Finished Final Piece...

Unfortunately I never solved the frame rate issue, so I added some hair and a cross shape to show the direction of the characters face as he moves. This gives a better illusion of a 3rd dimension in the animation, but still doesn't show the full detail I intended. The final piece is missing the jacket, collar, pointer and facial expressions which appear on the storyboard/plan in my previous post.

Animation Final Piece... Continued

After having finished animating the characters general movements to the sound clip, and added the colour, I came across another problem. As the animation has to be on a video layer that is that shows 12 fps (frames per second), but being played at 25 fps for standard UK TV viewing, there is a set way in which the frames from the video layer are played to allow for the fact that there will be an extra frame that needs to be filled at the end of each second. It does this automatically by making each frame repeat twice, except for the 2nd frame of each second, which will be repeated thrice. I understood this when making the animation, and it should (in theory) make no difference to how you make it. However, somewhere along the line there was an error in the way Photoshop adjusted the frame rate, and any new video layer I added ended up quickly becoming 1 frame out of time.

This was massively frustrating, as the sole reason I chose to make a 2D animation for my final piece was to be able to put highly exaggerated expressions on the characters and make a visually entertaining piece. This might still be possible to do (all on the same video layer, which is dangerous, as I cant afford to make any mistakes), but the amount of time spent trying to recover my original animation, and then trying to solve the frame rate issue, has left me behind in my other work, so I may have to leave the animation as it is for now. I hope this is not the case, and I will continue to work on it if I manage to complete my other projects earlier.

Animation Final Piece

After deciding to create a 2D animation, I picked my sound file (no. 2 "He's, he's tough... He's a brute, but he's got a good heart... And at the end of the picture... He saves the girl"). Although this clip had no sound effects other than voices, I felt it's fast pace would allow me to make quite an energetic animation to.

My first Idea involved 3 characters: The first character was the 'talking' one (he would do the gestures, but I was instructed not to attempt to lip-sync. any characters) who is based on a 50s style movie writer/director , in a grey suit, with a smart comb over hair cut. The second was the character who the first character is talking about. His role was to react to the first character with expressions, and occasionally morph to become a metaphorical representation of the description given by the first character. An example of this is when he says "He's a brute", he would morph into a gorilla. The third character would be "the girl", who would be a 50s movie stereotype damsel in distress, who would fall into the second characters arms on the que: "He saves the girl".

I liked this Idea, and began animating on Photoshop. I got to the stage of having fully animated the movements of the second and third character to the sound clip, with the intention of creating a new video layer to create the first character to interact with, and then add colour, when somewhere along the lines of moving files around they where corrupted. This happened to coincide with the server I use to back up the files being temporarily down. This was very unfortunate, as I felt it would then be impossible to make an animation as complex as this plan in the time I had left, so I created a new storyboard for a similar Idea with only one character.

The new storyboard basically consists of just the writer/director character, where the audience is in the position of maybe a producer, who is judging his idea. In this storyboard, the character is pointing at a flip-board on a stand, and pulling faces to fit with the lines.

My Animation 3D

Later, I made a 3D animation of a bouncing ball. I used Autodesk Maya to do this, with a 'ball rig' that had created specifically for this kind of animation. Similarly to animating traditionally, you start by setting key frames at points on the timeline, which show the objects position at that time. Unlike animating in 2D on Photoshop, the computer fills in the middle frames for you, approximately calculating the ball's acceleration. This doesn't mean it's easier though, as the movement the computer calculates is usually simple and unrealistic. You then have to go through a process of looking at the position vector graphs, and tweeking them to increase or decrease the acceleration at certain times (like making it accelerate quickly as it drops, due to gravity, and decelerating as it bounces back up).

This is actually a pretty fun process, especially when you know that this kind of process is what the proffessionals use to make CG animated films, and (of course) computer games. However I decided I would create my animation in 2D on Photoshop, as I wanted to be able to concentrate a lot on facial expression.

My Animation 2D

My first mini-project was to create a 2D looping animation of a ball bouncing, using the Photoshop animation feature (available in Photoshop CS3 to CS5). This was to practice traditional hand drawn animation. I made it at a frame rate of 12 fps (frames per second). This is a good frame rate for traditional animation, as it is enough frames to be smooth, but not too many frames as to make the process painstakingly slow.

The process of making a 2D, drawn animation appear full of movement involves using all of the 12 principles. In the bouncing ball exercise, 'squash and stretch' was the most important part. This is used, not only to create the illusion of physics working upon the ball (it squashes as it 'hits' the floor, and stretches and deforms as it rises), but to replicate effects that a camera would usually put on the image, such as motion blur, which is replicated by stretching the ball as it moves.

I found animating traditionally, drawn and 2D, to be pretty fun, and its simplicity allows you to be creative. For the ball bouncing, I did a very simple scene, as there is a floor (rough horizontal line) and a white background. Finalized and televised cartoons however, have detailed scenes and backgrounds, which give the illusion of a three dimensional environment. I would have to bare this in mind if i chose to do a 2D animation for my final project, as a visually pleasing setting, to which characters and objects can seamlessly interact with, is an important part of the animation.

The 12 Principles of Animation

WALL-E: A good example of animation.

The 3D animated feature film WALL-E, by Disney and Pixar animation studios, shows excellent examples of many of the '12 principles of animation'. These are:

-Squash and stretch

-Timing and motion

-Anticipation

-Staging

-Follow through and Overlapping action

-Slow in and out

-Arcs

-Straight ahead action and pose-to-pose action

-Exaggeration

-Secondary action

-Appeal

-Personality/solid drawing.

An example of squash and stretch in WALL-E would be the big, round, wobbly future people flopping over their chairs. In the Scene towards the end of the film, when Eve is trying to find the plant among the chunky people, sliding downhill in a tilting environment, there are several occasions where their big boneless bodies are squashed against glass, making them bulge at the sides, or stretched against chairs, only to revert back to their original, nearly spherical, shapes.

This scene also shows a fantastic example of staging, anticipation, slow in and out, timing and motion and arcs, all in the scene where the babies are sliding down the slope. The event is staged as the camera shows the audience, first, the female character looking up, and then the babies beginning to slide. She then slowly and heavily begins to swing the male character towards the babies trajectory, creating a level of anticipation, where they both grab the kids and slide down the slope. The swinging motion has a real 'slow in and out' motion, as the characters have to accelerate and decelerate. They also swing in an arc motion, and the timing of their movements is slow and heavy. This all gives a real sense of just how heavy and wobbly they are, which is hugely important to the comedy in this scene.

The whole film is full of personality and appeal, as the characters are designed to be brilliantly lovable, as they have a huge amount of facial expression (including the robot characters), which is often exaggerated to make for more appealing shots. The designs of the characters are fantastic, particularly WALL-E and EVE. WALL-E has this futuristic yet aged look, where his design appears to be focused on hardware and machinery, whereas EVE appears to be designed around software, and is encased in a clean and new looking white plastic shell. This appears to signify the move from machinery to technology which appears to be happening at the moment as more and more electronic equipment is built into our cars and appliances for example. There is also a sense of user friendliness in that EVE appears to be designed to look good, and has cute little power up sounds, whereas WALL-E appears to be built simply for a purpose (waste disposal). In fact, they kind of remind me of PC and Mac.

Wallace and Gromit

I found Wallace and Gromit, by Aardman animations (also made 'Morph') and then DreamWorks, to be a fantastic example of many of the '12 principles'. It is also a different form of animation (stop motion clay/plasticine animation), which I find to be incredibly enjoyable to watch, especially when you know how it was shot. It requires careful camera tricks to create the illusion of size (as the models are considerably smaller than the characters they are playing) and movement, as elements of film which help to portray movement, such as motion blur, aren't present in stop motion pictures.

In the 30 minute film 'The Wrong Trousers', the scene where Wallace is asleep, being remotely driven around in his robotic trousers, is a fantastic example of secondary action, as his unconscious body flops ungainly around while the trousers move jerkily. Similarly, later on in the film during the model train chase scene, the continuing momentum as the trains change direction or crash gives the characters and objects following through and overlapping action, making a seamless illusion of movement. This is all the more impressive with stop motion plasticine animation, as there is no motion blur. In fact the background in this scene is made of an image of a blurred photograph of the model kitchen where large parts of the show are usually set.

Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus: A not-so-good example of animation.

I don't wish to sound like I am slating the film, as I happened to find it very amusing. I've never seen a comedy that is so effective you find yourself laughing at massive scale civilian casualties (Was it a comedy? I think so). So hopefully it will be clear that all is said in good humour.
 

There are elements of the animation in the film which demonstrate unsuccessful examples of some of the '12 principles'. The best example is, in my favourite scene of the film, where the Mega Shark jumps several thousand feet in the air, and snatches a 747 out of the sky. I guess to start with, the staging is non-existent (Unless shouting “Holy s**t!” counts) and 'slow in and out' motion of the shark is lacking completely in the 'slow in' part. It just simply is moving. Also, although the natural arc movement of the shark appears to be relatively successful when it actually contacts the aeroplane, its movement as it approaches the plane, however, is a direct straight line, as if it chose to ignore gravity.

 

The general appeal of the octopus and the shark is a little lacking. Their colours are neither realistic or exaggerated, unfortunately, especially when the creatures are under water. They appear to become 1 shade of grey. This makes them neither terrifyingly realistic or full of character. Instead, their movements are wooden, with the appearance of plastic.



Internet links:
http://disney-clipart.com/Wall-E/Wall-E.php
http://www.wallaceandgromit.com/films/wrongtrousers/gallery.html
http://www.iwatchstuff.com/2009/05/mega_shark_vs_giant_octopus_tr.php

WALL-E, (2008) USA, Andrew Stanton, Pixar Animation Studios
Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers, (1993) UK, Nick Park, Aardman Animations
Aardman Animations
Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, (2009) US, Jack Perez