Final Animation

Below is a video of my final animation.

Overall I am pleased with the outcome of my animation, although in places it is slightly jumpy due to the tripod/wind when filming. The way the animated areas have worked together I am pelased with, I was apprehensive as to whether they would contrast too severely but I feel they compliment each other well.

End Title Frames

I had decided to use the end beach scene to apply my title information to, simply the project title and my name. I looked at different fonts that I could use and ended up choosing to use hand drawn, lose Arial as my type face, I experimented with solid, typed typefaces but decided it was important to keep the running theme that I had used through the project, and use simple line drawings... 

Here are the stages I went through to get the final 30 frames:

I began by loosely tracing the letters I needed in order to create the title page, I then scanned them into Photoshop and changed the contrast etc..

I selected the letters individually and placed them onto the background, creating a seperate layer for each one; this would later enable me to 'hide' the layers in order to save the frames as JPegs showing each letter at a time...

I played around with colours and layouts until I found the one I was most happy with...

At this point I had an idea, I was wanting to do something different, which tied the rest of the frames in with this one, so manipulated and moved the HAT and ICE CREAM which played large roles throughout the animation and turned them into the word 'TO' I was really happy with the way this turned out and thought it tied the frames together well and added a bit of colour, interest and focus to these final frames.

To create the white board effect of each letter coming on one after another I simply 'hid' the layers I didnt want to be seen and saved the image as a JPEG, working my way from the P of Print to the N of Wharton.

Composition Continued..

Below is the full 287 frames, I had problems on After Effects however; I have 287 images, so at 12 frames per second this should last 23.9 seconds - how whenever I played it it only lasted 10 seconds! So below the video is supposedly at 6 frames a second, which lasts just over 20 seconds.. The bird and end title just need to be added now and then it should hopefully be complete after a bit of tweaking!

Animation Composition

I began by creating the animated pieces on photoshop after scanning them in and then adding colour. I then had to apply these individually to each slide, to do so I used photoshop and used to layers tool to be able to place the images in the correct places as I went through the individual frames. I used the lassoo tool to be able to make the ice cream fit in the characters hand, making the ice cream opaque in order to cut the shape out accurately.

I began with the simple background scene and character..

Then added the hat, resized and positioned..

I then added and positioned the ice cream in front of the hand.. 

I made the ice cream transparent and using the lasso tool removed the section of the ice cream which should be hidden behind the hand of the character..

Press delete.. 

I had to repeat this for each individual frame!

First frame: 

Above you can see clearly how I have cut around the characters hand to create the effect of the character holding the ice cream... Below is the first 100 odd frames, played at 12 frames per second, the bird is yet to be added!

The Scene/Character Photoshoot

I went to the beach and took my chosen character with me, I used a 1/2 split scene of the beach and sky, I dressed my character in typical beach wear, shorts and a stop. I used a darker top as it showed a better contrast compared the the background and I found during experiments that white left a lot of glare during these sunny days..

Here is a sample of some of the 300+ shots that I took in an index form, I am using this to draw on the ice cream etc to make sure timing will be correct.

I took a sample section and took the key frames to work out timings for important events during the 30 second animation, here is an example of this:

Here are the 300+ frames and any necessary annotations I added before creating the animation...

Below is a short section of the photographs in action as the base layer of the animation, once these have all been changed to 72dpi (which is taking such a long time) then the other images can be applied and positioned:

(12 frames per second)

Further Development

Character Choices:

I created a brainstorm to decide on my final character, I looked at ages, characteristics and so on. I decided on a male character as I though a woman with long hair would be very difficult to  photograph for stop motion as her hair would be blowing, also I thought a side profile may not be as acceptable of a woman as of a man.

Once I had finally decided on my character, I needed to look at how I would incorporate the 3 main images onto the photo's. I had decided to Photoshop these on at a later date to create a more humorous, light piece. I thought it would also add depth and show more skills and hopefully make it more interesting than a simple animation using a stream of photographs. I had my mind set on hand drawing the pieces and did a bit of research by looking at existing images and types of the different icons I had chosen to use. I looked at ways they were portrayed/drawn and common photos/images that represent them, I then chose the most important and relevant ones I found and created a small mind map to collect all my ideas into one place:

I then drew my final 3 images and scanned them into Photoshop where I edited the contrast etc to create a simple line drawing, for the bird I created 9 sequential images which would be played to create the flying movement of the bird, as demonstrated below...

(Bird/Ice Cream Line Drawing)

Bird Animation:

I used After Effects to create a simple 10 frame slide of the birds wings going from top to bottom, obviously this would continue up and down through the duration of the animation...

10 frame experiment:

            

The movie splits into 10 frames at a rate of 12 frames per second and shows the basic principle and flow of the bird flying which will be placed in the animation I am making, it will also fluctuate in size as it will increase as it flies towards the character/camera show and then out of the scene again.. Hopefully all will go to plan!

Chosen colours for images:

After experimenting with colours above are my final choices, I experimented with adding textures too but decided against them in the end...

Idea Development

After presenting my storyboard I decided to focus more on the technique I wanted to use for my animation, I eventually decided on using photographs and incorporating some hand drawn images onto that. I began looking at the type of character I wanted to use and decided on a final character. 

I began looking at how I wanted to character to move and did some practice pieces using 12 frames per second just to look at possible outcomes. Below are the short stop motion animations I created:

(Low quality due to difficulty uploading bigger files etc)

I looked at the character walking, and found that this looked quite unnatural due to having to stop/start continuously as I took the photographs.. I then looked at the possibility of the character gliding, similar to some pieces I had come across on YouTube, I felt this idea worked better and would like to continue with this as I progress through my animation...

Bird Flying


I looked at some birds flying on YouTube and found a sketched animation which I thought worked really well, its probably a lot more advanced than what I had wanted to do, but I felt it was important to look at such examples in my research..