This is an image from this wikipedia article to show the layers nessicary in a Cel animation, assuming that the white backgrounds on the 'character cel' images are transparent.
From the same article I also discovered that:
Cel animation was invented by Earl Hurd and John Bray in 1915.
Digital Ink and paint were first introduced in the 1990's
Rotoscoping (tracing over film footage) was invented by Max Fleischer in 1915.
I am doing a timeline in poster form on A3 sized paper to describe the history of Cel animation. In this post I will list all the sources I used in order to find each piece of information.
The first thing I did was I looked at my 'Children's Bretannica' books I have at home. I didn't find any information on 'animation' or 'cel animation', but I did find a short amount of information under the word 'cartoon' in book 4.
On the topic of the history of animation, it says: 'There are some cartoons made by Raphael, the famous Italian artist, in 1520.' and 'Walt Disney's Pinocchio, about the puppet who came to life, was one of the first full length cartoon films.'
Another book I read and got sources from was one entitled 'Of Mice and Magic: a History of American Animated Cartoons'. From this I learnt that in 1921, many famous comic book writers of the time transfered their talents to animation. Examples of these are Milt Gross and Sidney Smith.
One might think, at first glance, 'what does a fish have anything to do with risk?' well I'll tell you. The bomb has many reasons for being in the animation. At first it seems as though the fish is swimming along normally, on some grassy planet. However, there is a hidden bomb in the ground which then blows up the fish until it dies (classic fish with belly up example). At first the bomb was designed to show the second world war, and how many mining fields have still been left which could go off at any moment if one person goes to the wrong place at the wrong time. Then we realised, actually the bomb is a metaphor for most risks in life. Sure, some of them we know are there and we go take them anyway. However, most risks we take we didn't even see were there at all and we walk straight into them like a trap, or like the fish walking into the bomb in our animation. It is simply our naivety which gets us hurt by the risks we take without stopping to wonder if they're there. Or sometimes they are such everyday risks such as crossing a road that we don't see it as a huge amount of steel heading at 35mph towards us, we just see a harmless car.
If I had the weekend time to complete my project in Coleridge using our computer, I would have:
Added the rest of the frames. There are a lot of characters we simply cut out of the final due to timing restraints. Such as the jellyfish and an angry red version of the fish.
Made the bomb explosion have a sound effect, and look more realistic by giving it more frames.
Made our own soundtrack using Garageband or Sibelius.
If there were three moments in our project that I would go back in time and tell my younger self something, they would be:
To not oversleep the day before the deadline and leaving my partner stranded, as I had the folder.
To finish drawing earlier
To not start by drawing the line for the ground and the tree, and not tell Alex to colour in the tree, as it's wasting time and the tree shouldn't move so it can be easily dragged with keyframes on Final Cut later.
We already knew that the Mac computers at Coleridge do not have the program we normally use for stop motion tasks called 'istopmotion', which is inbuilt to the Mac computers at Long Road. As this was our final day to work on the project, this was a serious problem. It's possible to animate in Photoshop but none of us or the class were entirely sure how to do so. I had an idea to use the program I use at home for this task called Monkeyjam, and it was all prepared that we would use that program. However, when we actually got to the point of trying to download Monkeyjam at Coleridge, we found out that the program is designed only for Windows. We solved this problem eventually by downloading a trial version of istopmotion from online, but it had a watermark on each of the frames so we had to remember to crop all of them. This cost us quite a lot of time as we rendered the final version once and then noticed that we hadn't quite got all of it as one of the keyframes made the cropping wipe away to reveal the watermark again.
We looked at two websites for this task. The first we looked at was this one but after browsing through the more popular funk style music types we didn't really find what we were looking for, most of them were too upbeat and may possibly catch the attention of the audience too much meaning they aren't prepared for the lecture. The second we looked at was this one, as we realised there was a whole section on 'film music'. The song we settled on was one by 'The Feral Men' entitled 'Cling Onto Freedom'. We were choosing between this one and the one called 'Hopeful Romantic' but we decided we wanted the more funky approach than a classical one.
For the purpose of the project, as the final will be shown in a lecture, we would like to have some music which wouldn't interfere with any settling down people would be doing and so should not need to be noticed at all- The animation can even be played alone and still work fine.
We could have lyrics in our music, but they should be calm and happy music, possibly with a funky beat to set the tone for the lecture as interesting rather than ambient.
Our plan for the start of the lesson today is to find some copyright free music from online which is suitable for our animation. The reason we are starting with this is because we need to get the camera from Long Road and we are waiting for it to arrive. So we decided to do something productive in the meantime.
Tomorrow me and Alex will scan in the images, as we didn't get a chance to do so today. We will order each of the images properly and even create copies of some frames so that we can create loops, but they will be saved in order of animation and we will scan them as best as we can in this order as well.
For each frame we will have to:
Cut out anything we don't want in the frame (such as pencil lines and the ground line in the first few frames).
Make each of the backgrounds transparent, and put it onto the background layer instead.
Colour them in in the same way each frame (so if we apply blending options or any filters in Photoshop, they will be consistent).
Change the expression of the fish when it meets the bomb to blank, or with sparklers in its eyes.
Import them into the Monkeyjam software (which is downloading now) to make a smooth stopmotion animation frequently so we know how it's going so that we can keep making modifications if we need to.
We also need to either make a soundtrack in Garageband, or find some copyright free music.
Today we looked online for inspiration on our ideas, and we found this animation:
My review of Kiwi:
The opening scene for Kiwi (after the yellow title), shows a flightless animated bird I'm particularly interested in the camera shots in this scene, starting with a camera shot as if the camera was on the ground, sowing the bird's legs and partly its beak. The music starts out with a very bouncy feel, and the bird is designed to look very cute and loveable, through the big eyes, the way he moves and struggles with what he's doing tumbling over himself. This also represents the bird as helpless, as if the fact he has no wings makes the bird disabled. Dispite this, the bird is determined with his task. At one point a tree is shown at the centre of the screen, with sky in the background as always (daytime, contrasts with yellow bird, shows height). The bird runs in from the left and runs some rope or wire around the tree and leaps through it to tie a knot and lands on the floor. This shows us how clever this bird really is and doesn't mind hurting himself (landing on the floor) to fulfill is dream of flying.
As a result of watching this, me and Alex decided that we wanted our bird to fall off a cliff at the end, after going through much difficulty to get there.
I have now created the background to our animation while we were waiting for the scanner to be free. It's set in space on some other planet as the fish looks a bit like a space ship. I think our risk animation looks a lot like it could be turned into a game, as it's from a classic perspective and the jellyfish etc could be the enemies.
I drew most of it with the brushes, using a simple circle paint brush for the stars and then a circle swirly one for the grass. I used different layers for this so I could use different blending options for each of them. I liked the bending option of a outer glow, as it really added the illusion of an atmosphere or light coming from the stars and the planet.
Over the last few days we have been creating the frames which will go into our animation, and finally we have finished and they are ready to be scanned into the laptops in order to be edited in photoshop.
To create our animation so far, we have drawn the characters onto tracing paper. At first we included all of the scene on each frame, but then we realised that we could put them in photoshop or final cut and animate a scene into it.
To make it quicker, I drew the characters roughly and Alex went over them in black pen. We were careful not to leave too many gaps. This way it's easier to colour in later digitally.
The new storyline is: The fish character is swimming along, meets a few others and copies their expressions. Then it meets a bomb and tries to copy it but it explodes and he dies. This is to show the message that it's a risk to copy everyone else because some people might make you a bad person, and could hurt you.
Here is some information I now know after reading this wikipedia article to help with our animation.
Cel animation (or handrawn animation) is the oldest form of animation.
Normally there is a lead animator who draws the keyframes, then all the others will fill the gaps.
Traditionally, all frames are drawn by hand, but now computers are helping, and som new effects can be used. (Now it's possible to draw directly onto a computer,
Animation loops are often used.
For special effects such as smoke before CGI, animators resorted to other media such as charcoal or airbrushes to achieve the effect.
Today me and Alex brainstormed some ideas. At first we wanted to animate the pea we animated on Friday, and make it last for longer and give it a scene like a plate. then we realised that the pea idea didn't really fit the brief idea of risk, so we drew the pea a few times and changed some parts of it, keeping the main shape as the circle. This is because we know how to use the bouncy ball effect if we need to and it's easier to use this on a circle shape.
Soon our pea evolved into a flying fish which will fly across a mountain, or some rocky land, and some trees and then finally fall off a cliff because it's going to fast. The message of this is about driving too fast on dangerous terrain, and the risk of an unexpected cliff edge.
So today me and Alex have been animating this figure on tracing paper- I've been drawing it and Alex has been colouring it in and going over with black pen. The most challenging part about today I think was making a tree fly past, while I had to keep the branches in the right places and also it took a longer time to draw each frame with a tree in it.
I have now completed my book animation. It's of a bird walking, he notices a puddle, flaps his wings and walks over towards it. Suddenly, a crate with a strange cloud man comes and ponks him on the head, so he falls in.
I would have liked to have added a few more frames in at the end, to show the bird sinking right through the puddle, and the cloud man coming out of the box, then lots of him appearing and there being a huge army of cloud men marching across the screen. This is because the theme was to go for a surrealist look, and I feel that perhaps mine could have been more surreal. However, I do like how I made the bird walk, but it would have been easier to make a walk cycle for it and a cycle for the puddle as it took a long time to shade in.
In future, I think I will scan in my photos as I go along if I go for this style again, so that I can add colour as I go along and can also create loops to save time.
Today after school I started making the voodoo doll I said I would make over the weekend based on the work of Tim Burton. I started off with a wooden spoon, then I wrapped cloth around it to bulk it out a bit and used masking tape to keep it in place. When I had bulked it all out into a basic shape, I used mod-rock (see image below for examples of some artist work using this material) to go over it. To use mod-roc, wet it and put it over the area you want to model, then smooth it out as much as possible and leave it to dry. It normally takes about 10 minutes before it starts hardening properly.
I made a basic human shape and made the legs together as it's simpler to make a skirt than legs, plus it's a girl and, as I didn't want to make hair or features to spoil the voodoo effect, I made the skirt. I them wrapped cloth around it for clothes, wrapped a rope around her next to show she is captured, and made a box from leftover card and plastic sheets. Here is a photo of the finished version:
In today's lesson we animated our pea. Firstly we put the camera which we had taken pictures of the peas on into the computer. We opened the images up in photoshop and projected them onto the board. We drew around the shape of each one in black board pen onto the cardboard which we taped to the board. Then we each coloured one of them in in felt pens which took about an hour as the pens are so fine and we wanted to keep the colours the same, but the light green pens ran out of ink pretty quickly. We all completed the last frame which took a lot less time as we were all more focused and working quickly as we were running low on time. In the end we decided to make out pea appear to gt stabbed by a fork and say 'ow' at every loop.
When we had finished animating, we took our 5 frames out on location (we went into the art block in Coleridge) and set up the camera. We slowly moved them forward and took pictures, then we went back to the classroom and put them into istopmotion. To make the film longer we reversed it so that it repeats, the only problem with this is that it doesn't say 'ow' on the way back, and also it's running backwards into the fork which doesn't make sense.
Today I am going to look into the works of artist, poet and director Tim Burton. I will also do a page or two on this in my sketchbook
Tim Burton is well known at the moment for his dark themed films. Most of them are done in 3d animations such as the Corpse Bride, though some are done in film such as the recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but still most run with this slightly twisted dark tone.
There is more information about the artist himself here but I am going to focus on one of his poems and perhaps draw a few things connected to the poem as I go through. I think this will help me think about drawing as I havent done so in a long time and I should get into it before I start animating for the college.
This is the poem I have chosen to think about:
Voodoo Girl:
"Her skin is white cloth, and she's all sewn apart and she has many colored pins sticking out of her heart.
She has many different zombies who are deeply in her trance. She even has a zombie who was originally from France.
But she knows she has a curse on her, a curse she cannot win. For if someone gets too close to her,
I will draw what It hink about this over the weekend. I also have the materials to make something of the sort and so I might make a voodoo doll if I get the chance. The materials I have are:
Various cloths
A spare wooden spoon (could use this for the body shape)
Mud-roc (like paper mache, a nice media to work with)
Today Steve showed us how to create Blu style animations without actually doing graffiti on a wall. The task was to create an animated loop of 5 frames using cardboard and paints. Steve gave a demo at the beginning of the lesson where he showed his example of a jumping alien with a squash and stretch effect as it was based on the bouncing ball. Here is Steve's finished demo video:
I worked with Sophie, Alex and Alison, although Alison wasn't here today she'll probably join us when we finish on Friday. At first we found it tough to come up with something to animate, as we were told that we could choose whatever we like as long as it'll fit onto a loop and looks like it's moving around a wall on location. Finally we came up with an idea based around a 'pea chia' on the Neopets website, which looks like this:
This lesson we drew the 5 frames which we wanted on paper and then on tracing paper ready to go onto cardboard. We couldn't put them onto cardboard this lesson as other groups were using the projector to draw their characters, so we can do it tomorrow. Sadly they have used all of the paint so we'll have to use the felt tips, which will take more time as they are fine pens.
In today's lesson, we descussed our ideas for the risk project, and went around the class giving feedback. We also did a checkpoint in our sketchbooks which answer some questions about what we've done so far and what we plan to do over the next week. We also filled in a sheet which asks us what a creative risk means, what positive risks can be made, and what negative risks can be made.
Positive Risks could be: .Having an xray .Riding a bike .Looking after animals
Negative Risks could be: .Becoming a criminal .Drinking alcohol .Swimming in the middle of the sea
I think a creative risk is a risk an artist takes which means a project may not turn out as planned, or the audience may not have seen something before about their work, or doing something irreverseable which may turn out well or badly.
In today's lesson we watched 7 abstract/experimental films. These films seem to be designed in the purpose of art, rather than in the purpose of entertainment, and we were told we probally won't have seen anything like this before as these are underground films.
We were asked at the beginning to take notes on our reactions to the films.
The films were:
-A Colourbox:
This film was made as an advertisement for the post office, and was funded by them at the time. Originally it was not designed for that purpose but they added weights and prices in at the end. The words I associated with this film were: 'abstract, wavy, polkadot, chirpy english clarinet music, cheaper parcel, unpredictable, jittery'.
-Dog Star Man
The artist who made this film experimented with the media of film and actually painted on, ripped, stapled etc. parts of the film strip. The words I associated with this film were: 'unique titles, baby dreaming or having a nightmare, snowflakes, blood red= embryo?, splatters of paint, random closeups, scribbles overlapping real life.
-Scorpio
I think that this was the least abstract of all the films we were shown, at least because it has some kind of storyline. The film is about gay nazi bikers, and we begin to realise this through the way they seem to love themselves and prance around in leather jackets. The artist who made this film was gay himself and took on 3 main roles of filming. The words I associated with this film are: 'scorpion logo, chirpy music, clockwork metronome in music with man as the boy- shows passion for the toys, how he is making things work like clockwork and the idea of time as it;s a flashback, skull, gothic, leather.
-Big shave
Possibly the most disturbing of them all, a man starts shaving, there are many close-ups of the sink which builds tension as we can forsee in a way that he'll cut himself. Then he does and he cut himself so much it's slightly funny for the audience as well as disturbing. Apparently this film is something to do with the Viet Nam war as there is a referance at the end of the film.
-La Rêgion Centrale
A 3 hour long film with a 360 degree camera spinning in circles for the whole time. This was very unpopular with the class. I thought fair enough the first time it went around. Then it stopped and waited for a split second, and then it went around again. This made me feel quite uneasy about the film. The robotic arm was programmed never to make the same rotation and so no part of the film is exactly the same.
-Fuzzbox
Everyone seemed to like this film, it's funny and the way it was made was very cool in my opinion. The artist put on a workshop, and got many people who had never had done animation before to think of an idea for ths music video. They thought the word 'fuzzbox' meant something else and so the video has a sexual spin on things.
-Berlin Horse
This is a video of a horse going in circles in the dark. Then it has some effects put onto it such as colour shifts and flips so that it looks like it's going the other direction. There is a man in some shots and I think it's interesting how some of the film overlapped so that the same horse followed itself in the frame. The colours change a lot and towards the end it looks like there might be a fire, though this is debateable as the colours might just have changed again.
In today's lesson, we were given time to finish our 10 second animations. I had already done 50 frames over the weekend but it still took a long time to finish animating them as I had to shade the puddle in with black every frame, which slowed things down. I would have liked to have the bird falling down the puddle, and meeting a wizard with minions at the bottom, as is in my sketchbook. However, we ran out of time and I had to leave it how it is. I think that it turned out quite well. It is a little messy as it was rushed towards the end and I took the photographs of the whole book without tearing out the pages. This made the animation slightly shaky as some pages stick out more than others. I did my animation at 8 frames per second so that it could run slowly enough to see what is going on, but still just about undetectable by the human eye.
In today's lesson we were asked to do a mood board about risk, which I have posted and written about below. We also were asked to think about some ideas we might have on our creative risk projects over the weekend and compare them.
Idea one: An animation (not entirely sure which type yet, I'll explore each briefly first to get an idea and do some research on this) of a small boy getting a yoyo for his christmas present. He is very happy and plays with it for hours on end (with shots of the clock moving above him) but then his parents finally get annoyed with him playing with the yoyo and cuts the string. The boy gets very upset and goes to his room, builds a new yoyo and becomes amasing later in life. This idea was inspired by an episode of the channel 4 show Black Books where the character Manny is playing with his yoyo too much and Bernard cuts the string. This idea may not be possible due to time constraints on the project, it seems a little complicated.
Idea Two: I decided to go for the same idea but in a simpler way. It will start with a boy playing with a yoyo, and hitting himself with it, but carrying on anyway. Then time goes by and he is bruised, and his parents cut the string. Then it fades out and in to when he's older and he's got a new yoyo and is performing in front of a crowd and looks famous. This would be a lot easier to do.
Idea Three: Completely unrelated to the yoyo idea, I wanted to animate someone walking into a park, and accedents happen all around him. Children fall of the swings, a dog runs into the road by the park and gets hit, and the man closely misses a tennis ball coming at him. Then he rewinds time and the people are in a safer version of the park with fences and child friendly swings.
Above is a mood board which me and Sophie created around the theme of risk. There are images of natural disasters (tornados, tsunamis etc) to show the risk people take when they live in the areas where they are more likely to be hit by them. There's a house on fire to show the risks of playing with fire, which includes cooking, there's also a man with his arms on fire for this also. Using fireworks, drinking alcohol, having an xray and chopping vegetables are all risks. Even the every day things we do such as walking down the stairs or crossing a road can be considered a risk.
I think that these risks should be made aware and common knowledge. However, a lot of the time the benefit will outweigh the risks, or perhaps the unlikely thing that may happen won't be too bad and won't have a permanant effect.
First of all, we did some artist research on Jan Svankmajer and watched one of his old videos called 'Darkness/Light/Darkness' which can be found here. We were told about our current project after this. The brief is to create a one minute animation which will be shown to an intellectual audience on a big screen whilst they wait for a lecture. It must convey a mesage about risk in some form, but should not have a distracting soundtrack (and so no dialogue is allowed). The way we are going to create this will be through animation, and we started today off with learning some of the building blocks of animation.
Each of us were given a flick book to work with, and we were asked to animate a ball bouncing across a 2d space. I learnt today how important the squash and stretch effect is in animation, and realised that's a crucial thing I have left out of animations I did so far, and concluded that this should have been the first exercise I did, and that I shouldn't skip the tasks which seem uninteresting when I get the chance.
We did the bouncy ball task in 31 frames and we copied the basic motion from a template. I set some keyframes through my flick book before I started and traced the arc shape I wanted throughout. This was so that the ball would not jump or become out of proportion, as this would look strange.
In the second part of the lesson, we started to create our own surrealist line drawing animations. We looked at the video Muto by Blu, a stencil artist, for inspiration before we begun this task. This was because his animation style was surreal which fit the puropse of the task.
Our homework for this week is to finish our animation over the weekend. So far I have 11 frames of a bird walking towards a puddle. The minimum I will need is 80 so that I can fit the brief of getting 10 seconds of smooth animation, and it could only be smooth with 8 frames per second. We are doing these in little booklets which works well as the paper is thin and it's easy to use the onion skin effect on the next frame, similar to istopmotion.
I also need to watch the film 'Beautiful Losers' as I missed it when the rest of the class saw it, and I've heard it could be inspirational for my own work.
