Herbert liked on YouTube that led me to spend time surfing through random animations).


YouTube user nosnoma's "paper horse animation test".


YouTube user mattpee's "Alice in Wonderland".

Freeze/Crash Count... 4

I finished the fly symbol last night, I wasn't happy with the legs I'd drawn on the other one, they looked a bit stiff considering they'd be blowing about in the wind as it flew. He has the anatomically correct six legs now! Each leg is on a separate layer and each individual leg is made up of nine different frames that loop with the wings.

I'm currently working on the lab escape scenes, I've completed the backgrounds, click for a larger preview...
The Inner Lab:

aaaand, the World outside the Lab:


I'm now off to animate the fly in these scenes :)

Planning... because it's better to plan a little bit late than not at all.

Being the neurotic I am, and in preparation for the Formation project, I sat down this morning with the help of (a not very enthused) Jake to work out the exact length for every part of the Animation. Besides my neurosis about needing to know exactly how long everything is, I have some good reasons for doing so...
...Flash is notorious for crashing (Jake suggested we keep a tally going which sounds like a good idea: it currently stands at 1), so hopefully by making the animation in separate files will ease the strain, and also make it easier to edit any mistakes... We can each work on our bits of the project separately (from the comfort of our own homes!) knowing that when we come to edit the animation together, it'll (hopefully) be the correct length and bits won't overrun. It's also been easier to share the workload, so that we all have an even ammount of things to be getting on with.

We decided that we're going to edit the final scenes together using After Effects, this is partly because it'll be easier than doing so in Flash, but also because we want to add a paper texture to the background. As the animation's stlye is paper cut-out (and most of the symbols literally are scanned in pieces of coloured paper...), a plain white background would be boring and plain lazy on our part. Flash hates having the paper texture in the background (we're having to produce the animation at 1920 x 1080, so it's pretty large), but having it move makes it crash (hence the total standing at 1 from when we tried this morning...), but AE seems to like it, and if we export all of the scenes from Flash with an Aplha Channel (as we accidently did with an old version of the Animatic which we had a test play with... see below...) then it'll (metaphorically speaking) be a piece of cake. Hopefully.



Annnd I forgot to post this, an update of the (as yet still unfinished) fly symbol, now with FOUR legs:

(P.S. Congratulations to my tutor Andy who's just had a baby boy!)

*insert witty post title here*

This is going to be a mammoth update. You have been warned.

First week back, and it's already as manic as the end of last term. We've already been set three major projects and have optional 3D sessions on a Friday, which for now I'm going to persevere with (I was really pleased, we briefly dipped our toes into the waters of rigging, and to my suprise, it actually made sense. It so far seems much more logicical in terms of thinking, which is perhaps why my brain can handle what we've done so far. However, this is only the beginning, and if I get in over my head I'll abandon ship - did you see what I did with that metaphor there? Yeah...)

The first project we've been set, we had a choice of two briefs: to create a title sequence for an internet program, ("Formation", which is essentially 28 Days Later, but with flies...), being made by the collaboration of students from different Cornish Colleges/Schools/Universities; or to create an animation of any length using the script "What, What, What, What, What".
I've chosen to be a part of the only group to do the title sequence, along with Jake and Rozi. In our brainstorming session, Rozi put forward the idea of the title sequence being styled in a similar cut-out style of the opening titles of the film "Catch Me If You Can". I think it's the idea of working to this style that made me decide to pursue this brief, I've wanted to try this style for quite a while, and now with this brief and feeling more confident about Flash I can finally get round to it. The videos below are of the "Catch Me If You Can" titles and the opening sequence for "Casino Royale" (which I've always loved) display the kind of style we're aiming/basing it on:




Our first storyboard (click for larger view):


Second:



All 3 of us are creating silhouettes of people to use, Rozi wants to create the lab and Jake is creating the bit with the apple (I think), I'm on fly duty and created a (very) basic animation test on Flash to get the wing movements, I realise the legs need to move aswell, but thought it wasn't too bad for a first attempt:



The second project is another Sketchbook project from Kathy, devising a "game" each week to base our sketches on. I'm not suer how that'll go. I really need to buy a another new sketchbook for, because I've already started to fill the one I bought with ideas for Derek's project.

The third project is the one I'm most excited about and have already started to create lots of characters and began to visualise the locations in my head. I'm going to use the Sims, like I did for the background project, to help get the buildings how I want them to look (I epically fail at trying to create a building from scratch) and draw them from the angles I want. I don't want to give too much away, but I drew up four characters yesterday, then, as I was starting to feel sleepy I had sudden inspiration (it doesn't happen alot, but when it does, it's normally pretty good) to write a really long description about one of the locations I drew a rough sketch for. We have to create a production bible for an underground Mafia style animation ("Animal Firm"), we can choose to make it for children or for a more adult audience, and create sketches of characters and locations they would associate in. Like I said, I don't want to give too much away, however, I will put up my pictures I'm using for reference and leave you to guess.
(Click for a mahoosive view).

Aaaand that's it. If you read this far, congratulations for having extreme patience, or have nothing better to do.

Bradford [2]

I’ve been meaning to get round to talking about Bradford again (like I promised a good while ago). I’ve hunted out some of my favourite films I saw on YouTube, and provided the links so you can have a cheeky peek at them (and either agree with me on how cool they are, or completely disagree).


The Professional Films
I have to say, if I’m brutally honest, I thought the quality of the student films were (dare I say it?) better than the professional ones. The Student ones have been proved much harder to find online, probably because they’re still owned by the Colleges that made them, two of the films I really liked (“Bruce” by Tom Judd & “I See What You’re Saying” dir. By Lottie White), came from the RCA but even though they’re mentioned on the website, there’s no link to see the films, which is a shame.


The Cat Piano
Directed by Eddie White & Ari Gibson (Australia/2009/8mins, 23secs)
I really loved the style of both this film and the one below, the story is a pretty strange one but engages your attention all the way through which some of the other professional films didn’t succeed in doing.


Lettin’ Go
Directed by Malika Whitaker (France/2008/5mins)
I love the style used for this, it almost looks like it has been drawn with spray paint and stencils, I also like the looseness to the story, I style can’t really figure out the ending and what has supposed to have happened to the male character.
Other films I really liked in this category were “French Roast” directed by Fabric O Joubert (France/2008/8mins, 15secs) and “Alma” directed by Rodrigo Blaas (Spain/2009/5mins, 2secs), both were done in 3D and are simply amazing animations. They both won awards, but sadly I couldn’t find videos for them.

Commercials
I love animated adverts so much, they make a nice break from the normal low budget adverts that are constantly repeated. I only saw this advert on TV a couple of times so was really pleased when it was featured at BAF (and won the Commercial award). It’s a clever combination of 2D and what must be Pixilation, I also love the song that goes with it, it fits really well, and you’ll see why:

Audi Unboxed


Panoramas


Photograph of Jesus
Directed by Laurie Hill (UK/2008/6mins, 40secs).
I really like this one (well, I like all of them which is why I’m writing about them), but I think this one is pretty clever, it uses Cutout and Collage with Pixilation which is something I’ve been really tempted to do myself at some point (who knows, I could try it out over Christmas...). It’s also a visual piece that goes with a spoken interview (like Creature Comforts).


Loof and Let Dime
Directed by Vereshchak Roman (Russia/2008/2mins, 31 secs).
This is similar to “Photograph of Jesus” in that it creates a visual to spoken words, but it couldn’t be more different. A lot of my fellow students disliked this film, but I thought, even though it wasn’t one of my favourites, it was worth talking about. It creates a visual to a nonsense repeated poem, even though the images it uses don’t have anything to do with the words being spoken, I love how the text travels around the screen, it reminds me of a similar thing on of my classmates did in foundation.

It’s been nice to be able to watch the videos again and write about them, I can’t believe Bradford was nearly a month ago! It’s not nice when you realise just how quickly time has slipped through your fingers!

snip snip... cut-out animaiton

This week we haven’t been set any 2D or 3D projects (sad times), but got to practise some of the Animation Techniques we’ve been learning with Derek. As our year group is so large (there’s about 40 of us) we’re split into two groups and get to practise every other week, this time it was my group’s turn to work on Cut-out & Collage and I worked with Olly Skillman-Wilson (who’s blog can be found here: http://olninyo.blogspot.com/) and Charlie Minnion (who’s blog is here: http://charlie1000.blogspot.com/).

The good thing about Cut-out animation is that you’re a bit more free to improvise as you go along, you don’t have to carefully plan beforehand (at least not just for a quick test like we did). We captured our Animation using the Rostrum camera and Stop Motion Pro software, the video below is (I think) at 12fps, we exported two final versions, one at 12 and another at 18, but the 12 allows you to see more of the details. As for the plot, we sort of made it up as we went along which is why it’s a bit crazy.



I drew the trees, stand-by skiers, the clouds and fire, Charlie created the little “Spartacus” character (who’s a kind of cross between a sheep and goat) and Olly created the crazy Penguin and Shark. We all took turns at moving the pieces around and being in control of the camera. We couldn’t stop laughing while we were making it, so hopefully you’ll find it funny too.

It’s not the first time I’ve tried to play around with the cut-out technique. I last tried it pretty early on in Foundation using another Rostrum camera and a hell of a lot of pieces of paper. My plan was originally to make a moving storyboard (hence all the crazy arrows) and then have the camera zoom in on certain bits, but as I only had two days I ended up just focusing in on certain “scenes” and didn’t make the large storyboard. Most of this was just made up as I went along as well, playing around under the camera will give you sudden inspiration and it’s a hell of a lot easier to go and cut-out another piece of paper than it is to go back and edit 40 hand-drawn frames! Anyway, it’s only short and it’s called “Pig” for (what become) very obvious reasons: