Favourite Animations

We were given a task to list our three favourite animations, narrowing down to just three was the hardest part of this task.

1. How to Train Your Dragon

This is the only animation I have no problem picking, it feels alive. I mean basically there's one scene in the movie that sums up everything where the Main character has an argument with his dad and his dad walks out of the room and in one action you feel the conflict this father feels it sums it up perfectly. The interactions in this film are just so genuine, that sums it up it just feels genuine. Any and all reaction in this film just feels real and believable, that's why it's my favourite.

2. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns 1+2

This is technically two films but it's really just one really long one based on the Frank Miller comic of the same name. It's one of my favourite Batman story lines and is perfectly realised in these animated movies. The tone is spot on, the acting is great, and it moves so fluently. It's basically the pinnacle of animated Batman, not including Bruce Timm's series. I would put the series here instead but I want to stick to movies.

3. Disney's Hercules

I've always been a fan of mythology, especially Greek, so when this movie came out I was ecstatic. I know this isn't an accurate representation of that but it is a fun one. I find the humour is great, the songs are catchy, the art style is one of kind, and it's overall incredibly enjoyable. This is my favourite Disney film closely followed by the Hunchback of Notre Dame. 

Animation Ideas for a Soundtrack

We were tasked with coming up with an idea to fit a pre existing soundtrack. We had three soundtracks to choose from, I chose the first one. My idea is that it's a battlefield set in the Han dynasty era. This era is chosen because of Guan Yu the Chinese God of War. The idea itself is a battlefield with sword fighting and it has Guan Yu riding through the battlefield much like he did in legend. The only problem with it really is that there is a lot on entail within it so I need to look into how to make that more manageable.

Essay Ideas

We started to come up with essay questions to answer on topics to do with animation that we were interested in.

1. How has Bruce Timm's work influenced super hero cartoons.

Bruce Timm's work has always been something I admired, I grew up with his version of Batman and how it could be dark, and still be enjoyed by children. His work is always one of the first I think about, I think the problem with this is finding references which I shall look into more.

2. Is censorship ruining cartoons

This is an idea me and Gin discussed at length in how cartoons seem to be getting censored more and more to seem more child friendly. We discussed how different we see cartoons today to the ones we watched when we were younger.

3. Should adult ideas be allowed in Children's cartoons

This could do with the title being more refined but the idea behind it is allowing innuendos and alluding to adult contexts in children's cartoons.

4. Is there Gender inequality in T.V

Once again this needs a better title but this is about how T.V channels are purposefully split into gender specific channels this is very obvious in the children's T.V segments where it's either aimed and boys or girls not both.

5. Is adult animation conforming to existing shows

This is about how a lot of adult shows seem to be re using jokes, storylines, and setups already done in shows like south park, simpsons and family guy.

Capturing Sound

We were split into groups and given a sound recorder so we could capture sounds around the building. We experimented with how to create our own sounds and how to capture them. Examples were just using our zippers to throwing a coin down a hallway. After we got all of our sounds we were then tasked with using them and other sounds to a piece of animation we were given and we had to create a soundtrack for it.

Editing a PSA

We were tasked with editing a PSA to mean something different, as well as editing it down to about 30 seconds, I picked one about despotism. I wanted to break the serious tone it had and have a more comedic touch to it, while looking through the footage I found a scene where a boy says 'it must be true, I read it in a book.' This is where I got the idea for the boy reading through the book and pointing out what he finds, this way I can have an ongoing sort of joke as well as a message about not believing everything you read. Also the lady scared me and fit the wicked witch look. Overall I'm quite happy with this piece people seem to enjoy watching it, it got a couple of laughs. If I had to change something it would be that the message is a bit hard to follow in it, I could probably make that a bit more obvious.

https://vimeo.com/122008294

Edited Showreel

Me and Bethany worked in a group to edit a nine minute show reel down to three minutes. We each picked key scenes we liked and didn't like and just incorporated those. We spent quite some time discussing our reasons why we liked the scenes and why they should be the ones to put into the film and not others. I don't think we did a bad job but with some more time we could probably shorten it down even more.

https://vimeo.com/122604843

Silent Movie

We have been tasked with making our own silent movie based around a bag, in a group. We planned out as much as we could before we started filming, but we only had an hour to do get all the shots we wanted. Another problem we had was that I was the chaser, and I sprained the ligaments in my ankle not to long ago which meant re-shoots were few and far between if any. This was because I started to limp more and more and is fairly visible in the movie itself. After shooting each member of our group took the footage and made their own version of the events with sounds and editing of their choosing. We still made an effort to talk about how our individual films were going. The only real problem I think were that they are all fairly similar, because of how the shoots were done. This is completely down to my ankle and how it just gets harder and harder for me to run throughout the shooting but, with that said, I think each of us in the group did a good job with what we had. Dan truly stole the show as the thief though.

https://vimeo.com/122603616
This is my version of the silent movie we did.