elijah animation evaluation

Animation Evaluation To understand animation, we began the unit by learning about the different types of animation techniques, making our own versions and learning about the history of animation. To make the history of animation we used a site called Dipity. Dipity is a website that helps you to make online interactive timelines. The features of this site were that you could add videos, pictures, and that every time you added a new bit of information it would find the date for you so you wouldn’t have to find it yourself. The best feature about this site was that you could embed the URL onto it to reference you had found out about it. A problem with this website was that it had a habit of crashing to the point where for a few months, we couldn’t see our work. Therefore if I was to it again I would find a different website.

Then we started making different animation techniques. The techniques we made were Thaumatropes, Zoetrope Pixilation, Cut Out, and Flash. To make a Thaumatrope, I drew two circles in those circles I drew two pictures that were either pictures when they came together were above and below , one inside the other or side by side. When drawing these pictures we needed to be sure their sizing so they fit well together however one had to be upside down. I found making the thaumatrope quite easy to make because I was easy to assemble however, it was difficult, to get the pictures to line up with in one another and also the elastic band didn’t work that well because it wouldn’t twist properly, therefore not giving the right effect. This was therefore the reason I didn’t decide to use this technique.

To make a Zoetrope, I cut a strip of paper. that contained 10 boxes. Within those boxed I drew a stick man and a ball where the story progressed from the man kicking the ball to it rolling away. We were then given a Zoetrope spinner and we had to test whether it worked or not luckily mine worked. I didn’t really like the Zoetrope because it didn’t work very well because you needed to squint with one eye to look at it. I felt however that my Zoetrope worked well and moved fluidly. I decided not do this type of animation as I wanted to do something digitally.

To make a cut out animation you drew different shapes to make a character, and set up the pieces to form a position and then to take a picture. Once you take the picture you move some of the shapes into a slightly different position and repeated this process throughout the animation, enabling it to look as if the character is moving. I liked this because the cut out method was simple. It was also fun to be creative by making different parts of the characters.

A reason I disliked this needed to take lots of photos and change the picture every time in order for it to look effective.

To make a claymation, I collected clay and moulded it into shaped to make characters. I also made a set for the characters, to make it look more realistic. I then began taking pictures, moving the characters slightly every time so that afterwards they looked like they moved. I liked this technique because its is a fast way to get my animation done and has a professional finish however there are some problems if you do not shoot all the pictures on the same day and have to do it another day the light outside is different and the shade on the characters will be different, so would need to be organised when considering this idea.

*** We then needed to produce three animation ideas. My first animation idea was a claymation about a Happy/Carrot man who has a bad day in Happy land. He gets hurt by the local bully, but equilibrium is restored in the end as the bully gets his comeuppance. The style of my animation is unreal looking and very cartoonish as in the main character looks like a carrot and hasn’t really got a body, therefore the characters do not resemblance real life. This is done purposely as I wanted to contrast the actions taken by these ‘cute’ characters and turn them on their head, i.e. you wouldn’t normally see a character like Morph murdering someone. The bully has not got many facial expressions and is quite plain, his eyebrows however change when he has performed evil. I also wanted to make him laugh in an evil way to indicate that he is a bad character.The audience is aimed at older children because the animation has violence and bloody scenes. The storyline of the first animation idea was not how the actually animation turned out, because in the original version there was far less brutality as the because the storyline was that Happy Man was driving through the village and the bully kicks him of his car, and there is a plane that crashes, kills the bully and Happy Man walks away. Later, it was adapted by having an extra main character, a little mad wheelchair man who ends up killing the bully instead of the bully dying by ‘accident’. The strength of this idea is that there is a lot I can do with the story i.e. there plenty of scope to play with, more characters, possible lengthen the storyline etc. The weakness is that it could take a while as moving the models and making it look effective could take a while.

My second animation idea was a pixilation about two people having a dance off. One character was a geek and the other was a hippy chick, who fought over being the best dancer before realising they were both bad after both being injured. The style of this animation is silly, but also in the style of a music video, as the music drives the characters. emotions and actions in the story The audience for this animation is for all ages, mainly for young years like children and teens as they are more likely to enjoy the humour of the animation. The strengths of this idea are that it will be easier to do as I have already had some practise using cameras. The weakness of this idea is that I think it will be boring for audiences as nothing really happens, and the characters are quite unrelatable.

My chosen ideas was my first idea as I thought there was scope to do more with it and thought it’d be more entertaining for audiences to watch.

We then produced paperwork for this final idea to help us understand what we wanted to make.

The different pre production we did was an animation plan, with sound effects, a storyboard, concept sketches and target audience notes. The animation plan with sound effects was helpful because we then knew what we needed to do in order to get straight on with production i.e. we had the storyline covered - so we knew the story, sound - so knew where to get the sound effects we needed and to download them, character description - gave an idea of what their role in the story was and where they come in in the story.

One piece of paperwork I found useful for this animation was a storyboard. A storyboard is tool that is the basis of animation/film/video, what it will look like by breaking the story into frames and describing what happens in the scene in terms of storyline, sound, dialogue, effects, shot types and lighting. A strength of using a storyboard is that it tells you what you need to do and what order it needs to be done in. It give you an overall scope of everything that needs to be included. A weakness of my storyboard it doesn’t provide all the information in order to make a good animation/film/ video i.e. where to put the camera, the best place to shoot it etc.

I then began work on making my animation. To begin this process I needed to make models and set. After making all my models, I began filming my Claymation according to the storyboard.

I had three characters, tree, bridge, bricks and an airplane to make which took a while, and a set made out of a cardboard box, covered in background paper, i.e. a sky and ground. This was quite tricky because often one part would be too short, another too long so had to do a lot of adjusting.

I produced many different test footages for this animation because I wanted to see how fast or how slow the animation was when you changed the frames per second. I also wanted to see which light worked the best.

Each test version I made, I adjusted the frames per second to see how it changed the pace and flow of the animation. I decided that the FPS that work best was when it was at 8 frames per seconds, as you could clearly see the story.

I found the making process difficult at times because it would never go to plan, and you couldn’t continue the next day, you had to do it all in one go to make the lighting accurate. What went well was the pace of the final piece because you could clearly understand the story going on. It would have been even better if I had spent more time preparing exactly what I wanted to do, it would've taken less time to shoot.

I didn’t manage my time well across the lessons because I felt very distracted trying to remember what I had planned and coming up with new ideas all the time for the storyline.

The final version of the animation is much different to the original because when I was filming, I thought adding an extra character would make the animation more interesting. The target audience changed massively as I originally proposed the animation to be for children but later became fir adults because of the violence in it.

I think the technical quality of the animation is ok, you can clearly see what is going on, some of the shots towards the end though become jumpy, however before this the animation is quite fluid. I think the characters are quite hard to understand because they have irrational thoughts, however this adds to the dark humour of the storyline. I think the sound works well but because the video is quite fast the sound often falls behind of the story.

Overall what work well with my animation was that it turned out better than what I was expecting. I like the additional character and change in target audience, as I felt the animation suited my peers and myself better.

If I had to do my animation again I would improve the end of the scene in turns of my photographs as I felt at one stage the pictures lost their order. I would also think about changing the frames per seconds to so that the sound would match the images better.