The ReNeGade

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My final stop motion animation for Studio VI animation and moving image.

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Studio VI-Animation: FInal statement

The brief for Space Image and Sound was quite interesting one. The brief was very expansive and allowed for me to do anything I wanted. For the project I was interested in creating a stop motion animation that was based on the idea of anthropomorphism which means giving inanimate objects human characteristics or personality. In this case I decided to apply anthropomorphism to toys and have them struggle to want to become human and do human things. Anthropomorphism is widely depicted in modern day media and the reason it is used is to usually attracted the attention of the audience and as it does it renders the character worthy of moral care and human consideration which results in the audience relating more to the character as a human.

This project was mainly influenced by modern day media which commonly depicts anthropomorphism. The main influence of my project is Toy Story as it focuses heavily on anthropomorphism as well as the first one having the character struggle with who/what he really is. However in my animation I am depicting anthropomorphism a little more differently than it is in modern day media, anthropomorphism in media usually depicts toys or animals with very human like behavior, appearance or personality but in my animation I want to focus on the idea of the character (which is a toy) wanting to become human and do human based activities but since he is only a toy he cannot do so, but whenever he comes across a human related situation he thinks of itself becoming human and being able to do those activities. This is the main part of anthropomorphism which emphasizes the idea of giving the inanimate project human thoughts as oppose to human personalities. The main purpose of my work is to show what if a toy did have human features what would they do?

As a creative project the outcome is to create a unique stop motion based animation on anthropomorphism that is different to how it is usually depicted in modern day media. I wanted to use stop motion as the medium as it the characters are depicted through real life photography so it makes it more realistic if they are moving through a real world environment rather than a hand drawn or hand animated world. By using stop motion since its based in the real world the audience can relate more easily to the animation and through the effect of anthropomorphism start to show an emotional connection towards the character.

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Space Image and Sound-Exhibition 2

Woah, after I did the editing of the footage I managed to put them up onto both the screens. Looks quite nice but there are a few editing that I need to fix up to make it look more in sync but that hopefully shouldn't be too hard. There is one slight problem though, the screen on the left is faulty and a dark outline appears on the left of the screen, I asked Kim but he wasnt able to fix it unfortunately so looks like it will have to be displayed like that during exhibition.  

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Space Image and Sound-Some editing

After gathering all the final footage, I took it home and started to do the editing for both the sides that we recorded with. It was a tedious task to sync up all the footage and make sure that both side were playing at the same timing. But I have experience in Premier Pro so it was not that hard for me to do, it just took some very pinpoint adjustments to get right. After thats all done its time for me to test it on the dual screens and see how it looks.

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Space Image and Sound-Exhibition set up 1

So on Monday I finally managed to track down Kim and eventually get hold of the two TV-on-stands that is going to be used in my exhibition. It was rough getting the TV from one side of the studio to the other by myself but after setting it up I was excited to test them. At I first decided to play around with the set up and how the TVs will be placed. The picture below is a possible set up method with the centre focus being on the wall, but it could also be that the two monitors are closer together. There are many options so I will have to test which one would look the best. I was also thinking that the entire set be rotated anti clockwise so that when people come through the door it is the first thing they will see.

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Studio VI-Animation: Materials used

These are the toys that will feature in my stop motion, I decided to use the soft toy as it stands out compared to the other lego toys I am using in order to give them contrast and more easy to distinguish. As well as that I wanted the soft toy to feel quite out of place in the stop motion and he is the one that is more unique compared to the others.

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Studio VI-Animation: Getting there

My stopmotion is getting there, this is one of the last scene I need to do and Ill be onto doing the editing and the finishing touch up.

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Studio VI-Animation: Animation work

Doing so stop motion shooting, it doesnt take as long as I thought and by following the storyboard it was easier for me shoot such as getting the proper camera angles. Some times for some fast movement I used burst shots to give it more action.

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Studio VI- Animation: Storyboard

This is my the new Storyboard for my new Stop Motion animation, it features a soft toy as he ventures around the house of its owner and stumbles across things that he wishes he can do but he cant because he is not actually a human.

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Space Image and Sound reflective statement

The brief for Space Image and Sound was quite interesting one. For the project I was interested in creating a collection of videos that represent the peripheral vision of the human eye, to achieve this I thought of using two cameras one pointing at each side to film.

This studio project has helped me develop my studio practice as unlike previous studio projects this one was done in a smaller group so I had to organize working with my partner and make sure we didn’t fall behind. This was good practice for me as it taught me how to become more oragnised.

As for the practical part of the project because I have a background in video editing as well as being interested in creating. For this project I have mainly been working on Adobe Premier CS6 to edit our work, I have experience in Premier Pro so it was easy for me to collect the footage that we had and edit it into what we wanted to show. This was very important as it allowed me to work faster without the hassle of not understanding the program.

I feel that this project will help me develop myself as a creative practitioner putting my skills to the test and challenging myself to working on something new. It has taught me to be more flexible. Something I feel I need to improve on would be to do a lot more testing and experimenting so that I can see what and how I want the final exhibition to look like.

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Space Image and Sound-Space and setup

We able to be one of the first groups to have access to where we want to set up our installation, so we decided to pick a space where there was a large flat wall and then think about how we want to set it up from there. Below is a mock up of what I want our set up to look like, at the moment I have not been able to access the screens yet as people are using them at the moment so I cant test what the mock up will look like. I am still thinking about what the focus will be in the center or should we just leave the wall blank while people are watching the installation. This would be something I could test on if I could access the monitors.

At this rate it does look like we can test it during our set up period.

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Studio VI-Animation: Influences

One of the main influential anthropomorphism based animation is Toy Story, especially the first one where the character Buzz Lightyear is having trouble with realising that he is actually a toy not a real space ranger. In my animation I was interested in showing something similar which is to give the toy a human characteristic as well as making him want to do human things.

However I am thinking of doing another kind of anthropomorphism which is to focus on the toy character believing that he can become a human but in reality he cant because he is simply a toy. So within the stopmotion I want the character to wish he can become human but not exactly give them human characteristics or personality. 

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This is an edited version of one of our shots, the involved adding a warp stabilizer to the footage, this results in the footage being more smooth but it required the top and bottom of the clip to be cut out to make it more stabilized. Although the effect looks good I have to think of a way to remove the black bars that are present.

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Space Image and Sound-Content

Now that we have some footage as well as our space, we have to think about our content and how we are going to show it. Since we could not have access to a steady cam we had to shoot using a hand held tripod or just holding the DIY double camera mount by hand, this resulted in the footage being shaky as we walked however this effect can be related to our project as we wanted to simulate the peripheral.

So at the moment we are not sure if we want to keep the shaky walking-like footage or edit it and remove the shaking in premier pro. This is something we need to test out during our set up period and see which one looks better.

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Studio VI-Animation:New Idea

After the critique I felt that my animation's idea seem quite unoriginal and I felt that there wasn't much meaning behind it, I was interested in learning some special effects as well as make a cinematic based animation. So I did some research into some other forms of animation and came across the idea of anthropomorphism which is the idea of giving an inanimated object human characteristics and bringing them alive. A lot of animated media today incorporate the idea of anthropomorphism as it allows the audience to treat them with human emotions. 

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Studio VI-Animation: Holiday practice

Over the holidays I decided to do some work and practice on making special effects on After Effects. I first made a short stop motion and from there I watched some tutorials online on creating basic special effects. I got the laser and spark assets from online as I wasn't at a stage of creating them myself. I have had experience in After Effects before so it was not hard for me to do some key framing work. I did learn quite a lot and being my first doing special effects I am quite happy with what I created. I can hopefully integrate these new skills into my future projects. 

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This is the second filming we did for our peripheral vision project. This time we went to more isolated areas that featured trees and bushes. I decided to go film at these kind of places as I wanted to avoid going to places that were familiar to people. It is kind of interesting to watch than the Queen Street one but it does get kind of boring as the environment is more or less the same everywhere. This means I'll have to look around at different places that are interesting to film at but have a lot of variety as well to make it more interesting to watch on screen.