Exploration #6

For this exploration I decided to use the same techniques for the the SyFy commercial and the Claymation I did. I made a Claymation of a lady wolf who falls in love with the moon and goes out to dance with him in the forest. The dancing scene is done in cut paper silhouette. The whole animation again was done at my home studio.

On the first critique, they loved the animations. The keying and color correction was really well done. They said that the silhouette part was exceptional. The only advice they had was to add some additional sound effects and to maybe find a paper texture for the silhouette background and the moon. I incorporated those changes and the piece looks amazing. 

Exploration #5

For this exploration, we needed to create a 3D stop motion animation with the theme of a TV show, movie, or video game. I decided to make a Claymation X-Files commercial. The modeling process took a very long time and I did the animation at home in my makeshift stop motion lab. The keying took some effort and in the first critique I was told that the sequence looked a little hurried and that I could slow it down to smooth the animation by using Time-Stretch in After Effects. The last advice I got was to break it up into several close-up shots. This not only allowed me to make it a longer animation, but also gave me some ideas that enhanced the piece in post-production.

Exploration #4

For this exploration we are to make an identity package for the SyFy Network in 2D silhouette with jointed paper cutouts. This project also requires us to animate to one of two given soundtracks that has timed bangs and taps. The soundtrack is 15 seconds long which makes the length the animation 15 seconds as well. I started out by listening to the soundtrack over and over to generated a few ideas. I then created a storyboard of a clown with a bubble machine that malfunctions. The clown goes to the front of the machine to pound on it with a hammer and a big bubble comes out to engulf him in it. One final bang and the clown’s sign fall down and pops the bubble with him in it.

After bringing the storyboard to Morgan, our very knowledgeable instructor, he suggested that he likes the premise but recommended that I change the character to something a little more scifi, like a mad scientist and I agreed. I also showed a stage with curtains and he recommended to eliminated the stage.

I drew a few sketches and then created the mad scientist and his machine in Adobe Illustrator. I brought the illustrator file to college laser cutter and then attached the joints onto the pieces of the character.

Because I have to care for my baby boy at night and live an hour’s drive south of the campus, I decided to set up my own makeshift stop-motion lab at home with some lamps my glass coffee table and tracing paper for a light table diffuser. I set up my tripod over the table so I could use my camera as a down shooter. I did the animation overnight as my son was sleeping and I was very happy with the resulting animation.

The next step was to go into After Effects to create the background and bubble effects. I got a circuit board image that I modified to create a blue glowing look. I then keyed out the gridded part of the image and created a fractal noise animation behind the image that looks like electricity. I also found a nice bubble pop by messing around with setting in the particle generator.

From the first critique, I got advice to make the background less busy by zooming in on part of the background image. It worked for the most part, but some said it was a bit busy still. I was very happy with the end result and got many compliments. 

Exploration #3

Our objective for this exploration was interpreting movement and animating chaos to order. We first had to capture a simple movement seen in nature and then rotoscope the video in Dragon Stop Motion using various found materials of our choice. This is also the first animation that we are adding an audio track to.

I chose to go to the beach to capture my video. I saw many shore birds flying around and I attempted to catch seagulls taking off, flying, and landing. This was a challenge in itself. I also captured a pelican flying and then diving into the water to catch a fish. It is this motion I decided on interpreting in stop motion. I brought the video back with me to the lab and tried to do some image stabilization on it with some success. After a few rotoscoping tests, it became clear that it would be much easier just to view the footage on my notebook next to the animation station for reference instead of trying to directly rotoscope it.

I chose to use a light blue paper for my background, cotton balls for clouds, and my wife’s necklaces and bracelets for the bird. Again, I was surprised how long the animation process took especially having to move so many objects for each frame. After shooting I chose a nice classical instrumental piece for the soundtrack and added the sound effect of a splash at the end. The final result was received very well during the critique. No comments on any improvements that I can remember. 

Exploration #2

Our second exploration introduced us to traditional hand drawn animation and the principle of squash and stretch. We were also introduced to the light table and animator wheel used to hold the acme-punched paper in place. For Exploration #2 we created five ball bounces; Regular Bounce Cycle, Bounce Cycle with Squash and Stretch, Parabolic Bounce, Parabolic Bounce Light, Parabolic Bounce Heavy. There was a sixth optional animation(3D Parabolic Bounce) that some students took on, but I chose to opt out due to time constraints. 

Learning from my mistakes with the pendulum animations, I prepared guides for all of my ball bounces showing the curves I needed to follow and the key frames for each drawing. Prior to this exploration, I had no idea how much paper it required to draw a traditional animation. It truly blew me away how much unused space there was on each piece of paper and how much time it took to create such a simple animation.  I wanted to make sure that with the potential for so much wasted paper, I planned very carefully. I took the guides that I drew to Mr. Williams and the one that didn’t look right was the heavy parabolic bounce; it still looked too light. 

After drawing many, many, many circles and compiling all the animations in After Effects, I made some color corrections to make the ball easier to see and made the background a pure white. The ending result was that the bounces looked great. The heavy parabolic bounce could have looked even heavier, but still looked good. 

Exploration #1

This introduction to animation class began with experimenting with a program called Dragon Stop motion. Is connects with a down shooting camera pointed at a gridded platform. We then practiced moving different objects around taking one image for each frame, then using the program or Adobe After Effects to compile the images into a Quicktime movie.

After getting used to producing stop-motion animations and creating certain affects with Newton’s Laws of Motion, we moved onto our first exploration, which was done in two parts. 

In Exploration #1a, we used a backgammon piece to show, Ease in, Ease out, Anticipation, Overlapping action, Linear paths of action, Curved paths of action, Fast movement, and Slow movement. For this I drew a guide and put dots on the line to indicate key frames where the checker needed to be in each advancing frame. I then placed the drawing under the camera to get a test frame that I would overlay onto my live view of the animation area. After that, the rest was easy. Just follow the guide. The result ended up looking a little long and not as imaginative as many other students’ work, but it included all the principles required. The next few sequences were a slow, medium, and fast degrading pendulum. The critique that I received for this section was that, the animations fulfilled the basic requirements but the movement didn’t show realistic degradation. They looked almost like the same animations, just played at different rates of speed.

For Exploration 1b, we created black paper cutouts (some jointed) to move. Cutting the paper pieces and figuring out how to use the snaps for the jointed figures took some time. There were six different animations: Followthrough, Jointed Followthrough, Oscillation/Stagger, Sine Wave, Jointed Arm Pound, and Whip Crack. I decided to give my jointed followthrough figure a little style by making it look like a foxtail. All the animations came out really well with the only comment that the arm movement could have broken the joint just a little more for a more exaggerated look. Finally we were given the option of redoing the pendulum with a very smooth movement. This pendulum animation turned out very successful, because I drew a guide ahead of time instead of feeling it out like I did previously. My followthrough animations also followed a guide that I drew ahead of time, giving them realistic movement. 

Exploration Process Posts

In the following posts, I will be sharing the notes, images, and videos I took during the shooting and development process of the different explorations in Animation Techniques class at Ringling College of Art and Design.