Module2- Character Preformance and Believibility- Materials and Sculpting

So the objective was to create 3 different expressions and i thought hair would be easy to keep the same but making the same hair again is impossible with clay,  so  the wavy hair became part of the expression. making  the head shape was easy, simply model it around those small yellow kinder egg cases. using simple shapes is also helpfull and gives clear expressions.  i would write this properly but i have a really annoyiong cough and i just want to sleep.  but basicly i loved making these stop motion heads, and am thinking of making a short animation with some other students after im done learning stopmotion.

Critical Studies- Studio Ghibli, scraping the surface

Studio Ghibli, is a Japanese animation film studio founded in June 1985. Many features animated by the studio have won the Animage Animé Grand Prix award. 'Spirited Away' won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2002 and it is still the only non-English-speaking film in the world to have done so.

The three key people of the organisation are Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki.
Co-Founder:
Hayao Miyazaki, Manga artist, film director and animator. With a career that has spans nearly five decades, the success of Miyazaki's films compare his level of influence to that of Walt Disney and Nick Park.
Co-Founder:
Isao Takahata Animé film maker, who is often regarded as one of the greatest directors of Animé, or Japanese animated films, who ever lived. war-film, romantic drama, comedy and ecological adventure. His film 'Grave of the Fireflies, in particular, is considered by film critic Roger Ebert one of the greatest war films ever made.' (rogerebert.com. Originally Retrieved 2006 -via Wikipedia)
Chief producer and President:
Toshio Suzuki is renowned as one of Japan's most successful producers after the enormous box office success (in Japan) of many Ghibli films. Hayao Miyazaki says, 'If it were not for Mr. Suzuki, there wouldn't have been Studio Ghibli.' (www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/whoswho/#suzuki)

I feel this is a good studio to study as its one of the only Japanese studio which has made its art known through the mainstream media in both the East and the West. 'Almost all Studio Ghibli's films are available in dubbed form, partly as a result of a distribution deal the company made with Disney' (Studio Ghibli p33). A lot of this is because the themes and ideology in the Ghibli collection are similar to the ones in Walt Disney Pictures. However, their second release, 'Princess Mononoke' made 1999, is a tale centred around the environment involving some violence, a lot of action, and carries a strong message. As this movie would not fit well with the Disney style, it was released through Miramax Films.

Takahata and Miyazaki have such a distinctive style that 'many of the films the pair worked on prior to forming the studio are often claimed as part of Ghibli's' (p15). Their feature films are very popular as entertainment and art.
Environmentalism, or rather the way man interacts with the earth. This is closely linked to the Shinto ethic 'in which our environment is a living collection of interconnected beings that should be respected.' (p20). Miyazaki and Takahata explore these themes through multiple angles which create different conclusions.
Flying is a theme which runs through out Miyazaki's early work and his films with Studio Ghibli. The joy of flying and the freedom it gives to an animator to experiment with speed and movement. Its also used to show worlds or situations from a distant perspective.
Children are often used in Ghibli films because they would naturally be more open to fantasy worlds and 'willing to face up to grave danger because they have not yet developed the facilities to recognise threat, or are even excited by it.' (p23). For example: 'Princess Mononoke- a human raised in the barren woods by wolves. She is attuned to the spiritual realm of animals, and dose not even regard herself as human.' (100 Animé, p190).
Anthropomorphism, Zoo-morphism and Metamorphosis are pretty staple products, but there used much subtly. Although some characters such as 'Haku' in Spirited away, 'appear to be human, only to be revealed later as dragons' (Studio Ghibli p24).

Wind and weather play a crucial role in the works of many animators whether its there to reflect a characters emotion, interact with the character, or set the scene. Wind and 'weather helps create a more impressive experience for the audience as well as showing the true art of the animator.' (p26)

Bibliography:
Hannah Patterson, (2009) Studio Ghibli, Kamera Books, Harpenden, Herts
Philip Brophy, (2005) 100 Animé, British Film Institute, London

Critical Studies- Subject of interest

I have decided to focus on Studio Ghibli as an animation studio which has raised its popularity in the east and in the west, being distributed through Disney. I will also look at Hayao Miyazaki who directed Spirited Away which won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2002 and remains the only film made outside the English-speaking world to have done so. The man is the Walter of Japan. Below is some background information I have gathered from previous essays I've written , people I have spoken to and Cartoons I've watched but it has no referencing unfortunately. But a lot of it can be easily backed up through Google and Wikipedia I'm sure. I may come back and reference but id prefer to concentrate on researching Studio Ghibli at this moment.

My main interest lies in critically comparing and contrasting mainstream animation in the Ease and West. I first became interested in this topic when I started researching the origin of the modern Manga (Japanese comic art). It became apparent that a lot of modern Manga, especially the famous Manga eyes was influenced by characters in Walt Disney's early Feature length films. I wrote an essay concerning it for Art foundation in 2010. i shall try to upload it in pictures as due to all the pictures it will not be 'copy,n,past-able'.

Animé is known in the west as a genre on its own but in Japan it is simply a vehicle to provide the same type of entertainment as live-action movies.
Many Animes' are adopted from Mangas'. The first official comic strips in Japan came from USA in the post-WW2 era and from that, Japanese artist began making their own comics. The difference was, the reader had to have every comic strip to understand the story. Typical US comics involve story lines which start and finish with the characters in a 'normal' or same situation.
Animation in the US was still developing and looking for business in the beginning of the century, through its TV shorts and occasional features, Largely developed by Disney or Warner Bros. During WW2 these cartoons served as short escapes from the harsh reality. In fact, the 1950 Disney feature, Cinderella was put down by reviewers. They claimed it had a large amount of human characters which made the film seem real and should be alien to animation.

In the 1900s the US mainstream animation market sold its soul to business and the main goal of the industry was to sell merchandise. Saturday morning cartoons effectively became 23 minute adverts for action figures. Story, was not as important, you could watch an entire series of X-men or Spider-man in mixed order without realising you have done so. Western civilisation took on a Judeo-Christian culture, identifying 'Good' and 'Bad' with one aim.

In Japan the majority of animations were based on the Shinto culture, in which many stories of great people and items are worshipped as deities. For this reason a lot of themes such as homosexuality and death could be explored through animation, but they would be considered taboo in the US. The Japanese stories showed a mix of human characters and their lives with some fantasy element. 'Kimagure Orange Road' focuses on a love triangle between a guy and two girls, but the boy and his family have the power of ESP (Brain Powers). Many are popular for being just like an American drama series. A continuous story line with plot twists and occasional slap-stick comedy. Characters can change and develop within episodes so the viewer has to have seen the previous episodes to understand the story.

Animations made to sell merchandise were primarily aimed at children, but soon they started appearing for adults as well. To this day Bart is 10, Lisa is 8 and Maggie is still sucking on a pacifier. The Simpsons, South Park and King of the Hill all poke fun at typical American life. This episodic approach fit into the busy American lifestyle. Animé on the other hand is developed from Manga, which was popular with all ages, so viewers will take time out to watch the episodes.

I'm not saying that all Animé is not episodic, Series such as Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z were made popular on American and British TV channels because they fit the bill. The latest interesting distributor of Animé is Disney company itself. They released feature-length films from Studio Ghibli, all directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Disney has recognised the underground Animé market in the USA and UK and is buying into it.

Module2- Character Preformance and Believibility- Experimental Stop motion

 For this project i ws in a group of five people and suggested the idea of light painting as an animation. the objective was to use found objects to create an experimental animation and so we looked at a few videos to inspire us including the 'talk talk advert' and 'light warfare'. we also looked at the behind the scene vide to this in order to learn how light painting was done.

after we had filmed, cut and edited the video we reviewed a few flaws it had, firstly the music was good but there was no real sound that required a dope sheet such as a splash when he dives in to the water and also it was not as smooth as we had hoped. so we set about creating another video this one was to be short and sweet.

The group was sure that we needed a new video but there was alot of discussion about length and  where we could film. i created a story board for a 45 second piece over night with simple movment and speech. Michaels idea to use wire on props so we could get consistant volume when light painting allowed for a much smoother video and even in tight conditions we filmed a small sketch with a day. there were other groups working in the room which ment the pictures came out with akward lighting. this was not a problem for Brian and Beatrice who quickly imported each frame into photoshop and darkened them up. I then put in the sound over night and since Brian and i were so proud of the video we cheekily thought it deserved the 20th century fox drums and trumpets at the beginning. 

this project was very fun to do, but also very hard. i love that i now know a new type of animation and would like to do it again on a bigger scale. 

What is Lght Painting ?

Light painting, also known as light drawing or light graffiti is a photographic technique in which exposures are made usually at night or in a darkened room by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera. In many cases the light source itself does not have to appear in the image. The term light painting also encompasses images lit from outside the frame with hand-held light sources. The first known photographer to use this technique was Man Ray in his series "Space Writing" created in 1935. Photographer, Ellen Carey, discovered Man Ray's signature signed by penlight nearly 74 years after the pictures had been taken.

Test Pictures:

Module2- Character Preformance and Believibility- Group work

so for the group project we looked at MJ's thriller  dance it has iconic steps which are easy to recognise, even with stiff stickfas men preforming them. everyone animated thier own character and mine is the tone on the far right. to get the moves right we simply looked at some thriller instructional  dance videos and copied the movments. we also looked at the origional Michael Jackson music video for inspiration and to sync it with the music. i have linked the dance video that we found most helpful below. over all we found our piece to be good but it could have been better so we decided to make a few other videos later.

At this point i felt i wanted to do another video, as did Jacky and so we decided to experiment with lighting and concentrate on the characters movment. so we created a scene using spot lights to make a clear difference between light and dark. jackys character jumps down in the shaddows which took a long time to get right but looked amazing. we animated our own characters and tried to build tension  just before jackys character  kicks mine. i felt that something as simple as having my character scratch his head sould communicate a confused look because of the Stickfas characters have no faces.

We were supposed to  make more on this video the next day and Andys character was supposed to come in but Jacky couldnt make it so Andy and I created another animtion. this time our characters were balanced on the edge of an 'Animation light box' which made it harder for them to balance. we experimented with panning the camera from one character to another. making the movment look real. so you can identify the karate master from the lazy bum in the beginning. also some movments were slower than others and we made an effort to show that. the only down side was that a few shots were blured and we didnt notice untill the end.  we used wire to make a paper ball fly through the air and  typical comic book anotations were appropriate and they worked well.

we were largly influenced by the video below.

Module2- Character Preformance and Believibility

Back to uni and straight to the animating chamber...

...this is the first time i animated with these Stickfas figures and it becam clear how hard it was to make the thing simply walk. the blue-tac was helpful but also make s the whole thing look abit unprofeshional.  i wanted to do a couple more types of walks to practice smoothe movement. making the caracter more believable.

This sneak walk i copied crom the classic walk cycle picture and i felt it was not helpfull at all because it makes this video look choppy...after making the video i realised that the positions on the picture ase only key frames to guide an animation. but as i went on to animate the group animation i felt more comfortable moving the character around freely and experimenting as i went along.

 I made this moon walk video after the group project but I grouped it with this post as its also a video i made on my own. i feel it also shows how i become confident in moving the stickfas figure. i also used some refference from MJ videos.

In this video i wanted to experiment with a few things. i realy enjoyed working wiht sound. it made the movments easier because the figure is already preety mechanic so the robotic sounds work in my favour. i also shot this in 18 framse per second which was was slower than 24 but faster than 12. in the end that didnt make much of a difference. the animation runs fairly smoohtly but i feel it would be tha same, even at 12. i may experiment with this further later on. I was also inspired by the 360 camera pan in the matrix and attempted to move tha camera around abit on this character with a zoom in at the end.

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).