drawing on previous hand-made-ness

today iv'e been furthering my research, looking back at things i already looked at, as the animation is now finished -minus credits, (they take place on thursday)!!!!!! so yeh looking back at previous stuff i looked at the juno trailer http://www.shadowplaystudio.com/juno/ again from shadowplay studios and discovered it was hand made rotoscoping using cut outs! there are photos on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shadowplaystudio/sets/72157603777361412/ which are amazing!

I was checking out other stuff they did as well, like there credits for: thankyou for not smoking http://www.shadowplaystudio.com/smoking.html which reminds me of saul bass work eg anatomy of a murder http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbgb3E7l_KY and the title sequence of monsters inc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hff329Wi0P0 and credits of the incredibles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vawsUk-9veQ all of these i think are great and i guess im drawing on them in a small way for my credits!

Southampton Solent work

A huge inspiration came from the work of Southampton Solent universitys previous students thankyou to those i emailed who offered there help in the form of questions and answers!!! It was incredibly useful!! For example Adam Smith explained that to get the timing right he created an animatic, where the storyboard is put in place of moving images against the soundtrack. This is exactly what i did. I think also through looking at there work and contemplating my preferences it helped me decide that 2d drawn animation was the way forward for this peice, the handmade quality of the work id seen on the dvd made the idea go from 3d to 2d. I think a bit of the time 3d computer work can look garish and stark, with little character I watched pencil to pixel, a film on the change in animation, ages ago, but one part i clearly remember is nick park, (aardman man) saying that in chicken run they had made it too smooth and to slick, so when filming curse of the ware rabbit he was encouraging people to leave the fingerprints in the plasterscene, not wipe them out. Hand made has a quality that you can't replicate with a computer, theres no pencil marks to errase or fingerprints to destroy, just pixels, maybe they should be made more obvious.

So much for catch up time

ok so as per usual i didnt exactly fill this in everyday (quite the opposite) so i think being that on hear so far is research links thats wat im going to use it for, additional info on my research that cant be included into my sketchbook coz, strangely enough, it moves!!!

Research

A really useful book for me was imagemakers, (as seen here) it mainly helped with my character development, most people go to disney or aardman for this, but i wanted a different style, because I'm rotoscoping people so I wanted it to look sensitive to the person and their character, as well as being styleised and not chartoony!

Thats also why I looked at Quentin Blake and did a lot of film research, to help with the editing of my bus sequence! By looking at Quentin Blake I thought about Roald Dahl and suddenly remembered that James and The Giant Peach had been mad into a film ages ago, and that it was part film part animation! So thats been really useful to my research, especially on the transition between animation and live action!

Another really useful piece of research was the animation work from the company Psyop, i researched a lot of their stuff through youtube before discovering their website with an archive of their work on, i havn't looked through all the stuff on their but one of their newst ones is the addidas olympics, which has proved really interesting in terms of style for the animation, as it conbines a rotoscoped crowd with a live action main figure: http://www.psyop.tv/main.php

catch up time

right i have decided that its now a vital time to fill in this blog so the next few posts are going to be explanations of where I've got to, as its been such a busy few weeks i've not posted anything and then im going to aim to post something every other day because i will be deep in animation making!!!

What I want to create

This blog is for me to evaluate the work I create during my final major project.  

I'm making an animation about people escaping everyday life by going into their own fantasy world.  

So far I've made the decision that stop motion animation will be too difficult for the movements I require, so basically because I'm using people, who are very complex, it will be difficult to sensitively and realistically recreate their movement.  Therefore the animation will be drawn.  But I will test out a stop motion version.  

I have finished my storyboard! There are still other ideas I need to get down, that I had previously thought of.  

I am researching at the moment, but this needs to be done by next week!!!!!!

Today with my research I need to write a list of questions to ask past students, so I will watch the dvd with their work on and write questions responding to it.