Evaluation

I chose animation as the main focus of the communication technology exploration process, and examined my relationship with it. I have often experimented with animation, and believe it is an increasingly popular form of visual communication. From television advertisements, to projected visuals for club nights, there seems to be no end to its uses. Animation is an often cheap and simple form of communicating.

We began this project by testing interactivity and communication. I was introduced to processes such as geo-caching for the first time. Geo-caching is a form of urban interaction and explores the idea of exchanging forms of communication and using gaming to create an invisible link between two or more different people by giving them a task. For example, I worked with a small group to create some form of game to give to another group to complete, when arriving in the city of Bradford. Many of us had never been before, and therefore our game would not only give others a way of instructed exploration of a new place, but also give the act of them ‘discovering’ the city a purpose. I found it an unusual way of creating an interaction with others who you may have never met (e.g. if you completed a route around an area and then posted it online for others to re-trace your steps) but also an interesting one. It all links in to the current phenomenon that is online communication sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

After participating in group exploration sessions I decided to focus on the technologies involved in animation and similar processes. I created a couple of my own stop motion animations to test the technologies and then delved in to and reviewed other examples, such as VJ videos and animated GIFs. Overall there are a number of programmes offering you the process of putting together some form of moving communication technology. Among these are Photoshop (a simple form of putting together an animated GIF), Adobe Flash and Final Cut. These are the most commonly used, especially among students. I learnt that there are numerous ways of showing my own animations to the public, including YouTube, blogs, competitions and showings in public places, such as club and bar venues. Another realisation about animation and moving image is that like many other technologies, it is one that is constantly evolving and is becoming increasingly more high-tech. The future will no doubt continue to offer opportunities to produce more complex and realistic images.

This project has given me a broader understanding of the process of animation and encouraged me to take a closer look at the opportunities that can be offered to an animator. I regret not being able to try my hand at VJing and some of the other technologies I learnt about as part of the experimental process, but unfortunately due to illness limiting my time at college was not able to utilise the technology offered to students in those areas. In the future I hope to produce my own work using many of the processes I have mentioned on my blog, and also have a deeper exploration in to other forms of technology.

Animation as Club Visuals

Although VJing is a popular form of creating live visuals for clubs and bars, many entertainment venues also have nights dedicated to displaying pre-made visuals. This can be anything from quirky stop motion shorts to pristine digital eye candy. Myself and close friend Lisa Turner-Wray were requested to create a really simple stop motion to play at a club night in London. The theme of the the night was to celebrate 'sex' in a tongue in cheek way and so we decided to use plasticine to produce bunny porn. It was played in loop with a few others over the night, projected on to a large white wall.

Animation in Advertising

In recent years, different types of animation have become more and more popular as a form of asvertising. A classic example if the Cadburys cream egg adverts, where stop motion is used to animate the little chocolate eggs and bring them to life. E4 is a channe that animation can often be seen on, in there 'E-stings'. Last year E4 challenged youngsters to create shorts to play on Air in advert breaks to promote E4. A large number of these were done using stop-frame and other various forms of animation.

Anime

Anime is a style used in Japanese animation, that has also been adopted by some artists in America and around the world. It started when the Japanese propaganda film 'Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors' was made in 1945 by director Mitsuyo Seo. It was ordered to be made to support the war.

The future of CGI

At the moment, animation sudios are attempting to develop ways to create realistic looking humans. A few films have tried doing this before e.g. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in 2001, however due to how intricate and complex a human body and its functions are (as well as the way we interect and show our emotions) this method of animation is rarel used. Another problem with creating an animated realistic human using CGI is making their hair and clothes move accoringly with their movements.

CGI Animation

This is a short piece of animation by Rani Naaman. So far I have only looked at 2D animation, but CGI is done ompletely differently. Computer generated imagery changed film forever. Toy Story, by Pixar, was the first film done completely in CGI. Creating a CGI animation is a long and tedious process. The 2D drawings used in normal anaimations are replaced with 3D models through a form of animation that pays attention to the smallest of details.

David Shrigley

An animation by David Shrigley. He is renowned for his simple line drawing style of illustrations and the animations he creates out of them. He uses Flash to make the movement in his animations and then often adds audio too.

An old example of an animation...

This is the animation I created for the beginning of Viscom, but I thought it might be a good example to show hand-drawing a sequence of images, editing them all on photoshop e.g. adding colour and cropping, that are then put together (in this instance using i-movies). This is a long, and repeatative way of creating an animation. I now have a graphics tablet and woul perhaps try using flash to draw my images and sequence them.

Playing around with animated GIFs.

An animated GIF is created by placing a series of images in layers, over one another and then timing each layer to be shown for a certain time. I had never explored GIFs before, an still wasn't clear on how exactly they were created. I found an amazing website http://macanimationpro.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=183491, that took me through how to create an animated GIF in Photoshop step-by-step. I created a really simple GIF at first, sporting my original blog name, which I have placed on my blog (amber-zombiekillswallow.blogspot.com).

Film Animation

In the 1890s, Charles-Émile Reynaud (inventor of the praxinoscope) created an animation system using a loop of 12 pictures. In 1892 in Paris he exhibited loops consisting of 500 images, using his Theatre Optique system - similar to a modern film projector.

An amazing example of stop motion animation...

This is an absolutely amazing example of stop motion. Every little attention to detail is astounding and the time this must have taken...pshhh.

Other types of animation.

So I've looked at stop motion, but there are other types of animation. For example, animating a series of photographs, by placing them in sequence and making it run. I have also created animation by drawing an image and then replicating this, changing only the slightest of movements in each one. I will trial creating an animation out of sequencing a set of photographs and put them together an as animation, which I shall post soon.

Stop motion animation...

I decided to play around with some stop frame animation, using plasticine and simple line drawing backdrops. I find stop motion the easiest animation to do, but can take a lot of patients. It's also hard to keep the lighting exactly the same in each shot when working on a make-shift location, and need to also ensure that the camera re-focuses properly for each shot otherwise it can occassionally appear blurry.

Stop motion is an animation technique, in which you physically manipulate an object to make it look as if it is moving without any help.

This animation is called 'Little Man Sandpit', to go with the title of this brief.

VJ and some history....

1965 San Francisco. Ken Kesey and the Prankster created Acid tests, described as an unscripted spontaneous Multimedia happening.

1966 New York. At a show, The Velvet Underground and Nico walked onto a stage in front of a movie screen and the dark began to tune up. Andy Warhol worked on one movie projector, playing a silent version of 'vinyl', his interpretation of 'A Clockwork Orange', on the screen. Superimposed on this by another movie projector (run by Paul Morissey) were close up shots of Nico singing "I'll keep it with mine" by Bob Dylan. Then as the Velvet Underground began to play, Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga moved to center stage and began gyrating in a free form dance pattern. The whole ensemble was now playing in front of the two movies. 

(exert taken from The History of VJ, by Michael Heap)

VJ and animation

I want to explore live VJing and animation. 

the definition of a VJ is someone who creates moving visual art, often on large screens at events such as gigs, club nights, festivals or in conjunction with other performance artists. It can include pre-recorded video. Techonology wise, wikipedia states "often using a video mixer, VJs blend and superimpose various video sources into a live motion composition". Never having done VJing myself, the concept of how you actually do it is still a little over my head. However if possible, would jump at the opportunity to have a play around.

Here is an example of VJing. This is a simple VJ, constructed of various old school disney clips and a music track. It's a Mr. Scruff VJ mix- Get a Move On.

Here is an example of another VJ live set by Eyescream in 2006.

We have been looking at the subject of 'urban interaction'. I got the understanding that this is pretty much an explanation of anything which involves interacting and communicating somehow with others in a public environment- examples of this could be through transport networks, time based gaming, geocaching etc. 

We created a task for another group of students to complete when in Bradford. We asked them to follow the marked out word (Bradford) on the map, not straying at all from the marked route. Whilst they were in each part of the route, they had to take 1 photograph of a sign/poster, or anything similar, that included that letter. Giving someone this game is not only a way of collecting photographs from an unknown area, but also leading them around a new city.

The Sandpit

The Sandpit. This is my current brief exploring communication technology.