Unit 33 Stop Motion Animation (Character movement)

This session you'll start by making a few notes to showcase all the professional animation skills that you've experimented with so far, and then explore ways to suggest your character's personality through movement.



Use the link below to see guide slides for this session
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QSUTdRLS01b2hIV2c

Unit 33 Stop Motion Animation: Making a structured character body.

This session you will produce a structured body to support the character head used in your lip sync work last week. This body is built around an 'armature' - a wire frame which is constructed to be able to both stand and bend in the right places.



See guide slides via this link for the session tasks and step by step guide to making the model.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QSVFJDVEs4aHNfMXc

Model size guide sheet
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QSN3Y2Q2dyUXNmSW8

Unit 33 Stop Motion Animation: Lip Sync Part 2

This session you will finish producing the resources needed for a character lip sync, and then work collaboratively to produce a short lip synced animation of your clay character head.

Learning objective for this session:
Work collaboratively to produce a lip synced character animation.



See guides slides for this session:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QScnF1cGFoVGc2d00

Lip Sync Exposure Sheet
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QSZ1RqUV9seVROVEU


Folder of potential background images for an animated head..
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QSVFVBcEwtUFgxYW8

Unit 33 Session 3: Lip Sync part 1.

This session you'll start by making some notes about your initial experiments with Stop Motion techniques. Then, you'll move on to create resources for your own 'lip synced' character animation. Lip sync is a challenging technique to learn, but it will give your character animations a professional edge.


Learning objectives for this session:


LO1: Be able to describe & discuss stop motion processes.

LO2: Be able to produce resources for a ‘lip synced’ stop motion animation of a character. 


Here is a link to the guide slides for this session:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QSWkJ6LUcxWDBrbjQ

Unit 33 Session 2: Lifelike movement & Character.

Last session you experimented with green screen and got used to Stop Motion Studio Pro.


Animation is all about creating the illusion of life. This session the focus is on refining your skills to bring smooth, lifelike movement to something and create a sense of character.


Task 1. As a group, set yourselves an ambitious animation goal for the next hour to bring something to life. You should aim for an idea that will test your creativity to the limit & work together to achieve it. 


Examples to get you thinking about movement & character...

Pixar Studios (CGI not stop motion) "Luxo Jr"

PES "Fresh Guacamole"

PES "Game over"

Jan Svankmajer "Meat love"

 Terry Border "Slice of life"

This slide show of Terry Border's work, gives some examples of characters created from just about anything...

Blink Studios "Sorry I'm late"

Mark Janssen & director Mink Pinster "Still Life"

Unit 33 Session 1: Stop Motion Animation [Session 1 slides including 'Stop Motion Studio Pro' Guide]

This term we will be exploring Stop Motion Animation in Digi Arts. You'll learn techniques, work in a small group to develop a short film inspired by a piece of music, and screen you finished film to an audience at the end of term.

This session will introduce you to the basics of 'Stop Motion Studio Pro' the application which you will be using to develop your work this term.

You will also start to expand your awareness of animators past and present.

Below is a link to guide slides with the tasks for this session and a 'Stop Motion Studio Pro' guide.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QSZkVDZm9Ea25rZTQ

Unit 33: Stop Motion Animation Greats Past & Present [In Historical Order]

Georges Méliès (8 December 1861 – 21 January 1938) 

French illusionist and film director who led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès was an especially prolific innovator in the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color. He was also the first filmmaker to use storyboards.[2] His films include A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), both involving strange, surreal journeys somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, and are considered among the most important early science fiction films, though their approach is closer to fantasy.

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Willis Harold O'Brien (March 2, 1886 – November 8, 1962) 
American motion picture special effects and stop-motion animation pioneer, who according to ASIFA-Hollywood "was responsible for some of the best-known images in cinema history," and is best remembered for his work on The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949), for which he won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

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Raymond Frederick "Ray" Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013) 
American-British visual effects creator, writer, and producer who created a form of stop-motion model animation known as "Dynamation." His most memorable works include the animation on Mighty Joe Young (1949), with his mentor Willis H. O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), his first color film; and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), featuring a famous sword fight with seven skeleton warriors. His last film was Clash of the Titans (1981), after which he retired.

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Richard Oliver Postgate (12 April 1925 – 8 December 2008) 
English animator, puppeteer and writer.[1] He was the creator and writer of some of Britain's most popular children's television programmes. 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, and on ITV from 1959 to the present day. In a 1999 BBC poll Bagpuss was voted the most popular children's television programme of all time.

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Jan Švankmajer (Born 4 September 1934) 
Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and many others.

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Stephen and Timothy Quay (Born June 17, 1947) 
American identical twin brothers better known as the Brothers Quay or Quay Brothers. They are influential stop-motion animators. They are also the recipients of the 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play The Chairs.

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Nicholas Wulstan "Nick" Park (born 6 December 1958)
English director, writer, and animator best known as the creator of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep.[5] Park has been nominated for an Academy Award a total of six times, and won four with Creature Comforts (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), A Close Shave (1995), and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).[6] He has also received five BAFTA Awards, including the BAFTA for Best Short Animation for A Matter of Loaf and Death, which was also the most watched television programme in the UK in 2008.[7][8] His 2000 film Chicken Run is the highest-grossing stop motion animated film.

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Timothy Walter "Tim" Burton (Born August 25, 1958) 
American film director, producer, artist, writer and animator. He is known for his dark, gothic, eccentric and quirky fantasy films such as Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), the animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the biographical film Ed Wood (1994), the horror fantasy Sleepy Hollow (1999), and later efforts such as Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Dark Shadows (2012) and Frankenweenie (2012). He is also known for blockbusters such as the adventure comedy Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), the superhero films Batman (1989) and its first sequel Batman Returns (1992), the sci-fi film Planet of the Apes (2001), the fantasy drama Big Fish (2003), the musical adventure film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and the fantasy film Alice in Wonderland (2010), which garnered a worldwide gross of over $1 billion.

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Michel Gondry (born 8 May 1963) 
French independent film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is noted for his inventive visual style and distinctive manipulation of mise en scène.[1] He won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as one of the writers of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which is often ranked one of the greatest films of the 2000s. His career as a filmmaker began with creating music videos for the French rock band Oui Oui, in which he also served as a drummer. The style of his videos for Oui Oui caught the attention of music artist Björk, who asked him to direct the video for her song "Human Behaviour". The collaboration proved long-lasting, with Gondry directing a total of eight music videos for Björk. Other artists who have collaborated with Gondry on more than one occasion include Daft Punk, The White Stripes, The Chemical Brothers, The Vines, Steriogram, Radiohead, and Beck

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Assignment 3 Help Slides

This link will take you to slides to help you break down Assignment 3

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QSWEpuQlBrZnh2Zm8

Assignment 3

Copy this link to your browser to see the Assignment 3 brief:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QSUWVhQjVLdGp6eXc

Session 18 | Customising your blog and getting ready to review your work.

Click on this link to see the guide slides for session 18.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ti8BamV6QSc1lWRmlLeVdFMVE