animation background set WIP

I have made a red and white background on the computer and printed it out for the walls of the background. I have also cut out felt squares, which I will stick down in a check pattern for the floor of the set.

mood board

I created a mood board to give people a rough idea of what my animation is about and to help further develop the plot of it.

Animation set process

I have started to build the set for my animation. I cute out a piece of foam board and drew squares on it 3cm x 3cm. This piece of foam board is for the floor and I wanted to have a checkered pattern carpet for the floor. Therefore I also got some black and white felts and drew squares on them too. I have started to cut them out and am sticking them down in the checkered pattern I would like. I have used felt to create a more realistic carpet effect rather than having it painted or printed.

Animation proposal blog and pitch

Animation proposal:

In my animation proposal I have two characters for my animation, who are called Seven and Lily. I won't have proper speech for my animation however I will do voice overs for small sounds like, sighing, shocked, and cat sounds. 

In my stop motion the character Seven is working on his computer when he sees movement in the CCTV monitor. From there the scene changes to Lily. Lily has a special sense as a cat girl and can detect cat lovers. She detects Seven's presence through the CCTV camera and approaches it. She then approaches the CCTV camera and makes heart motions and cat sounds to send her appreciation for his love of cats. Seven who is watching this from his monitor his shocked that there is a cat girl in front of him and he is so shocked that he spits out his coffee. From here the animation ends.

For the set and materials I will be using the foam boards to make the foundation of the setting. I will have two settings which are the bedroom of the character Seven and  a flat hallway which is where Lily will appear when she is on set. Further more I will draw parts of the background with paper and make some props from cardboard or thick card stock. Overall my whole animation will be mainly drawn.

I pitched my idea today and from the feedback I got I was told it would be quite long, so I would have to use a lot of my free time to do extra work and put a lot of effort into it. I have also decided to make the animation a bit choppy from the feedback I got and make small card/cardboard characters instead of drawing the properly on paper frame by frame. Instead I can move the characters manually on the piece of cardboard they are stuck on.

animation proposal

Contemporary genres and forms of animation

John Lewis 2013 Christmas Advert

In 2013 John Lewis animated a Christmas advert. They first started off with a 2D draft of the advert before they started to animate it. John Lewis uses stop frame motion to animate their advert. Everything in the advert is handcrafted. They have turned a 2D animation and have given it more life and dimension. They made their background from scratch making it seem as realistic as possible. From there they also printed and created multiple versions of the characters in their animation. These different versions represents the movement of each character. They move the characters and the backgrounds frame by frame. The characters and scenery have been animated so well that you could easily be confused with it being a computer generated animation.The characters are moved frame by frame capturing every single one of their movements with the camera making it seem like they’re actually moving.  

Contemporary animators

Tim Burton

Tim Burton is an American animator, film director and producer. He is well known for his stop motion animated film. In 1980 Tim Burton was an apprentice animator under Walt Disney Studios, however he grew tired of his work there and therefore decided to start his own projects. In 1982 Tim Burton released his first short film ‘Vincent’. Tim Burton wanted to make his pieces more alive and vivid unlike 2D animation therefore he became interested in stop-motion animation. The characters in Tim Burton’s movie are first sculpted out of clay before they are recreated as computer generated graphics. From there the final designs of the character are created from different materials to make their characteristics as realistic as possible. Different facial expressions are created so that they can be put on the face of the characters when they animate them to change their facial expressions. 

Significant Developers

Willis O'Brien

Willis O'Brien was a stop motion pioneer from America. During his teenage years he was a cartoonist as well as a boxer and cowboy. As years went by his interest shifted to sculptures. This mainly consisted of human and animal figures which he would add moulded rubber to their surfaces to give them more freedom of movement.

Willis O'Brien's idea of stop motion first started when he was making figures of boxers out of clay with his co-worker.  The Edison company took interest in his methods of stop motion and hired him to do several prehistoric themed shorts. Willis' models were mainly made of clay however throughout the years he career and skills grew, leading to a more advanced and detailed versions of his models. Willis went as far as to add inflating and deflating rubber bladders to his models to make them appear as if they were breathing. For his piece 'King Kong' he studied the movements of a gorilla to so that he could imitate it's movements with his characters. Willis was able to add actual actors to his films through the use of a green screen.

pioneers and early inventions

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge  was a photographer that mainly worked with stop motion photography. He is well known for his motion picture "The Horse In Motion". In 1872 a California horse racer approached Muybridge and made a bet with him about whether a horse was ever floating whilst it was galloping. Muybridge lined up a bank of cameras that had trip wires connected to the shutters of the camera. Every time the horse triggered a trip wire the camera would take a picture.



In 1879 with the helping of Stanford's funding Muybridge was able to produce a better method of capturing a horse galloping. Later on in 1883 he was invited to further extend his research at the University of Pennsylvania, where he produced thousands of photography in motion. He displayed his work with a projector device he created called the Zoopraxiscope. Images were projected by a Zoopraxiscope with the use of a rotating disc. Images are painted on the disc and then rotated to make the image look like it is moving.

Foxi and Doggo animation