Introduction to animation

 This is the story board for my final animation of the year. I have tried to demonstrate solid drawing in my story board as I know this is really important for effective storyboarding. I hope that the story is clear and the motion is clear. The red lines I have added are intended to illustrate motion in the scenes a little bit.  The main purpose for this animation is to establish my historical character, Louis the 14th. If you take a look at my plan for my folded format you will notice that the story for my animation is essentially an animated version of the first 4 pages of my 16page folded format. It would have been amazing to animate even more of the story but it was important to be realistic about what I can get done within the time frame we've been given. 

 Its important that before I begin animating anything for my final animation that I understand what visual style I want to go for. Sorry, more watership down im afraid! This visual style would work perfectly for my gritty narrative. Its also an interesting style because the backgrounds are often painted by traditional painting methods. I like the over exaggeration  and squash and stretch, this animation shows how cartoons can be gritty and designed for older audiences. (WARNING: the clips I have gathered are very gritty and of a dark nature, as is the story that I want to tell) The plague dogs film is created by the same animation studio as the watership down clip, both are examples of cartoon animation that is NOT designed for children. My story is not designed for children, its an adult story, but I would like to stay away from realism in the art style. These films are examples of how you can do that. Clip from the movie '9'- Its gritty and has some horror elements , yet the...

 In this weeks animation task we were to create a traditional walk cycle using a light box. Skeleton version Final outcome, different speeds as im not sure which works best Overall Im quite pleased with this outcome, I like the posture of my character, I think it suits them well, I also like how I have secondary animation going on with the clothes and hair.  The issue with this animation is that Ive changed the place of the hair too frequently (each frame) and so it appears to bounce quite rapidly. I think i could have moved the hair just a couple of times for a more fluid and natural bounce.  This was really fun to make, I'd never used a light box before and its my new favourite tool. I am going to experiment some more with these resources and see what more I can make. 

 In this animation task we created a stop motion using plasticine and objects of our choosing.  Honestly, what on earth did I create! This is definitely the most straight ahead animation I've ever done and I sort of made it up as I went along. I think it is quite funny and playful but also incredibly bizarre.  I like how I used a change of camera angle at the end of this animation I think that worked really well.  Overall not too pleased with the outcome, it definitely could have benefited from a planning phase, but for the purpose of the task I think its a fair attempt. I definitely need to delve deeper into this type of animation and see what I can really create with more time and planning!

 For this weeks animation task we created stop motion pendulum swings using string and plasticine.  I had a few attempts I am not sure why this one was exported upside down! The key elements to a pendulum swing are timing and speed. Its important to get that sense of speed and timing to create a realistic feeling of a swing. For example , as the swing reaches the top it slows down, and then speeds up quite quickly as it falls.  I think over my three attempts I have managed to capture the essence of the swing quite effectively, I could have improved this by taking a bit more time for each one and maybe making it longer so you could really see the speeding up and slowing down. It would have also been better if I had a fixed mount for my camera so that it didn't move at all, as this really let down a couple of these examples.  Overall I think this was a success.