Unit 7 - Animation photography
Animation = to give life to
Animation is the creation of the "illusion of movement" using a series of still images. When learning about animation it is key to understand the persistance of vision. The brain can only process a certain number of images at a time and the brain recognises images as separate images if they're viewed at 12 or fewer images per second. If the images appear faster than 12 images per second they begin to merge together and create the illusion of movement. Television and movies generally us 25-30 images per second.
Types of animation:
Digital 2D Animation -
creating animations in a 2 dimensional space with the help of technologies
Materials - Computer, Flash, Photoshop, Hand drawn frames
Digital 3D Animation -
•Computer animation encompasses a variety of techniques, the unifying idea being that the animation is created digitally on a computer.
•Usually very realistic characters
•You can animate everyday objects
•Everything is done on the computer often using CGI (computer generated imagery)
•Think Pixar for most
famous use of this.
Stop Motion Animation -
•Stop-motion animation, is the term used to describe animation created by physically manipulating real-world objects and photographing them one frame of film at a time to create the illusion of movement.
•Films like the original King Kong and Star Wars made heavy use of stop motion animation using miniatures and puppets. This was the only way to bring objects that cannot move by themselves to life on screen.
Stop Animation -
There are many different types of stop-motion animation, usually named after the type of media used to create the animation, these include:
•Cut-out animation
•Claymation animation
•Model animation (like the classic King-Kong)
•Object animation, Puppet animation
Claymation -
•In clay animation, which is one of the
many forms of stop motion animation, each object is sculpted in clay or a similarly pliable material such as Plasticine, usually around a wire skeleton called an armature.
•12 changes are usually made for one second of film movement. For a 30-minute movie, there would be approximately 21,600 stops to change the figures for the frames
Eadward Muybridge Research:
My Sequence Shoot Plan:
Sequence shoot Contact Sheet:
Reason for change in Sequence Shoot and why:
After getting just under half way through developing my images from my film photo shoot in the darkroom, I managed to lose my reel of film the shoot was shot on. The reel of film was left in the darkroom after a session of developing some images and I only realised it was lost almost a week after losing it. After a longtime searching and trying to trace my steps I was unable to find and recover it, hence why I have decided to do another sequence style shoot but digitally this time due to timing.
Shoot Plan:
For this sequence shoot I plan to take a large amount of photos of my friend in a short space of time, capturing the movement he makes. The way I plan on doing this is by using the 'Continuous Shot Advanced' setting on my camera, whereby it allows me to take three photos per second by holding down the shutter button. My friend will use his skills in gymnastics and parkour to create the movement that I want to capture in a series of photographs. The overall outcome of my shoot should result in a series of roughly 36 photos (the same as I originally planned on shooting on film) that when edited together or flicked through quickly should result in a short clip/film/animation of of my friend doing some sort of somersault.
I plan to locate the shoot in a big open space where my friend is comfortable doing his flips and somersaults etc., but also a scenic background that will look aesthetically pleasing in a photograph at the same time. I plan to do this at a local park near me on a fairly sunny day so that the natural light and natural location will create a good setting/background for my sequence shoot.
Favourite Mid-shot Images from the shoot:
Image 7 of 33:
Original un-cropped image, which I had to begin with. (edited black and white)
Cropped image slightly to get rid of the shadow in the bottom right corner and to allow you to focus and see the subject of the image clearly. This is image I used in my animation.
As this is one of my favourite images I decided to crop it down even further so that geometrically Beau became central in the photo, allowing him to stand out further and see the detail in the acrobatic stunts he's performing.
Image 27 of 33:
Original un-cropped image, which I had to begin with. (edited black and white)
Cropped image slightly to get rid of the shadow in the bottom right corner and to allow you to focus and see the subject of the image clearly. This is image I used in my animation.
As this is one of my favourite images I decided to crop it down even further so that geometrically Beau became central in the photo, allowing him to stand out further and see the detail in the acrobatic stunts he's performing.
Image 28 of 33:
Original un-cropped image, which I had to begin with. (edited black and white)
Cropped image slightly to get rid of the shadow in the bottom right corner and to allow you to focus and see the subject of the image clearly. This is image I used in my animation.
As this is one of my favourite images I decided to crop it down even further so that geometrically Beau became central in the photo, allowing him to stand out further and see the detail in the acrobatic stunts he's performing.
Evaluation:
When I first began the Unit 7 Animation project I was not the most confident, in fact before I began I knew I was not going to be confident in the unit as my interest in animation before the project was given, as well as my knowledge and skillset in animation editing and filming was minimal. So before having started the project I knew I had a rather big challenge on my hands to be able to produce an animation of a good standard. The most difficult aspect of the unit was coming to grips with and developing my skills in Adobe Premier Pro, the software we used to turn my 36 sequence photos into a short animation clip, the reason being for this is because it was a totally new software to me having not used it before and ICT skills are not a strong point of mine, bar Photoshop.
Our animations were all to be updated, but inspired by Eadward Muybridge. I researched some of Muybridge’s work before even starting my Unit 7, he carried out investigations through capturing movement in a series of images. The photography aspect of shooting and editing the photos in a similar way to Muybridge came easy to me, so this part was not such a challenge and was rather enjoyable, however when it came to combining the images into an animation I was not so confident and became challenged. Muybridge influenced me to shoot my sequence in a certain way. His work is black and white due to technology and timing of when he worked in photography (during the 1870’s/80’s) and his shots are all landscape rather than portrait. From my research I found out that Muybridge really struggled taking multiple indistinct photographs within a short amount of time at first, it was after 2 years of trying that he came up with a method to take between 10 and 18 images in a very short amount of time. What he did was set up a row of cameras with trip-wires in front of the movement he wanted to photograph, each which would trigger for less than a split second one after another. Despite my sequence being shot digitally and in colour, I edited all my sequence photos to black and white to relate to Muybridge’s work and because I knew it would show up well with my colourful backgrounds in my animation. I also made sure that my shot type was landscape rather than portrait to look even more similar to Eadward Muybridge’s sequence photography.
Planning and construction for my sequence was okay for me because almost right away after losing my first film sequence which I lost after getting half way through working on it, I had a clear a very clear idea in my head that including somersaults and parkour as movement would work well in a sequence and I knew just the right friend I could ask to photograph. I was also absolutely fine for resources and time to complete the project, I either had the camera I needed to shoot and the college had the Macs and softwares I needed to develop the images further into edited and finished animation. On the other hand the hardest thing as I’ve said before was using the Premier Pro software on the computer due to my lack of understanding in the software because I had never used it before the Unit 7 task was set.
I would say the worst thing that I encountered whilst working on the project was the fact that I lost my reel of film with my very first sequence shoot on that I shot within in college. I got as far as developing my film and printing around 6-7 prints from it before losing it. The reason I was unable to retain the film I lost was because it was almost a week after I had last used it that I realised it had gone missing so by this time after tracing my steps and trying my hardest to find it, it was gone from the darkroom which I had left it in. I was obviously quite far behind after this had happened. To overcome this problem I decided to re-shoot my sequence this time changing from film to digital, using digital is a quicker process than film therefore being behind was not such a problem. As well as this, losing my film gave me the opportunity to change my idea behind my sequence to something that I thought was slightly more interesting.
If I were to re-do my Unit 7 sequence animation project and change my approach I think it would have to be to be far more careful and aware of my film that I lost, that way I think my work would relate even further to Eadward Muybridge’s images and photographs, despite mine being shot landscape and edited black and white. I think that the overall aesthetics and look to my images and prints would look more similar to Muybridge’s if they were all film-based, this is because they would look older, considering all of Muybridge’s work was done in the late 1800’s. However, on the plus side overall I think that after completing this project my knowledge in the history and the many different types of animation has definitely increased due to my research done in contextual lessons with Sally. In addition to this, I think that my skills in using Adobe Premier Pro have definitely adapted slightly, when I began I was clueless as to how to turn all of my sequences images into an animation and now that it's come to the end of the project I’ve widened my skill set and have been able to produce a short moving image animation.