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.

Disney

Talked a lot about Disney this past week. I grew up watching Disney movies all the time. Every sunday night there was a different one on. Disney basically had a monopoly on animated children's films for a very very long time. The only Disney film that came out during my childhood that I can remember was The Lion King. The Lion King was a little different from the Disney Princess type story which catered more to me, a kid who spent a ton of time outdoors.

After that it seemed that a lot more companies, Pixar, Dreamworks, etc became prominent in animated films. I must say that Toy Story was really something different that was a huge success and I really enjoyed it. Another movie we talked about was Spirit. I had completely forgotten about this movie until I heard it mentioned in class. This film was brought up because it featured a prominent character, the horse, that didn't speak. Almost all Disney films had talking animals, or other various creatures, which brought you into another world. While Spirit wasn't really a big big success it was something different and I really enjoyed it.

This week

I watched a neat animation built inside of World of Warcraft this past week. It was a spoof off of a discovery channel commercial but I found it to be quite funny, and fun to watch. I placed the video and a making of at the bottom of my post. I think it is really amazing how people take textures and characters from this video game and turn them into their own animations. I am half inspired to try this for my final project but unsure whether I would be able to handle it entirely.

The animations in World of Warcraft are something else entirely. They are often criticized for being too cartoonish, however it is my belief that these animations add a lot to the game. In a way they make it more appealing than if the animation had been more realistic.

Wallace and Gromit have popped into my mind lately. I haven't watched one of the videos in maybe 10 years but I used to love them. Claymation in general is something I haven't watched in a while. I am thinking about trying some animations using clay, I think it will be a good experience. Only problems I might have is making a skeletal structure with joints!

-Ross

#3

I've been thinking about early animation. Specifically Disney films, and the more I think about it, the more amazed I am by the meticulous detail but into each frame. I am not artist myself, however I can appreciate the time an effort it would take to put together even a small feature. I'm sure this appreciation is inflated 10 fold in the eyes of a real artist.

Another thing I was simply amazed by was the talented work of pin-board artists. A pin-board is basically a board with a ton of pins in it, and you create images by pushing pins in and out to different lengths. We observed a feature that was of significant length and I found in simply amazing.

We also watched a feature done entirely in silhouettes. They used a multi layer system with one artist devoted entirely backgrounds. The artists used a large machine that was about 9 feet tall, and each incorporated their own part of the scene. I thought it was incredibly complex.

Week 2

This week I had thought my flipbook project was due. So I spent some time putting that together. I found it very intriguing how meticulous one needs to be in creating a flipbook. Any little mistake really throws off the animation. Anyways my project turned out ok, its basically just a ball moving around.

In class this week we talked about a few different things. Duck Amuck was featured. This animation showed a stereotypical animation with a few new things. The major difference was the artist was clearly involved in the animation. Throughout the picture the main character, Daffy Duck, would question the artist concerning his surroundings. You would then see a paint brush enter the scene and change it entirely. I found this to be a fun and refreshing idea.

We also watched a little claymation. Creature Comforts, was a film about animals interpretations of their lives at the zoo. I found it to be a good film and the claymation was certainly different and really involved the artist's touch. You could quite literally see the artists fingerprint in some of the work. That is all for now, see you next week!

Week 1

Hello Everybody,
I am Ross Johnson, a Junior RT Production student, and this is my understanding animation blog. l have very little animation experience so basically every I learn in this class will be knew to me. A couple of things that I found intriguing in the first week were the difference between animation and video, some of the old animation "toys", and how "stop motion" animation is achieved.
One of the first things we talked about was the difference between animation and video. While I knew it was different, I never really thought about why. We basically boiled it down to being that animation is taking something still and creating motion with it, and video basically the opposite. You take something moving, constantly being filmed, and basically slow it down and capture it. I had never thought of it this way.
We also viewed some examples of old toys that basically paved the way for animation. The zoetrope was the one that really interested me. It was basically a cylinder with images spread apart on the inside, and a few holes evenly spread on the outside. When you spun the wheel and looked through the holes it appeared that the images were moving. This effect was achieved due to persistence of vision.
Stop Motion animation was another thing we discussed. I had seen a few music videos that had utilized the technique but never really understood how it worked. I found out that this effect was achieved by taking 2 frames at a time. This allows you to get the stuttering stop motion appearance. Those are all my thoughts for this week.
-Ross