Overview

In this module we have been asked to create and experimental type animation that portrays realistic movement. For this I started off thinking of doing a time lapse style piece. Later I progressed my idea.

Initial Research in to experimental type animations

I started looking at various Animation and selected a few that I could perhaps model mine from.

The idea of linking my experimental animation to a time lapse was something I was keen on doing, however implementing this in to a successful idea was challenging.

Watching Disney's Day and Night gave me inspiration to involve the sun and moon and try and have some sort of interaction with each other as there is a time lapse of the sky.

Initial Idea and concepts

With my initial idea in place I began to put together a mood board of different images to again give me more of an idea of how this could be done and done well.

From this I drew up my initial storyboard.

The story in this is that the sun and moon want to be together as they have been apart forever, they do this by acting like balls and the the more erratic they bounce it displays the mood, however when they get close to one another this causes either sunrise or sunset.

 

These were three different bounces I wanted to test, although this is not the style I am going for the bounces flowed nicely.

Couple of pictures of the sun that I was going to use for my animation.

These were from a time lapse I did looking at different effects on them to see how they would turn out as I wanted to go for a cartoon stylized look. 

Movement research

After receiving feedback about my idea, it came to the conclusion that I would be too simplistic, therefore I went looking around for videos of different movement that I could implement.


I was interested in the movement of birds as I was keeping my time lapse of the sky I thought these would flow together.

This video was good as even though the bird it animated itself it allowed me to look at how small birds fly without having only a couple of seconds of motion.

Although this was good, I wanted to represent something that was more symbolic and easily recognisable.

These three videos I liked as they gave you a different perspective. The slow-mo video particularly helped with the front shot of the eagle as you could see exactly how the wings moved and how fluid it was. The motion in these was all different which also hindered me slightly as I was unsure which to use. In the end I decided to go for the real life as this was bound to 100% accurate.

I also wanted to implement a ball type object in to my animation, therefore I needed to see how it reacted when being kicked.

Although this has helped me, I feel that with the speed this happens it won't be visible on my animation or it will be over extremely fast, therefore I will need to exaggerate this.

This animation I really liked, especially with the way the different shapes transform in to human figures, this was again something I had in mind.

This animation I also like as the ball fluidly changes in to the next object.

Finally I did some primary research for the way humans moved. This was to get a good representation that I could successfully use. Because I had an idea of what motion I wanted to use I was able to act out a few iterations.

Storyboard and tests

1. Camera has a shaking effect. Close up of the eagle flying.
2. Long shot two eagles flying, they are pulling a landmass. Camera is stationary.
3. Pans in to a mid shot of the land mass, there is a contraption that moves like a pendulum. Camera pans from right to left.
4. The contraption kicks a spherical object that has rolled towards it
5. The sphere transforms in to an Eagle. No camera movement
6. The Eagle then flies off.

These are my animation tests.

This was my first look at the bird after looking at the different footage, noticing when the Eagle is in flight the range of motion of the wings is very slight compared to when the bird is taking off and going hunting, the problem was there was so much glide time so I exaggerated the amount of movement the birds wings would make.

This is the bird with early keyframed movement, this is rough and slightly mechanical with how it flies. The keyframe graph needs cleaning up to make this look more fluid.

This animation was to see how the bird would look with other elements in the scene, the flight still needed more refinement as it still looked slightly mechanical.

This was my first look at transforming one shape in to another, as each change happened in one frame the animation was over far too quickly. Even though that was the case the actual transition looked good to me but definitely needed taking forward.

This animation was much more refined and and had a much slower pace to it as it took place over more frames as well as me slowing down how long each frame lasted. The transition to me was what I was going for.

This test I did not like the movement was way too fast for what it was doing, then the decay came in too fast, all in all this needed a lot of work to look right.

This looked more like I wanted it to look, the movement looked much more realistic and held the characteristics of what a pendulum moves like, but it all felt too simple for the animation.

With this I wanted to add more of a mechanical vibe to it rather than it just hanging from a thin metal structure, there feels to be a bit more weight to this with more accurate swinging motion.

These are my Rotoscope tests. With these I feel they look and work in the style they have been drawn, accurately portraying the movement I wanted to put across. I am happy with this because you also get the characteristics coming through this as it is imitating my real life movement.


These are screenshots of my Work In Progress just showing how I put together my final piece and what went in to it with the different programs I used.