Creative Media: Animation 2

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Adobe Audition - Interview editing

This Audition mixdown showing how I cut down the interview to the parts that I used in the animation based on what would compliment the visuals and the overall message I wanted to present.  

For the same reasons, I made the decision to also use some further narration from the YouTube channel, Global Tea Hut,  about the history of gongfu tea, which is unique to China.

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Infographics examples

Rental company infographics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNLgHbEPvVk

Usually infographics are related to the topic.  Here animations of buildings accompany statistics.

Source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/7892975/Tea-Consumption-Infographic

This infographic showing the consumption of tea uses as the outline of a pie chart.

Video: How to Animate a Pie Chart in After Effects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThCUMeFnEuA&t=3s

This tutorial shoes how to create radial wipes to make moving pie charts.  By tracing over a pie chart I made in 

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Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics - Issues of representation

Pg 232

‘racist imagery did diminish, positive images did not increase...black characters in animation were still relatively rare until the 1970s’

Evasive techniques in animation

Tom and Jerry: Mammy Two-Shoes only being shown from legs down 

‘Doug’ - ‘using unnatural skin tones (e.g. his friend Skeeter is blue) to depict characters that can represent any ethnic or racial background.  

Other representation issues 

Depictions for Commercial/Political purposes - to sell a product or belief.  E.g. The Flintstones and The Jetsons (’fathers go to work and mothers stay at home’ - pg. )

More progressive animations send different messages or desensitize audiences to the presence of other cultures/ethnicities and groups e.g. LGBTQ community.  While presenting these groups as normal, real and current issues where necessary.

Lilo and Stitch (Deleted Scene)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taPoeIQaOiQ

 This clip shows an issue that creators wanted to address related to Lilo’s culture and integrate it with the narrative.  Though the scene was deleted, the issue is still addressed more subtly and visually in a scene showing Lilo’s introduction near the beginning film where she takes pictures of the Caucasian tourists and tapes the photos to her bedroom wall.  

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Brush test

This shows the brush tests I did in Adobe Illustrator to find the one that would best replicate Chinese ink drawings as Disney did in ‘Mulan’.

I decided to use Kyle’s Inbox - classic cartoonist’ as it best replicated a pen with different pressures from my Wacom tablet and was clean enough to animate. 

Video: ‘Mulan’ intro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKkGoa4-dlE

Video: Animation Tutorial: Self Drawing Lines

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYlG82XJj4

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The first image of this collage shows the concept art from Annapurna’s IOS game, Florence (2018).  In the storyboarding process of this game, Ken Wong would create scenes ‘like a comic strip.’ [1]  As seen in the picture below it, digital drawing is neater while still retaining the style of the original hand drawn image.  The colouring tones and style of this game are simplistic, muted colours and different shades of greys are used for backgrounds while brighter colours are used for main characters, so they are distinguishable from their stationary paper flat surroundings.  It is important to note that an interactive IOS game can get away with simplistic colour palettes in ways that films and shorts cannot without appearing bland.

[1] Annapurna Interactive, The Making of Florence | Episode 2 (April 27, 2018) – 0:43 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIMGLKT4NmI

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Week 3

Duplication and Parenting Part 2

With Auto-Key frames on, I continued to rotate the pentagons together to continue the spinning motion using the scale and rotate function in the object drop down menu.

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Week 3

Duplication and Parenting - Part one.

Connecting the three shape layers in the Timeline group the layered pentagons together so that any transformation/movement changes I made to one layer would apply to the two below by link them with the Parenting icon.

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Week 2

Creating a scene in Adobe Illustrator and then animating it in Adobe After Effects

Open Illustrator file in AE > Drag file to timeline > Right click on file > Create > Create Shapes from Vector Layer.

Using keynotes under Position I then was able to get the car to move from one side of the screen to the other.

Another way of doing this would be to keep the car stationary while having the background (including the road) move from right to left.

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Week 2 Reading

Animation: Genre and Authorship, Authorship - (A Wallflower Paperback), (2002)

‘the great irony is that despite animation’s ability to transcend political, geographical and generational barriers in conveying and delivering a message, it is still often viewed as in substantial and lightweight.’ (pg 47)

Wells argues that animation is not perceived as a media form that can hold any weight or impactful messages.  Yet, it could be argued that outside of children’s cartoons, it is only the types of messages that are portrayed in animations that have changed from being used for political and propaganda purposes to dealing with moral issues and in advertising.  

‘A high majority of mass-media animation is aimed at children and generally manifests itself in one of two distribution channels - broadcast media or gaming’ (pg 47)

‘Graphic design has become the natural home of digital animation, and in turn, graphic design has therefore become an industrially direct service industry’ (pg 49)

Mass media is generally more focused on making a profit and therefore will make animation products that appeal to the widest audience.  This however does not account for independent creators who work on their own projects without the restrictions of larger companies. 

Piper (2016) -  Disney Pixar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTjHEyEAlsc

This was a short film depicting a sandpipers own desire to conquer its fear of water.  This short was shown before Finding Dory (2016).  Though both these films were made by Disney Pixar, the animator’s free rein of Piper compared to the feature length film is evident in the differences in narrative, messages and animation style.  These Disney Pixar shorts have much more room to be experimental as there is no expectant audience to begin with.

Purl (2019) - Pixar Sparkshorts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6uuIHpFkuo

This short above a anthropromorphic yarn ball in a office work environment is perhaps even more unique as it was made by the independant animators of Pixar SparkShorts.  This animation company, owned by Pixar, is aimed at putting new independant animators in the spotlight, it was designed to ‘explore new storytelling techniques, and experiment with new production workflows’ and provide ‘an opportunity to unlock the potential of individual artists and their inventive filmmaking approaches on a smaller scale than our normal fare.”’

https://www.pixar.com/sparkshorts

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Week 2 - Task 2 - Image Tracing

Making a vector from a jpeg in Adobe Illustrator using Image Trace (and then expanding it).   A vector is different from a raster image (in this case a jpeg file) in that the latter is made up of a fixed number of pixels filled with colour while vector files use a different format that allow them to be shaped in any way without changing the resolution.

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Week 2 - Task 1 - Pattern Brushes

Experimenting with animation with Photoshop and the pattern brush, the transform/rotation tool and layers.

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Week 1 Reading

Animation: Genre and Authorship – Paul Wells

This reading chapter covers 4 main areas

History of animation/Forms and approaches

‘Historians have … insisted upon the recognition of other more experimental traditions as the true measure of the potential, variety and freedom of animation as a form.’ (Pg 3)

This refers to both the many forms and techniques that animation genre blankets, emphasising ‘the ‘openness’ of the form’ (pg 5), as well as the development of the genre through different ages of technology and the impacts these changes have had on the process.

‘it is important to stress that the impact of new digital technologies has profoundly altered the nature of this process.’ (Pg 4)

      2.  Distinctive vocabulary and ‘modernity’

Animation: ‘the process of drawing and configuration and photographing a character – a person, an animal, or an inanimate object – in successive positions to create lifelike movements.’ Pg 3-4. As defined by Preston Blair

The animator must ensure that technical aesthetic and conceptual continuity is achieved frame-by-frame.’ Pg 7

Norman McLaren: ‘How it moves is more important than what moves’              -  Directs the animator to think about the act of movement and what it aims            to express.

      3.  Genre

Against broadening of animation genre

‘many films now have such a degree of animated effects that it may be difficult to prevent certain ostensibly ‘live action’ films lobbying for an Animation Oscar’ pg 2

For broadening of animation genre

‘however, the Oscar category may also offer independent animators who do work to full-length…an opportunity to gain recognition in a way that their films never would in the main category.’ Pg 2

      4.  Authorship

‘recognition of the number of roles that combine in the creation of a certain type of animated film, each in a sense claim to a mode of ‘authorship’.

Example 1: Synchromie (1971) - Norman McLaren

The ‘depiction of ‘visual music’’ … ‘The soundtrack is perpetually present as the dominant visual image without a changing colour scheme, and an increasing complexity of bars’ (pg 12) ‘one aspect of the materiality of the form’ (pg 12)

This is an early example of how sound and music is necessary in animation as it diegetic sound cannot be recorded and so it has to be created and fit in with the visuals.

Example 2: Manipulation (1992) - Daniel Greaves 

Self-reflexive animated short of an animator who experiments with his creation that breaks free.

‘This whole sequence is a testament to the graphic freedoms of the form using all of the space to demonstrate the tension between configuration and abstraction.’ Pg 10

Centrality of self-reflexiveness: 

‘this is the key aspect of the ‘unpredictable articulations of the cartoon’ and discuss how animation facilitates the self-conscious enunciation of character as a phenomenological encounter’ pg 11 (Terry Lindvall and Matthew Melton)