Animation that I Like

This is an animation that I found on YouTube. I like it because it reminds me of Pixar and Tim Burton films. This is an animation done by students in Ringling College of Art and Design. It gives me inspiration. I hope to be able to create an animation like this one day. I enjoy the story line because its saying that cuteness and kindness can also result in toughness.

This animation follows the guidelines for the 12 principles of animation. For squash and stretch, it follows it because the sides of the characters and environment are 3d so when the characters turn they do not appear flat or squished. The anticipation principle is also applied, when the characters walk their needs bend a little, when they jump their knees also bend, or when the monster came out as a good monster, the audience knew it would blow out bubbles instead of fire.There is a lot of staging techniques in the animation as well, for example when the monster she created was suppose to be evil but it turned out being a pink fluff. Another example of staging is when the monster used it's cuteness to attack the bully. For follow through and overlapping action the audience sees that throughout the animation, one I have in mind is when the little girl threw her witch craft book on the table and the pens and other things on the table started to move showing that she had slammed the book down hard.

At first I was going to chose John Canemaker's The Moon and the Son, but I decided to go for a unknown artist and came upon this.

Environment Project

Original Photo

Flash/Bitmap Version

Week 2 Blog Post (Dots)

Norman McLaren's Dots is a drawn-on-film. This kind of animation is exactly the way it sounds. The footage seen by viewers are directly drawn on to the films. This means the dots seen in McLaren's Dots were drawn on and then processed. The way McLaren uses this tactic is brilliant and simple. It's almost as if the dots are characters. Each indivivdual dot is characterized with it's own musical note/sound. Some of the dots even transform into stars or splats. As the film goes on the dots get bigger and show more movements, it would twirl around and the melody also escalades and gets faster. The story Dots tells is that, dots are not simple. They can turn into different things and dots can come from different things. It could be a raindrop or the period at the end of a sentence. Dots can produce different tones of music as well. The way McLaren tells this story is almost like a symphany. He took such a simple subject like "Dots" and created a interesting story and art form out of it.

Class exercise

Before

after

Week 1 Blog Post (Hansel and Gretel)

For this blog I chose to write about Lotte Reiniger's Hansel and Gretel. The story was told through narration and silhouette film animation. The silhouettes remind me of shadow puppets. The visual aspect of the film is shown in black and white with shadows.  Based on the Wikipedia article about Silhouette animation the technique for this form of animation is simple. It is a form of stop motion and consists of cardboard cutouts and backlighting. Wikipedia states that the cardboard cutouts have wires or thread that would put the joints together, so the cutouts can move, like the shadow puppets. The way silhouette animation is filmed is with a rostrum camera. The cutouts are being moved frame by frame to create the motions as seen in Hansel and Gretel. Once again using Wikipedia I discovered that a rostrum camera is a camera that has two parts, a lower part, where the cutouts can be placed and frame by frame shots can be taken from the top portion which is where the camera lies. Other techniques Reiniger used to tell the story is through transitions. She used fading to transition from credits to story and then story to ending credits. This helps create a smooth story. The narration for this animation is told in story form where the narrator reads the “once upon a time” parts and mimics the voices of the characters as well. There are also sound effects that depict animal noises for the goose and the squirrel. Along with sound effects the story is also told with music throughout the ten minute film. The music helps bring emotions and setting to the animation.

I feel that this form of animation is effective. It’s artistic and very broad. It is broad because the characters do not have specified faces and allows the viewers to have more imagination. Most importantly, the animation was able to tell the story seamlessly. It did not require high end technology to tell the story. This simple procedure is a great way to tell stories. However, I did find some points in the Hansel and Gretel animation, where the narration and the silhouette motions are not in sync. If the motions and narrations were in sync it would be perfect.

Intro

This blog is for my Animation class.