Pixar!!

What is Pixar?

Pixar Animation Studios is an American computer animation film studio based in America. The studio has earned twenty-six Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and three Grammys, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Its films have made over $6.3 billion worldwide. It is best known for its Computer Generated Imagery-animated feature films created with Photo Realistic Render Man, its own implementation of the industry-standard Render Man image-rendering application programming interface used to generate high-quality images.

 

What films have they made?

Pixar has produced eleven feature films, beginning with Toy Story in 1995. It was followed by A Bug's Life in 1998, Toy Story 2 in 1999, Monsters, Inc. in 2001, Finding Nemo in 2003, The Incredibles in 2004, Cars in 2006, Ratatouille in 2007, WALL-E in 2008, Up in 2009 and Toy Story 3 in 2010.

Luxo Jr

Luxo Jr. is the first film produced in 1986 by Pixar Animation Studio, following its establishment as an independent film studio. It is a computer-animated short film (two and a half minutes, including credits), demonstrating the kind of things the newly-established company was capable of producing. It was the first Pixar short to release within a Pixar film.

It is the source of the small hopping desk lamp included in Pixar's corporate logo. In a subsequent re-release after Pixar became popular, a pretext was added to the film reading, "In 1986 Pixar produced its first film. This is why we have a hopping lamp in our logo".

Disney: The background!!

Disney has been around for many years, people would see Disney as the parents of animation. Walter Elias Disney was the founder of The Walt Disney Company and did many things for the company to work. One massive thing that Walter did was create the character Mickey Mouse and used his own voice for the productions.

Early Animation from Disney

In 1928, Steamboat Willie was the first animation with synchronized sound.

In 1932, Flowers and Trees was made as the fist Technicolour cartoon.

In 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' was the first full animated feature film.

All of these some how have helped animation progress with what it has done in the past.

Principles of Animation

The 12 principles of animation is a set of principles introduced by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their book (1981) The illusion of Life: Disney Animation.

1. Squash and Stretch- the purpose of which is to give a sense of weight and flexibility to drawn objects.

2. Anticipation- used to prepare the audience for an action, and to make the action appear more realistic.

3. Staging- its purpose is to direct the audience's attention, and make it clear what is of greatest importance in a scene; what is happening, and what is about to happen.

4.Straight adea action and pose to pose- are two different approaches to the actual drawing process. "Straight ahead action" means drawing out a scene frame by frame from beginning to end, while "pose to pose" involves starting with drawing a few, key frames, and then filling in the intervals later.

5.Follow through and overlapping action- These closely related techniques help render movement more realistic, and give the impression that characters follow the laws of phyics.

6.Slow in and out- the movement of the human body, and most other objects, needs time to accelerate and slow down.

7.Arcs- most human and animal actions occur along an arched trajectory and animation should reproduce these movements for greater realism. This can apply to a limb moving by rotating a joint, or a thrown object moving along a parabolic trajectory

8.Secondry Action- adding secondary actions to the main action gives a scene more life, and can help to support the main action. A person walking can simultaneously swing his arms or keep them in his pockets, he can speak or whistle, or he can express emotions through facial expressions.

9.Timing- refers to the number of drawings or frames for a given action, which translates to the speed of the action on film.

10.Exaggeration- is an effect especially useful for animation, as perfect imitation of reality can look static and dull in cartoons. The level of exaggeration depends on whether one seeks realism or a particular style, like a caricature or the style of an artist.

11.Solid Drawing- The principle of solid drawing means taking into account forms in three-dimensional space, giving them volume and weight.

12.Appeal- in a cartoon character corresponds to what would be called charisma in an actor. A character who is appealing is not necessarily sympathetic — villains or monsters can also be appealing — the important thing is that the viewer feels the character is real and interesting.

Objects: Let Sleeping Doe's Lie!!

In this Production, our task was to create a short animation (15-30 seconds long) using objects. Me and Matt decided to use dominoe's because we thought it would have been easy but also affective. We used a frame rate of 12. The short animation was aimed at children if they wanted to choose it. I thought the animation was really good and looked very fluid. The writing was very affective and worked very well with the animation because it explained the story and what was going on within the animation. The final production was quite successful because it was understandable and the use of camera angles was used well. The bad thing about the animation was that it would have been a lot better if we had more time to plan the animation. The principles of animation I have used is timing, exaggeration, staging and slow in and out.

Claymation: Morph and Chas' 'Freaky Friday'!!

In this animation (me and Tilly) used a different technique, this was claymation. I thought that remaking Morph and Chas was a good idea because it has got such a good background from TV and it was also really fun to make. In this case we sort have had an advantage because in our pre-production we didn't really need to think about character designs because we was just copied this idea from TV. The frame rate we used in this production was 24 because again it looked right to be at the frame rate because if it was any lower than 24 it looked too slow and jumpy but if it was over 24 fps it looked too fast. I feel that creating the characters went really well and they looked really affective but the problem we had with them was that when we moved them we had restrictions to how much we could actually move them so we had to create the animation quite quickly n rushed so the characters didn't break. Another problem we had was that in some clips you can see a reflection of my face. The overall production went ok but the animation could have been a bit better if we had more time on it. The principles of animation I have used in this animation are Exaggeration, slow in and out, staging, anticipation and squash and stretch.

Cut-out Animation: A Day at the Seaside!!

For this animation our group (me, Matt Clowes and Ben Morley) created a cut-out animation (see the video on this post). We used 24 fps because we thought it woudn't look as good if it was under 24 fps becuase it would have looked slow and not as affective as we wanted it to be. The results that we got from completing the animation were in some cases good but also bed. The good part was that it looked affected  and the animation was funny and had an understandable storyline. The bad part of the animation was that it looked a bit jumpy and the colours could have been used more effective. The colours of the animation was very affective but it would have been better if the characters of the animation could have been a distinctive colours to make them stand out. I feel the camera work on the production is really affective and have been used very well. If we had more time on our task to create the cut-out animation I would have spent more time making the animation to make it look more fluent and less jumpy and more time to work on the pre-production so we can fully understand what we are going to do on the final production. The principles of animation I used in this animation is staging, anticipation, exaggeration, slow in and out, timing and squash and stretch.

The Persistence of Vision and Frame Rates!!!!

What is the Persistence of Vision and How does it Work?

The Persistence of Vision is how the human eye see's moving image. This means the human eye see's a rapid succession of moving image and the images are retained in the brain. For a fraction of a second the images from before are with the images to what images the eye is seeing now.. The images will then blend and this will result into the image being the eye and mind being 'tricked' to thinking the image is moving like an optical illusion. For example, say if you had a bird on a piece of paper on one side and you had a cage on the other with string attached to both sides and you spin it at a certain speed, the bird looks like it is in the cage but it isn't. With anything that is filmed on camera the principle of Persistence of Vision will always be there because its the eye working to see the moving image. Frame rates have a big impact on the Peristence of Vision as well because if the frame rate isn't right it could look to slow and jumpy or too fast and not understandable.

What are Frame Rates and How do they work?

Frame rates are the main key to getting great quality animations as well  as films and tv shows. You always need to consider the frame rate setting, because it affects how smoothly your animation plays. For example, an animation set to 12 frames per second (fps) plays 12 frames (images) each second. If the frame rate is set to 24 fps (frames per second), the animation appears to animate more smoothly than if it ran at 12 fps. However, your animation at 24 fps also plays faster than it does at 12 fps, so the total duration (in seconds) is shorter. Therefore, to make a 5‑second animation using a higher frame rate, you must add additional frames to fill those five seconds than at a lower frame rate. In animation there is a specific technique to help create more fluid movement and this is known as '2's'. It means each movement is recorded twice.

Early Pioneer: Eadweard Muybridge

Who is Eadweard Muybridge?

Eadweard Muybridge was an English Photographer and working in photographic studies of motion and motion-picture projection. Muybridge moved to America as a Young man and lived in San Francisco.  Muybridge started his career as a publisher’s agent and bookseller, but developed an interest in photography that seems to been boosted when he was recovering in England in 1860 after nearly being killed in a stagecoach crash. Muybridge quickly became famous for his landscape photographs, which showed the grandeur and expansiveness of the West.

What is Eadweard Muybridge famous for?

Eadweard Muybridge wanted to prove to Leland Stanford that a galloping horse cannot lift up all four feet clear off the ground during its stride. Muybridge decided to go to Stanford’s race track to attempt the experiment using one of Leland prize horses. Muybridge set up a series of cameras so that when the horse went round the track it would set off the cameras to take the picture. When they put all the pictures together it showed that all four legs were off the floor. In 1893, Muybridge lectures on the Science of Animal Locomotion and used his zoopraxiscope to show his moving pictures making this the very first commercial movie theatre.

When did Eadweard Muybridge create the motion picture?

The first actual modern motion picture camera was designed by Louis Le Prince in 1888. However, Muybridge developed the process of using a series of still photographs to stimulate motion for an experiment historically known as “The horse in Motion” in 1878.

What is the Zoopraxiscope?

The Zoopraxiscope is an early device for displaying motion pictures. People considered it as the first movie projector. The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. The stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892-94, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, then coloured by hand. Some of the animated images are very complex, featuring multiple combinations of sequences of animal and human movement.

What affected the Zoopraxiscope?

The things that affected the zoopraxiscope was that you had to set the camera up and it was huge, also you had to have complete darkness and as soon as you took a picture you had to treat it well straight away.

How this information has helped me

This information has helped me to understand Muybridge and his invention the Zoopraxiscope. The information that stands out in my mind is his experiment of ‘The horse in motion’. I was able to learn how the Zoopraxiscope came to be through him trying to prove a point about the horse and its legs being off the floor as it ran. Through him creating the Zoopraxiscope has inspired other inventors such as Thomas Edison and the Lumiere bros. Thomas Edison invented Kinetoscope and the Lumiere bros invented cinematography. These inventions paved the way to what we now know as cinema.