Defined roles

As production develops we feel the need to set roles, they are as follows

Ashley:Background Animator / Director

Alex: Animation Senior Director

Sam: Animator/ Sound

Stuart: Animator/ Sound 

Outline of the story so far

1. To start off with, we would have the main character (a raindrop) happily bouncing along a cloud when he is to meet an evil drop and be forcefully removed from the cloud (a powerful kick should work) as if to demonstrate the injustice of this world.

2. As our raindrop falls his/her eyes widen as if to suggest discomfort and we see the limbs detach and fall away to suggest the trauma our little organism endeavours.

3. The drop falls down a umbrella,  which acts as a metaphor for overcoming a struggle. he/she could have broken into many droplets but our little protagonists fights through as one piece.

4. The adventures of our raindrop end in a puddle unfortunately, and we begin a slow zoom out, changing shots as we get a wider and wider perspective of the puddle, to the park the puddle is in and a wide shot of the UK and eventually earth and space.

The idea really puts us into perspective. Us as part of something greater, much greater.

Clearer storyboards

Idea development

A member of our group (Ashley) put forward an idea for the plot. The main premises of the idea is to display a mid-life crisis in the form of a raindrop, though that may be putting it simply. The plot is about what little effect a raindrop (metaphor for us humans of this earth) we have in our short time on this planet and the original idea showed a rain drop falling into a puddle to cause nothing but a pathetic little ripple but have it contribute to the billions of ripples caused by the metaphor of billions of people to eventually end up as a giant tide.

As this idea developed it became more focused around the drop itself and its changes during its life and from this we moved on to changing the main centre of the attention to the drop itself. What was just a "transition" (as Ashley called it) became the main opportunity to portray our story and we see the drop lose its limbs and eyes. With the drop having more of the spotlight it simplified the rest of the story by default and the plan to show a tide was changed to a gradual zoom out to show the size of the puddle in contrast to the overpowering size of the earth. Storyboards were exchanged and the idea was nearly ready to be executed

Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects was a program I was already familiar with as in conjunction with Premier Pro, it was my go to suite for editing, though rarely did I animate when using them. Learning about their animation capabilities was fascinating and allowed me to develop and refresh my editing skills and also learn about animating within the program. It is indeed a shame I haven't the quality of work to reflect such a statement but the following video wasn't made without it's struggles and thus I believe it allowed me learn things that will help me when working on the final project.

Despite the quality of the video being quite frankly terrible there are three elements I learned/developed working on this, Focus of the camera layer in AE, Camera movements and layer movements, three things I believe will be important in future projects and my final one.

Stop motion animation

We have all seen stop motion at some point, its the art of stopping motion, in a quite literal sense. We stop motion, capture it, adjust and capture, rinse and repeat. The difficulty of this is what do we stop and capture? In today's lesson we learned how to design and create a wire character, as simple as it sounds it presents a few challenges. Given enough time any fool can transform a wire into a potentially believable character (depending on your imagination of course) but in order to animate, a wire character needs certain characteristics such as the ability of standing on his/her own two feet or even sitting down and bending the metal in a way it doesn't wear out over time. our final result came to this

A proud moment as my creation sits unassisted. He has this strength due to the home-made bones he has which were creating with wooden coffee stirrers and masking tape, this allows him to have strength and the ability to animate realistically to some extent.

 

Different styles of animation

To begin with it was difficult to understand how beautiful animated moving images were made. Animation comes with the opportunities that are somewhat infinite but this also means they are rather intimidating, its almost impossible to even imagine how an idea starts and how the development goes through.

Watching various animations educated me, some have had enough care and love invested in them that they are designed and created frame by frame, some others have assets and allow applications such as Adobe After affects to fill in the gap once the beginning and end of a shot have been decided.

The main methods behind animation we have discussed involve the following

- Hand drawn stop motion animation
- Stop motion animation
- Adobe After Effects animation
- Anime Studio Pro animation

Each come with their own benefits and drawbacks, such as stop motion being time consuming and After effects limited RAM previews. but once an idea has been discussed and developed we can decide which shall be the best choice.

Anime studio pro

Adobe After Effects

Stop motion Animation