Image and Sound Assignment

This is my finished piece of the assignment. this first one was making a soundtrack to go along with a silent piece of animation.

https://vimeo.com/127455357

With this piece I used various sources for my sounds, mainly freesound.org, a website to get most of them. I also wanted to use the sounds that we gathered ourselves so I kept the ones I had already put it as I liked them, even though they are a bit rough. If I could I would imrpove this by making the sounds smoother or even experimenting more with sounds.

This video is my animation to a given soundtrack.

https://vimeo.com/127562178

For this I used soundtrack 1, of the three soundtracks we were given. At first I thought it had a very industrial feel, but as I listened to it more I started to think of sword clashes. So I decided to base it on one of my favourite Gods, that being Guan Yu. This allowed me to experiment more. I got to practice more with my graphics tablet, which I'm still getting used to, hence the sketchy drawings. I used a black background and empty spaces to isolate the sword clashes, that way it reminded me of the limited animations of a saturday morning cartoon. I would improve this by adding colour, clearing up the lines, extending it to tell more of a story, and making sure it didn't move as quickly as it does at times. This is because I didn't stick to the rules of two, I have learned from this and will make sure to not do it in the future.

Ideas for Animation

This is a very basic design for Guan Yu's horse he is often depicted as riding a horse into battle, one of his main claims to fame is when he rode through thousands of warriors to kill one man. As such I thought it would be key for him to have one.

This is a basic concept for Guan Yu himself. He is shown wearing green robes and having a pole arm a tall as himself. As well as an impressive beard, the one drawn here is not impressive.

A very very basic set of thumbnail sketches showing roughly were I want to take my animation.

A more detailed drawing of Guan Yu. This is what I will base my main character on.

These thumbnail sketches show the start of my animation where I just wanted to have clashes as apposed to swords straight away.

These are some more thumbnail sketches where I went back and made the start make more sense to me.

This is where I was looking at Han dynasty warriors and seeing how they would look in the animation (Guan Yu is from the Han dynasty).

12 Principles of Animation

We had to learn main principles of animation of which there are 12 which are:

Timing and Spacing


Anticipation

Straight Ahead/Pose to Pose


Arcs


Follow-through and Overlapping actions


Staging 


Slow ins and outs


Secondary Action


Exaggeration


Squash and Stretch


Solid Drawing


Appeal

We need to make sure to remember these to make our animations up to scratch.

Review of Essay: Essay 1 Has the Internet Improved or Damaged Our Social and Personal Relationships?

I found the essay to be rather vapid, I didn't find it enthralling at all. It had some good points in what the author was explaining, but at the same time I found it hard to follow. I found myself quickly becoming uninterested in points, as some just seemed to be over explored, while others not explored enough. The punctuation and spelling is all over the place while mostly good there are moments that don't have the correct spelling or punctuation. Overall I think that the essay has good points but is lacking in the way it is explained.

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.