Evaluation
When this project first came about, I’d never done an animation before in my life. I knew what stop motion was, and I knew that certain things were done using animation like some programmes I watched, but I never really concerned myself with how they were done, or what type of animation they were, or even the lengthy process that went behind each and every scene and even one whole minute of animation. This scared me quite a lot considering most things I’ve had to do on this course I’d explored partly in my own time before starting, so I had some basic understanding of how things worked.
When it came to the research, this was also something I had never really done before – analysing videos. Apart from in GCSE English where we wrote an essay on a car advert, annotating the meaning behind the advert like we would a poem. I knew annotating the videos in this unit didn’t deter from the writers perspective too much; I was confused though how much it deterred annotating from a writers perspective to an animators/artists one.
I really enjoyed researching Michel Gondry’s videos, no two video’s were the same and he didn’t direct video’s for one genre of music etc. It was nice to watch a broad range of videos when picking out the ones I was actually going to annotate. Something I definitely got out of the Michel Gondry research was the video, which he directed for his friend Mia using a lot of contrasting colours. I really liked this effect and it was then I came up with the idea of heavily using contrasting colours in my animation, regardless of the “gender-appropriate” colours I used which was blue and red.
Researching George Meilies was something I found increasingly difficult, as I had/have no idea how he did the things he did using a film camera. I wouldn’t even know how to do some of the things he demonstrated in his video using a digital camera. This meant that my annotations of his work was sketchy at best and to do this part better I would probably have to research on weird animation techniques used a long time ago that shaped some animation today.
The next step in my research was to look into the E4 channel in itself and annotate some existing estings used to identify their channel. The ones I liked in particular were the ones that looked as though they were made out of clay/play-doh. I think the reason being was that they seemed fun and colourful and fitted in well with the general feel of the show as it’s aimed at younger adults. I used this research to decide on using play doh for my animation, researching other animations in general later on helped me make this decision also.
After researching E4 estings, I went on to research idents from other popular channels, these were Living, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. It was interesting to see how different idents were depending on their target audience. Ranging from the ‘Living’ ident that was colourful, sophisticated but otherwise calm regardless of the domino effect – to the crazy, hyperactive nature of the cartoon network ident. My favourite of the three was definitely Nickelodeon though, one reason being that they have used the same theme for each ident (orange objects, green animals) but have creatively executed a completely different animation for each one. Even breaking the fourth wall in one of theirs, which I thought was quite impressive.
Finally I picked 5 animation video’s that weren’t subject to a particular heading, these were Claymation, Magic Water, Baking, Inspiration, Oren Lavie – Her Beautiful Elegance and Deadline. All were very good, considering I picked these from about 20 potential videos to annotate. My favourite was probably either Claymation or Magic Water, after I got into my head that I wanted my animation to be using clay/play doh, I watched as many Claymation video’s as I could to try and figure out how they managed to get their frames to transition so fluidly and their models to look so flawless after poking them around. I definitely took a lot of this research into account when doing my animation, especially the part at the end where my two little people mash together and rise up whilst mixing. I knew in order to get this right I’d have to do as many frames as I could and try not to move it too much whilst trying to mix the two together.
The planning stage of this project was quite easy for me as researching gave me a lot of idea’s and I already knew that I wanted to use some form of clay or play-doh. I had two main ideas which were the one where they meet in the middle and mix together to make the purple e4 logo, and the one where the e4 logo jumps out of the bushes and starts shooting people so they all turn purple. Before this though I did a mind map of materials I would use for the set, what I could use for certain aspects of the set etc. If I were to do the planning process again I would probably try and come up with a couple of more ideas and explore and incorporate other means of animation that weren’t clay/plasticine/play doh. All in all though I’m happy with how the planning process went.
The production stage of this unit was definitely interesting, and several times I felt like the unfortunate protagonist of a comedy who doesn’t have any luck, and after my set collapsed in on itself for the 5th time I nearly threw all of the play doh in the bin. After two remodels of the people, three set changes and one re-location of the set downstairs to a place that had more room and better lighting, I got there, eventually. From then on, everything went quite smoothly, and everything started going better than I actually expected it too.
The video in itself turned out better than I ever could have hoped, considering I was putting off shooting it for the fear that it would look completely ridiculous and I’d some how ruin the entire process by doing something wrong like putting too much movement between each frame, or that it would look ridiculous and amateur compared to the ones I had researched. But in the end everything turned out really well and I’m glad I chose the idea I did. If I were to shoot the video again I might have used something other than play doh to make the set, because when it got to the point where it kept falling apart I really didn’t feel like continuing shooting my animation at that point but I really had no choice or the play-doh would have gone hard and the set would have been ruined.
