animation evaluation

2D animation! that's what we chose to do. but ill get to that. first off I want to stress that this was a neat little project, only took about a couple of months, wasn't too hard and I learnt a lot from it. perfect. It was nice of Steve to let us decide as a class what we wanted to do for this project and most people did want to do this so it was all good. It was a little bit of an inconvenience as we were also doing our FMP along side this and If im honest my main priority was my FMP but I still enjoyed this project.

we looked at different forms of animation through the years, from the early Victorian Practinoscope to the modern 3D animation films like Toy Story and Wall.e, this was interesting especially to see how little it took to amuse people in the 19th century. the first stage of the project was to assess the different forms of animation throughout the years, I did find it hard to keep interested in this subject as some of the early forms of animation were extremely basic. It didn't help that I broke one of the models Steve brought in to show the class, my bad. we did son get to the more interesting stuff like Disney and stop motion animation, which I had always found fascinating. I was first set on doing a Claymation animation for the finished product but knew that they never really turn out as good as you expect, I had tried before in school and it was never as good as my expectations. we had a few laughs making our own thaumotrope when me and Tim Oates made an R rated animation of Ralf Harris with a Didgeridoo and a young boy.

when we came to choosing our groups I was determined to go with people who I haven't done before as I had generally stayed in the same groups throughout the two years and was kind of fed up with it so I looked for someone different. I went with Liam Foster and Claudia, we worked very well together and even come up with the story for our animation in about half an hour. we all then agreed to split the pre production between us and all did a fair share which was really professional of us and something I knew I wouldn't do if in my usual group. we decided that there wouldn't be a script as the charaters weren't really say anything during the animation, instead we thought of a soundtrack that would play for each location on the screen, for example in London there would be 'hail Britannia' playing over it.

the animating process was fairly straight forward we made paper cutouts of our characters and placed them flat on a green table which would act as a green screen for the characters to move across, the backgrounds would be added in post-production. we stood above the table with the camera pointed at the area where the animation was taking place, we took a single picture then moved the pictures slightly in each shot. we took Inspiration from south park which also use 2D cutouts on a flat surface to make their animations. we where stood above the table until Stephan came in and suggested that we mount the camera to a pole and face the camera down to get a steadier picture. this did at the time prove useful, however we were quite happy with the way it was before this suggestion by Stephan and we had to adjust the animation according to the new way of shooting. we wrapped up the filming feeling that we had made something better than we expected, we looked forward to seeing the final result once it had been edited.

We put all the clips onto the computer and put them in order, it took a little while for us to put it all together and we had to repeat some shots as there was a large chase scene in the film. Liam showed me how to add our animation to 'After Effects' and add in the desired backgrounds to each shot, I was amazed to the amount of possibilities After Effects had and the pictures looked great on the new backgrounds. Once we had all the backgrounds we put it onto premier pro and put them all in order, we now had a watchable animation but something key seemed missing, the sound. i took the liberty of filming myself watching the animation all the way through and speaking in the voices of the characters and then added them to the soundtrack. I did two voices, Neil and the French Unicycle guy and Claudia did the bride using the same process of watching it through and speaking into a camera. once the voices where all put on the only thing missing were the soundtracks to each locations, there were 10 locations and each needed a different music track on them. I downloaded some music and sped them up for each location to give it a more rushed feeling as if they were actually running through the locations, this worked brilliantly and all that remained was changing the sound levels which I did whenever a character said something interesting I turned that track up and the other down.

Once it was done we showed it to the class and people seemed to enjoy it which was a bonus, mainly because it featured the legendary Neil Hunt which seemed to make people laugh. The main criticism was that you couldn't hear each voice all the time because they are talking over each other, however this was deliberate and some people even commented that this worked well. It was good that Neil himself actually found it funny and enjoyable, he mentioned that the idea was clever and that the animation itself was impressive. So overall the animation turned out pretty good and the project was quite the success, i have learnt a lot about how stop frame animation works and i have a good experience a piece of work that i can show off.