FMP Final Statement

Overall, I feel that my Final Major Project was a success. There were a few problems that I encountered along the way, my first one being in Week One when I planned to start my research by visiting the Imperial War Museum. I wanted to start by looking into the war and what life would have been like back then. However, when I arrived there it was shut for renovation until mid-June. What I realised from this was that I should not throw myself straight at the past, but go through it in a logical manner. I was able to research part of the war later on in week 3 by visiting an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery called ‘The Great War In Portraits’ in which I got a feel for the art at the time.

Soon I also realised that it wasn’t so much the serious stories that I was interested in, but the ones that were impressive, interesting or funny. These tales were the ones that I felt more connected with and wanted to research further. It also helped that my Grandparents, who at first did not seem keen on the idea of sharing their history, soon got into it, and the accounts became more and more ridiculous.

One thing that I did not take into account when planning my project, was how long the research stage would take. It was the Primary research that took the longest, I wasn’t able to keep up with the rate at which I was interviewing people and soon I felt although I was drowning in the stories. From week 3 I felt that I would not meet the deadline, I had planned to have the final storyboard done by the end of week 3 and begin the animation at the start of week 4; and I was no-where near ready.

However, by week 6 I was ready to start filming. I had decided that I wanted to focus on puppetry as a form of animation and I created all of my puppets with moving joints and eyes. I did experiment with a few forms of puppetry, one with push-pins in its joints so that you would not have to reconstruct her each time you got her out, and the other which was completely detached from itself. Overall, I preferred the girl who was joined together, as her movement flowed better. However when animating you would be able to see the pushpins and I felt that this would be an eyesore to my work, so I decided to go with the detachable joints.  

To improve my work I feel that I could have kept the lighting the same throughout the animation, because at some points you could see shadows moving across the page. I could have overcome this by filming all of my animation at night or in a dark room with controlled lighting. However, as I was conscious of the time I wanted to get my filming underway as soon as possible. Overall, I am very pleased with how my project turned out.

FMP Week 7 Day 3. Budgie Smuggling Final Cut

Budgie Smuggling. Final cut

FMP Week 7 Day 2

The title of my animation will be: 'Budgie Smuggling'. I asked my peers to vote on which one that they thought was the best and it was almost a unanimous vote for Budgie Smuggling.

Today I shot all of the light-box scenes, i think that it went well, the shadows were not as clear as they could have been, but it worked well with what i made. 

light-box made of two chairs, a ladder, a lamp and an upturned TV stand

two lights did not work as it created a shadow, so i only used one

I filmed the whole thing, using my phone and an app called iMotion HD, which shot all of the footage in 1080p for this part i had to suspend my phone on a plank of wood tied to a ladder so I had to use a remote device to shoot the scenes, which was a leap in the dark as you could not tell if the photo had taken or not

on the news channel i decided to show a picture of the person that they were talking about 'Black Coat Brucie' as the talking went on for a long and needed something to break it up

I gave him a beak-like nose to make him resemble a bird, he is also wearing similar clothes to the main character of my animation to cast some suspicion onto him.

After i finished shooting all of that, I did all the post production work on Sony Vegas Pro, I had a few problems with some of the frame rates for the clips but overall it all went relatively well.  I tried to make the sound effects as real as possible to how it would have been, such as the background noise in the airport and the white noise on the plane.

FMP Week 7 Day 1

Today I started the filming on schedule and thankfully it all ran very smoothly. I finished all of the touch up shots and had time to plan how I would present to the audience that the animation begins in Australia and show them the title. Right now I am stuck between two titles, the first is: 'A G'Day to Fly' which hints at the Australian Origins, and the other is: 'Budgie Smuggling' which is where the name comes from, (smuggling birds from Australia). I like both of the titles, I think that Budgie Smuggling will strike audiences much more than A G'Day to Fly. To figure out which one that I should use I plan to ask my peers and test viewers (beta testers) which title they prefer.

Filming begins. 

I found a way of getting around my problem with people not knowing that it was Australia, I solved it by having the newsreader talk about the local news, which makes it clear to the reader that it is Australia.

As I felt that i did not have much time left to create the newsreader, I made him using a very simple design.  I planned on putting him against a green background and them green-screening him against a famous Australian landmark. However the green-screen did not work so I had to resort to masking him, which was very easy as only his mouth moved throughout. I then lip-synced it to the news-report which I had recorded earlier 

the News Reader with his moving mouth

Plans for the title

News Reader before being coloured

FMP Week 6- Anamatcics

'Budgie Smuggling' Animatic

I still need to plan the credits

At this point the title was not known, I have added it in at a later point for clarification

FMP Week 6 Day 3

My aim for today was to get halfway through the backgrounds so that i can start animating tomorrow, 

however i managed to finish the backgrounds and some other various things that i still had to do. Even
though i only have one week left i still feel that i will be able to finish before the deadline. As i am using puppets i will be able to do most of the animation in one day. What I don't like at this late stage is the amount of things that I only now realise that need doing, such as the glasses for the flight, the police at the boarder and the monuments from London.

initial sketches for the policemen

policemen, i went over their features and they have movable eyebrows to make them look more menacing

Inital sketches for the Evil Bird that sits on the woman's head, like the other, smaller birds the Evil Bird will only be one colour. I feel that red is too much of a denotation of evil and anger so i think i will choose green, as that is a neutral colour, which will lead my viewers into thinking that the bird does not mean any harm.

Initial sketches for the departure lounge, I plan to experiment with different textures and colours 

I experimented with having a similar collage style to the characters, but i feel that this has not worked as well as i desired, maybe due to the fact that all of the pieces have been torn up and give a rough texture.

I also experimented with different textures, but this still did not look right

In the end I decided to use water colours to give some colour to my background. another reason why i did not use the collage style was that it would catch on my characters when i tried to move them, so for continuity i would need something flat

I put known landmarks of Australia outside the window, however this was covered by the characters, so i will need to find another way of showing that it is Australia

(I wanted to put this at the top but blogger wouldn't let me)  The initial sketches for the backgrounds 

Runway (Was not used in the end)

London Airport. Grey to show the change from sunny, bright Australia

Plane Seats. I was going to fill in the background behind the seats but I felt that this would possibly draw the eye away from the main characters which i need the audience to be focused on as they might miss a trick if they look away, as the actions are quite quick

I did plan on having other plane seats in-front of the characters, but this looked too cluttered and then i would loose the detail of the hands

FMP Week 6 day 2

I have not been looking forward to making the puppet of the main character as I am scared that I will do it wrong as I have a limited amount of black paper to use. I shouldn't be worrying about this as I have not made any big mistakes on the puppets yet.

I am really proud with the amount of work that I managed to finish today, I had hoped to just get the main character finished, but I also finished the exotic animals for the end of the animation.

Plan for the character

cut out the body as a trenchcoat, acn move the legs to make him look shy and uneasy

creating moving eyes was not as easy as I first thought it would be. If i was to do this part again i would just cut out some black circles and place them on the face (which is what i am going to do for the other characters)

full body shot of final piece

head shot

All five characters together

cut outsof the animals at the end, will cut out the koala's nose to make it more recognisable, will not cut out the eyes as they will be too small to notice

I plan to colour them as i did with my experimental bird sketches at the beginning of the project. i will use one colour for each as anything else will be too overwhelming on something that size

FMP. Week 5 Day 3

Today I focused on completing the character designs for the main woman and the side characters in my animation. for the past few days i have been researching fashion and clothes from the 1950's to 1970's as this was somewhere around the time that my grandfathers brother smuggled the birds.

Main Woman

Hair ideas for secondary characters. I really enjoyed making these as i could be quite experimental with it

Another secondary character. I experimented with the realistic legs, but decided to keep them cartoon-like as it didn't look right on a puppet

Hands for the main character, I researched into they Horrible Histories animations as i feel that they use hands in a very effective way

secondary character, I wanted to have a range of different characters in the background of my animation to make it look more interesting and fun.

FMP Week 6 Day 1

Today I focused on making the cast of my animation (with the exception of the main character).

After I cut out the third person i had a brainwave and came up with a more interesting way of making my characters stand out against my dull main character. 

It was because of my main character being so plane that I wanted the rest of my cast to stand out both in  colour and in fashion. What I did was cut away all of the middle section of the clothes and replace the white card with patterns that I had cut out of magazines.I experimented with different fabrics, textures and photographs as the dress texture.

Doing this did take longer than I hoped but it looks really good. Just sticking the patten to the back did not make the puppet strong enough, so I ended up having to reinforce them with more card. But I am overall very pleased with how they have all come out.

If I were to redo this part of the project I would have planned the patterns earlier on, as then I could have planned more on what pattern would suit each character better. overall i am very please with how these puppets have come out, and would not change any of the patterns, but more preparation I feel would have improved my work.

test prints

Final outcome

Week 5, Day 2

Now that I have finished the storyboard, I am able to go into the character designs and concept art, which I am glad to finally be on. I am still experimenting between styles for the final piece, such as the birds, I am not sure whether to have them as plain black cut-outs or colourful, I feel that they should be colourful as they are exotic birds and should thus show this. 

I feel that I am quite limited on the character design for my main character as he is meant to be a shady gangster, but comes across more jumpy and scared, thus he has a high collar that hides half of his face. So i feel that instead i will need to focus on the character development of the surrounding people on the plane, such as the woman that is sitting next to him.

Week 5, Day 1

Finally, I completed all of the storyboards at the weekend and was able to start on character designs for my final animation. I had a lot of trouble deciding on which story to use as my final animation. I really liked the drunk woman story, but this bird story was far more interesting. I had a few ways of helping to decide which one to choose. One was asking people which one that they were more interested in, i explained both to them and nearly everyone chose the bird story, because they thought that it was so ridiculous and funny. Also listening to the tutors talking about radical ideas made me think about how in this project that i am meant to be challenging myself; through this i thought about how using a story that is practically laid out for me already is not challenging myself at all. I did have quite a bit of trouble finalising the bird story and have spent several hours over the weekend writing up ideas and crossing them off. I feel that where i have been doing storyboards all the way through i have run myself down and the though of having to do more put me off. However a positive from doing so many, I was able to pull in parts from past stories into this final storyboard, and so finally it was done. Also from drawing so many people over and over I feel that I have improved my drawing skill and my confidence with my own style, so even if this project does not go well in the end, I am glad that i have finally found confidence in my own skill and do not feel as inferior to everyone else in the pathway.

The final storyboard, slightly out of order and hard to read as i changed the way around

Authors own photographs

Character facial designs and clothing ideas, I was not sure which period to do this in, but as stated by some people; it is a long way from Australia to the UK even now.

Week 4, Day 3

Today I continued my research into puppets and different ways of presented it. I researched two animations that use After Effects and other computer programmes. The two animations were 'Dead All Along' by Giles Timmes and 'A-Z' they both adopt a collage style to their work and I love how each of them have so much detail and the characters are so bold
.

Photographs from Giles Timms, personal blog

I attempted to make a person out of newspaper cuttings in response to this animation, I feel that it did not go as well as i had planned, and would have looked better with paler colours. ((Photos from Sally Arthur's blog))

((Pictures from telegraph magazine))

I have looked through magazines for flower patterns that i could use as reference for my animation. I have also looked at pictures of flowers and scenery that is symmetrical, simple or flowing.

I felt bad for just cutting out flower patterns that other people had created so i had a go at creating my own patterns. I have found out that this is not something that I am very good at. Although they did get better as i went on, and I found that you take inspiration from things around you, as coming up with them from the top of your head is hard. I did know this, but I feel that putting it into action has reinforced it in my work.