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.