Armature Making

Armature Making

Armature Making

We moved on from making character heads and expressions to armatures. I have not done this before and so are my classmates. I had no knowledge about making armatures, we had a presentation shown by tutor on armature designs and best way to tackle making a good one.

Starting this, I had a tutorial with my tutor next day about this, and this made my mind clear on how to start to making it. I looked at my classmates and did a skeleton/wired sketches of them to give me ideas on where the joints are and how they look like in different positions, eg. standing, sitting, kneeling etc.

I liked the last one ( bottom right) and I developed it to the next stage in details.

Making Model Heads

Final models. Worked after-all!

Making Model Heads

Looking back at my rough sketches of models when I was experimenting with shapes, I saw a character of an Ant that I liked. I decided to develop it and see if it could possibly be better to sculpt. I simplified the character, left out most of the details because I did not have that much time with me since I spent quite a lot trying to make my previous model work.

Luckily it worked fine on the design. I thought it looked good and hoped it works when making it. I didn't want to over exaggerate the character, I left the shape of the head same volume but just played around with the eyes and the eye lashes, with a bit of mouth

Making Model Heads

Playing around with shapes gave me ideas on making my character and also the design obviously.

I went for the rectangular shaped character at first because I liked how it looked and that it was different from normal character. The character has no eyes or hair. I thought it would be interesting to sculpt, so I went with it.

As you can tell it did not work out so well as I hoped and looked completely different from my design. I decided to drop this and come up with another character.

Making Model Heads

Looking at stop motion models to give me an idea on the volume/ size of the head I will be making

Making Model Heads

So starting out before making models or anything, first I thought I would go find some ideas and inspirations. I looked at how characters are designed for stop motion compared to normal 2D animation. Most of them seemed to be simplified so it would make it easier to sculpt.

 I noticed shapes is mainly the key for designing characters, so I will be playing around with shapes to create characters

 Also to keep the animation principles in mind, I looked at some exaggeration in characters and other people's work.

Lastly I have to come up with my character and different angles of it.

Final Animation

We all are very pleased with the result of our animation, and also how we managed to do this in a week

Final Animation (with no sound)

This is unfinished version, we still havent added the last shot of the sunset which the paper plane goes into the distance and disappears.

Test

In the test I came up with the idea of having all of us in the group showing their hands in the animation going for the button, this will then show up as changing of hands to go press the button for the screen to unfold. I thought this idea would make the audience think that this is happening throughout the world that everyone checks their emails on a regular basis and some might be booking flights for holiday or jus contacting their friends. The animation is quite fast because we did not want to spend a lot of time on the test since we did not have enough time to do the task. Also we noticed that that the buttons eg. email, music, are mirrored so we kept that in notice and we will the settings to make it look fine on the actual animation

More Designing

In one of the emails will be on our animation, it will have a character booking for a flight to mexico which he received another email before from a friend asking him to come over to mexico. In the email we will have a plane fly in from the side with the name of the plane, "KJ Air" is the name we decided to use for the plane, it is the initials of our group mate in this animation. And the booking box will drop down from the top.  when booked the flight, then will have the keyboard folds to become a paper plane which will then fly around the screen and into the sunset.

My Role in Group (Designing)

My role in the group was to do designing of the sets and how things are going to look. The above designs are for the last shot of our animation which in the storyboard the paper plane disappears in the sunset. I did couple of designs on how the sunset should look and the paper plane would move into the distance.

Some more designs of the sunset with palm trees
















This is the design my group really liked to use and decided to stick with this sunset.

I did a larger drawing of it with colour. We decided to use this on the actual animation in the end which you will see in the video.

Week 2 Group Animation (storyboard)

I changed my group I was previous week task. For our new animation we looked at videos on youtube and also came up with our own ideas of what we should do. We lastly came across this video above of stop motion animation about eBay. It is an interactive animation which we all liked.

After deciding to do similar thing, we wrote down some quick notes and story-board of our animation. We wanted to be interactive as the eBay video. We chose to do a computer screen and someone checking email.

This is edited and refined story-board 

Principles

We had to keep in mind about the animation principles in this stop motion. I think the principles work the same way as the 2D animation. Had to time(timing) everything ( anticipation), staging also to make the viewers look certain position and important area to keep an eye on. Also exaggerations which will be the folding and physically moving words and pictures. Animating this will be Straight- Ahead Action because we can't do the keyframes and add stuff in-between like 2D animating. Overlapping action  will be using this principle.

Group Animation Task

We looked at the actual video of Michael jackson- Thriller, looked at some moves we wanted to use for our stop motion animation

Then when we had an idea of the moves we wanted, we looked at some video tutorials on youtube

We then came up with he dance moves and poses for the animation we are doing. Everyone was in-charge of their own character performance and animation.