Francesco's ND Research, Inspiration & Artwork B^)

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Animation Research Danny Antonucci Interview

This animation video was very inspiring towards making the final animation. Ed edd n Eddy's creator, Danny Antonucci mentions many interesting things in this interview such as the character's different coloured tongues, and the different ways they blink and run all go towards characteristics and differentiates them from the other characters which I think is very smartly done.

There is also a 'boiling' line which is similar to old fashioned cartoons in which the character's outlines continuously move even when the character is still to give a bit of life to the character. This is done by drawing the character in the same position 3 times on different sheets on paper and continuously overlaying them while shooting to give the effect in which the lines are 'boiling' or 'bubbling'. 

I liked this effect and so decided to replicate it in the 2D fully animated flash scenes by continuously redrawing the scene or the next frame rather than keeping the animation smooth. This way it allows the character to have a more old fashioned feel to it.

The idea of different characteristics especially is one to definitely look in to, if not for this animation, then definitely for one in the future as this helps to give the characters in-show a personality and a more defined character which I feel is very important when creating characters and animations, because it will allow the viewers to reflect with the characters and to believe the allusion of the characters really existing in their own world.

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I read several comic books and manga books during the creation of the comic. I wanted to get an understanding of speed lines, panel overlays, full images, items crossing over the panel lines etc and how it conveyed towards different feelings and effects in which the reader would feel upon viewing these scenes. Shaman King, Spider-Man etc each had examples of these, which I myself found effective as to me, certain scenes which this happened in appeared either more serious or more important than previous scenes before it.

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Practice

I crashed a quick session of life drawing several days for a body study and a better understanding of anatomy, however the classes which I crashed were only quick sessions, I really found it useful for becoming more alert and focused whilst looking at what it was I was drawing and moving between what was infront of me and what I was drawing.

If I could have taken more classes or even studied life drawing, this would definitely have been very useful for understanding anatomy of the human bodies and would have helped towards the fully animated Flash scenes in the final animation.

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Botanic Gardens Primary Resource

I visited the Japanese section of the Botanic gardens for inspiration on scenery and wildlife that could be used within the animation and took about 149 photos. While uploading all 149 is a bit too much, I decided to upload the few that are relevant to what I either found interesting, or inspiring towards the final piece of the animation. Several plantlife or scenery may look similar to scenes which appear in the comic or animation.

While at the Botanic Gardens however, I spent around 2-3 hours and enjoyed the time I spent there. The gardens was definitely enjoyable and very inspiring towards creating the 'jungle' scenes in both animation and comic due to the different shadings of green and the unique appearances of the plant and trees.

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Botanic Gardens Images, Primary Research

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Images used for the Final Animation

To create the characters, objects and scenery used in the final version of the animation I first drew each character and item as shown above and fixed them up. The process however was different for the characters than they were for the items and objects.

For the characters, I drew them in pencil, began inking several of them before I decided to digitally ink them on the computer using a program called Paint Tool SAI. Once inked, I digitally coloured the image, imported it to Photoshop and removed the background to create an image of the character quick and easy to edit once imported to Flash.

For the backgrounds and I drew, inked and watercolour painted them manually. Afterwards I enhanced the contrast on photoshop and continued to remove the background as I had done so with the characters.

As for the mountains, I selected an image of a watercolored building I had drawn on photoshop, copied and then pasted it behind the lineart of the mountain to have a set appearance for the mountain.

I then resized every item which increased the quality by shrinking down the images, increasing the pixels.

Unfortunately the digital files are misplaced at a college computer and I won't be able to upload them at the time being, however the final version is seen in the final piece.

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Acetate Experiments

In the first 3 photos is a test I did using acetate. I attempted to draw, ink (lineart) and watercolour paint on acetate in which I hoped it to be possible in order to use them in a possible stop-motion animation final piece however, I learned that it was not as simple as it sounded to paint on acetate, And that I would have to paint on the back of the acetate paper. Not to mention that it did not look too clean either.

while attempting to paint on the same side as the inked image, the paint would rub off the original ink which was not helpful at all, meaning that painting and drawing on acetate was out of the question.

The last two photos are the 2nd consideration towards the stop motion animation idea. I would print off the characters and backgrounds on acetate and slide them along the paper in a stop motion method to have the characters 'move' similar to the paper animation I have already posted below titled 'animated jouney'.

The problem with this however was that the characters were transparent and objects and backgrounds behind them could be seen, as well as the cost of the acetate was higher and mistakes (which could be make) would become a waste of money, though were a learning curve. As well as these, the paper was also reflective and if I would hold the images on a slope, should I use bluetac to keep them in place, it would be very noticeable. Unfortunately, these led me to abandon the idea of using acetate towards the stop-motion idea.

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I looked at images I took whilst at Orkney for inspiration and media practice. The first 3 images are from photos of locations at the Orkney Islands, while the last one is from a photo of me looking over the boat at Orkney's 'Old Man of Hoy' rock while the sun sets.

I practiced using copic ciao marker pens, watercolour paints and coloured pencils but overall decided to use watercolour paints due to the nice relaxed feel acquired from using them, and the fact that it could tie in nicer with the traditional Asian feel.

I liked using the copic markers due to the strong and sharp colours I could achieve from them and the how they were vibrant with energy, especially the blues on the jumper in the last image, however, with larger images, the quality of the image may lessen as the markings of the ink would show if not coloured quick enough. 

I did like the coloured pencils also, however I would not say they are my best point as I feel they appear too plain. Maybe had I had more time to practice different techniques I would have learned more effective blending methods however, I did not want to use too much time with coloured pencils and left them after these pieces. I did however, attempt several methods of cross hatch blendings and circular/oval blendings with the coloured pencils.

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Stop-Motion Animation

Stop motion (also known as stop frame) is an animation technique used to make an inanimate object appear to move on its own. The object is moved bit by bit between individually photographed frames, which creates the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of re-positioning. Stop motion animation using Plasticine is called clay animation or 'clay-mation'. Not all stop motion requires figures or models; many stop motion films can involve using humans (pixelation), household appliances and other things for comedic effect. Stop motion using objects is sometimes referred to as object animation.

The reason I looked into this animation technique is because I enjoyed viewing animated films in the past and still do today and have always wanted to attempt making a series of short animation with this technique. With the Final Major Project, I will be able create a stop-motion piece or at least smaller animations as part of tests and research towards the final. Also, due to the fact that at my laptop's current condition, animating on Flash could become unreliable which I would not want to experience halfway through animating and potentially have the film only half complete at the end.

The term "stop motion", related to the animation technique, is often spelled with a hyphen, "stop-motion". Both orthographical variants, with and without the hyphen, are correct, but the hyphenated one has, in addition, a second meaning, not related to animation or cinema: "a device for automatically stopping a machine or engine when something has gone wrong" (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993 edition).

Stop motion is often confused with the time lapse technique, where still photographs of a live surrounding are taken at regular intervals and combined into a continuous film. Time lapse is a technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured is much lower than that used to view the sequence. When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing.

Stop motion animation has a long history in film. It was often used to show objects moving as if by magic. The first instance of the stop motion technique can be credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for Vitagraph's The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1897), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life. In 1902, the film Fun in a Bakery Shop used the stop trick technique in the "lightning sculpting" sequence. French trick film maestro Georges Méliès used true stop motion to produce moving title-card letters for one of his short films, but never exploited the process for any of his other films.

One of the earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary, which dazzled audiences in 1912. December 1916 brought the first of Willie Hopkins' 54 episodes of "Miracles in Mud" to the big screen. Also in December 1916, the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, began experimenting with clay stop motion. She would release her first film in 1917, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Industrial Light & Magic often used stop motion model animation for films such as the original Star Wars trilogy: the chess sequence in Star Wars, the Tauntauns and AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, and the AT-ST walkers in Return of the Jedi were all stop motion animation, some of it using the Go films. The many shots including the ghosts in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the first two feature films in the RoboCop series use Phil Tippett's go motion version of stop motion.

Reasons for using stop motion instead of the more advanced CGI include the low entry price and the appeal of its distinct look. It is now mostly used in children's programming, in commercials and some comic shows such as Robot Chicken. Another merit of stop motion is that it is superior in displaying textures. This is appreciated by a number of movie makers, such as Tim Burton, who produced the puppet-animated 2005 film Corpse Bride.

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I travelled to the Orkney Islands at the end of March with a group of people from the Fruitmarket Gallery. Whilst there one of the coordinators decided upon a task to make a short animated film using characters people would randomly generate through either randomly selecting names, or sentences from books/leaflets and putting them together.

While this was impossible to do over there as we attempted this on a train, once I returned home, I set everything up (paper cutouts, backgrounds etc) and used the same stop-motion technique I used on the figure to create this. I moved each image slowly and took a photo of it.

However, with this attempt, I used a tripod for some scenes, and for others, I held the camera above the picture and either zoomed in or out manually to acquire a zoom and pan effect.

This is the type of animation I want to use in my animation as I find using paper cutouts is less time consuming to animate and the same effect is received upon watching it.

If worst comes to the worst, I will recreate this effect on Flash and have several scenes animated fully. It will save more time as well as I will simply have the characters slide in a motion effect, which will allow me to do more towards the fully animated scenes.

i created the music via an app on my phone. It was a keyboard app. I would set the keyboard to sound like a guitar, play a tune, record it on my computer, and insert it to the video track. Unfortunately it doesn't contribute too much to the story, though it sounds nice.

If I do use music in my final piece I will try to have more meaningful music to the scenes which they are played at.

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After watching several episodes of A Town Called Panic, and having seen other animations in the past such as Wallace and Gromit, I decided to attempt cretaing a Stop Motion animation myself.

When I went to Dundee to drop off my portfolio, there was, conveniently, an anime convention taking place, which I decided to check out.

There were many people selling things at many stalls, similar to a carboot sale, however, one caught my attention. They were selling small Marvel figurines. I bought a few to use for future animations I could try out and made an animation with the Spider-Man figure I purchased that day.

I used blue-tac at the bottom of the feet to keep the figure attached to the desk and not fall over, and I used folded a cereal box inside out and attached a white sheet of paper to it for the background. I set up a tripod, with the camera attached and began. the process took about an hour and a half for everything seen in the video, but the end result looked brilliant (in my opinion). 

Unfortunately, the camera's auto-focus would blur several times and I was unable to correct this, however I learned from the process the reality of how much time goes behind making even just 17 seconds of animation. If I am to make my full animation for my FMP I will definitely need to give myself enough time to do everything in it.

The process however was long, I had to move the figure slightly, take a photo, and repeat. Several times the character fell over and moved out of place, which I then had to look back over at my camera for the previous image to see where about on the desk Spider-Man was in order to have him back at the same spot without creating any mistakes or continuity errors. All in all, I think it turned out okay, and I learned the importance of precision when it comes to animation and patience as well.

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Final Piece for my Mini FMP

This was the final piece I created for my final piece back in February. I hadn't uploaded it to here unfortunately, but as I used the animation technique of 'Pixelation' (which I shall post sooner on here) I decided it was effective to use towards the research and experiment stage of my FMP

This was created by taking multiple pictures of my friend staying very still (at times) and moving very slowly (at other times) in order to get a near video/film effect once put together. I would then take the images, tell him to move slowly, or I myself would move (to have the rotation) whilst he sat still.

I then edited every image, manually, on a website to create a 'polygon graphic' look to the image, so that it would appear that as the character moved, everything behind him would transform into polygons. The process took about 9 hours as I had to resize the image, save it, import it to the website, edit it by selecting everything bit by bit, then print screening the page, pasting it back onto paint and saving it again.

I would have used Photoshop, however the program didn't have any effects to achieve what I was aiming to do unfortunately. Nevertheless, the final piece looks good and could have been slightly better had my friend moved slightly slower and had I made the polygon effect much more apparent, and is appear slightly too transparent.

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Here is an episode of 'A Town Called Panic' which tells the story of an object from space falling down to Earth and being accidentally eaten by the character 'Cowboy'. This object once inside, makes him transform into a red Hulk-like character when angry, similar to Marvel's character The Hulk.

The animation is quick and slightly choppy, but then that is what they aimed for, to obtain the 'crude' appearance. This gives the episode a comedic feel as the characters seem quirky and jumpy due to the way they animated it.

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Animation Research #4 - A Town Called Panic

A Town Called Panic is a French puppetoon series created via using small figurines and doing the Stop-Motion animation technique in which the figures would be moved slightly and a picture would be taken after each slight movement.

The show was distributed by Aardman Animations in 2000, and follows the everyday events of the characters; Cowboy, Indian and Horse in a small rural town as they live their lives. There are 20 episodes, each consisting of about 5 minutes each and were filmed to deliberately look cheap for a crude feel to the show.

The show later had a spinoff feature film of the same name 'A Town Called Panic' which released in May 2009 and debuted at Cannes. I have yet to find a full version to watch online, but from trailers and spoken word, it retains the same comedic style as the show and was well received.

In 2007 - 2010 several of the scenery and characters were even reused for Milk Adverts, and features a pirate, bicyclist and cow (as opposed to the show's cast of Indian, Cowbow and Horse).

While not thinking about using figures for animating I believe it would be effective to attempt using figures in a stop motion, mainly to get an understanding of how it works and the process behind it.

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Last video for the Code Lyoko research;

This is a fan-made trailer for Code Lyoko Evolution made by somebody on Youtube, replicating the style of the original series. I find this one works much better than the official opening (below) as the music and transitions are the same as the cartoon openings, showing live-action with CGI counterparts as the cartoon shows 2D with CGI counterparts.

the live action official intro has too much of a drastic style change, making it feel slightly different than the show it is meant to represent, however the style of the episodes are the same which is the primary thing about the series. 

Again, while I'm not doing an opening, it is always a good idea to keep in mind what is effective in the process and outcome of animations such as this.

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The intro video for Code Lyoko Evolution, which has the 2D replaced with live-action

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This is the opening to Code Lyoko, revealing the main characters and their 3D counterparts. As you can see, the 3D models have been corrected, the style of different in terms of realism and colour in response to the more detailed and shaded previous films (posted below) and the flow of what they do visual-wise is placed fully in the opening, allowing viewers to know what they should expect whilst watching.

I'm not making an opening for my animation, but it's something to look into how it's done as this leaves everything in terms of animation sense and style known to the viewer. I also find it is pieced together well and does what it is meant to, by that I mean reveal the characters and show some scenery.