53 2D Animation

This is my story board for the Yallery Brown animation.

This is my 2D walk cycle.


 
2D walk cycle evaluation

Overall I am fairly please with my 2D walk cycle, but I do believe I could improve my work in a few different ways. One way I could improve my work is by making the walk cycle flow better and more smoothly. One way I could do this is making more frames for more subtle and individual movements, this would make it look much more profesional and realistic. I could also improve on the length of the walk cycle because it is probably too short for people to get a good look at whats going on. One way I could do this is by making Yallery move the length of the whole screen and maybe even back the other way again instead of him walking on the spot with the terrain moving.
 I have shown my walk cycle to my peers and they have mostly agreed with all the improvements I could make. One point they all brought up was that they liked the art style I used to create Yallery Brown because it was apparently very unique to my very own style. Another point raised was that  needed to add a background (a sky or more trees) this is because the animation does look quite bare and could really benefit from more detail of the area Yallery Brown is creeping in. I also need to get rid of the of the original character (the red outline). The only reason i did keep this in was to show what i developed my character from.
Whilst creating Yallery's movement I was thinking that it would be a good thing to add his movements into the animation but more smoothly and  
I think that I have learned quite a lot from this course in terms of how to start a basic 2D animation in Flash. I have encountered a few problems on the way such as trying to learn how to use the programme with no experience of using it before. I also had to cope with a lot of unexpected crashes meaning I loose a bit of the work I just did, but luckily it was never a lot of work and I could vaguely remember how I did, what I did the first time.

I then decided to create the walk cycle again taking the advice my peers gave me. 






This is an image i created on illustrator of Yallery Brown/

This is an image i created on illustrator of one of the farmers who chase Tom.

This is an Illustrator image i made of Tom.

Research on Animation an

One of the first well-known types of animation was flipbooks. This is where there is a series of drawings in the same position on each sheet of paper but each drawing has slight changes, for instance if you wanted to draw a person walking you would draw each individual step and then flip through the pages and if you did it properly it should animate.

The first documented Flipbook appeared in 1868 and was then titled “kineograph” which means “moving picture”. The flipbook was given this name by John Barnes Linnett.

Max Skladanowsky who was a German film pioneer first exhibited his serial photographic images in flipbook form in 1894.

The flipbook was then modified into a mechanized form called the “Mutoscope”.

A mutoscope is where pages are mounted on a rotating cylinder rather than binding them in a book. The Mutoscope remained very popular through out the mid-20^th century. Now flipbooks are seen as a toy or a novelty gift. Flipbooks then started to become gifts in cereal boxes.

There have since been international flipbook events, the first was held in Stuttgart in 2004 or in Austria in 2005.

 Zoetrope’s

A Zoetrope is a device that produces the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures. It was given the name due to the Greek translation of “wheel of life”. A Zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertical on all the sides with a band of images for a set sequence of pictures. The cylinder with the images on then spins and the viewer looks through the slits and the pictures then animate and move.

The first known Zoetrope was created in China round 180 AD and was apparently created by Ting Huan. It was called “Chao Hau Chich Kuan which translates to “the pipe, which makes fantasies appear.

The Zoetrope has since been adapted to a 3D model using figures instead of static pictures. To create the animated feel the Zoetrope rotates the figures as well as moving them up and down and then uses strobe lighting on a specific frame rate to show the viewer the animation at the right time for the brain to process this. This image is a 3D Zoetrope is from Disney California Adventure and is used to show the advances in animation through the years.

In 2008 Artem Limited created a 10-meter wide, 10-metric ton Zoetrope called the BRAVIA-dome. This was created for Sony’s motion interpolation technology and contained 64 images of Brazilian football player Kaka. It was then declared the largest zoetrope in the Guinness World Records.

Praxinoscope

Like the Zeotrope the Praxinoscope used a strip of pictures placed on the inside of a cylinder, but instead of viewing through slits in the cylinder there are a series of mirrors which reflect the images producing the illusion of motion.

In 1956 in the USA the Red Magic Mirror was introduced as an adaptation of the praxinoscope. This included a sixteen-sided praxinoscope reflector with angled faces. It is then placed over a record player spindle and rotated this then created a video, which works with the music.

Edward Muybridge horse

In 1872 a former Governor and racehorse owned hired Muybridge to take photos of a horse running to see if all four hoofs were off the ground at once.

He placed numerous large glass-plate cameras in a line along the edge of the track and then the shutter of each was triggered by a thread as the horse passed. He then copied the images into the form of silhouettes onto a disc and viewed them on a machine he created, the zoopraxiscope. This was later described as an early movie projector.

Stop motion (stop frame)

This is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. Moving the object slightly in between photographed frames captures the movement.

Stop motion animation has had a long history in film and its first credited use was the humpty dumpty circus, which was created in 1897 by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton. The film was set around a toy circus of acrobats and animals coming to life. In the early 1900’s animators started to play with clay stop motion and some made short movies or episodes such as the 54 episode series of “Miracles in Mud” created by Willie Hopkins.

Willis O’Brien was a very well known animator from the early 1900’s onwards and is mostly credited for his work on the 1933 King Kong. O’Brien then taught his trade to Ray Harryhausen who went on to create a number of memorable movies such as “It came from beneath the sea” and the original “Clash of the Titans”.

In the 70’s and 80’s Industrial Light & Magic used stop motion model  animation for films such as the star wars original trilogy, Raiders of the lost Ark and the first two feature films in the Robo Cop series.

Although there were advancements in computer animation during the 90’s a lot of films were still made using stop motion. One of the most popular films was The Nightmare Before Christmas with Tim Burton producing with his own unique stop motion style, which was and still is very popular. Probably the most popular stop motion series is “Wallace and Gromit” which was created by Nick Park and his studio “Aardman”. The style of all the shorts are clay animation and have been highly praised winning multiple awards with the biggest being, Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the feature length film “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Other notable projects from Aardman are Chicken Run and Flushed Away.

Other on going stop motion projects includes the very popular comedy central show “South Park”. Tray Parker and Matt Stone created two shorts and a South Park pilot in the late 90’s entirely out of construction paper and it has been running ever since and is currently in its 17^th season with very little change to the unique style. This is a style i admire quite a lot and I have had a few attempts in doing

 a similar style, which might be seen in my animation.
In 2005 Robot Chicken was created using stop motion by using custom made action figures and other toys as principle characters.

CGI (computer-generated imagery)

CGI animation is the process used for generating animated images by using computer graphics. CGI is often compared to computer animation but the difference is that CGI uses both static scenes and dynamic images, whereas computer animation only refers to moving images. The earliest known development of animation was at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1960’s by Edward E. Zajac, Frank W. Sinden, Kenneth C. Knowlton and A. Michael Noll.

One of the earliest films to use computer animation was the 1976 film “Futureworld”. This film used 3D Wire-frame imagery to create computer generated hand and face. This was done by Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke.

The first feature-length computer animated film was the Pixar studio’s 1995 blockbuster “Toy Story”. This movie then created the benchmark for many compute animated films created after, many of which were created by Pixar studios such as Toy Story 2 & 3, Monsters Inc., Bug’s Life and The Incredibles.

The most common way that animators use to animate a person/character is to first create a skeleton or stick figure of the character. Each segment of the skeleton is then referred to as animation variables or Avars.

The Toy Story character “Woody” uses 700 Avars, including 100 Avars in the face.

A more recent method called motion capture makes a use of live action movement and then transfers it into the computer. This is done when the chosen performer acts out as if they are the character and the movement is then captured by cameras and makers on the performers body. A famous version of this is in “Pirates of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” where the actor Bill Nighy is transformed into Davey Jones. Another example of this is Andy Serkis in The Lord of the Ring’s Trilogy. In these films he is transformed into Gollum. This is done with Serkis is wearing a suit with all the motion sensors capture his movement.
Here is a video showing what Andy Serkis does to help create Gollum: