Like I mentioned in my last post I did a story board, this was the foundation to put our animation together.

This animation task has been the hardest one I’ve done so far, the other were challenging but this one was something else. In the beginning we needed to pick a theme on what our animation was going to be of. Aflie, Izzy and me all agreed on doing suicide, we didn’t know what to do all we knew was that it was going to be about suicide and a letter. We started a plan the next day and figured out what we were going to do, while Alfie and Izzy were booking the music studio and the actual studio, i was downstairs doing the story board. The board contained a little step by step on what we will be doing, what emotion we would be showing and who would be the model.

In between the planning we had a crash course on animation. We looked at the 12 rules of animation by Disney, different types of animation with Dan. The day after we did some paper flip card animation to test out what we really wanted to do. Our group was ahead so we didn’t need to do it but we wanted to make sure we really have a structure for ours.

We went to the music studio to see what song we wanted to do as the second day we were brainstorming music, if we should remake music or compose our own. Izzy had an idea for the guitar and piano, we went for piano eventually as it seems more mellow than a guitar. The piano music was extremely calming and something we needed, we instantly recorded it to use for our animation.

When we had the studio booked out we needed help holding the wiring for the rope that we were using, so we got Dan to get on a ladder and hold it up while we were shooting, we never ended up editing it until 2 days ago. In the middle of the madness we had a lot of tasks to do, The mood board was the most interesting one for me to do as it got a bunch of emotions to capture. One of the hardest things to do was maybe put the video together as I offered to just  put the video together myself to make it quick as i had an idea that i wanted to stick to. We had a lot of animation tasks to do such as the ball animation and the animation type we were doing called stop motion, a simple crumpled piece of paper saying “hello?” and “goodbye.” one of my favourite pieces to do.

While I was editing the video we did some script writing to help us in the future, i managed to do that but I am yet to write a blog post on that. Now that the animation is done I have time to reflect and see what i liked most about this project.

Reflection

Looking back we could have probably  made our animation longer by doing more things and been a little more creative, but with the short amount of time we had we still managed to finished finish early. I still need to learn premier pro to make better quality videos, considering I’m more of a illustrator this was a little outside of my comfort zone with the editing software. However i really enjoyed working with animation as it gave me something new to explore and learn.

Our animation is based on suicide, this is a touchy subject as it has affected the majorette of people across the world as well as the UK in 2017 the suicide rates in the UK was 727.1 deaths a year roughly. There are over 100,000 deaths each year in different regions.

Mental health affects the brain in many ways, we will be taking away the physical health issues like epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis etc, we will be talking about hidden mental heath issues. The most common cause of mental heath taking over your brain completely is negative thoughts, this can be lead to depression-one of the main suspects of mental health in your brain. The anti-depressant industry are making over £266.6m of its overall £9.2bn to help people. Most people suffer with Depression and Anxiety, this is usually caused by being bullied or have stage fright in school.

Mental health can be coped in many ways, one of the worst is substance abuse. This is one of the most common ways to slip deeper into your depression. The bigger the issue the more likely it is for that person to commit suicide. As many as 15%  of people with bipolar disorder will die by their own hands, half will attempt to, and nearly 80% will contemplate doing so. Bipolar is a more serious issue of mental health that people don’t know how to handle, it goes from having high highs to low lows to the point that you may end up by committing suicide.

Having a clear understanding of suicide and mental disorders it helps me as i already know what i wanted  to do as soon as we picked suicide, the story board that i managed to do we only did half of what i put down, the majorette was changed.  With knowing that more LGBTQ+ are more likely to take their own lives then anyone with a mental health problem, even though it is debatable.

Today we are discussing who should do the voice over while I piece together the animation. Hopefully I can get the ball animation done today as well as when the servers were down for premier pro it stressed me out as I wanted it done, as well as doing the final project, I may end up doing that tomorrow as I’ll need to spend time on it so it is all in time. I’ll be doing my risk assessment today as there were a lot of hazards when we were shooting that could have harmed people.

 open the image you want to make into a brush in Photoshop.

Use the magic brush tool to get rid of your background to make it transparent so you can make  a more significant brush.

once you’ve used the magic eraser tool you should be able to see something / very similar to this.

Go to edit and Define brush present.

 once you’ve done everything your brush will be complete!

 

another one is to put a model under brushes. Here is what I’ve done for this, i’ll give you a run through on how to make this design.

Step 1: Open a new canvas and drag the image you reveal on to it.

Step 2:Add a new layer and paint bucket it in your chosen colour .

Step 3: Select the eraser tool and in the brush present ticker scroll down to find the brush you want to use.

thats how you get your result.

For homework we were given a challenge to design a character and give it a “heroes journey”. A Heroes Journey is a simplistic table that helps you set up for character design. Last lesson when i was in i managed to design a character ( that is already a character of mine ), i just need to give her a normal life background > a call to adventure, this is all in the know that is the characters regular life before  the unknown. Once the adventure has been called, you’ll go right to the build up of the plot > resolution > realisation > Atonement then back into reality. The character usually always lives happily ever after as in Disney terms they always end up with a “happily ever after, the end” but then that’s up to us ( the watcher ) to imagine what could happen next.

 

For my character,  Her description is…

Theme: Fantasy, Adventure

Type: preferably 2D but 3D is good, Animation – has a normal life but then ventures too far.

Character: Animal, large coyote mix wolf.

In the normal life shes a regular animal, sounds like one, looks like one ( minus the abnormalities of markings ) one day during her hunting trip she travels too far, while chasing a raccoon it leads her to a cave that she falls and bangs her head and is in a coma. she wakes up and sees her body laying there, no one could see her. it’s as if the could do whatever. she goes on a quest to find her way back to reality as if she doesn’t, she’ll die. She has an Epiphany and realises what her true purpose is for, she goes back to her body and lays there in the hope she wakes up. Character:vv

 

The recommended screen ratio is 1280×720.

Dilapidated, clothes are changed.

Plot ( definition )

Plot is the organised pattern or sequence of events that make up a story. Plot is the literary element that describes the structure of a story. It shows arrangement of events and actions within a story.

Plot Structure:   Exposition > Point of conflict > Rising action > Emotional climax > Falling action > Denouement > Resolution.

Exposition: Comprehensive or a good explanation of who the characters are and where we are, who, where, when, what. ( about 10% )

Point of Conflict: The problem is causing something.

Rising Action: Create suspense, interest, and tension in a narrative, and is almost like a heart beat rising, building up to something

Emotional Climax: We question whats happened are they OK.

Falling Action & Denouement: come back to reality,  and calming down from the Emotional Climax.

Resolution: The happily ever after moment that we don’t know what happens after the film ends, or they don’t live happily ever after, it’s always up to the viewer to see what happens next.

We’ve been told to write a little story climb of our own.

Define the Exposition Conflict and Resolution:

Exposition – Allie lived in a cottage in wales and had a poodle named floofles.

Conflict: Someone tried to take away the poodle named floofles so Allie goes to move somewhere else, turns out floofles is a rare breed of doggo that people want to take, Allie protected nether less.

Resolution: Allie manages to breed her poodle floofles with a regular poodle and out came a floof ball called doodles, this pupper was half breed, not floofers was no longer a rare breed of doggo and lived a long healthy life. fin.

 

 

 

Jack Foley – Creator and developer of sound effect techniques used in film making through a performance method to record audio. These are recorded live and in post-production are synced to a film or moving image.

He work on films such as:

• The Phantom of the Opera ( 1925 )
• Dracula ( 1931 )
• Spartacus ( 1960 )

What is Foley?

Foley artists match live sound effects with the action of the picture. The sound effects are laid “manually” and not cut in with film. Foley is an excellent means of supplying the subtle sounds that production mikes often miss. The rustling of clothing and squeak of a saddle when a rider mounts his horse give a scene a touch of realism that is difficult to provide using other effects methods.

Started with radio drama > then moved to live > at last, sound was recorded separately then added to the film.

 

Different Floor sounds.

• wood
• gravel
• carpet
• tiles
• running
• walking etc..

 

• riding a bike
• some car sounds
• key jangling
• knives
• eating

Recording your own sound

You should try and position your microphone / recorder about 1 foot away from the subject. Think outside the box, sometimes you can create sounds using different objects.

Microphones – your microphone should usually be pointing at the source of the sound.

Noise – Try to record your sounds with little to no background noise, as any processing done to these clips will effect background noise too.

Timeout – Control your own breathing. If you need a break indicate the operator, simply give few seconds after making the sound to take a break.

We have a little task to try and recreate Foley effects, Faith and I managed to get 7. As i cannot put the video files.