Unit 1 Part B

My plan for the project is to try animation techniques that I have not tried before. I am going to develop my skills so that I can use them in the future. I want to do a good quality animation piece for this project.

DAY 1 - The group and I have started on the animation project. We have been commissioned by a company called Eye Witness to create a short film about World War 1. As a group we discussed ideas and assigned each other key roles, considering each other's skills and abilities. My role is to create a piece of rotor scope animation. I found an online clip of two people dancing during the war time. I decided that this would be a good clip to use as it was clear enough and the dancing was elegant. I was shown how to import a piece of film into Photoshop by my tutors. I had a go myself but clicked on a wrong option at one point of the process. I had to redo it and thankfully, I got it right the second time. By the time I had it imported, it was the end of the day's session.

DAY 2 - Today has felt long. The moment I entered the room, I got my equipment out and started up Photoshop. I have spent all day creating the rotor scope animation. It took me some time to set up which brushes, bush sizes and colours to use but after some experimenting I started on the animation. First, I painted in the base colours. This included the skin tone, the hair colour and the colour of the clothing. After that, I'd go over the base colours with highlights and shadows. The purpose of this was to give them life. They'd never look realistic but giving the characters some depth, gave them life in their movements. I completed 12 frames of rotor scope animation today. That's 1 second of animation.

DAY 3 - The third day has been pretty much the same as the second. I went straight to the computer and onto Photoshop. I realised that 1 second of animation wasn't a lot. I wanted to improve on this so I set myself a goal of completing 2 seconds of animation through out the day. I didn't quite achieve this. I managed to create another 1 second clip of animation. Although it takes a lot of time to create, I enjoy it.

DAY 4 - After talking to the group and tutors, we decided on a length for the rotor scope animation clip. It would be three seconds long but would repeat itself so that the dancers looked like they were dancing for longer. I carried on with the animation to create the last second. By the end of the day, I had finished the 3 second animation. I am pleased with the finished piece and I've now learnt new skills to use in Photoshop.

DAY 5 - To take a break from rotor scoping, I joined in with some drawings. We drew buildings and backgrounds for various parts of the animation. This was very fun as the whole group were joining in and trying something different from what they were previously working on. After this, I created a short rotor scope sequence on Photoshop where the man dancing turns into smoke and disappears. This took the rest of the day but turned out really well.

Most of what I have been working on over the past few days has gone really well. The couple dancing turned out to run smoothly and drawing them in Photoshop came out more successfully than I expected.

Creating the original Photoshop document was tricky. I managed to make a few mistakes and get confused but when I received guidance, it turned out ok.

I didn't expect it to take so long to create the animation clip. Next time, to improve, I would try to speed up in the creation process. Now that I know how to create rotor scope, I think that next time I will be able to improve on using the time effectively.

Here are some screenshots of the finished piece of animation that I created.

Here is Spencer's review on my work for the animation.

Here is the finished animation.