Rayograms

Today I produced my first rayogram. It is done by placing objects onto a sheet of light sensitive paper and then adjusting the aperature/shutter speed accordingly to develop a photograph. I decided to use a necklace, some lace and some feathers for my photograph. Starting out with a test strip, I placed my objects onto a strip of the light sensitive paper and then exposed parts of it by covering up bits of the photograph as I was exposing so that I could decide on how long the photograph needed to be exposed for overall. This is how the test strip turned out.

Here you can see all the different exposure times. On the very left it starts from 10 seconds and goes all the way up to 80 seconds (I think?) getting darker as it has been exposed for a longer time. I was running out of time by this point and quickly decided I would do a full photo exposing it for about 45 second, (around the middle of the test strip.

 This is how it turned out. As it was exposing I accidentally moved the lace and a few of the feathers moved out of place. You can see this by how it looks asthough there are a few faint feathers and a line of lace in the background. Although this was an accident I quite like how it turned out overall. I had hoped it would have come out a little bit darker than this.

Next time I'll have to remember to leave it to expose for longer as i think the feathers and lace came out better after a longer exposure time. Overall pleased with my first attempts. I like the black and white effect and thought it would fit in quite nicely with the ghostly and eerie vibe of my audio track. Would maybe like to think about using this technique for my animation.

Disney Animation

Thinking about animation I turned to my guilty pleasure, Disney films :) I own pretty much all of them and still remember being a child watching Snow White on video for the first time. I thought this would be kindof relevant to the storyboard bit of this project. Disney started out in 1929 and became publicity-traded as Walt Disney Productions in 1938. By 1934 the company had already pushed so many boundries of the animation world with the first Mickey Mouse sketches and decided they wanted to go even further. This lead them to create their first feature length animation film in 1934, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, based on the Grimm Brothers fairytale. Taking three years to complete, it became the highest grossing film of its time by 1939.

The way they produced their animations was to draw out every scene and put it onto a storyboard, kindof like what we're doing for this module. The sounds would be recorded afterward and made sure theyre synchronised properly to the movement on screen. This painstaking process meant drawing out each indiviual scene and movement of every characre,r and putting them all together at the end to form a kindof flipbook animation. The more scenes per second the smoother the animation.

First every detail of each character would be discussed, drawn out and developed as shown in the picture above. Then after completing the script and having everything planned out the illustrators would begin drawing out each  scene. Below are some very early drawings they would have used and then scanned in and put them all together to see how they would look animated.

I managed to find the deleted scene from the movie that was a bonus a the end of the video. Its a shame they didnt include it, it's actually my favourite song from the movie! They never completed animating it so what you see is their primary drawings all put together with the audio track. Enjoy!

Click here to watch the video!

It is a very long process, hence why it took them three years to complete, but it produces some amazing and wonderful results if done right :)

Kaleidescope

Starting to develop on my initial idea of using a kaleidescope as a way of using just pattern and colour for my animation, I looked up some videos on youtube as inspiration.

I personally think this is a really pretty pattern and would like to try something similar, although I would want to make sure that the patterns and shapes move in time to the music playing instead of just having something pretty to look at while listening to the track.

This video is a 20 second video I came across on youtube that is sortof similar to what I had in mind. Altho I was thinking of maybe using a selection of colours, not a whole rainbow, to fit the mood of the music.

Stop Motion

After listening to the track I began to look at videos to get ideas for my own animation. I mentioned in an earlier post that i've always been interested in stop motion. Here are a few of my favourites:

Her Morning Elegance video
Directed by: Oren Lavie, Yuval & Merav Nathan
Featuring: Shir Shomron
Photography: Eyal Landesman

I really like how they've done this video. The music fits in really well and they present it visually; a violin appears at 30 seconds when the violing playins in the music, the pillows turn grey and a scarf is put on as the song talks about it being cloudy and the way they move her hair in each frame to emphasize the wind as she's on the train etc.  Everything links together and in the end you have a really clever stop motion video.

Directed and Edited by Joe Penna

This video is called T-Shirt War and was origionally done for a Mcdonalds and Coca Cola advert. I think it's really clever the way the did this video using over 220 tshirts. This is kindof the thing we have to do for the project. They not only use their own images on the tshirts but they digitally animate them and sometimes pull the images out of the tshirts to show actual objects.  Watch the original advert here.

'This is the PEN Story in stop motion. We shot 60.000 pictures, developed 9.600 prints and shot over 1.800 pictures again. No post production! Thanks to all the stop motion artists who inspired us. We hope you enjoy :-)'

This video must have taken SO long to to. The track they used is a really nice fitting song for someone on a journey. The video sees the young boy grow into an old man through photographs taken at each stage in his life. I think it's an amazing video but would be hard to do for a 30 second animation. I think it works really well mainly because of the sheer amount of prints in the video.

This last one is an advert for Lego. I this the way they've done this one is really clever by showing how many different things can be made form only a few different blocks. It's comical and I would definitely go out and buy more lego after watching it :)

Music is Math

I decided to try and organise myself pretty well this time round to avoid stress at the end of the module and start straight away with some research. It seemed logical to start by researching the peice of audio I've been given, which will be the soundtrack to my animation. It is called Music is Math by Boards of Canada.

Listen to the track here!

Brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin make up the duo that is Boards of Canada, who first started releasing music on their self-run music label 'Music70' until they were signed by 'Warp Records' and released their first album 'Music Has a Right to Children' in 1998. Music is Math is the second track on their album Geogaddi which was released in February 2002. The album title has to meaning as the listener was meant to decide it on their own after listening to the album. 

Album cover review:
Rarely has an album cover so fittingly embodied an album's sound as that of Geogaddi. A bloody, sun-drenched, kaleidoscopic tessellation of a child standing in between two trees, the image imparts inscrutability, whimsy and an ominous sense of danger. Elementally, Geogaddi does not depart all that radically from its predecessor, Music Has the Right to Children. But in tone and texture, the album is Music's stark opposite. Possessing a uniquely alluring dread, Geogaddi's 23 soundcards form a collage of eroding nostalgia, a singular sonic experience whose reach we have yet to truly witness. Because though we can pinpoint aural touchstones in its predecessors and followers, we still cannot find an approximation of its consummate purview.
- Tal Rosenberg

I listened to the track several times and wrote down what I felt while listening to it aswell as what it made me think of, what I saw in my mind and any words I would use to describe it. 
Heres what I came up with:

• Relaxing
• Futuristic - reminds me of E.T
• Sci Fi
• Trance like
• Concentration
• Sadness? - loss? - darkness?
• Astronauts - their suits - slow motion - in space or under water
• 'The past inside the present' - moving forward
• Beat boxing
• Curious - somewhat mysterious
• Can picture someone concetrating completely in their own world
• Considered
• Completing a task - movement
• Uneasy
• Unfamiliarity
• Paranoid - danger?
• Communication
• Exploration - roaming

Print to Pixel - Assignment 1

Assignment 1 is to create a series of images that can be used  to plan a motion peice, and represent it with a storyboard which will give a linear view of the animation and its timings.
After our first seminar, that was actually pretty helpful in getting the ball rolling, I did a quick spider diagram of the things we talked about to get my initial ideas down on paper.  There were quite a few things that caught my eye, for example doing stop motion and only using pattern and colour for the video instead of creating characters for a story. I think I would be better at it and I've wanted to try out stop motion for a long time, and now i finally have the chance!