Animation

Throughout my Animation following the theme of pong I have used the stop motion technique and also using cut out coloured shapes which represent the main characteristics within my animation. I did not use artificial light for this as the production was accomplished at home. Although the lighting changes throughout the animation due to the lighting been natural, the lighting is for ever changing from light to dark. I think that this has given my Animation an advantage on a good level as the changing light's match the eerie high pitch tone that carries out through my chosen part of the song 'How To Smoke'. However, the lighting is not professionally made with using the Adobe After Effect's program, the natural light give's it that bit extra effect as I have taken a digital online played game and created it by hand giving a more natural influence to my animation.

Development Of Animation

For my final animation I have decided to still go with the theme of pong to lead for my final animation but I have taken a second opinion from one of my University Tutor's and produced my animation by using cut out shape's and a camera to use for stop motion. My animation consists of 12 frame's per second which I felt was a comfortable rate to work with, it flow's quite well at 12 frames per second and displays it well.
Here I have taken screen shot's of my process of developing my Animation in after effect's.

 Here is the process of how I organised my images for animation. On Mac software there is a programer called Automator where you can quickly re-name your images by using numbers from 1 to 353 and so on. This was far better than going through each image and re-naming them individually.

 Here is where I got the necessary files for my animation which would have been all the images which i imported by image sequence so the images would then be in order and at 12 frames per second. I also imported the edited audio file into my animation where the images would run along with my chosen part of the song.

This is the final stage at where I am editing my setting's ready for rendering my animation to upload to YouTube where I can then Show in my blog for final submission.

Tester Animation Shapes

This is a tester of my animation using different colour paper following my original storyboard. Only now that I am using paper for this tester I have chosen to not include character based items but simply the shapes to still follow the basis of my idea. Here is a video where I have experimented with the shapes and introduced different concepts and a wider use of the area. I think that the idea of using colour paper to portray the shapes and also creating my animation has a more abstract feel to it. I will possibly do more tester animations to get a better feel and create another storyboard to fit better.

Cut out shape animations and Tutorials

In this post I have looked at some tutorial's on YouTube of how different cut out shape animations are made and also final outcome's which will help inspire me in completing a final outcome if I were to follow on by producing my animation using shapes to tell my narrative.

Shapes

Here is just a blog post on a few different shapes that I have found images of using Google. I thought that looking at different shapes both 2D and 3D would give me a better look on how to portray the shapes from different angles if it was 3D or sizes if it was 2D.

Here are some images of 2D and 3D shapes that I can use as reference for the animation.

Further Development of Animation

After visiting the second group meeting with my Tutor I got some feedback on how to make my Animation easier through production and less stress. Originally my Animation was going to be produced by using the cell animation technique and using a whiteboard to draw each frame which would have made the process faster. I then showed my Tutor what I had so far by using the white board technique and suggested that I take this further and produce it onto a home made television to give the impression of my animation is a game that is been played. I then carried on with the production.
After attending a second group tutorial from a different tutor I got a second opinion about how to go about my Animation. This was to still use my idea of the theme of pong but using cut out shapes and developing that by using the stop motion technique which would make production much easier. I will do a tester animation to see how this technique will look and play along with the song I have been given for my animation. If the tester is successful this will be a final look for my animation which in my opinion would make the Animation more abstract.

Re-arranging Seconds

To get a better feel of how my animation will look during the time frame I have quickly drawn up my key frames and inserted them in to After Effects. I feel that this process makes putting my animation together far much easier than thinking about it off the top of my head.
I have also included the cut out of my chosen part of the song to also help me with getting the right timing for each scene.

This is a screen shot of my key frames with in After Effects which shows each layer on the timeline which I can edit by stretching the layer on the timeline to make the layer short/longer. This process is quite helpful for if there is a change of mind.
My animation used to stand at a time of 30 seconds long and is now standing at 25.