Mouth cut out analysis

Animation Analysis

For our animation, we were tasked with having to make an animation with our mouth cut outs. We had to create a drawn out character, and use different mouth cut outs to create the illusion of a flowing scene where the mouth looks as if words are protruding from it.

Stage1: Draw the character or object for the animation

Stage2: Chose and plan the cut out for the mouth, to make the words link with the shapes of the mouth        to create the illusion that the character is speaking.

Stage3: Take individual photos of each of the mouth shapes.

Stage4: Upload the photos up and put them onto final cut pro. Now they are in video form it should look something like the clip above.

Personal Analysis

What went well: How we managed to produce a clip that looks as if the mouth and the voice are paired together. Although the clip is short I believe it is a success.

What could have been improved: If we had been provided with more time, the clip could be longer and have more character too it.

Creature Comfort

Creature comforts was originally a 1989 British humorous animated short film about how animals feel about living in a zoo, featuring the voices of the British public from very corner "spoken" by the animals.

Creature comfort allows a mundane or boring interview to come alive with expresion and bring about a character within a claymation. The original Creature Comforts short film was five minutes long and was conceived and directed by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations featuring the voices of British non-actors in the same vein as the "man on the street" Vox Pop interviews.

The voices of each character were performed by residents of both a housing estate and an old people's home. Stop-Motion animation was then used to animate each character, and the answers given in the interviews were put in the context of zoo animals. The Polar Bears were voiced by a family who owned a local shop, while the Mountain Lion was voiced by a Brazilian student who was living in the UK, but missed his home country.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEwpupSi9Ks

Tim Burton and Aardman and Brothers Quay

Tim Burton was born on Aug. 25, 1958 in Burbank, CA, Burton grew up a lonely and isolated child who quickly became disenchanted with his homogenized suburban surroundings. Burton's withdrawal from his home life - particularly from his father - led him to spend time daydreaming, watching B-movies and pouring through issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland.

During Tims early work he created his first film, Stalk of the celery monster. Due to the success of his first film he was instantly noticed and picked up by Walt Disney Productions' animation studio who offered Tim Burton an apprenticeship at their studio. 

He is famous for his dark, gothic, macabre and quirky take on horror and fantasy style movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie, and for blockbusters such as Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Batman, its first sequel Batman Returns, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland.

Aardman

Aardman Animations, Ltd., also known as Aardman Studios, or simply as Aardman, is a British animation studio based in Bristol, United Kingdom. The studio is known for films made using stop-motionclay animation techniques, particularly those featuring Plasticine characters Wallace and Gromit. It entered the computer animation market with Flushed Away (2006).

In 1993 Aardman passed another milestone with the completion of Nick Park's Oscar winning The Wrong Trousers, Aardman's first 30 minute film. Acclaimed world-wide and winner of over thirty awards, The Wrong Trousers has become one of the most successful animated films ever made.

In 1995 Aardman produced Nick Park's third Oscar winning film A Close Shave. An immediate success, it confirmed the studio's reputation as well as establishing Wallace and Gromit as household names. In 1996 the studio produced Peter Lord's Oscar nominated 11' short film, Wat's Pig (for Channel Four) as well as a children's series based on Morph, The Morph Files.

In 1998, Aardman won a BAFTA for Stage Fright, an 11minute short film commissioned by Channel Four Television. Steve Box, Nick Park's key animator on both The Wrong Trousers andA Close Shave, directed Stage Fright.

Chicken Run was Aardman's first full-length theatrical feature film to be funded by DreamWorks. Directed by both Peter Lord and Nick Park it was released in June 2000 in the US and UK to excellent reviews and outstanding box office receipts. Chicken Run grossed over $220M at the worldwide box office.

Brothers Quay

Stephen and Timothy Quay are American identical twin brothers better known as the Brothers Quay or Quay Brothers. They are influential stop-motion animators. They are also the recipients of the 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play The Chairs.

Filmography:

The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984)
The Unnameable Little Broom (1985)
Street of Crocodiles (1986)
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1987)
Stille Nacht I-IV
The Comb (1990)
Anamorphosis (1991)
In Absentia (2000)
The Phantom Museum (2003)

BFI Distribution ident (1991)
Introduction by the Quay Brothers (2006)
Nocturna Artificialia (1979)
The Calligraphies (1991)
The Summit (1995)
The Falls (excerpt) (1980)
Archive Interview (2000)

Other animators

Joseph Plateau

• Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883)
• Belgian physicist 
• First person to portray the illusion of movement
• To do this he used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistoscope.

William Horner 

• Maths teacher and a master at school
• His contribution to approximation theory is honored in the designation Horner's methods, in particular respect of a paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1819. The modern invention of the zoetrope.

Emily Reynard

• Reynaud created the 'praxinoscope in 1877 and the Theatre Optique in December 1888, and on 28 October 1892 he projected the first animated film in public, Pauvre Pierrot, at the Musee Grevin in Paris.

Edward Muybridge Edison

• He was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection.
• He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name.
• Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.

Lumiere Brothers

• Auguste and Louis Lumière came from Lyon in France, where they worked in their father's photographic factory.
• In 1894, they saw Edison's kinetoscope in Paris, and decided to design a camera of their own. By February of the next year they had produced a working model of their ciné camera, which they called a cinématographe.
• The machine was in fact not only a camera but could be used, together with a magic lantern, to project the films which the brothers had taken.

George Pal

• He was a Hungarian-born American animator and film producer, principally associated with the science fiction genre. 
• He became an American citizen after emigrating from Europe. 
• He was nominated for Academy Awards (in the category Best short subjects, Cartoon) no less than seven consecutive years (1942–1948) and received an honorary award in 1944.

Willis O'Brien

• He was an American motion picture special effects and stop-motion animation pioneer.
• Who according to ASIFA-Hollywood "was responsible for some of the best-known images in cinema history," and is best remembered for his work on The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949), for which he won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects

Jan Svankmajer

• He is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and many others.

Questionnaire- Results

Ray Harryhausen

Saskia+harry presentation from saskia0404

persistence of vision

Persistence of Vision

'Persistence of vision is the phenomenon of the eye by which an afterimage is thought to persist for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina'. It is also believed to be explanation for motion perception, however it only explains why the black spaces that come between each "real" movie frame are not perceived.

The theory of persistence of vision is the belief that human perception of motion (brain centered) is the result of persistence of vision. The theory was disproved in 1912 by Wertheimer[1] but persists in many citations in many classic and modern film-theory texts. A more plausible theory to explain motion perception (at least on a descriptive level) are two distinct perceptual illusions: phi phenomenon and beta movement.
A visual form of memory known as iconic memory has been described as the cause of this phenomenon. Although psychologists and physiologists have rejected the relevance of this theory to film viewership, film academics and theorists generally have not. Some scientists nowadays consider the entire theory a myth.
In contrasting persistence of vision theory with phi phenomena, a critical part of understanding that emerges with these visual perception phenomena is that the eye is not a camera. In other words vision is not as simple as light registering on a medium, since the brain has to make sense of the visual data the eye provides and construct a coherent picture of reality. 

The discovery of persistence of vision is attributed to the Roman poet Lucretius, although he only mentions it in connection with images seen in a dream. In the modern era, some stroboscopic experiments performed by Peter Mark Rogetin 1824 were also cited as the basis for the theory.

(Wikipedia+wiki100k)

1.^ Wertheimer, 1912. Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung. Zeitschrift für Psychologie 61, pp. 161–265


with reference to Nike Binger Marshall 'Persistence of VIsion'

ANIMATION PRINCIPLES

12 basic principles of animation

The main principles were designed to create an illusion or real life affect of a character or subject adhering to the basic laws of physics.

Squash and stretch:

Considered the most important principal. This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character in a kinetic motion. This principal can also be used in animating dialogue and facial expressions.

This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions. How extreme the use of squash and stretch is, depends on what is required in animating the scene. Usually it's broader in a short style of picture and subtler in a feature. It is used in all forms of character animation from a bouncing ball to the body weight of a person walking. This is the most important element you will be required to master and will be used often.



Anticipation: 


Anticipation is used to prepare the audience for an action, and to make the action appear more life like and realistic. For an object to rise or jump off the floor the object must first bend his knees; a tennis player making a shot has to swing the racket back first. The technique can also be used for less physical actions, such as a character looking off screen to anticipate someone's arrival/entry. 

Staging: 


Staging the animation means setting the scene attracting the viewer’s attention and focusing it on a particular subject or area of the screen before the action takes place. Attention towards the background and surrounding must be taken into account as not to disrupt the animation itself.  'Background and animation should work together as a pictorial unit in a scene'. Examples of this would be having the subject move suddenly to attract attention, colouring or lighting the subject to the extent where it stands out from the rest of the scene.





Straight ahead action and pose to pose:

These are two different approaches to the actual drawing process. "Straight ahead action" means drawing out a scene frame by frame from beginning to end, while "pose to pose" involves starting with drawing a few key frames, and then filling in the intervals later.[1] "Straight ahead action" creates a more fluid, dynamic illusion of movement, and is better for producing realistic action sequences. Size, volumes, and proportions are controlled better this way, as is the action. 

[1] Wikipedia






Overlapping:

Overlap is when one action overlaps another. Applying this principal can make your animation flow nicely and have a nice rhythm. For example overlapping action is when the character changes direction while his clothes or hair continues forward. 

























Slow-out and slow-in:

The movement of the human body, and most other objects, needs time to accelerate and slow down. For this reason, animation looks more realistic if it has more drawings nearer the beginning and end of an action, emphasizing the extreme poses, and fewer in the middle. This principle goes for characters moving between two extreme poses, such as sitting down and standing up, but also for inanimate, moving objects, like the bouncing ball in the above illustration.




Arcs:

Most natural actions tend to follow an arched trajectory, and animation should adhere to this principle by following implied "arcs" for greater realism. For example a limb moving by rotating a joint, the only exception is the mechanical movement, which tends to move in a straight line.

As an object's speed or momentum increases, arcs tend to flatten out and broaden its turns. For example a roller skater moving at top speed would be unable to turn as sharply as a slower skater, and would need to cover more ground to complete the turn.

Secondary Action:


Giving a scene secondary action provides the scene with more life, and also gives the main action substance. A secondary actions main objective is to emphasize and help portray the main action rather then shadow it. However close ups in facials for example will tend not to have this action.





Timing:

This refers to the amount of shots/drawings within a frame for a single action, this relates to the speed of the film. To have the correct timing would mean the object would be 'obeying the laws of physics' providing a sense of realism. Timing can also help establish a characters personality i.e mood emotion and reactions.




Exaggeration:

Incredibly useful for animation this principle allows how realistic you want your animation to be. The definition of this principle first employed by Disney, 'was to remain true to reality, just presenting it in a wilder, more extreme form'. You need to be careful with exaggeration as too much can make your animation a bit extravagant so to have some restraint on the principle is necessary.

 



Solid Drawing:

This principle takes into account three-dimensional spaces. Using colour and movement this principle gives the character the illusion of three dimensional movement and life.




Appeal:

This refers to the charisma in an character or actor. All characters have to have appeal whether they're a hero or villain. Appeal includes easy to read design, clear drawing, and personality development that will capture and involve the audiences interest.