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.

Character sketches

sound in animation

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.

Storyboards and Mind map

final animation

Rotoscoping: Out of the inkwell

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.

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.