I think the most challenging part of making a stop motion film is animating the pauses (the 'mah'). There is such a compulsion to move the puppet on every frame when in the animating groove. This film could have used a pause, a moment of reflection, once the bird is buried. So the puppet doesn't die, an eye movement and maybe pushing some facial clay into a subtle expression change would have worked.
I was chatting with Jane our teacher about how good it is to stand up at an easel and draw for two hours.
Drawing big and using your whole body. Moving rather than sitting still with only eyes darting and hands moving as has become the animation student's life. It's nice to get out of a chair and away from a screen, mouse, tablet and keyboard to make some marks directly on to a surface. It's so immediate and textured.
Sometimes I feel the technology, while being the tool, is also the barrier between us and our imaginations appearing in the pixels.
A return to organic, to tangibility, is like drinking a long, cold beer after staring into a furnace all day.
Hopefully life drawing, and studio life drawing, will remain integral to the animation course at SBIT.
For our main assessment for "Create 2D Digital Animation" (Wednesday class with Jane), we are experimenting in, "learning by doing", stop motion animation.
The process has been to produce a short narrative idea to build into a film, produce some thumbnail drawings and develop a storyboard, design and build/sculpt characters, then animate.
A step that could have more time applied to it, that may have aided in planning, would have been to work on timimg out rough animation 'tests' in Monkey Jam. Either by doing these as paper and pencil line tests, or short sequences of stop motion.
The animation part is the most challenging, trying to work out how much to move and not move a puppet to get an idea of timing. Other challenges have been set design, achieving camera angles and framing of shots within the limitations of the set design, lighting and technical details with working with cameras and software.
This film was made using my digital camera (BenQ DC S30), the teacher's tripod, the course's 1Gb memory card in the camera. The set is a cut down, painted, polystyrene foam broccoli box. The poor lighting is ambient light plus a halogen desk lamp. The 'grass' is green fur. The dirt is from the banks of the Enoggera Creek in Brisbane (and what fine red dirt it is!).
Individual frames were captured on the digital camera. They were transfered to a computer. The frame images were adjusted in Photoshop using a "Batch action" command. The resultant smaller images were imported into Monkey Jam, viewed, and an AVI file exported with Microsoft Video 1 compression. The rough film was uploaded to Vimeo (further compressed) and the result is below (once it's ready on Vimeo).
Yesterday, Terry got the 2nd year's started with some basic action scripting. Then he left us to discover how to apply this new knowledge to a basic interactive Flash idea.
Unfortunately, I was sitting next to an unmentionable but highly influential first year who fancies himself as a creative director.
"The movements and attitudes of a figure should display the state-of-mind of him who makes them and in such a way that they cannot mean anything else."
Ian Lacey wrote...
"I'm not a big believer in "talent", if there is such a thing I think its just a tendency to be persistent, or to set your standards higher than the next person ... Even for the best, it doesn't just happen. It's the result of planning, self discipline and persistence."
Principles of Animation: A reference list for me to have up while I'm working
Character: [ ] Appeal [ ] Design for Animation [ ] Architecture b4 Add-ons [ ] Model Key poses * [ ] LOA * [ ] Power Centre * [ ] Psychological Gestures * [ ] Meaningful Symbolism
Animation: [ ] Plan with thumbnails [ ] Staging / Meaningful Framing [ ] Key Frames [ ] Timing, Spacing /Mah [ ] Fill the Mah * [ ] thinking * [ ] intention [ ] Anticpation [ ] Squash and Stretch [ ] Follow Through &; [ ] Overlapping Action [ ] Refine the Arcs [ ] Offset Action [ ] Exaggeration [ ] Appeal in motion
Illustrate ideas or thoughts, with the attitudes and actions
Squash and stretch entire body for attitudes Change = Impact: If possible, make definite changes from one attitude to another in timing, LOA and expression
Animate the Thought: What is the character thinking?
It is the thought and circumstances behind the action that will make the action interesting
When drawing dialogue, go for phrasing. (Simplify the dialogue into pictures of the dominating vowel and consonant sounds, especially in fast dialogue Lift the body attitude 4 frames before dialogue modulation (but use identical timing on mouth as on X sheet).
Change of expression and major dialogue sounds are a point of interest. Do them, if at all possible, within a pose. If the head moves too much you won’t see the changes
Don’t move anything unless it’s for a purpose Concentrate on drawing clear, not clean
Don’t be careless Everything has a function. Don’t draw without knowing why
Let the body attitude echo the facial
Get the best picture in your drawing by thumbnails and exploring all avenues
Analyse a character in a specific pose for the best areas to show stretch and squash. Keep these areas simple
Picture in your head what it is you’re drawing. Think in terms of drawing the whole character, not just the head or eyes, etc. Keep a balanced relation of one part of the drawing to the other
Stage for most effective drawing
Draw a profile of the drawing you’re working on every once in a while. A profile is easier on which to show the proper proportions of the face
Usually the break in the eyebrow relates to the highpoint of the eye The eye is pulled by the eyebrow muscles
Get a plastic quality in face — cheeks, mouth and eyes Attain a flow thru the body rhythm in your drawing
Simple animated shapes The audience has a difficult time reading the first 6-8 frames in a scene (don't do important movement in those frames)
Does the added action in a scene contribute to the main idea in that scene? Will it help sell it or confuse it? Don’t animate for the sake of animation but think what the character is thinking and what the scene needs to fit into the sequence Actions can be eliminated and staging "cheated" if it simplifies the picture you are trying to show and is not disturbing to the audience
Spend half your time planning your scene and the other half animating How to animate a scene of a four-legged character acting and walking: Work out the acting patterns first with the stretch and squash in the body, neck and head; then go back in and animate the legs. Finally, adjust the up and down motion on the body according to the legs.
This is a web version of the stop mo' short film experiment.
