First Cel Animation Key Frames

First Chosen Character to Animate

New characters

Learning Outcomes

Overall I am happy with my cell animation and its outcome, hopefully it will get a few laughs from the audience. I believe that this project was certainly challenging for me because I found it to be very hard work, you need to have a very logical approach to animation and i think i have tackled the problems that i came across very well. I found this project to be an eye opener for myself and I believe that I am not cut out for animation but now i i really appreciate how much work animators do to produce a piece of work.

Final Animation

This is my final animation piece. I hope you all enjoy it!

Music Trimming

Here I have trimmed the selected part of my track, hopefully it will fit well with animation.

This is the soundtrack in full, hopefully from my calculations I would have cropped the right bit to fit with my animation.

Individual Scenes

Jump 1

Jump 2

Jump 3

Jump 4

Space Jump

WTF

Space

Thud

Melting

Oh No

Here I have uploaded my scenes onto youtube, hopefully when i put them together it will create the animation that i had planned in my storyboard

Space Background Design

Here is the space background, I wanted to keep it very child like and rough so it would fit the style of my animation - hopefully it will work and fit in well.

Space Research

Here I have done research on space images as i have changed my storyboard to where the ice cream jumps into space, so i need to create a space background and hopefully this research will help me make one.

New Storyboard

1. All Dancing - Tribal Jumping

2. John Travolta ice cream does a really big jump.

3. Tribal ice creams are like - "where has he gone"

4. John Travolta ice cream jumps so high that he's in space.

5. At the climax of the song where it ends, this appears because John Travolta ice cream has fallen down.

6. He starts to melt away

7. Then there is a mixed reaction from the ice creams

Final Character Design

This is my final character design, after looking at my research I have come up with suitable and fun characters for my animation. I have considered the colours the ice creams should be from my research and the tribal attire that they are wearing.

Kawaii Ice Cream

Here I have looked at ice creams and kawaii ice creams, this was to help me choose my colour palette for my ice cream characters. As you can see they have used a lot of pastel colours and I will use the same idea for my characters.

Kawaii Research

After looking at my initial storyboard, i thought that my characters were very similar to the kawaii style. So I thought I would have a look at some kawaii images and see if I could apply some techniques to my own images. 

Tribal Clothing Research

This research will help me design clothing for the three ice cream characters.

Storyboard

1. All Dancing

2. Passing Judgement

3. The Split

4. The Spin

5. Fallen to the Ground

6. Melting

7. Oh No

Characters

Story

After listening to my track multiple times, I have decided to use the last 30 seconds of the song. The reason for this is because I like it where it comes to a climax then the track suddenly ends.

I have created four ice characters, three dressed in tribal clothing and one dressed as John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever. All the ice creams dressed in tribal clothing are dancing in a traditional tribal manner and the John Travolta one is randomly dancing in a very energetic fashion. Then the other ice screams look at him and glare. Then there is a close up of the John Travolta ice cream dancing, he then spins, hits the ground and starts to melt away. Then it cuts to the rest of ice creams facial expressions where they are all shocked.

John Travolta Dance

I have decided that I want one of my ice creams to dance like this:

Whilst the other ice creams are doing a traditional tribal dance like this:

More Research/Inspiration

Stop Motion Animation Research

These are my favourite stop motion videos that I have found on youtube. Hopefully I will draw inspiration from these to help me create a final animation.

Rayograms

These are some rayograms that I have produced during my darkroom sessions. I believe that these are very successful and I might consider to use this technique for my final animation.

My First Stop Motion Animation

Today I had my first stop motion animation lesson, this was a workshop where we got familiar with the equipment to create stop motion videos and hopefully have enough time to create a stop motion too. We were given some toys, a camera and a mac to create our animation.

Here is the end result of my groups work and for our first time we thought it was very successful, given the amount of time we had.

Simple Shaped Characters/First Cell Animation

In our first workshop we told create some simple shaped characters, then our next task was to create a 36 frame animation with a partner and to create a simple story with the two characters that we have made.

These are my simple shaped character design.

This is my final character design.

This is the storyboard with our key frames.

Once we created all the cells for the animation, I went onto after effects to piece the animation together and this is the end result.

Types of Animation

Thaumatrope

A thaumatrope is a toy that was popular in Victorian times. A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to persistence of vision.

The invention of the thaumatrope is usually credited to either John Ayrton Paris or Peter Mark Roget. Paris used one to demonstrate persistence of vision to the Royal College of Physicians in London in 1824.


Thaumatropes were one of a number of simple, mechanical optical toys that used persistence of vision. They are recognised as important antecedents of cinematography and in particular of animation.

   

Zoetrope


A zoetrope is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures. It consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. Beneath the slits on the inner surface of the cylinder is a band which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a set of sequenced drawings or photographs. As the cylinder spins the user looks through the slits at the pictures on the opposite side of the cylinder's interior. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together so that the user sees a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, the equivalent of a motion picture. Cylindrical zoetropes have the property of causing the images to appear thinner than their actual sizes when viewed in motion through the slits.

CEL ANIMATION

The cel is an important innovation to traditional animation, as it allows some parts of each frame to be repeated from frame to frame, thus saving labor. A simple example would be a scene with two characters on screen, one of which is talking and the other standing silently. Since the latter character is not moving, it can be displayed in this scene using only one drawing, on one cel, while multiple drawings on multiple cels will be used to animate the speaking character.


STOP MOTION

Stop motion (also known as stop action) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Motion animation using clay is called clay animation or clay-mation.