POST FOR BLOG!!

Here is the check list of things that i need in this blog!

  What is it?         Show         What Else?
1.  Cut out         | Examples | Class Exercise
2. Model Based | Examples | Class Exercise
3. Pixilation       | Examples | Class Exercise
4. Cell Based     | Examples |         N/A
5. Time-Lapse   | Examples |         N/A


O. Persistence of Vision - what is it?
O. History
      o. Origins
      o. 30's - 50's
      o. 50's-80's
      o. 80's-present
     

Time Lapse Animation

Time Lapse Animation is a series of lots of images taken of a subject over a length of time, and then the images are all played one right after another. The results then look like a sped up recording of something that has been film. Time Lapse Animation is used to show the sun rising and setting in the sky, also it is sometimes used to show a room filling up over a couple of hours, and even to see the progress of a growing plant.

To do a time-lapse animation, a camera is set up in a place where it will not get moved and keep the same thing in the frame. The camera is then put on a setting so that it takes a photograph every so often.

Here is a Time Lapse Animation, It is a bowl of fruit that was left for 74 day. The camera was set to take a picture every 40 minutes, and is played back at 30 frames per seconds.

Cell Based Animation

Cell Based Animation is a series of hand drawn images on sheets of clear plastic, and every time one is drawn a photograph is taken of it, and then traced over but slightly changed and another photograph is taken. this process goes on until you have your animation. But it also takes 25 images to make up a second on when creating a cell based animation, so that takes a really long long time! A traditional form of animation used in the production of cartoons or animated movies where each frame of the scene is dran by hand. A full-length feature film produced using cell-based animation would often require a million or more drawings to complete. 

Here is the first full featured length movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a disney classic. It took disney creators a least  3 years to create this movie!

Cut-out Animation

In this lesson, we are creative a cut out animation with the cut outs that we got last lesson. For our animation we are turning, moving and swapping facial features on the two base faces that we have got. In the end the features will have gone and it will just be the clear base faces. At the current stage we are half way through taking photographs and moving the cut out features.

This is the final image of our cut out animation. Altogether it is 14 seconds long, although it took over an hour to create. 

This is our finished Cut-out Animation.

Our Cut-Out Animation Designs

 For our cut-out animation, we went though a magazine and took out large close up portraits of women, and then from then we deciding on one of the portraits as the base of a face, and with the rest of the faces, we cut out the individual features, such as eyes, noses and mouths. Them from this we placed them onto the base face, making the model look very weird.

Cut Out Animation

Cut-Out Animation is a type of animation which are made with a bits of cut-out shapes which are them placed on top of each other to make an picture, then a part of the image is moved slightly, making it look like the image is moving.


This is a independent cut out animation that i found on YouTube. All of the backgrounds and the characters look like that have all be hand drawn and painted. Also at the joints of the elbows and on the knees you can just see some little black dots that look like they could be small split pins. This would make it easier to move the arms and legs with out them moving out of place, but still able to be moved about.

Here is an original short clip of South Park, by Seth Mcfarlane. There are basic shapes and backgrounds, this is because it is hard to get a lot of detail, but it is still effective enough. But not the new South Park is digitally animated, which makes it a look quicker to create, a lot quicker then move a tiny piece of paper and taking a new photograph every time! Especially when its 24 photos per second!

My Fish Animation

In today's lesson, I used the model that i created in my last lesson and made this short animation. I used tissue paper for the background, and created little blue circles, to look like bubbles. In my animation my fish swims across the screen but stopped in the centre and 5 bubbles then come out of its month, before it then carries on swimming to the other side.

Model Based Animation

Here is my Model fish! I used plasticine to create this! I will be using this to make my animation in my next lesson.

Model Based Animation Examples

King Kong is a pre-Code 1933 American monster/adventure film directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose was from an idea conceived by Cooper and Edgar Wallace. The film tells of a gigantic island-dwelling ape creature called Kong who dies in an attempt to possess a beautiful young woman. King Kong was a clay based model distinguished for its stop-motion animation by Willis O'Brien. 

Morph is another popular model based animation. Although there is not speech, a story is still told with comedy too. 

How it works

To create a model based animation, what you need is model, can be any material but most people like to use clay because the models can be moved, to give the effect that it is movie in the animation. First a camera is set up, so that it will not move and then a couple of shots are taken for an establishing shot. Then the model is moved slightly into the frame and another picture is taken. This is continued until you have model the model to where you want it to be. After every little move, you take another picture, and then when it is all put together and played back quickly, it looks like the model is moving on its own. 

Animation 1970's - Present

Since the 1980's animation has developed, mainly changing its target audience to an old age group from young children. Mainly people describe some of these animation as being very childish or juvenile. People also describe most of them as being quite annoying.

Matt Goening

Matt Goening is the creator of the Simpsons and Futurama. The Simpsons is about a middle class family in America and about their life and about all of the crazy things that happen. There are some adult/mature themes in the Simpsons, but not very often. It has quite a lot of adult humour though, and it is one of the most popular animations ever created as well as the longest running one.

Billy and Mandy

Billy and Mandy is another American animation aired by cartoon network. Its is about two children named Billy and Mandy and their friend Grim, who is meant to be the grimm reaper. Many people say that the genres of Billy and Mandy are 'Black comedy, Comedy horror, Satire, Farce and Toilet Humor'. Billy and Mandy is also quite gross and sick, this is because of the themes that are in this animations show.

Seth MacFarlane 

Seth MacFarlane is a very popular modern animator. He is known for the shows Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show. Each of these shows do have quite a lot of adult humor. Some people enjoy all of these shows, but other people find some of them quite stupid and even a bit repetitive and similar to the other shows. These animations are aimed for an older audience, because there are a lot more mature themes throughout each of these shows, and show things that only an older audience with understand and get the joke to. The genres of Family Guy are Cutaway gag humor, black comedy, off-colour humor and also surreal humor.

Sponge Bob Square Pants

Sponge Bob Square Pants is aimed at a younger audience to the others, but it does still have some mature content, things that 7 years olds would not understand, but a parent watching would find slightly funny or amusing. Although Spong Bob is popular with a wide range of people, some people do find it very annoying and stupid, because of the juvenile humor. Sponge Bob was created by a man called Stephen Hillenburg, and is a very popular show in Nickelodeon, and the a main genre of it is slapstick comedy. That is probably why some people find it very annoying and childish, but it is still loved by many people of all ages. 

Pixilation - Mad Animation

Pixilation

Pixilation is a type of stop motion animation that used people instead of inanimate objects. To make this pixilation we used iStop Motion. The size of the video was 4:3 and the frame rate was 12 images per second. The length of our film was only 9 seconds, but it means we took about 109 images to make this short clip.
Sally started by laying on the floor, then after every picture that we took, she moved slightly into a different position. By doing this made it look like she was sliding across the floor, up the table then back down, and then walked on by shoes. To finish with her laying back on the floor.

Animations 1950's - 1970's

Looney Tunes

Looney Tunes is a Warner Bros. animated cartoon series. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and was Warner Bros.' first animated theatrical series. The series features some of the most well-known and popular cartoon characters in history, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Tweety Bird. Many of the characters have made cameo appearances in television shows, films and advertisements. Also all of the characters had the same man doing all of the voice overs, and he was called Mel Blanc.

Hanna Barbera

Hanna-Barbera Productions was an American animation studio that dominated North American television animation for nearly three decades in the mid-to-late 20th century. The company was originally formed in 1957 by former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera and live-action director George Sidney in partnership with Columbia Pictures' Screen Gems television division

Oliver Postgate

Oliver Postgate (12 April 1925 – 8 December 2008) was an English animator, puppeteer and writer. He was the creator and writer of some of Britain's most popular children's television programs. Pingwings, Pogles' Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Bagpuss, were all made by Smallfilms, the company he set up with Peter Firmin, and were shown on the BBC between the 1950s and the 1980s.

Magic Roundabout

The magic roundabout was originally a french children's television program that was created in 1963 by Serge Danot. The BBC produced a version of the series using the original stop motion animation footage with new English-language scripts, written and performed by Eric Thompson, that had no relation to the original storylines. This version, broadcast from 18 October 1965 to 25 January 1977, was a great success and attained cult status, being watched by adults for its dry humour as much as by the children for whom it was intended.

Animation 1930's - 1949's

Norman McLaren 

Norman McLaren,  (11 April 1914 – 27 January 1987) was a Scottish-born Canadian animator and film director known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada.







Norman was the first animator to create animations using people instead of figures.






Art Clokey


  Arthur "Art" Clokey (October 12, 1921 – January 8, 2010) was an American pioneer in the popularization of stop motion clay animation, beginning in 1955 with a film experiment called Gumbasia.








Fleischer Brothers

Fleischer Studios, Inc. is an American corporation which originated as a New York animation studio. It was founded in 1921 by brothers Max Fleischer and Dave Fleischer, who ran the company from its inception until they were fired by parent company and distributor Paramount Pictures in April 1942. 

The two most famous animation from the Fleischer Brothers were Betty Boop and PopEye.

Ray Harryhausen

Raymond Frederick "Ray" Harryhausen (born June 29, 1920) is an American visual effects creator, writer and producer. He created a brand of stop-motion model animation known as "Dynamation."

Among his most notable works are his animation on Mighty Joe Young (with pioneer Willis O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for special effects) (1949), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (his first color film) and Jason and the Argonauts, featuring a famous sword fight against seven skeleton warriors.

 

Pioneers of Animation

George Melies 

George Melies was a French illusionist and filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema.He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, dissolves, and hand-painted colour in his films.

Winsor McCay

 Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator, best known for the comic strip Little Nemo and the animated cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur.

Lotte Reiniger

Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger  was a German silhouette animator and film director. She was well known for her cut out silhouette animation. 

Persistence of Vision

Persistence of Vision means that when we look at a series of images on after another, but that we slightly 
different to the one before, our brains are fooled into thinking that it is a moving image. 

A form of early stop motion animation is called a 'Zoetrope'. The zoetrope worked on the same principles as the phenakistiscope, but the pictures were drawn on a strip which could be set around the bottom third of a metal drum, with the slits now cut in the upper section of the drum. The drum was mounted on a spindle so that it could be spun, and viewers looking through the slits would see the cartoon strip form a moving image. The faster the drum is spun, 
the smoother the image that is produced.