Print To Pixel

STORYBOARD

I began starting to develop a storyboard for my animation. Here you can see a very rough first draft.

And here my storyboard so far! The narrative basically consists of a woman casually walking down a city street, whilst she's walking the background will be moving too, displaying an array of different buildings creating using a range of collaged materials. The woman eventually comes to some steps which she proceeds to walk down until she reaches a park, as she's walking through she swings off a rope swing hanging from a tree and finds herself at a man selling balloons. She buys the balloons and straight away she starts lifting off the ground into the air. The following scenes will simply be the woman drifting off over the city whilst keeping hold of the balloons.

I am a bit concerned that the animation has too much going on so might take too long but if that's the case I think I'll just cut out the tree sequence. What I need to focus on now is which 30 second portion of music I'm planning to take from my track.

An idea I also wanted to incorporate which doesn't come across in my storyboard is that I wanted the story to flow through a series of different sketchbooks so the character would be stepping from one book to another . I haven't seen it done by anyone else and I think it would add a really interesting element to the story. I guess time will tell whether I can create my idea or not.

GENERATING IDEAS

After looking at the video above by Franz Ferdinand which is focused on clever transitions from one scene/image to another it led me to think more about how I want my character to travel. As one of the key elements of my video is to involve some sort of journey, I began experimenting with how my character will move about from one place to another and how I could intertwine this into an interesting narrative style. A-B but all the different roads inbetween.
I came up with the idea that as well as the character moving from one place to another it would be interesting if I could some how incorporate the whole animation moving from page to page or have the character physically move from book to book, crawl from one sketchbook to another. I began sketching out ideas to see if could make this happen.

I really like some of the ideas I've come up with and I'm hoping I can figure out how I could use some of the transitions in my animation.

INITIAL IDEAS FOR DEVELOPING A BACKGROUND

After looking at a range of animation involving the use of collage and a mixture of materials I began experimenting with how I can create the city backdrops for my composition. Below you can see a few beginning experiments with various materials.

Don't know why they've uploaded the wrong way round :(

Here are some other ideas I had

Johnny Kelly

As well as the past two animation on the last blog I'm also very inspired by a video called 'The Seed' by Johnny Kelly. I'm not going to include another video on my blog but here are a few stills taken from the animation.

I really like the because of the obvious qualities that the seed goes on a journey but also the way the video is created and produced is beauitful and I love the trasitions from one part of the story to the next and hoe everything is made out of paper cut outs. I'm definitley thinking along the lines of using collage and stop motion for my animation so looking at videos so expertly created like this one really helps to push me in the right direction and begin experimenting with different materials.

ANIMATIONS FOCUSED ON A JOURNEY

Because I'm so focused on my animation showing some sort of journey I've taken special interests in animations that follow a similar theme. Here are two examples that I really like.

This is 'standing egg' by Taijin Takeuchi. I really like the collage style of this composition, definitely considering a similar look for my piece. I also really like the idea of having a silhouette character, and how they used the cat as a flat piece of paper and then later as a 3D standing character.

This second animation is absolutely beautiful. I've also included the making of the animation so you can see just how painstaking the whole production must have been. I was immediately inspired by this piece to think creatively about little bits and bobs i could collect and how they could be used to create a city scape background in my animation. I love the use of money and pins and stitch to create obstacles for the little character dot. Even though the scale of the piece only hindered the painstaking process, i also think it really makes the composition. This video has definitely inspired me in the creation of ideas for my own.

LIFE SIZED ZOETROPE

After looking at the thaumatrope, zoetrope and phonograhantasmascope I stumbled across some videos that use similar effects.

Firstly here is an example of a life sized Zoetrope- a very impressive achievement. I think the reason this is so effective is obviously because of the scale and use of people on a theme park ride but also how there are so many different techniques used- a multitude of canvas's used.

Think the user has disabled the embedded code so if the video doesnt work you can watch it here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-75uRHYHWE&feature=fvwrel

I also found a really nice video via vimeo of a guy that's created a whole new element of phonographantasmascope by creating a similar outcome but using the wheel of a bicycle rather than a vinyl player. Although I'm not sure this would be relevant to my animation this is definitly a technique I would like to attempt over the summer break. It's also a really nice example of how the different sections of the video are brought to life by the music.

The Cyclotrope from tim Wheatley on Vimeo.

Another video that i really like is called 'Intervelometer' created by Kunal Sen. I absolutely fell in love with the concept of this idea. I like how it's still a bit messy and rough around the edges but the effects are very well created, and how there are references to Victorian thaumatropes and the first ever animation by Edward Muybridge in the 1880s (the horse). Another reason this video is so relevant is because it fits in really well with my animation idea of a journey through a city. I love the concept of the animated characters traveling through the real city life. Just in general a nice combination of techniques and production.

Intervelometer from Kunal Sen on Vimeo.