Finished animation and Evaluation

Our final animation.

What have I learnt?

Previous to this project I knew very little about how animation was made, and had no experience in creating it myself. I have learnt how to develop a story using storyboards and concept art. I have learned many techniques for creating animation - found object, stop motion, silhouette puppets, shadows, drawn. I would have liked to have experimented with clay as well but didn't get chance.

What new skills have I acquired?

I think I have learned how to work in a team better - as well as the animation techniques listed above.

What have I learnt from my experiments?

I have learnt how using a different material, technique, colour or lighting can effect the mood of an animation.

In creating my animation how have I applied my new knowledge and skills?

Through our experiments we decided to use stop motion with hand drawn images and some digital drawings for the characters.

How did I develop my ideas to explore my themes?

By collecting primary and secondary research of buildings, people and phones.

Have I been inspired by other animators?

Ping (creator of Last Breath), students who created Rainy Town. Studio Ghibli.

What would I develop or change?

As the majority of the animation is stop motion through taking photos, there are some messy parts where the floor/table around the background is seen, or where the movement is jolty. This was difficult to avoid, but I think we could have made it look smoother in this way, if we had more time.

How can I make use of my new knowledge and skills in my future work?

I found stop motion animation quite frustrating as it was very time consuming to make - so I'm unsure if I will use it again in the future. However I will make use of storyboards and concept art to develop and plan out my ideas in future.

Scenes

Summary - The main theme of our story is the idea of phones and social media being like a drug that people are addicted to, and people are constantly 'upgrading' to a new phone, i.e a stronger drug. This keeps them distracted from the dismal world around them - shown by the fact that the colours of the city are dark and grey. However, in an attempt to control his addiction, the main character hasn't upgraded like everyone else, and so his phone breaks, leaving him without the drug. The question is, will he choose to stay in the real world, or go back to the drug like everyone else?

1st scene - made with the shadows, filmed with a camera on a tripod, see previous posts. Begins in a dark city.

2nd scene - on photoshop Tomaz slowly zoomed in to the photograph and took a screenshot each time, then put them together on movie maker. Focus comes in on the main character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=000iCuXqv_Y

3rd scene - again using movie maker, Tomaz put the frames of the eyes I drew together to make it look like they are blinking. This is the character "waking up", coming out of the haze from the drug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sOPcnpndcI

4th scene - using Su's painted background of the pavement, Hannah's painted hand and phone, I layered them and took photos slowly zooming in. Tomaz then put these together, and added in phone screens Su had drawn. This is showing the character looking down to see the phone in his hand, and that it's breaking, hence him "waking up".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbY90bDAdJw

5th scene - Tomaz put together the frames of the eyes I drew, to show them looking down the phone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g285VWgLQoI

6th scene - I took photos of the same piece from scene 4, but panning down to show the character looking down and noticing that the phone is connected to his arm with a wire, like it's a drug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g285VWgLQoI

7th scene - Tomaz put together the frames of the eyes I drew, to show them looking up at the city.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX89z8HurRY

8th scene - I took photos of a city background that Hannah painted, which Tomaz put together to show the character looking up at the buildings, then noticing the symbols on parts of the buildings, suggesting that this 'drug'/the phones are a commercial/mind control thing. Like everyone is addicted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yCGlwomcT0

9th scene - using photoshop and movie maker, Tomaz moved a black block slowly down and up over the city, and then did frames slowly zooming in towards a road in the city. This shows the character blinking, and then running forward through the city, away from the people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4gkDBG3c6k

10th scene - Tomaz overlapped my drawing of the man's face on top of Su's painted background of a wall, and took frames of the face moving left and right, whilst the background slowly moved to the left. This shows the man running through the streets, notice that the posters have the same symbol on as in the city scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jkDGcGOfjA

11th scene - Same method as above, but he added the alleyway and dead body I drew onto the end - to show the man has come across the alleyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSWNkCQ7y48

12th scene - Tomaz then did frames slowly zooming into the dead body, focusing on the phone in it's hand. This shows the man walking down the alleyway towards the body, and noticing that they have a functioning phone still attached to them. It suggests they 'overdosed' on the drug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByEBHFWt8lc

13th scene - I took photos of Su's background of another pavement, and Hannah's painted hand, with Su's modern phone - Tomaz then took frames moving and rotating it, and added Su's phone screens to look like it was flashing. This shows the man walking closer and turning to see the dead body's phone, with the 'drug' symbol flashing on it, encouraging him to use it, as his own phone is broken.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dwt8rTm21g

14th scene - Using Hannah's painted hands and old phone, Su's phone and background. Tomaz erased the backgrounds of the hands so they were separate, and flipped on of them so they looked like a right and left hand - to show that the character is looking down at his own hands holding his old phone, and the dead man's phone. He also edited in Su's screens onto the dead man's phone to flash "UPGRADE", as if to tempt the main character. He then took frames of the hands slowly moving together, like the man has just picked up the phones. He then slowly moved an black block down over the whole frame to show the man blinking. The main character holds in his hands his old, broken phone, showing his chance to be free from the drug, and in his other the dead man's upgraded phone, showing his chance to go back to the addiction and cut himself off from the world again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB4V4MFr8So

15th scene - Tomaz put together the frames I drew to show the eyes opening. This represents that the man did choose to go back to the drug, so he is back in the 'haze', which is why his pupils are so big. The end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Zu--2LbKc

Digital

On my computer I used a drawing tablet to create some frames for the animation. Several scenes were planned to involve cutting to show the character's eyes - to show him blinking, looking around etc. For the first and last scene where he opens his eyes I drew the above, I tried to make it as many frames as I could so it would be smooth. At this stage I was unsure what colour his eyes would be, so I did both.

When he opens his eyes, as he comes out of the addiction and the 'drug' drains out of his body, his pupils shrink and focus. Again at this point we weren't sure if he would be drawing white on black, or black on white - so I just inverted it so we would have both.

In a later scene, the character is running away from the other people through the streets. This is from a side view, so based on a photo I drew it very simply, with a blank background so Tomaz could edit it in.

At the end the character comes across an alleyway with a dead body in it. For this I just drew around the outline of the photo and then coloured it in grey scale. Tomaz then scaled it down the fit the alleyway.

Based on the above sketch, I drew the alleyway the dead body is in, it's supposed to look abandoned and grimy, with the posters on the wall showing the symbol for the 'drug'. I had limited time to do this so I think it could have been better.

Concept art

Dead body in the alleyway. This was drawn from the photo of Tomaz modelling. It was difficult to get the perspective and size right, so none of the sketch turned out properly. We decided to fix it later digitally.

Tomaz's concept for the alleyway, better perspective.

My concept for how the city background could look. We were originally going to have a scene showing the crowd of people in the city, but didn't use it in the end.

Su's concepts of the city, the floor background, posters on the walls. We ended up using most of these to create the backgrounds.

Some eyes I drew based on Su's. We wanted them to be quite simple to contrast the detailed background.

Hannah and Su worked together to create concepts for hands, symbols and phones - since we knew several of our scenes would be looking down at the hands.

Silhouette videos

We decided we wanted our first scene to be made using silhouttes, similar to Lottie Reiniger except we used the shadows instead. We set up in the dark room with a big piece of white paper as the screen, and cardboard cutouts of buildings and people of different sizes. We attached pins to the bottom of the cutouts so they would stand up on their own. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4dqQAYbBC4

First we used an over head projecter as the light source for our initial experiment, which cast the shadows onto the wall. This was just to test it out, but the image was too blurry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8iv6IM9Sp8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCy1BQEH380

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PIulCN2wdk

Instead we used the light on Tomaz's phone. So when we turned the lights off, we could move the light around the cutouts, whilst I filmed from the other side of the paper. We discovered some interesting effects we could create depending on the position of the light - we could distort the shadows to look taller/shorter/bigger/smaller by changing the angle and distance the light hit the cutouts. It was easy to use this to make it look like the people were moving through a crowd. In the end our chosen technique was to move the light so that it looks like you are walking through the crowd, then focus on the main character.

This was our finished first scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XB8Rgzazpw

I really liked this technique because of the way the light gradually moves down at the beginning, it creates an atmosphere. It was really easy to do but still really effective. The only difficulty we had was making sure the cutouts were positioned properly, because if they were too close together they blurred into one since it's all black. However we resolved this by reducing the number of buildings and people we used.

Seconday research

Since our theme was about mobile phones
and addiction, for secondary research
we looked at imagery of phones being used as drugs,
as well as dystopian cities

Primary research

For primary research we looked at phones, 'dead bodies' and crowds in the city