Finished animation.

This is the finished animation for the Print to Pixel module, thankgod! Overall i was generally pleased with the outcome and particually like that i handmade all the characters like the work produced by Aardman productions such as the Wallace and Gromit characters. I decided to use unordinary colours for the characters as i thought it'd provide something a little bit different, and add to the animated effect. The movement of them however was a little tricky but with a bit of patients i kind of got there in the end :) I was also pleased at how i stuck to the story board idea and how it all fell into place and didnt have to change anything dramatically.

The making of...

...the final animation.

I started off creating my animals out of plastercine, and wire so that they could be moved and changed into different positions for the animation. 

I made cartoon elephants, a lion and a snake, and this is what they looked like...

I then created a blank back ground for the setting of my animation, and directed my camera so it was stable and wouldn't move much between taking the images. 

After taking my series of images, i then imported them into Imovie, and changed the time settings to 0.2 seconds per frame. 

This made my movie 32 seconds long.:)

I next clipped down the section of my music using a program called WavePad again, and faded the beginning and ending in and out to make it smoother. 

I then added this music into Imovie and matched it up with the frames in my animation.. 

After doing this i fiddle around with the contrast and colour settings to make the colours a little more vivid... 

storyboard idea 3..

This is a story board for the third idea i had. Using the same three words - Dancing, Jungle and Instrumental, i thought of a different story which would relate to these and my piece of music

In this story, the elephants start off playing and dancing in the water from the pond/lake, and then squirt the water aimed at the camera. Then another jungle animal, the snake slithers past them. Next introducing a third jungle animal, the lion comes up behind the elephants and scares them away, which leads into the closing titles. 

another tester..

as i couldnt decide what to do in the back ground of my animation i decided to play around with a few other ideas which could be used in my final animation if i wanted to.

This idea was using cut out shapes from a magazine, and using the stop motion technique to make it appear as if the leaves are falling from the branches.

I origionally thought this could be used as a background image for the animation i was going to make but after creating it i decided it was a little too busy and that it would detract away from the other characters and other things that were happening.

however, after watching this short clip a few times over and over again i decided that i didnt like the outcome and wouldnt be satisfied with it being in the animation at all, and decided to scrap this idea aswell :)

tester...

After making my ideas on my story board, i decided to do a quick movie of the idea i wanted to portrey to see if it would work how i wanted it to..

 I took pictures of moving around my flat from room to room and pieced it all together in after effects.

 

I added a clip from the music 'Babel' that i had cut down using WavePad...

however, the final outcome didn't turn out too good so i decided to change my idea all together..

FINAL TWO STORYBOARD IDEAS

This is a final version of my story boards.  

My first idea is of the pictures of a journey put together to the beat of the music with the animation over the top..

and the second is the hand drawn bird dancing through the jungle. 

STORY BOARD IDEAS.

 For this project we had to pick three words that reminded us of our piece of music. After choosing a few words that i thought were relivant to the thoughts i had when i listen to my music i made ideas stemming from these words to make my decision easier.

Every time i listened to the piece the most vivid thought i had was 'jungles', so automatically i knew that jungle would be 1 of my 3 chosen words.

My final three words were:

-Instrumental

-Jungles

-Dancing

These are scanned in images of some sketch book work i did to get different ideas for my final story board. 

As my three words were Instrumental, Dancing and Jungle, for my first story board i decided to use the idea of a jungle animals bouncing/dancing through the jungle. The section of music i chose for this ended abruptly so i ended the story with the bird slamming into the screen, to add a bit of fun. 

For my second story board i decided to keep with the jungle theme, but chose to include more animals. 

For this story, I chose a section of music from the beginning of the piece that sounded like different animals making different noises at different intervals. The first 4 sections show the animals individually and then the last section shows them all together as a tribe. 

The third anf final story board idea that i had was something a little different. I decided that the back ground image would still be keeping with the jungle theme, but instead of it being hand drawn they would be still images. I would then create a small animation to have overlaying the images that moved around to create my animation. 

With this idea i originally had the idea of the story starting off in a bedroom/other type of room and working its way down the stairs, out the door, into the car and out into the forest. However after producing this story board i then decided that i could have the animation set entirely in the forest and have the animated section being animals from the jungle walking to the beat of the music. 

Darkroom workshops

In this darkroom session we were shown how to set up the equipment to create rayograms and images to make different effects that could be used within our animation.

To create the rayogram I simply exposed each section of the image for different amounts of times to see how long I should expose the whole image for.

For this rayogram i decided to use a daffodil flower, The different thicknesses of the flower made different sections expose easier than others. The petals were thinner than the stem so that section of the image exposed more. 

I started off exposing the image for 4 seconds, and added 4 seconds for each section after that. 

From looking at this rayogram i can see that the top where it had been exposed for 24 seconds is a little bit too over exposed, and thought that the section that had been exposed for 20 seconds looks like the right balance. 

 I then exposed the flower image for a duration of 20 seconds and the picture on the left is how it turned out. However, The petals exposed a little too much compared to the stem so i changed the contrast by adding a level 4 filter. This sorted out my problem and my final image was the image on the right.

Stop motion workshop.

In this workshop we were taught about how the animation is made up of frames.
For the mind to convert these frames into what looks like a movie, the mind has to process at least 12 frames per second. 
The faster and smoother the animation/movie is, the more frames per second it has.


In this workshop we had some cartoon toys and a camera hooked up to some stop motion software. We had to continuously take pictures of the movement of the toys in the actions we wanted them to make in the movie. 


After doing this workshop i had decided that this is what i wanted to do in my final animation. 
So i started looking at ways to incorporate this into my work.
After looking at Aardman Animations, and how they created plastercine characters i decided to take this approach. 

Aardman Animations.

Chicken run. <3 ahhh bisto, what a great film!

After looking at pixar animations i decided that id look at a different type of animation. I decided to look an animation that was based on built models, and not just drawn animation. 

For my final piece i want to create my main subject out of clay/plastercine, so thought i would look at the work created by Aardman and look at the different characters they have produced.

This company has created films such as Chicken run, Flushed away and the one and only, Wallace and Gromit.

Using the characters created by the Aardman company, I decided to create some of my own characters in the same way....

DISNEY PIXAR

possibly the one thing everyone thinks of when disney pixar is mentioned...

This is a simple design, yet contains a comical value, which is possibly why it works so well. 

This simple yet effective idea is what i want my animation to be like.


Pixar have created many animated movies such as


Toy Story 1,2&3
Up
Wall-e
Cars
Finding Nemo
Monsters Inc. 
A bugs life




I looked on the pixar website for information about their animations and found a handy little thing of how they make their animations...
These are a few screen shots of their website:)

nortec collective - Babel..

this is the music that i got given for my animation.. at first i was little sceptical as the first 30 seconds just sound like a jumble of music but as i listen to it more and more it grew on me.

The piece of music is split into different sections which seem to have more and more instruments and beats joining. Each section is quite repetitive until something new is added and then that piece repeats as well. 

After listening to this piece of music over and over and over again, i downloaded it onto my ipod so i could listen to it on the go and in different surroundings. I also decided just to sit with a blank piece of paper and write down any thoughts that popped into my head whilst listening to this. 


Some of the things that i thought of were:


-Animals - (elephants, snakes, lions, rhinos, parrots, giraffes, monkeys)
-marching bands - (trumpets, trombones, drums, triangles)
-jumping frogs
-electro/techno
-circus' - (juggling, tightrope, gymnastics)
-jungles - (watering holes, trees, noises)
-salsa dancing
-carnivals
-jamaica
-Africa


In a way the music reminds me of traveling.. when another beat/sound is added to the piece its like a new  story within the journey.



A bit of info about the Nortec Collective..


'Nortec collective is a musical ensemble formed by various individual one or two man production projects. The group came together in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Their sound genre mixes electronica with musical elements and instrumentation of Tambora and Norteno music, resulting in the nortec ("norteño" + "techno") style. The various projects began producing and performing Nortec music around 1999.'
-'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortec_Collective'




After reading this i had already thought that the music had a slightly 'techno' feel to it.. However the music didn't remind me as much of techno as it did other things such as animals, countries, circus' etc. From the list of things that the music reminds me of, i also decided that i wanted my animation to have a cartoony element so started researching into companies such as dreamworks and pixar to looks at their animations.

my poor attempts.

After looking at many different animations on the internet i thought the only way to start would be to try making my own.

using a simple design to start with, i draw a series of pictures each changing slightly..

I then scanned in each section and using 'imovie' on my mac and added some background music to make these into a short animation..

The second animation i created was only two frames long, As the music i got given reminded me of animals running, the beginning more specifically reminded me of an elephant plodding, i decided to use this in my animation. 

I drew a cartoon elephant and only changed the position of the legs..

I then repeated these two frames over and over again to get a running effect. I added music again and some grass and whambam...

research.

'Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways. The most common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video program, although there are other methods.' -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation

The print to pixel module seems slightly overwhelming as i have never done anything like this before, but gonna give it my best and see what i can do:-)

These are some examples of animation that i quickly found on youtube..

print to pixel.

This project is scary.