final animation session

We continued with our final workshop of animating our sequence, i painted the hills green top give it another field of depth.

Also i created the dancing scene with the sheep, and recorded some of the footage, once we had created the final animation, we came back down to the media room and started to edit the footage together.

14th june 2012

     The strengths for our animated sequence are; we have 3 people to work on it so we get things done quickly, we are all hardworking and get into the work from the start also we have created the background and the sheep also this lesson we created the farmer who is a big contribution toward the making of our film.

The weaknesses of our video sequence is that sometimes we can go off takes or we can not focus on the task at hand.


Our plan is to finsh painting an decorating the background, put our final production piece together for the arnolfini centre.

The group has progressed well from last week as we have created our farmer and pieced together the start of the final production piece.

1 Day In The Art Room.

In this session we went to the art room and started to put together a backdrop we used an A3 paper box, ripped some of it off with a knife, after this i painted the grass for the background and also made the hills and cut the cardboard out to make it,i also made the sky coloured it blue and made the clouds using wool. i drew on faces for the sheep using a permanant marker.

creating a pixilation and editing

this week we continued on our research report and i made a lot of progress on it this week by adding in why characters are important to making the piece a successful, also i included the history of stop-frame from the 1890's-1910's and from the 1980's- present. then in the middle two lessons we went to create a pixilation/stop-frame film starring ourselfs! i was with jaime and we deceided to show me moving round a bench by sitting on each one and taking a picture on each seat. the last two lesson's we edited our sequences using adobe premiere elements, here is my video ....

animator and authour visit

Blog entry

This week we had an animator come in to teach us some animation techniques, show us different types of animation and different types of animation we could create.

Some of the animating techniques we learnt were maybe not start the film with all characters on stage, but to start with a plain shot of the background and then to bring in the characters according to how the story was planned out.

He also taught us some types of animation; my favourite out of the few he showed us was the clay-mation, i enjoyed this because it’s something that’s not easy to make, takes a long time to create a final piece. So that was why i enjoyed it, the downside to clay-mation is that you need a lot of time and effort put into it if you want your animation piece to be presented well, and i don’t know if our group has the patients to carry on this animation technique.

The animator also taught us you can have different types of animation (as in genre of film) such as; action, horror, thriller, romance and much more.

Or task was to create a horror like feeling from the script we got and put the final ideas down on the storyboard, i came up with showing a kitchen then a women coming in to open the freezer and calling her husband’s name, but there is no answer, she starts to get scared and then after calling her husband’s name over and over he finally appears behind her giving the women a shock.

Claymation workshop

This morning we were shown an animation on YouTube called ‘Trap door’ this animation was well created because they got away with not moving the character though he did a lot of talking so this made it seem more interesting. We gained a lot of inspiration from watching the video so I and samy decided that our characters were going to be monsters.

When we were going to make our monsters we had to think carefully about the way we wanted them look, what colours to use and how they would move.

Once we had made the bodies of both our characters we then had to think about what their faces were going to look like, my character had one eye bigger than the other and his arms were like boxing gloves, he had little pink antlers on his yellow head.

Samy’s character was a big pink blob with brown eyes and a wide mouth for eating; his special feature was that he had a hammer finger on his head which he used to kill the other character in the animation.

When we finally got round to filming the animation using stop-motion pro, we couldn’t find a background suitable and then we found a paper box and put some paper in front of it to make a white background.

The lighting was just right as we were near light so it wasn’t dark but I was shining on our characters so we couldn’t see them.

We tried to focus the camera but we couldn’t so we just waited for the camera to get into focus by-itself.

The video was about 30 seconds long and we were very impressed with what we had created.

animation review

Blog entry

In the first two lessons we watched five or six animations that were made by some professionals, there was one that really stood out for me and that was called ‘food’ by Jan svankmajer (1992) this was about two people who went to a restaurant and the waiter kept running past them, so they chose to eat their own clothes such as; hat, shirt, trousers, pants and shoes. They also ate the table, chair and cutlery from the table.

I thought this animation was good because it was very humours the whole class thought it was a good animation and our group decided to bring some funny elements into our piece so that we could make our audience laugh.

The target audience for the film Jan created was from 8-12, even though I thought it was a funny film I wouldn’t be able to watch the whole clip as it got quite repetitive and boring so this is why younger kids would find this much funnier than some of us did but on a whole it was a film anyone could watch.