Unit 53 2D Animation Production

Task 1 - Write an article on historical and technical developments in animation

in this article im going to review a range of different techniques of animation from its very beginnings to the varied present.

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE

                           

Eadweard Muybridge was the first true animator, creating the first moving picture effect in 1872 of a horse galloping (as shown in the youtube link above), this was done at the request of leland Stanford (a former californian governor) who contacted him to settle a bet that all four hooves of a horse left the ground when galloping, a sight not fully seen before as the motion was far to fast for the human brain and eyes to comprehend. to do this he had set up 12 cameras with a trip wire connected to each one so as the horse raced past and tripped the wire, the picture would be taken. next was to arrange the photos and by sight it seemed that Stanford was right but the process of "animation" was not perfected yet. in 1878-1884 muybridge had refined his technique of animating by adapting the zeotrope,created by William George Horner in 1833.

Zeotrope 

in this video shows the zeotrope, a cylinder sat atop spin-able platform with slits cut around the sides at intervals so when it is spun, you can look through these gaps or slits to view a section of frame by frame images placed inside the cylinder or drum. as i mentioned before, it was invented in 1833 by William Horner but wasn't actually popular until the 1860's when it was rebranded and patented as the "zeotrope"by american developers. Horner had called it the daedalum meaning "wheel of the devil" where as zeotrope means "wheel of life" so you can see the intelligent business minds at work here and  it only took 30 years to figure out what was wrong!!.

it works on a larger scale too, in 1980 an independent film maker, bill brand, installed a linear zeotrope on the walls of a subway station, it consisted of 228 slits; behind each slit was a hand-painted panel, riders on the subway would see this as a motion picture due to the phi phenomenon  (optical illusion of perceiving continuous motion between separate objects viewed rapidly in succession).

the name given to the subway zeotrop is called the "masstransiscope" and the restored feature can be seen in this video

its a very colourful display and would definitely cheer up any grey and dull train ride.

Emile Cole and his hand drawn animation Fantasmagorie

this 2 minute animation is considered to be the very first cartoon animation, relaesed in 1908 and consists of the protagonist clown meeting a varied bunch of morphing shapes and other characters, at one point Emile's hands make and appearance, seemingly interacting with the clown. i consider this to be a very nice touch especially for such an early stage in animations life, its still in its infancy and already by this point there is interaction with the work. the animation consists of around 700 separate hand drawn stills being exposed twice. the original drawings were done in black chalk onto white paper, using the "chalk-line effect" Emile reversed the negative to then make it look as if it were white chalk on black paper.

1928- Steamboat willie

steamboat willie is widely known as the first cartoon to depict the world renowned character "Mickey mouse" and his girlfriend "minnie", it was also the first to incorporate synchronised post-produced sound which gave it the edge on other less popular animations of the time (e.g song car tunes; 1924-1927).

this film is seen as a cultural mile stone in animation as at this point, in my view, everything needed to create a full length basic animation is apparent and i think its a view shared by many others as this animation was selected for preservation in the united states national film registry, being deemed "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant"

1929- The skeleton dance


just a year after the release of the hit "steamboat willie" the skeleton dance airs as the first of a series of 75 other shorts( 5-15 mins in length) called "silly symphony". hit characters from some of these shorts would eventually get their own spin off series, an example of this would be the famous character donald duck, originally shown in the short episode titled "The wise little hen, 1934".
The reason i've chose another of Disney's animations is to show the development in animation and sound syncing in only a year. if you watch both videos provided, you can tell how much they had refined the animating technique in only a year, clearer lines, fluid movement and a sense of eagerness to show off how complex they can make the animations.
The sound synchronization had greatly improved, becoming clearer, louder and more in time with the animations movement. Disney knew what they had and they wanted to flaunt it.
it strikes me hard to believe that they made these improvements in such a short amount of time, considering it took the early animators a good twenty to thirty years to refine their tools but then with the modern technology present in the 1900's im sure it would've been much easier.

Stop Motion Animation




stop motion animation is a technique used to give inanimate objects the illusion of movement by taking hundreds of pictures or "stills" of the scene and moving the objects in the scene slightly in between each picture, when all the pictures are then put together, often with computer software, and played in sequence they come together to create the stop motion animation.
 This technique is a more modern version of the first animation created by Eadweard Muybridge (running horse featured at top) and the early zeotropes, all though the concept is the same, stop motion allows more to happen and immensely longer animations compared to the zeotrope, the only limitations of stop motion animation are what you can imagine and craft with the materials you have all though sometimes CGI is used to speed up the production process or even add the things you simply cannot make or "rig".

Flash animation

flash animations or flash cartoons are computer based animations that are usually distributed over the internet in the .swf format. they are probably the most modern and widely used form of animation process being taught in schools and colleges. they are usually 'vector based' drawings of the artists creation, much like stop motion you have to have each section of a movement to create the full sequence but as mentioned before its drawn into the flash animation software to be played as a whole to create the 'cycle' you want. the vector style gives a more clean and professional look.

THINGS THAT INSPIRED MY ANIMATION.

The research I did to help guide my creative inspiration came from many different sources,  the main goal I wanted to achieve was fun, or laughter with the audience.  The only way to make an audience laugh is to connect with them, tap into what they would like, so I scoured the internet looking at videos of all types and these are the examples I came up with.

 1. EDDSWORLD

Edds world is a British flash animation and comic production company created by a man named Edd Gould, its main focus is the ‘adventures’ of edd and his friends, tom, matt and previously tord.

Its visual representation, aesthetically, is very pleasing, it always has a high level and standard of quality e.g the lip-syncing is very good but the main thing I looked at was the comedy element involved. It touches on things that most people do, say or act, this is the main way to connect to an audience, take the piss out of them tastefully. A recurring theme in the episodes are Edds love of cola, it’s the main focus of few episodes, a prime example of this is in “sugar sugar” where he uses the 1969 song ‘sugar sugar’ to express his love for the beverage.

This got me thinking about possible ways to find things that a wider audience would relate to and I had an idea, what are the few things that link us all together or we all have in common? And then it hit me few days later

2. SOCIAL MEDIA

 social networking and modern media are all ever present in modern age Britain  and is the best and fastest way to share ideas thoughts and what you had for tea to the whole world, but a new popular culture phenomenon has popped up on the internet and most social networking sites, the meme!

3.MEMES

a meme in its modern form is an idea, behaviour or style that’s spread through the internet, person by person. A picture, sound, or gesture can represent the meme in a number of ways, the meme is usually a statement about culture or life in general. The more “viral” or most seen/ spread memes are the most successive, the more the better. This concept was the thing I was looking for as being in a class full of media students they would all have an online presence in some form and all would of know a meme or two… hopefully. So I trawled the internet again and came up with a few memes to use.

i chose the third picture because i could integrate it into the animation, tom essentially catches yallery brown and has him work for him. but in the animation ill make the capture cycle short to show it being an easy catch, this way it could be perceived as yallery wanting to be caught/ let free so is it tom catching yallery or vice verca? 

so by using the premiss of popular culture references shown in edds world i can integrate that idea into my animation to make a point but also to have a few laughs in the process,  this old tale being rejuvenated by modern day ideas 

Storyboard

this is the first rough story board of the yallery brown animation

these are the revised and colour rendered story boards  for the yallery brown flash animation

walk cycle with character design

this is the preston blair walk cycle, it is a basic format for the movement of the human body. it shows the movements of the arms, legs, head and height of the character for each frame to create a realistic movement when all frames are played together.

                          this was my attempt at recreating the preston blair 'skipping' walk cycle using flash.

here is my basic character design for the yallery brown short animation, theres not much detail invloved but that character should be pretty unremarkable in my eyes as on the yallery brown tale he is just a poor boy who isnt very special atall.

decided to draw some more detailed character designs to help create a better quality animation.

yallery brown short walk sequence


this is a quick walk cycle for a character in an old tale called yallery brown.

evaluation of animation-

In this short video I have animated a character to walk across the screen in flash and added sound.

I have learnt how to successfully put together a basic walk cycle to show movement in my story and how to add sound to give the animation more realism.

This has been useful as now I have a basic understanding of animation so in the future I will be able to understand how to create longer possibly more complex animations.

The use of flash to create the animation was straight forward when using tutorials, I feel the animation had turned out well considering the short length, when asking others about the animation and how they thought it had turned out, most were very positive but they felt the characters actual walk sequence could have been more “fluid and less shaky”, this Is a concern I had my self, in future projects I will have to take more time and care when drawing out the walk sequences to ensure a more polished finish.

Another critique was the sound bite I had used and how it was properly synced to the animation " it sounded okay but it seemed abit off"  it could have been worked on more to line it up properly with the foot steps of the animated character, I will have to spend a little more time with sound editors to get familiar with the software.
a final critique i had from a friend was the length of the video " is that it? not very long", i admit it wasn't very long and this makes it hard to get all of the aspects of the animation, i had problems converting the SWF file to a .MOV file to be used on youtube, the software i finally found aloud me to record the animation whilst it played but i had to control the start/stop timing, this made it difficult to get much more then the 2 seconds of video as seen due to the original only being 4 seconds long.