Illusion of Life: Assessment two

Using sound in animation.

I was really excited to start this animation. We were given the task of adding sound to our work. This meant drawing animations which would match a sound clip. 

The class was given a variety of sound clips to choose from. Most of which were 11seconds long. We then had to think of an animation to go with it. 

We had 4 weeks to make our animations and they were going to be assessed on the "acting" in our animation and, of course the presentation on assessment day.

Critical studies: Sitcom Comedy vs Superhero animation

For critical studies we were asked to list generics of a genre. Below I have chosen two animations and listed why it belongs to a certain genre.







COMEDY ANIMATION

VISUAL
Bright colours

CHARACTER TRAITS
Smiles
Over exaggerated expressions

STORY
Quite random
Unexpected plots
Silly arguments
Out bursts

MUSIC
Happy
Bouncy
Makes you want to smile
Puts you in a good mood






SUPERHERO ANIMATION


VISUAL
Lightening
Weapons quite sci-fi

CHARACTER TRAITS
One has "ugly' features, pointy, big eyebrows, mad scientist hair
Superhero has a suit, recognisable as the goody.

STORY
Problem
Struggle
Good guy saves the day
Cops try and help but superhero wins

MUSIC
Duh duh duh music
Then save the day music
Fast music durin action

SOUND
Deep voices
Evil laugh
Sci-fi noises for weapons

Critical Studies: Essay, Animation: The History and Development of the Industry

            Animation, is not, as so many of us think, a new art form. In fact animation has been developing for thousands of years throughout the world.

            As early as 4000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians painted murals of people in mid movement with each picture at a different stage. The Persians and Ancient Greeks painted in a similar way on bowls and vases, so when spun the picture would appear to be moving. These are clear examples of artist's moving towards moving images and animation, despite not having the technology that is available today.

In the Victorian era, inventions to make images move were normally intended to amuse children.

            The Zoetrope was first invented in China around 180AD and then modernised in 1834 by the English inventor William Horner. However, these weren't popular until the 1860’s when it was patented in England and America. The device had a cylinder shaped drum with vertical slits around its edge and a  long strip of images around the inner edge. Thus, the illusion of movement was created when the viewer looked through the slits whilst the device was spun. The faster the device is spun the smoother the animation appeared to be.

            From the Zoetrope came the Phenakistoscope (1831). This was similar to the Zoetrope however instead of a cylindrical drum, the Phenakistoscope was a small disc with images drawn in order around its circumference. The disc had slits cut into it and was mounted against a mirror so that each of the images were reflected back at the disc. To view as animated motion all the viewer had to do was spin the disc and look through the slits. This was developed further into the Praxinoscope.  

            The Praxinoscope was invented in France 1877, by Charles- Emile Reynaud. The Praxinoscope combined both features of the Zoetrope and the Phanakistoscope. It had the same basic appearance as the Zoetrope, but used a series of small mirrors inside of the cylinder drum to view the images instead. The mirrors were fixed in place and the images would spin round and would be reflected in turn. This method produced an image of better clarity and quality. Reynaud also developed a larger version of the Phanakistoscope which he called the Thréåtre Optique, to show images on a screen and, in essence, was an early projector.

            Another Victorian invention for animation was the Tramatrope, developed in 1824. This was (and still is) used to entertain children as a very simple toy. Two separate images were draw on to disc of card and placed back to back and attached to string. The string was twisted tightly and then pulled to make the cards flip round and round. If done quick enough the two images appeared to be one image. For example, if one image is a bird and the other is a cage then the viewer would see a bird in a cage.

            Kinographs, better known as flipbooks or thumb cinemas, were first patented in 1868 by John Barnes Linnet, an English printer. A flipbook  was a sequence of images drawn onto paper which, when flicked in order gave the illusion of a moving image. The technique was so effective that, even today flip books are being used to entertain children and teach students the basics of animation. The flick technique is even used by professionals, who would flick through their animation drawings to get a rough idea of the action before finalising them.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the animation industry really began to kick off.

After the invention of the motion camera in 1889, Emile Cohl combined 700 images on to film. He photographed each image individually and then combined them together so that they appeared to be moving on film. He released “Fantasmagorie” in 1908 which was the first fully animated film ever made and lasted almost two minutes. Other animations soon followed as other animators were inspired by Cohl’s achievements.

George Melies began making his own animated film, after he had purchase his own motion camera. He was most famous for his film “A Trip To The Moon” featuring a face in the moon, which has been referenced in many other animations since.

            The Development of Celluloids in 1913 made animation a lot easier to deal with. Transparent cells were used to draw on the animations, meaning that artists could incorporate detailed and complex backgrounds and foregrounds with out having to draw them out over and over again and sandwich the moving image between the cells when it came to capture them. Walt Disney’s "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" is widely considered to be the first feature length film to use Cel animation.

            By using celluloid’s, animators were able to use perspective to show depth in their animations, however it was difficult to show realistic distance within their animations. For example when moving closer to the image, everything would get bigger, even the things that wouldn’t necessarily in real life, like moon. In 1940, Disney invented the multi plane camera that did create realistic distance in the animation. Instead of the camera moving closer or further away from the images, the images would move closer or further away form the camera and each cel had a different plane, so that they could keep the correct distance. You can see this demonstrated in Disney’s Silly Symphony “The Old Mill” in which the moon stays the correct size as each of the planes move near to the camera when zooming in on the old mill. This gives the viewer the sense that they are travelling down the path towards the old mill.

           

            The use of CGI animation completely revolutionised the world of animation. The first feature length film to use CGI was Pixar’s Toy Story which capured the hearts of audiences around the world.

            CGI uses many of the same techniques as traditional animation, but replaces drawing with 3D modelling, almost like virtual Stop motion.

Refences:

www.randommotion.com

www.terramedia.com

animation.about.com

www.wikipedia.com

           

           

Criical Studies: Essay, Out of the Inkwell

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_OLiXotBYM

Out of the Inkwell

"Out of the Inkwell", also know as the "Inkwell Imps" was first developed as an animation, so that Max Fleischer could demonstrate his invention, the Rotoscope. This device projected an image onto canvas so that live action could be traced out to make an animation, with realistic looking movement.

It all started in 1915 when Max would use video references of his brother Dave, whose job it was to dress as a clown as live inspirations. Fleischer then proceeded to make three short experimental animations based on his bother's character throughout 1914 to 1916. By 1918, "Out of the Inkwell" became a major animated series which originally ran up until 1929. 

Fleischer produced "Out of the Inkwell" at Bray studios as a monthly publication for Paramount Pictures magazine and then at Goldwyn studios in 1921.

Max Fleischer was one of the most imaginative animators of his time and it was his flare that made the animation so popular in the early part of the century. 

Fleischer worked hard on all of his animations, working as the writer, director, producer and actor in the "Out of the Inkwell" series.

What is so inspiring about this animation is how Fleischer integrated live action into his films and how the animations would come to life, jumping of the paper and acting alongside him, really giving a sense of magic and inspiration to the audience. This made it one of the most popular silent films of its time. 

In a typical "Out of the Inkwell" film, Fleischer would start by drawing his clown who would then come alive and start to interact with Fleischer ending up in sword fight or other exciting tales. What is truely fascinating is the skill and the imagination it would taken to achieve this realistically without the use of today's technology.

In 1923 Dick Huemer was employed as the director of animation for "Out of the Inkwell". During his time working on the Silent series, Huemer gave the signature clown a name, KoKo. He also gave and perfected the inking technique used in the animation, which it is now so well known for. He also added new characters to the animation, such as Fitz the dog (later named Koko-nut and then Bimbo) who was one of the first and most popular characters that he added. 

At the time that "Out of the Inkwell" was being produced animation was still new. This was before the Disney era and a lot of people didn’t know what animation was or had never seen a cartoon. Fleischer's invention of the Rotoscope completely revolutionized the animation industry and even today the term rotoscoping is still common amongst animators, despite the new technology which has since been developed.

At the time of the "Out of the Inkwell", the idea of science rather that religion was beginning to take a stronger hold on society with the idea of darwinism and evolution. This allowed animators and artists to uncouple and develop ideas and remove them from a larger social meaning. They were able to develop completely new concepts and step away from the idea that God was the creator of all. Even though religion still remained strong and many people still had their faith, it became easier for them to accept different ideas and story lines. For example, throughout the Inkwell shorts, Fleischer is the creature of his drawing, who comes to life. In previous years the idea of this would have been completely unacceptable and the audience would have not allowed the thought of someone other than God being able to create life! 

Aesthetic formalization was developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It illustrated how visual experience began to change in the social system once science began to gain respectability in all aspects of life. Formalization focuses on the analysis of physical and perceptual characteristics of an object by breaking it down into its reduced form, i.e to its lines, its shape and its colour.

You can see this throughout the "Out of the Inkwell" animations. Koko the Clown had a very simple form about him, very 2-D and two toned, and these aesthetics about him were much the same as that of the movement at the time. As the years progressed and Koko was kept to much the same style, though his inking was developed further, keeping him recognisable to the audience.

Overall, "Out of the Inkwell" was a very successful animation in the Silent Era of film. Fliecher’s success with "Out of the Inkwell" inspired him to carry on with other animations, such as Betty Boop, Superman and Popeye, which rivaled Disney in popularity. 

Unlike Disney, Fliescher’s most loved characters were humans characters, which gave him some edge over the other animation studios of the time. However, due to new, stricter censorship laws enforced by production code in 1934, Fliescher was forced to “dull down” a lot of their more risqué humor, which lead to a fall in popularity of their short cartoon animations.

Out of the Inkwell Productions was later renamed to Fleischer Productions which ran up until 1942 when Paramount Pictures made the Fleischer bothers resign due to legal rights over "Out of the Inkwell" and other short films made at the Fleishcer Productions studio for Paramount Pictures. 

Week 6: Assessment

For my first assessment I wanted to incorporate everything that I had learnt so far into the animation.
This needed to be a maximum of 20 seconds long, so I was excited to do a longer animation then I had done before, it also meant that this animation needed a bit more planning behind it.


Planning: Coming up with a concept!!
I didn't know quite what to do at first. This was going to be the longest individual animation I had done. So I wanted to make something simple, yet effective.
When designing, I usually just draw whatever pops into my head and then develop my ideas from there, so I took that approach when deciding what I wanted to do for my animation.

Here are a few of my ideas. I started to develop a little alien, I was going to use it on my final animation but then I thought it would be far to complicated to to fit it onto a 20 second animation.

I soon decided to use POP CORN in my animation.

After developing the popcorn idea and working out a brief story line, I developed it further so that I understood where the animation was leading to.

I wanted to express how the popcorn was "feeling" during the animation so I experimented with how his eyes would look at different parts of the animation, i.e when he realises that he is caught on fire. 

I wanted to make my animation more "real" so by giving it a background, it would bring the animation to life, give it more depth.

Throughout the preparation I was talking to people around me and I realised that people didn't necessarily know what the the corn was it supposed to be, "oh its the water drop going to put out the fire". So I needed to add to a beginning that would make it obvious that the corn was in fact a piece of popcorn.

I hadn't used colour in my animations yet and I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to as it underlined further exactly what the animation us supposed to be.

 Story boarding the animation made it easier to draw up the animation as I had a plan of what to do. 

Research for the animation. Everything became a little bit more real. It was easier to animate. I did a lot of research so that I could make sure that I was drawing things correctly and making it obvious to the view what was happening in the animation...

for example how fire flickers and grows.

Facial expressions and how the face looks when blowing air forcefully and how I could "animate" air. how fire looks when it is being blown out!

I wanted to EXAGGERATE the popcorns face when he was blowing so I experimented with puffing out the its checks. I drew from life and looked at myself and my expressions and incorporated it into my animation.

Another way I researched was by looking at other animations. I mainly concentrated on how the other people used eyes to express emotion. Sponge bob made it obvious by drawing in the water in the eyes, You can tell he is upset, about to cry.

Where as the Simpsons used the lines around the eye and the eyebrow to express emotion.

Anime also simplifies its emotion in animation by drawing lines for tears and sadness and also by drawing teardrops.

After looking at professional animation, I looked at animator animations of popcorn, how others had done what I was trying to achieve. It was a different kind of animation to cel, but it was still useful to see what others had done.

Once I had finalised the design for the popcorn, I was ready to draw up the individual pictures on to animation paper and test the animation.

LINE TEST.

Once I had drawn up all the animation, I made several line tests to make sure that the animation worked and the principals looked correct. 

I split the animation in to four parts:

Zooming

The Fire

The Jump

Popping

This allowed me to test out small parts at once, which I think that, improved the quality of the final animation.

Im not going to put all my line tests on my blog. This is because there are more than 15 and it would be boring to watch

This is one example of them. You will notice that the volume of the piece of corn varies, this is because I drew it out quite quickly and roughly at first and then Lined and fixed the volume once the line test worked out.

The most difficult part of this animation was working out how to zoom in on the popcorn bag smoothly, this took the longest to work out and had the most line tests, even though it was only one picture used.

Before I made the final animation I had to make the following changes:

The shape of the popcorns head before it popped, more square (looked more exaggerated).

The Final Animation

After all the research this is how my animation worked out, I am really pleased with the result.

Anticipation

For our forth assignment, we had animate the anticipation of a stickman jumping... therefore the take off.

To get the jump realistic we drew from live ... looking at how people prepared to jump, the take off and the landing.

 Above are quick sketches of a jump. I have also sketched them in comparison to each other ... so one drawing on top of another, to show how the feet and arms moves.

Here I added body to the stickmen to show movement of the body. I also looked at how the feet bend during a jump so that i could incorporate it into my animation.

I had a few ideas for what the jumper could be doing, to put a story to the animation, for example a ballet dancers leap or a man jumping through the days of the week. Before that I made the Animation I had to Storyboard what was going to happen so that I had a clear plan of what I wanted to achieve at the end of the animation.

The first time I drew this out, I thought the landing was too jittery when his arms start to come down. 

This line test I was happy with the jump but I thought the landing was two fast,  therefore I doubled up the frames to make the animation slower.

This is the final jump animation. I have added to the swings that the man makes before he jumps and i've inked the man so he stands out more against the paper. Originally he was going to be jumping through the days of the week but I thought it would be mre effective to keep all the attention on the man jumping.

How could I improve?
      Well I think that I would improve the swinging of the mans .. so his torso moves up and down with the swings of his arms.

Timing & Spacing, Squash & Stretch

To show the principle of squash & stretch and to work on timing & spacing we had to animate a bouncing ball.
I thought it would more interesting to experiment with two different types of balls and try to animate different weights. I also thought that it would be quite fun to use a sea-saw / catapult in my animation.

I chose to use a bowling ball as the heavy ball and sticky rubber ball as the light ball. 

I used a ruler as a catapult to fling rubbers to show roughly where the initial arc of the small ball would bounce to. Once I had an idea of what arcs the balls would make I created a story board.

Before I started to animate I drew the line of travel for the ball in dark pen that would show through the animation paper to make sure that I followed the right arcs through the whole animation.

I also made a reference to the "the Animators Survival Kit" about ball bounces and looked at how the shape of balls change and how fast the go from one bounce to the other. (Images below from task notes).

This diagram has helped me to understand basic ball bounce, showing the squash and stretch of an average ball and the timing and spacing of the individual balls. As you can see for this ball it stretches when it is falling quickly and just as it starts to bounce (more if the impact is greater .. i.e it stretches more coming out of the first bounce than it does on the second). You can also see the squash of the ball is greater on the first bounce, giving the illusion that the impact is bigger on this bounce and getting less and less for the others until it eventually will stop. This is basic science as each bounce will absorb some of the energy as it hits the ground and therefore the bounce will have less potential energy for the next, therefore each bounce will be less and less and the gravitation effect on the ball will still the ball after a while.

The timing and spacing is also important. the diagram shows a lot of balls together at the top of a bounce, this is called hang time, the ball will slow down as it changes direction and speed up again when it its falling. Therefore more frames of the ball at the top of the arc will slow the animation down and create hang time.

This is the line test for my final animation. I wanted to make sure i had the arcs right before i made the final animation. 

For this animation. I first concentrated on the bowling ball. This was because I wanted to make both balls realistic and thought if i worked on one first and then went back and did the other I wouldn't get distracted by either one and make little mistakes. Firstly bowling balls are heavy, so I thought, "Ok, so it's going to fall fast" therefore I spaced the bowling ball far away each time". Also it's heavy and hard, so it's not going to squash or stretch on impact, furthermore, the ball will bounce, thought not much only slightly and will come to rest very quickly. 

To keep the volume of my ball I used the large circle as a template and drew around this to make sure that the shape and size of the ball wouldn't change, when the ball came to rest I traced it from the previous animation paper.

My second ball was completely different altogether, for one thing it was very light and sticky, so would easily squash. I also used a template for this ... however this doesn't appear much, mostly when the little ball was stationary, this was because the ball squashed and stretched a lot when it was bouncing.

To make sure that the little ball was following a steady arc, I made a template to begin with where i thickly marked the direction of the ball and its background and put this behind the previous frame and the frame I was drawing, when animating the little ball, that way I was able to see the previous frame and  the line of action.

Exaggeration

Our second task was all about exaggeration and morphing on expression into another.

We were told to pause on each of the exaggerated expressions before changing to the next.

Like with the group flip book I also needed to loop this one.

There for I needed to morph a neutral face to expression one to expression two back to neutral.

At first I started to experiment by drawing different expressions of one person but I felt that I would be able to exaggerate better using a more simple shaped head.

I found a more rounded face far easier to work with and thought I could concentrate more on the expressions if I made the face a bold man, However I was still developing different expressions of the square faced boy from the previous page. I also considered animating a sneeze, although I thought that even though the face changes though out the sneeze, it all happens to quickly so I wouldn't be able to put emphasis on each expression. 

Once I was happy with the shape face and what expression he was going to do (neutral to scared to happy to neutral) I then drew out how his eyes would change and how his mouth would change. I decided to keep the top of his head and his nose the same through out the animation ... and use them as anchor points.

From there I could story board the animation, which I would use whilst drawing the animation to keep me on track.

As you can see from the animation I had to add in an "O" expression between shocked and happy. This is because it felt unnatural to me to go straight from one to the other. And when filming myself and observing others it seemed to make sense to add in an in between emotion to connect the others.

Flip books

A flip books is a series of pictures with gradually movements from page to page so that when flicked in sequence will show a moving image... Basic animation. This was our first task. To create a flip book animation on post it notes.

Here are some of my ideas for my flip book. At first I thought about using a simple ball falling down some stairs or gradually building a brick wall ... but i wanted to be a little more creative. i started to draw cups of drink and then thought i could have a little boy sneakily having some. Then I thought wouldn't it be better for him to be stealing a biscuit... which is where the ANGRY COOKIE came from. 

My animation developed as it went on. This was because i used straight ahead animation. First of all the little boy was going to get his biscuit. but whilst drawing i thought it would be a little better if the cookie came to life too.. when i had finished i went back over it and added the door in the back ground so that the book could run away at the end as if scared of the cookie.

As well as being asked to create individual flip books, we were also asked to work in groups to make another. 

Our group wanted to keeps ours simple but still have fun with it. 

Together we decided on a stickman character. This way he was more likely to look consistent despite 5 people drawing him. 

We were also asked to make the animation a loop. So the second thing we decided to do as a group was plan what our stick man was going to do. We all wanted to make our sections different to each other so we decided a journey was a good idea. First he would walk, then dive, then climb, then walk again (see design concepts ... red ink)

Then to make each individual part fit together we each drew the start of each action twice and gave one to the person who was going to draw the action that came before ours ... that way we each had a start and an end point and could do whatever in between as long as they ended up at the correct points.

When i first started to draw the little man climbing the ladder, i decided that it would be fun to blow the ladder up and create an obstacle for the little guy.  At first the water level was a lot higher but when i was drawing this i thought ... The man can swim ... why would he need to be climbing the ladder now ... can't he just swim to the surface and then use the ladder ... which meant ... the hole in the ladder wouldn't effect him at all ... so me and Harshini adapted our joining point so that the water level was lower at the start to make it a little more realistic.

We named our animation THE OPTIMIST because the little guy is always smiling.

Induction Task Two

This is task 2 of our induction to BA (hons) Animation. Here are direct observation of landmarks in Birmingham.

Birmingham has more canals than Venice ... Here I have drawn a Canal and then added this phrase to the front of a bridge. I saw this on a wall by New Street Train Station and thought it would be a nice touch to add it to the drawing. (Colour pencil).

This is one of the many sculptures found around birmingham. This particular work of art can be found in Victoria Square. (Soft Pastels)

This is my abstract view of Victoria Square in Birmingham. The statue in the centre of Victoria Square is of Queen Victoria. You can see the back of it in my drawing.

Induction Task One

Life drawings of people at the BCU freshers fair 2010.