Critical Studies- Compare two animtion genres

For this study i chose two Daffy Duck cartoons to compare because i could easily distinguish between the conventions that belong to the genre and typical behaviours of the character.
 
War genre conventions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSquwia0eaY

Text- Title appears in bold, 'Areal Black' font, large white letters stands out clearly against dark blue background, connection to how search lights looked for planes during the war.
Character reads a letter in which the German is written in old fashioned writing where as English is clear, like text from a type writer which would have been seen as up to date and professional during the time the animation was released.

Dark colours like black and blue are used for the background, burst of light create new shadows, aggressive actions by German Sargent towards his solider, a lot of it to do with propaganda. Precise movements- marching instead of walking, explosions, shooting, crashing.

Mise-en-scene- weapons, army uniform and helmets, country flag, rubble, search lights, para-shoot, bombs, machine gun, wire fence, cannon

Location – underground shelter in war ground.

Sound and Music- National Anthem type trumpet in the beginning, tune of (honour and pride).
Sounds are loud and mimic that of weapons firing/drum roll herd when army marches. Planes over head. German language, English language. 'Hail Hitler'

Use of cell animation as Daffy hits Hitler with a hammer in the end.


Super-Hero genre conventions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o5YoEtapUA&feature=related

Opening Title- Bright spark zooming around in night sky before title appears. Typical line ' up there in the say, its a bird, its a plane...' title appears in sparkling golden 'comic sans' font. (no logo)

Story- Hero floats proudly in the sky while voice over introduces him (sparkling) mimics title.

Hero visits multiple locations to solve crime, typical double life as news reporter. City scape, sea scape.

Normal life mise-en-scene-Office, type writer, glasses, pills and drinking fountain.
Super Hero life mies-en -scene- Blue and red colours in costume like superman, talks to camera, says his catchphrase b4 attempting rescue, cape, shoulder pads.

Music and Sound- music that builds excitement, high notes. Explosions, alarms, flying in the sky. screaming

Module1- Illusion of life- Sound clip

Ok, wow this project was harder than I thought. I really like the final video, its not like other animations ive done and you may need to watch it twice to understand what happened but alot of research was gone into making it the way it is.

I began by listening to the sound clip. The main sounds i picked up on was something tapping and then a buzzer rings, and the first thing i thought of was Count Down. So maby someone practising for the show in thier house? but i mainly loved this idea of building tension and thought back to what I had learned in Alevel media studies. In movies a good way to build tension is fast editing and zooming into the character under pressure. I definately knew i wanted to make something like this. Taking pictures of google i made a quick collage of the ideas in my head and started drawing a bit aswell. my idea went from countdown, to a guy re-taking his exams, ive been in a similar situation where i had to re take maths so i knew in some ways what emotions the character may feel. the next thing i had to do was actually draw the character...

I sat in Starbucks and started sketching and the guy cleaning the tables kinda stood out to me coz he was really lanky with scruffy long hair, like a typical skateboarder. i drew him working and quickly made connections from the main character in 'Nightmare before christmas' and the pink panther. i loved the idea of this guy who looked like a lollypop with a skinny body and a round head, like 'Mr Mackey' from Southpark, CANT BELIEVE I FORGOT ABOUT HIM! I thought this guy would look so good on a small chair trying to retake his exams, because i wanted a bit of comedy in it obviously. The next guy i used to develop my character is Sheldon from the American hit comedy series, Big Bang Theory. If you've seen the show, you know all the amazing faces this guy pulls and i found a montage of them on u-tube and drew my character in that style. the result was awesome, really liked him and then all i needed was colour for clothing and i didnt know at this point whether i wanted it in colour or not so i tested it anyway. The clother just had to come from Bart Simpson, because hes popular with viewers, its easy to conitate the red top and blue jean colour with the local bad boy. the one face this guy was gunna pull was the 'tense to the point of exploding' face. so i practiced that a few times to see what shape the eyes should be and how much the jaw should streach etc.

 

I made this animatic and amediately realised that the pace of the different sounds was quite quick so to check if i could actually animate this i acted it out .

This confirmed what i had thought, i could only topple the table if it the action was to happen at the same time as the sound because i had no time to react to the clock, swing back and let go. this was before i came across Anime!

 

this technique relies alot on the sound acting as the thing that allows the viewer to understand what happened because the movment on screen is minimal. this technique was developed in Japan, about 2000 when young artists were going into the mainstreem market and racing forward to catch up with animation in America and take over. This is the typical type of animation known world wide as Anime, except for in Japan. I also found a much older tv cartoon called 'Crusader Rabbit' a similar type of animtion is used in that where the camera simply zooms in to the character and the voice over  explains thats happening in the scene.  and so i developed this into my own animation and the result worked. Below i made a charcole drawing of the type of thing i was looking for when it was in my head. the movment looks so quick that u almost see a ghost of the previous position of the character still in the air. 

 

Blur Technique

Below  is an example of how i made the blur effect in my animation. now in alot of movies you see this focus change camera movement were the camera is focusing in the background and the character is blury and the the focus slowly changes. i wanted to create this in my animation, showing that the guy was worried because of the fact that the time was running out. i have no idea what this effect is called so i simply got these two pictures showing the transfer from one to the other to show what i mean. when drawing for my animation i could have done this by photoshop but i decided against it because i wanted to keep it fully drawn because that was the point in the exercise. i also took my master shot and drew red squares closing up to my characters face, showing closeups which i could then use a s a guide in my animation.

The final thing to do was create a story board and dope sheet in order to correctly time my animation. i didnt find it difficult to do this, picked up on how a dope sheet works quiet  quickly and got it done. id love to do something longer with sound .

Module1- Illusion of life-Jump

In order to see how a jump is preformsed, the class got int o groups and some people jumped whele others drew from action. this was helpful as it showed me where start and end up after the jump is complere, which foot is the take off foot and how the other one comes up, etc. From there it was quiet simple to draw the inbetweens. I also looked in the books for the jump breakdown and drew it myself so i understood the anticipation, action and reaction.

 

I thought it might be easier to animate a jump with an object underneath the jumper, so I animated it ut it looked more like somone jumping hurdles than a big jump and i whished to retry with something more creative.

I then decided to do a backflip, so i looked at videos on utube of people  preforming them and from that i decided to put another aspect into it, a soft cube sounded realy good and so  i did a quick plan and began animating straight away. I decided to use my created character, Peanut man to do this animation rather than a stick man because i felt it was easier to see left foot from right foot.

 

 

I am really happy with the final piece here and i feel its the best one ive done so far in that it looks the neatest.

Life Drawing- More Boxes and Shading

Todays lesson continued with drawing more boxes and then using different shades to colour them..  it was litrally going back to basics, and abit annoying but but hopefully building up to something good! .. anyway .. Flip festival this time in two weeks. woop! x

Its not that I didnt take care with these the whole point was to draw fast and roughly sketch.

Life Drawing- Drawing Boxes

The correct process of drawing still life is to draw the base line  and then use the angles of the lines comming away from that base line to depict the rest of the box. This process will give a realistic view of the sides of the box, how much is shown and what angle its shown at. I learnt from this process exatly what an artist is focusing on when he holds out his pencil at an arms length from his eye. It is tto use that pencil as the base line of the object he is drawing.

Module1- Illusion of life- Directed Study Activity

I was quiet excited about this project because it was going to be the longest animation i had created. I actually started this animation before the previous one but stopped, because it had a longer deadline. The objective of this project was to learn morphing, pause, spacing, straight ahead and hang time. I also love this animation because it was the first time I designed a character, and the way he walks by research and then developed him using small gestures to anthropomorphisize him. I watched  videos on Youtube of ducks walking and discovered that they bend forward and streach there neck out to observe new things. and I then animated my character doing that smoothly this can also be seen in my test sheets were I plan the motion in change of body the duck has. I know this is only a small thing but for my first time I think its a good way to learn for later works. Also I really like the morphing of the head when the duck turns his head and also the squashing of the body when its about to fall into the puddle, the exaggerated eyes give him that sense of fear which quickly turns to shame when he looks around to see if anyone is around before moving back. I enjoyed animation the step back because of the slow step  but quick shift which gave the character a bit of life, as if hes thinking about how to move and were to move. This is again seen when my duck wiggles his tail before jumping off and taps his feet together before jumping into the puddle. I definately think this has made me more confident to experiment with character movment. I thought the story was also a big part of the whole thing, heres a young duck who finds a puddle and thinks its deeper than it is. I really do love innocent stories like thins where things happen to cute characters simply because they dont know any better.

 

I did take a look at real ducks and studied definate features that mine should have but I felt the simple and imagionative version ment less could go wrong. e.g I realy needed was a recognisable beak an and body shape, but wings and feathers were not necessary unless they are in use because they almost camaflage against a young ducks body when there folded in.

 

Below are videos i looked at for research to my final video on this module.

 

The video above, I slowed down in order to see clearly how the duck moves. My observations show that it leans forward and although it looks slow in the video the feet move quiet quickly. I also looked at Disney's Silly Symphonies - Ugly Duckling (not the black and white one).

Module1- Illusion of life- timing and spacing, squash and strech (part 3-final video)

Above is the every frame  my ailen character is in  put one on top of the other .. this shows the path he takes in the animation which is the same as my origional plan.

The final video looks quiet good I think. It may not fufill the objective exatly but I believe I made a good animation which has tought me alot, for example, how I can put a background to my work without continously drawing it, how to twist and bend lighter areas on a characters body to balance against heavier parts. I certainly learned to squash and streach my character and use timing efectively to show different emotion. I did this when he stops in mid air and waves his arms around because hes scared.

I believe i need to work on making the animation look a bit smoother and my ease in and ease out techniques.

Module1- Illusion of life- timing and spacing, squash and strech (part 2- mid work review)

Ok, so from my practice animation  which was part 1 of this project I have now created a small character and have started animating it using the techniques in the title, I think I give a believable bounce to my character but not much of a realistic one. This is seen in the extended period of hang time when hes waving his arms in the air and the dead stop at the end when he manages to do some flips and land square on to the rock. I quiet like to keep it this way because its rather imagionative and daring way to approach the project.

This is the test animation which I think goes rather quickly but slowing it down would make it look odd.

I will talk about the  background issue on  part 3 of this post.. there is a reason this animation has no background.

Module1- Illusion of life- timing and spacing, squash and strech (part 1- testing)

This video is simply a test video for a much more interesting animation I want to do with this bouncing technique.  but I had to do this to:

A. Makesure I was timing and spacing correctly.
B. See if my squach and streach is believeable.
C.See if I can use photoshop effectively to use the same background for the whole animation also allowing me to make sure the background dosn't move about.
Photoshop allows me to bring the back ground together with the action infront  (see two frames below)

Action frame

Background

My test has tought me that when the ball falls down after hang time it should be its origional round shape  and that I may need to give it a bit more hang time and difinately draw an accurate arc guide line for my ball to bounce believably.

Module1- Illusion of life- exaggeration

 For this project I took  photo of a friend, drew a quick sketch of his face and then developed that into an easy-draw cartoon character. Simple features made it easier to animate facial expressions in an exciting and effective way. I then chose two expressions I was happy with and used the straight ahead and inbetween technique to morph from one expression to the other.

Module1- Illusion of life- flip books

These are a couple of simple experimental pieces i did, the first is part of a group and the other is on my own.  The course is teaching animation from the ground up so hopefully later works will look smoother. I feel this simple method is a fun and creative way to come up with random ideas of transformation because it doesn't have to be drawn perfectly there is more room to think outside the box.