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.