Diary of a school day 19/11/09

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.