Bringing the Limerick to life!

As a group spent the next couple of sessions carrying on creating and cutting out assets and creating the characters for our animation we were creating - 'There was a Young Lady of Niger".

We finished of the main background which was a jungle setting where the tiger and the lady explore through, this consisted of trees, vines and other specimens of plants drawn onto a sheet of paper. we then cut the out and stuck the top and bottom of the paper to a green sheet of card so that we could place things behind it freely. We also had to make the setting for the inside  of a stomach for when the lady gets eaten by the tiger, we created it in the same way as the jungle setting. We created a wave on green paper and cut it out so that it would represent rising acid levels inside of the stomach. We then cut out a circle and overlayed it onto some some red card which represent the inside of the stomach then glued it down except for the bottom part so we could then raise up the green waves we had created to engulf the woman inside.

To film the animation we used iStopmotion, after we had done this we would the export it to final cut. We added credits to the end of the animation using cut out letters which spelt out each of our names for a mess of letters, I thought this was a great idea as it had the same style and feel that the rest of the animation has. Scott did some voice overs for the animation so he sort of became the narrator for the project, he edited the sound track he had created so that it was in time with the speed of the animation and it worked out very well.

GROUP 3 LIMERICK CUTOUT ANIMATION FINAL from Long Road Applied Media Diploma on Vimeo.

I am very pleased with how the project worked out as I had never done anything like it before so I enjoyed all of it. The team I worked with was great as we just got on with everything and there was no hassle involved. I think that the animation itself could of been a bit more smooth but it still looks great.

Limerick Exercise - Cutout Video

We were shown a video of a limerick created by students who once attended Long Road and were told that we would be crating our own stop animation video. There were 10 limericks to choose from and we were also in groups of around four, each group selected the limerick they liked then had to figure out how the would portray it, we chose the following limerick:

"There was a young lady of Niger

Who smiled as she rod on a tiger;

They returned from the ride

With the lady inside,

And the smile on the face of the tiger."

Our group decided it would be best to allocate people to do specific roles so we could spread out all of the work and people could do what they were best at. I was chosen to do the drawing of the tiger and the lady as the group felt I was the best drawer; Doug and Holly created the background and researched in depth about what jungles and rainforests looked like and incorporated them together; Scott was chosen to create the story board and had to brainstorm with the three of us to decide what we would do frame by frame.

Character Animation

Lemon Jelly

Lemon Jelly - The shouty track is done by using animation in the style of a flip book. It has the same principle of animation as the drawings in it are animated, something that I think works really well is where they have thought about what animation was needed for each part of the song. These are then repeated for the chorus, from the simple animation you start with to get the rhythm of the song going and it stays in your mind. The name of the track certainly works with what you hear, the animation inside is also just as bonkers as the music as it is all so random. Monsters are randomly beating each other up and causing havoc but it is so well done.

Sumo Science

Sumo Science are specialists in animation and work together to create fresh new animations unlike anything you have seen before. Ed Patterson & Will Studd make up the team of two represented by Aardman Animations. They have used many different styles of stop-motion, 2D, live-action and Puppetry. They have worked with a variety of companies to make commercials which include Hellmans, Innocent Orange Juice, Weetos, P & O, Johnson's Baby Wipes and most recently Nokia with their Gulp animation.

The inspiration for Gulp came from their previous work on Dot which was also mad whilst working with Nokia. Dot was the smallest stop motion character as she was only 9mm tall, the film won a Guinness world record as well as 15 major advertising awards. The brief behind Dot was to celebrate Nokia's new phone and cell scope however knowing they couldn't animate blood cells they came up with the idea of Dot. For an animation of a minute and a half they were making 4 seconds a day which was a very tedious process and the video got 3 million hits on Youtube.

This then lead onto Gulp which was the worlds largest stop-motion animation ever created with the largest scene being over 11,000 square feet filmed on location in Pendine Beach, South Wales.The film has had rapid success online, just like Dot it was also filmed on the Nokia N8. In Dot they used a 3D print to create all the character models whereas in Gulp it was easier to use a real person for their fisherman and moved each joint like a puppet. The story of Gulp was about fisherman who catches a fish he then becomes the bait for a larger fish and sets off a chain reaction. It was shot for 5 entire days outside with the help of a large team of animation graduates. To produce 20 seconds of animation took about 16 hours. The set of stills play back at 25 frames per second to show the motion.

Jan Svankmjer

Jan Svankmjer is known as one of the world's best animators. He was born in Prague in 1934 and still lives today. He done all his training in Prague during the 1950's at a institute of Applied Arts and an Academy of Performing Arts. Creating his first film in 1964, he is responsible for some of the most memorable and unique animated films available. A lot of his films usually involve objects coming to life, he uses stop-motion on many of the objects and they are made out of clay as seen in his animation below.

To me this is one of the strangest things I have ever watched as everything is random and doesn't make any sense at all but it is so well done you just sit there and watch it trying to figure out how it is all happening.

In the majority of his work he uses Stop motion along side with live action, these pieces include Alice made which was made in 1988 which was his first feature-length film. This won the feature film award at the 1989 Annecy International Animated film festival. He often uses fast-motion sequences when people are walking and interacting but one of his trademarks are his exaggerated sounds. Although much of his work is made from a kids perspective such as Down to the Cellar they sometimes have a weird disturbing feel to them and are usualy in an aggressive manner. His latest work was in 2010 called Surviving Life but his next project is set for release in 2015.