Experimental Animation (Final Work)

Experimental Animation

Production report 

Aim 

My aim for this project was to produce an exciting and experimental piece of animation, which would flow alongside and react to a piece of music. 

Production 

For the first few weeks of my production I researched and practiced a number of animation techniques including white board animation, animation with people and cardboard, but I found that most of them were things that I had tried before. So I looked to one of my favourite childhood films “Fantasia” for help and became greatly inspired by some of the first scenes in the film, where they use lines to express the tones and beats an idea so simple yet so interesting to look at.   

It was at this point where I began to look at the idea of animating light trails, which I had photographed a lot before but had never tried to animate. So I began conducting a number of experiments with various lights and movements to see what looked good, as well as seeing what would work well in an animation. It was this experimentation that lead me to discover  the look and pattern I wanted to create as well as giving me a good idea of the level of unpredictability these trails would give. 

It was this point in the production that I realised a dope sheet may not work for what I wanted to do, due to the fact that the lightrails were very unpredictable to shoot. It would mean it was almost impossible to predict the number of shots I would get, which always put my dope sheet out of track. So I decided to shoot the trails in multiple short sequences of about eight to ten frames long and then split them up in to separate categories and work out the timing of the trails in post production editing. 

Before the actual shoot I listened to the track that I had chosen and worked out around twenty patterns and markings that I thought were best related to the music, so that I would have a reference to refer back to on the shoot to ensure I was direct as possible, saving time and (darkness). 

Once I had done the shoot I had to resize the images in Photoshop so that they would fit into flash and speed up the whole rendering time, which turned out to be quite ironic in the end as this very task took me even longer to do than the rendering as I had to resize them all manually because the batch resizing I tried didn’t work. 

The final part and most interesting part of the production was putting the images together in a sequence along side of the music I chose, as I could really start to see the images come together. The idea of matching the images in the post production seemed to work very well in this project, as I could create that actual movements I wanted rather than having to use the sequence as a restraint , which may have messed up my timings.  Over all this worked well in this instance and the idea of using sets of pre planed sequences to pick and chose while editing seemed to work particularly well in this instance, but in future will be something I will do as it works well with other mediums  

(Here is my final artwork for my experimental animation and above is my production report sorry that I haven't been able to post my final video as iv'e had a bit of trouble uploading the video, but  I will post it up here as soon as I can.)