While researching old radios and old mechanical items, I found a common field was gears, gears are used in old mechanical devices and are quite useful forgotten objects. I think I want to use gears as a main part of the animation, so I have started drawing out some of them. I am thinking maybe they can intersect with one another and this could possible turn into some sort of stop motion.
Just been playing about with some text that could maybe somehow get into the animation. Sorry if some of the images look a little confusing, but inserting small images together on blogger is more difficult than trying to dissect a cow.
It would read "The great machines of the industrial revolution were in full swing, producing 'things' for the empire."
There have been quite a number of occasions where I've thought to myself "Why didn't I think of that". But time in particular was when I was browsing the work of Peter Callesen for his amazing card cutouts. When I first laid eyes on them I really couldn't believe what I saw. The accuracy, the perfection, the attention to detail, it was all so stunningly creative, and I can't imagine how long it took him to create such pieces of work (, and how many errors he must have made in the process!). The main reason I wish I'd thought of it, is just for the time and effort put in, some art is difficult to tell just how long they took to create, but straight away, you can feel Callesen's pain from all the kneeling down and stress from the tiny details he has paid so much attention to. I really appreciate work that has taken time and dedication to achieve. Although I could just get up and make my own, I feel Callesen has really started the 'trend' now, but his work is and will always be inspiration to me, both to my work and to me myself, it just shows what you can do if you put your mind to it!
I have been recently looking at animations made by people on Youtube, and a big interesting trend that I have noticed is the abundance of Lego animations. A very interesting one that I have seen is a Gears of War lego animation, this one stood out to me from the others because clearly a lot of time has been spent with the set-creation, the stop-motion animation(, and probably lego collecting!) and the ideas processed throughout. If you have ever played or seen any videos of the actual game Gears of War, you can see how accurately they kept the style to fit with it. Even when the monsters jump out, it must have been very difficult to keep everything perfect to fit with the whole animation. I think it is mostly the effort that I spot, and how it makes you "wow" when you see it, just because it is unbelievable to see the things that appear, you instantly see the amount of time that must have been put in to create the sequence.
Bricks of War - Lego Animation
For the BBC project I am currently doing, I am to make an animation for a voice-over from the BBC4 radio, I thought this was relevant for me. Obviously I'm not about to make anything out of Lego, but I think the purpose and skill can be taken from this and applied to something else. The idea of stop-motion and thinking outside the box could be used in a similar sort of way if I decide to create my own stop-motion based animation.
For an initial starting point, I have looked at work by Ben Croshaw, he is part of a section of a Magazine Company called "Zero Punctuation". As I am currently doing a project for BBC, to create a background animation, I thought this was very appropriate. I like the way he illustrates over what he is talking about in a very literal way. Even when he speaks in metaphors, he creates imagery in a literal respect to this, which is quite hilarious.
Ben or 'Yahtzee' as he is sometimes known, does gaming reviews for this internet-based magazine, he has really gone beyond the depths of simplicity, because all his animations have the same characters, same background and you can instantly spot that the work was done by him. He has made 100+ videos, and makes them on a weekly basis, so they are constantly being made even now, and aren't losing any repetition value.
Example video:
Zero Punctuation reviews Halo 3
I thought it would be interesting to do something similar for the animation for the BBC voice-over. It really inspires me to do something in this style, combining the humour with a literal awareness, making a parody-like animation in response to the voice-over, but keeping in line with enough respect to make it not a parody.
This is the first thing that instantly hit me when I decided to take up this brief, so I really think it is a great starting point.
For my latest project, I am going to animate a "rant" as I like to say, from Radio 4. You hear alot of interesting and informative talks over Radio 4. I have decided to use an extract from a talk about 'The birth of Radio'. I think it's a pretty good talk that goes into how radio was invented and created, talks about the mechanics of it and how it changed into a revolution. I feel most connected to this conversation and want to make a short animation to go behind the extract. This may be a looped stop-motion or maybe something completely different. We'll have to see! Exciting.
I have just about finished my final designs for FairTrade A-Z. Just missing a few final letters, those being 'M', 'X', 'Y', and 'Z'. For X Y Z, there are no actual products, so I must try to think outside the box with this one. I haven't properly implemented colour yet, I just wanted to get the designs done and dusted, but I think in colour, they will look great.
Oh, and the 'M' is there because I fail at drawing mangoes.
This is my final poster for FairTrade! Well, almost, it isn't quite finished yet, I still need a fair few letters, but they seem to be piecing nicely. The background needs tampering with as there are a few white marks that need to be erased. But as far as it goes, this is an initial final design... If that makes sense...
After doing this, I'm starting to get sick of the blue, but probably just because I've been working on it all day...
Here is my final design for the Wind in The Willows project. It has been a really fun and exploratory few weeks and I really had fun making characters and investigating their habitats and characteristics. Overall I feel fairly accomplished with my final piece, I had a fair few final design ideas, and this is the one I decided to implement just because I thought it said more about how I've been working in the past and made the most sense to put into play.
If I could do the project again, I would probably spend longer on character design as I think that is the weakest (although most crazy!) part of the piece. I do really admire the creation of the scenery, this is the strongest part of the project, because this is how I started it, the scene is the most important thing in my opinion because it is the first thing you see and feel. I am going to submit this design to the Puffin competition later today.
