Recently Steve showed the class how to scan in and 'clean up' our scanned drawings for our Character Animation we did a few weeks ago; these would in turn become the frames of the animation we would go on to use to project against walls in a later task. This cleaning up process would be done in photoshop to made the pen lines thicker and to get rid of the background from the paper. I went into a panic when steve was showing us how to do this because I could not apply these techniques; I was too far ahead compared to what people in my class had done and had actually put myself at a disadvantage.
The ultimate goal of this character exercise was to take the animation and use After Effects to 'project' it against photographs of walls around the college in a similar fashion to the animation 'Muto' by Blu. I went back to my ghost animation and analysed it, I concluded that it looks far too smooth and vector like to be used for such an application. I had a predicament: should I re-use the scans I originally did or capitalise on the work I've already done digitally? I have a philosophy when it comes to video work, I believe any information available can be manipulated in any way to achieve any visual look desired. With this in mind I decided I would go back to my digital animation and see what I could do to make it look more natural and hand-drawn.
This is the 'Muto' Animation, a look I will try to aim towards
This is my digital animation I am using as a reference for the process below
I opened up my animation in After Effects and started by reducing the number of frames of the animation; mine currently has 50-60 frames throughout its duration which is great for giving smooth motion but poor for replicating a drawn feel. I reduced the number of frames by changing the composition frame rate from 12 to 6. Next I disabled the motion blur as stop-motion animations don't have this visual atheistic unless added in artificially. There is slight hints of colour in the animation which I didn't want so I applied a 'fill' effect to each coloured layer to make it a solid colour.
At this point the animation has the properties of a stop-motion animation but the illustration is still smooth and un-convincing. I thought about this and decided I would use the distortion effects in the program and animate them over time to make the animation jiggle, expand and contract in a way that made it look as if it had been drawn. I was able to achieve the following effect after using and refining various distortion effects:
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I am satisfied with how the effect turned out and I believe using this distorted animation will be more appropriate when I interoperate the animation onto a photograph.
We watched a video today in class titled 'Love Spin' which was another great example of the possibilities and scale that can result from stop-motion animation.
The animation features a slowly rotating circular platform with a central plant and pot. There is a main blue plasticine figurine that sits in-front of the pot who later stands up and walks at the same rate as the rotation keeping it in the centre of the frame for the second half of the video. As the platform rotates the set slowly evolves and transitions from empty countryside to village to city with all of the props and buildings centred around the plant pot. With each full revolution of the platform there is a noticeable difference of the sets and props; these slowly come to being from behind the plant pot where the viewer cannot see them being placed. The video finishes with the figure walking 'out' of the city (or this could be seen as the sets 'de-evolving') towards the countryside to sit down in his original position but with a female figure.
I really enjoyed watching this video as it shows some imaginative ways to spice of the tried and tested stop-motion animation technique. The technique of placing objects behind the plant for them to rotated into view is a stroke of genius; the rotation effect creates a consistent pace and evolution throughout the entire video, makes it easy for the animator to add or remove objects in 3D space all whilst creating an interesting video. All of this keeps the viewer engaged which can be difficult with stop-motion animations.
I've enjoyed watching the animation but I feel as if it is too long. The strongest point was the evolution of the world around this character but this process stops about half way and stays flat whilst in the 'city' scenes. The video builds up to the city environment however nothing really happens once the character starts walking; I feel as if something more could have happened other than the traffic becoming busier, it seems like filler to sync up to the song. Whilst the animation in this scene is admirable it drags on for too long unlike the buildup from the countryside to the village and then onto the city which has a lot of change. At the end of the video the camera zooms out of the platform to reveal it is sitting on-top of a vinyl; whilst impressive at first to consider the animation was done at this scale but can be analysed as a visual effects editing technique to transition from a larger model to a smaller model. I see this transition a fabrication; it was created smaller scale to make the animation seem more impressive. Whilst I am not doubting this is a well made animation it seems unfair pass it up for more than for what it is worth when other animations such as 'Dot' go to great lengths to animate at a miniature scale.
It would be interesting to try and apply some of these principles (evolution, consistency, seamlessness, forced perspectives) to our own animations but with any stop-motion work it is extremely time consuming, however the end result can be impressive just as 'Love Spin' has shown.
We spent the next couple of sessions continuing to create and cut out assets as well as animating them together into one stop-frame animation to re-create our Limerick: 'There was a Young Lady of Niger".
We had started finishing up the main background setting and we had the idea of cutting all of the trees and foliage off the A3 paper and placing them onto another - this allows us to move characters such as the tiger and the girl behind trees as well as in front of them, we felt as if this would give our animation some depth. Having the option to be able to move characters in-between the trees would give us more options on how to animate the sequence; in the final animation we had the lion character exit the scene by moving behind the trees on the left side of the set. Doug worked on cutting these objects out using a Stanley knife other than scissors to get a more accurate cut; we didn't want to have unnecessary white paper hanging off any of the objects. Holly and Dan were making the tiger and the girl characters in the meantime; we needed two iterations of the girl because they were in different poses. In any stop-motion animation it is easier to have pre-existing templates or iterations of characters for different actions or poses than it is to modify an existing one. Modifying a cut-out is difficult because unlike other materials used for this type of animation (such as clay) card and paper are difficult to modify because they need to be cut which in turn is a destructive and linear way of editing something.
At this point I started making another set for the 'stomach' scene where the girl is eaten by the tiger, I wanted to have it similar to the film 'gulp' in which there's a red stomach surrounded by black. I wanted the stomach setting to be self explanatory like it was in Gulp but in this animation the girl would be smiling, look around and act surprised and the view would zoom out and it would be self-explanatory she was in the tiger's stomach. This gives the story some charm because it isn't force-feeding the viewer information, the viewer can fill in the gaps of what happened in their mind, especially when the narration says 'the girl was inside'; it would be pretty evident that the girl was eaten. The animators making the animation did not follow the storyboard as I had written it down; neither the smiling sequence before the 'realization' and the realization itself were not present at all in the final animation making this scene confusing. the 'realization' hinted to the viewer what had happened but now this was gone. In order to make sure we didn't confuse the audience we out-right had to make a scene of the tiger eating the girl which in my opinion really dumbed down the animation as a whole because we had to explain what was happening rather than letting the audience 'fill the gaps' with their imagination. There was no zoom outwards out of the tiger's stomach either which further simplifies the animation. However, we did manage to make the stomach scene more interesting by adding a 'flow' of stomach acid which washes away the girl; I feel as if how I envisioned these scenes playing out was more engaging and humorous.
We filmed the limerick animation in the same way we created previous animations: using iStopmotion to capture frames which would be exported into Final Cut. We added credits onto the end of the animation with cut-out letters; we had the credits slide and appear into view animating each letter individually by hand. We felt as though hand-made credits rather than computer generated ones really pushed the animation across as manually cut-out and alive rather than having a hybrid of the two. I brought the video into Final Cut and extended some of the credits (having the full name on-screen for longer) and ends of scenes (such as at the end of the stomach scene before cutting to the next scene) to make the animation easier to follow rather than giving the audience little time to process what happened. I also voice-recorded a narration to the limerick and placed that over the video; with the narration I also edited it to pause inbetween verses to ensure different verses started at the correct points in scenes.
This is the final animation; Overall I am dissatisfied. I think the cut-outs, sets are well done especially the jungle scene which features a lot of trees of foliage and the two characters have a charm to them. These cut-outs fit the limerick well and truthfully represent the limerick. I dislike the project itself however for a number of reasons. The animation is very jittery and jumpy which is very evident in the jungle scene. The tiger seems to float through the scene with no sense of weight or gravity which makes it unbelievable; the tiger seems to clip through several trees, this is down to someone trying to pass the tiger through the tree and placing it ontop before the entire body has moved through. The sequence were the girl is eaten is poor, I feel as it was tacked on. The lion itself isn't the original lion, it was a traced version from the internet; As I explained earlier the entire reason this sequence exists is because the storyboard was not followed but improvised along the way. If we had more time we could polish the animation by making it smoother with more focus; we had to use 6 frames per second as opposed to the usual 12 for stop-motion because of time-restraints, this very low rate makes the video longer as a whole as well.
inspired by an ex-long-road student's cut-out stop-motion animation (as seen above) we have decided to make our own in the same spirit but with a twist. The class teamed up into groups and 10 famous limericks were laid out on a central table for us to choose and work on as a group. We reviewed the limerick and started to think about how we wanted to translate that into an stop-motion animation. This is the limerick:
"There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger."
We decided the best way to handle this task was to assign each remember of a group a different role. We mutually agreed Dan was the best artist in the group so we gave him the role of drawing the most imporant elements of the story - the tiger and the lady - whilst Doug and Holly researched jungle imagery to draw and colour in their own 'set' for the animation. I was given the role of storyboarding the animation; I sat and thought about it for several minutes and talked to other members of the group about how we wanted to portray the limerick before starting on an gridded A3 sheet.
Now I had created the character and separated the body parts into their own layers it was time to import it into After Effects and start animating the character. In this environment the layers from the character file as treated as their own layers in the time-line, similarly to how video and sound in Final Cut can be separated onto different channels in the time-line. I dragged the appropriate files from the project files (left) onto the timeline.
The next step is to animate each element. Animation in After Effects is done by changing values of properties on the object that is to be animated, in this example I have animated one of the wings of the ghost. I can expand the layer to bring up the transformation properties in the time-line and manipulate the rotation by changing the rotation value (pictured to the left) or rotate it manually in the project preview. The number manipulated in the screen shot is the angle of rotation, a '90' value creates a 90 degree turn for example. Effects and other tools in after effects give elements more properties to manipulate but I have only used the base transformation properties for this animation. Changing the value (like in the above screenshot) will only change the property for that given moment in the timeline, to animate over time I use a common process in After Effects that animates a property over a given time.
Animating a property over time is a similar process to adjusting a property. The 'stop watch' icon beside the property needs to be pressed at the desired point in the time to tell the program that you want the animation to start at that point by creating a key-frame. The needle-head is then moved through the time-line to the desired point in time for the animation to complete; changing the property at this point will create another key-frame - this creates an animation. Scrolling between these key-frames will show the gradual change in the rotation as shown above in the demonstration. Essentially this can be applied to any object and property, this is the corner stone of animating digitally with After Effects. I can copy and paste these keyframes onto the rotation of the second wing so the movement of each wing is precise without me having to re-create the key-frames. I can build the animation up by animating properties of different elements. However before I start animating the wings (and eyes) and I need to adjust the anchor points and parent them to the ghost.
Be default, the wings will rotate around the centre of the object which in this case would be very inappropriate. I wanted the wing to rotate around the ghost's shoulder giving the illusion of there being a joint between the wing and the ghost. Each object has an anchor point (shown above), this can be moved to change the centre of rotation for the object; it is moved either manually on screen by dragging the anchor point on the object to the desired location or by changing the anchor point properties in a similar manor to other transformation properties.
Characters made up of several parts like this in After Effects can be 'parented' together, what this means is that layers can copy a layer's transformations exactly but can still animate on its own. I've used this to parent every body part to the main body of the ghost. In this example I can parent the wings to the body to ensure they move up and down when I move the main body around, but I can also animate the wings to flap without having to worry about trying to move them up and down with the other body parts. I can parent by dragging the 'pic-whip' icon (pictured above) from the wing to the wing to the body to parent it (like a rope) or select the parent layer from the drop-down menu. Once I parented everything correctly I could animate the body's position to make the ghost move around.
To animate the eyes I handled them slightly differently from other body parts. In the main composition I 'pre-composed' the two eyes together into a single composition. A composition can be seen as a group of layers and another 'nested' timeline. My entire ghost animation is held within a composition, I can nest other compositions within it. Compositions are useful for treating groups of layers as a single layer; in this example I pre-composed the eyes so I could move that composition to animate and move both of the eyes at once in the main time-line as if they were a single layer. You can 'open up' compositions to edit their respective layers and effects. For the eyes I parented the group to the body and moved them around to make it look as if the ghost was looking at his surroundings. To add life to the character I animated a mask to move up and down over the eyes to make them blink.
This is what the all of the key-frames over the time-line look like one I had finished animating the character. One of the goals was to create a looping character; this was quite easy. I copied and pasted the starting key-frames and pasted them as the end key-frames for each individual layer, this translates to a seamless loop when played back. To finish off the animation I converted all the key-frames to 'easy-ease' key-frames, this means that the animation will act like an arc rather than a straight line to subtlety make the animations more life like. As an example, the wing would start accelerating but slow down by the end of the animation rather than moving at a constant speed. Try straightening your arm by your side and bring it up to be horizontal across your shoulder as fast you can; the motion accelerated but slowed down to stop, it wasn't a consistent speed throughout the motion. I also added motion blur to the wings to make the animation seem more alive by enabling motion blur on those layers.
This is my animated character loop running at 12 frames per second. I really like this animation as it has a lot of charm, feels alive, isn't overly complex and is easy to understand. The flapping motion of the wings actually looks like it's keeping the ghost in the air and the character has a sense of 'weight' to it which is important for any character animation. I could improve this animation further by having a shadow underneath the ghost that would expand and contract and the ghost moved downwards and upwards to give it more depth. I dislike the blinking motion as it looks unnatural and awkward, if I were to do this again I would create additional closed-eye shapes to replace the eyes when needed.
There are other ways of animating characters in After Effects (such as using the puppet tool) but dividing up the character into several layers proved to be easiest; this method is useful when there aren't too many body parts and for when I need to create joints between body part however, this method can be harder to handle when there's more layers and compositions involved. Using the puppet tool gives an animatalbe 'mesh' to solid images which is useful for giving life to still images, but is more complex and unsuitable for this task.
herre's a comparrison between the digital and paper-scanned versions of the animation; it is easy to tell I tried to keep the new animation true to the original vision.
To create a digitally illustrated version of the ghost character I started by importing a single frame of the scanned animation into Adobe Illustrator. It was pretty straight forward to re-create the character, I used my newfound illustrator skills from another class and I used the scanned image as a reference to build the character up piece by piece; I put each piece onto it's own layer to make it easier to import into further programs to animate.
To make the body parts I used the pen and shape tools in Illustrator. The main body was created with a circle with the bottom removed, the rest of the ghost body was made using the pen tool. The eyes were made using the circle tool with a coloured stroke. The wings were made using the pen tool and tracing over the wings I drew and refining it until I saw fit.
The character did not change that much in translation. I made the outlines much bolder it give a more distinctive look, I filled in the eyes (which I actually forgot to do in the original sketch) and added an outline to them, I also made the wings sharper and gave them a hint of shading. Below is the completed character with all of the body parts correctly composed together.
I really think my character transitioned well once I had illustrated it. The ghost has a very bold look and feel which makes a distinctive character, combined with the simple shape makes it look a like a character I could expect to see as a street art character. I personally think the character looks good as it is and adding anything more would be detracting from the charming simplicity.
I scrapped my idea for the pumpkin. I found illustrating the pumpkin design very difficult and I didn't understand how to illustrate objects like wings and feathers as well as the pumpkin itself; using a simpler design would make it easier in the long run to illustrate and animate.
I liked the use of wings from the previous design so I decided to incorporate something similar into this character, I used sharper and more menacing looking wings. The main contrast in this image is that a ghost has wings, a figure that is normally seen to float freely through the air on its own. I felt as if this would lead to an interesting animation with charm.
I also drew 30 frames of this animation on paper and scanned them all onto the computer. Drawing these frames was difficult because it was hard to judge sometimes to what degree an element should move (such as the wings flapping or the eyes moving around). I've uploaded these scanned images and uploaded them to my DropBox (online file storage). They can be downloaded in a packaged Zip file by clicking on the DropBox logo on the left of the page (135 Mb download).
This is the rough animation of my character. I took all of the images and placed them in a chronological image sequence using Adobe Premier Pro (this can also be done with Final Cut) to create the illusion of motion when played back at 12 frames per second. I don't think this particular animation is as fluid as it could be but I think that's down to the low frame rate, I also attempted to make quite subtle movements which didn't translate very well.
I tried to animate the following properties of the character:
Have the wings flap in unison.
Have the character as a whole float up and down as if it is using its wings to hover
Have the character slightly rotate to imply it doesn't hover completely still
Have the eyes blink and move around
This version does not have to be final, everything is subject to change in the digitally animated version but I would like to keep the overall ideas I listed above the same.
Sumo Science is formed by Will Studd and Ed Patterson, they specialise in advertising for companies using stop-motion, 2D, live action and puppetry animation; The two are represented by Aardman Animation. The group is hired by other companies to create adverts, their most successful of which were comissioned by Nokia. Funded by the mobile phone giant they went on to create two record breaking stop-motion animations, 'Gulp' and 'Dot'.
Dot (shown above) is their most successful animation; Dot holds the Guinness world record for the smallest stop-motion animation ever created and holds countless awards in animation. Funded by Nokia the tiny world of the little girl is recorded using a Nokia N8 combined with a cell scope the video was filmed on a programmable moving table that can move millimetres at a time. Because the girl character was so tiny it had to be printed from a 3D printer that uses resin to print objects; to move the girl around the world without breaking her with their fingers they used a wire which was removed digitally in post-production. Ontop of that they hand-painted each printed model of the girl and arranged them into trays so they were not lost.
In direct contrast 'Gulp' is the world's largest stop-motion animation; the film is again directed by Sumo Science and again funded by Nokia and filmed with Nokia N8s. As opposed to Dot and the small team involved, Gulp required a whole team of animation graduates, assistants, artists and even a single person in charge of the cameras all located in the south of Wales. The cameras themselves were hoisted on a crane above the beach. The team would use rakes to create the shapes of the oceans, fish and birds whilst artists brought in costumes for the fisherman (who was actually a live person who acted like a human puppet) props and even a costume made mine for the fishes belly. Each scene would be raked and then erased for the next shot only for the scene to be re-composed again. In total this took 5 days including during the night for the interior scenes in the fish's belly (that required lights mounted to cranes to control the light); 16 hours of work equated to roughly 20 seconds of screen-time.
I have discovered a music video to the Lemon Jelly song: "The Shouty Track" which features an animation similar to that of which I will be planning to make using paper and animated 'street-style' characters.
I quite like this animation because it demonstrates a lot of visually appealing ways to animate characters that have been focused around being simple and easy to draw. The style of the animation struck me immediately; it is made to look like a drawn 'flipbook' animation but is primarily computer generated. The illusion of this being a flip-book style animation comes from the paper background; the background has been animated slightly to look as if it has been moved in-between each frame which mimics that type of animation. The characters however have been animated digitally rather than drawn to also mimic typical flip-book animation.
The characters move a lower fps than conventional animation and at the same rate as the paper in the background, the strokes (lines) on the characters also jiggle slightly to imply they have been re-drawn for each frame. The most obvious evidence for this digital animation is the paper itself; even though it wiggles throughout the characters look as if they have been overlaid over it and look as if they are made of ink which can't be erased, rather than pencil.
The music video shows that there are many interesting ways to digitally animate characters which I will keep in mind when I animate mine.
Our goal is to create an animated character; our first task was to create a mind map of all the potential characters we could use to animate and then decide on our favourite one. One of the briefs we had to follow was to design these characters in a similar fashion as to how other street artists had designed there characters and tags. My initial thoughts was to create eyes with limbs as these are memorable designs however, whilst creating my characters I had saw this is what a lot of others had though so I decided to use something else. I experimented with different designs focusing on creating characters featuring blends of contrasts.
- mind map -
In the end I decided to use my pumpkin character; I liked this design because it was an interesting character. I thought the wings were quite visually striking and the idea of contrasting something associated with Halloween and evil (the pumpkin) and more holy and positive elements (the angle wings and halo) appealed to me.
My next goal will be to illustrate this using Adobe Illustrator, eventually moving it over into Adobe After Effects to animate it. Before I can do that however I will need to draw the animation's frames similarly to how I drew every frame in the bouncing ball exercise; I will keep in mind the problems that occurred before and correct them this time whilst drawing my new animation.
Jan Švankmajer is a film maker is renowned around the globe for his surrealist stop-motion animation; born in 1934, he studied at the College of Applied Arts in Prague through the 1950s and later pursuing his passion for animation, puppetry and film at the Department of puppetry Prague Academy of Preforming Arts. His work has inspired many modern day film makers such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and countless others.
Among his work some of the most notable and iconic pieces were his short films, some of which featured extensive stop-motion clay-animation involving human forms and body parts. These clay characters would join, form, detach, blend, move and interact with each other to create alive and stunning surrealist imagery; these short films could take take weeks to months to complete due to the high level of detail and careful, smooth, progressive changes made to the characters and objects in-between frames. Beyond clay he worked with a large variety of physical characters and objects.
Darkness/Light/Darkness (above) is one of Švankmajer's clay animations. Along with the fluidly animated clay body parts and iconicly exaggerated sounds lies underlying themes similarly to his other works. In this particular example there's many ways to interpret the piece as a whole; One possible meaning is that man is composed of animal instincts in a strange blend of intelligence (shown through the animal characteristics of some of the body parts and the intelligence of the hands). Another possible meaning is that man's growth has only led him to be trapped and confined; Švankmajer leaves it up to the viewer to decide on the meanings of his work.
He has also combined his animation skills and techniques with film and live characters, the most famous of which is his surrealist re-imaging of Alice in Wonderland. 'Alice' was the winner of 1989 Film Feature award at the Annecy International Animated film festival; the film was praised for its fluid animation and clever intergration of a live actor with stop-motion animation. The film is also an example of the variety of materials, props and characters he has animated. Even as a re-imagining 'Alice' stayed truthful to the original story.
Most recently Švankmajer has released the comedy feature film 'surviving life' that combines cutout animation with live action footage and actors; the film proves his talents in animation and story telling continue to excel. His next release 'Insects' is due to be released in 2015.
Today we combined our knowledge and basic skills of stop animation with our previous experience with creating sound tracks.
We created a stop animation using coins and a topple-ware box. We took the box and started brain storming in what we could do; most of the actions were improvised as we filmed as we suggested ideas throughout the process which turned out to be successful.
We had several piece of large card (to hide the table below) which we preformed all the actions on. We had a video camera on a tripod linked to a laptop beside it running iStopMotion.
We had the box open and spill coins across a table, the coins then moved around and back into the box. The lid of the box formed a ramp for a single coins to roll up and fall into and then the lid was put back on to finish where the animation started. We were sure this time as a group to make the animation much better than our previous ball animation, we did this by making sure each change in-between frames were less dramatic and more subtle. Carefully animating this makes sure that the overall video is more visually pleasing to watch and the length of the video increases as a result which in this case is a positive side effect.
We used iStopMotion again to record this. To run through the process again we took a photo whenever we made a change and by the time we had taken a photo throughout the sequence we could play them back as a video and we create the illusion of motion.
the change we made this time was to add a soundtrack using foley sounds (which involves recording the sound something makes and placing that over video). We completed the video then used final cut to record voice overs however, we used this function to record sounds for the video. For example for the topple ware box we would start recording then close one of the sides of the lid, we repeated this process for each side and then synced them to the video in final cut. We individually recorded each sound and synced them up throughout the video and end result is great and we are satisfied with it. We did this by recording all of the sounds and matching up the start of each sound with roughly the start of each the action in the video.
This is the end result and we are all pleased with it, both the sounds and animation work well together and creates a nice and fluid animation. We also managed to fix the previous issue with the lighting by making sure no excess shadows in the shot. There is a small blurred object in the top right at one point of the video, we are not sure what this is but we will be sure to keep all objects away from the lens next time.
Blu is a street artist based in Argentina who uses a personal to conceal his real identity to avoid being caught by the police. Blu has been active in creating his street art since 1999 and has visited other areas of south Africa and a variety of areas in Europe to create his street art. His style began to be defined in 2001 with a slightly surrealist themes and flat coloured characters.
Blu's Logo
Blu started off using traditional means of creating street art: the classic spray can. Later on as his skills developed he moved to using house paint with a roller attached to a telescopic stick which allowed him to paint larger pieces in more-difficult-to-access areas which literally put his art above the rest. Blu's signature pieces often include human figures and faces with varying styles sometimes directly contrasting each other. Some of his largest pieces are large forms or characters composed of smaller ones,.e.g., a large human formed out of smaller ones. Blu also maintains a website at blublu.org which in addition to a port folio also includes links to some of his videos and animations that he has created using his street art skills. As mentioned Blu creates videos featuring his art; one form of animation he enjoys creating is stop-motion animation, which is manually manipulating subjects and objects and taking a photo of each change (and putting those into a seqeuence) as opposed to filming a video. His most famous video animation is the video 'Muto' which features street-art that evolves and moves around the walls of buildings in Buenos Aires.
Blu has been known to collaborate with other street artists notably Ericailcane in 2003 and 2006; Ericailcane is nutorous for drawing beautiful painting of animals which complimented Blu's signature human subjects well. The two artists commonly joined each other in nightly runs aroudn the city to anonymously create art in the streets. Blu is internationally famous and has been invited to numerous art shows (a lot of which he declined to conceal his identity and limit his presence in the 'official' world of art). He has been comissioned on several occasions to legally create huge murals on buildings which can take him weeks to months to create.
For this exercie I had to create an animation of a bouncing ball; creating this animation involved several processes.
Step 1 - Drawing the ball
To create this animation we had to understand what animation is and how it works. All video is composed of frames; video is essentially a series of pictures accompanied by sound that creates the illusion of motion. The most conventional form of animation (such as in disney cartoons and moveis) is composed of lots of drames that have been drawn and then placed into chronological order, we were going to attempt to create this kind of animation.
For our first animation we made a simple bouncing ball. The main principle to remember was animating the ball through an arc because most motions in real life are arcs despite how subtle they may be. In our animation there was going to be three arcs, the ball would drop from high up and create an arc and each subsciquent arc would be smaller until the ball lost all interia.
We started by gathering 32 pages designed for flip-book animation and drawing one frame of the animation per page; the ball would be in a different spot between pages and when it made contact with the ground it would compress. The more consistent the distance the ball moved between each frame the more fluid the end animation would look. We also had to preserve the volume of the ball (size) to avoid the motion looking too unnatural.
Step 2 - Capture the animation
Sanning the pages would be the optimal method of capturing video however, due to time constraints we used a video camera along with the program iStopMotion. iStopMotion captures a single frame from the camera and builds up a collection of images so they can be played in a similar fashion to a conventional video.
We loaded up a new project with PAL settings and 12 FPS. FPS stands for 'Frames Per Second' which is the number of frames (or images) per second in a video. The higher the frame rate the seamless the motion is to the viewer watching the video. Movies tend to use 24 frames per second for a cinematic feel and TV (in the UK) uses 25 frames per second. Video games vary depending on the hardware and software used, but the ideal range is 30fps - 60fps as it is more visually appealing. Frame rates for stop-motion animation is typically 12fps, this gives the animation a distinct visual 'feel' and it makes it easier for animators as they can draw less frames per second.
To capture the animation we stuck the flipbook in place and took a picture of each frame being careful not to move the flipbook or accidentally include anything else in the frame. To capture a frame we could press space or press a button on-screen to take a photo. Between each camera press we would change the flipbook page (alternatively if we were animating something we would make a slight change and take another photo, this creates the illusion of motion when played back as a video). Once we had taken a capture for every page of the book we could preview it to see if it was smooth, then out-put a video file to edit,
Step 3 - Editing the video
This step was simple, all I had to do was import the video that had been rendered from iStopMotion and import it into Final Cut; the frames were already compiled into sequence so I did not have to do this manually. All I had to do was add a title using the tools in Final Cut and a fade. To make the video some style I added a soundtrack from an MP3 I thought I had fitted. I then rendered it and placed it on Vimeo.
Here is the final video:
Regardless that this is my first flipbook stop animation and I am disappointed with it. The most obvious and distracting flaw is that the lighting changes dramatically between frames; this change in lighting conditions could have been solved with a more controlled environment without other people or objects creating shadows. The motion is not entirely consistent, it could have been smoother but I think this comes with practice. If I was to do this again I would like to add more detail and colour and possibly shading; there could be other objects like flowers or trees swaying, the ground and location could have a context and colours could liven up the scene. However, each detail and shape multiplies the time spent on the animation as each detail has to be re-drawn in every frame.
