Animation evaluation To understand animation, we began the unit by learning about the different types of animation techniques, by making our own versions and learning about the history of animation. To make the history of animation we use Dipity. Dipity is online website for making timelines. On the timelines you add the name of the animation, pictures, videos and weblinks. What was good about this website is that you can upload your own videos and put information up about the topic you add to each timeline section. A problem with this website was that it was too slow and the connection wouldn’t work. I ended up losing some of my work due to the website failing which meant a lot of time was wasted. So we then used Popplet to create out animation timeline which was a much better website, as you could still do the same stuff but it wouldn’t crash. The problems with this website was that it didn’t have a timeline so it didn’t look as nice, and also because it has no timeline, when you move the popplets around it can look quite messy, however the timeline was complete so was happy with the popplet in the end. The next part of the process was making different animation techniques. The techniques we made were Thaumatropes, Zoetropes, Pixelation, Cutout, Flash, and Stop Motion. To make a Thaumatrope, I drew two equal circles, and 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 together. Therefore I drew guideline lines to make sure the pictures matched up. When it came to putting it together, when we made a design that was one inside the other, one picture had to be upside down . We then glued the two side together, coloured them in and then put two holes in either sides. We then pushed an elastic band through the hole so that when they spun, it was make the Thaumatrope move. Although this worked, it didn’t make it spin very well, so then redone the design to use a stick, and I found that this made it easier to spin, and better to see the animation progress.
To make a Zoetrope, I was given a strip of paper which contained ten boxes. In those boxes I drew a stickman kicking a ball 10 times, in which the story slightly changed because the
character started off with the ball and then eventually the ball rolls away. We then put the strip into a Zoetrope device to test it. What was good about this animation technique was you could see the animation progress as in you can see it moving from one state to another. What didn’t work well with this animation technique was you had to look through this slit and you were like had to strain your eyes. Although it didnt bother me it would bother other people, so I decided not to chose that animation because I would want people to watch it.
We also made a manual Cut Out animation. To make this animation, firstly, I cut out different pieces of paper to make funny shapes to make up parts of a face. Then set up the camera laid out out the first face I wanted, took a picture and for the second one I changed the face and took another picture. I continued to do this which left me with a two second animation. What was good about this animation technique it worked well because I changed the parts very quickly. What didn’t work well with this animation technique was that I didn’t have enough face parts, so there wasn’t much variety, and therefore made the video too short.
Another animation technique that we did was Cut Out on Flash. It was same technique as the Cut Out, however it was done using a computer and the programme Flash. First we found images on the internet that we liked. I found a picture of a Pig’s head, a Robot’s body and a Jungle area. I then imported the picture of the Robot’s body into photoshop where I need to separate the arms and legs of the robot. To do this, I cut out the body part I need using the Magnetic Lasso tool, cut the picture, and pasted it into a new document making sure it has a transparent background. I then went back to the original picture, and did the same, cutting out arms and legs. When I saved these pictures, I made sure they were PNG as they worked best in Flash.Then I imported the pictures in the Library. I then made new layers and labelled them. I then dragged the picture on to their layers to make it animate. To make the Robot Pig animate I used Keyframes. Keyframes are a way to put the movement in place, so when you change the movement on each keyframe, it make the thing you are changing look like its moving e.g. when you have a arm on the sequence, if you keyframe each frame and move it slightly in each keyframe, it will move. The thing about keyframes was that it make the movement quite jagged.I liked this animation technique the most because you could experiment a lot with it. I knew that there could be a lot done with this animation, which is why I chose to do this technique. We then needed to come up two animation ideas. My first animation idea was about a robot pig called Robot Pig is set loose in the jungle after escaping a Pig prison. He is making his way through the jungle to take over the world. A pig who is a ninja, Ninja Pig, saves the day by destroying Robot Pig. My second animation idea was an evil orange rabbit is stealing all the carrots from the carrot factory. He lives in an enclosure with other rabbits. Buddy Bunnington and his friend Roger Rabbit must save the day. I chose my first idea because I found it more interesting and I thought it would make a better flash animation which I wanted to do. The animations target audience is between 12 15 because it is quite a silly storyline that this age group would find funny because at that age they will find silly things funny. The style of this animation is going to be quite low budget, similar to something like South Park, because i want people to focus on the story rather than the way it looks, i.e. the humour of it was more important to me than the characters and sets. The strength of this animation idea is that it is an easy storyline to follow, so the audience will be aware of what’s going on so they can enjoy it more. The weaknesses of this animation idea is that there’s not enough characters, so may not be that entertaining to people, also the animation will look cheap compared to real animations. We then produced paperwork for this final idea to help us understand what we wanted to make, thee included; storyline, character outlines, sound plans (soundtrack and voices), storyboarding, and target audience notes. One piece of paperwork I found useful for this animation was a storyboard. A storyboard is a tool is paperwork used to plan what a film/video 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 helps widen your knowledge of what you want to
achieve and you get an idea of what your animation will look like, this helped me achieve what I wanted to achieve. A weakness of my storyboard was that it lacked colour so didn’t know what colours I would use, I also think my storyboard lacked information like sound effects and lighting. If I was to do it again this is what I would improve on. Concept sketches helped me with planning my project because they gave me a rough idea of sort of characters I wanted to make, which help me come up with my final idea. My Animation ideas and sounds popplet helped me with planning my project because it helped me plan my ideas fully, thinking about each part of it like sound, technique, location, characters etc. I then began work on making my animation by finding pictures online of different characters and locations I wanted to use. I imported all the characters into Photoshop in order to break up the body into parts that would move like separating the arms and legs. magnetic lasso or magic wand, saved as a png After making the characters and background, I imported all the pieces into the library. I then began producing different scenes on flash to make the animation story. Each scene was a scene from the story. Splitting the animation into scenes was good because the scenes would have been too long and would have wasted my time I then used keyframes to move my characters body parts, using Motion Tweens to make the bodies move fluidly. I found this process easy once I had been showed. how to do it and practised it a few times. After adjusting the characters movements, I then set about working on the sound. To edit the sound on flash I went on Youtube and downloaded the sound effects from Online Video Converter. I then imported it into Flash and then had to fix it so that it worked properly. I found using Flash quite difficult because I wasn’t sure what I was doing at first however after being aided with the project I found it easier to use. As the projefct went on, I felt my technical skills got better.To manage my time, I split the jobs I did into individual parts in order to help manage my time. This helped me make my job easier. I learnt this early on as I found when I took too much on at one time, it made the process more difficult. The most difficult and lengthy process was playing with keyframes, this is because when you insert the keyframe, you need to adjust the picture within the frame which took time and accuracy. This was one of my main problems, when I moved the picture, it might get a few of the picture layer out of shape, which ruined the flowed and was quite frustrating, so I learnt that locking layers really helped keep the order of things. When I added sound, I realised that some of the clips were too long, and needed to crop them down in Quicktime player, to make them fit in with the storyline. This meant I needed to learn how to change the files file type in order for it to work in Flash as Flash doesn’t like MOV files. I’m glad I chose Flash because I felt it helped create my animation a lot quicker however much I
found it difficult. Overall what work well with my animation was that the characters were distinguished and were exactly the same as my original intentions. My animation is appropriate for the audience I originally decided to target because it isn’t too violent for the young audience and it has a plot that is easy to follow. I know this because it is similar to other types of comedy shows that are already made like South Park, except my animation is intended for a much younger audience, as it contains less violence and no swearing. My characters are understandable and you can tell what they are trying to portray by the actions they carry out. The quality of the animation looks quite cheap and cheerful, but I’m happy with this as I felt the storyline was the main focus of the animation, and this was always my intention. However if I was to improve it technically, I would improve the movement of the characters so they would be more fluid. I’m really pleased with the sound effects of the animation as they reflect what the video is doing. If I had to do my animation again I would improve on making the quality of the animation by perhaps working to a different style, so instead of the animation deliberately looking cheap, I would try to make it look more professional by creating a better fluid with the characters. Overall I pleased with the way my animation has turned out.