Final animation

Over 1,000 drawings and many many hours of Photoshopping later, here is my final animation!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXp_Z3WYN_o

I'm quite pleased with the outcome, it is quite wobbly and amateur looking but I'm pleased that I managed to finish all my drawings and stick to a schedule!

Audio

As most of my time has been spent drawing and scanning i haven't really had a chance to experiment with audio. As i only have a day left and still quite a bit to do I think I am going to go with a piece of music instead of having sound effects. I am going to go for a piece of acoustic/instrumental music as I think words may distract from the visuals slightly. It needs something fairly upbeat and simple.

I have found a website called Jamendo.com which has loads of royalty free music. The tracks are free to download and can be used for commercial and non-commercial purposes so I don't have to worry about copyright issues.
http://www.jamendo.com/en

I had a little search through some of the instrumental pieces and found something which I think will work well. It is a simple guitar piece which I think is appropriate for the rhythm of my animation.  I have put all my frames together now so hopefully the audio won't need too much tweaking!

So much drawing...

I've actually managed to keep on schedule for this project hooray! Altogether i have scanned in and edited 93 pages of drawings from my sketchbook, almost there! 

First section

Here is the first 23 seconds of animation. I'm working at 10 frames per second so it's 230 frames worth. It's time consuming to say the least!

Testers

TESTERS

Refining Ideas

During my learning agreement consultation with my lecturers it was suggested that the boy character is unnecessary to the animation and that it needs to focus more on the evolution aspect. I have therefore decided to present the book on its own and to have the pages turn without the aid of a human hand. The audience will be looking down onto the book, observing the creature moving and growing on the pages. I also need to consider the use of audio, i.e. sound of pages turning, animal noises, voiceover narration? Apparently After Effects will be needed so I also need to practice more with that and see what I can do with it. I'm starting to get the hang of Premiere Pro which is good as I had never used it in my life until Tuesday. So I need to draw a new storyboard and maybe when I get the evolving creature down I could add in that beginning section if it works and if I have time.   

Tester

Today I started experimenting with Adobe Premiere Pro to get familiar with how it works and to test out the frames I have drawn so far. It took me three hours to scan it all in and then put it together and it's only 2 seconds long! Hopefully i will get quicker as the project progresses.

Research and ideas

I have made a few notes from Darwin's 'Origin of Species' as well as looking at the Natural History Museum website which has been interesting.
Tree of Life

I've also been looking at some nice animations online.
Vimeo
TV Paint Animation

This animation 'When the day breaks' is by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby. I like the concept and the way it has been done gives an interesting effect. A live film was rotoscoped and then each frame was painted over using oil sticks and put back together. The people in the film were drawn as animals for the animation, and some of the backgrounds from the film were kept in which gave it extra depth. Overall it is made up of 7,000 images and took four years to make! Obviously this is on a different scale to how I will be working as I only have six weeks left.

I have decided that I am going to make a completely hand drawn animation which means I am going to have to draw each frame. I'm thinking that it should be at least 12 frames per second as 24 is going to take FOREVER. I am in the process of drawing a storyboard and I will be making some short tester animations in the next couple of days. I am going to work in a very simple style with limited colours as I don't want to be over ambitious with the amount of time I have left.

Tree of Life

I have chosen to make an informative animation on Evolution. I am looking specifically into the theory of 'divergent evolution' as I find it interesting and I think it would be interesting to experiment with visually. Darwin's idea of 'the tree of life'
 

"As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications."

Charles Darwin

 

 

 



Experimenting with some very simple hand drawn animation. I put the individual frames together on Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. It took far longer than it should have I must have done it the longest, most complicated way possible!

Brief

In our fast-moving society, the need to provide accessible screen based communication is an important requirement within the profile of an illustrator. Increasingly, growth in this area of the illustration sphere can be evidenced in the range of new products brought out by manufacturers each year, which consequently, provides new platforms for illustration. This in turn, creates an exciting dialogue that emerges from the more traditional ideas of illustration through to the newer emergence of challenging and exciting hybrid forms.

Screen based outcomes for example, can educate, inform, comment upon or provide light entertainment by combining sound, text, visual imagery, still and moving pictures.

This is my brief for the Convergence/Divergence project. I have ten weeks to work with screen based illustration, in other words I have to make an animation of at least one minute in length.