Friday 13 February 2009

Evaluation



I was completely new to After Effects, or any digital media based animation software before this brief, so my knowledge and skills were incredibly limited, I feel though I have grasped the basic skills and understandings needed to create a successful animation as well as incorporating my own style of illustration and design into this smoothly. Although I feel I used the skills I gained effectively in conjunction with my animation, I wish I’d perhaps been a bit more ambitious with my animation ideas in the time given.

Researching into current digital media styles including animation allowed for a great amount of inspiration, especially when struggling with my ideas. My digital media blog was an important asset to research, or at least on screen based research and I soon began to use it as a valid tool within research, it was accessible and easy when searching videos, animations and screen based work to display and annotate.

My strengths were definitely the imagery of my work, I realised half way through and confirmed at the end of this module that I am not an animator, but I really enjoyed storyboarding my idea and putting it onto screen, successful or not, the storyboards I feel area definite strength of this project. I feel my online research including my blog was a strong point as a way of displaying my development and inspirations, especially when I could link my own animations alongside those of others in my research.

My weaknesses is my attention and patience when animating, thus taking from my animation. I found animation itself time consuming and a painstakingly slow process, I feel I work much better working at a fast pace, especially being used to creating images when drawing quickly, animation became the lesser enjoyed aspect of this project and in turn I feel this effected my outcome.

I would perhaps try to be more ambitious with my idea, but sensible still, understanding time constraints and how I can use my current knowledge to its full capacity.

I would also try and perhaps to put more stop motioning of my illustrations in, I used stop framing in the final transition of the animation as the healthy bacteria transforms, and I enjoyed being able to draw the transition on paper and place it successful and effectively onto screen.

If given the chance again, I feel perhaps I could attempt to work backwards, in the sense of choosing my sound initial and working my animation around the song, rather than finding the song towards the end then altering my animation to suit.



Final Animation!


Final animation, finally, finished.

My choice of colour remained the same yet I switched them around so the purple will stand out more and be more prominent, so in turn the characters of the bacteria stand out more too. Sound gave the animation much more depth rather than completely silent, I wanted something 'science-y' and quite trippy to suit the tongue in cheek approach to the animation. Enjoy.

Rudd Studios





Rudd Studios are the London based design company responsible for E4's fonts, logos, designs etc.

Here's what they had to say;

E4 was Channel 4’s new baby. It needed a brand that was recognisably young, rebellious and different, without rejecting its parent. It also needed to make a lot of noise in a crowded market place.We needed a new colour. We were pretty sure E4 should be a single colour brand. Orange and purple seemed to stand out as having the right feel and energy, but orange was much in use elsewhere. We chose purple, and E4 made it their own.We created a distinctive, edgy font and a series of sound stings to augment the logo. Together with the colour purple, this gave the new channel a powerful, unforgettable on-screen brand.The movement also gave real depth to what was happening on screen. It had the effect of drawing viewers in and making them feel that a world viewed through E4 was different from and more interesting than other worlds.


Thursday 12 February 2009

Stop motion animation research

I stumbled across this video through my research, I instantly loved it, being an illustrator myself I love seeing other artists take their 2d images and working 'outside the box' regarding drawing on paper, I'm pretty sure recent Carphone Warehouse adverts have a similar thing going on, wether the artist in question has been commissioned or they've stolen both the idea and music, I'm not quite sure.



Not only in 2d, but a response to this video was made using stopmotion and clay, amazing!


M Dot Strange Animation

While looking into and considering all forms of digital media, I recalled an interesting peice of animation by a director known as "M Dot Strange" below is the trailer for his full feature film, his first too, an interesting mix of japanese cartoon influence images combined with retro game style animation, I love it!




E4 idents

Looking into current and past E4 based and intended productions, here some of my favorite idents and stings.






WotW

Whilst watching War of the Worlds the other evening, I found the opening sequence particularly interesting and relevant, I love how the bacteria is broken
down into even smaller cells repeatedly.

Tuesday 10 February 2009

So far..

Plodding onwards with the animation,  I'm not entirely confident about the colour use within the animation so far, I feel the lack of colour is perhaps letting it down.


Iweb Ideas

A small animation below for the welcome page of my iweb, the type is hand rendered in the same
style as the illustrations used for this project.


More bacteria vids!

Keeping up with inspiration throughout this project I found some more amusing videos featuring cells, microbes,bacteria imagery etc.






Tuesday 3 February 2009

Iweb pages

Here, my initial layouts, screenshotted for the iweb design, I have tried to keep in the same style as my animation, crudely drawn, as well as easily navigable, with a small animation at the opening page.









Animation begins!

Here, the first few sections of my animation, these need developing and more adding to but you can begin to get the idea where it is going.



Iweb Ideas

To digitalise my research and development, I will be creating a site based on my project featuring all the information gathered and tests from start to finish, below some ideas


.as.




Storyboards

Here, are the storyboards for what I hope my animation to look like, although I will have to probably make modifications as I go along baring in mind time and technical knowledge of the software at hand.









Disease Origin Research/Dev

Below, I researched the origins and spread of all the diseases featured in my list, the red on the world map represents the most affected areas, and the blue represents the origins.





Bacteria Image Dev.

Below, imagery on which I've begun basing the images for my animation, almost cartoonised, I have attempted to given the different cells and bacteria a persona and characterised them, for humourous irony, what should prove interesting for the actual feature animation.