Second verse done!

Wow...what a night.

Tonight was definitely not my night for animating but I got there in the end...after about 5 hours of animating.

The program I'm using has been really temperamental. It was absolutely fine the last time I used it but tonight it decided to hate me by just quitting unexpectedly all the time...like every few minutes. At first it was great...I spent about 20minutes doing a second of animation and forgot to save it and it decided to play the quitting game...maybe it just hated what I was doing and was trying to tell me to start again and do a better job...I don't know...but I surely didn't appreciate it because it meant that I had to clear my chopping board of coffee grains and start again.

And so I slugged along for the first hour or so just to get something done and then decided to turn the computer off and give it a rest and it worked...but I still saved after about every frame after that, just in case! That's the hard thing about stop-mo animating...if something happens like you lose the last 10 frames you did...you're stuffed because it's really hard to just go back and do it again. Maybe with cut-outs it'd be a bit easier but with something like coffee grains it's really hard to get it looking exactly the same.

Soooo...I've done 43 seconds tonight so that's about 1 minute and 9 seconds done and 1 minute and 21 seconds to go. My song has 3 verses and 3 choruses...so I've done 2 verses so far...one more to go...and then the choruses. For the chorus of the songs I'm being more abstract and experimental so I think it'll be a bit faster to animate. I'll be painting with the coffee...just randomly so that the audience can make their own visions from the strokes and textures painted. I hope it looks good. Luckily I'm really ahead so if it doesn't work out I can think of something else to do.

Tonight with the second verse everything went pretty much according to plan apart from the third part of the verse (and the program being temperamental). I wanted leaves to weave in and out of squiggles of coffee...but it proved to be a lot harder than I thought! I'm sure that if I had hours and hours of spare time I could achieve it but it was just too hard to do for 340 frames! So I changed the end and decided to grow a tree instead using basil leaves from my garden. It looks pretty cool and I think it matches the lyrics of the song much better.

All in all I'm relieved to have done another part of my animation. It's pretty daunting because I have to do my animation in chunks. I can't just leave it because the coffee dries on the wooden board...but at least it means that I put aside time and just focus on my animation for a few hours at a time instead of doing little bits which might get me lost and I might not be as into it if I just do little bits. It's amazing because you just zone out doing this and don't realise how tired you are and how late it is till you're finished a few hours later! Luckily I had blueberry muffins to get me through tonight. =P

And let's just hope that I don't spend the next 8 hours dreaming about stop-mo animating like the last time I did stop-mo before bed. Haha.

Aaaaaaaaagh!!!

Problemo numero uno. So I did my first 7 seconds of animation yesterday and it looks awesome. It took me about two hours because I had to do a little bit more planning and move the coffee around on the board (which is more time consuming and messy than moving the cloth around). And then I had to leave everything to go to work...and then I woke up this morning to find the coffee has become all sticky and it's stuck to the wooden board! So now I have to try and get it off and then replicate it so I can continue the animation smoothly. I just hope it doesn't stain. =S So that is my first challenge for this animation. Wish me luck!

Set-up done

Eeeek...tonight I set up my at home stop-mo station. It's very simple and may not be as good quality as the one at uni but it can add to the authentic hand-made feeling of my under the camera piece.

I don't have glass with a backlight and at first I was just going to tape paper down to the table (which, once again, might move around and have textures/bubbles but could add to my animation) but then decided to use a wooden cutting board to work on. I think the textures will add to the look and feel and looks great with the coffee and red cloth. It's very earthy and raw.

The camera has a back light which didn't looks too bad (first image) but the desk lamp has a much warmer look so I'm sticking with it. (second image)

I'm using a freeware stop-mo program called 'Frame by Frame' for Mac. It's extremely basic but it's great because it has onion-skinning and I can watch what I've captured at different frame rates. Unfortunately I can't export what I've captured as separate images but I'm thinking that I can just export it as an uncompressed 10-bit movie and then export it as an image sequence in quicktime so that I can still edit it and then go back and have it compressed for my final export.

Having set up my at home station means that I've had a chance to play around with my materials. The cloth that I have is a bit stiff but I've figured that I can use pins and wires to make the shapes that I want to make it more flexible and stay still in a shape that I want it to. The coffee is a bit harder to work with than I thought because it springs around and leaves the tiniest granuels when it's moved but I think that this adds to the beauty of it.

These are two videos of really quick experimentation with my materials. (excuse the hands!)

Now it's time to start on my piece. It's going to be a lot of work but I'm really excited about starting now.

P.S. No good quality coffee is being harmed in the making of this animation!

Planning

Today was my planning day and I'm happy with the outcome. I spent the afternoon fleshing out my storyboard; going through my music and working out how many frames for each part of the song (i.e. image/idea corresponding to each part of the song) and then I created a very rough animatic to help me further work out the timing and flesh out my ideas. The animatic was a great idea because it helped me expand on my storyboard with more of an idea of what I will do for each part of the song, and get a better sense of timing. Timing and planning is the most important part of this animation because it's straight ahead and you also can't just go back to fix it up (well you can, but it would be very very difficult).

The intended technique for this experimental animation will be to use a combination of instant coffee, red cloth, leaves, and a marker. The coffee is great because I will be using it both as the granuels (so it will be like working with sand) and also as a liquid (so I can paint with it using my fingers and/or a paintbrush and maybe use a blowing technique where you blow the liquid with a straw to make pictures). It is a great mix of textures and materials, and the coffee also has it's own unique mix of textures, for example even when it is liquified there are still granuels within the liquid which will give an interesting look to my work.

The visuals for my piece will be partly abstract and partly a story. In the verses of the song the images will reflect the lyrics in an abstract way. The red cloth will be the main "character" that the audience will follow through the song. In the chorus of the song I want to build up an image slowly using liquified coffee and then a marker. This will be a bit more abstract but will keep the audiences interest because hopefully by the third part of the build up there will be a visible image...or it could be an abstract image/mixture of tone and line in which the audience can come to their own conclusions. This is something I still have to decide.

I want so use animation principles as much as I can in my piece and focus a lot on timing, stretch and squash, anticipation, ease in and out, etc. even though it will be a bit abstract. I think in such an experimental piece it might be easy to be too flowy and forget to use incorporate these principles.

My aim is to captivate my audience and draw them into my piece and make them continuously wonder what will happen next. =)

Stop mo experiments

Today Alex and I did some stop-mo experimenting and it was awesome. I am so in love with this style of animation...maybe because it's new and different and you can just let your mind go wild.

We did a short claymation (total improvisation!) and then I did an under the camera experimenting where I drew with a marker on my hand. They both turned out really cool for first time at this style of animating and I added music to it which makes them even cooler. =)

Updates on my experimental animation assignment: I finished my song yesterday so I now have music! And I've been doing a lot of brainstorming as to what types of images/story/flow I'll have to my animation so I now have the beginnings of a storyboard. My goal is to spend this next week (or maybe by next Wednesday), doing all the planning for my animation, so storyboard and hopefully an animatic and timing and setting up my at-home studio so that I can start animating later next week and work really hard on it until it's due. I'm really excited to get started but a bit unsure about whether it's too complicated. I think I can do it so maybe it's not too complicated. =)

Will update more on how I'm going and what my animation idea is later on. So far...coffee, cloth and leaves.

Peace out

The beginning

This is my first entry for this blog that will be filled with my discoveries in animation, ideas and progress for projects and various other bits and pieces.

I'm in my second year of doing a Bachelor of Animation at Griffith's QCA and this looks like a very exciting year indeed!

I'll mainly be focussing on the stuff I learn in 2D and Alternative Techniques this semester. I'm am so excited about this course, I think I'll be learning so much. The first part of the course we're doing experimental animation, and on Friday we learnt all about cut-outs, sand animation, paint animation and various other mediums and techniques that people have experimented with. It totally got my mind jogging and now I can't stop thinking about what I'll be doing for my first project.

I've already decided what soundtrack I'll be using and this is making me even more excited. I play a bit of guitar and write songs and I'm getting a friend to help me define one of my songs so that we can record it and use it. It will help me get more of a focus on the "story/message" of my experimental piece and hopefully help to create emotion in my audience.

I have also brainstormed different materials I can use. Buttons, water colour, foil, string/wool, coffee, hands, cut out pictures. I think it would be great to combine a range of different materials to experiment with. One I would especially like to try out is coffee. It probably sounds weird but it would be cool because it's grainy like sand but you can also wet it and play around with it when it's a liquid.

So that's where I'm up to so far in my experimental project. I'm going to spend the next week working on the song for this experimental animation piece and also experiment with different mediums and do some little tests.

Signing out!