11 Seconds - 2D Animation

This is my 2D animation, unlike what was previously mentioned within the planning of my 2D animation, I have found that making a Claymation, was pretty impossible with the time and also the equipment.

For Claymation, to make it, I would need:

Clay
Mac Laptop
Background that stood up
Camera
And mouth cut outs so that it would be easier to show the movements.

For PaperStopMotionAnimation, which is what I ended up making, I needed:

Paper
Camera
Mac Laptop

As you can see from these lists there is a difference in the amount of equipment that I would need, and also, the availability of it. Clay was something that I could not get a hold of, I could get sculpting clay, but that would of been good while working with it, but it would harden over night, and also, there would be cracks begin to form in the clay if it got too dry while modelling it. So that was a main thing for the Claymation that I could not get a hold of.
Also time was a big factor when it came to making the animation, I needed to make sure that it was time efficient. Claymation was anything but, this needed extensive time to make and that was time that I just did not have. With the animation having to be made in school, due to that being the only place with the hardware and the software that I needed to complete this animation. For Claymation, I would have to make: characters, the background and generic word movements. So this would of taken time, in figuring out how to make the different emotions appear on the face, but also how to get it back to neutral, and also whether or not I would be able to move the limbs in the way that I would like them to. Then would be the background, I would have to make it so that it was vertical rather than flat, this is so that it looked like the characters were within a scene rather than just on a table in a classroom.
So all of these made it pretty impossible with the time that I had and the equipment that I did not have to make a Clay stop frame animation.

So I looked into another version of stop motion. This is when I thought about Paper stop motion animation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDPYiZSKHfc

This is a link to a youtube video, this is demonstrating Paper stop motion, and it is doing it in the form of little red riding hood.

This animation is however going to follow the same storyboard as the Claymation one was. So that has not changed.

So to make this animation I had to start by making the background and also the characters, this took me about a day and a half to complete, this was something that I could also carry on at home, unlike the actual making of the animation.So that was the first thing that I did, for this I collected a few pieces of coloured paper, pink, green and black are what I went for with the background.

Background

This was something that I liked about the animation, although the perspective of it was not right, it was something that added to the cartoon effect that I was going for in this animation. I think the green works rather well with the pink and that both of these colours stand out against the black. On the black I used a silver gel pen to make what should look like starts and also a moon. I also added some silver to the buildings to show some reflection of the moon.

Character 1

This was the first character that I decided on in terms of design. I wanted these two characters to have opposing looks. So I thought of someone in a track suit and also a cap, and they had a bit of an angry look about them. 

Character 2

This was the second character that I made, as you can see the style of this character is more Punk and this was something that I thought contrasted quite well with the other character. As you can see in this image, the character has a bag. In this bag is the 'stolen' item. I tried to make it obvious that this was something that belonged to this character, and that it would be a bit weird if the other character had put something in there.

Also for the characters I made duplicates of the bodies, but I did them from what would look like different angles. So I did the back and sides, however the side views of the characters were never used, this was to make the camera angles more dynamic.

Camera: With this I mostly kept it stationary, this was because most of the character shots could just be done by the character just moving, also that would of been near impossible to replicate with the camera, since it was 2D and on a flat horizontal surface. The camera did however, near the end have some zoomed shots that were taken of the characters while they were doing there part.

The program that I used to make this was iStopmotion, this is some Apple software that easily allows people to make stop motion animations. This was something that I liked due to how easy it was to use. However, for some reason, it would not allow me to import sound into the creation of the animation, so using a different piece of software (SoundPro) I worked out the timings the best that I could, and have tried to make it so that the animation will match up as much as possible.

If there is anything that is really out, this is going to be corrected by movie maker and this is also where I have made it so that the sound will be with the video, and then this was exported as a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qvcZuuzruk

This is a link to my animation on youtube.

Evaluation of 2D Animation.

I am happy how this animation turned out. Even though I know that the sound and video is not in perfect sync with each other, I am still happy with the final product.

What peers thought about my animation.

Due to there not being a real concise way to do this, I showed my animation and got back basic feed back.



Positive

Most of the feed back for this animation was about the style and the type of animation that it is.
They mentioned how it was good that I did stop motion, due to this not being something that people did.

Another thing that they liked is that I got the majority of it to match up, and that they appreciated that it must of been hard to do, from having to do it though individual images.

Negative

One that was mentioned was that the characters lips syncing in certain areas was out of line with the sound clip.
This would be done by using a software that could also be imported into the scene with the frames at the same time, so that I would be able to see more clearly where I am within the sound clip, and what would have to happen in the next set of frames, rather than having to estimate a guess.

Another was that the movement of the characters was jittery and that it could do with smoothing out.
This would be done by taking more in between images of the animation, so that there is less noticeable movement between the frames.

As can be seen from the two frames above and looking at the punkish character you can see there is a big difference from where the arm was, to where it ended up. This is something that I would be able to smoothed out if I was to add more frames.

Another thing was that they did not get the story behind the animation.
This was obviously not shown clearly enough for the audience to see what it was that was stolen by the character.

 This was something that I made sure to add into my animation, however, this was not noticed, I should of put some more emphasis on the bag, so that people got my intention behind the animation.

There was not much else in the way of feedback for this animation.

What went well

What went well with this animation was the design of it. It is clear from the start what character is who, and the background suits the type of people that I have put into the animation, so they do not look out of place.

The characters were something that I had to decide on pretty quick, this is because with the animation originally going to be claymation, the characters were not going to really have defining features. For the paper animation this was something that was important, and as you can see, I made it so they were different.

I am very happy with the design, because it is not too busy and it is also not too simple. They had to be simple to be able to define the detail on the camera and see it within the animation. But they also had to not be dull and boring so that they did not take away from the animation, but they it added.

What did not go well

They sound syncing to the video. With the software that I have and the knowledge of them is pretty basic at best. So when it came to making the animation, I had to make it in Apple software called iStopmotion, this was something that I had never used before. So when it came to making the animation I had to go with my intuition and  try to make it to the best of my abilities.
What made it worse was that with it being the older software - or just being unable to find the application within the software, I could not import a sound clip into making it hard to try and link the mouth movements to the sound, so I had to make an educated guess.

This was difficult to then correct. I had to do this at home, since it was the weekend before the deadline, since this was a last minuet swap from claymation since I did not know that I would not have the equipment needed to do so. When at home, the only video editing software that I have is the new version of Windows Movie Maker, and this was pretty impossible to used and get around when it does not really have a easy to use time line.
So for this, I got it the closest I could for the dialogue and the video to sync. This was something that did not go too well due to some elements changing if other are corrected, so I got it done to the closest likeness that I could, and even though I am not completely happy with the out come of this. I am happy that I was able to so something different with my 2D animation, even if it is not as perfect as I would like it to be.

What would I do differently 

Next time, is I was to do two animation again, I would probably try to do something with Photoshop and/or Flash in stead of doing it in paper. This was quite difficult to do in paper, since I could not play sound along with the animation.
Moving things bit by bit did not always work, and was quite hard to do subtly, due to human error. So with computer drawing software that allows for stopmotion, it would be quite easy to do.

Also another thing that I would do was make sure to divide up my work equally if there is more than one major task to do at a time. This is because I did not really leave my self a lot of time to do my 2D animation, this is why it is probably not as smooth as the 3D one. This would be something that I would like to try and correct, if it is possible, this would be done by having more time, but also by adding frames and making sure to have software that could have sound imported into it as well as images.