aliceparkesanimation-blog

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Self Evaluation

I have always struggled with the choice of music to accompany in any animation I have ever worked on. And in a way, this module was both an interesting and daunting one to be given. 

I have always been fond of music, I have been fascinated with learning different musical instruments for many years, however: I have never been one to compose my own music - and as such, I was nervous about what this module was trying to have us do!

Despite my reservations, I found myself really enjoying to work of artists such as 'Soul Bass' and 'Joshua White' far more than I would have prior to the project, because it had opened my eyes to what the artists where trying to achieve with the complimentary visuals and music. 

I liked the final track that we completed as a group for the animation. The sound that we had created was not something I would have considered 'musical' before this module. But, now that I have had time to delve into the world of 'concrete music', I think we as a group, did a good job of recreating the sound of 'concrete music' with the 'unique' piece that we handed over to the other group. 

I have always preferred a more conventional form of character animation, and music, but this module took me away from my comfort zone and had me experimenting with more abstract��shapes and transitions. I wanted to combine my love for character animation with the abstraction we were seeing from the artists we studied in class, so for my final project, I hoped to create something quite different to anything I have done prior. 

One thing I was quite disappointed about with my piece of animation, was that it was repetitive. The music was rather limited in that it was the exact same beat for the duration of my part. I tried to add something different to each different pulse of shapes, but I still feel I could have pushed that concept more than I did. 

As a final piece, I think the animation works well. The style of each of our work compliments the direction the animation takes, and the 'ink drops' that overlay the animation, gives a really nice feeling of fluidity, and in my opinion, ties everything together neatly.

If we were to do this project again, I would have liked to collaborate a little more with my fellow group members on each segment of animation, so that each segment had a mix of work from each of us, instead of a block of animation from one person transitioning to a block of animation someone else had done. I would also have liked to create some more traditional mediums into the animation, such as stop motion animation with paint, clay, paper cut outs, etc.. 

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Presentation for our final critique.

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Above, is our Group's final animation. The visuals were created by:

Alice Parkes (Animation)

Nadia Topp (Animation)

Anika Rozwadowska (Animation)

Arina Radaeva (Animation) 

and Lisa Morgan (Overlays)

we agreed to name our project 'The journey' for a number of reasons. The first journey within the animation is the addition of colour to the greyscale figure that is walking along with the beat. and the second, is the transition from a more standard form of digital animation, into a more colourful and vibrant abstract animation. 

We also felt that the name was suitable to describe our own journey into the world of sound and music. As a group, we're all on the animation course to do animation, and prior to the assignment, we hadn't yet put much thought into how those animations would work with music. Our journey was in discovering how to cut and edit sounds, and fit them in a complimentary way to animation. 

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Above is Mika's contribution to the group. Her's will be the last transaction in the video.  

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Above is Anika's final piece of animation to contribute to the group's project. Her piece breaks into even more abstraction, inspired by 'The Joshua light show' The piece will transition from Nadia's adbract piece also. 

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Above is Nadia's contribution to our project. We decided that she too would use Flash to create her project, in order to keep a consistent feel to the transaction between her and my animation. 

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In addition to my final piece that is to be added to our finished group animation, I created the video above. I was inspired to expand on my animation with an 'ink drop' scene and see if I could blend my digital Flash work with a more traditional medium.  I considered using the very last 'beat' at the end of our music track, to re-create the digital scene in inks. The 'Journey' of the animation would have closed with the figure re-appearing in ink, rather than on screen and digitally. 

However, when it came to compositing we found that there wasn't really a place for this animation to fit into the work, and so I decided to leave it our as a piece of development instead!

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My piece of Animation

I decided to animate my final contribution to our animated video in Flash CS5. I am comfortable with the program, and wanted the animation to work well with the music we were given. Flash enabled me to view the 'peaks' and dips in the track, and I feel this was the best feature to help me create a beat in the animation, that would reflect the beat of the music.  I am satisfied with the final outcome, however If I was to go back and edit it, I would have added more vigorous 'glitches' in the walk cycle, and perhaps made each 'glitch' increase more as the music continues.  

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After we showed our re-animating newport in class, it was suggested that we expand upon the concept and animate another piece to go with the first. 

As with the first animation we did, Nadia provided the 'desolate' photos to work on, and this time Anika animated the growth of nature around it.  This piece seemed to have a better impact on the class than the previous one that I had animated. The style of animation seemed to fit more with the theme of 'nature taking over' than mine did. 

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Since our video is going to be a very colourful and colour concentrated piece of work, I looked up some colour palettes as inspiration for our piece. I plan on making the colour transitions in my animations smooth, and hope to use colours that compliment the mood of the music. 

Our group had also discussed the possibility of beginning the animation with a greyscale colour scheme, and slowly adding colour to the piece as the music plays through, ending with a vibrant piece of animation. 

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We decided as a group that we would split the track up into segments, and attempt to animate each segment separately. We will then assemble the clips that we have each created separately to create the finished video.  We decided that we would split the work up between each-other in the following order: 

Alice (Me) (2D abstract walk-cycle animation) 

Nadia 

Anika

Mika

Lisa

Having decided that Nadia's piece of animation would be coming after mine, we discussed how the transaction could work. Nadia had been researching the idea of making a more abstract piece for her segment, so we discussed how this would tie into my part, and created the quick storyboard images above. 

The storyboards illustrate my walk cycle, which will 'pixilate' or almost 'break apart' with the beat, and as the music changes direction, I will break the character up entirely into shapes, where Nadia's piece will come in and continue to animate those shapes in a way that will compliment the music. 

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Inks

We discussed the possibility of doing some 'ink in water' experiments to add to our group video. To get a better idea of what 'look' would go well with our music, I looked on youtube to find some inspiration that might possibly help with our project. 

I really loved the effect in the video below - the music is very fitting in my opinion, and I would have liked to see the same video filmed professionally with higher quality music, however, I do like how we can see the process first hand here! 

Again, I found this and thought it was a really nice technique that we could base the ink drop part of our video on:

If anything, the beautiful shapes that the water and ink create could serve as inspiration for the 2D elements of our video as well. 

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Visualising our track

I wanted to try and visualise the song we were given in a really abstract and simplified way, so having done a similar thing before with cut out pieces of paper, I took two pieces of black paper, and a tip ex pen, and  listened the the music while scribbling out the sounds that I could hear in the most visual way I could think of. 

I did two pictures, and after I had completed the first, I tuned it over and repeated the process only to put both of the abstract imaged next to each other to see that they are almost identical. 

To me, the track we were giving manifests itself visually like this, so it will be interesting to see how my other team mates respond to the segments of song they will each be animating. 

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"TWO SISTERS" - Caroline Leaf

The animation itself takes a back seat to the sound in this piece. The imagery served to compliment the read point of the film, which is the sound. 

I think this is an interesting film to look at for inspiration on our group's project, since it is the same principal at work. The sound must be the dominating aspect of our film, and the imagery we create must compliment the sound track that we have been given, rather than distract from it.

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One of the girls in our group showed us the animation above, and the fluidity of the transactions between scenes is so unbelievably well done, that it's been a huge inspiration to us on this project. Although the style is a lot different to what we will be aiming for in our final piece, the way the the animation ties in with the music is something we're striving to achieve with the project we are working on together.

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I saw the image above and I really like how the artist has morphed abstract-like animation to the conventional flying animation of the bird. This animation has inspired me to look further into abstraction to compliment the walk cycle animation  I'm planning to contribute to our piece. 

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Proposal

Having split up and thought about what would work best for our track, our group gathered to write a short proposal for our animation: 

Proposal: To communicate the sense of a ‘journey’ in mixed media - using live-action film of ink drops in water filtered over animation made in Flash.

"Starting in grey-scale or de-saturated colours, the figurative character will appear to be walking and ‘blip’ in time with the music’s beat into something more colourful until eventually bursting into a purely abstract concept. At first it will appear as something aggressive before mellowing out into something reminiscent of a lava-lamp’s more laid back style, to mimic the funky 60’s vibe that our group got from the piece of sound given to us."

Our group also discussed adding an 'ink drop' texture using footage we will film of ink dropped in water to add some depth and texture to our animation. 

We thought it would be a good idea to sketch out thumbnail drawings of each segment we will be working on individually.