Sunday 1 June 2014

Trailer Plan


Trailer plan
Format

I am going to make my animation style of sequential and digital cel/tradigital, as I will be able to keep game play as a feature in the trailer, so that the viewer can have a taste of the product they will be purchasing. I will be also using tradigital styled animation for my text in the trailer or maybe for animated characters.

I will be using flash, Sony Vegas Pro and Fraps for my animation as I will be able to combine the tradigital and sequential styles of animation.I will not be able to use styles such as flip book, index card or cel as this style of animation does not include sound and I must include sound in my animation as a requirement.
I plan on making the format WMV as it is easier to render and also has a good HD resolution when rendered in Sony Vegas pro.

Ideas

Idea 1

My first idea is that I create a video in which the character address the audience thought dialogue that explains what the game is in a joking manner by taking the mick out of me the developer and the game itself and to show dialogue the character will have movement of moving up and side to side a lot like style that AlfaBusa does on his YouTube animations.

Idea 2

My second idea is that I animate text in the trailer to move, squash and stretch and burn. The text would move onto the screen and slowly move to the side while burning over blurred gameplay from my game in the background.



Audience

I will be aiming the trailer at people of the age of 11 – 65 as that is the audience of the game I made for Fareham Byte. To make the trailer suitable for my audience I will not include gore, bad language, drug references or sex references. If I am to use humour I will have to make it understandable for my age gap. However my idea to take the mick out of the game and the developer would work for that age gap as long as I keep my language suitable for my audience that will include no Sexual references or bad language.

Planning links and production schedule
 

Script

Storyboard

 
Production schedule
Day 1
Character animation and masking: This will take  about  6 - 10 hours in total not including breaks.
 
Day 2
Special effects e.g. fire, blur, explosions  and fade in and outs: 1 hour
Adding in text: 10 minutes.
Rendering: 30 minutes
Approximant amount of hours to complete 11 hours and 40 minutes 
I was able to follow this production schedule, but I was able to complete the trailer in 5 hours rather than spending 10 to 11. This is because I found the animation process a lot easier than I expected. Next time I will re-evaluate my work to  estimate a faster schedule and will consider faster techniques when executing the animation.
 
 
 
 
 

Trailer

Trailer

Friday 9 May 2014

Web banner

Web Banner 


My web banner is going to be a number of dinosaur feet stepping on the banner leaving foot prints that then would disapear. I believe this is a good idea because it's simple for me as I have little to no experience with flash and it relates to my game where dinosaurs are the main bad guys.

The storyboard below will show you what I would like the animated banner to look like.

Storyboard

My animation will have a black background with silver foot steps that will appear after the green dinosaur feet have  hit the ground, it will also include a marching sound as the animation plays. The animation will be done in Adobe Flash CS6.

Size of banner will be 468x60.

The FPS is 24 frames per secound

Animation play time will be less than 10 seconds as it will be too long

Sound: It will play some royalty free marching sounds to give the animation the action genre.

Banner


Saturday 3 May 2014

History of animation

Part 1 The Optical Illusion era 1824 - 1868

1824 John Ayrton Paris












John A Paris invented the Thaumatrop, a small disc with pictures put on the two sided disk, when the pieces of string used to spin it were used, the Thaumatrop would trick the human eye perceiving it as a moving image. This is and example of early 2 frame animation, by using only how the human eye perceives speed of an object. This led to similar animation devices such as the Phenakistoscope that had a series of images painted on the front and when spun it would make it look like the series of images were moving.










1834 William Horner











William Horner invented the Zoetrope a device that worked similarly to the Thaumatrop however it was shaped like a wheel, inside the wheel it contained a series of images which when turned would make the pictures look like they were moving using the same optical illusion style used by the Thaumtrop and the Phenakistoscope.


1868 John Barnes Linnett












Was the inventor of the flip book animation in which a image was a drawn on each page of paper, When the paper is flipped quickly enough from first to last page. You could also find flip book animation in kinescopes for some of the public to view. the images on each page of paper would move so fast it would look like the images were moving. You could say this is the beginning of early cel animation as each page consisted of a frame and was completely hand drawn. This would then later lead to modern cel animation with the invention of early picture film and would lead to massive companies such as Disney and Toei animation being founded.








Part 2 The Birth of Animation Media and Techniques 1906 to 1933

1906, Stuart Blackton, 












In 1906  Stuart Blankton created a short film known as the Humorous Phases of Fun a animated cel film which was created using Camera film. Each scene's frame was hand drawn on a blackboard. The film showed many different sketches most notably a clown playing with a hat and a dog jumping through a hoop. This kind of animation style is called traditional or cel where a object is drawn by hand, frame by frame so when all the frames are brought together it create a animated set of images.


1908 Emile Cohl












Two years later another film was created called Fantasmagorie made by Emile Cohll, came out which is similar to Stuart Blanktons work. The film was a traditional cel animation where each frame was drawn onto paper and then each piece of paper had a photographic still taken with negative film. Using negative film it gave the animated film the look of being made on a blackboard even thought each frame was done on paper.















Max Fleischer 1915









In 1915 Max Fleischer created the technique known as rotoscope in a small series called out of the inkwell. Max got his brother to dress a clown and then draw over the filmed footage film inventing the  rotoscope. technique. The film also included some stop motion











1923 Walt Disney 











In 1923 Walt Disney left Laugh O Grams studios due to it losing all funds and going bankrupt. So Walt Disney went to Los Angles and went on to form Disney in which he went onto create such animations such as Steamboat Willie in 1928 which ended the silent film era by including sound into animation for the first time. Disney then went onto making large amounts of cel animated movies such as Snow White, Cinderella and  Aladdin. Today it is still known today for it's traditional animation style and being the founding father of major animation companies.

In 1932 Disney made the first fully coloured animated short called Flowers and Trees a began the rea of coloured cel animation.












1933 Merian C Cooper











In 1933 Merian C Cooper directed the first film to combine animation and real time footage to create a film called King Kong. instead of using cel animation with the footage he used something different known as stop motion animation. Stop motion animation is where a model is moved slightly then a photo is taken and then rinsed and repeated till editing where all the frames are brought together to animate a moving model.
















Part 3 Modern Day Animation


1973 Michael Crinchton 












In 1973 Michael Crinchton created the film Westworld with in this film it included some of the first Computer generated image use ever created for some brief scenes where the scenes are pixelized to portray cyborg vision. This was done using very early computer software which created the pixelisation effect.











1993 Steven Spielberg









In 1993 Steven Spielberg made the film Jurassic Park the film included completely photo realistic computer generated image animations of dinosaur's put into into live action film footage. The animations were made using a software called power animator which the animation crew created the dinosaurs into the film.












Summary
In conclusion animation has come a long way from optical illusions in the 1800s, to computer generated image animation in modern day. Today we have software that can be freely acquired from the public such as Adobe Flash, After effects, Source Film Maker and Sony Vegas when doing stop motion animation, because of this has given birth to such great Youtube animators such as Egoraptor, Psychic Pebbles Harry Partridge, and the late Edd Gould.