Research Sources

Books:

• Women & Animation - A Compendium
• The Complete Animation Course by Chris Patmore
• The Focal Guide to Shooting Animation

Films:

• I Met the Walrus
• A Pixilation by Alvaro Posadas
• Metamorphosis by Quintin Gonzalez
• 'Sing Sang Sung' by Air
• Dreamworks' 'Up'

Equipment List

• Digital camera
  
• Bamboo digital drawing kit


• Adobe Photoshop


• Adobe Premier Pro

Jim and I booked out the T-319 studio from 12-5 on December 2nd 2009.

Side Effects Include...Evaluation

Animation has very really been my strong point, so this assignment didn't fill me with an awful lot of joy. I decided to go for the method I knew I could do best; Pixilation. Even though it isn't, as Andy said, 'pure animation', I am in no way good at drawing, so it seemed to make sense to take the route I did. I had just started to play with the art of rotoscoping, both in the previous music video module and in this current one. Jim drew up a storyboard of our main idea, developed from a talk with Chris about ideas to consider. Our idea was to create a film of a man picking up a black dot, eating it then emitting black liquid from various face orifices, travelling across the floor before being picked up again, for the process to repeat. The actual process of filming was quick as Jim, the subject, felt ill. So, I felt the recording process was rather rushed, as neither of us were particularly enthused about situation. After collecting a few photos resembling some kind of sequence, Jim went home and I rented out a Bamboo digital drawing kit. As I said before, I don't have much faith in my drawing abilities, but I managed to keep my drawings fairly continuous, spending 1-2 hours drawing in the desired shapes on photoshop, using the Animation bar to go from frame to frame. For the soundtrack I highly effected the introduction to Tim Heideckers 'Theatre of Magic' after accidentally playing the sequence to piano music from another computer. I felt the gooey sounds accompanied the visuals well, with the audio giving the film a paranormal element too. Overall I'm quite pleased with the finished result, considering it as 'not bad for someone who strongly dislikes animation'.

Final Production

This is the final film, fully rotoscoped and soundtracked. It took me around an hour to film and an hour to draw in the additional elements. Although on reflection I wish I would have tried rotoscoping over the original footage (see previous blog) I'm still pleased with the result of this.

Filming Result on Dec 2

This is the result of the filming. I was initially going to rotoscope over this sequence, but I zoomed into the image and rotoscoped over that instead, preferring the other version.