1st scene of Animation Project

Final Project thoughts

I am really looking forward to seeing everyones final projects. As one of the people in the class with no animation background, let alone practical experience, I think it was a lot of fun completing this class.
My original thought was to attempt to do a stop motion animation with people as the subjects. However I quickly realized this would be far too much work. Stationary objects are so much easier to manipulate and keep still in the frame.
I especially liked the segment last monday on machinima. As an avid video game player I find most of this videos incredibly interesting. In an earlier post I showed another machinima from World of Warcraft if any of you are interested.

Adult Animation

South Park, in my opinion, is one of the best adult animations available today. I really enjoy the cutout-like appearance of show, and the content is incredibly enjoyable. One of the overlooked pieces of South Park is how relevant the show stays to current events. I watched a little show on the making of South Park and according to that show South Park is one of the only, if not the only, shows that makes a new episode each week. Most television shows are made a long time before they are aired and just played at the correct time in the series. By making a new show each week South Park keeps itself incredibly relevant and it allows for so much more humor. I cannot imagine the amount of work that goes into each episode, let alone cramming that all into 1 week.

Wallace and Gromit

I love Wallace and Gromit. I was thrilled when we watched the wrong trousers in class. I used to watch that film when I was younger. Claymation is an awesome art form and other than the small stop motion animation I worked on for this class I have never really experimented with it. Like Dr Torre was saying it is one of the most personal art forms because all of the clay is shaped by hand so you can in fact see the artists fingerprint on the art. I am curious what sort of clay and structures they use in pieces like wallace and gromit because they are so consistent with the shaping between scenes. If anyone has a making of wallace and gromit or anything like that please let me know!

Brick Films

I finally went over to Brickfilms.com and checked out a few of the Lego stop-motion animations, and I found them quite interesting. It looks like it would be a lot of fun to try out and a very simple medium for producing stop motion animations. I might try making one of these in the near future and I will be sure to post it on here if I do.

Another thing I was thinking of this week was the movie Titan A.E. This movie was about a one of the few remaining humans in the universe who was trying to decipher a cryptic message left by his father to eventually find a spaceship that could recreate earth. I really enjoyed the film, and while it was not anything out of the ordinary animation wise I still though it was very well done. If you have any free time you might want to check it out :-p

This week

So this past week in class we looked at a few different things. Astroboy in particular really paved the way for Japanese animation. It is really amazing to me how the character designs have stayed very similar to the early Astroboy characters.

Two other shows we talked about were the Flintstones and the Jetsons. I used to watch both of these shows while growing up but never really recognized their significance. The Flintstones were the first animated show to hold a primetime spot, and basically paved the way for the Simpsons.

The Simpsons is another really amazing show. It really pushed the limits of animated cartoons and is currently the longest running show on television. I am interested to see if we ever see another animated show that will live up to the Simpsons legacy.

Stop Motion Animation

This is Scott Pellico's and My animation project. We used a clay character that Scott modeled and manipulated the characters limbs in order to create the sense of animation. Scott worked with the clay, positioning the character, etc, and I worked with the camera. Overall it was a very fun project and something I'm thinking about trying to do again.