WALL-E . Looking at Sound

Wall E is an amazingly well created film. Despite having little or no dialog in it, it shows that a movie can still owe with only sounds. The reason for this was because they focused on creating new noises and ambiance sounds for every minute detail. Every character has it's own unique identity and this is portrayed with the sound behind it.

In Animation and sound design, you get nothing for free. It's hard to walk onto a set and know what the sound is going to be like, or the voices that would be depicted. In that case, sound really means everything here. From each squeak,bump,noise splat to the voices of Wall-E and Eve - everything has it's own meaning. Ben Burtt the academy acclaimed winner for the sounds of Star Wars, was asked to produce the noise for this film. He looks into the past of what sounds have been created by Disney, and the way they showed this.

One thing that still presents itself to me as being outstanding is the way the film is shot. Without adding too much details, you can get characters like Wall E to appear more realistic, than having something too clean and polished like Eve. The use of Depth of Field in shots and the shift of focus is something that for me, gives the film more credibility.

Below you will find a link, unfortunately I was unable to embed the video, but it is from the extra footage of Wall E DVD.

Enjoy

Wall E Special, Building Worlds from Sound

Le Voyage Dans La Lune

This movie was created in 1902 Georges Méliès, The idea behind this film was a way to awe the audience. For the first time, through camera trickery, people appeared to appear and disappear from screen. Due to the sought after techniques of his idol, Robert- Houdin, a master of magic and tricks, he found out a method he could use for himself. By pausing the film and changing the object or performer with something else, it gave the illusion of disappearing. Splicing, editing, rolling animation and many other techniques were used to produce the uniqueness of this film.

To date, Georges Méliès is known as a pioneer in Animation and Film Techniques.

We were asked to be in groups for the new animation. The groups were decided

but us- mine consisted of: Louie, Ashlea, Sarah, Zez, Roxy and Myself.

We were then given a selection of three different stories to choose from. We all decided to do Frankenstein.

We began by editing the script which was done by Louie. This can be found on his blog LJ Animation.

We began by doing research into asylums- they can be seen below.

I then decided that I would do the cat armature. To begin with the armature that I came up with was the one which can be seen below, followed by the plasticine moulding on top.

As I found out the hard way, you need to do face sketches from all angles. The cat does not resemble my initial sketch and the face looks startled.

After this I tried to do it again, I found that this time it worked better.

Replacement Animation

These images were taking from Coraline, this shows how they made a separate mouth for all the dolls and I thought it would be somewhat useful to do in this stop motion production.

This is the armature for Coraline. The eyebrows are changable and although they have used resin in order to achieve this look- the idea of diving the face into upper and lower work well.

This is an example of the cat walk cycle. This is an animation done by someone, and sometimes they get it wrong- so I thought I would record the Tiger walking, the day we went to the zoo.

Tiger Walk

Here is my version of the walk cycle- This was a bad test.....

Although I didn't animate Victoria, I asked my room mate if she could walk up the stairs to ensure we got the right movement.

Cat Animatic

Although not much has been done, I have began to do my cat Armature. This can be seen in the images below.


In order to do this cat, I looked at several images including the anatomy of a cat.
These can be seen below.



This is the cat from Coraline.


The Anatomy of a Cat.
Side view of a real cat to see how the legs work.

Stop-Motion

Initially we had a group discussion to find out what we could do. This was a brainstorm of different ideas/techniques we could use to present stop animation in a different way.




This animation is the result of a quick idea on what would count as squash and stretch technique. In this the person putting the pressure is squashing in order to change the person.



In Animation you are 'bound' by the 180 degree rule. Whilst this is very good for some animation, we were all inspired by the Matrix. Knowing this, we attempted to re-create/direct our own matrix short. The only difference is we wanted something different. A 'magic' trip to happen. This was done by holding the camera whilst the 'actors' changed over.

A free Newspaper that was given to us in the canteen. We always see people reading the newspapers, but what if the next time the person lowers it, it's not the same person :O. That is where this idea was based from.



The chair didn't work too well. The problem with this was peoples height. We thought it would be cool that when we turn around we would switch all using Jonathan's jacket. Unfortunately what we hadn't taken into account was the height differences, and whilst they rotate you can see the changes going on.


This was some silly thing. A quick little idea of not knowing what lurks beneath. People just came up and down like fish going for food. The interest was when Zez decided to pull Jonathan down, that included some character/light humour into the animation.

Our main idea was the changes to promote growth. For this short animation we were simply experimenting to see what style would suit it best and some actions people could do. This was in inspiration from these two short clips

Coldplay- Strawberry Swing
Deadline Animation



This was a little appearance trick. We had seen it in Melies films and attempted to do something like it. By holding the camera/correct angles we were able to make this interesting clip.


Our final video can be viewed here.
.TRANSITIONS.

StikFas

So, we've been given a little creature to build. 10secs into the opening and I've already appear to have cut myself. Not ideal .... So, I am in the black group consisting of:

• Ashlea
• Louie
• Sarah
• Roxy
• Greg
• Me

For this task we were asked to build the model individually and then attempt stop-motion animation.

This is the very first replacement animation that we did. This is a mixture of two animations. First session is one walk cycle and then it leads into the other.

I was looking at how models walk and using the Animation Survival Kit to see the way the legs cross. The picture below shows this example.
This was just a quick attempt at making the figure walk up some steps. I don't think it's too bad, but you can see the tape attached to the feet- which is NOT ideal.


Without a facial expression ,you struggle to come to terms with what the character is actually doing. In this animation the character is yawning NOT just flailing around with the arms.

11 Second- December

Okaay, this was one lengthy project... firstly it was choosing the right audio file. I wanted something which was interesting and yet not hard. Okay, so maybe hard isn't the right word as I don't mind a challenge.

I listened to all the audio files and there was something which intrigued me about the December one. I could already picture the scene/scenario from just listening to it... something which failed to occur with the other voice clips.

Once I did this I went on to watch old disney movies. As this part of the course looks at 2D design I went for the old disney movies and examined how they did the angles and lip sync.

The images can be seen here

Mid shot- Two characters portrayed with upper 1/2 of the body

Close up- Less than 1/2 the body is shown in the image

Long Shot- Perspective shot of the whole character + surroundings.

Long Shot- Perspective shot of the whole character + surroundings.

After getting some reference, I needed to check out how to lip sync correctly- therefore, I went searching for ways to lip sync. Here is what I found

After doing this, I began to do some character design sketches. (These will be uploaded some other time).

We were shown an animatic from an Animator called Jeff Gabor and I was inspired by how he acted and portrayed this is his animation.

I attempted to do something like this and my animatic can be seen here

Once I had done this I began to do some tests, to find out which would be the method to approach this animatic in my Animation.

My earlier tests can be seen here

What went wrong here was the fact that I forgot about the 180 degree rule. This meant I put both of my characters merged into one which is VERY problematic. Also, the scaling was wrong so I couldn't really work with lip syncing. I had issues as an example of this I did have... instead of saying the word have I animated H-A-V-E. Obviously the lips move differently when pronouncing the words than saying the individual letters.

Following this I decided to increase the scale of my illustrations and began to continue with more tests

At least this short clip works better as I remembered about the rule, but it still needs much work and the scaling is still bothering me.

I am pleased with the leaning action in this clip. The reason for this was teachers tend to peep over the student and look at what they are doing. The reference for the bending can be seen above in my animatic.

I wanted to test out what it would do in the second where there is no audio, so I decided my character would be writing on a paper. I wanted to make it look like she was struggling and hence the facial expression. :)

This one is working better but still has glitches. I am pleased with the zoom effect- I was slightly worried about how it would look but it's okay.

This one didn't work well, the lip sync went out in places and wasn't very clear or good. I have to keep working on it.

For the pointing finger I used myself as reference

See below

And finally, I am pleased to present my final animation.

Enjoy it :)