#animation 101

EVALUATION

101

In Semester 1 we looked at how to animate the movement of objects and how the weight, density, material and size - of an object must be considered in order to create natural and realistic movement.

I was tasked with animating a ball tempo, the movement of a pendulum and a wind-up animation. For the wind-up exercise, I tried using the 3D program Maya. I wanted to add a rig allowing me to stretch and warp the size of the cube in order to implement squash and stretch into the model. However, I couldn’t figure this out so I had to leave it as it was. My confusion with using Maya and lack of confidence asking others for help was frustrating. For the next exercises, I used digital 2D and stop-motion mediums. I will practice using Maya and better acquaint myself with the basics and going forward I will need to overcome my reluctance to ask for help.

For the ball tempo, I used Procreate for iPad which I’ve used in the past. I made two variations on the test: a pink orb moving from point A to B at 12 frames per second, and another at 24 frames per second. While exporting the 24-frame test as a gif/mp4, I noticed a flickering effect with circles jumping to different parts of the screen for a frame or two. I discovered the frames were out of order, so I rearranged them. This error was me not adjusting the opacity of the layers temporarily so they could be distinguished from the new frames drawn, then resetting the opacity to full when finished. I’ll remember to do this in future.

I animated the pendulum using paper cut out stop motion on a light box. Filming frames and animating on my iPhone with the app Stop Motion. One was a looping animation, the other a pendulum coming to rest. I'm happy with the result, especially the looping one. I do wish the moment where the pendulum was losing momentum was slightly quicker and less drawn out; my attempt looked unnatural to me. In future, I will keep in mind how long the last few lingering swings of the pendulum should be.

The next part of the course was animating balls bouncing using live action reference footage. I filmed videos of three different balls bouncing. This showed how the weight, size and material of each ball impacts the way it moves. A soft, rubbery, bouncy ball will have more squash and stretch to its movements on a hard surface. A firmer, larger basketball won't squish against the contact point. If a ball is dense and heavy like a bowling ball, it will not squash and stretch, and will give only a few low-level bounces. The three balls I used were a ping pong ball, a tennis ball and a football.

Whilst animating the bounces on procreate, I used reference videos/gifs and went through each frame to make sure the movement felt accurate.

One challenge with the animations was keeping the shapes of the balls consistent. As I was animating frame by frame. I initially just redrew the ball using the frame before it as a guide. Eventually though, I decided to copy the previous layer, paste it to a new one and move it slightly according to the movement. For solid objects such as bouncing balls, I will utilise the copy and paste option in future to keep the shapes consistent and solid.

For Halloween, we were asked to animate either a pumpkin or a spider swinging like a pendulum. I chose the spider. I assumed the exercise was supposed to be done exclusively in Maya. Once again, the program was confusing and hard to navigate, but I did complete it. I later discovered we could have used any medium. If I had time, I would’ve made a 2D version with a frame-by-frame animated spider. I need to communicate better and ask my tutors more questions.

Creating a showreel. I had HD footage of all my animations except those made on Maya. I couldn't find all the Maya files I’d worked on, and some wouldn't open. So, I used a lower-quality version I filmed using my phone. I was also required to download graphics from Blackboard to mark the different clips. The download didn’t work possibly due to my version Premiere Pro not being compatible with the graphic. So, I created a similar graphic from scratch using the Premiere Pro shape tool. For music, I used the royalty free site Mixkit.com, which had free songs I could download that complimented the video and gave it a sense of professionalism without sounding corporate and lifeless. I’m happy with the music I chose.

Overall, I was happy with my 101 showreel. I was not only able to brush up on my Premiere Pro editing skills but also my animation clip editing skills. Learning how to use tools such as the shape tool to create professional looking graphics and discovering useful resources such as Mixkit.com, which I will use again in future projects.

102

Our 1st task for Animation 102, was to create character expression poses. Initially I used Maya, but I encountered difficulties accessing the files from home, so decided to create poses using a stop-motion armature. I made reference videos of myself in the poses and drew them on paper. Then I worked on posing and photographing the armature in the stop-motion booths.  I really enjoyed this process as it was less technically demanding and fickle compared to working with the Maya 3D models and, up to now, I had no experience working with a professional metal, ball and jointed, magnet-anchored stop-motion armature before, so it was a great experience.

The second exercise involved our characters transitioning from one expression to another. I decided my character would transition from curiosity/inquisitiveness to surprise/fear. Using hand drawn key poses and enacting the movements myself, I was able to see how natural movement would occur. For example, if the character was going to raise one leg during the surprised/scared pose, I acted out the movement from leaning in curiously to jumping in surprise to see which leg I would naturally lift, which leg would be on the ground, etc. I animated this sequence and the sitting/standing animation using the Stop Motion app on my iPhone and a small phone tripod. The result was good, but I realised I should have done live action videos of these sequences to use as reference and that the finished film was slightly shaky due to the basic tripod and iPhone set-up. If I were to reuse this set-up, I would need to stabilise the camera and tripod better.

For the third animation, I sought the help of the stop-motion tutor, Owen who showed me how to use Dragon Frame. Using this, I made the walking and sneaking animations. As first attempts, these both looked slightly awkward, but it was excellent practicing using this new software and camera.

Using Dragon Frame, I then completed four further animations; lifting a heavy object, lifting a light object, pulling an object and pushing an object. There were a few practical issues such as, my armature did not have fingers to grasp the paper and lift it – I used blue tac to attach the paper to the hand. Another issue was sourcing a heavy looking weight, so I made one using magnets designed for keeping metal armatures feet in place.

Another problem was the armature couldn’t hold the weight in the air - I realized I needed to tighten the joints of the figure. I also accidently brushed against the camera causing it to zoom in during filming the ‘pull’ sequence - I will need to be aware of my movements when working in the booths.

My final animation was a short story. I wrote a brief synopsis of mysterious lidded box, armature removes lid and slug creature emerges. One problem I encountered was when I exported the frames to video, the lower half was cropped, and my hand was in shot despite me having deleted these. I asked Owen to help me identify the problem. Seems I had edited the wrong cache of photos, so I edited the correct set and removed the hands

Sequences complete, I edited the work into a showreel on Premiere Pro - adding titles and music then uploaded to Vimeo.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with the work I produced in Animation 101/102 so far. I’ve gained experience in stop-motion and learned the basics of Dragon Frame. I have problem solved practical issues. I am honing my skills in using the metal armature to breathe life into a character. I feel I’ve improved in my ability to animate these professional armatures and have come far in a short amount of time. I hope to have the opportunity to work with 3D stop-motion animation in future. I feel I have great potential in that field. I want to learn/improve my skills in Maya 3D. Apart from difficulties with Maya I’m still happy and satisfied with my work in 101/102. I have learned many valuable techniques in a range of mediums and software.

A few weeks before my return to university after the holidays, I saw the Mackinnon and Saunders 30 Years and Beyond exhibit. Held from the 9th of November to the 25th of February. An exhibit dedicated to the animation and puppet-making studio that created the stop motion models and armatures for animated productions such as The Corpse Bride (2005), Fantastic Mr.Fox (2009), Frankinweenie (2011), Mars Attacks (1996), and most recently the Guillermo Del Toro's stop motion version of Pinnochio in 2022.

Coming to this exhibition with my family, I knew it would house many stop-motion puppets from notable productions like Del Toro's Pinnochio. But it was only until I saw these signs with the Mackinnon Saunders logo and the list of staff who worked on their productions. It was eye-opening knowing just how many productions this studio contributed to so many of the most iconic and critically acclaimed pieces of stop motion animation, yet the general public and animation fanbase credit the craft of these films to a single individual such as the directors of these films (Wes Anderson, Tim Burton Guillermo Del Toro, etc.). It made the concept of animation, especially films and feature films, a collaborative effort shaped by an entire team of talented artists rather than by a single genius auteur sink in.

Plus, it was incredible being up close with stop motion armatures from animated films that I've watched and continue to inspire me. As well as incredible to photograph and film them.

As part of my Animation 101 class, I was tasked to compile the animations I had made so far into an Adobe Premiere Pro project and create a showreel.

The animations I have made so far for this brief include several sequences of different balls in motion of various sizes, materials, and weights produced using Procreate for iPad, two paper cut-out stop motion clips, and a Maya test animation. I couldn't find all the Maya files I worked on, and the one I wanted to access to get high-quality video wouldn't open. So I used a lower-quality version I filmed using my phone. I need to explore and understand how to export into a higher quality in Maya for future projects - I am new to Maya, and this is a learning curve.

I was also required to download a graphic to annotate my various animations (i.e., test 1, test 2, etc.); however, I tried downloading it from Blackboard, but it wouldn't work. I believe this was because I was using a different version of Premiere. Without the graphic, I instead improvised using the Premiere shape tool. Using the video Premiere Pro : 'How to Draw Circle and Rectangle Shapes (EASY and FAST method) by the Youtube channel Adobe in a Minute, and created a similar graphic from scratch.

Once all the clips were together, and the graphic added, I set about finding a soundtrack to go along with it. It didn't take me long to find a website that provided me with royalty-free stock music to use in my reel. On the website called Mixkit, I found a track entitled 'Hip Hop 02' by artists Lily J that gave the footage a mature and contemporary feeling appropriate for a professional feeling animation reel.

I'm glad I was able to find a track of such high quality in such a short amount of time on a free music website such as this. Royalty-free music, especially the type found on websites without the requirement to create an account or subscription to download any tracks, tends to be not of best quality, and they often have a bland, soulless sound to them. So I'm happy to have happened upon a website like Mixkit and the excellent work of Lily J.

Once I exported this project as an mp4 file, I finally uploaded my animation reel to my Vimeo account.

In continuation of my bouncing ball exercise, I made two other bouncing ball animation tests. One that I based on the movement and physics of a football, and the other is based on a ping-pong ball.

I enjoyed getting into the rhythm of animating each part frame by frame, and there's always something satisfying about seeing the movement you created in an object or character come to life as you work on it.

Some problems I had while animating these two, particularly the football, was drawing each frame, or layer, of the football by hand and trying to keep the shape consistent. I wanted to train myself to be able to redraw the shape with consistency to the shape that came before. I did this by lowering the transparency of the previous layer in the procreate document, tracing over it in a new layer, and moving it slightly. This was easy for the most part, as the football was heavy. It didn't have that many contact points with the ground and lost momentum quickly. The ping-pong ball, on the other hand, is light. It isn't easy for it to lose momentum, and it is probably the ball with the most contact points with the ground. It also bounces higher too, compared to the football, so redrawing each frame would be impractical and an unnecessary strain. So I drew one drawing for the ball and copied and pasted it to each successive layer, moving it each time for each frame.

Another problem I ran into with the ping pong ball animation was that I ran out of frames to work with. as it turns out, a procreate document can only have a maximum of 88 layers. Thus I couldn't finish the ping-pong ball's movement in full, such as showing the point where it runs out of momentum and stops on the ground. As I couldn't figure out how to fix this or extend the project's layer capacity, I was forced to leave this test unfinished.

As part of my homework for November 1st's Animation 101 class, I was given the task to find a ball or object and take a video or two of it bouncing and use that as a reference in animation to learn how energy transfer and dispersion work in animation.

In class Sir presented us with this clip from the Brian Cox-hosted documentary 'Human Universe'. In it, we learned about air resistance and how it affects the rate at which different objects fall.

With air resistance, a bowling ball and a feather fall at different speeds: the bowling ball falls faster, while the feather floats slowly down. However, when air is removed in a large vacuum, the bowling ball and the feather fall at the exact same rate. I wondered how I could take advantage of this fact for future animations. For instance, animating objects falling in a world with no air like space or the after life.

For my animation exercise, I had to think about what the ball is made of and how that would affect the way it moves. If the ball is made of a soft, rubbery material, like a bouncy ball, it will have more squash and stretch to its movements and impact on hard surfaces. If the ball is more firm, like a basketball, it won't squish against the contact point. If a ball is dense and heavy like a bowling ball, it will not squash and stretch, and will only bounce twice at most on a very low level. A balloon is light and the least dense object, therefore it will fall very slowly and will move around unpredictably due to its more lightbulb-shaped body.

When I got home, I set about capturing my own footage for test reference, I captured footage of three balls bouncing in different ways; a football, a ping-pong ball, and a tennis ball. I initially filmed the balls bouncing on a soft wooden table but was curious how the objects would behave on different surfaces. So I filmed a handful of videos on my living room coffee table which is veneered and harder. As far as I can tell, I couldn't tell much of a difference in object behavior.

I used one video with a tennis ball bouncing for my first test. I opened up iPad Procreate and created a 4k canvas to animate on. I also had the video on my laptop in another tab for reference.

Along with this, I actually took the video and used the website Convertio to convert the video into a gif file. With this gif version, I could go through the footage frame by frame.

Initially, I drew the tennis ball falling with a slight stretchy blur effect - as the footage I had captured had a blurriness to it in certain frames, So I wanted to try and emulate this in the way I animated it. However, the tennis ball looks too fluid and not as sturdy as a result, which did not reflect the realistic physics of the tennis ball I was going for, so I edited these frames to be more solid.

Also while animating and looking at how the animation looked via the export as gif option, I realized the tennis ball gets smaller by the end. so I went back into the document and resized every frame near the end accordingly so that the size of the tennis ball would be uniform.

Finally, I saved the animation as a 24-frame-per-second mp4 and gif and uploaded the mp4 to my Vimeo, along with the video reference.

I was tasked with creating an animation using either a pumpkin or a spider as a subject. I worked with Maya 3D as I thought that was the mandatorily required software for this exercise which we were all going to use.

In the 24th of October's Animation 101 class, we learned how to carve holes and shapes into 3d models, using a pumpkin as an example. To do this, the teacher selected the Make Shape tool and elongated the shape horizontally, put the shape through the pumpkin model, and press the B and A to make the shape disappear along with the space it inhabited in the pumpkin, creating an untextured hole where the shape was.

In last week's lesson for Animation 101, we learned about how to animate a pendulum movement. This involved us observing and learning the physics of how different pendulums move depending on what string or wire the object being swung is attached to and the weight of the object attached.

While listening to the lesson, I took notes on what was said about how a pendulum should move.

During the lesson, we were given the exercise to animate a pendulum swinging in Maya 3D. During this session some of us, who specialized in stop motion, were given the option to go to the stop motion room for a demonstration on how to animate an armature, so I went with them.

The teacher who demonstrated the stop motion to use used the program Dragon Frame. A software that is industry standard and connects directly from a camera to the computer. The Teacher also used a special remote that was plugged into the camera which could be used to take photos one or two frames at a time. I myself have been using the Stop Motion app on my phone for most of my animations, but perhaps I should look into getting Dragon Frame and experimenting with the software. It would be good for me to learn industry-standard software for stop-motion specifically.

After school, I was given homework to create a pendulum animation using any medium I wanted to use. For this exercise, I used 2D paper cut-out stop motion and my Stop motion app. At first, the mini tripod I was using kept falling over due to the weight of my iPhone looking down at the lightbox I was using. I placed some spots of museum putty under the feet of the tripod to keep it in place, and this worked well.

I created two animations; one pendulum that swung from side to side and was intended to loop, and another that had a delay to it where it would swing until it lost momentum and came to a stop in the middle.

Once these two animations were done, I exported them from the stop motion app to my photo reel and uploaded the videos onto my Vimeo account.