LAUAN 504 - Documentary Week 7 (Easter Week 3)

This week I powered through and animated 2 of my 3 scenes. I was pleasantly surprised by the speed and quality of my animation- I always thought it wasn't a strong point of mine. On the other hand, my clean up definitely needs a bit of work. Not to blame the equipment but I think my lines would be better on a Cintiq, which I'll use in future for lining.
This week I also started researching and developing how to create a psychedelic animation for the Jimi Hendrix scene. Although fun, I am very much stylistically unsure of how to execute this. Having begun developing some ideas, I stumbled upon a mirroring technique on After Effects to create a kaleidoscope kind of effect. It definitely needs developing but I think I'm on the right track.

Kaleidoscope Effect Test:

Animated Scene- 

LAUAN 504 - Documentary Week 6 (Easter Week 2)

After returning home this week I took time to catch up on my blog, edit the footage together and begin animating. I struggled quite a lot with editing the footage. Because of the way we'd shot it (without easing, intending to take the frames out in post), I found it difficult to manually create the easing. I could definitely do some research and find a better way to edit the video, however with the footage now together we could begin animating. The animating was the highlight of this week! I really enjoyed choosing the acting of the birds. The outcome works nicely and I'm really wrapping my head around TV Paint too.

Also a note from last week- I realised our book isn't really a book, it's a stop motion set.

LAUAN 504 - Documentary Week 5 (Easter Week 1)

Week five was a very, very intensive week- considering starting the week the book was still under construction, by the end of the week we'd finished shooting. Constructing the pages individually worked fine and only using the coloured paper meant they all worked cohesively. Binding was a real issue. After trying and rip out two hard spines, we decided on a soft spine which in the end worked great and so was worth the trial and error. For the book cover, decisions on composition and colour were shared then I designed and constructed it. This turned out quite well and worked in sync with the rest of the book. Following from last week I also fixed my tree. I'm glad I did as it was worth adding the extra quality. Mainly this week we were shooting which went really well! We worked and communicated well with each other. Rory's wire construction in the book definitely worked at holding the pages up by themselves. Setting up and taking down the set wasn't too labour or time intensive. The soft spine worked well and all the pages popped up fine. Looking back at the footage however the lighting does feel quite cold and overly bright, slightly washing out some of the detail- we fiddled with lighting for a long time and couldn't get it perfect- in future more tests should be run. Some of the animation definitely could have been smoother too, such as the storm page which we should have done on 1's. However, as a first proper stop motion shoot for all of us, I think it went really well and the outcome looks great. 

Fixing the Tree

Front Cover Rough Sketch and Font Ideas

Timelapse Reel

Tests Reel

Binding Issues

LAUAN 504 - Documentary Week 4

This week was exciting as I completed my pages for the book. I encountered a lot of issues while making and was constantly problem solving. Making maquettes of the pop ups and referring back to 'The Elements Of Pop-Up'  helped hugely in solving issues. The biggest problem probably was the tree on the garden page which wouldn't stand up by itself. Now that it's complete I can see how different fold would have made it more effective. Although challenging, I enjoyed making the pages so much and really feel I found my feet with the paper construction this week. It's definitely something I'd like to do more of in 3rd year. Also, now that both my pages are finished I can see that I spent too long developing the picnic page and not long enough on the garden page, which feels spars and not as well thought about in comparison. The fans work really nicely but given more time I would have developed the foreground much further.
Dotty's rhyme was also finished this week which was amazing and we were all really pleased with- the animation started to come together.

Maquettes 

Construction: 

LAUAN 504 - Documentary Week 3

After our last phone calls to Hazel Jackson, Richard Arnold and Chris Thomas this week, we started to think about narrative and teamed up with Dotty to make the rhyme! This was an interesting experience to mock 'hire' someone for the project, laying down guild lines and a plan etc.
We began mocking up pages this week too. This task was aided by three books we took out of the library, one of which 'The Elements of Pop-Up' by David A. Carter and James Diaz, explained the engineering behind the different pop ups which was super useful. I thought about colour this week and what visual style the book will be in. Experimenting with paper cut outs was really useful in seeing what colours work together for the pages I will be making and also to explore constructing things out of paper. I really enjoyed the processes and research this week but could have produced more visuals.

Pop Up Books From The Library 

Paper cut out & colour experiments 

LAUAN 504 - Documentary Week 2

We undertook a lot of research as a team this week. I spoke to Hannah Peck, Rachael Dixey and Ian Woodward to gain primary research which proved very fruitful. The world design continued, again, this was mostly through generating ideas. To have improved I definitely could have produced some primary visuals, such as thumb nail sketches, to couple the ideas and aid the development.
The pre-production presentation was really well received this week- Halli's visuals, the natural triangulation from the interviews and the style approach went down overwhelmingly well. Communication between the group and attendance is really good, thinks are looking fantastic.

Moodboards I made for the presentation:

LAUAN 504- Documentary Week 1

This week our documentary team, Halli, myself and Rory as director were all tasked with coming up with ideas for all aspects of the documentary after deciding upon the subject of the Parakeets in London. I focused mostly on medium and style and came up with the idea of a pop up book(!) hybrid with 2D animation. I initially thought this could play with shadows and silhouette's agains block coloured backgrounds to tell the story and possibly experiment with materials such as foam, sponge or cardboard. All ideas currently are quite loose. So far we're working nicely as a team and the ideas are flowing really well. We probably could have moved things forward a bit more this week in prep for the pre-production presentation but at this stage it's also important not to rush.