RCA Animation Club

A space for all cohorts of the Royal College of Art to come together and watch/discuss animation. 

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RCA Animation Club  x Postponed x 

Due to technical issues and finding ways to adapt the workshops to not be limited too RCA students or just an online platform -our sessions have now been postponed and kept to the confinement of RCA Campus (and currently limited to the animation programme) moving forward. There will be continued screenings and in course workshops held by the coming year students open to the RCA Cohort as we lead from 2021 into 2022. 

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We hope to open the doors to have a mix of in person and online events (open to all) whether it be continued here at RCA or else where in the near future. Look out for these updates on the Student Union page as the Royal College of Art goes through programme changes in 2022/2023 for a stream of limited events.  

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RCA Animation Club - Pass the Frame Workshop

In this Pass the Frame Workshop we focused on making an animation loop together with colouring and re-illustrating a sequences of frames with a basic shape that was passed on from one participant to the next. This outcome will continue outside of the session until all established frames have been assigned and handed in. 

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If you signed up for the session but missed out on the workshop you will be able to print out spare frames at home to colour in or find ways to re create the image in 3D or digitally painted in Procreate. You can try a range of styles if you want to to finish more than one frame. Don’t forget the results of this piece will also be exhibited on our new Gallery page.

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RCA Animation Club - Joining Across RCA Week!

Whilst we still plan to have one more one off event this month- we will also like to announce that the RCA Animation Club will be joining RCA’s annual AcrossRCA teaching weeks for 2021. Current Club Leader Anayis N. Der Hakopian will be running a full week of workshops and talks to with recreating mythos from participants cultural roots. 

This will include a range of sessions focused on visual and writing techniques and exploring how these mythos have been drawn upon on newly released and upcoming animation. 

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As of Summer 2021 Volume 1 of Our Mythos has been released and can be found one Issuu and Gumroad. Entries for Volume 2 will be open to individuals both in and outside of RCA in 2022/23. 

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RCA Animation Club - Mixed Media Workshop

This Mixed Media Workshop focused on mixing, crafting and animation as we will use a mixture of mediums to create a new world and characters for a short animation (both with traditional and digital techniques) as a follow on from the last sketch session. After a quick intro, we focused on gathering materials and planning the short piece that participants might want to create. This can focus on creating a world that the character can fit into or stand out in. The last segment of the workshop focused on how these different dimensions and styles can be pushed in these and what elements can be separated and animated.  

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Don't forget all pieces will be exhibited on our new Gallery page, so if you want to finish up your piece after the session do send it our way and tag us on social media. Whether you plan to work with paint, ink or cut outs make sure to have some preferred materials prepared in advance or on hand to get crafting for this workshop whether you joined us in person or want to follow along with the recording.

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RCA Animation Club - Sketch Session: Collage!

For our second Sketch Session in 2021 we stuck into Collage! Working with digital manipulation/edits, funky combo draws or sticking cut outs together to create a new piece. Like the previous workshop we started with a quick intro to the session with some example guides for those who might be struggling to come up with ideas before moving onto drawing and collage making. 

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We looked at a range of ways that collage has been used in both design and animation, from working in layers and working together to plan a composition for a scene to designing characters with scrap materials or stock photos.

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These are all relaxed sessions, where people can join in collectively to draw and craft with us throughout the year. Make sure to bring and prep your preferred medium before the start of these session, whether you are working on a tablet or traditionally with paper, magazines, paints, glue and your trusty sketchbook  unless special materials are requested on the event outline.

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RCA Animation Club - 2021 Introducing... 

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For 2021 we are launching a range of workshops! As you might have already seen in January, we are focusing both on animation and as well as creating open events for those who are interested in learning, discussing and just drawing from all art backgrounds. Anayis our Club Leader will also be leading the “Our Mythos” project during Across RCA which will result in an online publication - so make sure to check out those details on Moodle and don’t forget to register before February 10th for the workshops, talks and projects you want to be a part of. 

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 We our opening our doors for students to submit proposals for workshops they might like to run with us so we can get a diversity of skills and artistic approaches within these sessions that can inspire our members to try something new. 

We also launched our Gallery as you might have seen in our news before. So don’t forget to go and check that out too, email us your results from our workshops so they can be added on to our page!

Art Shares and Sketch Sessions are live and will be reoccurring events for those who want to sit and draw and those who want to share their projects to the cohort.

Will also be organising game nights, quiz events and fun social and skill building events. Keep a look out for this!

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Workshops to look forward to include “Introduction to animation!” We listened to you all and we will be running lessons and trying to get recorded sessions up on the RCA net for those who want to learn how to put animation together digitally and traditionally. 

Will be running Character Design 2 and 3 repeating on some principles we introduced in our first session as well as new exercises. With these sessions will be introducing themes and worldbuilding techniques. 

Narrative and Writing Workshops - We will focusing on a range of exercises, illustrating to writing and writing stories to illustration - including storyboarding and script tasks (a lot more to be announced in these themes) 

Based on Classics - Recreating artwork and stories, looking at famous paintings and re illustrating them or using similar techniques/styles to create new worlds and stories. 

Collaborative - We will be running more collaborative sessions though out the year with fun exercises and events that anyone can participate on including individuals outside the RCA institution. 

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That is the round up for this academic year and we are committed to running events through the summer for those who want to collaborate on interesting new projects and possibilities or even short film workshops. We are looking for people to join us on a possible future podcast whether they’d like to be part of the team or being the one discussing their animation work so do get in touch if you’d like to hear more about this!

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RCA Animation Club - Art Share

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Part of our 2021 campaign we are launching art shares every few months for students at RCA to showcase work in progress or finished work to the cohort from all backgrounds whether their work be illustration, audio or written text. This first session brought up questions on what we can plan for a more efficient art shares, to give students the opportunity to sign up and express what piece they want to showcase or get feedback on.

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For our second edition will be having a open discussion with students explaining their projects and guiding us through their progress of work and thinking. Thank you Shangyun Wu for sharing your music with us and hope to have you part of our future projects and shares to come. Make sure to keep a look out for our sign up sheets for future Art Share’s that will have a limitation to them so we can get around to viewing work from everyone who signs up to share in the session.

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In addition to these Art Share’s will be reintroducing animation discussion sessions based on work that is being produced in the industry like we did in our welcome event.  

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RCA Animation - Sketch Session

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With so much interest in drawing from a previous session we have decided to launch the RCA Animation Club Sketch Sessions which we plan to keep going every month inviting students and grads to join us a themed sketch session. Inspired by the RCA Drawing Club we wanted to provide another platform for students to draw outside of their class schedule and get to know one another especially if they can’t make it due to the time difference of the session. These are all open to interpretation for those who might like to take inspiration to the theme discussed or just to get drawing. If we were in college we’d all do this on campus in a classroom, instead we are trying to learn how to sketch online collectively. 

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This first session was based around the Ben Day Comic Dot and the textures/mark making used within Retro Comics and then was established as a style for Pop Art. We looked into how this is currently being used in Animation with the splendid feature Spiderman Into the Spiderverse and within other media including Face Paint/ Body Art. 

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The full pdf can be viewed through this link for those who want to take a look at what was discussed and some of the drawing suggestions we had. 

Will be doing another session in March so keep a look out for the information under events here and on the RCASU events page. 

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RCA Animation Club - Gallery Launch 

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To all our followers who might not already know - we have launched an accompanying site to our blog which is the RCA Animation Club Gallery where we will be uploading the results from workshops and challenges ran by the club. 

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Winter theme gifs are all already uploaded - for those who might have completed earlier workshops and want to still submit their pieces please drop us a line at [email protected] 

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RCA Animation Club - Winter Workshop

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Two Workshops in one week! The first session was a learning curb as we understand what different backgrounds everyone is from and as requested we are planning a introduction session to basic animation techniques and pathways for those who want to become more acquainted with animation for these workshop sessions. 

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Back to this Winter Workshop we focused on creating animated loops to be sent as cute Ecards or gifs that can be shared to family and close friends during the pandemic holidays whether they be Christmas orientated or seasonal. Participants worked on 1080x1080 canvas for this workshop, sketching out initial ideas and continuing to finish gifs they started in their own time. It was great seeing everyone planning out animation in our workshop as well as getting some time at the end to play some games. Also a thank you for those who couldn’t make the session but contributed with some animation that is now on our gallery page. 

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It is difficult to commit to an idea in a short space of time and find ways of making it limited yet impactful and we got such great results! For those who were picking up a digital pen, brush or pencil for the first time to try and animate congrats for the effort and putting time in to try and learn even if you weren’t able to complete your gifs this time around. Hopefully with the more gif shops your able to start picking up the skills you need to find a system you like to work with.  

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RCA Animation Club - Animation for Social Media 

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It was a difficult learning curve on how to get an animation session working online when we probably would have done this as a physical drop in animation session testing out different techniques on campus if it weren’t for the current covid crises. So we’ve been trying to find ways of introducing fun animation exercises for those who are both beginners and experienced in animation so that everyone feels like they have a platform they can inspire to work in without feeling restricted or even bored. This included focussing on possibilities of animating on paper and then how to edit your work onto a timeline, working digitally with different software and creating a piece that can be advertised on Instagram Stories. Trying out both new perspectives an themes within everyone work. 

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This particular workshop was inspired by our first year animation student Pey who had created a vertical piece for her Instagram with a beautiful cat - so we wanted to see what other students would come up with it working in a similar format. So instead of working with 1080x1080 for a normal gif or the typical 1920x1080 we asked our participants to work on a 1080x1920 canvas and see how they would create looping animation to work in this perspective. 

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Themes given to mix and match from were: 

1) Dreams

2) Theatre

3) Phantoms 

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For inspiration we watched the Knock Knock Music Video that showcased how animation can be created as interactive pieces to be played simultaneously on digital devices. This is a form of animation that needs lots of taught and brought up concepts of creating digital stories that can be tapped through on Instagram. Instagram its self is a platform that can be used to create interesting stories, whether updating the lives of fictional characters or illustrated interactive theatrical pieces that play in real time. @livinthefuture is a great example of that, documenting the future world that the protagonist Liv has been transported to in an interactive clue based story. 

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As a result we had some monstrous faces being produced, wonder dreams, dark phantoms and even an Alice and Wonderland taking a trip down the rabbit hole. For future sessions within the year will be repeating this workshop working on designing Instagram Stickers and AR flitters. 

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RCA Animation Club - Shape Exercise 

As requested we are uploading some sections from the character design workshop for those who couldn’t make it for the session or access the recording. This is a warm up exercise for those wanting to work with shape and themes- try to draw a design with the reference image provided made out the matching shape. A cat with a base of circles or a sharp tringle corner cowboy. Play with the line of action and breaking down sections of the character. 

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RCA Animation Club - Character Design Workshop 1

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For one of our first sessions after our welcome event we put together a Character Design Workshop that is accessible for all levels and open to those who want to grow confidence in their drawing and character creations. Remember there is no such thing as drawing a character wrong but there are many ways to help improve production design when animating your characters or trying different styles that can help improve the affect of your drawing. 

In this session we covered initial design in animation, sketching and working under pressure with your ideas based on themes and exercise. This include creating character with restricted shapes, based on given themes and generating new fun drawings and finding what people are comfortable and uncomfortable drawing. 

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One particular link/challenge presented for those who wanted to try different themes as well as find a place to be inspired we suggest taking a look at the Character Design Challenge for more info and setting up tasks to draw and experimental with theme and design. There is also a great publication the Character Design Quarterly which invites known artists in the industry to showcase their design pathway and how they go around creating their characters. 

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The drawings as result of this workshop were amazing and create to see people from different skill levels and backgrounds try some of the exercises that were set up. For those who had to leave early or had program clash the information for this project will be uploaded in chunks as well as link to the final PDF to be added here. 

You’ll find all the details presented in the workshop under our Workshop TAB as well as some resources linked in our resource page. 

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RCA Animation Club - Welcome Event 

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Thank you for all who joined us for our welcome event on Friday November 6th where we gathered and discussed some of our favourite animation and the different creative fields we are in. We had students working in film, animation and sound join us from our cohorts at the RCA talking about independent animation as well as some of great features that are being released in 2020.

We asked our new members to share some of the work that has inspired them the most, here were some of the results.

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Beth (from Experimental Animation Y1) shared a beautiful experimental stop motion piece focusing on textures - You Could Sunbathe in this Storm by Alice Dunseath. You can see how this is reflected in Beth’s own practices as she works with a range of material and textures in her experimental pieces. This was definitely a stand out unexpected piece in the discussion that evening.

Another experimental piece was introduced by Lewis (a 2nd year student from animation who also focus on experimental animation - he also showed us some amazing tests he created animating on film) who shared some work from Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren with the animation Begone Dull Care a short piece created directly on film strip.

Some of the examples brought up didn’t stop at animation as we had Jiazhen introduce us to experimental moving image short by Mark Leckey - Dream English Kid that inspired her in her own moving image shorts. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be just the animation that inspires you but also use of sound as shown with Shangyun example as she shared a clip from Cartoon Network’s popular cartoon Adventure Time. (as well as introducing us to how this has affected her own sound practice working with animators).

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We also had some Disney features mentioned as we discuss Treasure Planet and Lion King before we moved onto independent features with Bipasha (1st Year Narrative Animation) introducing us to Cartoon Saloon’s The Secret of Kells before discussing the Apple TV feature special with Cartoon Saloon - Wolfwalkers (2020) which at the time of this event was being released for early preview before it’s official December Apple TV launch.

It is to note there is a great interest in more 2D independent films after there being a dip in 2D features during the 2010s. Rachel (1st year Experimental Animation) introduced us to an early French animated feature from 2003 - The Triplets of Belleville. 

There are so many styles presented in our welcome event and within recent animated features and cartoons. It shows how this is currently changing the way some networks are producing their animated content especially when this is viewed alongside more experimental shows like Headspace and Midnight Gospel. 

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It’s been great seeing some of the discussions from this intro session. We hope to have more club sessions like these -with examples of animation to watch from our members soon. For now we will be split between animation and general workshop sessions up to early 2021. More open discussion sessions to be announced.

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RCA Animation Welcome!

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Thank you for all who signed up to found the RCA Animation Club which is open to all students, graduates and staff at the Royal College of Art (with planned events for open access to students and creatives in other institutions). Will be doing a lot of planning and organising for new exciting events through out our first academic year 2020-2021 online and doing are best to make it accessible to everyone who is split across the different time zones.

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Currently we don’t have access to session recordings but we will be do our best to create guides and short clips that can be accessed by those who might have missed out on the sessions due to class clashes and time zones. 

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Keep a look out for more information on all our socials as we announce animation events, discussions sessions, doodle clubs and more.