Sunday 6 February 2011

Character performance and believability - Task 1

To begin with, our class was asked to animate a small plastic figure, that we pieced together ourselves, we first stared animating a simple walk cycle, just to get the feel of how to animate using stop motion, such as how many frames it took to make the animation look smooth, following this we assembled a group and started to think of ideas our animation could be about. People in the group decided to merge different coloured pieces of different plastic models together, in order to create a certain character, one person chose to create a character similar to that of superman, whilst the other, iron man.

 From here, we decided to create a fight, between two of the worlds greatest superheroes, what else would you want to do!, one of the principles of animation is anticipation and reaction/secondary actions, and so in order to achieve this, two of the members of our group, acted out a series of fighting moves which were recorded by myself to keep as a video reference, which we would later use in creating the animation. Another example of animation principles that we tried to incorporate into the animation was exaggeration, we tried as best as we could to make the animation as over the top as we could, such as creating a huge explosion created by the two super forces battling together using "After Effects" Other animation Principles such as squash and stretch however we felt we could not really use, because of the fact that the solid plastic material that we used, was unable to do this.

We decided to use a white board to help with our animation, this create a unique feeling as we were mixing together stop motion, with...well traditional hand drawn animation, only using a white board instead of paper. This enabled us to show energy beams shooting from each character, resulting in the city which was drawn in the background to be obliterated! So that we could position our characters better, we placed blue tack underneath their feet, this enabled us to place the character in a certain position, (i.e. kicking the other character) without having to worry so much on balancing. 

We also decided that we wanted the superheroes to fly, to do this we tied strings of cotton to the characters, that we hoped were thin enough to not be seen on camera, however some of the time the cotton is visible. To try and make the animation a success.

We assigned different people with different tasks, the creators of the individual superheroes opted to animate their own figurines, which was only fair, the rest of us were in control of capturing each individual frame, and monitoring the way the animation looked, also chipping in with suggestions about how to make the animation better.

This is the end result which we feel we were pleased with, as this was in the end, an introduction task, and for me my first stop motion animation. As a group we felt that the animation seemed to be a little choppy, and that  it would probably benefit with having fewer frames 

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