Animation Production

last week I began to create my models for y animation. The first models I made were the trees for my production. i found this to be hard but got better the more I made. the second model I made was of the bear. Though I  did not finish this, I made a start by making its head and its feet and legs. The images can be found below. 

This weeks I left my animation models at home and so could not continue in the production. However, I did look around to find the backgrounds and settings that I would need for when my models are finished. I also looked around for some tree tutrials because I had trouble with the making of the trees. 

Animation Production

level 3 media 

Stop Motion Animation 

Animation Production 

Proposal 1: 


The animation I intend to produce is going to be a model based animation, following an alien abduction. The animation plot is of an alien space craft happily flying through space/earths atmosphere past the stars and the moon who will give a panicked scared look at the alien spacecraft. At this point in the animation I intend to insert a song of my choice that will match the moment of the space rafts adventures. Further on, the spacecraft will then crash land on earth in the woods, near a lake of some sort. I will use print out backgrounds for this and also add some hand made tree models to make it look more realistic. The aliens will then exit the spacecraft and look around, when a bear cub appears and they will try to abduct it when the mother bear comes up behind them and eats them. The mother bear and cub will then enter the spacecraft and fly it up past the moon again (which will now be smiling) and the beginning song will then re-appear to follow the movements of the spacecraft which will show the bears in the window.
                                          

proposal 2: 

Because, the animation ideas above were quite complex and hard to make, I decided to go for something more simple. the animation i will make will be a model based animation of a moon dancing in space. the animation will allow me to practice multiple movements during animations. the model I intend to make is a moon with a happy face and comically large red clown shoes. The large shows are partly for show but mostly to balance out the heavy body of the animation so that its stands and balances better. To make the animation more entertaining I will add in some music of my choice. My aim is to create an animation that can move around and make multiple movements.

Final proposal 

Given that my previous animation proposals were a little bit complex I decided to just produce an animation (claymation) of the famous shriek scene where the princess sings to the bird and the bird explodes. The narrative of the animation will follow the shriek scene almost exactly. First the princess will be walking into the woods and then she will begin to song and ance and the bird will join in. Then she will sing louder and the bird will copy which will lead to the bird getting fatter and fatter until it explodes. The soundtrack from this animation will be easy because you can download the soundtrack to the bird scene from shriek from you-tube  this will benefit me as i have lost a lot of time due to planning and creating new ideas and models. The models I wil need can be copied of the models from the scene and I will only need 2 models for this animation. Regarding background images, I will simply look on google images and see if I can find background images that are similar to the ones in the movie. i will only need 3 backgrounds for this animation. One of the house on the hill. one of the path leading nto the forest and one of the trees and the sunset behind them. regarding the bird having to expand throughout the animation, I thought that it would be best to make at least 5 bird bodies (each getting bigger each time)m and only one bird head. This way I can simply switch the birds head to each body and use the hue cam to capture the image. This then will look as if the body is expanding throughout the animation.

preparation:

resources and materials

In order to create this animation the resources I will need are as follows:

• Green clay (for the dress of the princess) 
• Yellow clay for the patterning of the princesses dress 
• Blue clay for the birds body 
• White clay for the birds chest 
• Red clay for the princesses long red hair
• Pink clay for the skin of the princess 
• A background of a house on a hill 

• A background of a path leading into the woods 

• A background of trees near a sunset 

• A hue camera 
• A board for the backgrounds to stick to 
• The soundtrack to the bird scene from shriek 
• Brown clay for the tree 
• Wires for the models so they are strong and can moved and be flexible during production 

The timing for the production is as follows; 

• The firs 6 or 7 seconds will be the princess walking to the woods 
• Then about another 7 or 8 seconds of the princess dancing and the bird singing with it 
• Then about 5 or 6 seconds fo the birds body to expand and then explode
• Then about 6 or 7 seconds for the bird to explode and bled out and the princess to show how upset she is 

Audio/sound fx: 

As I have stated previously the audio will simply be the soundtrack to the shriek bird scene. This is the only audio that will occur through out the animation however I may use another soundtrack for the opening and the credits. This soundtrack will most likely be the them tune to shriek. 

Shriek theme tune link 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYb7gUc5R-0

Model Making: 
The first model I made was the model of the princess fiona.

















To do this I simply cut out a rectangular shape of green clay and then cut out a triangle from this to create the shape of the dress. I then used wires to create the arms and wrapped them in green clay also and attached them to the triangle shape. the next thing I concentrated on was making the patterning of the dress. although i could not copy it exactly I gave it a try. However, I did not have any yellow clay to make the patterning and the crown so i had to substitue with white. This looked fine. And to make it a little more colourful i decided to use a little red in there. The next step I took was to outline the colour of the dress by cutting in a square at the top of the triangular shape. This is where the skin started to show. Because I had no pink I had to mix red and white together to make a peachy coloured skin tone. This did not work the way I wanted it to as the skin looked a little to red in parts. I then used blue to make the eyes which was easy. And I used red to make the lips. I also used red to make the long braded hair. To do this I used three strands of red clay and platted them together. But first I used the red clay to make the top of her head red and the sides and I also made the two long fringe bits at the from and then I simply added the play to the side her head so that the play lay over her shoulder. I also made another play and attached it to the back of her head so that when she is walking from behind you could see the plat as well. After I had finished the princess model I went onto the birds model.













The first thing I did was make a normal sized bird body and then made 4 other which were bigger in size each time. I then made the birds head so that it could be moved onto each body. I used the blue clay to make a ball shape and the used my fingers to put pressure on the sides to make that rounded but long bird shape. However, I applied a little less pressure each time so that the body begun to look rounder. I then added a white patch to the front of the body to show tat the chest of the bird is white in colour. I used small balls of white for the eyes.





The next model I made was the tree.

To do this I first started to used the wire and bend in in the way I wanted. I then applied brown clay around the wire to make the trunk of the tree. I made it fatter at the bottom and then thinned it out toward the top. I then made individual branches using wire as I  did before and then building brown clay around them. I bent the wire in the way I wanted the branches to look first. After this I used green clay to make leafs which I then put on each of the branches. Once this was done I attached the branches to the trees trunk. To make the tree truck look a little bit more realistic I used a small knife to create a bark like pattern in the trees trunk. I did this by simply using the knife to make small indents and waved patterns in the trunk.

Production: 
The first step in production once all the models were made was to print out the three backgrounds and put them on a board so that I could shoot each scene on the same board. I then set up the board against a wall so that it would not fall over. The next step was to set up the hue camera and place it so that it was in the right place for the first scene. I then repeatedly captured the pictures using the I stop motion programme and moed the princess in small motions so that it would appear like she was walking. I did this for the first scenes and placed her on her side so that it appeared to be filming from the side of her. I then used the other background of the path leading to the trees and filmed her from behind so that it appeared like she was walking away from the camera and into the forest. Then onto the last scene which was princess dancing in front of the trees and the sunset. For this I simply twirled the model around using very small motions so that it looked like she  was spinning herself around. I then inserted the tree I  made which had the bird sta in it. The bird at this point was using its smallest body. I moved the princes closer to the tree so that the bird could site on the princesse shoulder and then I began changing the birds body (taking different shots with the hue camera each time) and then I made the bird fall of the branch. To create the illusion that the birds had exploded, I first used red clay and put a dent in the middle of the birds chest and then used small bits of red clay and took pictures each time I out another piece of red clay down. This gave the illusion that the bird was bleeding out. The next step I took was to make lots blue birds feather using smal bits of blue clay and then i sprinkled them over the bird whilst taking more pictures. I intended for this to give the illusion that the bird had died and then its feather had exploded. The next step in my production was to show the princesses reaction. so in small motion I made the princess bend down and look at what the she had done to the bird and then still in small motions made her stand up again and look at the screen and cry. To make it look like she was sad and crying I simply changed the mouths lip shape to a small circle to show she was shocked and then I used small bits of blue and captured them moving down her face to show that she was crying.

Editing:

1. The first step I took in the editing of my animation was to upload the IStopmotion file into premier pro. I then placed the captured animation onto the timeline and then double clicked so the it would go into the editing section where I could use in -points and out-points to get rid of any unnecessary parts of the animation or any mistakes that have been made. Once all the scenes of the animations where in decent condition and had the mistakes edited out, I put them together to see how the animation looked over all. This was fine for now as I would be adding affects later. the next step was to make title screens. I decide to used images from the internet to put into photoshop and then import into premier pro so that the title screens would be a little more interesting than just a black screen. I then added a title screen that introduced the animation correctly. This was placed on top of the picture I used from photo-shop so that it appeared as though the writing was hovering over the picture. I then used the title screen options to choose an interesting way for my introduction to be presented. eg colour, style and the way it presents itself. I decided to go with the writing scrolling up from the end of the screen. The pictures I went with for the animation was a open fairytale book at the beginning and a closed fairytale book with an arrow in it at the end. This added to the comedy of the animation as it is making fun of fairytales. regarding the soundtrack for the animation I used 2 soundtracks. The first was the shriek theme tune which I had playing until it cut off and the bird scene from the movie shriek began playing. The beginning song then played again at the end of the animation. I also added a title screen that said 'the end' and that the animation was by me. I used the title screen settings to make the writing scroll downwards like the end of a movie would do. The last step I tool was to render and then export. 

Below is a screen shot of the finished editing. 

Below is my finished animation 

Evaluation 

For this assignment we were asked to produce an animation of our own choice. We were also told that we would be marked on multi movement from my animation models. The animation we made could have been any of the major animation types. I choose do produce a model based animation. I think that the strong points of my animation is the models (although they were not perfect) they were well balanced and easy to move in small motions and change the movements of the them. I also like the soundtrack I used as it went with the theme of the animation. My bad points are that the animation was a little bit to short and didn't turn out like I had expected. It was also harder toe edit than it should have been because of all the mistakes I had made during my production. This lost me a lot of time. I also spent a lot of time thinking and planning ides and making models instead of actually producing an animation in the right time frame. Because of all the changes in my plans and the unnecessary extra model making I lost a lot of time and fell behind. If I had to improve on anything I would have handled my time better and practiced my editing techniques better. To conclude, my animation did not turn out as I expected but I am ok with it. 

Feedback: 

From my feed back I found that my animation was a little shaky in parts and one individual mentioned that I showen my hands in some of the shots this made me think I should be a little more careful when moving the models around. I also learnt that my sound track was a little out of sync. This was actually a problems I was already aware of because it was the most difficult part of the animation production. I struggled with keeping the animation in line with the audio due to the audio being longer than the animation so a lot of cutting and pasting was needed. I was told frequently in my feedback that my animation was funny and that the models were well made. I had a little difficulty with the models but i am happy to see others like them. Also i was glad to here that my animation was funny as i was aiming for this. Although no one said this in my feedback, I thought that the way the model of the princess was walking was a little bit bit shaky  the reason for this, I think, was because I moved the model to fast during the production and also the model was a little to heavy and it kept falling over which made the model look as if it may have been movie forward and then backward and then forward again. also something that i did not get feedback on was the way the arms moved. I needed the arms to move quite a bit in the animation to show that she was dancing. However, the arms were not steady and there wire kept coming out, i think this was due to me using wire that was a little to short and not placed steady enough in the model. this is something I could defiantly benefit from improving.  Overall I think the animation production went well, despite a few mistakes being made. If I were to say one area I was to improve I would defiantly say that I could use some practice with the model making and how the timing should work. 

Styles And Techniques Of Stop Motion Animation 

This weeks lesson we focused on the style and techniques of stop motion animation. We looked at the 5 different styles of animation:

1. Model 

Model animation refers to a style of stop motion animation that uses animation and mixes it with live action footage. The purpose of this technique is to merge a fantasy and ordinary world together.  For example, the movie king Kong uses this technique.

2. Cel

Cel animation is the most basic style of stop motion  the characters are drawn on plastic transparent sheets and painted to create a very traditional type of animation. The example animation below is a Cel-shaded animation.

3. Time lapse 

Time lapse animation is often referred to as time lapse photography. The technique is where you use a camera and set the frame rate to a low speed and take a set of photo and then speed them up to create the illusion of the moving animation. The video below is an example of a time lapse animation where the producers have shown an apple decaying. to make this time-lapse you would set the apple and camera up and take photos of the apple every couple of days and then edit it and play it back to see the apple decaying in just few minutes or seconds when in reality it would take 1 -2 weeks.

Time lapes are usually used commonly to show flowers, trees growing or to show the decay of animals, fruit or plants. although the effect of timeless actually speed events up, the actual time lapse itself looks as f it is sone in slow motion. 

The above video is a time-lapse of a flower blooming which shows the flower growing in a fes seconds when in reality it would have taken a couple of days. there are many different types of time lapses such as pregnancy time lapses, space, starts or aurora borialis time lapses  all of these are basically produced using the same technique of setting up the camera and either taking a picture every day or couple of days or by in the case of the space or starts or aurora borealis time-lapse  the producer would video the event and then edit it to make it seem as if it is going faster. 

4. Pixilation 
 This stop motion animation technique uses lie actors as the subject of the animation. The technique requires the live actors to frequently change poses whilst each frame is created. Through research I came across a popular music video by cold play that used this animation technique.

5. Lego

 Lego animation, also known as a brick film is created by using Lego bricks or other plastic toys. The animation is created by using a still digital camera e.g DLSR. The images caught can then be adjusted to create allusions ans effects. Through the editing process the images are made into and animations. This can be done by stop motion editing software. below is an example of Lego animation.


 

  As well as learning about the 5 areas of stop motion animation, this weeks lesson also focused on animations for a teen/adult audience. We had to choose 3 animations with adult themes and humor and research the techniques that were used to create these animations. 

 The Simpsons
 My first choice was the Simpsons. The reason for this is because the Simpsons is created by using traditional 2D drawings. However, the producers/creators (Matt Groening/James L Brooks) sometimes use 3D animation in the later seasons. The animation has used the the same technique of Cel animation for 14 seasons. However the producers recently changed the technique to digital ink/paint. The change was not consider a positive change by the create Matt Groening who complained that the technique was to complicated for the animations timing and composition. The first video below is a clip from one of the earliest episodes of the Simpsons and the one below that is a clip from a recent episode. You can notice the difference in quality. For example, the earlier video is not a focused and sharp as the later one. also the colours are more vivid in the later episode. 

 Season 1 clip









   Season 12 clip


South Park/cut out animation 
 The second animation I chose to do was south park because the animation itself looked different to most other animations. the reason for this is because south park uses stop motion cutout animation techniques. This was inspired by the Monty python's flying circus, created by Terry Gilliam. The effect this technique is designed to give a a kind of paper cut out of the cartoons. the animation was created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Although it still gives the same effect, over the years the animation technique has been changed and produced by computer animation. This technique took the cut out techniques place because it was a quicker method to use. However, the the production company still requires a chain of animatics. 

This animation technique is quite simple regarding the use of primary colours and basic shapes that are used. For example, most of the adults will be the same shape and size and most of the young kids will be the same shape and size, making the animation very simple. Unlike Cel animation, this technique does not allow the characters to move smoothly and we often only see the characters from one angle. This gives the effect of stiffness to the characters which we can see through the way they walk and move around. 

The earlier seasons of south park were animated by coral Draw. However, the animating software used to create the show has changed several times over the years, such as power animator, Maya and Motion (Apple software). Due to the changes over the years, like The Simpsons, you can see the difference in quality by comparing an old episode to a new one. 

Season 3 clip







Season 12 clip

Celebrity Death Match
 For my last animation I decided to use celebrity death match because it is very different from mainstream animations. The reason for this is because the animation technique used is a claymation, also knowen as model animation. This technique is very familiar to me as we have made out own practice claymation in lessons. The claymation/ model technique is interesting because the entire cast is made out of clay and made to move by simply taking frame by frame shots of very small movemnts and then playing them through as a film. This gives the illusion that the character are moving. Audio can be added in sepratly and carefuly edited in to make the sound be in sink with the moements by the characters. The show was created by Eric Fogel in 1998 but was cancelled in early 2003. However in 2005 the show made a comeback. 

Referring back to how the show was made, the animation was produced in the cuppa coffee studios. Below is a clip from one of the episodes where you can see a clear example of model animation/claymation.