Lifting Tower - Idea Synthesis

After meeting with Vlad and sharing both our individual ideas, we began fusing them together to pitch to Jimmy on the 24th October. As our ideas were very different, we had a good variety of themes and narratives to choose from and decided on 3. We drew up three storyboards together, so that our pitch would be clear and concise and we would easily be able to show how we wanted the animation to be planned out. Below are the storyboards we drew up.





This is my personal favourite idea! I feel the merging images into Christmas objects is simple yet really effective!



I like all three of these ideas and once we decide on a final idea, we will draw up a full digital/colour storyboard to follow as these are only rough plans. I also thought it a good idea to come up with some colour palettes, as we have to consider the projection can only really show bright and bold colours.








Here are some of the colour palettes I have come up with to follow and I will show these to Vlad next time we get together to talk about our next plans. I particularly like the 2/3 palettes.

Projection Mapping on the Lifting Tower - Initial Ideas

For the lifting tower brief, I teamed up with Vlad to make an animation. It was advised we get into groups, and seen as though no illustrators seemed interested in the brief, I teamed up with another animator! We thought it would be best to start coming up with ideas individually before coming together and synthesising these, to pitch to our external client on the 24th October.



Firstly, I drew out the lifting tower and began writing down words that came to me when I thought about the theme 'Christmas'. This helped me come up with a variety of ideas, however I wanted them to be very simple, as the audience targeted will be transient. Very basic and bold colours will work best a well as geometric shapes, so I will keep this in mind when taking any ideas further.



Here are another two ideas I had, my favourite being the one with penguins as it involves comedy and I want this animation to be quite light-hearted and make people feel happy when they watch it.



Finally, here are another two ideas that I quickly jotted down, so now the next steps will be to meet up with Vlad and lay out both our ideas and hopefully come up with an idea based off either or any of our ideas! I'm thinking that the medium for this project will work best digital, possibly with After Effects, considering it will be projected instead of on a screen, I will discuss this further at our next meeting.

Loopdeloop - Reflection and Evaluation

Love is Love from Stacy Straub on Vimeo.

Here is my final animation submission for loopdeloop.

I'm very happy with how this animation turned out and it was my first ever claymation loop! I found it challenging to think of ways for the clay to flow into different colours/shapes smoothly. If I were to do this kind of animation again, I would put more time into the planning of the actual transitions, so that when I came to animate I didn't waste time trying to figure it out. I did cut out a couple of scenes, such as the DNA and the birds, as I felt that it was too many different ideas and the ones I chose to keep were enough to get the message across. As stop-motion is straight ahead, it allowed me to experiment as I went along and I was able to develop my creative skills with thinking on the spot. I improvised little details like the white spots and the spiral at the end, and played around with easing in and out. The main skill this brief helped me to develop was my timing, as I wanted the motion to be almost dance-like and surreal, so I combined quick and slow timings to achieve this. For future projects, this has allowed me to think more deeply about my timing in animation, and I want to develop this much further by continuing to create more animations like this.

Loopdeloop - Production Development

For this loopdeloop challenge the theme followed 'Love is Love'. I wanted to challenge myself to something I had never tried before for this brief and decided on something claymation that flowed and morphed into different objects/things.

I began with initial drawings and concepts around the idea 'Love'. I had quite a few ideas, however I didn't want to spend too long deciding due to the time frame of work that I have this year, so once I found a solid idea I liked, I dove straight in.

























I then drew up some ideas with watercolour.



And finally I came up with a storyboard, although I had never tried this kind of animation before I wasn't fussed if I cut out any of the ideas, if they happened to be much. I had the idea of two flowers, merging to form two fish, two hands, two birds and then loop.



I decided to also make a very rough animatic to follow, so that the animation flow would come out smoother. Even though this was a very small brief, I still felt that creating an animatic helped me plan out the movement of shots and without it, I wouldn't have been as organised or as successful.