I’d call this week as assignment submission and library referencing week as I have collected the required books from the library and we had to submit the bouncing ball animation as well. I mainly focused on “The Animator’s Survival Kit” and “An Introduction to Film Art”. As I’m new to this field, it was really a lot of new information for me to take in, but I was trying to understand the core concepts, so that my fundamentals and basics are right.
Chris told us more about film theory in the collaborative seminar. He showed us a lot of videos and it was very interesting to watch all of them.
Unit 1.2 Design for Animation Narrative
In this class Nigel told us about different types of experimental animation. This entailed the basics of abstraction. I learnt that the term “Avant Garde” meant an experimental work of art. This was segregated into two types, formative and conceptual abstraction. Formative abstraction is basically focusing on changing the visual fundamentals like color, space and form. Conceptual abstraction can be termed as abstraction and juxtaposition of story telling, which basically means selecting only certain aspects which are relevant for a particular purpose through a filtering process. Nigel showed us a bunch of short videos to give us an idea of what experimental animation is.
A fun short film I found on the net was Mothlight which is a type of formative abstraction. The film is pretty old and it shows us images of insects, leaves, wings and moth body parts that move rapidly on screen. It gives an impression to the viewers that all these elements are naturally a part of the film. The director, Stan Brakhage, used a very interesting technique to integrate all of these elements and moth parts into the print. I found this film very unique in a sense that he actually made the entire film without the use of a camera! Stan pressed all the objects he had collected between two strips of 16mm splicing tape. The tape was then contact-printed to allow for projection in a cinema later on. This particular short film was well received by audiences world-wide because it directed the attention away from the screen and instead, it showed more focus on the physical object in the projector.
Unit 1.1 Computer Animation Fundamentals
Serra carried on from last class and talked us through setting up levels. We opened a sample scene in Unreal Engine and explored the environment. We created a basic shape and moved it around. We also did basic material setup. This time she went in depth about camera placement and setup. She also taught us about the level sequencer and how to go about adding camera animations in it. It was very similar to a video editing tool like premier pro. After that each of us had time to discuss about our ideas that we wanted to implement inside Unreal. I spoke to Serra about a car racing idea that I had. It involved a racetrack setup and also rigging a car. I need to brainstorm further about this.
In our next class, the following day, we had to submit our assignment, George went through each of our bouncing ball animations and he reviewed it with the whole class. Although I was the last one to submit the assignment, I was very happy when he told me he had little to no feedback and that it was one of the BEST bouncing ball animations he had seen! My first attempt at proper animation and I could not believe it turned out that way. He was also explaining about the next assignment, which is a pendulum animation. He showed us a few cool videos for reference and we have to submit this next week. George also told us that each of us has to have a sketchbook and that we need to start sketching more often. So, I made my own sketchbook at LCC’s print workshop!
The link to my pendulum animation video is below: