Media : June 2016

Monday, 27 June 2016

Sunday, 26 June 2016

Evaluation for Final animation

We are asked to create an animation for our final task in our unit. We first devised ideas as to what our animation will be, so placed our ideas on a mid map which we wrote down key words we could think of which would be important to our idea, we had come up with three separate choices to then choose one of the ideas. I was in a group with someone else and we both discussed for which animation concept we should do. We ended up going with the choice which was Lego object animation. This type of animation is a form of stop motion which involves the movement of any non hand drawn objects which are not fully malleable. So the next stage once we decided was to do a storyboard, which we follow for when we animate the characters, Its useful to have a story board for production as you have a planned idea and know what to follow as a guide rather than just improvise on the day.. We needed some equipment to complete this task which was, a webcam which allowed us to take the pictures and have them viewed on the computer. This means we had to use the application "motion camera" on the Apple mac, this was so we we could see each shot at it is taken so we knew what to move in order create a consistent animation between the different frames .It is a long process for object animation as you have to move the objects to create a fluid motion with the characters, however for cut out animation it is a much simpler process and takes far less time to create an animation. A negative for doing this animation is you cannot have movement in the face for the characters so you can only covey non verbal communication from the movement of the body of the characters. Some people viewed my animation and said a positive was the use of sound and character animation, which matched fairly well, however a negative is that I had a large amount of camera angles changes, this was because we had characters in different locations. My opinions match with theirs, however I noticed that the animation was quite fast at points, however it was difficult to slow it down. My favourite shot was my character lifting an object which showed the movement of an object.

Wednesday, 22 June 2016

animation timeline

Animation introduction

What is animation?

Animation is the process of motion using it to create an illusion of movement and is shown as a sequence. It can be presented in different amount of ways on all technological platforms such as television, internet etc. There is a difference between animation and video, as video is takes continuous motion and splits it into frames while animation takes individual frames and puts them together to create the the continuous motion.

Animation has been around since the 19th century and existed before being consumed on a screen. Such as on a flip book and the next frame would be drawn on the next page. There has been evolution of animation since then and has advanced with the modern age.

1830: Zoetrope

Phi phenomenon is the optical of perceiving a series of still images, when viewed in a chain of continuous motion. This is the reason motion illusion in cinema, animation and including the zeotrope. There is also a way to test this with a experimental demonstration, this would have to viewed by a person to get the phi phenomenon involves a viewer or audience watching a screen, upon which the experimenter projects two image in succession.

Persistence of vision is another optical illusion where multiple discrete image blend together to make a single image in the human mind when there is not one in actual fact. For example the famous jesus optical illusion is the effect of this as you stare at the dots in the middle you start to realise that now the image has turned into Jesus in colour.

The Zoetrope is type of pre-film animation that produces an illusiion of movement by showing a sequence of drawings or images that show the stages of motion. The name "Zoetrope" came from the greek root words ζωή"life" and τρόπος"turning". the zoetrope features a cylinder with slits vertically cut in the sides which is what the viewer will look the through, this will stop the blurring that will happen if you just stare at the paper which turns around in circles. The zoetrope has barely changed over the years and still feature the same set of equipment.

It was modern zoetrope was invented in 1834 by a British mathmetician called William george Horner which he called the daedalum which actually means the wheel of the devil
however it was actually first invented over 5000 years ago from Iran which was the early stages of Zoetrope we know today. William f licoln had rented it to zoetrope meaning the wheel of life, the popularity of the zoetrope came in the late 19th Century. Since the late 20th century zoetropes have been used for artwork, entertainment and in other media use such as in horror films which have been used several times.

We were asked to make our own zoetropes, I began with a simple design which was a ball moving around, which was fairly easy to do, but I wanted to make them more complex which is involving movement of a stick man and having constant shapes for each image which was harder. The zoetrope overall has limitations as you can only do so much with it and you would need a larger zoetrope to do something incredibly creative. The zoetrope overall has many limitations as you cannot tell much of a story as it only goes round in circles which means a receptive narrative which has a maximum length in which to present it.

1918: Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping is a type of animation technique which is when animators trace over live action footage filmed of someone talking and will follow those same movements so it appears that the animated of characters are talking. This is done frame by frame, originally, recorded live action movie images were projected onto a frosted glass panel then redrawn by animator which would be used as the platform to animate with the objects for the animation. However this element has changed is now replaced by computers and in the visual effects industry, rotoscoping refers to the technique of manually creating a matte for an element from a live action shot such as of the actor talking then it is composited over another background. Rotoscoping was invented by Max Fleischer who used the technique in the Out of the inkwell series which was in released in 1918. The rotoscope would project motion picture film through an opening in the easel. Overall this show was considered the pioneer of rotoscoping and also incredibly influential, which is inspired many others to create animation in that genre. Another animator Ralph Bakshi who used the technique for films such as Wizards (1977), The lord of the rings (1978), American Pop (1981), Fire and ice (1983). For Wizards rotoscoping was used becuas of lack of budget so rotoscoping was used for battle scenes. This is not a technique that has been used consistently over the years. A positive of this technique is that you can have dialogue match with the voice which would add more character to the objects in the scenes rather than in clay animation where you can not move the mouth as much. Another positive is that there doesn't have to be a huge amount of movement with all the characters and the story can told just through the dialogue. However a negative is that takes a long time perfect the mouth with the voice as many times it can not look right, also it can never be done exactly to math and it can be easier to do for cut out animations.

1970 cut out animation

Cut out animation is a technique for producing stop-animations by applying flat characters, backgrounds, objects, or any flat prop you can find, this is only 2D animation. The materials used would be from paper, card, stiff fabric,or even photographs which can be found in books, magazines or catalogues or any item that has photos featured in it. Cut out animation has evolved over the years to the point where now it can even be done by computer animation which appear as cut out animation, this is by vector graphics taking the place of physically cut materials. South park was originally a cut out animation but in its second episode was changed to computer software.Similar to the other animation techniques it does not need a huge amount of equipment, for example you need a camera, tripod and the paper you will use to produce the animation, to set up scissors may be needed to cut out the objects you want. One famous director who uses this technique is Terry Gilliam, he started his career by being a strip cartoonist and became famous for "Monty Python and the holy Grail"which used the cut out animation for comedic purposes and used sound effects and music to add more creativity to the animations. The first use of Cut out animation was for a film in 1926 but was not used again until the 1960's with "Heaven and earth magic" , then lefty and "Go There, don't know where. Then many shorts were released by the mentioned Terry Gillian, however this genre never had a huge success and not many films or shows were presented in the cut out animation format. However on major film that used elements of the cut out animation was the south park movie which was computer generation to imitate cut out animation. This helped with the type of film it was and it wanted to be unique also it had an r rating which was very unusual for an animate film, Though overall as a style of animation it has never been a major use in recent years more used as an extra such as in Juno or in a music video. I created a cut out animation short which was a fun process and can let you be creative in the objects you choose but there is a limitation as you can only move the objects up down or around as there is no 3D motion involved. The benefit of cut out is that you can get realistic looking objects or people and create some humour out of it. One huge postitve I realised was the mouth as you can adjust the jaw incredibly easily to have it appear the character is talking once sound was added.

Claymation animation 1921

Claymation Animation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each piece in the frame can be deformed which is usually made of Plasticine clay, as the most popular type of material used. The way the illusion of movement is created is by moving the clay in different positions then photographing each new shape, then when you edit together, adding all the frames then makes clay appear to move. There is not a huge amount of equipment needed to perform this animation platform as you mainly need the clay and camera equipment. The amount of clay can vary depending on the scale of animation you want to perform. The other equipment could be sets, an animation that is considered one of the most popular claymation is Morph. It has been around since 1977 which was created by Peter lord which has a simple but effective use of claymation animation. The character itself can move in any shape and has an extremely basic layout which uses its eyes and mouth to create most of the expression. To create this show they needed many morphs for one character as the clay would wear out after a while. Each episode only lasts a certain amount of time roughly a minute. Another example is Wallace and Gromit which similar to Morph is produced by Aardman, it has been around since 1972 created by Peter Lord and David Sproxton who wanted to realise their dream of producing an animation motion picture. One other which was released in 1986 called Pingu, which is a TV series which ran to 2000. It was created by Omar Gutmann who ha developed the idea to not have dialogue have all the characters squeak and make sounds so we interpret what they are saying through tone of voice and non verbal communication. A negative about this animation is that it has limitations to how much you can create as it has to be able to function with the clay as you have to move it constantly, another limitation is that you have to keep the clay cool otherwise it can start to weaken with the heat and u cannot hold the clay in the position you want and it can hurt the final product. I then created my own claymation which was a fairly long process as you have to prepare for each shot and an abundance of frames have to be taken to finally reach several seconds . It was an interesting process as we could make any story we wanted so we had to have several characters and add them in. My Favourite scene was with the morph character was climbing up the side of the computer, to improve I would have a more coherent story and more character developing.

Object Animation

Object animation is a form of stop motion animation which involve the movement of any non hand drawn objects, such as toys, which we used for our final animation which was lego. This cannot be something that is fully malleable,such as clay or wax as its object can be formed into different shapes so it would have to be an object that can retain its shape. This a form of animation that is not as used a technique for films and television and more one that would be featured on youtube instead such as with lego animations with "star wars characters. One popular object animation was robot chicken which was a tv series that aired online in 2001 and created by seth green. Each episode was roughly 11-12 minutes, it is still running, which shows the popularity of the medium which many people like. it is unique as this isn the only form of this animation which people are watching and no competitor has tried to replicate this technique. A poitive of this technique is that you can use anything and get hugely creative, also lego is great object to use as you a variety of characters you can use, "The lego movie" proved this. A negative is that you cannot move the objects so you cannot add a huge amount of depth the characters that you are using. We used this for our final animation and was a fun process and we could move our characters in any form, luckily i had some other tools to use with the characters.

Time lapse 1910

Time-lapse is a technique where the frequency at which film frames are captured by a camera, the frame rate is much lower than that used to view the sequence, when it is played a normal speed time appears to be moving much faster, this is because it could showing hours worth of time in a matter of a few seconds. one example could be filming the sunset over hours and when you play that it would show the sun appearing from total darkness. If it was played at a normal time it would appear subtle to the human eye (Suns movement), however when played at a much faster rate it is much more extreme it is much more clearer. This is not a version of stop motion as the frames a moving in one continuous motion and only the speed has been adjusted in some way. the first use of time lapse was in 1897 was by George Melies which was in a feature film. This it not an overused technique usually used for effects sake purposes such as to show a passage of time in a day. F percy Sith pioneered the technique in 1910 with the release of the film "Birth of a flower", this led to a special camera being which help film this process in the years 1911-12. The first major use was for a film called Koyaanisqatsi released in 1983 which was an experimental film directed by Godfrey Reggio. Today it is a technique still used and sometimes would appear and there have been whole films presented in this format.

Sound in animation 1928

Sound animation has now been around several years but there was a time where cartoons were presented as silent films up until the late 1920's. This was when a short film called "Steamboat Willie" was released November 18th 1928, this revolutionised animation and the first step into the future of animation for many years to come. It was directed and written by Walt disney who aimed on creating his own studio which happened and was called "Walt Disney Animation studios". The first animated film with sound in colour was Snow white and the seven dwarfs (1937) which became one of the highest grossing films of all time, which led to an abundance of sound animated films being released by Walt disney. This then led to another competitor in this which was Warner bros who released "The Looney Tunes" in 1930, only two years after steamboat willie. It was inspired by the animation by disney which shows how influential Walt Disney was in the animation genre which now is one most pofitable genre of all time.

Gif 1987

This is a type of silent animation that is in a bitmap image format which supports up to 8 pixels for each image allowing a single image to refernce its own pallet of up to 256 different colours from the 24-bit RGB colour space. It was introduced by Compuserve in 1987 and now is used worldwide as it is has been published on the internet as it has wide support and portability. Gif became popular because it used LZW data compression which was more efficient than the run length encoding that formats such as PCX that Macs used. Gifs have some uses, which one is to store low-colour sprite data for games, another is for small animations and low resolution film clips, the most popular is for a humorous effect, one or more video sources can be edited, rearranged or changing the order to create a juxtaposition. These could placed all over social networking apps such as Facebook or Twitter for different effects. A negative of the Gif is that it has pallets limitations which means it makes the Gif less suitable for replicating colour photographs and other images with continuous colour. However it is well suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid area colour. one example being:

Cgi animation 1995

There is a huge variety of animation the most popular of the 20th century being traditional animation which is hand drawn. The create the illusion movement each frame has slightly different drawings from the next so it appears as it is moving. This was the most popular and well known of animation up until the late 90s to the early 2000s. The first animated film was snow white and the seven dwarfs which was traditional animation and still one the highest grossing films of all time. This style had dominated for almost 60 years. Until the release of CGI animation with the opening of toy story.

Computer animated films are fully computer animated films to appear as 3 dimensional. Cgi animation films have been around for 21 years, beginning with toy story 1995. However computer generated imagery has been round for longer and then when CgI got advanced enough it become part of the animation genre of films as many people were still cautious if it would succeed. The first feature film to use Cgi was Tron (1982) and John Lasseter had worked on it and was inspired to have computer animation. Cgi animation has become the staple for any animated film that is released and constantly always successful, completely overtaking and destroying hand drawn animation. A positive of this medium is that as there is no limit to what you can create and you can create hugely complex images on a a screen, however a negative is that it is extremely costly and most animated films cost between 150-200 million in todays industry. However it is the way forward and at the moment there is nothing competing against this technique of animation.

My favourite animation: Toy story 3 (2010)

My favourite animated film is Toy story 3 which was released in the summer of 2010. It is a computer animated film by Pixar and distributed by Disney, its style followed the previous films while improving the technology of the animation. The budget was 200 million dollars which the second most expensive animated film. The main style of the film was to appeal to adults and children unlike alot of bad animated films which would only feature funny scnes but forget to be emotional as well which Toy story 3 excels in. Another style is to focus on characters and story which are then added with the animation.

For the content, the film is 103 minutes which is just above the average for animated films as the usual length is close to 90 minutes, as they do not want it too long for children but also have a complete story and this is to close off a trilogy. The film is a fully computer animated film and recorded in a sound stage. The film contains some of the best animation for the time, completely wiping out the level of effects of the previous films. We also have extremely detailed animation and the way the characters move it is more fluid than ever.

The Storyline is fairly similar to 1 and 2 but has it own spin on it where the characters are placed in the wrong box after the toys thought they were being thrown to the trash but they weren't. So they go to sunny side and think life is good now. But there is a clever twist that the head toy is actually a villain and there has not been a plot point like this in the previous films but still in the same spirit of toy story which is going on a adventure and trying to get home. We also have another storyline to develop a new child as woody manages to get to her house and he gets played with. This puts the characters in a situation they have never been in where it is almost impossible to leave and adds a different genre of heist into the film to not be a rehash. They also make this the most emotional as there are moments where our main characters could die especially at the end, where they assume its the end which create an affect on the audience, young and old. There are a few storylines in the film but the important part is that they all integrate to make one story which is the case here, as many other animated filsm have too many sub-plots which do not add up to the story.

All the main characters are back and still have the same affect as they did 15 years ago from the original, They still have brilliant chemistry as the dialogue fits the characters and the lines do not feel forced. They also keep the focus on the main protagonist which is Woody and still focusing on the other members. We are also introduced a new character who is the villain called "lotso". We then have an introduction to new side characters such as "ken" and the female t-rex. Lotso is the most interesting new character, as they first introduce him he seems nice and caring but you realise he is the complete opposite. The clever part is that he is not a card-board villain and has a compelling back story which we are shown visually. Usually a villain in animated film is evil because they are without any motivation.

Platforms which animation appears on

This is the media device to which you can view the animation. They were first performed on pieces of paper as a flipbook. So You have the next frame on the next page, then you would flip the pages at a fast rate and it would create the animation, this is for hand drawn image.
This had began in the 1800s and was the most popular way to view animation up until the 1900s when animated films came into the mix.

This is what took animation to the next level, this was with the release of snow white and the seven dwarfs which came out in 1937, it became one of the highest grossing films of all time. This platform is still hugely prominent today and hugely profitable.. These would be viewed in movie theatres and mostly the only way they could be viewed until many people had televisions.

This is televsion which is another huge platform to watch animation and similar to film, still is today. The first animated TV show was released in 1958, but first joined mainstream TV with the Flinstones on 1960. Animation in general is aimed more towards chldren and this made it more accessible to them. There are now television channels just dedicated to animated shows.

Another platform is gaming which is where the viewer can actually participate om the screen, this would be to complete different tasks dependng on the game. All games are animated you are controlling whatever is on screen. Such as a character, some franchsses have even been turned unto live action films.

Last is the internet which can gather all platforms and put on the web. You can even cerate your own animation with a computer and put on the internet, this has only been around for teh last few years, so overall animation is always looking for ways to evolve and no one can exactly predict where animation will go next.