Camera angles

Animation 101: Ball bounce

Basketball bounce 

From all the ball bounce videos I had made I was the most pleased with my basketball ball bounce. By no means it is great, but from all the animations that I had made – this is the one that I hated the least. I think like it looks like the ball has the right weight to it. It still has mistakes like the final bounce is probably a bit too high and a bit too fast. Other than that I am quite pleased with the result.

 

Ping Pong ball bounce

I used reference footage from the internet. It is not the best reference footage, I should have made my own reference videos but I hadn’t, because I did not have time for it.

About my ping pong ball bounce video – I think I have to address the quality of the video first, because there is a lot going on. I made my stop motion in a weird angle, because I could not get rid of the shadow of the tripod. Also you can see a shadow flickering on the right hand side of the video. It is not the best. The other issue is the disappearance of the ”floor.”  I do not know if it was the software’s fault or the camera, but it has cropped the bottom of my video which is a shame, cause it did exist! At least on the screen it did. Not the greatest, I did struggle. I am not very pleased with it. Now when it comes to the actual ping pong ball bounce – it could have been a bit faster. I think if I had the whole animation a bit faster it would look more believable. Maybe it’s not even the whole animation that needs to be faster, but the beginning of it.

 

Beach ball bounce

My beach ball bounce attempt is a bit odd. I am not sure if you can tell that it is a beach ball, because at times it looks a bit too heavy for a beach ball. I think the issue with this animation is the way beach ball lands on the ground. I think it stays on the ground for a bit too long.

 

Bowling ball bounce

As bad as I am with the bar sheets, I should have made one for the bowling ball as well, but I did not. I thought that the bowling ball is going to be quite easy. ”As long as you can make it look heavy, you’ll be good” – that is what I kept telling myself and that is why it is not the best animation. First of all, I should have not used little white cap, because that killed the illusion even before you saw the actual movement. Next time I’ll definitely make a bars sheet and make sure to use the right props.

 

Maya

I attempted to do the bowling ball bounce animation in Maya but it did not go so well. I can not really get used to the software. Bar sheets and graph editor did not seem to help either. I gave it a go.

Animation 101: Interaction

We were given the creative freedom to make any scenario that we wanted for this assignment. I really liked that. I could finally step out of my box and do something that I wanted to.

For the block interaction assignment in stop motion I decided to make an animation were two blocks become friends. In my head I was imagining a party were these two blocks did not fit in and once they met each other they found something in common and became friends.

My animation looks a bit too hectic and it is a bit too fast. It needed some holds in it. Now that I am re-watching my animation again, I can see that it looks a bit too dark as well. It could have been better, but that being said, I think you can still tell what is happening in the video. It is cute and I do not hate it. Success?

I would have created the same scenario in Maya, but I am not very good at Maya, so I had to make a different scenario. It’s the complete opposite of my stop motion interaction. While my stop motion video was cute and nice, my Maya one is not so friendly. I picked a bullying scene – two big cubes picking on one small cube with. My little cube becomes Hulk and scares his bullies. What a plot twist ey

It was quicker to make everything in Maya, but I still struggled with it. Animation is one thing and rendering is something completely else.

Just a torture.

City Project: Life in The City

Finally! It was lovely to see our work on the big screen on the day of the exhibition. Especially because we had gone trough so many challenges. We had spent so much time on our animations and seeing them finally come to life and not being catastrophically bad was wonderful. We even managed to make some people chuckle.

All of us had made animations for the group. All of us had illustrated, animated, done voice recordings for the final product. We did a lot. Everyone contributed to the final animation. You can follow our process on

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1K8B_TGTbXI8WWfQRjBmHuzLWUWW2dMZh

You can watch our finished video on

Green Screen

Green screen is a visual effects/ pre-production technique for layering two images or video streams together based on color hues (chroma range). The technique has been used heavily in many fields to remove a background from the subject of a photo or video – particularly the newscasting, motion picture and video game industries.

I was aware of what green screen was, but I did not know how does it actually work. I have never done anything with green screen before. In this lecture we had access to the green screen studio and we got educated about the green screen and told many fun facts about it.

So why is it green? Green is the go-to because it doesn’t match any natural skin tone or hair color, meaning no part of an actor will be edited out through chroma key. When it comes to cloth it is different. Wear something green and it will become invisible on the screen.

We were told how to use the lights on the green screen and people in front of it. I did not know that you would use different lighting on people, but it does make a lot of sense. I just had never thought of it.

After that we were shown a brief tutorial on how to record and edit the video in the green screen studio. Unfortunately I could not stay for that part, because I had to go to work. I did give it a go at home with Jean Claude Van Damme green screen clips which were available on blackboard.

I used my drawings as a background for it. They do not mash up well with the video, but here it is.

 

 

 

 

Foley

Foley is the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film, video, and other media in post-production to enhance audio quality.

I did not have any knowledge about this subject. I had never made any videos or sound effects before, so this was something new for me.

We were told different ways how you could add sound to your animations, also we were told about some interesting ways how you could make sounds. We were shown a video from a third year student and in this animation a fox was jumping on a bird and breaking it’s bones. So how do you make a sound of breaking bones without breaking bones? In order to make these sounds student had wrapped twigs in leather material and then hehad recorded snapping them. I thought that was very cleaver. I do not think I would be able to think of something like that. We were also shown short clips from TV show ”Happy Valley” as an example. I was surprised that for some of the scenes they had used so many sound effects. For one particular scene they had used foot steps, punching , scratching, door slam and lighting sound effects. I never knew that those noises were added in the editing process.

After this lecture I made a little research of my own on how to make different sound effects. I think it was a very interesting lecture. Can not wait to make some foley sounds of my own.

 

Some water and not much colour

I had not painted with watercolours for almost a year? I used to paint with watercolours almost every day. In fact painting used to be a very relaxing process for me, I did not think that after not painting for a little while it could be so hard to pick it up again. Painting turned out to be more challenging  for me then I thought it would be.

In the work above you can see my attempt at painting entrance to Manchester Town Hall. I really struggled with painting it. I am not very good at drawing or painting architecture. It was not easy to paint it, but I think it does slightly resemble Manchester Town Hall? So maybe it is not a very bad sketch?

My painting of Manchester Town hall was a bit stiff, so I tried to save the page of the sketchbook by painting some little studies of hands and an eyeball. I think they came out pretty good and that they did saved the page. They are almost like eye-resting space of the page. They did not come out as forced as the architecture piece, which I am quite happy out.

Different Formats

Can you recognize the place on the right page?

It is a café in the Northern Quarter and it is called ”Blue Daisy Café.” I actually have never been in and I can not recommend it for you, because of that reason, but it does look very cool from the outside.

On the left of the page you can see a little sign ”Jackson’s Row.” It is not related to the café or to the Northern Quarter, but when I was walking pass the Jackson’s Row I did make an eye contact with this grumpy old man, who had been smoking through the window and I thought it should be included in my sketchbook.

I am pretty pleased with this page of my sketchbook.

Jolanta, where did you find sakura trees in Manchester?!

Well, I did not. This was my attempt at drawing regular trees which ended up looking like sakura trees and I do not know what else to say about it.

Sketching with crayons! The cheap ones! I felt like a kid when I was drawing this couple. It is just a quick and fun sketch for myself.

I enjoy drawing people so much. I could sit in one spot all day and just draw strangers. In the drawings above you can see that I do that quite frequently.

Fable

 

Characters

As a person that comes from Latvia and had always been encouraged to read Latvian literature, I was not familiar with the ”The Cat & The Birds” fable. From the fable list that we were given to choose from, I was most drawn to this exact one. When I read “The Cat & The Birds” fable I could already envision a dark version of it. In my fable version cat would be bone thin and I envisioned birds to be a specific bird species – ravens.  Ravens are one of the smartest animals, so obviously they would not fall for anyone’s lies.

“So he put on a pair of spectacles, and with a leather box in his hand, knocked at the door of the Bird’s home” – because of the spectacles, and patients being birds the first thing that came to my mind were plague doctors. Plague doctors wore masks that resembled birds peak and masks had glass eyes. I thought it would be perfect if my character would try to look like the patients in order to trick them. It just seemed like it goes hand in hand.

Background

I did a little research and I found these very odd looking twig houses that are actually not houses at all, but they are sculptures that were made for Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. I thought they would be a great reference for my birds house.

Making Of: Interior and Exterior

Choose from one of the following:

• A Longtime Castaway’s Shelter on a Mysterious Tropical Island.
• A Remote Mountaintop Castle, base of a Secret Experiment
• A Derelict Alien Outpost on a Strange Moon
• A Magical Cabin deep in an Enchanted forest

From all of the subjects we were given to play around with I chose to go with “A magical Cabin deep in an Enchanted forest,” because I thought this was the most suitable one for me.

I had fun making the interior and exterior for my little cabin. I love it when I have my creative freedom and I can make something that I like. I chose to make a big, round nest which is not exactly the most easiest thing to make the interior for. I did not play around with the furniture or windows or anything like that mainly because I thought that it did not fit the aesthetic I was going for? I envisioned a forest which was so far away that it was for humans yet to discover. This forest would be home for unknown animals that live in the dark. In nature most animals only care about shelter. They don’t make beds or anything like that, so I gave my creature just a little leaf as a ”bed.”

For the animation I did not really know what to do, because I had chosen to draw such odd exterior. There was not much I could move in it, so I made the little lights move and I added one of my creatures in it so it would not look as plain.