Final Project

Chris Ware's Building Stories, 2012

Okay, time to bring this thing in for a landing!
For your final presentation you'll be presenting:

1. Your stand-alone final animated film with sound.
2. A one-minute demo reel with sound. This can include pieces of your final project.
3. A short write-up of what you've done this quarter for potential collaborators/employers. This is short and informal. You can use this on your blog/Vimeo page.
4. BONUS: Submit your film to the Ashland Independent Film Festival Student LAUNCH program. It's free! Here are the details. Deadline is January 5. Also, submit your stuff to the spring SOU Student Film Festival!

For the final turn in:

1. Your updated blog/Vimeo page including your write-up
2. Your final project and animation reel files in the courses dropbox.
3. A pdf of your short write-up. Include a still of your work and a bio picture.

Our final presentation is Monday, December 4 at 8 a.m. Yeeks!

Project 6: Animatic and Storyboard

Here's Eric Goldberg showing how a storyboard pitch is done! Note, how as this video is shot, it basically becomes a rough draft of an animatic.
'Trouble Shooter' Storyboard Pitch from Living Lines Library on Vimeo.

 
Jamie Hewlett animatic for the Gorillaz video, Clint Eastwood.

Felix Colgrave's Double King. This fellow doesn't do animatics OR storyboards and he turned out just fine!
DOUBLE KING from Felix Colgrave on Vimeo.

I really like what he had to say about learning how to animate... This is from his blog on FelixColgrave.com

Someone asked: i want to animate. i just ordered a light box. i have no idea what i'm doing. thoughts?

Good. If you learn animation in an academic context, it’s often taught with a lot of arbitrary dos and don'ts that are a hangover from old industry methods. More concerned with teaching formulas than helping you cultivate a genuine understanding.

Familiarising yourself with the medium and experimenting with it before anyone else has influenced the way you approach it, will harbour an uninhibited relationship with what you’re doing, and you’ll develop working methods that are informed by your current creative processes.

Missing out that step is like giving an anatomy book to a child that’s never drawn before. That would be a weird. Just give the kid some art supplies and let them figure themselves out, then when they’re older they’ll know if an anatomy book is right for them, or if they work with a completely different set of values and processes.

So get that light box and don’t worry about the ‘right’ way to do things. just Play around with it, see what happens, and if you like the way something looks then roll with it. Good luck!

Project 5 - Preproduction

This Wednesday, we'll look at several animations as research for your final projects. We'll develop our discussion around some of these concepts and principles...


Story
Visual storytelling
Complete action
Acting
Staging
Narrative design
Writing a script
Story with and without dialogue

Visual Design
Palette
Figure/ground
Line and shape
"Character" design

Animation Design/Production Design
How is the piece to be made?
Approaches to process
How process influences meaning

Sound
Foley and practical sound
Music
Rhythm
Ambient

Content
Relationship between audio and image
Mood
Intention
Meaning/idea

Below are some approaches to animation that may inspire your own final projects:

Oskar Fischinger, who created this film using... paper and string... egad! An Optical Poem, from 1938:

Another fine example: Norman McLaren's Verical Lines from 1960:
 

Not to be outdone, here's Paul Glabicki's Object Conversation from 1985... No computers here, either!
 


A nice example of clear visual storytelling of some crazy stories... Felix Colgrave... viz Zachary Pearson...