Capture timeline poster: Internet sources

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.
  

Capture timeline poster: Book sources

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.

Why our project relates to risk

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

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.

The Monkeyjam Problem

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.

Final Video for Risk Project

L3 RISK - CHARNA & ALEX - FINAL from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

Music we have found for our animation

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.

What kind of music would we like?

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.

Plan for Friday's lesson

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.

Review of Kiwi

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.

Background

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.

School Diary 09/12/09 (and the week before)

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.

Info about Cel animation

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.

School Diary 03/12/09

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.