BA Animation Year 1 Unit 2

BA1b Amy Davenhill

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More research into creating maquettes for the stop motion process.  

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Research into the materials that we were using and my thoughts on the material and potentially what I could do with it in the future

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Research into wire frames and armatures

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Small experiment using the wire armatures, working in a group; Alex, Ray and I. 

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Analyzing group experimentation using the wire armatures - I will post the video separately. 

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Thinking about rigging in animation and further looking into walks and the characters personality and how that would effect the way that a character would walk as well. Then moving into analyzing my walk cycle I did before Christmas. 

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Some research into the stop motion project looking at walk cycles again, but pushing more towards stop motion than 2D like we have done before. 

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Using Google Slides, I decided that i wanted to create a presentation for each smaller part of the unit, I did this to help me with my organisation of my work, including independent research and I thought that this was a useful way of documenting my findings. I have found that using this method helps me a lot in terms of looking back at what I have done as well. I will upload everything that I have done onto this blog as well, but for the time when I am actually documenting I will be using Google Slides as I have found this easier to work with. 

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Mind map to start thinking about how I could start writing elements of my essay and how they could connect with my essay.

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Starting to look at feature-length animations to widen my options and talking about how/what visual storytelling means in terms of narrative and for the audience as well. 

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Looking at different animated shorts for my essay research.

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Starting to look at model making

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After completing my tester for my puppet I began to focus on my walk cycle. I think some aspects of my walk cycle are good, however I could improve on this quite a lot. For example, when I was animating and looking through what I had done I noticed that when the puppet walks towards the middle of the frame it gets quite fast in terms of how big of the steps the characters takes and so make it almost look like it stumbles a little. I tried to fix this in slowing in down when I noticed it and the rest looks okay. As I only had limited time to animate in the studios I would want to go back again and possibly get a better result than I managed to get this time around. 

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After completing my stop motion puppet, made out of recycled materials, I wanted to test out the flexibility of my puppet and see if I could still move all of its limbs in order for me to animate my walk cycle. I started off by setting up the lighting which I quite like and gave me a chance to get a little more used to working in the animation studios. I wanted to test out by doing basic movements mainly with the arms. the only thing that I would note about this is that in one or possibly more frames my arm is in the way of the camera. this doesn’t necessarily matter too much as it is just a simple test, however I might bring the video into premiere pro to remove those frames just to give it a polished finish and more professional look. 

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This is my attempt at a walk cycle using the stop motion puppets provided at unit. there are a couple of things to note including that I was mainly focused on getting the feet and the leg movement right and I noticed after completing the walk cycle that the head was a little off. next time I would like to aim to focus on all of the aspects of the animation rather than just the legs and feet to make it look a lot smoother. I enjoyed the project and would like to try again and think that my result is quite successful for a first attempt. I could light the scene a little better too and maybe use the different coloured filters to enhance the overall look of the frame. I do like the way that the feet flow to floor I think that came out quite well and the movement of the legs is quite successful. 

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Looking at composition

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Thinking about mise-en-scene and analysing some screen grabs from the animation