Rebecca Downes

LSAD 1st year Art and Design - Animation

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Animation Statement

While this section of semester 2 passed very quick, I really enjoyed what I was learning as each week offered new things to experiment with.

Before being accepted into this elective I hadn’t done much in terms of animation, bar just the workshops that were offered. I was nervous in that sense that I hadn’t done much but I was able to pick up what was being taught quickly I think. It was comforting doing all the group bonding / team work projects and felt more at ease asking my peers for help on stuff. These 4 weeks have been great and I’m looking forward on continuing.

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Sketch Book / Research Book Video

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Research

My Walk Cycle

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Research

THE WALK CYCLE

In animation, a walk cycle is a series of frames or illustrations drawn in sequence that loop to create an animation of a walking character. It’s looped over and over again so that you don’t have to keep drawing each step repeatedly.

There are 4 main positions:

- Contact - The foundation. It’s the start and end of each step and sets the stage for how your walk is going to look. Both feet are making contact with the ground. The weight is split between each leg

- Down - The full weight of the character goes down and shifts to the contacting foot. Lowest position. 

- Passing - Half way pose. Character’s legs pass each other. The weight of your character will start to go up. 

- Up - Highest position. Character’s weight should be leaning forward and the heel of the back foot is off the ground. 

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26/04/22

We went to Fota Wildlife in Cork for a drawing trip. I haven’t done much of live sketching animals and at times if was difficult when they kept moving around. I took photos of the animals also but I mostly stuck tried to draw them in the moment, except for the giraffe mid-chew which was completely drawn from a photo I took. I liked drawing the meerkats but I think my favourite out of the lot in Rupert the Red Panda.

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Research

What makes a make movie poster great?

The most effective movie posters present the themes in the film without resorting to flat out saying what it’s about. They use imagery, whether a close-up of a character or item that’s a major plot point, or a simple graphic, to establish the film’s plot.

One thing that I am tired in seeing in movie posters in the floating heads. Take Thor Ragnork movie for example. It shows unnecessary characters that are not a main focus in the movie at all. The other one is much better with just Thor in his new look and the background showing just a stadium/arena 

The original Halloween poster where the knife morphs into the pumpkin is genius. The ET poster is iconic, being replicated and referenced through movies today. A new one that I found is the Lightyear poster, it shows perfectly how Pixar is going the sci-fi route. 

Personally I think simplicity makes the best movie poster.

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Research

12 Principles of Animation

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Learned that how if you double click the object being animated it separates into a sub layer where you are able to add another action. After making a few with the help of Paul we then tried by ourselves. One of the videos I had done 2 sublayers so it moving across the screen, shrinking/growing in size and turning. And how it will repeat if new sub layer doesn’t take up as many frames as the main layer.

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Using Premiere Pro I added the audio recording of my brother saying ‘Hello’.  One thing about replacement animation that you wouldn’t really consider if how precise every placement has to be to make it run smoothly. 

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This is another audio that I found from a video in my camera roll. I was able to remove the background noise better in this one. 

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I found this video in my camera roll and thought that the audio would be funny to use. I tried to edit out the background noise as much as I could but still missed a but at the end. 

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Today we were taught how to create an animation to an audio by lip-syncing the phonemes. Each mouth image had to be made into a symbol and that allows the mouth movements to align themselves. We all did a practice one to the audio ‘This is fun’ before trying again with our own audios.

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End result without the sound that will be added in later.

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First trial with just the mouth shapes. It does not run smoothly at all and I’m glad now that I did this test so I could see where I could add more mouth shapes in as in-betweens.

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To make the base I used cardboard, tinfoil, kitchen roll and a whole lot of tape to stick it all together. I didn’t have a lot of clay with me so I had to work with what I had. The proportions are exactly right and the colours mixed a bit as I was putting it together but I’m happy with how it turned out. I had no red clay so I had to colour the white in with a marker. Pretty much just the front view is complete, the back still has all the tissue and tape showing and the hair designs only go as far back to where the ears are. To do the hair the image of Kubo came into my mind with how its just rolled up lines of clay but way more looser that what I’ve done.

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Each sound that the mouth makes has a different shape.

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Resaerch

GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995)

It is an animated neo-noir cyberpunk thriller film directed by Mamoru Oshii.

This was my first time watching this movie and while it’s not something I would normally watch it had an interesting concept and you could see how much this movie influenced others. The pace was much slower than modern anime movies and a huge use of still shots were used but it did make you more focused on the plot and dialogue rather than on all the movement around the characters.