Animation Analysis

In Matreyek's work called the 'Factory', In this piece, the majority of the objects that appear are related to some kind of technology and manufacturing. Hence the title, the video takes place in some sort of Factory, starting off with people seemingly walking into it. Everything is precisely in order, including the people. After the video has shown people walking into the factory at the start, the shot moves upwards to the sky, showing 2 aircrafts that are holding large ships underneath them. The movie piece then moves on to inside the factory, showing the different varieties of technology and their uses. The technology seen is seems either extremely outdated according to the 21st century, or very peculiar. In particular, one of the technology include a machine that is basically just a hand, which repeatedly moves from one place to another, grabbing and putting down at the same time. The movie then moves into a close up shot of a woman working with a piece of equipment with a lot of repetition. This woman was in the bottom right hand corner previously. Behind her, a person wearing a mask is writing something down on a clipboard. The next scene shows two working people, one working with an extremely large wrench, larger than a human body. Next is shown yet another person, who seems to be doing the same activity as the previous but with a different tool. An object that looks like a blender is also seen. The overall mood of this piece is simple and boring. Everything in the piece has repetition and presented so that there is no emotion in the piece. When seen closely, it can be seen that many of the actions in the video are repeated, just as if they were copy and pasted. The actions that the technology and people are doing are repeated exactly the same. Sound in this piece also uses repetition. The sounds in this piece are realistic sounds, sounds that one might hear when the machinery in this work is turned on. There are no particular sound cues in this piece, although in the very first scene and the last two scenes the action is done exactly 14 times. For example, in the first scene, 14 people walk into the factory until the scene ends. In the last two scenes, the actions are done 14 times before the scene ends. This work is interpreted as a film that shows an extremely boring and repetitive life of some people who work at some sort of factory. The film could be set in the future, as the majority of the items and objects that are seen in this film are not seen in real life. When various people were asked what they thought this film was about, people responded with, “I think that this is about a world that’s has become overcome by technology”, “ I think it is about people who have a hard lifestyle” and “I think it is about the repetition of a working lifestyle”. The intended audience for this piece are people in their mid-teens and older. This is because the themes and movie itself will probably only be understood by people in these ages. That way, the main themes of this movie may be understood. Visual language such as the colour and especially repetition results to the interpretation. The colour scheme of this entire movie is black and white, and as described before, the actions in the film are repeated throughout the whole movie. Matreyek has also used sound to emphasize the boringness of the factory. There are no particularly interesting sounds in the movie and everything is again, repeated.

Evaluation

For this Creative Media assignment, me and Abbey decided to do something related to do global warming and the environment. So we thought up of an idea of how a magic seed could appear in an environment that was black and white, and everyone was suffering because of the bad environment (hence the coughing in the video). For this particular part we decided to put in sad music to make the feeling be shown better. We then thought that the seed could explode into another environment where the world is all colourful and also like a cartoon, because everyone is perfect. For this section, Abbey thought that the song 'Walking on Sunshine' would be good, so I agreed and we used that song for the cartoon section. In the story, suddenly the world fades away, with the whole world turning into a world of black. When Abbey was drawing this scene, she thought of the idea of the clouds raining black tear like drops, and then that flooding the whole scene. I thought that this idea was a really good one, which made the fade out more smooth than it would have been without that idea. In this part, we put in the sad music again, but fading in from the happy music so it would get the fact that the world was 'fading away'. I also put a thunder clap jingle from Garageband, because I personally thought it matched the scene alot. Previously, the next scene was just straight away the little girl waking up from her dream, however we then decided to add another mini white and black explosion because we thought it sent the message better that she was infact waking up from a dream. For the little girl scene, I got a picture of a cartoon girl sleeping from the internet, traced it on Animation-ish, and then used the selecting tool and the moving tool to make her look like she was blinking and moving her head. After this scene, we repeated the first few scenes from the very first scene, to the explosion to show that the dream actually happened in real life. This part was the easiest, because all we had to do was copy and paste the scenes into the back of the movie. After that, we put in our credits for the movie. Before, me and Abbey were just thinking of putting in the credits through iMovie, which would make it a lot easier, however Mr Powell suggested that we used Animation-ish because it matched the rest of our film. So we got to creating the credits through Animation-ish. A problem we had with this assignment was with the USB's. About 2 days before the Assignment was due, I discovered that my USB had broken. We searched Abbey for the movies and found that she had everything but she did not have the updated version of the magic seed scene and the credits. We were not worried about the credits because we just had to draw this, but we were worried about the magic seed scene. For this scene, originally the guy who brought the seed in would walk out again, but we just decided to keep him in there and put the explosion over him. So that is how we solved our problem. From this I learnt that we should definitely be saving our assignments on both our USB's and maybe also email the minor parts to ourselves so that if something happens, we always have it in some other place. I thought that for our assignment we managed our time well, because we had finished the assignment with about a month left to go to the due date (this is without the sound). We started planning out our sound and then I put it in at home on Garageband. Overall I really enjoyed doing this assignment and working with Abbey.

Evaluation

For this Creative Media assignment, me and Abbey decided to do something related to do global warming and the environment. So we thought up of an idea of how a magic seed could appear in an environment that was black and white, and everyone was suffering because of the bad environment (hence the coughing in the video). For this particular part we decided to put in sad music to make the feeling be shown better. We then thought that the seed could explode into another environment where the world is all colourful and also like a cartoon, because everyone is perfect. For this section, Abbey thought that the song 'Walking on Sunshine' would be good, so I agreed and we used that song for the cartoon section. In the story, suddenly the world fades away, with the whole world turning into a world of black. When Abbey was drawing this scene, she thought of the idea of the clouds raining black tear like drops, and then that flooding the whole scene. I thought that this idea was a really good one, which made the fade out more smooth than it would have been without that idea. In this part, we put in the sad music again, but fading in from the happy music so it would get the fact that the world was 'fading away'. I also put a thunder clap jingle from Garageband, because I personally thought it matched the scene alot. Previously, the next scene was just straight away the little girl waking up from her dream, however we then decided to add another mini white and black explosion because we thought it sent the message better that she was infact waking up from a dream. For the little girl scene, I got a picture of a cartoon girl sleeping from the internet, traced it on Animation-ish, and then used the selecting tool and the moving tool to make her look like she was blinking and moving her head. After this scene, we repeated the first few scenes from the very first scene, to the explosion to show that the dream actually happened in real life. This part was the easiest, because all we had to do was copy and paste the scenes into the back of the movie. After that, we put in our credits for the movie. Before, me and Abbey were just thinking of putting in the credits through iMovie, which would make it a lot easier, however Mr Powell suggested that we used Animation-ish because it matched the rest of our film. So we got to creating the credits through Animation-ish. A problem we had with this assignment was with the USB's. About 2 days before the Assignment was due, I discovered that my USB had broken. We searched Abbey for the movies and found that she had everything but she did not have the updated version of the magic seed scene and the credits. We were not worried about the credits because we just had to draw this, but we were worried about the magic seed scene. For this scene, originally the guy who brought the seed in would walk out again, but we just decided to keep him in there and put the explosion over him. So that is how we solved our problem. From this I learnt that we should definitely be saving our assignments on both our USB's and maybe also email the minor parts to ourselves so that if something happens, we always have it in some other place. I thought that for our assignment we managed our time well, because we had finished the assignment with about a month left to go to the due date (this is without the sound). We started planning out our sound and then I put it in at home on Garageband. Overall I really enjoyed doing this assignment and working with Abbey.

Todays lesson

Today in Creative Media, Mr Powell taught us how to add sound to the movie. He taught us to firstly use iMovie in order to put all the separate scenes into one big movie. He then showed us how to use Garage Band and the jingles that are in it to add sound to the movie. He showed us that then we could just export the whole movie including sounds into a QuickTime movie. I thought that it was really easy and simple to add the sound, but it could take some time trying to synchronize the movie and the music.

Making the Credits

So after we finished creating the other scenes, we decided that we were going to do the credits. We were going to do the credits in iMovie, but then decided to do it in Animation-ish because the majority of our movie was animation, and it would flow nicely to have the credits in animation. For the credits, we included the cartoon character that was in our first few scenes. We also mentioned Tory for helping us in filming for some of the scenes, and then we put a special thanks to Mr Powell, because he helped us a lot when we had trouble with some things or were stuck on something. For the special thanks, I thought that we could do something a bit different. So I found a picture of him on the school website, photoshopped it so that there was only his face, and then added that to a cartoon of a body that we found on Animation-ish. In the credits, we also included scribbled out parts for the transition of one scene to another, because in the actual movie, we used the scribbling motions a lot of times for transition. We also found out that colouring the cartoon character (the first one) in looked a lot better, and so we decided to go back to the first few scenes and colour it in again.

Finishing the first scenes - images

1. Creating a new action.

2. Pressing record.


3. Adjusting the picture so that it is black and white. NOTE: While recording.



4. Saving



5. Closing the picture.


6. Clicking 'stop recording'.

Finshing the first scenes - explanation

Because we finished all our animation scenes, we started our last iStopmotion scenes last lesson. With the help of Tory, we filmed our first few scenes outside. After we had filmed these scenes, we had to make the frames all black and white. To do this, we exported the iStopmotion film into images, and put all the images into a folder. We had about 130 images in total. With these images, we then opened them all in Photoshop. Because it would be too hard to individually change all the frames into black and white, we decided to use a tool called 'Actions'. When opened, we pressed a button called 'new action'. With this we pressed a button that looked like a record sign. We then went through all the steps we had to in order to change a single frame to greyscale. After this, we clicked save and close. When we had finished all the steps, we pressed the record button again so that the 'recording' would stop. This would then save as an action in the actions tab. All we would have to do then was click on the next frame, and press the 'play' button. Then all the actions we had saved would play so that each frame turned into black and white, saved and then closed by itself. We found this extremely useful because it made the job alot easier as we had more than 130 frames in total.

Our progress so far..

So far, Abbey and I have worked hard on a animation/stopmotion assignment. We have finished the majority of the scenes in our story board. We now have about 3 scenes to go, which consist of having to use iStopMotion to create the scene which consists of a person walking through a heavily polluted place, in which some random person comes and plants a seed, which then moves on to the next scene, which causes a colourful explosion and then moves on to the next scene. Once we have finished the stopmotion parts, we can bring them altogether and then do the finishing parts.

RECAPPPPP

This is a quick reflection on why Abbey and I chose to use all of Animation-ish, Photoshop and iStopMotion. We chose to use all of these because we thought it would be good to use a combination of tools, and because it would also increase the amount of ideas and etc. we could use. We chose to use Photoshop because it would enable us to colour in and use different filters for each frame that is made in Animation-ish and Photoshop. We chose to use Animation-ish and iStopMotion because it matches with our story line.

Friday's lesson

Today in Creative Media, the girls that do French as one of their electives had to go to an incursion.
My partner, Abbey was one of these students and so she couldn't come to Creative Media today. Abbey had all of the files on her usb, and I didn't move any of them to my usb, which meant that I couldn't do any work today. Although we had finished the majority of the scenes, and so it didn't mean we were behind, but I thought that this might've affected our organization if we hadn't finished the majority of our assignment. I think the next time we have Creative Media, I will move all of the files onto my USB also, so that if this situation happens again, there will be something to work on and we won't fall behind.

Thursday's Lesson

In today's lesson, Abbey worked on Scene 6 and I worked on Scene 9.
Scene 9 was the scene that the main character girl in our animation woke up from her dream.
To make this scene, I got a picture of a cartoon girl sleeping from Google, and traced it. After I had traced it, I duplicated the foreground and background so I wouldn't have to draw it all over again. For part it the animation, I wanted to make the girl's head move. Mr Powell teached me a way to do this, without having to draw the whole animation again. I selected the parts that were not going to move, and cut and pasted this onto the background so that it wouldn't change. After this, I selected the part that was going to move it, and made slight changes in each frame. This saved a lot of time and was very effective.
After I did this, to create the effect that the girl was blinking, I went to one of the frames which were going to be of her blinking, rubbed out the eyes and drew a simple eye. After this, I copy and pasted this frame into the places which I was going to make her open her eyes. I did the same thing with the frames with her closing her eyes, which also saved time.

Friday's Lesson

In Creative Media today, we did Scene 8 of our animation. For this scene, we used Animation-ish. We plan to do Scenes 5 and 7 next as these do not require iStopMotion but only Animation-ish and Photoshop.

Storyboard 1

Tuesdays Lesson

On Tuesday, Abbey and I finished out story boards for our animation/photoshop/iStopMotion assignment. We plan to do the hard photoshop scenes first, so we are not rushing at the end, if we do not have enough time. We also think that this will help us in our organisation. I am really looking forward to seeing the finished animation. :D

Monday's Lesson

Today in Creative Media, Mr Powell taught and showed us about story boards and how it can help us in planning and managing our animation.
He also told us the time frame in which we could be able to organise ourselves and finish the animation in time without doing it at the last minute.
I think that the story boards will really help me with this assignment because my weakest point in assignments is my organisation and doing it in time.

Walking Girl with blonde hair

Bouncing Ball

Today in Creative Media we played with Animation-ish and made a tutorial of a bouncing ball.

EVALUATION

EVALUATION:

For my Creative Media assignment I decided to do a zombie or ghost-like type of people for my new race. I decided this because I wanted to try something that not many people would do and something that would leave a bigger impression and stay in someone’s mind. I also wanted it to stand out from the others because of its theme and idea. Before I started on my assignment, when Mr Powell showed us a variety of assignments the older girls had done, I saw one that was very interesting. The race of people looked extremely aggressive and scary. They looked like they were bleeding from head to toe when in fact they were just sweating. This left a big impression in my mind and I got a lot of inspiration and ideas from that particular work. To make up my mind of the specific details of my race of people, I started to think of what I found most scary and the colours that I related to when thinking of ghosts/zombies. I found that the colour red mostly related to my image of scary people or things. This is why I decided to make the eye colour of my race of people red. I also like this idea because it was abnormal and no human on earth has completely red eyes. Another aspect I found particularly scary was the ghost’s that had long, black hair. At first, I decided to make my race of people have long, black hair. After finishing my first emotion, I realised that it would be too hard for me too cut out a hairstyle from one picture, and add it on to another. I mostly found this hard because the hair did not look like it was part of the person, but it looked obvious that I had done the process of cutting and pasting it onto the person. Because of this, I decided to delete the black hair and change it, so that a person that was not aggressive would have colourful hair. To change the colour of the hair, I firstly cut out pieces of the hair and then changed the hue and saturation without colourising it. This would make the hair various colours, instead of one colour. I did a similar thing with the lips. I rubbed out the majority of the lip, and left one part out. I then colourised it and then changed the hue and saturation. I repeated this for every part of the lip. In addition, to make the colours blend in, I went back to the layers, and rubbed out and blended in the bits together. Another bit I did differently to my original plans, was the opacity of the skin. At first, I just made it a plain white by changing the lightness of the skin. Then I started playing with the opacity, and found that with the opacity down about 50%, there was a better effect on the scariness. Some things that I did not like, was some parts in my second emotion (the non-aggressive emotion). After finishing my work, I found that it felt like I had left something out but I didn’t know what it was. To solve my problem, I asked some of my friends and peers to answer truthfully whether they found something was missing. All of them answered that they could not find the flaw, and so I decided to leave it as it was. One thing I dislike about my aggressive person, was that the main focal point was not directly to the person. I found that a lot of the time, I was led to look at the background instead of the person. I think that to make my assignment a better one, I could have organised my time better. For example, I could of made a plan on what I would work on at what time and for how long. I think then, if I had left about a week to the due date, I could have maybe noticed some flaws later on an changed it. Overall, I enjoyed this topic a lot and I hope to work with Photoshop later on in the future.

Personality Profile

My race of people are very similar to zombies. They can get very aggressive and do not like to socialize with people of other races or families. They have extremely good eyesight which is why they have huge eyes. They have pale skin. The people themselves are not horrific but they use their scary features to scare off people that they consider a threat to themselves. Their hair colour describes their current mood. The less colourful the hair colour is, the more aggressive they will be. Their eye colour also represents their mood. The colour of my race's eyes is red. However, as they get more angry or aggressive the shade of red will become brighter and redder. When they are less aggressive the eye colour will be similar to a maroon. According to their appearance, their current hunger status can also be known. When they are hungry, their lip colour will be an inky black. On the other side, when they are not hungry, their lip colour will be as colourful as the rainbow. They always live in dark places, to help with their protection from enemies, but if their current thoughts and feelings are not aggressive, the colour of their lips, hair, etc will change anyway. They will also often wear bright colours such as red,pink,white because they're actual minds are not so dark as how they appear.

Pros and Cons of Photoshop

Pros:

- EXTREMELY FUN
- Plays with your imagination.
- Can do anything that comes to your mind, even if it is something that wouldn't exist in the real world.
- Can make peoples appearance look better (?)

Cons:

- Enables people to do illegal acts.
Eg. Can Photoshop people (mostly celebrities) doing stuff they didn't, and in result ruining their reputation.

For fun

BEFORE

AFTER

Angry emotions

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/6493837/2/istockphoto_6493837-angry-face.jpg

This cartoon is showing anger by its red eyes and its frown. When one sees a cartoon with red eyes, automatically you can think that it is either evil or angry. This cartoon is also showing its anger because it is frowning. You can also see frown lines on its forehead.

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/6237485/2/istockphoto_6237485-angry-boy.jpg

This boy is showing its anger with body language. It is clenching its fist and pointing it to the viewer as if he is going to punch someone. He is also frowning like the picture above. He also has shut his lips tightly which makes him look like he is not going to change whatever his choice is.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_I1FJP4mlhuI/TKPjup5T-sI/AAAAAAAAAjI/Tc8O8gGGAMk/s1600/angry-woman-737341.jpg

This woman is also showing her feelings with her body language. She is pointing her finger at the camera and also frowning. She has widened her eyes which also makes her look more angry. Unlike the sad emotions, all pictures have highlighted their faces so that the focal point of the photo is their face and their face expression.

Clara H 9S

Happy emotions

http://blog.123inkcartridges.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/riko-tooney-happy-face-2792.png

This cartoon is portraying a happy emotion. This cartoon is telling us that it is showing happiness because it has a wide smile. We can also see that it is happy because its eyes are also smiling with its open mouth.

http://davidswanson.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/happy-go-lucky.jpg

We can see that this woman is happy as she is clenching her fist but gently, so as if something good has happened. She has a smile on her face and is also smiling with her eyes.

http://ih3.redbubble.net/work.2463252.2.flat,550x550,075,f.happy-australia-day.jpg

We can tell that this boy is happy because like the other pictures, he is also smiling. Also another similarity with the pictures is that they all have a light and bright colour scheme. The pictures are mostly made up with bright colours.

Clara H 9S

Sad emotions

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/9208829/2/istockphoto_9208829-sad-little-girl-looking-down-and-holding-flowers.jpg (11/02/11)

This picture is showing a young girl looking down and expressing sadness. This picture expresses sadness as the girl is looking down and her hair is covering her face. Automatically, one thinks that she is sad or is ashamed of something. The lighting of the photo also affects the mood of the picture. As the background is a light colour, and her dress is also relatively light, but her face is under shadows it enhances the sad mood.



http://b-med.net/files/music/sad_peng.png (11/02/11)

This picture of a cartooned penguin is once again showing sadness. It shows sadness because it is crying and you can see the purple tear falling from its left eye. It also expresses sadness because its eyes look worried and sad. It is also nearly frowing which adds to the imagery.


http://alexanderstoyanov.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/sad-clown.jpg (11/02/11)

Once again, this picture of a boy dressed up as a clown shows that he is sad. Similar to the previous picture, he is crying, his eyes express sadness and he is slightly frowning. Also, the makeup on his face also add the the sad mood. For example, his lip makeup is drooping down, so that it looks as if his actual lips were drooping down. The lighting and colours in this image also add to the mood. The colour scheme of this photo is dark and mostly black and grey.

By Clara H 9S

Katy perry edit