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 :)

First Animation

For this very first project I was set to work in a group. This consisted of Joe, Gareth, Chrissi, Greg and myself. It was a continuation of each others work- my animation followed Chrissi's which is why it has legs and a face. After my animation followed Gareth- the way it was set out was my last page would become his first page, from then on it would become a cycle.

This was the very first animation that I had done. Apart from the hair that keeps growing... (I think it was having some hair vitamins) it's not too bad. I really tried to focus on the bending action, as the character leans to pick the bomb up. I did plenty of sketches and asked for my friends to 'act' the motion out for me. I found this useful to get an idea of the motion of the body as I kept watching it repeated. When I began to do the animation I realized that it all just fit together and started to work.

Below you can find some sketches for the character design

Above you can see how much trouble i had to get the body to actually lean correctly. Some of the poses are very unreal and awkward. Thankfully when it came down to doing the Animation it all worked :).

Below is my final Animation (>v<)/''. Enjoy