Final-The Panopticon

Time to build: 1 hour wardrobe.

Time to animate: 2 hours.

Problems encountered:

My tripod was standing on a rolling chair. I found it difficult to direct, and snap photos at the same time. We ran through the script a couple of times before the actors knew what they were to do exactly.

If I animate this next time I will:

Snap more pictures, and extend the animation. I didn’t have a clear  narrative but a steady  visual reference. It was more fun to think of the actions spontaneously.

Found Object Redo

Cigs

The cigarettes are kind of boring, but I really liked how my hand movement came out, it worked smoother than I expected I tried to make it just a natural movement when I animated.

Paper and Sound Revisited

http://vimeo.com/41917844

I tried to make the slips of paper look like they were crawling, and I added the squeaky effect to make them seem like they were bugs or something like that.

Puppet & Final Project

password: puppetlove

Time to Build and Animate: Several days

These puppets were my only friends for awhile. The puppets are made of armature, old headphone wires, epoxy, outlets, hot glue, and painter’s tape. They’re both in pretty bad shape after the shoot, especially poor Outie. His wires are all over the place. In shooting and editing, lighting was the most difficult to control. I never want to look at a three way color corrector again – there are still several light fluctuations. My walk cycle makes me laugh – as you can see, I cheated with a lot of close-ups because they just looked silly walking around. Something to work on. AHA moment was in building the puppet. I had so much fun building the first one, I decided to give Outie, Tapey to fall in love with – they fall in love in less then 72 frames.

Final Project by Jillian Black

Time to Build: 5 hours
Time to Animate: 2 hours

It took me ages to come up with an idea but I thought it might be fun to do a joke. This is literally the only joke I know! It took me a long time to cut everything out and put it together but animating it was quick. Although I hate the sound of my own voice, it was fun recording it. I think I have officially frightened my new neighbors in the process. I know the lip-syncing isn’t perfect, but it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. It was difficult to get the characters to walk because I kept getting confused about which leg I moved and they were so small I kept bumping them out of place. If I animated this again, I would give myself more time so I could create scenes around the characters, and I would do more close ups with lip-syncing.

Final Project_Annie Seo, Katrina Richter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLhVXzoesn0

Time to Build: 4 hours

Time to Animate: 8 hours

Katrina:

This was my first time working with paper cutouts, so it was an interesting experience. We were really trying to make it fluid, so it went by VERY slow. The end result was worth it though. I like the whole silent film idea pared up with the silhouette portraiture. It made making the puppets fairly manageable. Looking back, I wish that I would have made the puppets with a thicker paper. I just used some cheap construction paper, and then assembled them with tacky wax. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but I’m sure the animation process would have been a little easier. Honestly the most difficult thing for me, was animating the man, bending down on one knee, and rising back up again. The latter more so. It had to look like he was physically pushing himself upright again. It probably helped that we acted this out, to get the motion right.

In all, I’m really satisfied with our animation. If could changing anything, I suppose I’d like to pause on the wolf after it walks out from behind the tree, and then have it continue walking. And again, just make the puppets on thicker paper.

Annie:

Learning from my experience from the past paper cut-out assignment, I felt like I understood the process more. From the previous assignment, I made my cut out really small, but this time I understood that they needed to be a lot bigger so my group tried to make the paper dolls and sets as big as possible. I enjoyed the concept of the project because we were taking the inspiration from silent movie films and integrating it with paper and stop motion. Some of the problems that we encountered were: the camera kept moving and there was nothing we could do about it (luckily it worked to our advantage of our the film looked), the lighting was uncontrollable (which also worked in some parts to our advantage as well), and figuring out how the movements of our puppets would be accomplished. If we could go back and fix some parts, it would probably be to use all the same paper, because there were some papers that were different shades of black. Other than that, the sounds and music were able to finalize the video the best way.

Chelsea Domaleski Final Project

Time to build: I was building/creating while i animated

Time to animate: 6 hours

Using coffee grounds was a little ambition and time consuming but I really liked using the medium, and ultimatley am really proud of this piece. It was pretty relaxing to animate everything and I think that the faces work the best. However, I would maybe go back and change some of the transitions in the middle, but overall i think it was successful.

Paper Cut-Out with Magnus, Joy & Seeta

Time to Build: 1.5 hours

Time to Animate: 3 hours

Problems Encountered: We animated at the DT lab and there was light beaming in through the shades. Although we blocked it several times, it always managed to come through – possibly with change in time throughout the afternoon. In the initial splash (from the first jump), the motion of water pushing away the other lily pads was not conveyed enough, but we added that emphasized motion in the leaps after that. From the :04-:06 second mark, the lily pad abruptly shifts and was not intended as a motion in the piece.  Other than that, something as simple as attaching the vines to the lily pad was actually trying. Because they were so thin, we had to cut the tape to the shape of the individual vines instead of placing them with glue. (we tried glue sticks which didn’t work out very well)

If we had to animate this again, we would probably fix the things mentioned above.

Aha Moment: Shooting in 1’s verses 2’s. For some reason, when we shot in 2’s there was a light change in the second frame, for every second frame. We were working in the manual mode, so that definitely shouldn’t have happened. After reviewing the animation at our half way point, we switched to shooting in 1’s.

PASSWORD: stopmotion

Time to Build: 5 hours

Time to Animate: 5 hours

Problems Encountered: I took the time to put all the cutouts on cinefoil after I had already cut them all out, which means I cut everything out twice. This took up most of my time. I’m not sure that cinefoil was a good idea, since a lot of the edges kept curling and were too fragile for tape and any other substance left a mark on the white background. Lighting and shadows from the curled edges were also difficult to control.

If I animated this again, I would animate on a background that did not show dirt, dust, glue, basically anything that touched it. The timing of music and picture should be planned in advance. Next time, I would use a head that could move and eyes that could blink.

Aha Moment: Making the puppet limbs with wire was a cinch. After the first one, I found I could wire all the limbs together very quickly and the more joints, the more fun.

Pixilation – JUDY

Time to Build: 1 hour

Time to Animate: 4 hours

Problems Encountered: One of the main issues I had was that the camera had a lot of trouble focusing, which made it incredibly hard for the actor when she had a mouth full of peeps. Trying to film chocolate sauce pouring into her mouth was also challenging since there was really no way to slow down the flow. We tried to film a shot where confetti slowly blew out of her mouth, which gravity also made impossible.

If I had to animate this again, I would choose different candy. I like the way the jelly beans seems to roll around on their own. Candy or food with more texture and less liquid would have been better. A better lens would have helped.

Aha Moment: I was shooting on twos and having my actor move very slowly. Towards the end, I realized I could achieve the same effect with much quicker movements.