Kite section

For Tuesday's meeting in GO1, I brought in all the frames I had drawn out after John had drawn the motion of the kite, for us to all colour together as it's a tedious task.
Before finalising this section of the animation, we line tested it to see if the timings were correct and how well the kite moved and we were very happy with the outcome and hopefully the rest of the animation will be ompleted to this standard. It was great seeing part of it come to life and made us more motivated to get started on the rest.

Here's the test for the kite :) it works really well, tho we will take out that random cloud that appears for one frame then is forgotten! lol. We like the way that the scribbled lines almost make the whole image seem animated and as if the child is drawing the pictures.


Kite Test from Jade Midson on Vimeo.

New take on the Animation

This was briefly mentioned in Laura's last post, but as of yesterday, we have decided to produce the animation using purely 2D. We had a long discussion of the pros and cons and referred to our production schedule to see how well we were getting along, but we were stumped. It was also in the back of our minds the difficulty of green-screening the puzzle and having to photoshop all the different puzzle pieces to then be added into after effects, we felt that this was overly complicated especially after mine and Laura's conversation with Andy last week to see if he could work it out, to which his response was, 'ah, my brain feels like its melting!!!' This issue followed us around for a few days and was really getting to us as a team, especially considering the time we have left and the lateness getting started due to many reasons.
It was brought forward to me that my team would feel a lot happier with creating the entire animation in 2D and after collating everyone's ideas, i also think that this is best. It is a shame, but we can still create a great animation in 2D, proven by Laura's animatic example. A Happy Team  = Great Animating :)

Ok, so for this week:
Imogen: First part of the stpp motion- child placing the family photograph in the centre of the puzzle frame.
Laura:  Child placing puzzle pieces 1 and 2 (mum's head and dad's feet)
Jade:  Child placing puzzle pieces 3 and 4 (kite and dad's head)
Tom:  Child placing puzzle pieces 5 and 6 (mum's body/feet and 'missing piece') and boy slamming hand onto the puzzle
John: Keeping up with the good work of the rest of the 2D animation (the 2nd half- animated kite, dog, family etc)

Remember : Meeting Thursday 31st March- 10am GO1- bring all work so far so we can hopefully line test :)

Stop Motion Test

Here is the test of the stop-motion. Its a tad inconsistent in terms of lighting in the bottom left corner and with static puzzle pieces moving so will need re-doing me thinks...


Stop Motion Test 1 from Jade Midson on Vimeo.

However, the latest decision is to do the animation in 2D, which I think is going to be more realistic in terms of time left and also as the tests on digitally merging the stop motion and 2D were both extremely time consuming and also unsuccessful as the drawn puzzle pieces were not fitting onto the stop motion ones etc.

Thursday's meeting

Ok, so after our meeting on Wednesday and speaking to Andy, we decided that it would be best to get cracking on the 2D animation and merge it with the stop-motion at the end because by the time next Thursday's come around, it won't leave us with much time.
John, Laura and I spent all day Thursday deciding on the right approach to the 2D and also created a stop-motion test using the light boxes in GO1 to see if we were headed in the right direction and to get prepared for Thursday. I think this test worked really well and Laura will be uploading it to the blog in the next couple of days. We are also waiting to get feedback on it from Andy, though i think after a lot of thought, it may need to be a bit slower.

We set up a little system in  GO1 which involved John planning out the frames, focusing on the parts that are going to be animated, then passing them on to Laura, who drew the outlines first of the rest of the image, before colouring some in, whilst I was trying to cut up plastic for the puzzle and mounting it for the stop motion test, cutting my hand along the way!!

We spent the next couple of hours testing the stop motion and continuing with our little system, with John still sketching out the key parts of the frame and Laura and I spending a gruelling process colouring the background and the parts that 'stayed the same,' which then has been continuing through the rest of this weekend!

So far so good guys and I'm really proud of my team!! Keep up the good work! I dont think we realised how monotonous colouring the layouts would be and how many packets of colouring pencils we'd go through, but we have to keep going and I'm confident that we'll suceed in this project!! :D

update

I've done about 5 seconds of the hand-drawn animation today. Planning to have the 30 seconds done certainly by this time next week. I'll start posting line-tests when I'm back @ uni.

Recap of yesterday's meeting

WE HAVE BOOKED G143 THE SMALL STOP MOTION STUDIO NEXT THURSDAY - (March 31st) AT 10AM!!
Please make sure you are all available to join! Andy will be meeting us there to help set up lighting etc. By this time we need to have all the props ready which include: A table top, pencils/crayons (anything extra that can be laying about on the table where the child is making the jigsaw, blue tack, puzzle pieces and someones hands! As head of Stop Motion Tom, I will leave you to sort this out! :)
Imogen, could you please upload the family photograph onto the blog before then :)

We also decided that as we have 3 weeks before Easter and preferably we should get the work finished before - then to get a break. The 2D animation should start ASAP which John is over-seeing as the head of 2D animation as the stop motion and 2D can be created singularly or each other. The week before Easter (2 weeks time) is when the digital merging shall begin, this way if we do find obstacles we have the 2 weeks Easter as a back up.

Any questions, let me or Jade know :)

Here's a couple of possible intros for our studio. Lemme know what you think, and be honest :) just playing about with the sound at the moment. We could also have a glowing/animated logo instead. Just need you guys to decide on a logo if you want me to do that. I'll upload my designs as soon as illustrator starts working again :)

Animatic

Ok, this is my fourth attempt trying to upload this!! ARGH!
Anywaaaays...
Here is the animatic, I'm not sure about the music both in terms of copyright and also if it actually fits with the animation? I will email Andy to see what he says about using others music work and let you know what he says :)
Also, Andy replied to my email regarding what was needed in terms of sound and he said that just a song in the background is insufficient so need to add in some Foley work. I was thinking maybe wind blowing, birds tweeting, dog barking? And also a slam when the boy punches the jigsaw?
Can you guys think of anything else we could add in?

In terms of the animatic, I had trouble making it reach the minute work hence the longer time on the last "My Perfect Family" frame. However, if we are following John's suggestion in regards to using the animated logo, I think it will work :D

Let me know what you think!

http://vimeo.com/21120750

(Sorry havent figured out this new vid thing yet!)

Vimeo

Hey guys :)
After our discussion with Andy earlier, I've just created a Vimeo account. I used our group email adress and password which I'll remind you of in our Facebook Group for anyone who's forgotten :) It's veeeryyy easy to use, so to upload our own videos onto blogger, we'll use this account rather than youtube :D

Reasons why children draw how they do?

Some insights on the history of children's drawings - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1798813

Understanding children's drawings - http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=NMmF6OdXnTAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=history+of+children's+drawings&ots=hRmxdbZHOq&sig=B1w9Zmzr0MTiRndo3DiSvDp_xWs#v=onepage&q=history%20of%20children's%20drawings&f=false

Drawing development in children - http://www.learningdesign.com/Portfolio/DrawDev/kiddrawing.html

Children's drawings, come to life - http://teachingthatsticks.blogspot.com/2010/04/childrens-drawings-come-to-life.html


Some theorys about why children draw how they do? The typical artistic side for certain ages.
Good insight for thinking about how children could draw?

*The book one is kinda long!!!

:)

Kids drawings old research!

Found these earlier on, to help brainstorm typicsl childrens drawings.
The colours, brush mark used, how they interperate forms of animals and people etc.
Jungle one is my fav! Was wondering whether we need to make the dog more like the leopard? By having more simple shapes used?
:D

Some Animations

I found this tumblr with some animations on, stop frame ones we could use as examples of how smooth we can get the jigsaw puzzle going?

http://lostmojo.tumblr.com/

Personally i love this one :D

Pretty beast :D Watch it and also watch the puppet stop frame, gotta say that one didnt give me the heeby jeebes watching it! I liked even though for stop animation it was really smooth!

Let me know what you think!

Mock-up Puzzle

Hey team :)
Just thought I'd let you know that I've made a mock-up of the jgsaw puzzle so that when it comes to the stop-motion animating, we canget everything perfect. The overall design is working quite well, though I added a tree on the left hand side of the image in the border because it was too plain.
For the final puzzle, the material needs to be quite sturdy- my mock one is ony made of pieces of card sandwiched together which works, but when it comes to the stop-motion, I can see the pieces moving and coming apart quite easily...
Ill research some more into some materials and also try to get it ready for tuesdays meeting in our lesson :)

Character Designs Finalised - Dad & Dog

Firstly i have to say blogger is awful for uploading! 3 TIMES i have done this!
Rotational character designs for the dad and the dog. The style is achieved by the lines need to be thicker. It was somewhat comical doing this!
Front - Dad and Dog
Back -  Dad and Dog
Side - Dad and Dog
Crouch -  Dad and Dog

6yr Old Boy Character Designs

Here are the development, final and turnaround of my design for the illustration of the little boy in our animation:

Please let me know your thoughts on the design and if it needs to be developed further :)

Felt Tip Pen Animation Test

Hey!

So as Jade explained, me, her and Tom were given a different media to test the animation and as suggested by the title, mine was felts :)
I think the boldness of the lines work but unlike crayons, you are not given as much freedom in terms of varying the weights and shading etc. However, does this matter when drawing in the persona of a 6 year old?

The characters are positioned differently to Jades, personally I think hers works more effectively as keeping the characters looking straight ahead is making the animation look quite woody? But as Jade also said, the inconsistent lines used to colour in I think works very well :)

Animatic Test of a scene

So that we can identify which media we're going to be using for the animation, Tom, Laura and I picked a few frames from a scene to prodoce a test animatic each using wax crayons, felt pens and colouring pencils.
My given media was colouring pencils.
The scene is only 5 frames and not brilliant but it gives an insight into how the animation will look like using coloured pencils. The quality of the images isnt that great as my scanner seemed to change the colours a bit and alter the brightness, so i had to play around with the contrast of the images first.

I must say, it was quite fun, and also wierd at the same time, drawing as if I was a 6 year old child!



I like the way that in each frame, the colouring, ie the lines of pencil, are inconsistent, giving an almost animated feel. This works well because the scribbly lines children use when drawing are also inconsistent and also makes it more obvious that the child in the animation has drawn his perfect family- it's more edgy.

Crisis Meeting with Andy

Hey guys, I dont mean to be negative on the blog, but I thought id note down what came out of our crisis meeting today.
Attendance to the group meetings and tutorial lessons is VERY important- if you know you cant make it for any reason, please let either Laura or I know in advance.
The main issue we're having is not meeting our individual deadlines and with the help of Andy, it has been decided that if you have been set a task to do for a certain time, and you don't keep to the deadline that is set, your role and tast will be allocated to someone else who will meet the requirements. That does include the director and producer roles.

However, we are on the right track, we just need to pick up the pace to keep up with our production schedule. We have notified Andy about needing to book out the stop-motion studio and he is allowing us to use the small one upstairs- we just need to send him our production schedule so that he can give us a realistic amount of time to get the animating done.

By wednesday's meeting....
- Jade, Laura and Tom- have test animatic done for the kneeling down scene in a variety of media.

-John- character designs and also note down how you think the best way to approach the 2D animating will be and how to merget the 2 together in After Effects etc.

-Imogen- Drawing of the photograph of the broken family.

See you all Wednesday at 11 in the Library!

Heys :)

Here's a few of my rough character sketches. I think the very childish look we're currently working towards could be fun, (though we could perhaps clean up the lines with our final animation) and we could animate the characters taking into account the restrictions their body type might have on their movement. I still think the surrounding articles such as the tree etc and background should animate on as if it were being drawn by the child. Though perhaps at a fast pace than real time drawing.

Main puzzle image design

Here are the 2 images that I would like as the basics for our main image on the puzzle- obviously, the characters will be changed. I'm still unsure about the white space on the left, it looks quite uneven, though adding a tree there gets in the way of the sun. I know children have a lot of negative space in their drawings, but at the same time they do almost make things look evenly spaced. I'll see what you guys think. Im thinking that it's just maybe the size I've drawn the boxes in the picture so it'll probably be more compact in the actual final piece, especially if there's animated objects in the scene.
Anyway, here's the design- the 2nd is the same design as the first, but drawn with colouring pencils.

Layout designs

For these layout designs, I was experimenting with media, colour, space and the main components of the puzzle image, which is mostly the outside pieces of the puzzle as these aren't animated over.
When I scanned the images into the computer, the colour didn't come out properly, mostly in the images i drew with colouring pencil. I've written notes beside the images in the sketchbook for more details on these designs. I can also do some more designs as i didn't have any wax crayons.

Mum Character Design

Ok, so here's my rough character designs for the mum! Tom came up with a great idea to make our drawings more uneven and child-like, which was to draw with our left hands (or whatever hand's opposite to your writing hand!)

I thought I'd add large images so that you can see my notes from my sketchbook rather than typing them all  out on here.

Recap of today's tutorials and meeting

Hey guys,
So, our tutorial went well today and Ron seemed pleased with our work so far and was very impressed with Laura's production schedule :D so from now on, lets all try to stick to it- if anyone has any planned time away and can't turn up to the meetings, please let Laura or myself know before hand :D

Anyway, as there was only 3 of us today and we really needed the animatic done, we decided to take 1 character each and do a few character designs. Jade- mum, Laura- child, Tom- dad and dog!
We also decided that even though these are 2D drawings, we should do a couple of turnarounds or at least some different poses. We'll post these designs on the blog, but there's always room for more and improved ones!
I said that I was going to take on the role of creating a few layout designs using different media and compositions, which I'll also post after this.
Laura, Tom and I decided we should do a test animatic each, taking the same scene and drawing using different media-crayons, colouring pencils and felt pens.

We're waiting on the design of the family photo from Imogen, though Tom offered to produce one as backup.
I posted a note under John's door with the stuff he needs to be doing this week so that we can get the animatic done :)

We'll be back on track very soon so everyone get to it :)

URGENT PRODUCING NOTE ALL MUST READ!!

Ok so I think I should start with an apology as in terms of schedule I should have been more organised, however, I have learned the error of my ways and as of next week we need to all pull our weight - and attend ALL meetings! If you cannot attend a meeting, you need to tell me before so we can rearange as a group. If this is not possible, it is up to you to chase up either me or another member of the group who was present at the meeting to catch up on what you have missed.

Here is our master production schedule. If any of you have planned time away from now till Easter, please let me know so I can plan accordingly.

 
If anyone has any questions etc get in touch, will talk it through this Tuesday!
Have a good weekend :)
Laura

A is for Autism

Hey guys!
Was re-reading through my notes and came across the name of this animation we all watched as a class at the start of the project.
May be useful with our project animating childrens drawing etc. :)

Kinda Urgent- blank puzzle!

hey guys, as i was doing some research, i came across this website that sells blank jigsaws and the right amount of pieces that we need for our animation. U can get 2 in a pack for £2.03 or 6 in a pack for £5.10. Im not sure how big they are tho, but i need ur feedback on what to do. The minimum order price for the site is £5 so need to know soon so I can get shopping and i don't wanna waste money on something that is pointless :) Please get back to me- ill write this on the facebook group too!

Children's Drawing

Some random pictures Google picked up :)

Childs Development In Drawing

http://www.learningdesign.com/Portfolio/DrawDev/kiddrawing.html

Was looking into children's drawing and came across this site, worth having a look and considering for our character designs.
HAVE A READ :)