Cutout Animation

The process of cut animation is done in certain steps:
Here are the materials used

1)Masking tape/ Double-sided tape
2) Glue
3) Blue tack
4) Scissors
5) Magazine puppets/cutouts


Then you will need to do is to set up the process of recording the animation

A table or an elevated platform is required to serve as the work area where the cut-out animation can be created. A digital video camera is mounted on a tripod connected to a computer loaded with the Final Cut Pro software for stop-motion capture on the table.
An ordinary photographic tripod is usually used and the DVC is placed such that it points downwards and would shoot the cut out puppet from above.



After then you will then go onto production of editing the animation piece

.Construct the basic set up accordingly as shown in the set-up section. Switch on the computer and start the programme Adobe Premiere. Select File> Capture> Stop motion.
2. Draw the paper cur outs, in this case, a car, and the background, the road, hill etc. Cut them out and place them together.
3. The moveable parts are attached with either blue tacks or masking tape so that the parts can be removed easily when needed.
4. The car is then placed on a background of the road and the sky. take 12 frames of the car at the bottom of the hill.
5. Move the clouds and the sunrays about during the action sequence.
6. To show the car moving down the hill accelerating, the car is repositioned further apart from its previous position. therefore, lesser frames are required to capture the acceleration down the slope.
7. To show the the effect that the car is climbing up the hill slowly, the car is repositioned close to its previous position. Therefore, more frames are needed to capture the gradual climb up slope.
8. When the entire sequence is captured and replayed, the actionsequence will show the car climbing up and down the hill on the road. The aniamation sequence ends with the train exiting out of the picture.

Here is a video I done for cutout animation. In class we had to make a video of a cutout animation for our project which had to have a max of 30 to 1 minutes. This is an example of not a fully finished version. 




A great professional who has used cutout animation and created many animated shows are Lauren Child. She was famous for making the show Charlie & Lola which is shown on Ceebies. 


By evaluating the whole project itself there were many strengths and weaknesses i had in this project. The strengths was that you was highly motivated into this because I am a very creative person who likes to cut out things and design some stories with the cutout puppets. Also i believe that I acquired new skills such as: Using final cut pro which was to mainly design the animation itself, developing new skills such as: cutting out, moving the puppets very slow. My weaknesses were that I didn't have the right ideas to know what to cut, plus I was very late with decisions on what to plan the story on and knowing what to make from the background and the characters I cut out. Also I had a bit of a downfall with final cut because at first it got me very confused and I didn't know how to use it, but with the improvements and support from my classmates and teachers I knew what to do and gained more required abilities to finish off my final piece of cutout animation. I could of improved many things as well. One of them was that I should of planned out a story board for my animation so I could of had a simple plot for my animation. Also I should of took some of my time off at lunch time and develop my skills upon final cut pro so I can take down the simple options and gain some advanced techniques to make my project a master class.
Overall I felt that the project was a very creative one and it gave me very thinking to do because it was something I haven't done but it was an exciting one to do and it established some new ways of how media can be like and how animations today make people exciting with very great imaginative skills.

Zoetropes

A zoetrope invented in 1834 by William George Horner was created as a little device to produce an illusion movement of a certain action (mainly for cinematic animation movies) for a rapid succession of pictures. 

It is demonstrated by beneath the slits, on the inner surface of the cylinder, is a band which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a set of sequenced drawings or photographs. The faster the rate of spin, the smoother the progression of images. A viewer can look through the wall of the zoetrope from any point around it, and see a rapid progression of images. Because of its design, more than one person could use the zoetrope at the same time.

I did many examples of zoetrope actions. The way I started off by doing it was by getting a paper which had 11 boxes. Each of the boxes were sided from the same level of when an object or person is dropping or growing (for making cinematic actions).  So for example of how I did it was I made a small stack of balls, and from the start of the left side I started with one ball then up to the 6th box which ended with 6 balls and then after that I drew the same balls from the same amount on each boxes I did on the right side and put the equal ones onto the left side. 

Ident Elevator Pitch

Ident Analysis

This is a seasonal-led ident that would only be appropriate to use at Christmas time as it advertises this time of year along with the channel. The music used emphasise this them as it sounds magically and glittering (adjectives usually associated with Christmas). The duration and tempo are appropriate as they give a relaxed amount of time that doesnt drag on too long but allows the information to be shown effectively.
This ident could techniqually be re-packaged to be shown in high definition as it is not an animation and includes alot of detail which could be improved by a better resolution. However this would then become a limitation as not every viewer would possess a HD television. There is also no room for creation of corporate identity within this ident as christmas could not be associated with one specific television channel. However, there is a slight incitement of brand loyalty as the same ident is used for both Sky 1 and Sky 2. This ident is also limited to a smaller audience as it is recieved as a satellite channel and therefore analogue receivers cannot view it, limiting its marketing reach.
The ident can be creatively communicated as the audio corresponds with the visual theme; thus giving an idea of what is happening to non-visual viewers.

Animator Timeline

Development in animation

Joseph Plateau

Pioneers: The First Generation of Animation

Joseph Plateau (phenakitoscope) (1801-1883)

He was the first person to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. 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 (zoetrope) (1844-1918)

A French science teacher, responsible for the first projected animated cartoon films. Reynaud created the Praxinoscope in 1877 and the Théâtre Optique in December 1888

Emile Reynaud (praxinoscope) (1844-1918)
He was a French science teacher, responsible for the first projected animated cartoon films. Reynaud created the Praxinoscope in 1877 and theThéâtre Optique in December 1888, and on 28 October 1892 he projected the first animated film in public, Pauvre Pierrot, at the Musée Grévin in Paris. This film is also notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used.

Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)

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. He immigrated to the United States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous. Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs, and hiszoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion picture that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.

Edison (Kinetoscope) (1847-1931)
was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles ofmass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Lumiere brothers (Aguste 1862-1954) (Louis 1864-1948)
The Lumiere brothers were the earliest filmmakers in history, they began creating moving pictures in 1892 and on 19 March 1895 the first footage ever to be recorded using it was recorded. This film shows workers leaving the Lumiere factory. 

George Pal (1908-1980) 
He was a Hungarian-born American animator and film producer, principally associated with the science fiction genre. He graduated from the Budapest Academy of Arts in 1928 (aged 20). From 1928 to 1931, he made films for Hunnia Films of Budapest, Hungary. He is best remembered as the producer of several science fiction and fantasy films in the 1950s and 1960s, four of which were collaborations with director Byron Haskin including The War of the Worlds (1953). He himself directed Tom Thumb (1958), The Time Machine (1960) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962).

BBC Voxpop (Lucy)

Editing

Editing is the process of selecting and preparing images, sound, video, or film through processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications in various media. A person who edits is called an editor. In a sense, the editing process creates with the idea for the work itself and continues in the correlation between the author and the editor. Editing is, therefore, also a practice that includes creative skills, human relations, and a precise set of methods.

A light edit or else recognized as a minor change may be regarded as changes that do not substantively change the theme, type facing, tone, structure, characters, or other elements of intellectual property that are held by the author. Such changes would include spelling, or grammar in a way that does not deviate from the author's use of, say, non-standard grammar or speech patterns. A heavy edit may change substantively the tone, structure, characters, or other elements of intellectual property contained in the work.

Technical editing involves reviewing text written on a technical topic, and identifying mistakes related to the use of language in general or devotion to a specific style guide. Technical editing may include any of the following: correction of grammatical mistakes, misspellings, mistyping, incorrect punctuation, inconsistencies in usages, poorly structured sentences, wrong scientific terms, wrong units and dimensions, changeability in significant figures, technical ambivalence, technical disambiguation, correction of statements conflicting with general scientific knowledge, correction of synopsis, content, index, headings and subheadings, correcting data and chart presentation in a research paper or report, correcting errors in citations.

Invisible art

What is crosscutting?

Cross-cutting is an editing technique. It is when the camera will cut away from one action to another action that happens in several places at approximately the same time.
 

What are reaction shots?

A reaction shot is when the emotion face of the actor being shown. A close shot is mostly used to catch the emotional reaction looks on a number of actors.

What is seamless editing?

Seamless editing is when an editor thinks that he or she knows what they are doing with their editing, but the more and more they get deeply involved with the project they get less aware of what is happening.What is a jump cut?

Jump cut is a style of editing from one shot or sequence to another camera position in a discontinuous way.

What is a flash back and what does it achieve?
flashback is for example when a character is in a devastating scene and takes you back in time to he or she’s current point in which a memory is unexpected. And it helps the viewers understand more within the story.

Sin City Effect

First we had to look at a tutorial and understand on what we need to do to be able to do the effect.
Then we had to plan a scenario and go out and film our footage so that we can edit them on Final Cut Pro. But during the editing I found that some of the colours were the same in the background so it didn't blend well. Then we had to render and upload onto Youtube and embed it on my blog.

Step 1: Select Footage
Step 2 Effect>Colour correction 3 way (which will open a tab)
Step 3:Open advanced options by clicking on one arrow at the bottom of the tab
Step 4: Use the sampling tool to select the colour that you wanted to be shown and use the colour sliders to make it as accurate as you want.
Step 5: Uncheck Luma and Saturation
Step 6: Tern the saturation BAR not slider completely to the right. (its located on-top of the colour slider)
Step 7: Don't panic if it looks nothing like you wanted it. Now click on the invert button and use the colour slider to adjust the colours depth
Step 8: Finally if your picture has still samples of colour around places you do not want, you can either mask it or use the softening tool on the tab to make it more bolder to the place selected.

This technique is very useful for highlighting object within the scene, because it singles the colour of the scene gaining the audiences attention. One popular example of this technique being used is 'Sin City', since the movie is mostly black and white and only a few colours are shown, making it more defined which gives it an artistic value.

Course Leaflet (Lucy)