adding visuals

part of my plan for this animation had been to combine 2d with 3d stop frame animation as into the scenes heres a example of a butterfly piece i had been working on.

I wanted to develop on from the earlier idea of using 2d within my animation characters as i returned to this aspect i had been interested in before i noticed that drawing on the details of the eyes also being tedious but also unnecessary instead the character could pass more emotions and depth within just eyebrows and a small mouth . 

looking at developing this concept of the character to make the eyes less focal worked better i felt with the shadow and lighting as well as body expressions of the piece

Editing animation

Over the past months I managed to get through all of my stop frame animation scenes here are a few giff examples of the classrooms scenes i finished. 

As managed to finish the last of my animated scenes 

i spent a few weeks sorting through them on premier to get a idea if anything was missing or if any of the frames timing should be extended of shortened.

Picking a voice

Over the course of the animation, something that has always been playing on my mind was who would be narrating the audio to my film with reading the poem. 

Initially, I had thought about asking a child from a drama school, but I felt while animating the actual piece that I wanted a voice that was unpolished, possibly stuttering, shy and sensitive, which would match  the context of the poem.

It struck me when walking through the playground of Hungerford school, (which is attached to the workshop) to see if any of the children would suit the role. Who could bring the right shy emotional feeling of the audio I was looking for,

I asked the school and they suggested a year 4 group’s as they would be the most qualified for reading.

This was a really interesting, casting the class as the teacher asked them to read out a line. It was engaging to hear all the different voices of the children and the characters they could be. There were three children that stood out to me as having the right sound for the storyline feeling, both shy, nervous or stuttering in the pronunciation of the words.

In some ways the sound of there voices were quite similar, as they where all boys that had a quiet disposition, sounded young and with a relatively neutral tone, that I was looking for.

Picking between the voices was more of a difficult task as they all has positive and negative qualities when I auditioned them.

 Voice options

-Chris

-Voice has a charm with the slight lisp

-and a higher lift at the end of sentences.

-Sounds very young and cutesy

-Struggles with reading words and pronunciation

-Kan

- Very quiet in the way he speaks and timid sounding

- Tended to get quieter with the lines and use of words

- When he speaks louder has a bit of of a dry sound

- Had difficulties with the bigger words

-Ron

-More of a cleared pronunciation in the words 

-There is a nervousness in the voice

-Slight lisp on letter “s”

-More of a sad undertone.

-Who's voice stood out

Chris
 voice was most infant like and had a cute lisp in his pronunciation

-who had the most character

Kan

-who read the lines the best

Ron understanded lines best

Which matched the context of the story

Ron was able to read through the story and struggled less with unfamiliar words and so was able to focus more on telling the narrative. His voice may not have been as cute as Chris or as in character as Kan which had a quiet disposition, but overall they struggled with telling the narrative of the story.

simply moving

Some close-ups of animation angles.


Animating the earlier scenes where there were more faster movement, was easier to plan through each action in the stop-frame and the timing was quicker between each frame.

In the classroom animation scene, there was more difficulties in timings, between frames creating something, that was subtle movement, such as a slow sigh or hunch of the body.
Although, these were easier to move into, getting used to animating a slower pace between scenes could be difficult to adjust to. Timing out and holding frames between animated and still shots.

angles of animation

This was the first scene for my short animation.  Most of the movement was focused on one character and in the confinement of his desk.
By this point I had got more at ease with using the Dragon Frame software, so aimed to move quickly between each shot but setting up the initial set, lighting and scene was also a necessity in presenting the project story.




Recreating some of the angles I intended was also a difficulty, as my initial rough drawings of the class were larger than the space I could work within. So adjusting the camera to suit to this was also important.

xmas new year break

Ok, I have been a bit delayed on the posts again recently, as I was previously packing in all my remaining scenes before the animation workshop stopped for the Christmas and New year break.

Anyway, I'm back now and willing to fill in on all the the progress
I have been making from the end of 2014 and into the start of 2015.

face fear

Eyes and expression placements.
 After doing all of the stop frame animation I had initially planned to add expressions on top of my stop frame characters model face.. However, this was more of a challenge then I had intended.

Initially, I had planned to use motion path tracking and hoping by learning this I could already use the dark beads I had placed for guidelines for the eyes but ..Unfortunately when I was testing this in animation clips it continued to crash after many attempts I decided to try a few other ways of working on this piece,

attempt 1

With mask shapes (weird shape movements) 

attempt 2

 Digially drawing in photoshop (too many layers)

Applying photoshop shapes to frames (distorted effect) 

last attempt 3

Mask shapes individual 

This was the most effective in shape and matching the movements but overall this has been too time consuming to persue as a final effect even if it is what I would have initially preferred.