YCN Brief - Action on Hearing Loss - DIARY 6

Below is the final animation created for YCN. I found this brief to be a good learning experience, working with plasticine puppets and armatures; in total we made 5. I found they were easily to manipulate, however they were sometimes a pain as Vlad and I had to keep remoulding and shaping them back to their original shape. I definitely find that it's easier to use a solid puppet, but it's good to be able to use all kinds of materials as an animator. I also made the poster, which is the cover used on the YouTube video, so that we could visualise the kind of campaign and look that it would give. I also thought up the hashtag #highfiveforaction as an extra little idea for the campaign.  If I were to do this project again, I would like more of a say on the final edit, as I would have colour corrected the final film to be the exact correct colours of the brand. This way it would be more in keeping with the house style. Overall, I felt that this was a successful animation and working with Vlad was a really good choice as it gave me a lot of inspiration and motivation, I find working in teams really is the best way to go with side briefs such as this one!

YCN Brief - Action on Hearing Loss - DIARY 5

We decided that it would be better for me to do a little more of the animation side as Vlad was going to be animating digitally and handling post-production, so I mainly animated the main character whilst Vlad animated the people walking by.

Below are a few pictures from the animating.

YCN Brief - Action on Hearing Loss - DIARY 4

As part of my role I was to build the bench, the main prop of our set. Below is the progression of building it. I wanted to wait until we had the puppets built before I made the bench so that I could get the proportions correct first time.

 

Materials, plus paint and lolly pop sticks.

 

I used wire to connect the pieces of foam board.

 

 The lolly pop sticks were used to create the handles.

 

 

Waiting for glue to dry, then I painted it brown with acrylic paint.

  

 The final product next to one of our puppets!

YCN Brief - Action on Hearing Loss - DIARY 3

Original Ideas - playing around with Plasticine

Here was my original idea for how the characters could look, we wanted to keep them really simple so that they could be easily replicated and easy to re-mould when animating.



Mine and Vlad's ideas for puppets.

Then we began putting together armatures, after deciding our puppets were to be 15cm tall and we wanted 5 of them. We decided on making 3 white puppets, 1 magenta and 1 blue (the colours of the logo for Action on Hearing Loss).

 

My armature designs and one of the armatures.



 To divide the work I built the 5 armatures and Vlad moulded the clay around them so that we could keep them as similar as possible!
 

 

 

 

All done! I decided the main character to be called Burt Jiffy.

YCN Brief - Action on Hearing Loss - DIARY 2

Below are Vlad's storyboards.

 

And here are my concept art pieces and final bench design.

YCN Brief - Action on Hearing Loss - DIARY 1

For my live brief I have chosen to tackle the Action on Hearing Loss brief!
I chose this brief as I wanted to make an animation that had a purpose and in turn was able to help people, so this brief is bringing awareness to those who are living with hearing loss everyday.

My original idea for this project was to create an animation about someone who gradually loses their hearing and then to explore their journey and make quite an empathetic and heartfelt animation.

I pitches this idea to Vlad who really wanted to join forces with me and create a stop-motion animation that explored this idea. So, we got together and began coming up with some ideas.

We decided to simplify my original ideas for the sake of time management and sometimes the simpler the story the easier the message can be put across, and below I created some moodboards to start getting an idea of the aesthetic we were going for.


 

Final Storyboard

Animatic - The Box

Here is the full animatic for The Box.

I have put a few placeholder foley sounds for the purpose of understanding the surroundings.
I've also sent this animatic to Nick who is now starting to work on the original soundtrack and proper foley sounds that will make up the final animation.

Final Storyboards

Gantt Chart - The Box

 
 This gantt chart I decided to make from the 1st of March as I felt the beginning of my project was mainly just drawing and designs, so it would work better for me as a stop-motion animator to start really tracking my progress at the point of creating the final storyboard/animatic and then so on.

Hopefully, having this chart will keep me on track as I need to be as time efficient as possible when it comes to building sets/puppets as well as animating in time for the deadline. I have made sure to leave myself the full month of April to animate and I want to have all of my pre-production done by the end of March.