Experimental Animation

For this assignment I have to create a 30 second long piece of experimental animation illustrating accurate movement and then evaluate the techniques I use. Here is a gantt chart of how I would like the project to play out:

I quite like the idea of doing an 'animator vs animation' type of project, where I create a man or a creature in one way or another and he comes to life and rebels against my hand. There are many examples of this sort of thing:

I would like to use stop motion as it is an area in which holds a lot of interest for me and I feel I haven't had the chance to do as much as I would have liked so far in my animation career. I plan to take what ever I capture into a finishing program like After Effects, just to polish up what ever footage I have, but I don't want to do too much in the post production side because I still want the piece to have a hand made feel. To get a better feel for the idea, I am going to do a bit of research into the stop motion animation style and I therefore will be able to create a better animation.

Stop motion, in essence, is a very simple but time consuming technique. It basically involves taking pictures of things like clay, toy figures, and even cut out drawings, in a slightly different poses in every frame so when it’s played back, normally at 24-30 frames a second, it gives the illusion of movement.  

In my opinion, it is because of the simplicity of the technique that stop motion has been around for so long, with examples dating as far back as the early 1900’s, with such short animations as Albert E. Smith’s  ‘The Humpty Dumpty Circus’(1908) and J. Stuart Blackton’s ‘The Haunted Hotel’ (1907). There is some controversy over who actually pioneered the concept of stop motion with both Smith and Blackton having convincing arguments and supporters. Smith achieved his work by borrowing his daughter’s toys and barely moving them between shots. This premise is one that is still used in stop motion animations today. Unfortunately, this film does not exist anymore and therefore it is difficult to analyse.

 However, just because the premise of stop motion is fairly straight forward, to create work like Ray Harryhausen’s stunning contribution to the 1963 feature film ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ requires immense skill and imagination. The scene with the mass skeleton fight for example is still regarded as a fantastic piece of animation, even by today’s high standards. In order for the stop motion skeletons to look natural and moving with the real life characters the whole fight sequence was choreographed with painstaking accuracy and practised with real stunt men. Only after achieving what was considered perfect were the stunt men taken out, leaving the actors to fight nothing and the skeletons were inserted afterwards.

Another significant name in stop motion history is Oliver Postgate, the man responsible for such children’s classics of the sixties and seventies as ‘Clangers’ and ‘Bagpuss’. It is my belief that the main reason his works were so well received back then, and is still considered as one of the best children’s show creators today, is that the characters are so very simple and have an almost homemade look about them, which allows the child to relate them to some of their own favourite toys. Another key point that brought these shows such success has to be the use of sound. Not only are the theme tunes soft, therapeutic and easily recognisable, almost like a lullaby, but the sounds the characters make themselves, I think, are purposely tailored to be imitated by the child after he/her has finished watching. The way that the Clangers communicate with each other in whistles and Bagpuss’ yawn are immediately recognisable and contribute to the show’s cult status. This gives the characters a more permanent status in the minds of the viewers. Oliver Postgate created these programs while in a two man production team with Peter Firmin under the company name of Smallfilms. Consider any modern day stop motion program or short and you will find a number of people working on it, such as researchers, producers, animators, writers and many more. The fact that these two men did everything themselves, and still managed to create television that many generations hold close to their hearts continues to be impressive and gives any animators starting out today a lot to aspire to. 

I believe that some of the best stop motion being made today is coming from the minds of Seth Green, Matthew Senreich, Douglas Goldstein and Tom Root in the form of the television programme ‘Robot Chicken’. Robot chicken is quite a unique show in that it has no real narrative; it is purely just a series of short humorous clips. In comparison to the older stop motion productions already discussed, the movement in robot chicken is fairly seamless and really highlights the standards that you would have to reach in order to be part of the animation process in creating programs like these. I think that the most impressive thing about this show is the quality of the sets; they look so real and in such good detail that it helps give the illusion that the dolls and other various props used have come to life.

I want to do cut out stop motion as apposed to any other kind because I feel it has more of a personal touch. I really like the animations that Terry Gillliam brings to Monty Python, not only are they hilarious but the way they flow, something from the scene goes onto set up the next scene, is very much a style that I would like to imitate. For example:

Another example that follows this kind of 'each scene sets up the next' sort of style is the Arctic Monkeys 'Do I wonna know?' video:

One of the main reasons I want to follow this sort of style is because you aren't really limited as to what you can do. The story follows a narrative in that each scene has been set up by the last so it doesn't have to follow a story as such. It gives me a lot more creative freedom and keeps the viewer guessing as to what will come next, which in my opinion makes for a much more interesting animation.

Here are the storyboards explaining what I want to happen in my animation:

The first scene is going to start with a time lapse of the sun rising across a mountain scene with some soft soothing music then the mountain stands up and grunts in a grumpy fashion and slaps the sun out of the sky and into the next scene. After that I plan to use the squash and stretch principle to my advantage by using the sun as an egg hitting the face of this guy with the sphinx's body.

Then the guy wipes the egg from his face and leaves his mouth open which the focus then zooms into. In his mouth there is a river where we see a fish swimming down it. The fish then swims up to a set of stair.

The fish walks up the stairs and into a living room. He picks up his brief case and hat and heads on out the door. He walks in to the middle of the road and gets ran over and focus turns to a wheel of the car.

The wheel then turns in to the sun and hits the unsuspecting mountain on the back of the head.

A drawing of the fish and its parts:

Colour tests:

With scales:

After drawing the fish I wanted to just do some basic tests into how he would walk so I looked into some walk cycles:

Then I sketched out a basic 8 step walk cycle just for the legs (being cheeky and using 2 of the frames twice)

Legs in colour:

Test of the fish walking (animated on two's):

A few rough tests of the fish jumping:

A couple of simple concepts of the sphinx guy:

And in colour:

I also started to think of how could i reflect realistic movement onto a mountain. I imagine it would be slow and kind of grumpy, like the troll from Harry Potter (but obviously far less animated):

  

Or maybe a sloth:

Test of how mountains arm will work:

First test of mountain moving:

Everything is way too slow so here it is sped up:

The standing up is too ridgid, I think it would look funnier if the arm just bust out and the 

mountain doesn't stand at.

The stages of the mountains arms drawn up in photoshop:

 And then the mountain with added colour and a better arm:

All of the egg/sun stages drawn up in photoshop:

The sun raising will obviously just raise up evenly on a curve but after the mountain slaps it it needs to go up fast and peek in the air, then come back down fast. 

So I looked for some reference to see make sure the ball would move smoothly. 

First scene (no sound):

I had to trim down some of the scenes because the piece was going to run over the 30 second target. I changed the second scene so the fish is just swimming across rather than down then across.

For the waves I though the best way would be to get two strips of waves and just move them back and forth in opposite directions.
A couple tests for the movement of the waves:

For the next scene I needed to do a test to make sure the scene and fish would

move round each other at the right speed, keeping the focus on the fish:

I couldn't think of a good way to make the fish grab the hat from the hat rack. The problem was the fish was too small to reach the hat. I thought wind blowing it down was a good solution, it actually fits in really well with the flow of the piece. 

Tests for the wind to blow the hat from the hat rack:

Just as the hat landed on the fish's head I wanted the shot to zoom in and 

look really detailed and the fish would wink. 

Like this:

Here is my attempt:

I don't think it looks too bad but it takes away from the flow of the piece and

unfortunately doesn't really work.

Pictures of the cars used to come closer to the camera:

I strayed from the storyboards again with the car because I couldn't get the fish getting ran over to look as good as I thought I could, so I just changed it so the fish gets across the road and then the car drives past and we follow the car into the next scene. 

Then the car goes off of a jump and explodes. The explosion that the car creates:

Test of the car wheel bouncing into the tanning booth:

Most of the sound effects I collected from freesound.org. However I made a couple, the wind for example, myself because I couldn't find exactly what I wanted for some of the sounds.

The final piece: