NEW BRIEF: A Tale in the Sting.

We have a new brief! 
To create either an ident for 3 out of 4 popular tv channels: E4, CBeebies, BBC4 or The Discovery Channel...
OR
To create some titles for a new movie or tv adaptation of a book that we get to choose...
OR
To create an animated charity campaign video for either Childline or Amnesty international...


I think I will choose the idents as it appeals to me most and I think it sounds really fun. I am going to choose E4, CBeebies and The Discovery Channel.





I have done some research into previous idents on E4 and Cbeebies..

E4's estings are always quirky and interesting and don't always make a lot of sense. They always involve E4's colour- purple. EStings can be done with any kind of animation technique. I think I'd like to do a stop motion for this animation.

CBeebies often use their CBeebies blog characters and the colours Blue and Yellow are frequently occurring. Their idents are always flowy and cute and dont have any solid edges, and a lot of rounded corners and fluid movements. Always 2D animation on photoshop or flash etc.

The finished animation!

Well, here it is. The finished animation. 

There are still a few things I'd like to sort out if I had more time, like his feet dancing around a bit too much and the fact that his arm doesn't look quite attached, but for the deadline which is today, this is finished.

PROJECT UPDATE #2

Today I had to present my "finished" animation. It's almost there, enough for the presentation and I got some feedback. I need to add shadows to place the character more in the scene. It was also suggested that I make the lobster king more angry and show the rock that he throws maybe on the castle somewhere- destroying part of it. I also need to sort out my characters feet in the first scene as they dance around a bit, but I knew that already. The sound also needs to be adjusted and toned down a little in parts. 

Everyone in my class agreed that the emotions and expressions were well done as was the weighting of the second rock.

If I had the time I would go back and reference more movements to get a more realistic movement in the characters.

PROJECT UPDATE

I have now done the backgrounds, and a skeleton/stick man armature for the character and added the face for each frame. all that is left to do is the Lobster King at the end and the body of the boy in each scene. Not long to go now!

More Photoshop experiments.

Today we were taught a different way of animating in photoshop, by using the timeline tool at the bottom of the screen. It is a lot easier than the first method of animating in photoshop we were taught, however it makes it difficult to use different layers in one frame as each frame comes from a new layer. This can get quite confusing but overall I like this way of working. 

Once again we experimented with this new way of animating by making a ball bounce using squash and stretch, and by making a pendulum swing using timing and spacing. The pendulum in this method of working was a lot harder than in previous methods, I'm not really sure why...

Jellies! Photoshop animation

After the ball bouncing excitement of this morning, we were allowed to do whatever we wanted to, trying out our new animating skills using photoshop. I applied the squash and stretch thing to a jelly fish. I think it worked quite well, what do you think?

I want to keep working on this one animation, perhaps adding in more jellyfish or maybe something more dramatic.... always needs some drama!

Photoshop basic animation

Today, I've been learning how to animate frame by frame using photoshop. I started off by making a ball bounce simply using separate layers and then running them together. 

Next, using the stretch and squash technique that we learnt while making flipbooks on monday, I created and exaggerated ball bouncing in a more cartoon way. This means the impact when the ball hits the floor is shown and the ball squashes and bounces back, elongating and stretching as the ball falls/ rises.

Finally, I learnt how to animate a pendulum swinging, using arks similar to the ones used for the ball bouncing. 

Arks are used in animation to add realism to characters and objects moving, for example when a character walks, their arm swings (like a pendulum) in an ark and the head bobs up and down in an ark. This brings more life to the character instead of everything moving stiffly and robot-like.

Photoshop

In our first photoshop induction, we were taught the basics of photoshop, like masking, editing and blending, as well as how to access the backgrounds  and adjust colours to make it fit with the scene. We had to manipulate Disney's Wall-e character for the example, so I created a scene involving 4 images of Wall-e at different distances from the viewer, and I placed them in front of a city skyline and adjusted the colours to fit with the night-time theme. Then, as all the Wall-e's were looking up at something, I added in a picture of earth from space so that they had something to look at. To finish it off, I was playing around with the artists effects that are available on photoshop and I decided that I really liked the look of the oil paint one and I stuck with that on each layer apart from the background.

Then we were let loose from set tasks and allowed to manipulate any image or do anything we wanted to. Let our imaginations run wild! And as I'd just watched Wreck-it Ralph again the night before, I decided to take the characters out of their video game world, and drop them in a real world bus stop. I had to adjust the lighting and colour so that it looked like they might actually be at the bus stop, and erasing the picture around each character took a long time, but I really like the way it turned out.