Final animation

Production process

Storyboard & dobe sheet

Feedback

Suggestions: My classmates have said that I could use a union jack colours or flag in my animation. The group said that they liked my idea however, they find that my idea is a bit too much for a short clip. They have said that I need to further consider the music and dialogue. Jelyseen suggested to me that I should look at Paddington Bear film or even the trailer because it's centered around London, She also suggested that I should watch a short clip from the children's television programme Brum.

Treatment and pitch

Task 2- Treatment and pitch

Materials/characters/set
Hopefully, for my animation I will be using Plasticine to make the London eye, a black taxi cab and a red bus and telephone box, other materials I will be using is a cardboard box to create the set some paper that I will use to draw a sky with clouds and some famous London buildings. I'm going to have only one character in my stop motion animation, his name is Ralph and he's on a tour of London. Other material I will need is paper to make some drawing, this will be a part of the background for my animation.

Scene 1
In this scene, Ralph will be in a taxi cab where he will get off it, then the taxi cab will drive away. He will be seen looking and walking around. Then he will come across the Big Ben, however, moments after it begins to rain. He is very upset because he hasn't spent much time in London, and tries to shield himself with his briefcase. Then the taxi cab appears and he goes inside.

Target audience
The target audience for my short stop motion animation film is teenagers. Teenagers are my target audience because it's shown that teenagers are a fan animation films too, this proves that animation isn't just for children.

Where it will be shown
My animation video will most likely be shown on YouTube. If it was to be shown on a television channel, then it would shown on Disney channel, Nickelodeon and CBBC.

Music and sound/ Graphics
I will be using sound effects for my stop motion animation such as bus noises and other various sound effects. One of the sound effects I need to get is the sound of rain. Graphics will be rain drops.

Length of video
The length of my short animation piece will last for around 50 to 60 seconds because I want to entertain my audience without boring them.

Colour/theme/style
The colours that I will be using are, red, black grey, blue and orange. I will use black plasticine to make the taxi cab and green and brown to make the trees and grass.

Comedy show

This task consisted of us creating a short animation piece based on sound effects that we found on Soundtrack pro. We came up the concept of having a stand up comedian tell the audience a joke to and then have him go off stage. At the end of the clip, we added two sound effects which was an applause and laughter. We also had Usama tell a joke.

Task 1- Research

Coraline
Coraline is a 2009 American stop-motion 3D dark fantasy film based on Neil Gaiman's novel and directed by Henry Selick. Henry Selick said that the making of the film was a long and tiring process as they had started filming in 2000 where they finally finished nine years later. There was a around 28 animators on set working on different things at any one time. Some of them rehearsing or shooting scenes for the film and producing 90-100 seconds of finished animation each week. Others prepared from scratch all the puppets, costumes, sets and props. The puppets also went through a painting stage, giving detail and definition to faces and even clothing. Henry Selick and Tim Burton worked together on The Nightmare Before Christmas.





Frankenweenie

Tim Burton’s ‘Frankenweenie’ is a gothic black and white stop motion animation film that was released in 2012. Tim Burton is known for being the creator of other stop motion animation such as ‘Corpse Bride’ and ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’. On the set of Frankenweenie, set designers had to move miniature props such as tulips, clogs, character hands and legs so that that every scene was different from the last. There was 24 frames per second in the stop motion for “Frankenweenie.” This meant that the animators working on the film had to position the puppets 24 times to get one second of filmed action.

On average, one animator could only produce 5 seconds of animation per week. Over 200 puppets and sets were created for the film, there were 17 Victors and 12 Sparkys. Since each animator worked independently on different scenes they had to be more people working on set. They also needed backup of models just in case a puppet required repair. Most of the puppets where made of plasticine as Tim Burton felt that the characters ' had a real softness to them and he wanted that to come through with the puppets. He didn’t want them to look like they’re in a CG film. Tim loves the handmade quality to the puppets so we used texture in the skin tones and in the costumes.' Filming began at Three Mills Studios in July 2010 and ended in 2012. The crew created three giant sound stages, including Victor's cluttered family attic, a cemetery exterior, and a high school interior. The sound stages were then divided into 30 separate areas to deal with the handcrafted, frame-by-frame and the style of film making.

There was much debate on whether Frankenweenie was suitable it was a film that will be suitable for children because of the dark film, however after much discussion the film was rated PG nonetheless. Frankenweenie is a great film for adventurous young audiences. Similarly to the equally impressive ParaNorman it's an animation that combines humour, enjoyable scares, moments of wicked humour. 


King Kong (1933)
King Kong is distinguished for its stop-motion animation. It was created by Willis O’Brien and directed by Merian C. Cooper. Animators on the set of King Kong used a tool called a surface gauge by placing pointers on the gorilla and moving it slowly. Before all the current technological tools, surface gauge pointers were used to measure the movements of just the major parts of the puppet.

Willis O’Brien invented a lot of techniques of how to take his stop motion creatures and nail them with live action actors and performers. They used a lot of in camera effects, which was achieved by exposing part of the frame and then running the same piece of film through the camera again to expose the other part with a different image. It is then processed and checked if there aren’t any mistakes. This technique of Rear screen projection was used to merge live action with animation.

Moodboard

Animation inspiration : LONDON

The inspiration for my short animation video is London. The reason for this is because it is the city that I live in. It's a magnificent tourist destination and I'm always fascinated with what London has to offer. Therefore, thought it would be a good idea to centre my animation around the London. I have also had inspiration for it after watching the Paddington trailer.

Sea story Export

For this task, myself and Leah had to create a short animation that revolved around the theme of 'under the sea'. I created the background for our animations and the shark that I made out of plasticine and Leah created the little fish after taking inspiration from Finding Nemo. I was pleased with the outcome because it told the story of the little fish running away from the Shark and ended up not being eaten at the end. Although it was short it was longer compared to our first video 'Pockets', it was an improvement in that sense. It was longer video because we took more shots and made our characters take a few steps at a time.

Persistance of vision

Persistence of vision makes moving objects and puppets appear to be move on it's own. In animation, what we perceive as a moving image is actually an illusion. What we are really seeing is a succession of still images displayed in rapid sequence. Persistence of vision was not created by anyone, instead it was discovered by very early optical illusional toys which showed the theory was correct and accurate.

Eadweard Muybridge was the man who famously proved a horse can fly. Adapting the very latest technology to his ends, he proved his theory by getting a galloping horse to trigger the shutters of a bank of cameras. This experiment proved indisputably for the first time what no eye had previously seen – that a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at one point in the action of running. Seeking a means of sharing his groundbreaking work, he invented the zoopraxiscope, a method of projecting animated versions of his photographs as short moving sequences, which anticipated subsequent developments in the history of cinema.

Pockets

Our first animation task was to find things that we had in our pockets or in our bags and to animate it. I had a Mcdonalds voucher and a few coins. This was the outcome.