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 .
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