University Offers

I am pleased to say all my University interviews went really well and have been offered conditional places on all three, now it's just a case of passing :D.

Animation Trials

After some debate and consideration, I've decided that instead of a comic book final project, I will instead present my final project in the form of an animation that will be projected onto a pre-drawn and created display / background that matches the animation and creatively have the animations interact with said background.

This animation will take form of stop motion drawn animation as I lack the know how and time to digitally animate the piece, plus the fact that the animation will be drawn will help it integrate with the drawn background.

I've previously attempted drawn stop motion animation in my previous AS level studies drawing a commercial, so this media isn't completely new to me. This time however I made use of a light-box which eases tracing images which I found very useful when keeping my drawings accurate to one another. The top animation was my first trial. I originally planned on it being a simple stick figure animation, however along the way I decided to make the animation more interesting g and daring, and I would like to admit that it turned out better than I had hoped.

The 2nd animation is more linked towards my major project in the fact it features my main character Thod. With this animation, the main difference is the use of background. This was helped by me watching a documentary on the creation of the second 'Snowman' animation, called 'How the Snowman came back to life'. One of the things I realised thanks to this is in 2D animation, the background, unless interacted with, remains solitary and not changing at all, and I could use this to my advantage with me drawing my animation with the use of the photocopier.

So to intergrate a solid background with my stop motion animated piece, I drew a background for the Shack shot, making sure to leave blank areas for variables such as the smoke, clouds and the door which eventually opens. This made my job a lot easier, as otherwise I would of had to of traced the background for every frame, and at 5fps, it wouldn't of been an enjoyable endeavour. 

I enjoyed animating these 2 pieces and look forward to working more with animation, however now I will begin to look into integration of projected animation and backgrounds to see if this final project idea is feasible, or even possible.