BSA 106

BSA 106

Animation film history pre 1900


400 BC-Running walk cycles depicted on greek vases
1824- theory of images being played quickly can fool the mind into thinking there is movement. due to single images registering in the retina after the image disappeared
1825- Thuaumatrope invented demonstrating that a two sided piece of card with a bird on one side and a cage on the other when spun quickly takes the appearance of one image.
1831-Phenakistiscope wheel with a sequence of images on it that when spun shows movement
1860- Zoetrope meaning the wheel of life. a cylidical wheel that when you spin it and look in slits in the sides you see movement painted on the inside walls.




1- Film & Animation History
1905-1915

James Stuart Blackton (UK/USA) 1900
English born Journalist turned director and animator
made one of the first animations on film.

Emile Cohl (france)

Member of an art movement called the Incoherents who believed in the power of the ridiculous and ludicrous. Cohl took this attitude to distort characters in a way that would influence the way the likes of Disney, Pixar and Warner Bros would created animations.

he created Fantasmagorie (1908) Considered to be the worlds first fully animated film

Ladislaw Starewicz (Russia)
An insect Embalmer that attached the legs of the insects back on with wax allowing them to be moved for stop motion animation. The beautiful Leukanida (1910) was a success with rumors spreading that the insects where trained to do the tricks by a russian scientist.

Martin Thornton (UK)
Created "In Golliwog Land" (1912).
which was combination of live action and stop motion. credited as first colour animated film and was made with Kinemacolor process.
Kinemacolor was the first widely used colour film making process. it was complex and was short lived due to how expensive it was.

Winsor McCay (USA)

First Classical animator who used perspective, precise lines and intricate designs.
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) McCay interacts with his creation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmVra1mW7LU



1-Ten Favourite Films

1- iron giant (2000) Brad Bird
2- The Lion King (2003) Disney
3- Edward Scissor hands (1990) Tim Burton
4- Jumangi (1995) Joe Johnston
5-Labyrith (1986) Jim Henson
6-Toy Story (2010) Lee Unkrich
7-Titanic (1997) James Cameron
8-Fight Club (1999) David Fincher
9-Pokemon 2000 (2000) Kunihiko Yuyama, Micheal Haihney
10- Independence day (1996) Roland Emmerich







1 -George Melies 
A Magician that invented camera tricks to captivate audiences

-what techniques did he create?
stop frame, fade in, fade out, dissolves, reverse motion and cutting in the camera

-How did the new techniques influence future films in general?
all of the techniques he pioneered are still very relevant techniques used in Hollywood big budget films today. there have been many films that soley consist of stop motion such as Wallace and Gromit and the Fantastic Mr Fox


-From your Top Ten list of films, describe how George Melies may have been an influence

Labyrinth is full of similar camera tricks to what George Milies established. such as the scene with the Fire Gang where they take off their heads and throw them around which could have been influenced by the Man with the rubber head.








3-DW Griffith

Considering the controversy over Birth of a Nation, research the following questions –

´What is the name of the book that the film based on?

The Clansman by T.F. Dixion Jr

´Who does the film portray as the hero’s?

KKK

´Who used the film as a recruiting tool?

kkk

´How are the African American men portrayed?

unintelligent and sexually aggressive  

´Oscar Micheaux made a film called Within our Gates (1919) as a response to Birth of a Nation – Why?

to show a different angle to the race war.

´What was the name of Griffiths follow up film?

Intolerance 

4-the golden age of American animation

Steam boat willie (1928)

The skeleton dance (1929)

Following the success of steamboat willie

Three little pigs (1933)

won an oscar

The wise old Hen (1934)

part of the silly symphonies

The old Mill (1936)

test in realism by walt disney

FEATURE FILMS

snow white

Rotoscope

fleischer films 

betty boop (1930)

Popeye made his first appearance in betty boop

Gullivers Travels

fleischer studios first feature film

superman (1941)

Warner bros

Daffy duck

BUgs bunny (1938)

walter Lantz

ran his own studio from 192

MgM

Hanna Barbera

Tom and jerry

terry toons

mighty mouse

Choose an animator from the golden age of animation

woody wood pecker was created by Alex Lovy and Walter Lantz as part of universal pictures

•Choose a New Zealand Animator / Film Director

Peter Jackson 

•Provide overview of their body of work

Lord of the rings trilogy
 The Hobbit 
District 9
King Kong
The Lovely Bones

•How well was their work received in NZ?

he is renowned  as one of the best Directors in
New Zealand. as well as establishing the New 
Zealand Weta studios as one of the best special
effects companies in the world He also spawned 
cult classic films with huge followings through
Lord of the rings and the hobbit.


 

•How well was their work received overseas?

He is a world class director with a knighthood for 
his works. with an impact to overseas viewers 
comparable to the Harry Potter Films  

•Nominated for any awards?







ACADEMY AWARDS

Best Director The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)


Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)


GOLDEN GLOBES 

 Best Director - Motion Picture The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

BAFTA 

 Best Screenplay - Adapted The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

and many more 

4-German Expressionism

the time period of german expressionism is A German style of screenplay art that was prominent in the golden years of germanys film making industry (roughly 1910 to early 1930s).

German Expressionist film differed to conventional Western film conventions though bold stylistic choices that suited themselves well to the horror genre. Shadows were used to as a tone setting element that vignetted many of the scenes and created airy lighting as well as a story telling element where cast shadows would be visible on the set usually of a character yet to be revealed. Much of the lighting was faked through painting the sets and the actors faces to create a fantastical feel. Shape language was a focus with German Expressionist films with shapes that evoke pain, fear and confusion these are sometimes literal objects in the scene or an assortment of triangular shapes painted directly to the background these shapes are also echoed throughout the costume and makeup.

Limitations of technology in the early 1900s meant that films were shot on monochromatic film reels or straight black and white. this is still found in modern interpretations of German Expressionism today.

5-Italian Neo Realism
1930s

used non professional actors.. .actors who live at that location to produce a more believable setting.
focus on ordinary people.

preference for natural light

Luchino Visconti
Ossessione 1943

created when the state controlled the media but showed the regime in a more negative light

Roberto Rossellini
known for his war trilogy

Rome open city
oaisan
Germany year zero

didn't need to make sets because Germany had already been destroyed after ww2


Vittorio De Sica
directed the bicycle thief

6-Conventions used in Neo realism films

Had a tenancy to portray the stories of the average citizens furthering this they shot in a location with unknown actors from that location. this helped the story telling of the film type by relating the characters to the story rather than relating them to actors as well as increasing authentication of the type of people that live in those types of areas. lighting of the scenes was based around natural light.

7-Bicycle thief

- agree with "one of the greatest films of all time?"

i think it is a influential film to the film industry and a stepping stone. but placed against todays developments in fast paced storytelling it stumbles from place to place with no real leads and too many happen stances that happen to further the plot seemingly from nowhere.

-what does the bike represent?
opportunities to make a better life or any life at all for his family. the disappearance of the bike holds weight because of this importance it has to his future and his families.

-is the non professional actors evident? Good or bad?

I think the practice of using non recognizable talents is a good practice in film arts as it furthers the believability of the on screen character without being seen as a super star playing the role of a character.

boy opinion of the father

the boys opinion of the father doesn't really change throughout the film.

Character arc of the father

write a review on your blog


Surrealist Film

Time period
 1920's

how does it differ
It focuses on dreamlike subject matter and cuts that don't necessarily follow any story. it  has a bigger focus on emotion and symbolism rather than thought and dialogue.

contemporary film director

Jim Henson

the  Labyrinth

Has a Scene where The Girl has to catch toby as he crawls around a room full of stairs that twist and turn upside down. It is a disorientating scene that shows the mental state the Girl is going through and how confused, hopeless and unfair the situation is.

Chose and Animation company from the golden age of American animation and write about


Walt Disney

What Characters they created
Micky Mouse


what studio did they work for

Disney

what changes to the character were made over time

from the start, Micky mouse had a strong iconic silhouette that has stuck throughout time. the main variations on his renderings were present in his proportions of his feet and body as well as his eye shapes. I the first image you can see that the arcs where his eyes sit under were originally the whites of his eyes. but as time progressed his eyes got smaller but the distinctive line between the top of his head and his face remains.

Animation

Marius's Animations

Ease
the ease is the first animation that was completed and was achieved by creating a circle and making two keyframes on either side of the page. after applying the ease in and ease out from the curves drop down menu, the circle would move organically and smoothly from one side of the screen to the other. over all this was a pretty simple task that i had no trouble with.

Pendulum swing
with the pendulum swing I created a single image of the pendulum and put the rotation pivot point at the tip of the string. after that it was just a case of repeating the steeps of the ease and move the swing of the pendulum from one side to the other and then back again.

Side walk

The side walk was interesting for me because i made a few new observations as to the bob of a character in the vertical direction. such as the highest point of a walk is generally not at the passing point of the legs, but actually the frame after on an 8 frame walk cycle. this also means that the low point is on the frame just before the passing point when the weight of the step is being processed by the character shown through a bend in the knee.



Front walk 

the front walk is the hardest of all the walks that i did. I experimented on a couple different animations trying to make the side to side motion natural. one thing i found is that with the bob and the side to side movement, if you draw a figure eight on a reference point like the head or torso and draw all the following frames to that shape, it smooths out the motion and keeps everything consistent.



Dog walk

the main stumbling block i ran into with this animation is that when i looked at the provided reference animation I was not happy with how the dog walked with the legs pinching on either side of the dog as he walked. When i looked at video reference online i saw that the legs seemed to be fairly synced up with each other with the left legs moving at the same time. I tried this and the result seemed stiff and unbelievable. I then noticed that the back legs of the dog move a few beats before the front legs but not on the extend extremes of the poses. So i animated the front and back legs on different layers and moved the front legs layer across the timeline until they moved in a believable way. what i found is that when the front legs are on their contact positions the back legs will be on their passing position. while i am now happy with how the legs move, the torso doesnt move to my liking at this stage. I would like to play around with the effect more and less bobbing in the two walk cycles would impact the final result. at this point the chest moves way too much for my liking.



jump

I enjoyed doing this animation after doing cycles up to this point. It felt good to do an animation with a start and a finish. I started with the extremes of the sequence, the anticipation for the anticipation of bending of the knees, the stretch in the jump, the weightlessness at the top of the jump and the squash at the end to neutral. I then went back and filled in the in-between which i found could be cheated to a small degree by copying the previous drawing and moving it slightly to the side to smooth out the movement without drawing an entirely new drawing. although i wouldn't recommend it as common practice as it could get obvious corner cutting that ruins the animations fluidity. but i think it worked well in this case.



Head turn

I did the in betweens first finding the start the middle and the end then filling in the rest. i focused on getting the follow through on the hair and the blink in the middle. I would have like to have an arc in the movement as well as a change of expression.




Lip sync
For this task I tried to animated the drawings in a straight ahead manner, animating each facial expression and each mouth shape. I found that the result made the character shake unnaturally and quickly. even though he was hitting all the shapes at the right times it still felt rushed. I then decided to keep the movements of the mouth more subtle so that the change in shapes wouldn't be as extreme from frame to frame. Vaughn introduced us to the shape library where we can store mouth shapes and use them to speed up the lip sync process. with my final result I found the lip sync worked well but the rest of the character seems stiff. I think next time i will have a focus on animating the characters movements first and then overlay the lip sync after that.


3 Quarter walk

I had become quite accustomed to walks by this point so the walk was pretty easy disbite the angle. all the principles  are the same.

 Cat Run

This animation is different to the 4 legged walks as all legs seem to bend and stretch consistently but all the legs touch the ground at different times. 

lift

with the lift I wanted to push the anticipation so i have him reach all the way up before going down. i further the weight of the box by him going down a second time and then really bending his body with the weight distribution. 

Horse walk

I used what i learned from the dog walk to start this animation, drawing the torso, legs and extras on seperate layers for easy correction on individual elements.

Character Study

My design process happened very backwards. With me coming  into the animation course late I started with my finished pose before I worked on concepts or the turn around. This was just because it was what the other students were working on at the time. Because I wasn't being too serious with my design at the time, I drew a character of a ninja that used a scooter to fight with, I thought it was funny at the time.

 I tried my Turn around a number of different times but kept failing to get clean accurate lines. that was until I found an easy to use curve tool that I downloaded for ClipStudio Paint. There are a few anatomy issue which I would like to go back and fix such as the shoulder in the side view being too far forward.

 Facial expressions

I wanted to show some knowledge of squash an stretch with facial expression as well as head tilts. just trying my best to get the acting across with each facial pose.

 Pose Sheet

With my poses I wanted to embrace how ridiculous the premiss of a ninja with a scooter is.
for example...
he is throwing a kick... with a scooter
he is delivering a final smack down... with a scooter
the idea of him using something so counter productive is funny to me. Why not use a sword or staff or anything else. This is what was going through my head when drawing these images.












Main Pose

I went back to edit my Illustration to fit depictions of my character in my later works. after drawing him many times during animating his appearance evolved into something quite different from my original depiction of him. I also fixed some of the line work and some personal problems I had with the colors.

What I thought about when designing this character is what are the main ninja tropes that i could pull from. So I put in the long wavy belt reminiscent of the ninja turtle masks that increase action to the poses by creating drag
or hinting at wind in the environment. As well as the belt I also included the ridiculous spiky hair that is present in many anime characters, notably Goku the main character in "Dragon Ball Z"