City Lit Year 1 Animation Day 1 & 2

I've slightly had a go at some animation on my own with some success and also made sure I did some research before the class, which paid off in class actually as my group were able to make a pretty good little 10 second film in the space of 40 mins. 10 second film in 40 mins!! yes it's that time-consuming. The theme we were set was TIME.

Collaborating with others was sometimes difficult - i found that I could lead and that I had lots of ideas, and that I could also hone them in and encourage contributions from everyone.

Given my lack of time I'm hesitant about pursuing animation for my own direction, however it does link to my background making tv, my love of taking photos, and also setting up scenes, making objects, playing with dolls' houses etc. The great thing about animation or - I should really say - stop motion - is you can make the impossible happen - you can really make anything happen! It's also very satisfying, but you have to be patient.

The main tip I took from an online short course on Skillshare that I'd seen was, that it's crucial to have a beginning middle and end to your story,

As you can see in the three examples my group made in class, the one that doesn't have a story is the least successful (the third one) but that was because we had very limited time and we were working out what we could do with our bodies in that one.

Examples of ground-breaking animations to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Wp96uG-N8&feature=youtu.be

Tarkovsky

William Kentridge

Norman McClaren

Pinot (uses the Vine app to make short and clever clips, using his illustration skills and blending with reality. )

We were taught by Angel Dardem . I had every good intention to make more animations at home, but time got the better of me and as usual, the next topic of my attention quashed time for the previous one. Got loads of notes though.

Here is the entire class's animations in one video , visible on Vimeo here .

One thing to remember:

If you want your movement to be very flowing (eg a Fimo Man walking appearing realistic) you need to make the gaps between the individual shots very small, with frames at 2 per shot. So every time you press the button to take a shot, you can set it to automatically take 2 frames (so you don't have to press the button twice) . We used a Mac App called Stop Motion.

25 frames = 1 second

12 frames = half a second

So if you set it to take 4 frames a press , you would need to press 6 times to create 1 second worth of footage. So you need to make your moves only very slight in difference to eachother.