Animating and Illustrating

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Puppet Project - Research

My puppet was based off the Snowboarder Zeb Powell, as winter sports is something I have an interest in and is something I thought would provide interesting opportunities for movement in animation.

Winter sport clothes tend to feature bright colours and bold designs and I thought this would be something interesting to emulate.

Although I started off research with a snowboarder, I looked at snowboarding culture as a whole as well as skateboarding culture. Snowboarding was seen as a rebellious response to the dominant skiing culture when it arose, and the subculture are embraced some elements from punk amd hip hop subcultures. In my research I found parallels between skateboarding and snowboarding subcultures.

I decided to make the puppet a skate boarder rather than a snowboarder because of some shared qualities between the two sports/ subcultures. I also thought that skateboarding would be more flexible and better to work with in terms of what set design and animation can be made for it.

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Adobe After Effects 2

I did a second test with Adobe After Effects, again with the Assets provided on Canvas. This time I created another path animation however this time we learned how to use the camera. I added a camera into the scene, and then was able to turn on 3D editing for the assets I imported. In a second window which had view from the top, I was able to move objects closer or further away from the camera. Here I have the buildings in the mid/ background and trees much closer to the camera. By enabling depth of field, and setting the focus distance and apature to what I needed them to be, the camera would automatically apply blur to objects that aren't in focus.

To create the animation, I didn't need to animate the individual assets as they were static in the scene, and instead animated the position of the camera. Since I had depth of field and 3D layering enabled, the camera automatically calculated how objects should appear to move in relation to it and created a paralax scrolling effect.

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Adobe After Effects Brief (Path Animation with Own Assets) 1

For this brief, we were instructed to create a path animation and make our own assets. I was quite excited for this task because I immediately got ideas on how to use Adobe After Effect's tools (in particular its camera) to create atmospheric effects (such as with particles). I had tried to acomplish similar things with other software in the past (mainly with video editors) however found After Effects to be much better suited for this.

I knew immediately that I wanted to try and create something that could pass as an area in a video game.

[erikscourseblog]

Adobe After Effects 1

When starting with Adobe Effects, I initially used assets provided on Canvas to learn how to use the program. I learned how to import assets into Adobe After Effects, group assets into a composition so that they can be treated as one singular object while retaining the option to be edited individually, as well as animate some basic movement with Assets. For my first test with Assets, I aranged a row of houses in the mid/ background and a row of trees in the foreground. I did not add a camera to the scene as we had not learned how to do so yet, so I had to animate all the assets moving manually to simulate a camera moving by. I animated the assets in the background moving slower to try and create a paralax scrolling effect/ depth effect.

We learned how to animate an object moving in a path and how to import gifs and change their frame rates. I imported the provided gif of a bird, created a shape layer of the path I wanted it to move in, and the copied over the path of the layer to the bird's position.

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Sequential Practice: Experimental Animation PT03 - Pixillation

For this brief we had to work in teams to create a stop motion animation using ourselves as props. This means that we had to take a photograph for every time that we changed position. This technique can be used to create magic or impossible motion or action, such as objects of people suddenly appearing or dissapearing. In a team of four people, we planned out a fight scene to animate. We drew a very rough storyboard of all the actions we would need to do. At any given time, at least one of us was operating the camera. We had to be thoughtful when directing eachother, thinking about the timing and when someone would enter or leave a the shot. We kept the camera in the same position the whole time.

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Sequential Practice: Experimental Animation PT02 - Animation in the real world

For this assigment, I had to record real life footage, and then animate a character over it to create a seemless loop in which the character appears to interact with the real world around them. I recorded footage of a location at the university where I thought there would be "platforms" the character could interact with (in this case, the scaffolding) and foreground elements that the character could be behind (the people walking by) to make them seem like a part of teh environment.

When animating the character, I tried to keep in mind the principle of Squash and Strench, so that my characters movements woudl apepar to have weight and momentum.

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Sequential Practice: Experimental Animation PT01 - Collage

In this lesson, we split off into teams and created a contuious animation using collage. We cut out segements from magazines to create a set and characters. We found multiple instances of a person throughout a magazine so we decided to use them as we would have multiple poses of them.

We used a stop motion technique where we aranged the character(s) on the set and took a picture every time we changed something. We used a camera with a rostrum set up and the software Dragonframe. Although we had multiple "sprites" of the same character (multiple cut outs from magazines) meaning we had multipel poses, we still opted to cut some of them at the joints to have more options with mobility.

We tried to impliment the animation principle of slow in and slow out when creating this animation, particularly with the movement of the character's limbs and body on the set.