Animation Errors

There were many errors pointed out to me once I finished my animation, the main problems to do with my proportion of my character, object with in the room are bigger than him and he starts off big and shrinks through the process of the animation getting smaller. When the perspectives of my character in changed to first person certain parts are designed with small errors that need adjusting e.g. length of the mallet hammer is small to a real mallet hammer, when the hammer is in certain angles it get longer and the perspectives are badly drawn in relation to real life objects. The movements of the characters are very jittery and skip from time to time because I have missed in between stages of the character movement and the detail in the windows are not close to resembling a real window, the white lines across the windows were questioned because they did not look like shine in the window, I agree because they are too dark and strong I should have made them even more transparent.

When it comes to doing another animation again I will concentrate strongly on proportion to scale because I am weak with in that area and it needs improving and attention to detail is something I need to reflect on because it is key to make situations and the atmosphere with in an animation look real and relative to real life. I need to make sure these are problems are adjusted before going on to produce any good animation because I feel this will hinder me from producing and animation that I am capable of creating. The key to getting my proportion and angles right is to measure and pin point with a ruler of number involved tool to get an accurate size I can stick to though out an animation.
    

Wind Animation

Research of my idea of what I want to do, this Animation is called "wind Animation" and it follows the same concept of my ideas involving strong winds and the struggle for the characters to make it through the weather, believe this is a prime example of what I want to accomplish because it exaggerates the force of the wind and demonstrates the power and push used to get the characters from one side to the other, I want my character to look like he is really struggling to get one side to the other using continuous and non jittering movement. The characters seem to stretch a lot which makes the animation exaggerated and funny because of its squashing and stretching along with the exaggeration. there bodies are comical and shaped which is why I have decided to shape my character to keep to proportion and scale, as these character do in the animation.

Final animation

I feel that my final animation is good on a whole because its story concept, character and scenery. The room creates a very homely atmosphere and the characters body shapes make him a lot more funny because they make him look over exaggerated, his body part are not in proportion because they are larger in some parts compared to actual human body parts. The characters movements are sometimes too fast/jittery because I think I have skipped movements and jumped spaces causing my character to look like he is skipping across the scenery. The character is large in some areas and longer in others because I have not kept to proportion and his head enlarges compared to other scenes. I would say personally my work could do with slightly more improvement because of its jittering, skipping and sometimes slow and fast movements of the character him self. The biggest problem I have currently faced with this document is the size of it because it has caused me some problems in converting it into a gif for my blogger account and I have found it hard to get together, but I really think the story I have is well thought out and carefully considered, because it is focused on a real life situation and turned in to something over exaggerated and funny to audiences and me personally.

Frames

These are few of my 240 frames that I created, this scene is first person perspective scene of when my character is walking towards the window while it blows open with a strong force of wind. I drew in guides in pencil to help me keep to the  proportion of my created window and the level of where I would place the window its self. The only problem with how I have been drawing the frames is to do with the order of the way I decided to draw them and the equipment I had to used, I bought exactly 240 sheets of paper at A4 to and used up four of them leaving me short which meant later on when I got closer to finishing I would have to use another type of paper (animation paper) which involved a change of size and texture, my scanner was A4 so this involved cutting down the animation paper from A4 to A3 so it would fit. The second problem I faced was the designing of my character which I changed, I thought it would be better if I made my main character shape based to keep to proportion but the it did not work out because  the character first started of large but later on became even smaller as he moved across the page which was later pointed out to me but, this problem occurred in too many frames so it would mean I would need to start again and there was not enough time. Along with design errors my third problem was to do with running out of equipment to colour in my character, I used fine liners and ink pens but they began to run out half way through my frames  which left me to result to using a permanent, this left a mess.

If I was to redo this project again I would set me a target of doing a certain amount of frames a day e.g. 20, draw them up and them ink and colour them all in one day. This will be done everyday so when I reach my goal of having all my frames drawn up will not have to go through all of them colouring and inking from the beginning, because leaving this all to the end has caused me to take up a lot of my time when I could be getting on with the rest of the written work.              

Character change

I changed my characters appearance because the original form of the character did not look right in appearance and I felt it would be harder to animate due to the scale and sizing involved, my weakness when drawing and developing characters is scale and I sometimes divert from the original form of the character and end up enlarging body parts or the hight of the character it self. I wanted to make the character more shaped because I find it easier of keep to the form of shapes and their sizes and I felt it would be a way of avoiding my problem with proportion and scale. The shapes are something that I will be able to stick with and keep in form, but this alone was not the reason for my change of mind, I originally drew plans for my characters movement and inked certain parts of the icons to get the profile of my characters body and realised the shaped templates featured a shape and profiled which seemed very comical due to the shapes of his body and feet sizes are over exaggerated.    

Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay)

Gertie is a short animated film produced 1914 by an animator and cartoonist Winsor McCay it is the earliest animated film to ever feature a dinosaur. The inspiration for the story of this dinosaur in a comic strip called "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend"

Long-necked dinosaurs often appeared in Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. (May 25, 1913)

Winsor McCay from 1867 to 1934 had worked as a commercial artist and cartoonist by the time he started making newspaper comic strips such as Dream of the Rarebit Fiend

"McCay had earlier introduced dinosaurs into his comic strip work, such as a March 4, 1905, episode of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in which a Brontosaurus skeleton took part in a horse race, and a May 25, 1913, Rarebit Fiend episode in which a hunter unsuccessfully targets a dinosaur; the layout of the background to the latter bore a strong resemblance to what later appeared in Gertie. In the September 21, 1913,episode of McCay's Little Nemo strip In the Land of Wonderful Dreams, titled "In the Land of the Antediluvians", Nemo meets a blue dinosaur named Bessie which has the same design as that of Gertie." 

Gertie was designed to look like it was answering every question that was asked of it e.g. "When her master McCay calls her, the frisky, childlike Gertie appears from a cave. Her whip-wielding master has her do tricks such as raising her foot or bowing on command. When she feels she has been pushed too far, she nips back at her master. She cries when he scolds her, and he placates her with a pumpkin." 

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertie_the_Dinosaur)

Preparing the thousands of drawings for the film, from the film's introduction

The skeleton dance

Skeletons dancing

The skeleton Dance is a 1929 animation apart of the  "Silly Symphonies animated short subject produced and directed by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks."

In the film four human skeletons dance around the grave yard making music as they move, they dance in sync this is said to be a modern film example of the "danse macabre" a dutch myth where the dead are supposed to be personified "summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer. They were produced to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life."

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre"   

Magic lantern

The Magic lantern is an early type of image projector project pictures on sheets of glass. It was developed in the 7th century and was commonly used for educational and entertainment purposes.

"The magic lantern used a concave mirror in back of a light source to direct as much of the light as possible through a small rectangular sheet of glass—a "lantern slide"—on which was the painted or photographic image to be projected, and onward into a lens at the front of the apparatus. The lens was adjusted to optimally focus the plane of the slide at the distance of the projection screen, which could be simply a white wall, and it therefore formed an enlarged image of the slide on the screen.
Apart from sunlight, the only light sources available at the time of invention in the 16th century were candles and oil lamps, which were very inefficient and produced very dim projected images. The invention of the Argand lamp in the 1790s helped to make the images brighter"

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern"

The creator the project was to be debated over time and was said to be Christiaan Huygens and was claimed to have developed the device in the late 1650's

Christiaan Huygens "was a prominent Dutch mathematician and scientist. He is known particularly as an astronomer,physicist, probabilist and horologist.
Huygens was a leading scientist of his time. His work included early telescopic studies of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan, the invention of the pendulum clock and other investigations in timekeeping. He published major studies of mechanics and optics, and a pioneer work on games of chance." 

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Huygens" 

Phenakistoscop

The Phenakistoscop was designed similar to the Zoetrope following the Zoetropes creation.

"The basic like drum-like form of the zoetrope was created in 1830's by a British mathematician William George Horner he was aware of the recently developed and closely related phenakistoscope disc."

The phenakistoscop was an early animation tool/device that functioned using a spinning disk of images spinning in sequence to one another closely crossing paths and merging with one another to create an illusion of motion.

"The phenakistoscope used a spinning disc attached vertically to a handle. Arrayed around the disc's center were a series of drawings showing phases of the animation, and cut through it were a series of equally spaced radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc's reflection in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images that appeared to be a single moving picture. A variant of it had two discs, one with slits and one with pictures; this was slightly more unwieldy but needed no mirror. Unlike the zoetrope and its successors, the phenakistoscope could only practically be used by one person at a time."

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenakistoscope"

 

The phenakistoscope – a couple waltzing

A phenakistoscope disc byEadweard Muybridge (1893)

Astro boy (Osamu Tezuka)

Astro boy is an animated TV series written and directed by a Japanese creator called Osamu Tezuka the original name of Astro boy in Japan is Mighty Atom the character was illustrated by Osamu from 1952 to 1968.

"The story follows the adventures of a robot named Astro Boy and a selection of other characters. The manga was adapted into the first popular animated Japanese television series that embodied the aesthetic that later became familiar worldwide as anime. After enjoying success abroad, Astro Boy was remade in the 1980s as New Mighty Atom, known as Astroboy in other countries, and again in 2003. In November 2007, he was named Japan's envoy for overseas safety. An American computer-animated 3-D film based on the original manga series by Tezuka was released on October 23, 2009."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astro_Boy)

The Astro Boy series consists of several story lines. Frederik L. Schodt, who wrote the English adaptation of the series, said that, as Tezuka's art style advanced, the character astro is slowly advanced and becomes more modern and soft in look and apearance to apeal to the target audience of boys at a younger age and in Elementary school.   

         Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridges cat in motion similar to the
horse in motion involving the sequence of images below.

The Horse in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge.

Galloping horse, animated in 2006, using photos by Eadweard Muybridge.

Eadweard Muybridge took up professional photography in 1861, "Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography."

He has produced over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not as separate movements.

  

Fantasmagorie (Émile Cohl)

Émile Cohl created Fantasmagorie 1908, this was class as one of the earliest uses of traditional (hand drawn) animation and also happened to be the first animated cartoon.

The film largely consists of a stick figure like character moving about and encountering all manner of different types of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower. There were also sections of live action where the animator’s hands are involved in creating the scenery and the characters. The main character is drawn by the artist's hand on camera followed by indivdual morphing objects being added gradually, and the main characters are a clown and a gentleman. The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is a reference to the "fantasmograph", a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls.

The film alone was created through drawing each individual frame on paper then each frame was later on shot on negative film which gave the pictures a black board look.

"It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was exposed twice (animated "on twos"), leading to a running time of almost two minutes. It borrowed from J. Stuart Blackton, the "chalk-line effect"; filming black lines on white paper, then reversing the negative to make it look like white chalk on a black chalkboard."

 

Zoetrop

The Zoetrope is one of seven pre-film animation devices that use illusion as motion, they use a sequence of images of drawing or photographs displaying progressive phases of a motion. The name Zoetrope was composed from the greek root words "Zoe-life tropos-turning"

"The Zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion."

The Zoetrope was originally developed by a Chinese historian of chinese technology called "a variety of Zoetrope", this was created around 100 BC by an inventor called Ding Huan, this was an early example of animation and was highly recognised as a early animation device. The basic like drum-like form of the zoetrope was created in 1830's by a British mathematician William George Horner he was aware of the recently developed and closely related phenakistoscope disc.    

Willis O'Brien"

willis O'Brien was a motion picture special effects and stop motion animation pioneer, he was regarded as one of the of the best special effects pioneers of all time due to his known images in cinema history e.g. "The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949)". "A former newspaper cartoonist and sculptor, O'Brien began making short films in 1914. His animated dinosaurs for the film version of Arthur Conan Doyle's Read more: Willis O'Brien Biography (Animator)".  

A trip to the moon (george melies)

A trip to the moon was a 1902 silent french film developed by George Melies, it was said to be inspired by a wide range of sources, mostly two novels by Jules Verne "From the earth to the moon" and "Around the moon" the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the moon in a cannon propelled capsule to explore the moons surface and to escape from an underground group of selenites (lunar inhabitants). This animation was created using frame by frame in camera shot form.        

Process of production in movement

These are the basis of my moving character and the action I have gone through, I used the Animators survival kit for referencing and ideas to help me understand the steps of moving. So far I have found this process very time consuming but easy to follow, I think its a very helpful technique to making sure you get very accurate stages of moving, the only main thought I need to consider when drawing my movement is to make sure I put in inbetween stages and keep my movement continuous and arced for when the character moves, for intense I want his head to be in motion with his body instead of being on the same level through out because I want to show that my character is moving along with exaggeration.

This technique is very helpful because it helps me out with making accurate measured movements and gives clear indication through steps and stages. I found this process time consuming because it required me to think a lot about make precise movements in sequence and flow which happened to slow me down every minute because I had to analyse where the character will place his foot steps, I have had to think about a lot to do with the 12 principles and movement these were ; arcs, secondary motion, easing in and out and exaggeration, in the past I have happened to skip movement so I had to count all the steps to make sure were correct.

I have now solved this problem by plotting out the main points of the characters walk to show the main reaching points then I have filled the gaps using my key frames so when I play it back it back in flip book form it walks the  stages as a full flowing movements.

 The drawing of the stages took half an hour, If was to do this again I would make sure a varies of different colours for my drawn stages because at times I have gotten lost with drawing the stages of movement due to the close overlapping of my points and similar colours being too close, so my point of continuation was lost which is a result of me taking half an hour to develop a continuous movement.