Animation Brief

 The brief: Create an animation with the title 'me', or, 'who I am and what I want'.

Initial thoughts

Initially, when I was presented the brief I sat in my chair and sighed. I thought to myself about how I do not like animation. After thinking it about it, I realised it is not animation which I do not like, it is the drawing side. This has made me realise that I should probably look into other types of animation which will require less 'artistic' methods such as stop motion.

I believe the time I have for this project is very reasonable and I should absolutely be able to complete the work in this time. One of the first things I will have to do will be schedule out my time.

Consider?

What is manageable?

 A type of animation which I would deem as manageable would be something short and simple (like what the brief wants) and not a animated feature film as that would be unrealistic.

Week 1 - w/c 16th Nov

Initial Ideas

Detailed Plan

Storyboard

Week 2 - w/c 23rd Nov

Gather Everything I need

Write Script

Week 3 - w/c 30th Nov

Film

First Edit

Week 4 - w/c 7th Dec

Finishing Touches

Reshoot (If needed)

Evaluation

What are my initial thoughts and ideas?

After spending some time looking into the type of animation I could do, I think I have settled on the idea of wanting to do some sort of stop motion animation. I do however, not want to do a clay stop motion animation as I believe they have been overdone. After watching Februaium by John summerson I decided I wanted to use stop motion in a subtle way to help tell a story like he did.

Vimeo. (2020). John Summerson. [online] Available at: https://vimeo.com/johnsummerson [Accessed 10 Nov. 2020].

Thinking about how I wanted to approach stop motion differently, my new idea is to do, what I can only call a scrapbook style of animation. I discovered this type of stop motion on the introduction to a youtubers video in which I thought to myself 'this is fantastic'! I think that I want to look down this path of animation and see what I can do.

The scrapbook animation can be seen at 0:45 below:

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Mace, D. (2018). Season 1 finale (also a bionic arm). YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soB6PAjfFGg [Accessed 12 Nov. 2020].

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What will success look like to me?

To me, calling my work a 'success' will happen when I have completed the full process of making an animation. This mean everything from planning, scripting and storyboarding right through to my finished product. My finish product will have to be something I am 100% happy with. At this point I will be able to call my work a success.

Another thing I will be looking for to call my work a success will be if other people, understand and enjoy my animation. If it makes them smile then that is an absolute success in my eyes.

Research so far

• I have looked on youtube for examples of this type of animation and found that it is quite rare.

• Watched a youtube video on how to make the style of animation, found below:
 (From 3.40)

Mace, D. (2018). How to edit like Dan Mace. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J64YekAS_8A&t=325s [Accessed 12 Nov. 2020].

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• Watched another video of someone following the tutorial. This is found below:

Ember, A. (2018). I TRIED MAKING AN INTRO LIKE DAN MACE II Tutorial. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UTDkRZuyRU [Accessed 12 Nov. 2020].

My initial ideas in regards to what is happening in the video is using the scrapbook style animation to visualise a narration of me, or a person summing up their life, or talking about what they want to do with their life.

• Researched equipment that I would need:

The above could probably be rented out from college.

Narrative:

After spending some time thinking about what I would like the video to entail, I decided that I want it to be a very brief explanation of what I want to do with my life. I will add aspects such as humour.

Research to do

So far I have researched the type of animation, the equipment I will need and how to do the stop motion animation style. The next stage of research I have is to attempt a version of this animation in a rough, mini style to see how effective it is and to see how well I can make it.

Script

Thursday 19th November: Today, in order to help me and other people visualise the narrative of my animation better than just reading words of a script, which can be hard to visualise.

Friday 20th November: Today I am going to complete my storyboard which I made a very brief start on yesterday.

Storyboard

Monday 23rd November: Today I am going to assemble a rig which can hold lights, my phone (camera) and the paper steady for the animation. I will be filming with the camera straight from above. In order to do this I am going to use some wood in my house, and from the skip we have outside due to building work.

Creating my Rig

In order to create my animation I needed to create a stable rig to hold the phone (camera) straight above the material being animated. In order to do this I used my DIY skills to build the below:

Monday 23rd November: After lots of stress I have completed this successfully. I am no builder so it was a bit stressful. I used wood lying spare around my house from our extension. I also figured for lighting, I can borrow ring lights that both my father and sister have.

Wednesday 25th November: Today I worked on completing my practice animation. I did this animation to decide whether it was right for me to go ahead with it and work out if I could do it. This ended up going very well and being something I was very happy with. At first attempt I tried to do this animation at fifteen frames a second, however I soon realised this was too much and cut it down to twelve. I also had an Issue when importing the shots, they were displaying in portrait mode in premiere so I had to rotate them all around outside of premiere.

Thursday 26th November: Today, now I have successfully proven I can successfully do scrapbook style stop motion, I will begin work on my main animation. The first step towards my scrapbook animation will be to collect all my different images that I need to print and cut out and put them all together. 

Friday 27th November: After a bit of a slow, unmotivated start yesterday - today I am going to complete gathering all the main cutouts for my animation. This will allow me to start the full animation tomorrow. 

Monday 30th Nov: Today I have started the full animation. I found myself guessing over the first 5second where events were taking place. In order to stop this I planned out each second. I decided to do 12 fps.

Tuesday 1st: Today I had some struggles, my entire animation rig was knocked over, this caused all of my 'set' to be knocked out of place. Because of this, I spent the day redoing what I did before.

Thursday 3rd: Today I reviewed the first section of the footage and was happy. I decided to continue with the animation and completed up until 10seconds.

Friday 4th: Today I continued with my animation. However, annoyingly I mispositioned a piece of paper accidently which I did not realise. This meant I had to go back and redo several sections of my animation.

Wednesday 9th: Due to work experience, I have had to take several days away from my animation but today I plan to complete it.

Wednesday 9th: Today I finished taking all the shots for my animation, and then put them into premiere and edited them. I had an issue with some parts being to quick, so I changed some of the shots from two frames to three or more.

Animation Practice

Final Animation

Personal Evaluation

I was tasked to create an animation with the title 'What I want and Who I am'. Immediately I knew I wanted to create almost a comedic storyline with a character who wants to something silly. As many people know, animation is something that I do not get on with particularly well - but this is animation that involves drawing. Because of this I decided to do stop motion.

I believe I created an animation which fits particularly well to the title which was given. The process of creating the stop motion itself was long, and at times very boring due to its repetitive and time consuming nature. 

If I were to do the animation again, the one thing which I would change would be how quickly some of the action occur. I needed to remember twelve frames is one second and actions don't occur over one second in real life, most of the time.

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At the start you said what success would look like to you – were you successful?

At the start of the project I said that I will call my work a success when I completed the full process of creating an animation and it is something that I am happy with. Looking at my project now, I believe that I am at this stage. I completed the research, prep and production work of the animation which allowed me to complete something which I am very happy with. The animation is what I envisioned in my mind before and I believe people enjoy it.

What was the hardest part?

The hardest part of creating this animation was getting the timings right, I had to do a practice animation in order to work out a suitable amount of frames per second. Once I had this I had to work out how many frames per action, and convert it to seconds to make sure my animation would fit in the time requirements.

What was the most enjoyable part?

The most enjoyable part of this project was when I got to place all of the individual shots into premiere pro and watch it play back for the first time.

How did you improve your animation skills?

In order to improve my animation skills, I ensured that I did a practice animation before the main project animation. This was insightful as it allowed me to know what I should and should not do for the main project. I learnt that smaller movements looked even more realistic when played back. 

What changes to your workflow could you make in future projects to improve your outcome?

In future, if I were to make changes to my workflow it would involve reducing the period of time animating. I found the actual shot taking side a little repetitive and therefore lead to me getting a bit bored and taking a long time to complete the animation, but this gave me less time in post.

How could you improve your presentation skills (get feedback if you haven’t yet)?

In the future I could improve my presentation skills by making a slideshow to go along with me talking about the final project. I would also spend time thinking about what I am going to say and practicing it.

You did lots of work before beginning your animation, included in this was lots of research, trying out animation techniques etc. Which research was the most useful (explain)?

I did lots of research, like looking at other examples of the animation style, watching tutorial videos, looking around on the web. However, the most useful was when I attempted my own version of the animation style as this allowed me to understand what work best for me personally.

Who would you say is the target audience for your animation(consider: age range, gender, interests)?

I believe that the target audience for this animation is quite large however predominantly people in the age range of 5-15. They could be either male or female but probably have an interest in comedy and/or sci-fi or going to space.

How successful were you at evidencing your progression and work as you went along?

I believe I was very successful and evidicing my progression as I went along because, every time I worked on the project I logged what I was getting up to and any problems I encountered on the blog page. Sometimes I accompanied the log with an image.

How would you manage your time differently next time?

In future I would ensure I had a complete concise calendar with a more detailed time plan to ensure my time is more evenly spread out.