I've been really lazy these past few months and haven't uploaded my last two projects or updated my blog, so over the next few days i will become a recluse until it is up to date.

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:

Flairs-Truckers Delight

I just thought I'd share this video, I really like it. *not for minors

Live Brief

I have chosen to make an E-stinger for my live brief, I've been looking at a lot of street and urban art so I want to create an e-stinger that's influenced by this sort of art. I've looked at a few videos that are related to my idea:

Company Flow-End to end burners

I find this video very interesting and want to animate graffiti in this style.

Blu

I've seen this video a few times now and it gets better each time, I like the style used by blu and want to emulate parts of this.

I watched this again recently and it made me giggle:

Ad 207

AD 207

12th-18th October.

This was the first week of our new brief. For this project we had to turn our characters into stop motion puppets. They had to look like our characters and be fully moveable. To help visualise what our model will look like and to improve our armature building skills we were advised to make a maquette using wire and plasticine before making our final model. We used our model sheets to work out size and scale. I also started to build up my research file this week, by looking at various different stop-motion characters and how they were put together. For this project I wanted to improve on my research file as I feel I didn't include enough content last time round and it wasn't organised very well.

19th-25th October

I worked on finishing my maquette this week, I had already made my wire armature and started fleshing it out using plastacine. Because plastacine is coloured I was able to match my maquette to the colours of my model sheet. I found it difficult to get any detail using the plastacine as it was too soft. Here is the making of:

26th-1st November

I continued with my research at the start of the week to help inform me on how to finish my model. I had already decided to make the armature out of wire, and to pad out the main part of it with wadding, I had to choose how to finish the arms and head as they were the only parts not covered by clothes. I decided to paint on layers of latex over the wadding bound arms. I chose this method because it allowed the arms to move freely and had a realistic finish to it. I started making the wire armature using the thicker wire to make the body, and the thinner wire to bind it together hopefully improving its durability. I found it very difficult to make the fingers as the kept snapping, eventually I managed by using a different wire. I also added poly morph to the armature, this restricted the movement of the wire, making the movement of it more real. I also made my models head, I used sculpty which is a type of modelling clay that hardens when baked in an oven. I scrunched up a ball of tin foil and covered it in scuply and moulded Zeus's features. I used tin foil so the head wouldn't be sculpty all the way through, this helped keep the weight to a minimum. I left a gap in the beard so I could fill it with white plastacine, this will allow me to create a mouth that can be changed with ease. I will also use plastacine to make the hair and eyebrow as I want this to be animated.

2nd-8th November

I continued with the construction of my model this week, I started binding wadding from an old pillow to my armature. I started with the body then worked on to the limbs and finally the fingers. I tried to get the bound wadding on the arms and fingers as flat as possible so the arm will look more smooth once the layers of latex have been added. After i was happy with the wadding I started painting on the layers of latex, it took about 3 hours for each layer to completely dry.

9th-15th November

This was the week of our hand in, I had to finish off my model and complete my research to a higher standard than in the last project. I continued to paint layers of latex on the arms of my model so they would smooth out more. I then started to make some trousers for the model, but as I was putting them on the leg snapped, I decided to take the wadding off and try and fix it but the other leg was close to snapping off as well,so I had to start again. I made a new armature, this time using a thicker wire and using the other two sizes to bind it together. I kept the poly morph from my last model and re-used it and started to bind my model and finally start to paint the latex on. It took me most of the day to get this far but at least I was now in the same position as before.

I then made his clothes out of two old t-shirts I made two halves for his t-shirt and for the trousers and sewed them up. I added two back pockets for his trousers and a belt to increase the detail, I also added a yellow lightening bolt on his t-shirt. Once my model was finished I had to finish off my research file by printing off all my pages and putting them into a folder.

Overall I enjoyed this project, as I found making my model very rewarding. I feel I have improved on my research this time around, however I feel my strengths lie in the practical side of it as i find it more interesting and rewarding. I still need to improve on my research though and that is my target again for the next project. Here is my finished model: