2D Animation

Initially, we planned to make a 2D Flash animation, but after we produced our claymation, we decided to instead make a cut out paper animation, as it would go along with the theme of manually produced animation. I came up with the first concept of the animation, and my team all decided that we should produce that idea. The idea consisted of a ball falling through a wall, which would then travel past titles of what our team do, before exploding into our team logo, where it will be surrounded by each of our names. We created the illusion of passing the titles by printing them off in increasing size, then when we use stop motion software, we began with the smallest size, gradually going up into the largest. We used the same technique for the ball getting smaller as it travels away. We gave the illusion of the wall crumbling by cutting the print out of the wall and folding it away, this looked much better than we all anticipated. An example of where this technique is used in professional animations is in Looney Toons, where Wiley Coyote falls form a cliff and hits the floor. the same illusion that we used is used here. 

Filming

Today we began capturing the footage for our animation, we decided to film in chronological order, meaning that we would film from first to last scene. On the first scene, I took a back seat and allowed Jake to move the character, as he has had more experience with it that I had. We swapped for the second scene, with Perry doing the most animation, as he had also had more experience, I animated the character for the final scene, which happened to be the longest and most tedious scene we had to film. It was easier than I expected to begin with, but the third scene has some awkward movements in it, which soon made me realise why it had previously annoyed other groups in the production process. The clay began to get soft under the heat of the light and the wire frame soon began coming through the clay, after a few patch jobs to make it look as good as new, we ran in to another troublesome moment, in which we had to make the character fall over. This one second of real time footage took us longer to produce than the whole two other scenes. It would simply not fall over realistically. After attempting to use small pieces of wire to prop him and just allowing it to fall, hoping we could capture it using the software, we had to think of other ways we could possibly do it. We decided to retry with the wires holding him up, but only using extremely small movements, we would then speed up the footage in editing. This seemed to work best, although it did not seem realistic in real time, editing would hopefully make it better. This trouble on the third scene made me realise how excruciatingly annoying it must be to produce feature length claymation productions such as the Wallace and Gromit movies and Chicken Run, in which they have much more impossible movements to pull off. 

Creating Sets

Today we created our sets, after we each sketched a scene previously, we now each decided that we would produce the scene we sketched and planned. This meaning that I would produce the first scenes' set. Although I had probably the most simple set to produce, it proved to take longer than expected to get going, after lining the set with backing paper to paint on, I had to wait nearly an hour for it to fully dry, after which I began painting the main colour blocks which was green, but before I could continue with surrounding colours, I would have to wait again for it to dry. The entire production of the set took three times what I expected it to take. 

Character Sketches

To plan the production of our animation, we needed to conceptualise what we wanted our characters to look like. We began with a discussion about the characters themselves, including, their hair, clothes and height, after which, we each made an initial design for the main character. These designs would then allow us to combine the ideas into one, final concept for the character, which we could then change to our specification and requirements. The design would then give us a guideline to what our character should look like when we make it out of clay, the character sketch is simply a design that we follow late on in the production. Character sketches are a massive part of claymation production, for example, the popular characters wallace and gromit would have been sketched out thoroughly before they were actually made from clay. We also sketched the sets that we are going to make for the animation for exactly the same reasons. We were each delegated a scene to sketch, I chose to do the first scene, where we introduce the character to the animation, it is a basic park area, with trees and fields, with a betting shop in the right hand corner. 

Production Schedule

Production schedules are used to plan all stages of production and post-production, giving a simple to read schedule of exactly what will be happening, what day it will be started and completed, and who is responsible in the team for each task. We used a production schedule in our team to show what we will be doing on each day and to keep us on track when producing the animation. I created the production schedule itself for our team, conversing with Perry and Jake, to decide who will be doing what. Production schedules are used in every part of creative media production, especially video production, all aspects of the production will be documented in the production schedules, as was our production schedule. 


As a production team, we need to have regular meetings, discussing the days work and reviewing what we did in the previous day, and any overlying issues or news from the last meeting. My team and I decided that I would be the one that would scribe the minutes of the meetings, the meeting minutes would help us record the discussion points of that day and help us refer back to previous meetings when reviewing what we discussed in previous weeks. Every business and company has occasional meetings, usually every week, in which they would use and record meeting minutes, solely for the reasons stated above. 

Production

Today I received a list of things that were either missing or not up to scratch in our pre production from Lorraine. So after our team meeting, in which I allocated jobs to Jake and I for the day, I began to change the proposal for the second time to meet the criteria. 


As Perry was not in until lunch, I made the changes to his part of the proposal that were required. After printing copies off, to give to Lorraine, I also wrote the full dialogue for the narrative of our advert in the script. We planned to record the audio narrative for the advert today, but we were not able to use a Marantz Recorder in time. After returning from lunch, we got the remains of the character that Perry and Jake made when I was not in. We had to make the character again. 


After practicing movement of the character the previous week, we had discovered that the wire frame in the character, used to give it stability, was made using thicker wire than required. Meaning that it was nearly impossible to move the character without the wire splitting the clay. We got the thinner wire and made the frame, but we were not able to fully coat the frame with the clay, as we ran out of time. 

Leave it on the pitch, Part 1

As we are presenting our pitches next week, we were going to start making our presentations today. We began with a talk from Lorraine about what we should put in the pitch and what order to arrange it, after this, we were free to begin. By conversing with the rest of my group, we decided to each write about what we wrote about in the proposal, meaning I would write about the story narrative and how it would look. I began, but did not get far along the first slide, as I then had to update the collective group proposal we wrote on Monday. After I had changed the layout, punctuation and grammatical errors of the proposal, I went to continue with the pitch. Only to be stopped again to update my Task 1 (the leaflet about animation styles and techniques). I began reading the feedback I had been given for my first draft, but time was not on my side, as it was too late for me to make any of the changes. 

Questionnaires

Last Monday, I made our groups' questionnaires to research our target audience, I aimed to find out about gambling habits of the participants we asked the questions to. I also asked whether the participants were employed or not at that time, I asked this as we all believed that the amount of times that people gamble relates to their employment status. After we had altered some of the questions after input from Lorraine, we printed 15 copies and went to ask our audience to complete them, we thought that getting our target audience to complete them would be problematic, but we were proved to be wrong, as all 15 were completed before two o'clock. The results we accumulated were not entirely surprising, for example, being the middle of the day, we believed that most of the people we asked would be unemployed, however only 20% were, with 47% being in work. However, we thought that less people would have gambled before, but 73% of people we asked had gambled before. 


Creating these questionnaires have helped us with the research of our audience, with this data that we had collected and collated, we can alter our advert to cater to the audience more than what we had initially planned it for. 

Script + Storyboard

Last Thursday we illustrated our storyboards, I began by producing a script for the advert, after we had our meeting in the morning with the rest of the team, we discussed what we would include in the script, and the order of events in more detail than before, we also agreed what we were going to illustrate in the storyboard. After we returned from break, I started work on the script, once that was complete, we had a lighting workshop with Brendan, where we practiced the final part of our advert where a shadow engulfs the main character, after he trips over a log. This turned out very successfully, with the footage we captured we had worked out how we would create the intended appearance in the final video. After we had finished our experimentation with the lighting, we had to complete our storyboards, we split up the advert and each of us in our team illustrated and annotated three key frames of our advert, I did the opening three scenes.

Proposal

Today we created our advert proposal for our client, as a team, we delegated the parts of the proposal we would each create. I had produced a few project proposals in the past, so I was confident of how I would arrange my part of the proposal. We decided that as I was the member of the group that wrote the narrative outline and who imagined the initial idea that we have chosen to follow through with, I would be the one who produced the management, format and story outline in the proposal, this would ensure that the narrative outline would be explained to the client in most detail. 

Animation Styles

At the beginning of term we were introduced to the basics of animation, including some different styles or techniques. For me, the most relevant aspect of this was learning about the style of animation, time lapse. At the time, I knew what time lapse was, but I was not an expert on the history of it, this task taught me about the development of it. This is due to the research Harry and I conducted into the history of time lapse and pixilation, we then created and presented a presentation to the rest of the class. I have significantly developed my knowledge of the technique.

Animation Experimentation

A few weeks ago we began experimenting with the stop motion capture software, we began with a talk from Brendan giving telling us the basics or the software, we then used a movement template and some coins to get us used to the level of  movement we would have to use when making our advert. For me, the most important element was learning what resulted from moving the coin too quickly. At first I realised that the coin would have to move very subtly to make it appear smooth in playback. This could be explained by saying that the software only captures images a few frames a time, with 24 frames per second, the coin would have to move 24 times in a second using '1s' to make it seem somewhat realistic. This also demonstrates the phrases 'shooting in 1s and 2s', this simply means, how many frames are captured before the next movement. Having practiced using the software, I now know how to make our final advert when we get to it, using this software. I have significantly developed my ability to make a stop motion animation, as I had not had any experience in animation before. 

Flash...ahhhh!

We started to learn how to use Flash, Brendan told us the basics and we went about our business, experimenting with the features and just generally getting comfortable with it. I had not used it before, so it was a new experience for me, after using key frames and the paint tools, Michael and I made a 2 part animated video, where a footballer on his screen would kick a ball off the 'stage' which would then appear on mine and my character would kick it back, I was very proud of it.