Whitehead Workshops

improvements

1:- Make the animation smoother with less jagged movements.

2:- Add more frames to make it run at a proper speed.

3:- Spend more time with each frame, making sure they line up well against the previous frames.

What was good

1:- The sack shows signs of personality that would be more obvious if the animation went on for longer.

I got 3 different people to watch my animation and give me feedback, and this is what they each said:

Josh

Josh thought that the animation itself wasn’t too bad, but thought that my animation would have been better if it had had some hand gestures and body animations.

There are no animations other than the mouth.

Nicki

Nicki thought that, for my first time lip syncing, I had done quite well, but thought that the animation would have been a little better if it had a decent background to go with it, and that it was quite plain as a result.

The background is just a boring white.

Mike

Mike thought that my lip syncing was well timed, and featured a nice range of mouth shapes and movements. He also thought that the audio was very clear, and easy to understand. However, the addition of facial expressions would have made this a little better.

Nothing in the characters heads move other than their mouths.

Overall, I thought that the unit and animation went quite well, but it would have been nice to have a few extra animations and a good background to add to this. I was unable to do this due to a lack of time.

I thought the characters were fairly well designed, but the lines could have been straighter and, in particular, the arms of Caboose (red shirt) were a little disproportionate and weren’t sized properly.

What was your assignment asking you to do? My assignment was asking me to plan, create, and design a personal 'portfolio' website using Wix.

What method/software did you use to produce you graphic and why? We were required to use Wix to create our website. I designed my website based off of the designs Wix had, and chose the one I thought looked good.

What went right and what went wrong? Because Wix is easy to use, designing the website and making it go live were really simple and worked perfectly, but I had some difficulty with embedding videos on the website, and I was unable to embed any of my videos.

If some thing did go wrong, how did you correct it? I was unable to correct this problem.

If you did it again, would you do it differently? and why? I would pay more attention to the dimentions of my images, to make sure they are roughly the same size, as one or two of the images are drastically different in size to the others on my home page.

Pre-Film

Although there have been some examples of animation that dates back to 4000 BC, it was during the 1800's that animation really began to take off as a form of entertainment. The biggest innovations of the century are as follows:

The Thaumatrope (1824)

Invented by either John Paris or Peter Roget, the Thaumatrope was a popular toy of the time. It consisted of a paper disk, and is attached to two pieces of string on either end. On either side of the disc, an image is drawn. When the string is twisted quickly, the two images appear to blend together and create something of a basic animation.

The Phenakistoscope (1831)

Invented by Joseph Plateau, the Phenakistoscope is a device which uses a spinning disc to display a number of images in a sequence. They were printed around the edge of the disc, and when spun, the images give the illusion of motion.

The Zoetrope (1834)

First proposed by William Horner, and marketed as The Zoetrope in the 1860's, the Zoetrope is very similar to the Phenakistoscope in most ways, but instead of a spinning disc, it uses a revolving drum. Using slots on the side of it, people are able to view the images on the inside which, when spun, creates an illusion of motion. It is used more often than the Phenakistoscope and had the advantage over it of being easier to spin, faster, and being able to use more images, creating a longer sequence.

The Flip Book (1868) (Also known as a Kiniograph)

First patented by John Linnett, a Flip Book is a bound set of pages which all have images drawn on them. When the pages are flicked through quickly, the images create the illusion of motion, making the image move in the way it is draw.

The Praxinoscope (1877)

Invented by French science teacher Charles-Émile Reynaud, the Praxinoscope is the successor to the Zoetrope. It uses an inner light and a strip of paper placed around the interior of of the revolving drum or cylinder, placed in such a way that it is almost perfectly stationary, to make an image that appears clearer and brighter than one seen through a Zoetrope.

Traditional Animation

The first example of hand-drawn animation to appear on a Standard Picture Film was in the year 1900, in the short silent Film The Enchanted Drawing. In the film, a man draws a cartoon face onto an easel. He then goes on to draw a bottle of wine, a wine glass, a top hat and a cigar onto the easel, and then take them off, interact with them, and then put them back onto the easel. This was followed a few years later in 1906 by the first fully animated film, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.

The Age of Silent Film

The earliest known example of projected animation was Charles-Émile Reynaud's Théâtre Optique, a moving picture show presented by Charles in 1892. It consisted of a large Praxinoscope (known as a Projection Praxinoscope, which he invented in 1880) which had been modified to allow the images in the drum to be projected onto a large screen for a large audience to view. This however limited him to only 12 images a drum, until 1888, when he used a pair of wheels similar to modern film reels to hold up to 600 images.

Although Charle's show was shown in Paris up to 1900, it was overtaken several years earlier by the invention and creation of the Cinematograph (1894) and subsequent films (1895 onwards) created by Auguste and Louis Lumière. The Cinematograph was a motion-picture camera which was very similar in practical use as Thomas Edison's Kinetograph (See Below), but had the advantage of having a projector, making it viewable to more than one person at a time.

The year before the invention of the Cinematograph, in 1894, Thomas Edison invented the Kinetoscope. It is composed of a large box which had a hole which can be looked into, and from there you can see the images in the Cinematograph which are rotated or pulled around the interior of its 'box' to create the illusion of motion. There were a few fairly important inventions over the next couple decades. Several techniques, such as the Cel Technique, were developed over the years, and there were a large number of films that help to revolutionize animation during this period, such as Gertie the Dinosaur, Creation, El Apóstol, and many, many others. The biggest, and perhaps one of the most important, moments in Animation History came in the year 1923. Walt Disney

In 1921, Walt Disney opened the animation studio Laugh-O-Grams. This studio was short lived, however, going bankrupt in 1923. Later that year, Walt Disney opened another animation studio, now known worldwide as The Walt Disney Company, or simply Disney. With his new company, Walt Disney started what would become one of, if not the, most popular and successful animation studios of all time. The first animation created by Walt Disney and his partners, most notably Ub Iwerks, was the part-live action animated series called the Alice Comedies. In this series of animations, a live-action Alice would interact with an animated world in many different ways, the first of these being called 'Alice's Wonderland'. Walt Disney's first breakthrough is considered to be the third animation in the Mickey Mouse series, titled Steamboat Willie. Much of its success was because it was the first animated cartoon to include a full soundtrack, voice acting and sound effects which were printed onto the film itself, but this shouldn't take way that it was a cleverly made animation which delighted all who saw it.

In 1933, Walt founded the Warner Brothers Cartoon studio, which had more freedom to create what it desired to create, rather than being restricted to just what Walt himself wanted to make.

Technicolor

Technicolor is a process invented in 1916 which allowed films to be fully color, but it wasn't used fully for any animated works until the year 1932, which saw the release of the film Flowers and Trees, which was created by Disney Studios. It was a huge success, and went on to win the first ever Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Soon after, the use of Technicolor became an industry standard, and added an extra level of enjoyment for people watching the films.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Although it isn't actually the first of its kind, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is considered the first feature-length animated film, and it won an award for being so. The reason behind this belief is due to the fact it was the first one known to the English-speaking world, with the other seven before it coming from other countries, three from Argentina, two from Germany, and one from France and Italy. The other reason for this, is that all of the other 7 films were made using cutout, silhouette and stop motion animation, which isn't quite the same or as popular as more traditional animation.

After the success of Snow White, Walt and his companies decided to focus more on feature-length films, although they still continue to make animated shorts from time to time. Television

With the release of colored televisions in the 50's, 60's and 70's, came the possibility to share animated works quicker, easier, and to more people than ever before, all in full color. The first half hour television program to be fully animated was Hanna-Barbera's The Huckleberry Hound Show, which was made entirely of animated skits staring a character known as Huckleberry Hound, who would usually be seen trying to perform different jobs from the past and present, with jobs ranging from Roman Gladiator and Medieval Knight, to a Rocket Scientist and a policeman.

Later that year, Terrytoons released the short-lived Tom Terrific, which featured a character named Tom Terrific and his sidekick dog Might Manfred the Wonder Dog in short 5-minute adventures which featured in the TV series Captain Kangaroo.

The Flintstones

·         Technical Director:-

The job of the Technical Director is to lead the Technical Team, and to be the ‘bridge’, so to speak, between all the different teams involved with the production, and to coordinate between them all. They also build and manage the entire development of the production, from start to finish. In addition to this, they also provide technical support and come up with workarounds to technical problems that may come up. They have an active part in recruiting for the team, and have generally good knowledge of design, programming, debugging, and optimization, as well as considerable problem solving skills.

·         Graphic Programmer:-

The job of the Graphic Programmer is, in short, to make the game look and run at its best. They squeeze every bit of graphical horsepower out of the hardware available for the production. It is often said that the greatest thing ever to a Graphic Programmer is to make the numbers smaller, meaning that the production they are working on will be able to run a few frames per second faster. They also spend a lot of time to make every aspect of the game look as good as it possibly can.

·         Concept Artist:-

Above is my ‘About’ page, and the design for the page can be seen above. Where the two large text fields are, is where all the information about me would go. Above them would probably be pictures of me or related to me or my work.