AD202

AD 202

I have found this project quite exciting as a whole as the final animation was something I have never done before, actually building a working animation puppet and a set from scratch has been a new and valuable experience. I have learned new compositing methods that will help me with future projects and work, and learning to utilise digital techniques. It was also new to be working in a group and sharing responsibilities.

However this project wasn’t a smooth as I thought it would be and if I'm honest it was a bit of a non-starter for our group. This was due to a number of different reasons but mainly due to the lack of communication between ourselves at the start of the project. It did however get better towards the end when we only had a week left. I felt this was too late.

I believe if we had set up a solid time plan at the start and shared out the tasks, we wouldn’t of had so many issues. In the end we did get it all done and I think have a good animation as result.

Other issues we had involved the puppet. It wasn’t as stable as we had hoped and it was becoming increasing tedious and difficult to animate so I had to strip the clothes of and reinforce the legs with more wire, I then wrapped electrical tape tightly. It seemed to do the trick.

Overall I thought the final animation was good considering the issues we came across, the only part I don’t really like is the bit where the live action scene comes in. I thought we should have filmed it using the puppet but we had run out of time and other groups needed to use the camera. I feel our group has used digital application well, especially during editing. We also used digital media to help build the set. A good example of this is when we made the wallpaper, we first found influences of the style we wanted on the internet and created our own using Photoshop. We the cut it in to thin strips and mounted them on to our wall which created the effect of real wallpaper.

Our main point for improvements lies in our organisation and handling of the production process. I felt it was a bit uncontrolled and everyone was doing their own thing at times which wasn’t very useful as we were wasting time on things that weren’t important to this project. If we followed a good strict time plan I feel our animation would have been that slight bit better and neater in parts as we would have had more time to film and edit it.

Another part we could have improved on was the sound. As the quality of it wasn’t that good and it showed. I feel if we had good quality sound recordings it would have raised the quality level of the animation. We had to use microphones built into our laptops for the majority of the sound we used. If we thought about it more we could have hired a microphone or found a better one. As the ones we used weren’t sensitive enough and we ended up with a lot low quality sound effects.

Pixelation

In today’s lesson we learnt about pixilation as a possible filming technique. It is very similar to stop-motion but instead of using puppets actors and actresses are used. Some notable examples of pixilation are a short film by the Bolex Brothers called The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, and the music video to Radiohead’s ‘There There’.

Anyway we were split up into groups and given the task to film our own short pixilation video. We came up with the idea of turning a group of chairs into a car and driving through ‘Shoe country’.

We used Frame Thief to capture our video frame by frame. Overall it was quite simple for me as all I had to do was shuffle forwards for every shot. However towards the final scene Alex (who was filming) had to capture each frame and hold a shoe while moving it forwards each time, in the end we had to enlist the help of Lynsey. We also had to tie string to the boots and move them in such a way to give the effect they were walking, which was fairly difficult as the boots kept spinning around. Overall I found the lesson enjoyable as we could experiment with different ideas. The result was good to considering we only had two hours to film it: