Week 1- 11th Jan - Proposal

For the second part of the final major project I am developing my idea from my advanced pre productions unit (found in Final project tab), which is about a spirit that journeys through an old mans memory book.

I asked Katie Plume if she would like to work on this project with me as I felt her style and skills would benefit the animation greatly. She accepted the offer, so we began researching different inspirations and influences so we knew what we wanted from the animation and could develop the story and style further.

The style of this animation is going to be a mixture of all types of animation. We decided that we would use stop motion animation for the beginning and end sections where the old man is in his living room. For the memory book we are going to use a variety of 2D animation styles. The WW2 scenes will be an old vintage style possibly black and white or sepia tone. For India we imagined the animations to be very painterly, using water based mediums or ink. India will also be full of bright colours but as they will be water based they remain very delicate. We thought this would be a good transition from the ww2 scenes and leading on to the America scene where the colours become much bolder. The USA section will consist more of a graphic style, taking influence from the pop art era. Lastly, the end section of the memory book will be a collage style, combining all the styles together. By having several styles of animation, we are hoping it will showcase our diverse skills and ability to adapt to different styles.

Our animation is a big project but with careful planning and time management we believe it is achievable. We will distribute the work evenly and effectively so that we are working on different sections of the animation resulting in creating the animation in the time frame we have.

As we decided to use stop motion animation for our project, we realise that this process will be very time consuming, from planning and designing the sets, finding and buying materials, building and making the sets, making the armature character and then the animating of the puppet, lighting and camera work.

As for the memory book, this will contain a considerably large amount of 2D animations. To make the animations more manageable we decided that they would be short animations, that will only have subtle movements and gestures. I think that by doing this it gives the impression that the viewer is looking at a memory book but by having the subtle movements it makes the composition more interesting.

We plan to set up a space in Eldon Building so that we can build our stop motion sets there. By doing this we are able to work on them together and by having them in one place saves us time from setting everything up again and again.

Week 1- Inspiration/influence 

The animation above is by animator Ryan Woodward. The way in which the book comes to life is how I imagined the old mans memory book would be animated. In short animations which flow together as the camera pans across the pages. 

I also found the use of different animation mediums very interesting, as they fit together seamlessly from the live action, 2D and 3D. 

From the same animator as the previous video (and I mentioned this video in my blog for part 1), this animation style is very inspiring to the spirit character in our story.

An incredible animation which uses a style that combines traditional 2D hand-drawn animation, stop frame, and 3D model made sets. Particularly focusing on the style of the forest.