Operation:STICKMAN

Evaluation.

Here is the final piece of the whole 'Stick Man' Animation. Evaluating overall on the animation, we had to change the whole storyline of the animation. This is because we had many difficulties when making the 'Vendetta' character, the process of making the mask for the characters, also the features were highly difficult for me and my partner to make such an advanced character with so much details on it by using clay to model it. Therefore we had to change the process of the whole storyline of it by making a more simplistic and easier character that would endure the audience with entertainment called 'Stick Man'. This exciting and amusing character was made to inspire the animated designing of stick men, therefore making something more different then a normal clay animated design. Me and Tomas used the software 'Stykzplayer' which was a software to design 2D animated stickmen, making them move with dynamical stunts; making a whole new and totally dimensional character with great action stunts that has dissipation to make AMVs designing, a new step for creating more anticipating and fantastic storyline's and characters into using 'Stykzplayer'. The animation may look great, but it still lacked something, because the animation didn't had any sound effects, music and others things. So me and Tomas used a software called Sony Vegas, downloaded the soundtrack, pictures and sound effects from youtube and google. I added all those files to my Sony Vegas project, which includes my stickman animation. Overall this animation was a success, because it had so much amusement and different aspects of ideas that can inspire animated designs into a new level of higher ranks. With this as our final project, it developed my whole editing skills and my idealistic thoughts to make a storyline that was fairly simple to create.

Pre-Production animation designs

These pictures are some of designs that i done for some body parts. As you can see in the first picture, I designed the head for the design of the characters, which at the start of the project the whole class had to take some parts in drawing anonymous body parts, so we can see how the outcome comes together. The 2nd picture I designed the upper body part (Pecktoids) and the arms of the character. Overall I think that it was a good outcome to mix and match others drawings together to see if we have the creative minds to design our own characters later on the project.

This is my design for the final production. This will be the character I will be using for my story. I mixed and contrasted the character Vendentta and contrasted it with a ghost as well so it would make the whole character interesting

This is the actual final design for my animation design. Because we had so much trouble to design Vendentta as a character by using clay, we then stuck to an idea by using the software 'Stykzplayer' to design the stick man design of the character 'Stick Man A.K.A Stykz'. This character was inspired to make a a simple character made from the software to make an exciting character that will make the audience excited with pure amusement.

Below the picture is the story board of the story. I will explain each step of how it works.

1st part: Stick Man enters the battleground.

Dialogue: No people talking.

Action: Stick Man swings and lands on the ground, enters to battle his mortal enemies.

FX: Added rope shooting effect, along with some action noises e.g. rope swings, stunt noises like punches and heartbeats.

2nd Part: Stick Man takes on the enemies.

Dialogue: No people talking.

Action: Stick Man fights up to 5 to 6 people that want him killed, but with his brute force and swordsman skills, he defeated half of the enemies.

FX: Punch sound effects, More action stunt effects and used loads of troll faces to make it look interesting.

3rd Part: Stick Man is victorious.

Dialogue: No People talking.

Action: At the end of the animation, Stick Man finally defeats his mortal enemies and is claimed victorious. At the end credits it shows what happened to Stick Man. 

FX: Music Fades, and more punch sound effects. 

Vox pop questions

Question 1 – Notes/Ideas/Section:

Final Question 1:  What qualifications do you need to get into the media industry?

Question 2 – Notes/Ideas/Section:

Final Question 2: Do you think there is enough training and experience for your chosen area?

Question 3 – Notes/Ideas/Section:

Final Question 3: What skills do you have that you can transfer into the media industry?

Question 4 – Notes/Ideas/Section:

Final Question 4: What are the key transferable skills that would contribute to your chosen area?  E.g communication, working cooperatively, improving own performance.

Question 5 – Notes/Ideas/Section:

Final Question 5: How would you get into the section of the media industry that interests you?

Question 6 – Notes/Ideas/Section:

Final Question 6: what publications or internet sites would you look at to find a job?

Question 7 – Notes/Ideas/Section:

Final Question 7: which method would you use to get the job you want? E.g internet; words of mouth, personal contact, internal; promotion.

Question 8 – Notes/Ideas/Section:

Final Question 8: Which of your skills would you identify to be improved?

E4 IDENT

Clay Animation

Me and Tom have completed our Morph animation. It is called Wrath of the Morphtans. We were working with this project for two weeks. We needed to create a morph first, to start our animation. We took the plaster and created two morphs. At the first time they weren’t perfect, but after some time making them better, they were good enough that we could start animating. We took the mini-cameras, plugged them to the Apple computer. We used ‘’I Stop Motion’’ software to do our animation. While we were creating our animation, the morphs haven’t stood still, so sometimes in the video you can see that morphs suddenly change their standing position.

When finally we finished, we needed to edit the video and put some sound effects. We edited with ‘’Final Cut Pro’’ and just because that Tom don’t have much experience how to edit with this software, so the editing is not that good, which by our standards I think should be better, but because I had experience in final cut pro before, I knew how to edit and make some fantastic effects to our video. If we could have more practice, we are surreally can make it better.  It wasn’t hard to find the style of music/soundtrack we were looking for, so as soon we found it, we have included in our animation.

Overall, we are satisfied with our final result, and the whole class really liked it, but I think we can do better by our standards. 

Cut Animation Evaluation

Cutout animation is a technique for producing animations using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs. The world's earliest known animated feature films were cutout animations which it was originated in Argentina. Cutout animation is also something very creative which can be developed to a plot of stories with mixtures of characters from magazines. For example The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger was made from 1926 and had many characters and armatured cutouts and backgrounds which were variously painted or composed of blown sand and even soap.


Now in the present days cutout animations have been more advanced on the way their animations have been adjusted, frequently produced using computers, with scanned images or vector graphics taking the place of physically cut materials. South Park is a notable example of this transition since its first episode was made with paper cutouts before switching to computer animation.
Here is a video of south park 





The process of cut animation is done in certain steps:
Here are the materials used

1)Masking tape/ Double-sided tape
2) Glue
3) Blue tack
4) Scissors
5) Magazine puppets/cutouts


Then you will need to do is to set up the process of recording the animation

A table or an elevated platform is required to serve as the work area where the cut-out animation can be created. A digital video camera is mounted on a tripod connected to a computer loaded with the Final Cut Pro software for stop-motion capture on the table.
An ordinary photographic tripod is usually used and the DVC is placed such that it points downwards and would shoot the cut out puppet from above.



After then you will then go onto production of editing the animation piece

.Construct the basic set up accordingly as shown in the set-up section. Switch on the computer and start the programme Adobe Premiere. Select File> Capture> Stop motion.
2. Draw the paper cur outs, in this case, a car, and the background, the road, hill etc. Cut them out and place them together.
3. The moveable parts are attached with either blue tacks or masking tape so that the parts can be removed easily when needed.
4. The car is then placed on a background of the road and the sky. take 12 frames of the car at the bottom of the hill.
5. Move the clouds and the sunrays about during the action sequence.
6. To show the car moving down the hill accelerating, the car is repositioned further apart from its previous position. therefore, lesser frames are required to capture the acceleration down the slope.
7. To show the the effect that the car is climbing up the hill slowly, the car is repositioned close to its previous position. Therefore, more frames are needed to capture the gradual climb up slope.
8. When the entire sequence is captured and replayed, the actionsequence will show the car climbing up and down the hill on the road. The aniamation sequence ends with the train exiting out of the picture.

Here is a video I done for cutout animation. In class we had to make a video of a cutout animation for our project which had to have a max of 30 to 1 minutes. This is an example of not a fully finished version. 




A great professional who has used cutout animation and created many animated shows are Lauren Child. She was famous for making the show Charlie & Lola which is shown on Ceebies. 


By evaluating the whole project itself there were many strengths and weaknesses i had in this project. The strengths was that u was highly motivated into this because I am a very creative person who likes to cut out things and design some stories with the cutout puppets. Also i believe that I acquired new skills such as: Using final cut pro which was to mainly design the animation itself, developing new skills such as: cutting out, moving the puppets very slow. My weaknesses were that I didn't have the right ideas to know what to cut, plus I was very late with decisions on what to plan the story on and knowing what to make from the background and the characters I cut out. Also I had a bit of a downfall with final cut because at first it got me very confused and I didn't know how to use it, but with the improvements and support from my classmates and teachers I knew what to do and gained more required abilities to finish off my final piece of cutout animation. I could of improved many things as well. One of them was that I should of planned out a story board for my animation so I could of had a simple plot for my animation. Also I should of took some of my time off at lunch time and develop my skills upon final cut pro so I can take down the simple options and gain some advanced techniques to make my project a master class.
Overall I felt that the project was a very creative one and it gave me very thinking to do because it was something I haven't done but it was an exciting one to do and it established some new ways of how media can be like and how animations today make people exciting with very great imaginative skills.