francisanimation

The Children’s society is an organisation to develop and focus on supporting children and young people with difficulties, mental health and who have been through abuse. We have been asked to make a 3 min animation based on a recording of one of the children’s experiences. My animation is called Every Step. Every Step is about a homeless teenager who is experiencing difficulty getting into college and the course he wants to do. He is really passionate about becoming a mechanic but every attempt he has made on his own he has been rejected from college. He was alone, no one was there to support him. He was approached by the Children’s Society and they took him to the mechanic course that he wanted to do and helped him to get a place at college. They also provided him with accommodation, clothing and food vouchers to prevent him starving. Unfortunately he found it difficult getting hold of a lawyer but his support worker from the Children’s society helped him find a new one. The support worker helped him every step of the way. I started out by creating some initial drawings and ideas. I then converted these into an animatic sequence which was exported on premiere. I used this to pitch my ideas to the Children’s Society. I am currently still updating some of my imagery, making improvement of the drawings so that they show a bit of illusionary movement. I want to make the final animation in TVPaint.

Lucy made us stand around in a circle, then she gave us the first line for a story. Each student then had to add another line to the story.

Lucy’s first line was:

” On a street in Rome … ”

The next participant said: ”There is pizzeria, and a chef is making pizza dough….”

At first the students couldn’t come up with a line to the narrative. So Lucy put a sign up on the board with the following statements:

”There is no failure in this room!”

”This is a safe space.”

“All ideas are welcome.”

“Today is about playing.”

This reassured the group who then loosened up and started to have fun and play around with the concept.

Lucy then introduced us to a sad fairy story about a farmer who had seven sons but wanted a baby girl. This episode of magical realism was inspired by Lucy’s love of fairy stories like Aesop’s Fables / Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

This was exercise to get our imagination flowing and our creativity firing on all cylinders.

This exercise has helped me when considering storylines for my future animations.

To energise the group Lucy introduced us to the game ‘Zip! Zap! Boing!’ this game really gave us the energy we after the post lunch slack feeling and tiredness. I really found Lucy’s session interesting as she taught me to identify ”The Bones of a story.”

At the exhibition I had learnt the important significance of play in childhood and across society. I learnt that to play is a role in learning and developing social bonds, resilience and wellbeing.

It is also a crucial tool in developing and refining character traits and skills like self – esteem, cooperation and aspects of problem solving . It can be served as a way of treating trauma and employed to express emotions. Play is a way in which children can adapt to the world around them, and thus enables them to learn about the world and provide physical and psychological benefits of having fun.

I enjoyed learning the essential way of play. I enjoyed examining around a series of objects and design materials from games, toys and echo shifts.

What did I experience?

I have experienced the subject of the child era, known as the kindergarten movement around in the early period 20th century during the aftermath of WWII. Originally there were many children who would play in slum areas and some adventure playgrounds were built on these sites for the benefit of many generations of children.

We were lectured on the exercise on lip synching.

What did I learn?

I have been learning how to get our characters to voiceover using the dialogue in a way in which our character is speaking.

I learnt that the important thing in lip-synching is by acting it out in a scene with their movements.

What was the process?

Firstly recorded a piece of dialogue from a part of recorded film, which we then downloaded and transferred on tv paint.

I then had to break down the recording. Then work out frame by frame where the sound occurs on the dialogue in a scene where we were animating.

What was your experience?

Last thing I have learnt is when breaking down the dialogue. We needed to frequently play it a few times and note down what is said on the X – Sheet then practice sounding the letter with our mouth.

At first I wasn’t clear about using the wav of the audio and how the frame works on the sound dialogue, but thanks to the tutorial given in the lecture, I was able to get the idea on how the lip synching works.

We were introduced to the 3D software application Maya Autodesk which features complex 3D computer generated character animation and has the benefit in 3D modelling.

Our task today was to animate a 3D model of a hunting dog with the use of the rotoscoping demonstration.

Roto-scoping was a technique that we were learning about which consists of drawing and designing over live – action image just by tracing over frame by frame in order to make an animation to make it more realist action.

We had used a rotoscoped image of a dog to animate it’s agile movements. We were making use of the tools:-

Scale – Used to extend an image larger to it’s size.

Rotate – Used to alternate an image in a circle round an axis on centre.

Extrude –

Keyframes

Channel box

Timeline slider: – Was mostly the tool that we were using below the viewpoint to position our scene’s current animation frame, and indicates the value from left to right. we made use of the grey bar to manipulate the range of the numbers values.

Using the slider below we played around by clicking across the timeline and dragging it.

Other tools that we used that were acquired on the timeline was the play speed button to play the time slider either backwards or forwards in real time mode.

Week 2:

Week 1: We were given a talk about voice recording at the workshop. Last week we were tutored a list of technical equipment that are acquired for our voices.

These equipment included

Recorder, Microphones, Wind shield.

What we had focused on learning to do was by using the Hand-held sound tracker device to practice recording our voices.

On the second week:

We had to come up with a comment about things based on pet peeve – something that would annoy you.

Then each of us spoke out a comment using the Microphone then edited it on.

I think it was good practice which would be useful for voicing our animated character.

We were given an objective to create 5 drawings of objects around the environment, ones that we visualise in the museum, ensuring that we had included parts of the architecture of the walls and the case of the objects.

What did you learn?

Just by observing an object whilst drawing, I had learnt that it is important to visualise an object that I see of interest and to add more information around the background of the object that I am sketching out including bits around the environment. In relation I had to look and think about the scale in parts of the building in relation to the people and objects.

Also I learned that when I am drawing I should make sure that my drawings show a gradation of traditional shading techniques as it will enable more value to my drawings making them more convincing.

I could improve further by documenting more materials and adding different tones, textures and hatch markings.

Born in Soho London, Blake studied poetry with painting. The artists views contemporary art in origin, which depicts his experiences and frustrations in his career.

In his work Blake experiments with watercolour designs that tell biblical stories and fantasy narratives. In the late 1780s Blake became passionate in writing poems and visual arts, which made him start the production of illustrating imagery.

His work expresses matters including religious stories and epic fantasy tales.

Blake’s artistry exploits symbolic imagination.

What I like about artists work.

I really like the materials and decorative techniques. I like how Blake uses the process of prints in colour to combine with texts and images in an experimental contrast.

I like how his style depicts engraving and etching techniques,

I like the enrichedness of his watercolored images

I like the use of the experiments particularly etching, which he would then use to produce books, paintings, and poems.

I like how his imagery tells a narrative about the biblical prophecies of the bible.

What Inspires you?

Illuminated printing and watercolours.

Epic fantasy imagery which depicts characters in the artists own imaginative pantheon.

What did I learn?

We had learnt the understanding of the camera framerate and the pioneering of video editing using pixelation. I learnt to use the technique in filming movements of real live actors posing and moving incrementally, frame by frame ensuring that they are animated on film. The process involved capturing a picture frequently, and then repeatedly did the same process but changing the actors pose slightly. We took our video sets of the stuff that we’ve been learning and doing, and had applied it on Adobe Premiere.

I have been building a puppet character using different variation of soft materials. The skills that I have learnt to were building our characters for example wool, wire, fabric and glue.

The process of this exercise was by building the head of our figure. Then using the wire to attach on the electrical joints, and place them on each body parts separately. then covered the entire figure with soft wool to wrap around. Went to the clothing design workshop and had learnt to use the sewing machine.

we then applied some fabric strips which we were using to customize on our character.