Response to Peer Feedback

In response to my animation, my peers have been fair and have noted some constructive and postive criticisms regarding my final animation. Overall I think I have succeeded to keep my animation original as possible.

The most popular suggestions for improvement were altering the lighting exposure or changing the video filter, this also obscured the characters in my animation, making it hard to recognise them for example Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs faces are obscured because of both the over-exposure and the 'Cartoon' video filter I had chosen to apply to the short.

The following image is a screen shot of my animation, you can see how the quality was hampered due to over exposure of the camera and the choice of video filter.

 

 

 

I wish I'd have taken more time producing and exporting my video, I would have preferred it to look like Terry Gilliam's animation shorts from Monty Python's Flying circus.

 

 

 

I think if I had focused on the colouration, the tone and the range of images I think I could have produced a better animation.

 

 

Another positive suggestion was how well the animation worked with the music bed 'This Here Giraffe' by The Flaming Lips. I am pleased with this response as I believe my goal was to cut 30 seconds of the music that would fit well with the animation, I think this has proved successful.

Futhermore I think if I had managed my time correctly, I would have had time to re-shoot and possibly involve more drawings and include more tweaking in the post-production stages.

My Stop-Motion Animation

Finally I have completed my stop motion animation, I began by illustrating two characters, the giraffe and his friend. I then cut out images of things I associated with hope and despair for example Bill Hicks for me is a hopeful but relentlessly passionate comedian. Whereas The Westboro Baptist Church are a group of hateful and aggressive people pushing extremist views forbidding and condemning homosexuals and other subcultures and mass media. Still I'm not trying to excuse it for its lack of narrative. I hope somehow you don't vote me a pass but a merit at least  if not for the design the effort? Appreciate that guys and girls.

Production

To create my animation
I used the following:

• A4 Paper
• A3 Black Paper
• 1 Gel Pen
• 1 Ink Pen
• 1 Pair of scissors
• 1 Computer
• 1 Printer
• HUE HD Camera (Web Cam)

I used iStopMotion linked up to the HUE HD camera I then laid down my A3 black paper and placed my cut-outs accordingly, sometimes having to erase frames that included my hand, or I had changed the position of my characters too quickly, a way to avoid doing this would be to use the 'onion skin' feature.

This is where an outline of your last frame will appear before you take another still. This helps you to create your animation with painstaking accuracy. It took me a duration of around two hours to create my animation, after completion I then exported the animation by clicking export movie.

Post-Production

When I had exported my short animation I opened it up using iStopMovie, a film-making software ideal for creating short, uncomplicated films. I then sourced an Mp3 file save of The Flaming Lips - This Here Giraffe dragged the music onto the timeline and then experimented with a range of video filters. After I decided on the 'cartoon' themed video filter I added credits, naming some of the characters that had featured themselves i.e. Bill Hicks, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski etc.  After this I then exported the film and then uploaded the short animation by using the Blogger Video upload option and publishing this very page!