Week 14 | Animation

Animation

T'was the week before christmas and, i'm guessing as a treat, the tutors decided to let us end the term having a bit of fun. This meant letting loose on a bit of animation. It was only the most basic of animation but arguably it is the most fun and interactive, also seeing as we only had a week to come up with something it was a smart decision.

There wasn't a brief as such though, not like the previous projects. We simply were given the task of creating an animation that showed a sense of togetherness. However the catch was that we couldn't use any representative shapes or objects. That meant anything and everything that depicts an existing being or thing. It had to be totally abstract. 

We watched a short animation called Balancing Blocks. The short clip was about a group of abstract blocks that literally came in all shapes and sizes. There wasn't much of a story to the animation except a need for teamwork and unity. The blocks begin by exploring and discovering what they can do and that develops into them working together to form a tower, they fall and fall and fall yet each time they pick themselves and rebuild the tower, getting higher each time until they peak. The inevitable happens and they fall one last time. What would it matter, with teamwork they achieved something.

We started off with some really basic stuff such as flip book animation. It seemed really easy at first but I kept getting caught out with the placing of my drawing, I often found my animation drifting across the page in different directions.

This was my first creation, its just a circle that gets fuller and fuller with each frame. It was very time consuming because each frame I redrew the whole circle, this allowed the dots to be in different positions and therefore the animation wouldn't feel so static. My animation showed togetherness as all of the dots combined to create a circle.

My second animation was meant to be a pretty snowflake-like shape but a small mistake ended that dream. Instead of throwing it away I decided to reinvent it and make the mistake the plot. These are just nine of the main frames in the animation but they show everything that needs to be seen. 

These animations that I have created were all made by myself on my own, but later in the day we all had the option to work in a group and so me and a few fellow classmates decided to work on an animation together.

We spent a lot of time brainstorming ideas and settled on a christmas themed one to fit in with the festivities

Our idea was inspired by the animation Balancing Blocks. It involved a lot of abstract and colourful shapes coming together to build something. In this case it was to create a Christmas tree. The whole process was long and tiring as you'd have to end up moving about 20-30 pieces of plasticine a centimetre at a time whilst simultaneously making sure you didn't move the camera and/or some of the pieces in the wrong direction.

 The main large shapes were all different shades of green and they would make up the tree, the small colourful shapes were all meant to represent the baubles. They all started from outside of the camera and slowly progressed into the middle. We were aiming to show a sense of togetherness and that working in a team is somewhat beneficial. Personally I thought the idea was a really fun idea and it was turning out quite well. I was a little sceptical because it was a huge workload to take on in such a short amount of time. We only had the day to create this and we actually only decided on the idea just before break and so we really had to work our socks off.

Thankfully one of us stayed behind during our lunch to help get some of it done and thankfully some people from other groups saw what we were doing and decided to help out as well.



Final Animation: