Thursday 7 October 2010

Dying For Stop Motion

For my final piece last year I made a stopmotion sequence after researching into afterlife theories. Using ready made wooden models developed into their own characters with clay, plastacine, fymo and fabric clothes. I thought using ready made models would make life easier and less time consuming (cheating, yes!) but actually they were a nightmare to balance and move into positions I required.
By the end of the piece, the clothes were in tatters and the poor main character had been dropped on his head so many times his scalp practically had a life of its own.
I enjoyed doing it, however the lighting and timing is off, and I like watching back over it to spot the bloopers (notice the green tear drops when I mislaid my blue plastacine, and strands of the main characters wig dotted all over the set...)
Still something I am proud of, for all the slave labour put into the making off and the hours sweaty days spent in the animation booth, faux pas aside there is just something about stop motion that I have a bit of a love for.

Cuttin' out here and there

For my 2009 project in college for animation I looked at a bit of cut out and did a brief experiment. I was researching South Park at the time so went about creating a short piece of slapstick violence used from cut out pieces of felt.

A Bit Of The Past

This piece was my first stop motion piece from last year but also is kind of personal to me. Going back in to full time education after 8 years in full time work, meeting new people, many of which were 8 years younger than me, I felt a bit nostalgic. During the move from Birmingham to Taunton I stumbled across some old diaries which I decided to animate and over dramatise for a media piece. Reading through them, they were astonishingly cringe worthy, a 14 year old me banging on about which boy I fancied this week and trying to find a baby blue Kappa Jacket to match my Kappa popper trackie bottoms to impress the boy I liked (it was cool clothing back then I swear!!!)
Anyway, so yeah I took one of my old diaries and decided to create an opening title sequence by animating it. I must add that I completely over dramatised the images and "storyline", I was no where near that rebellious or promiscuous at that age, but I wanted to create something opposing to the stereotypical mainstream tweenie chick flick where the heroine is a girl next door hottie/underdog who somehow always gets the drop dead gorgeous jock heart throb.
I have actually lost the original finished piece with titled credits unfortunately, but actually they only distracted from the animating anyway. Also I made a bit of an error in the audio I chose to use with it. I heard the song on the radio, and loved it, but unfortunately went with the fact I loved the song, and ignored that it is famously associated with Slumdog Millionaire and the lyrics have little relevance to the theme. Plus it ends short as this was not the final piece, so apologies for music and images just cutting off at the end!
That aside I enjoyed making it.
Its funny how at the time I was so proud of it, yet now I can see so many errors or things I would do differently or better, but then I take that as a good thing, practise makes perfect eh?!

***ALL IMAGES USED IN THE
PIECE ARE IN NO WAY
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE PEOPLE THEY FEATURE AND WERE USED PURELY ON PHOTOGRAPH VALUE. ALL IMAGES WERE USED AT THE CONSENT OF THE OWNER***

CGI experimenting

For the last ten years I along with billions of other people I have found myself going to the cinema to watch the latest CGI feature length piece, at first wowing at the advances in animation but soon like many others, taking for granted, you may say, how far animation has come. So given the opportunity to have a go at some CGI at uni I got over excited with the prospect of creating some funky little characters, one with a crazy moustache maybe, another with goofy teeth and bad skin, and I dunno... they could have a pea fight or something, but actually sat infront of the computor with MAYA software open, despite considering myself reasonably computor savvy, I soon realised it wasn't as easy as I'd hoped!
That aside my simple bouncing ball and irratic cube sequence which lasted all of 10 seconds long, yet took 2 days to complete, render and manage to save successfully, is something I enjoyed doing and gave me a new found appriciation for how long a CGI piece can take to do