creating first animation

Animation clay model

This week we made our 1st clay models. showen in the above picture is the turtle that I made.

This week we made our 1st claymation. using the clay model I made the week before I used a hue camera and the IStopMotion programme on the computer. I then created a flat floor and and white background for the animation to take place. this was not a part of the storyline, it was just to make the claymation more clear. I then took my turtle character and paled it at the beginning of the scene, where I moved it very slowly frame by frame and took the pictures as I did so. To add a little more interest to the animation I also moved its head slightly up and down as the turtle walked and I also made it turn its head slightly towards the camera as if it were looking at it. The animation was only about 3 seconds long so far so I made the turtle turn back around and walk back into the scene, again doing this slowly and frame by frame. I also made the model walk towards the camera as if it was curious and then made it walk off the scene again. This took the animation to around 7 seconds long. However I intend to add move to the story next week and bring in more characters if necessary.




This weeks lesson revolved around us using our claymation clips in the Imovie programme and editing it to our liking and also adding starting clips, credits and other titles or texts. Using my claymation of a lonely turtle walking around on a white background I used and adjusted the the lighting and brightness settings to make it more dark and dreary to go with the mood of the lonely turtle.

I also added the day to night effect on the animation clips which i found when playing back made it look like it was a stormy night. I also added a beginning title credit with an orange background and a lens flare which the titles pops out of.

I called the piece the walking turtle. Then through out the clips I added titles between them to give the small clip a story line of some sorts. I said the same text font which was house script in red and the font size of 2. I did this about 3 times.

Toward the end I also added some ending credits which also consisted of the same font, colour and text size. For these credits I used the scrolling credits and stated the name of the animated character and who created the animation (me)

This was the finished project.

Conclusion 

For this assignment we were asked to create and produce our first model based animation. The purpose for this task was to get used to making and animating models to prepare us for our main assignment. During this assignment I struggled a lot with the model making. However  I eventually made a decent looking turtle the turtle was the only character I created because I had no real plot line as this was just a class exercise  despite the difficulties with the model making, I found using the hue camera very appealing. However I had to re do my animation a couple of times because I was either making the model go to fast or making it go to slow. Eventually I learned the right speed to do it with. after completing producing the animation/claymation, we had to edit this animation in Imovie which was relativity easy. In this I added title screen and put effects on the animation to make it look like it was stormy where the turtle was walking. We also learned how to add audio to our animations which was useful. To conclude, this assignment taught me all the basics of how to create a model based animation.