Finish Limerick Video + Evalution

This is the final video of my groups animation. I created background, mountain, sky and mall sign for this. I also contributed to the sound effects and also the movement of the man during the animation sequence.
I am quite pleased with how the sound effects turned out as they sound quite comical. I think the footsteps could have sounded a little more realistic we tried stomping our feet but it didn't sound quite right so we settled with hitting or hands against the table in a footstep like fashion.
I think we portrayed the limerick well. I made the background the Peru flag to show that it was in peru with a mountain and there are a lot of mountains in Peru.
I like the way a bigger shoe knocks the other shoe off the edge of the mountain as well.

Limerick

Wee were given the task to create an animation from a Limerick. First we had to story board the limerick that we were given.  Our Limerick was "There was a man from Peru, who wanted to live in a shoe, a size 6 was to small, So he went to the mall" 

Blu

Jan Svankmjer, who was born in Prague in 1934, is one of the world's foremost animators. He studied at the institute of Applied Arts and an Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in the 1950’s. Jan made his first film in 1964 and created some of the most unique and memorable animations today. His objects (often made of clay, as in Darkness Light Darkness) come to life using stop-motion.

Many of his films use live action alongside Stop motion, such as his 1988 feature-length film of Alice (which won the 1989 Annecy International animated feature film award). One of his trademarks is the exaggeration of sounds, and he also often uses fast-motion sequences for people walking and interacting. Although many of his animations appear to be from a child’s perspective, they can also appear a little aggressive and disturbing. His most recent animation was released in 2010 and called Surviving Life and he has another project due to be released in 2015.

 BLU is an Argentinian street graffiti artist who became known for his spray paint artwork, carried out in the suburbs of Bologna. Although he began his work with spray paint, after a couple of years he began experimenting and started using house paint and large rollers which enabled him to create artwork on a much larger scale. He often works with another artist called Ericailcane. Blu is good at drawing characteristic human figures, and Ericailcane draws typical animals. Around the same time, (in early 2000), Blu also started experimenting with (stop motion) animation. His potential was noticed, but Blu declined requests to attend collective shows in art galleries, preferring to stay unknown. In 2005 Blu began to travel to different countries, spreading his horizons. He painted a large wall with a human figure created from bananas when arriving in South Africa. The painting was dubbed Hombre Banana, or Banana man, and it was particularly significant, reminding those who lived there of the time when workers went on strike on Banana plantations.


Blu went on to visit countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica and Peru, making his mark in each country. In 2007 in Bethlehem, Blu together with other artists including Ericailcane, Banksy and Mark Jenkins, painted part of a watchtower on the wall that separates the West Bank from Israel. The artwork shows a man using his finger to try to tear down the "open air prison".

Today Blu is well known for producing stunning artwork, particularly in the form of stop motion animation in the same style as his wall murals. Instead of using a blank canvas to paint each frame onto, Blu chooses to paint on walls and pavements. After drawing a single frame, he blanks out the previous frame, painting over it in a neutral colour such as white or grey. The process is time consuming, and the passing of days can be seen when looking at his animations, with changes to daylight and the colour of the sky.

SumoScience

Sumo Science specialize in animation work. Aardman Animations have Ed Patterson and Will Studd making up the team. The styles of animation that they have used include 2D, live-action, stop-motion and Puppetry. They have also made commercials, most recently with Gulp animation for Nokia. Other companies that they have created commercials for include Weetos, Johnson’s Baby Wipes, Innocent Orange Juice, P&O abd Hellmans.

The inspiration for the recent Nokia commercial with Gulp came from their award winning previous work on Dot (also with Nokia). Dot was the smallest ever stop motion character, and at 9mm it earned a Guinness world record. Dot was also credited with 15 major advertising awards. Aardman Animations came up with idea for Dot after being asked to create an animation to celebrate Nokia’s new cell scope and phone. Dot was created when they realised that trying to animate blood cells might prove tricky. A day’s work resulted in 4 seconds of animation footage, building gradually to create an animation that lasted for 90 seconds. It proved very popular on Youtube, with 3 million hits.

From Sumo Science’s award winning smallest-ever Nokia ‘Dot’ animation, came Gulp, the largest ever stop-motion animation. One particular scene (filmed on Pendine Beach, South Wales), is over 11, 000 square foot. Filmed using a Nokia N8, it too is becoming extremely popular, particularly online. Unlike Dot, who was created using a 3D print, Gulp uses an actual person, who is moved, joint at a time, in a similar way to that of a puppet.

Gulp is an animation about a fisherman, who after catching a fish becomes the bait for a larger fish, setting off a chain reaction. It was shot outside, with the help of a large team of animation graduates, over a period of five days and nights. Every 20 seconds of animation took about 16 hours of work to create. Stills are played back at 25 frames per second to show the motion. 

Nokia 'Dot' from Sumo Science on Vimeo.

My bouncing ball animation

This is the bouncing ball animation i created. This exercise was our classes introduction to animation. We first were given a sheet which showed the balls movement from start to finish and was given a flick book for us to draw the balls in. I started from the back of the flick book as the pages were quite transparent to trace the line and ball from one page to another. After this i went over in pen so the lines would stand out more which made me more happy with my drawings. Next i used the program IStopMotion to take a shot of each page in my booklet. I connected a camera to the laptop using a usb cabel so that IStopMotion would recognise the camera to be able to take shots of my bouncing ball book. After this i had to take a shot of each page by pressing the space button and turning the booklet making sure that my hand weren't in any of the frames. I then created a soundtrack in Garage Band which imported into my final cut video.

Box Animation

This is the box animation i created after getting inspiration from watching an animation video from the Czech filmmaker, 
JAN SVANKMAJER was born in 1934 in Prague. We used IStopMotion and had 206 frames. Our animation consisted of a pack of cards which came out of the tin, shuffled and then went moved back into the tin, After this we created the sounds for the video we used the tin against a table to create the sound of the tins lid moving and we flicked the cards onto each other to create the sounds of the cards moving. I thought this was effective.