Character Movement

I also found this book on character movement very helpful :

Character Movement continued...

Another book I looked at was:

Character Movement

Along with the character's mouth movements, I want to look at the character's bady movements too. So I went to the library and found a few books, which I found helpful, so I am off to try a few of these techniques out now.

Sound

I was trying to do a little research on sound as I will be concentrating on that next too and found this great article in the "Vacuum" paper.

It tells of some of the wierd and wonderful things they to use to create sound effects in films.

My favourite was the "strangling of a leather wallet filled with credit cards to create convincingly gristly sounds of the exorcism scene" in The Exorcist. How on earth do they discover these things.

So I am looking forward to trying a few of these out for myself.

Character's Mouth

I was looking through this book for my typography project when I cam across a great piece on "Lanuage: the spoken system".

It shows a great example of how animator Nick Park created a set of interchangeable mouths to recreate the lip shapes of human speech for Wallace.

I think this would be a great idea for me if I chose to do the cutout character. I would not have to keep changing the whole character everytime he talked, I could just add on the appropriate mouth to his face.

There was also an example of humans talking and how their mouth changes when using different vowels and consonants.

So I thought this woul be useful information to know as I will be looking at my charter's talking parts and mouth movements next.

Workflow.

I have put my workflow onto a large poster so I can stick it up above my work space, so I can tick off what I have done as I go along.

Walking Man Animation.

I then took photos of the pictures I had drawn for the flipbook animation to try out stop motion using this style. The quality is not great as I rushed it and did not tidy up any of the photos in photoshop. I just imported the photos straight into windows movie maker. I will not rush my final piece in the same way, I just wanted to see quickly how this concept might look so I would have more choices for my final piece.

Flip Book

Next I tried doing a flip book animation.

I enjoyed doing this, but it looks a bit slow because I was trying to flip the book and record it at the same time. So next time I would get someone else to flip the book while I recorded it.

Although the drawing takes longer than the cutout animation, it does not take as long to record it, so there are advantages to both types of animation.

Cut Out Animation

The first animation I tried tackling was cut out.

So first I did a drawing of my character.

So next I needed to split him up so the different parts could move.

I started doing this drawing but realised I was not splitting him up correctly.

I am still not splitting him up enough, so tried again.

Then I coloured him in on photoshop, printed him and then cut him out.

Then I tried to make a small animation of him walking using Windows movie maker and this is how it turned out.

I don't think it turned out very well as he looks like he is skipping rather than walking. I think my main problem there was I was not using the proper "Brad" clips to hold my character together, which made it harder to keep the character in the same position as the shot before.

So I will deffinitly invest in those if I chose to do cutout animation.

As I did find it enjoyable, but very time consuming.

Storyboard

I have finished my storyboard so just adding that on now.

Next I will start work on my three different concepts and ideas; cutout, collage and drawn animation.