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Final sound animation

I drew the cracks, birds and the girl's face in photoshop first then redrew them in illustrator as it uses vectors so I could scale them in after effects without loosing the quality.

To make the cracks appear I used a masks and the stroke effect in after effets also I played around with opacity and scaling and moving the layers.

The waves at the were rotoscoped in photoshop, and I drew them frame by frame.

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Pieces of final animation - 3

As the song's title is "Flight" I decided to add some birds into the piece, they will serve as transitions and hopefully make the animation a bit more interesting and add a king of mystery to the piece.

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I rotoscoped waves for the closing seconds of the animation, actually the original gif of these waves was the inspiration for the final idea.

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Pieces of the final animation -1

I decided to drew one big picture of the girl's whole face in illustrator so I will be able to scale it without loosing the quality, earning an easy zoom in zoom out effect and also making creating transitions easier.

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Sound Animation Practice

Song: Dean Lewis - Waves

As I previously stated, our final project animation’s most important part is how good the movements respond to the music so I decided to do an exercise about it, something very simple with’s main focus is the timing.

The idea was to have a simple drawn figure with and making watercolor stamps appear in his chest as if they were heartbeats.

This animation is not related to the final piece. The only resemblance is how the music has a very well recognizable and powerful beat. I loved the drums in the background, they dictated the tempo of the music so I decided to attache visuals only to them to see if only one piece of the music is able to set up the mood. And I think it does. 

When I first showed the animation without the  music to my friends they were a bit disappointed as they were expecting the figure to move too. What I learned from it is that colorful flashy visuals are not enough only in themselves.

Then I put a part of the song under it, but the appearance of the stamps did not matched the beat of the music so I needed to change them. Tricky was to find out how much time the stamps should be left on screen for the viewer to notice and acknowledge them before they disappear. 

Challenging was finding the tempo of appearance and disappearance when the drum beats became very fast. And also the amount. At first I wanted to put one stamp per beat as I was doing it with the previous parts too, but then I was thinking do I really need a stamp for all the beats? Tuned out not. At some point the beat become so fast that even tho I had know the stamps appeared at the wrong places I did not notice it as I was test-watching it. Also I did some experiment on the amount. At the end of the fast part I left significantly less stamps appear than beat, and although it’s noticeable it matches, it gives of a different vibe but strangely it fits into the concept.  

In conclusion I think this exercise taught me a lot about timing and made me realize that at first seemingly unfitting ideas could also serve as good solution, and that sound and visuals combined abstractly could result in a much more powerful outcome than common concepts do. 

[mi4011annabodgal]

Task: make an animation for a given music using only 30 seconds from it 

Music: Hidden Orchestra - Flight

Sound Animation - Reflective piece 

When we were given the music pieces to chose from I did make the first mistake of choosing the one I liked the most and not the one I had ideas for, making my own work just one level more difficult. ‘Cause I'm a genius. 

Actually I had two favorites and was contemplating the idea of choosing Poppy Ackroyd’s Birdwoman for a very long time but eventually decided next to Flight by Hidden Orchestra, for numerous reasons. 

Both song’s captivating element was the beginning, starting with slow humming setting up a mysterious vibe then slowly unfold into a ambient atmosphere, and mostly goes on the same tempo till the end. I really liked this as I find it tricky to make something enjoyable and intriguing to watch for something that is almost steady. One of the reasons I choose Flight was because it has a bit more dynamic, and reveals the atmosphere faster than Birdwoman which was something to be taken into consideration as I only have 30 seconds to work with. 

So after deciding it, I did research on the musician and the origin of the music.

“Hidden Orchestra is an imagined orchestra created by composer/producer Joe Acheson

Currently based in Brighton (UK)

The releases feature a wide variety of guest musicians from different musical backgrounds, recorded separately, and combined by Joe in his studio to create an 'imaginary orchestra' that doesn't really exist.

Dark orchestral textures, with field recordings, bass, and layers of drums and percussion.”

My first thought was that it’s like a cat, that sands in the open door half body in other half out. It exists and not at the same time, as if it can’t decide. And I love that. It gave me an idea about something constantly changing, something what is just in a reach yet untouchable. Or something that you touch but not at the same time. Like sand or water.

I also loved the fact that it’s not just one person’s work, but the combination of many artists using various styles and having different backgrounds. Inspired by that I wanted to make various storylines that are going to cross each other at some point. But then I made the second mistake.

I listened the music in it’s whole 7:50 minutes length for like 5 times then I blinked and I had a story for a good 7:50 minutes animation. Hups. Also I stubbornly sticked to it for some days, because I’m a genius, resulting in loosing precious time from the production part. Accepting that something is wrong and searching for a new solution in relatively fast way is again something I need to work on. Not in the accepting part but finding a new solution fast. I had known since the long idea was born that it won't make it, I was sticking to it because I had no other idea for it, so I desperately tried clear the story form the dispensable parts and only holding onto the key bits. But somehow I could not figure out what was really wrong with it, nor to what to change on it by myself, so I reached out for inspiration. On Pinterest of course. 

I searched for short animations, any kind, and dug myself into the question why were they so successful. The answer is relatively simple. The animation resonates well with the music. It may does not contain a world saving life changing message, because that’s not the point here, the goal is to lift the music into pole position, it’s not just an additional element for the movements, in this case it is itself the engine of the animation. These short pieces rely on the entertainment and fun principles rater than on the educational part. I’m not saying that 30 seconds can’t contain both elements but first, it takes incredible amount of creativity to shove them into 30 seconds, and second, it does not always have to be educational. Sometimes it’s enough if it’s just fun, fun to watch and fun to make, without stressing over of giving it a deeper meaning. Meaning will come later, somewhere in the finish, unnoticed. Totally and completely out of accident.

So after making terms with it I rethought my idea, but kept some motives from the original. I loved how the music had a base drop but works on so many different higher notes at the same time, this evoked the idea of following a cracking through a floor that at first glance seems formless but then builds up to be a face then tiny moving scenes are brought to life by small  cracks inside the face, after that, as they are always in constant movement, they dissolve into ocean waves. I aspire to make it to a one line drawing and hopefully only using black and white colours. 

In conclusion, don’t stress out things, and don’t stress out on the fact that you are stressing out. The idea will came, you just need to force yourself into thinking as many times as you can, and realizing that only the first half an hour of it is what’s painful. Or two. But you will eventually get the work done, if you work for it. 

[mi4011annabodgal]

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Walking cycle - first attempt

working on 8s 

To first glance looks okay but.... oh BUT:

-Foot change sizes 

-Made the arms reach out too much so there are not enough in-betweens for the arms to reach the other side in one step resulting in looking like there is a glitch.

[mi4011annabodgal]

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Beast - Cut out animation

Task: create a 10 seconds long cut out animation

Week: at least it’s done

Cut out animation is actually a branch of stop motion animation, specifying and emphasizing the fact by its name that it prefers to use various shapes cut out from paper. And because of the previously mentioned fact it mostly works on 2D but now thinking about it I’m quite interested in testing the boarders of what we call cut out animation by somehow pulling it onto space. But oh gosh not now and not with this task.

The inspiration behind the story was an already existing flip book of mine which used the same fish design.

For the story line I wanted to play with the manipulation of the viewers. As it’s a “film” it possesses all the characteristics of a film of which one is that it’s a strictly one-way communication, the director has full power over of what it will show to and hide from the viewers eyes. Making people believe that they know something, then showing them that they actually don’t. Sounds cruel but the audience actually loves when you do that to them.

I realised I can get that effect by using big contrasts, the red fish is small, cute, and even emphasises its cuteness by acting adorably childishly by chasing a bubble. After that, the shark comes in and the scene possesses all the characteristics that makes us believe that we know what will happen. Then comes the plot twist and the viewers were successfully tricked.

This story line is not the original one. And not even the second. Nor the third. The thing was that at first try I ended up with a much much longer story line that could have resulted in a whole minute or more animation. And our only requirement was the length, to make a 10 second long animation. Oh well ideas must be dropped and changed sometimes. So, I shortened it.

While shooting the animation I came across some other problems. Numerous, to be exact.

-      Leaving 2-3 bad frames in the work, not correcting them but continuing shooting just to realise from the feedback of your peers and by yourself too that something is off and having to reshoot the whole thing.

-      Lighting changes during animation because you don’t shoot it in the same light conditions.

-      Not getting enough sleep and getting distracted causing you to spend more time on shooting it than originally planned

-      Shooting on the wrong frame number per second

-      The used set is not big enough to fill in the frame – bad and lazy measuring while making the background

That’s the story of how I shoot 10 seconds of animation in 3 days.

In conclusion I feel I have spent awfully lot of time unnecessarily in making this, mostly slipping on small mistakes that could have been avoided by being more precise and with better time managing. Lesson learned.

[mi4011annabodgal]

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BOUNCING BALL

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ANIMATION DAY - 31.10. 2018 

Task: Let’s create a spooky Halloween themed alphabet together, all the students, from all levels, like a big happy family what

Animation day is an optional program organized for all animation student from foundational year to masters to gather together and in small groups let’s do together a piece of animation by the end of the day. How you solve the lunch is your problem.

Egh… I’m not gonna lie, that was my first thought about it on that morning. Don’t get me wrong, just one day before I was head over hills by that idea, because I was pretty aware of how much I could benefit from it. Building connections, meeting with new people, gaining experiences, chances of free pizza and candy, yep, sure I wanted to dive into it, who doesn’t?!

Then on that specific day, somehow the exact same reasons become the cause of your anxiety because your lazy introvert mind recognizes what is it up to for real:

 Meeting with new people - greeeeat, I need to socialize, go through countless small talks to warm up to strangers, like I’m not doing that since the past 2 months heh?

Building connections - oh sugar honey ice tea, so I even have to do a good first impression

Gaining experiences -  aka showing how poor skills I have compared to demigod 2nd and 3rd-year peers

 Free pizza - Free pizza DECLINED… Oh…

So after waking up to thoughts like that, I don’t think that it’s surprising that I had even considered the idea of ditching that day because first, it’s optional, second I had so so so many other things to do such as finishing storyboards or updating blogs… but worry not, I go through thoughts like that in relation to almost everything, some call it worrying, I call it listing my options and the possible outcomes before I start anything. I usually have my priorities sorted out right, so a little social anxiety won’t stop me of living up all my possibilities, and also funnily, the exact same reason to cons can become a quite supporting statement to pros… I could put it on the blog…

Talking from experience, an attitude has a lot to do with how we handle stuff and what we end up with. So I walked in taking big steps, deep breaths, putting on a smile and deciding that I will do everything in my power to collaborate and make it as good of an experience as I can. I have to make the best of it. I have to make it worth it. 

And I immediately got much much more relaxed when I realized that there were others in nice numbers from my classmates who turned up too. Probably with the same bothering thoughts. And we stayed like that. Together. For some time. 

After the 3rd and 2nd-year students were sorted out equally for different letters we came to the part that where we had to sign up for letters. Now by that time excitement took over most of the place of my anxiousness so while some of my classmates decided to stay together and sign up for the same letter, I boldly chose a random letter with an unfamiliar name. Long story short, I ended up being in a group with a girl from 3rd year, two guys from 2nd year, and 3 other boys from my class to make animations for 4 letters. Now comes the interesting part, teamwork.

I have always found teamwork the most interesting but also the most challenging task of all. The basic concept is quite admirable, people with different views and ideas create something phenomenal by making compromises and working toward the same goal together. Now here comes the problem, the phrase “working together” has as many definitions as many people exist, that’s why sometimes it can result in a rather unpleasant experience. Who doesn’t remember from group projects from preschool and secondary school when usually one person did 80% of the work, one person ditched completely their part, and the others did only the minimum?! We are all one of them. It also hides lots of conflicts, tension, and disagreements of who wants to do what part, who’s idea are we keeping, who is the leader etc. I personally think part of the conflicts wouldn’t even exist if we didn’t take so many things personally. Look at the questions above, who’s who’s who’s. It emphasizes the importance of the person behind the idea. Change some of them to which. Which idea do we keep, which parts should be done, it’s not perfect but you get the idea of this phrase sounding more objective. It emphasizes the idea itself. Just because your idea didn’t make it, that doesn’t make you stupid. The decision is not against you, and not even against your idea, it is for a concept that will have the most efficient result.

 Every group needs a leader otherwise, it’s chaotic. We are humans, we don’t know it but we like to be told what to do. Let me give you an example. At the beginning of a project, the same question crosses through our minds, what are we doing? At a group project, the leader is the one who knows. They keep it all together, usually because they are the ones who know which step comes after what mostly because they have the most experience in it. They see the whole picture. They don’t oppress or boss around but supervise and make sure the group stays on track. At least that was how we sorted it out and made the girl from 3rd year - let’s call her A - the leader. We hadn’t had to discuss it really, from the first minute it was visible that she has the most experience and she had known where to starts and how to go. And we just naturally felt it right. Of course, it had to have to do a lot with the fact that we discussed everything together and everyone’s thoughts were listened.

First thing first was to decide if we wanted to do 2D or 3D. Who was not a newbie preferred the idea of 3D but we greenies were absolutely terrified of it. Given that we did not have any mentionable experience in using Maya and that we were a majority of the group, they ended up making compromises and agreed to do 2D or anything that does not include advanced software knowledge. Even tho they were incredibly nice and offered to help us learn to use the software or they just wanted to see us suffer as and I quote them: ”Maya is a special kind of hell”, we only had one day to make 4 pieces of 2-3 seconds of animation, it was pretty clear that there was just not enough time for that.

We chose to work with charcoal mostly in one paper for every animation because it has a special unique effect. Our teachers even suggested that we should shoot it on putting it on easels, vertically. Do you remember the part when I said an idea should be accepted when there are more useful things resulting from it than problems? Well… Now tell me how do you say no to a teacher, if you wanna build connections and you are also just a dummy newbie and it’s only been your first month here? Exactly, you don’t.  Well, it was definitely interesting and challenging to work on. I am not entirely sure if it was worth it, because we sometimes accidentally bumped into the easel so it moved a bit off place and we couldn’t put it back to the exact same spot it was so it resulted in small jumps in the animation, and also the camera was extremely close  to the paper for small details and high resolution so we had to work in a rather interesting poses, very very carefully. But one more experience to gain. Yay!

We decided to dissolve into smaller groups within our group so we can work on the animations more effectively. When we had some solid designs we discussed them together and gave critique to each other. Getting feedback from your peers is incredibly useful as they are also part of an audience you will want to make stuff for. I ended up being with A and we were given the letter “M”. Which was awesome because we know many words starting with M which had a spooky vibe. Monster, mystery, murderer, moon… And by saying moon I did get some extra knowledge about the course. There are 3 banned cliche things, that under any circumstances should not appear in animations, these are dragon, robot, and vampire. Vampire or werewolf, she was not sure which. That was one of my favourite aspect of it all, that we ended up talking about all sorts of kind of things, and not just with my group mates but with others too through them. I was disappointed in a pleasant way, I don’t know what did I expected but it was half as not friendly and open-minded as it turned out to be.

 We agreed on making a monster who has mad cow disease and committed mass murderer and adding mystery by it’s appearing from the fog.“A” did the design as I was pretty clueless of how this should look like or where was I supposed to start. Seeing my distress she asked me what were my specialties. I immediately said character design. She asked me if I do stuff like taking random words and design a character from them. And I said no, I meant humans, I draw human characters. Until that moment I did not realize how boring that sounds, but yes it is boring. Only humans are boring. Sure anatomy is important and gestures and poses too, and yes you can have a bunch of own humanoid characters with a whole storyline that you promised yourself to bring alive once you have all the skills you think are required to have before starting and concept arts and designs and mood boards, hell yes, of course, I do have, but you need to realize that they are incredibly interesting for you because you have a strong emotional attachment to them, because you created them, you know everything about them, you love them, and it could easily happen that strangers without that amazing backstory knowledge won’t find them as captivating as they are in your eyes. Additionally, it’s always better to be good in more stuff than just in one. You stand in more legs you have more opportunities, so just have the courage to move out of your comfort zone, it can only benefit you in the long run.

At the end of the day, which we previously decided to be 5pm, all the animations were done and we even had a look at them as a whole sequence. It turned out pretty amazing, seeing so many different styles and solutions was really fun.

To sum up, all, if one thing to learn from this day was to dare to move out of our comfort zone, whether socially or artistically,  chances are we are gonna end up with more benefits than regret. I know now that I have a lot to improve in terms of creative character design, need to leave humans alone for a while for sure. Also, let’s be brave enough to collaborate and get your ideas out, being wrong is not a failure. Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will and a wrong idea written down whorts a thousand times more than keeping it in and contemplating whether it’s good or not. We can soon realize that something is off and it can give space for new ideas if it’s out early. If we keep something in for a long time we become over biased for certain concepts and don’t notice the black holes in it. We need feedback from the outside world because their opinion is objective, and that is something that every artist who wants to move an audience is in desperate need. 

[mi4011annabodgal]

Favourite animation - Kubo and The Two Strings

Week - better later than never 

Task - Do research on your favorite animation film how was it made etc. 

Me:

My current and probably staying an all time favourite animation film is LAIKA studio’s phenomenal 2016′s stop-motion movie, Kubo and The Two Strings aka The Totally Devastatingly Underrated Masterpiece of Our Time.

Let's do a basic introduction. Kubo and The Two String is a 2016′s stop motion movie made by LAIKA studio and it’s also the director debut of Travis Knight who is the president and CEO of the studio, and also has been doing stop motion for nearly 20 years now. So a pretty big fish in the game, you know the kind of person you expect to know what they are doing. And oh gosh he does. 

The story is about a boy named Kubo who in order to take care of his not too  sane mother and himself, makes their living by narrating legendary battles to the people of the village with the help of origami figures which he moves around with his magic as he plays his instrument. His tales are mostly about the adventures of his never-known father, who was killed by Kubo’s grandfather the Moon King who also took away one of Kubo’s eyes. (Nice family isn’t it?!) 

Soon our protagonist finds himself against his evil grandfather again and sets up on an adventure with his new friends Monkey and Beetle to find his father’s long lost set of armor which could help him protect himself against his grandfather. 

First let’s talk about the technic and the studio.

When we are talking about animation and animated movies in general, most people automatically think of Disney’s classical 2D features like Mulan or Pixar’s well known amazing CGI’s such as Up, and sadly, LAIKA’s awesome stop-motions like Coraline or Paranorman came to mind only after asking them for the hundreds time and what other? This is a fact that disturbed me a lot and to find the cause of it I decided to dug deeper in this matter.

My first perception was quite oblivious, there are significantly less stop motion productions than traditional or 3D computer animation movies. Now comes the question, why? So I went back to the roots.

Stop motion animation -in a more traditional form, although it has many variations- involves building puppets and props and moving them around on miniaturized sets shooting a movement one frame at the time with cameras pushed close enough to make tiny things seem huge.

In filmmaking 1 second on the screen takes 24 frames, now just to get some visual representation let’s go back to this gift:

It is roughly 1 second, let’s say 1 and a half, that means 36 frames, now take a good look at the gif again and realize how many tiny parts are moving together in sync. It’s a puppet, you can tell it to raise its arms in excitement while jumping a bit and also letting out a goofy smile, but it won’t do that. You need animators who move every piece around, one by one, including the arm movements, the change of the facial expression, the jump of the shoulders and also make the cloth and the hair seem like they are falling naturally... Now that we are exhausted enough just by the thought of the amount of work a stop-motion film requires, we can confidently pronounce that it’s a long and meticulous work done by the craziest people in the world who also seem to possess the most patience too. 

Now another question. Why are they doing it? Why not just use computer 3D or 2D animation, why are they willing to put themselves through this again and again and again?

Because it’s fun, because it’s different, because it’s exciting.

Travis Knight – president & CEO debut director with Kubo

“ I love that aspect of it, I’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years and I still think it’s as close to magic as anything I have ever seen.”

And he is right. Every animation is somewhat about magic, the illusion of movement, but also the magic of story telling. Humans are social creatures, we have an innate need to share experiences and stories through hearing and seeing and filmmaking is able to capture those two senses mercilessly effectively. 

So how’s LAIKA doing it?

Travis Kinght – president & CEO debut director with Kubo

“…There is something inherited restlessness in the creative culture, we always want to challenge ourselves try something new, we always want to tell new original stories, dive in new genres to explore different aspects of what it means to be human…Our style our execution of how we make our films is a convergence of art and craft and science and technology…”

What does he mean by technology? Of course just being passionate and determined about doing something in today’s world sounds a bit out of a fairy tale like thing. The fact that stop-motion living it’s renaissance today is thanks to technology’s crazily fast development and especially to 3D printing, which dramatically shortens the time of production and also provides an incredibly precise and “purse friendly” method. 

66000 faces were 3D printed for the characters, each was constructed with two interchangeable parts, bows and mouth. Kubo is able to make 48 million facial expressions, the seams that show separation in parts were removed digitally.

Now, LAIKA and Kubo and The Two String are quite special because of numerous reasons. This movie is probably the biggest, most complicated and ambitious feature of the studio to date.

But how a project like this starts?

Travis Knight – president & CEO debut director with Kubo

“… As you develop a film for the first 2-3 years all you are doing really is figuring out who these characters are, what this world is, what are the themes that you are addressing what parts of your own life you are weaving into the movie to give it resonance and meaning. And then it’s only once we are feeling pretty confident in our foundations that we start developing the film visually, start thinking about what the characters look like, what the world look like how will we bring this alive, how will we execute physically to make this thing happen…”

The film was in development for 5 years. – while LAIKA was in production for Paranorman one of the character designers Shannon Tyndall come up with the idea to create an epic stop-motion samurai tale.

Georgina Hayns – puppet fabrication supervisor

“Once we’ve got the character design and the character line up, the first thing we do is sit with the director the head of animation and the production designer and we want to get three really important sort of things from them, we wanna get the directors vision of the whole film and what the storyline for all of these characters is, we want the production designer to give us the key, of visually what is important, what is the pattern language, and then the head of animation is the person who will know everything about these characters before we go into that room and then tell us what they want from that puppet. Generally it’s like we want to do everything, enroll!”

Usually great ideas often come with great problems too. How design and practice meet each other in production is the most interesting part for me.

Cooperation cross-platform has become a key discipline at LAIKA because when the designer or directors have creative goals they don’t know how to meet mechanically they don’t necessarily know which department will be able to solve the problem.

Brian McLean - director of rapid prototyping

“Moon Beast was unusual just because it was asking people to exercise a muscle that they don’t typically ever think about using. And we were very familiar with working with different departments, for different things but we were thrust together on a common problem, it was difficult just for little things like who’s running it who’s idea do we go with, and that was where LAIKA’s sort of mentality fall into place. In order to achieve the look of some of the character’s from Kubo, we knew we needed to try different printing technology... Our challenge within RP department is to never allow the technology to dictate what we can do and that is I think one of the things that made us so successful as a department, because there was no ceiling, we never knew what the limits of this technology were, that whenever we would see a challenge or a character design, we had a group of really talented artists and technicians and wizards that were just willing to accept it and figure it out.”

The monkey needed to have realistic but poeasable fur so the design team wound up coding fur fabric with silicon rubber, they used a similar technic on Kubo and his mother who have real human hair on their heads coated with silicon.

Beetle had to have a complicated armature that would support his armour plates but let him move, so the rapid prototype department got involved designing interior wireframes for the puppet rather than just working on the face.

The costumes were meticulously researched and designed, but because the fabric had to hold poses, the clothing on the puppets is full of wires and tiny weights that hold each folding place.

The intricate origami figure Kubo creates are actually possible to make, artist first sculpted the figures with paper to ensure they were realistic.

Even though the film is set in a fantasy world and filled with magical elements the directors didn’t feel the need to explain the world’s rules. They believe that they don’t have to water down kubo’s world for audiences to understand. Through fantasy, the story tellers can express elements poetically through action.

And so I could write on hundreds of more pages to list every interesting aspect of the making of this film, (the story would deserve an another separate hundred pages) but now I just wanted to list and emphasize the most outstanding and most evident pieces of the movie in order to truly try to understand what is behind a production like this. It turns out it’s pure magic, that comes from the care and detail that goes into every piece, the staff’s dedication and experience and their willingness to make each project more ambitious than the last.

Travis Knight:

“We always strive to be as good as we can, strive in our art to be perfect to make these things as beautiful as powerful as they can, but we are human after all, and we always fail, the entire film is filled with all different kinds of imperfections and failings and it’s something you have to come terms with, and I think there is something beautiful about it, it’s one of the things that makes stop-motion so unique is that inherent in what it is, it’s crafted by human hands and so it has that raw human quality, it’s frustrating, sometimes it’s maddening to work in this medium because of the imperfections but I think that‘s one of the things that makes it inherently beautiful, and so we really embrace that side of it because it makes these things human.”

Reference:

Sources used:

https://youtu.be/plXmbLAUTRg?list=WL  - The Verge

https://youtu.be/qhx88U7SbEE?list=WL  - ChannelFredarator

https://youtu.be/Vhpq7-c911A  - get into movie

pictures belong to their rightful owners all was found on Pinterest.

[mi4011annabodgal]

Week 2 -3

Task: cut out animation

We were told to create a 10 second length cut out animation in the second week due to November 8th. Only limitation was the length so we got quite a free hand in the story and the design.

Almost immediately I had known I wanted it with simple and rather geometrical shapes so it goes well with the technique’s peculiarities. 

I already had already made a flip book with a small fish where I used similar forms so i decided next to a sea and fish themed story, for various reasons, -they are easy to draw, they are easy to move around.

So for the characters I sticked to straight lines, simple shapes, but I wanted some contrast too and to get the oceans billowy nature I have experimented with curves, ellipses and circles for the background. I gained inspiration from the Ancient Greek motives and the from the shapes of shells.

Colours and patterns are tricky, and as I was trying to find my way through them I realized and established some important perceptions:

-the background must not get more attention then the characters -less is sometimes more

-the characters’ colour should be well distinguishable

-also the characters’ and the background’s colour should be well distinguishable too

-be careful with vivid colours, as despite of their brightness they still should compliment each other and be pleasing to look at. 

Establishing the storyline at the beginning can save you a lot of times both at the design then at the producing process. That’s the reason I drew a story board for this, even though it’s only a 10 second animation. This, I have learned from my own previous projects, because obviously one time was not enough to learn the lesson. Yes doing a story board is tiring, and looks like a lot of unnecessary work... at the begging. I’m not gonna lie, one need to get the hang of it, through lots os lots of and more suffering but after a while it becomes easier, and it saves you so much time and energy. You get to see which scene works and which not, which angle, where to put the characters, where to cut etc.

What I have learned is that the beginning is as much -if not more- important as the middle and the ending, and it’s better to catch up on mistakes at the start then two steps before finish. 

Also, planning is fun and all, but it can’t take too long. You need to let have time to realize the mistakes and fix them. Even though you don’t feel something perfect, if time runs out before you are done then you loose everything so it’s a good thing to learn to make compromises with yourself. 

[mi4011annabodgal]

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made: 11.10.2018.

First attempt of working with dragon frame with a classmate

working on twos