Dissertation

Greetings once again and welcome to largely dissertation themed blog. I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by the reading week task and I’m hoping that that and the literature review things we are doing will help me get back into the swing of essay writing.

At the moment I am not too sure what I want to write about for my dissertation. I’m probably going about it completely the wrong way and looking at individual’s work rather than a specific theory as a starting point. Nevertheless I have carried on and looked at some interesting essays involving the Quay brothers and Jan Svankmajer, who I am interested in but don’t know a huge amount about. So that could be an interesting way of finding some theory’s to look at. On the other hand I am also quite interested in the whole 1920’s/30’s German art scene, DaDa and all of that, particularly the work of George Grosz and John Heartfield but I’m not sure how I would link that to animation.

The other are that I have considered looking at is acting theory as that would hopefully benefit my animation at the same time, the only drawback to that is that, from the little I understand of it, there are so many different theory’s and approaches to acting.

So the jist of what I am trying to get across is that I don’t really know what I am doing.

Anyway just a brief mention of my crazy old lady who throws puppies in the river story. I have had a play at developing my character designs from the original exercise. The originals, as you can see, where quite crude and sketchy and focused wholly on the puppy killing bit of the story.

I have been trying to soften up the character a bit so that the audience will just think it is a nice story about an old lady and her puppies, then I can spring the horrible truth on them!

What a forgetfull day I am having

The blog returns and you would be forgiven for thinking that after such a lengthy absence I would have a lot to talk about…Well I do, so there.

I think a logical place to start is to have a little natter about the various bits and bobs I have been up to for the past week or so, so assessments. I didn’t think that they went too badly all things considered, with the lip-sync stuff I already had a rough idea of what was wrong with it all and had re shot it, twice, however in fixing the problems I merely created more. I think this is mainly because I rushed the re shoots because I was eating into time that I had set aside to do the storyboard stuff, with hindsight I could have actually afforded to slow down a bit and taken my time as I was able to get the storyboards done quite quickly. Ho-hum, I was going to have another bash at doing the lip-sync today (inspired by the lip-sync workshop at Exeter, that was very good) but after traipsing up the hill I discovered that I had left my dope sheets at home so I will do it tomorrow.

I’m not too sure how the storyboards went really, the feedback was a bit mixed and last time I checked there was no mark on moodle but I’ve got a nagging feeling that I focused too much on the artwork and not enough on developing the story, we shall see though.

Now, on to the reading week…I have actually surprised myself and done some reading! So far, I have read the passages in Paul Wells’ Understanding Animation and Andy Darley’s essay in A Reader in Animation Studies because I already own these books and therefore it required the least effort to find. I went to the library today to get the others and came back with The British Avant-Garde Film and a book which I thought was From The Mouse to The Mermaid but is actually completely the wrong thing altogether (its not been a good day). The other books I couldn’t find but as I have to take that other book back I will have another look tomorrow.

And finally, my other little assignment for this week has been to try and second-guess the next project, a decision I will probably live to regret but I will carry on nevertheless. So what have I done? Well, I shall tell you… since I know that the next project is a 90 second film I have started to develop a possible idea which I have adapted from an exercise Kathy gave us last year when we had to story board a poem, my poem was The Dog by Ogden Nash which I turned into a cheerful story about an old lady who through puppies in a river. My plan was to plan on the character designs as well as trying to bulk out the story, which I have done mentally, but the only actual progress I have made has been to come up with a soundtrack for it, which at the moment consists of me making lots of funny noises on the guitar which by sheer luck rather than skill sounds ok when its all layered together although I think it could do with some kind of percussion baking and maybe an overriding harmony, so I will get on that.

Short and Sweet

I’m sorry if this seems a bit rushed but I am bit pressed for time this week but I might have some time to add some more to it tomorrow.

Stop-motion has been a little frustrating this week; I tried to re-shoot it, twice but I still can’t get it right and the first one I did is by far the best so I’m just going to have to submit that one. I have prepared for you a lovely montage of all my animation tests and whatnot that I did with the puppet (the lip-sync stuff I did in flash is on my missing USB pen and the files with the hand drawn animation on have buggered themselves sidewise and refuse to play and have therefore been omitted from the montage). The first little bit shows some basic keying out that I did of the main poses just to get the timing sorted out and the rest is just experiments that I did to try and work out how to animate the puppet. I think it is safe to say that I was a little rusty on animation theory when I started the project and it shows, thankfully a lot of the kinks where worked out in the tests but there are still some issues with the hands in the final one.

As promised I have the colour test that I did of Jesus here for you all to see, my finished storyboard actually looks completely different to this; it is a lot darker as I wanted it to look more moody and I haven’t used any ink splats as I have here because it just looked like Jesus’ hands had exploded.

The storyboards are now finished and I am reasonably happy with them, they are a bit hard to follow and ideally I would have spent more time developing the story and tweaking a few drawings but bar that I hope its all ok.