Complimentary Studies: Animation

So far, I have been to two of my Complimentary Studies Animation classes and I am loving it! It is a completely new area for me, something that I have never tried before... or even considered trying! However, since starting the module I have realised how interested and excited I am by it. It is definitely something I will want to continue with in the future. So far we have looked at simple animation and I have produced two short films... and when I say short.. I mean short! I never really understood what a time consuming and tedious process animation really is. It can often take 24 images to make one second of film!! One second! Anyway, here are the films so far.

This simple animation was done by drawing an image in charcoal and then carefully changing it each time. To be honest there are far more faults with this video than achievements, but it was an important learning curve for me and truly made me understand the importance of slowing things down. The idea of the video was just to learn about making something 'live'. This doesn't mean that it needs to move across the screen necessarily, it just needs to 'shiver'. Until you go through this process once, you don't realise how little you need to change an image to make it 'move'. I mean seriously, a tiny smudge of the line is very noticeable when played. Watching it back is irritating because I changed far too much, and far too quickly. But at least I will have more of an idea for next time.

This is the second animation I have made, this time in a group. We decided to animate a camera, making it walk along and just to complicate things, having it look in the 'mirror'. This produced some interesting challenges and solutions. Originally we were going to have to draw a lot of images to create the 'reflection' until one of the boys in our group had the brainwave of drawing the 'reflection' on a separate piece of paper and cutting the 'mirror' out so that we could place the reflection behind it and simply move it as desired. I suppose to summarise this... turning the reflection from a drawing into another 'object'. This is one of the advantages of working in a group, two heads (or more) are always better than one! Animation is something that is a whole lot easier if you work in groups, we were able to separate the tasks and also have someone 'checking' the animation images the whole time... aiding continuity and speeding the whole process up considerably.