Production Diary, The Other Side - 29/12/15

I have been working over the holidays on colouring my scenes and tweaking them and putting in shadows where I think it's necessary. I only now have one more scene to complete and then I can start to put all of my scenes together, however I do not have Premiere Pro on my laptop so I will have to wait till I get back to college before I can start to do that! Below I'm going to put a line test, and this scene has been particularly tricky for me, I feel like my character does not move how I wanted him to. I'm going to focus on changing this scene when I go back to college as on my laptop I'm facing technical difficulties where the timeline will not play at the right speed so it's very hard to fix the timing of the walk cycle.

Faces! - Captain Character

I've started to look at different faces and facial expressions for my character and I really like how this is turning out! I feel that by using her leaves as a way to tell her expressions works really well to bring my character together. My next steps will be deciding on a final body shape and face so that I can create a final design.

Waking Sleeping Beauty - The Silver Age

As part of my research into the history of animation I watched the documentary 'Waking, Sleeping Beauty', which explores the silver age of Disney Animation Studios and how much the studio crashed in this time. After Walt Disney passed away the studios went through a time where they produced films that were mediocre and didn't have the same magic as they had once had and in the time period between 1984 - 1994, things had to change in the Disney Studios, otherwise they would end up bankrupt. Roy E. Disney decided that instead of relying on the same people that were already present in the Disney Studios that he would bring in people from the outside that were more business smart to bring more money into Disney. This was when the animation side of the studios were shunned away to another building and at this point the animators felt as though they were soon to be fired. The reason being for this movement was due to previous Disney animated films were failing and not doing very well in the film industry, as well as costing a lot of money to produce. Things had to change otherwise the animation side of Disney would soon have to be completely scrapped, so they had to come up with new ideals and techniques. They started to bring in things like Broadway musical scores to make the animations more interesting and entertaining, where they also brought in people like Alan Menken to encourage this. Menken inspired a lot of the animators as even though he had only been given the treatment to 'The Little Mermaid', he had written all the songs straight away so that they could be animated to. They also decided to bring in computer generated graphics into Disney's animations to give a new technique and look to the films, this really pushed the whole genre of animation as this was something new in the industry that Disney decided to push first. By coming up with all these new ideas and techniques, Disney started to flourish again as a company and soon they created 'The Beauty and the Beast', which was to be one of Disney Studios most successful animations. Although Disney did have a downfall in this time period, they still managed to bring it back with the main help of people like Micheal Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg who even though were not the talent and the animators behind the great films, but were instead the driving force of the company and the people that managed to save Disney from crumbling. They did this by asking the animators to come up with new techniques and ways of doing things instead of always thinking 'what would Walt do?'.

Captain Character - Rihannon Rose

I have created a character called Rihannon Rose and she is a small fairy who is yet to be given her wings, first she has to prove herself and earn them. She will have to go on an adventure through the forest she lives in to collect all the elements, once she has collected these she can come back to her fairy kingdom and gain her wings. As she is only a young girl this is the first time she is leaving home!

I have started off by trying some different body types to see what I want my fairy to looks like, I want her to be cute but not look too distorted. I also want her character to be memorable and easy to recognise!

Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka was heavily inspired by Disney's Bambi and Betty Boop, which influenced the style that he developed as a manga artist. Tezuka became the first anime artist to tell stories simiar to way Disney had, he borrowed the style of round heads, bold lines and large, expressive eyes to create his characters. This soon became the house-style for the anime genre, and Tezuka had established the genre himself and inspired lots of animators after him such as Hayao Miyazaki, where his characters also featured the anime style. With borrowing styles from Disney, the anime genre was able to shoot off as they were able to easily express emotion with their characters and establish a style that anyone nowadays would easily be able to recognise. Without Tezuka, anime may never have gotten so big as it lacked a style that brought it all together and made it a genre. The anime style is clearly still present today as Japanese animations still use large eyes, and heavily expressive faces to tell their stories.

The Other Side, Production Diary - 11/12/15

I had a crit session today with my classmates and in this we looked at each other's work so far and was able to give comments and discuss the next steps each of us should take. The issues that were discussed during my crit were that some of my shots seemed a little too quick, although it was hard to tell as my shots were all broken up and if they had been sewn together first it would have been easier to judge this. To tackle this I will have to ensure that my shots have extra room on the end of them in case they are to short when I come to edit them together, or I could try putting them together as I'm going to make sure I'm timing them correctly as I go. As a positive comment on my animation so far, it was said that everyone liked the colour palette I had used and that it was very eye-catching. Today I also almost finished on my scenes for the final animation and hopefully at this rate I will have it done during the Christmas holidays, giving me time when I come back to tweak things.

Very Early Animation! (PRE-FILM)

Before animation became anything near what it is today there was a lot of different ways that people figured out how to make things move. This was the very beginning and early stages of animation that is very simplistic and mainly involved only the upper class as the equipment was no accessible for everyone. The first example of animation being the Magic Lantern, which was an early predecessor to the projector, this made slides jump back and forth giving the illusion of a moving image. By creating a moving image, this was of course something very intriguing as people had only ever experienced a still image, as well as inspiring others to come up with new ways that they could make images move. The reason being for the strive of new ways to make images move, I feel was the desire for new technology as this was a time where inventions and creators were very popular. Animation then moved up where new pieces of equipment were developed and eventually animation became a form of entertainment for the masses. The development of animation could have been slightly encouraged by the idea of gaining profit from it, such as putting on shows and attracting an audience. Additionally, people saw it as a way of entertaining house guests with things such as Zoetrope, where animation really started to kick in and the upper class all had to own one for themselves. Flipbooks were also something that were popular in 1868 when they were created and this can still be seen as a modern day art form, which is pretty great! This also shows how animation has developed, something so little as a flipbook, which would have been very simple back then, has now developed to be crazy complicated books that are hundreds of pages thick and can tell a detailed narrative! The way animation has developed has been drastic and in this time period, even though so long ago, it was still developing rather quickly as new inventors came up with new equipment using only what they knew.

Ideas for SHOE

My first ideas for coming up with 24 images relating to the word shoe were simply just to draw different types of shoe, but I found that I was bored of this idea and that it was too bland. So, instead I decided that I was going to come up with lots of phrases that related to the word shoe and create different drawings that explain these. Here are a few that I personally like that I have found, some are still going to be the idea of different shoes as there is only so many phrases.

• Goody two shoes
• Shaking in your boots
• Big shoes to fill
• The shoe is on the other foot
• If the shoe fits
• These boots are made for walking
• Blue Suede Shoes

Below I have put a few drawings on mine to show how I have approached my word.

Walt Disney

Walt Disney, founder of Walt Disney Productions which is now one of the most successful and best-known motion-picture companies in the world! His ideas stemmed from experimenting with hand-drawn cel animation and inspired him to start his own animation business after working for different film studios. The reason that Walt Disney was so important in the animation world was because of his innovative ideas and the way he made lots of people from adults to children enjoy animation after having his cartoons shown before films in Kansas City Cinema. Disney was always motivated to keep making each animation better and better, and decided to use technicolour to create the first colour cartoon. By creating a coloured cartoon, this inspired other animators to start producing their work in colour too, which created a new direction for animation as it started to become more and more developed. When Disney came out with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, this also inspired animators globally, such as Japanese animators. Before the release of this full feature-length animation, Japanese animators believes that animation wasn't suited for feature-length film but this then inspired them to start making longer films. Osamu Tezuka, a founding animator for Japanese animation, was greatly inspired by Walt Disney's work and was the first Japanese animator to start to tell meaningful stories with animation, whereas others were still quite simplistic and aimless. Disney had such a large impact on the industry because he was a determined animator that put his heart into it, instead of always looking for the easy answer he created new pathways where other animators would soon follow.

Winsor McCay

Winsor McCay was an american animator that became one of the pioneers in animation history, this was because of his new approach to it and he started to develop characters. He thought of his idea after being inspired by his son's flipbooks and this gave him the idea of executing this on different film frames. McCay also came up with the idea of repeated cycles of animation loops to cut down the time it took to create an animation, which is still used today. As McCay developed some very important techniques such as key framing, he really helped to move animation forward as it allowed for animators to plan easier and cut corners in some places. Without his development of the practice and famous Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), animation may not have developed so quickly after this point. What I particularly like about Winsor McCay is that his animations were made for the masses instead of being very out there and strange, this meant that more people started to like the idea and thought it was quite entertaining. What I have noticed about many of the pioneers of animation in history is that a lot start out as cartoonists and working for newspapers and I think this is where the ideas developed to creating such creative characters.

The Other Side, Production Diary - 4/12/15

Like I had previously planned I managed to get a video of someone swinging an 'axe' so that I could animate it better. This helped me tremendously and I feel that in the future if I am animating any complicated movements of the body that gaining reference material is definitely beneficial to the animation! I have got finished 7/9 scenes of my animation now so I have a lot of material to show for my crit session, which will be a great advantage as I will hopefully gain lots of feedback. I also had a small progress review with Mat today and this helped by just making sure I was on track and things were going okay, from this I gained that I need to watch 'Waking Sleeping Beauty' to help with my animation history research and that to gather audio I could look at Free Sound Project, BBC sound library or UB sound. As long as I keep going at the speed I am, I am going to be on track and will still have time to go back and refine my animation over the Christmas break as well as when we come back before the deadline. This will give me a overall better animation as none of it will be rushed, below is some videos of reference material and then the rough scene I created from it!

Sketchbooks That Inspire Me

The Other Side, Production Diary - 1/12/15

Today was just another studio day for me, where I carried on with my animation and it's going really well. I tried to animate a scene where my character goes to chop a tree, but I found it very difficult by using videos from the internet so my next plans are to record someone swinging their arms as if chopping a tree to get the best result. This way I can go through frame by frame and draw up my animation correctly without it looking unrealistic! I have quite a few scenes that are pretty much finished and I feel that to keep on track I need to do a few more blog posts on the history of animation to keep on track. Also, the last thing I need to start collecting is my audio which I'm unsure on where I am going to source this from yet.

Below is a clip of one of my finished scenes, I am going to wait til my crit session before I start to make small changes on them so I can change what others notice can be tweaked.