Introduction to Animation
WEEK 1
29/09/22: Introduction to Animation Seminar
Today I had my first lecture inside the college, it was taught by both Jane Hilton and Stuart Hankin. Throughout the lecture I was shown numerous new different artists and animators, some of which I had never heard of before, they showed us their animations which was mainly made up of stop motion features. Some of these artists included: Oscar Morillo, Virginia Mori, Jan Svankmajer, Georges Schwizgebel and so many more than I want to do some research on. After the lecture I immediately did some drawing. Moreover, we talked about what being creative means and different peoples interpretations of this; I felt really motivated in the way in which we were allowed to express different answers and opinions so freely. After this we were asked to gather objects from items we had in our bags and make something move, I liked doing this as I met some new people and found other creatives. At the end of the session we were told of the upcoming deadlines, one piece of homework being to take 20 pictures of things we do not own and record them. Lastly, we were told that we would be presenting a film by December 1st, thus meaning I have to make a film in 2 months. I talked to my lecturer at the end of the session and asked when we should start, she said immediately, I liked this motivation and feel I will start gathering ideas and documenting more of the art and animation I see in the day.
02/10/22
Today wasn’t a college day however I went to a local flea market to record and take photos for the homework set, this really helped see things in the way my lecturer talked about – noticing the small details in the world around me. Later I edited these photos to my liking, differing between black and white to warm tones to highlight certain aspects of the photographs. Alongside this, during this weekend I have been looking through the reading list and have started reading ‘Identity in Animation: A Journey Into Self, Difference, Culture and the Body’ by Batkin, J. Thus far I’m really enjoying it and is helping me create ideas for the film.
WEEK 2
Introduction to Animation – Picture Perfect
06/10 — Online Session
Reflection Notes:
Today was the online seminar named ‘picture perfect’ in which we discussed the homework from last week in which we were asked to take 20 photos of things that caught our eye. We were asked to critique each other’s work and why we took said images. Moreover, the brief for the 30 second film was outlined again and given in more detail. Jane gave us further artists and museums to look into that was then put into the ‘artist bank’; she then asked us for the next 2 weeks to go to a museum(s) with a group of 5 people and find objects that inspire us. Overall, today was looking into the critique of our work and exploring what will inspire us to make the final film.
Furthermore, previous to the main online seminar we had an online briefing of the online academic support sessions which gave information on who can support students when writing essays, understanding critical thinking and helping art block.
Notes:
“When the image is new, the world is new” – French philosopher – hyper questioning man, allowing himself to see the world in so many different ways
Narrative choices are framing choices
“In the place called lost strange things are found” – field guide to getting lost/men explain things to me – Rebecca Solnit
‘Every image embodies a way of seeing’ – Don McCullin (war photographer)
Questions to ask yourself:
How do images communicate ‘information’ and tell stories?
How are they shaped by the contexts in which they are made, and the materials and tools used?
What value do they have?
What power do they have?
What effects can they have on the people that consume them, on society as a whole?
How do they shape our attitudes to each other and our sense of ourselves, our identities?
What kinds of meaning do they have and what gives them meaning – the people that create them or the people that view them, appropriate them, remake and reinterpret them?
YOUR VISION – to know what your going to draw you have to begin drawing – Picasso
What are you curious about and what are certain about?
In all images, things are included, and things are excluded, and the world is presented in a particular wat. These choices are NEVER natural – Tatsuya Tanaka
Students Images:
What catches your eye? Consider: point of view, language, authority, choreography, storytelling
Is the language consistent?
Is there a clear sense of authorship? Of story?
Of something indefinable but seductive: truth/a reaching/a rawness?
A kind of ‘living’ spark that runs under the collection?
“Every time you make a choice, whether consciously or subconsciously you place a ‘value’ on the work” – Maria Gusakovich
Artists:
Christoph Niemann
Joey Guidone
WEEK 3
Introduction to Animation Seminar – Object/Subject (Online)
13/10/22
During this this online seminar, Stuart looked through some of the homework from the week previous, analysing and showcasing the photography taken by a range of different students. After this, Stuart showed us a presentation that showcased numerous different artists, including: Micheal Duchamps ‘Fountain’, Duchamps ‘Bicycle Wheel’, Picasso’s ‘Bull’, Lenka Clayton’s ’63 Objects taken from my sons mouth’, David Shringley’s ‘The contents of the gap between the refrigerator and the cooker’, Lubna Chowdhary’s ‘Metropolis’, Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Model Room’, Olafur Eliasson’s ‘The Weather Project’, Haim Steinbach’s untitled works and many more. After this, Stuart demonstrated an animated video that showed the transition of numerous different objects. After the seminar I finished animating the project, using both Procreate, Photoshop and Adobe After Effects to finalise the look of the short film.
WEEK 4
DIGITAL ARCHITECTURE
17/10/22
Notes from the digital architecture seminar part 1:
Topics looking at: Compression Process
- Resolution
- Frame rate
- Colour bit depth
- Colour subsampling
- Intraframe compression
- Compression codecs
Resolution = pixel (picture element)
Horizontal pixel count and vertical pixel count multiplied together adds up to the pixel resolution
1920 x 1080 = 2 million pixels
Framerate (15FPS / 24FPS / 60FPS)
Each would be the same amount of time, each would only 1 second its just a different amount of frames
24FPS is the absolute minimum amount of frames for images to seam moving – our brain can only see between 21 and 24 frames per second as fluid motion, anything above that is a waste of frames (24 is bare minimum – can see a small amount of jittering)
Think of it as frame resolution – the more frames you have in the finer the motion
Colour Bit-Depth (1 Bit, 8 Bit, 16 Bit, 32 Bit)
Colour is also being stored in frames
1 bit can only have 2 possibilities (can only be black and white) – for reference, with the light on your phone you only have the option to have it ON or OFF – every pixel would have to decide if its white or black, there is no grey scale
- Bit = 2 = black & white
(8) Bit = 256
2* 2* 2* 2* 2* 2* 2* 2*
1*2 = 2
2*2 = 4
4*2 = 8
8*2 – 16
16* = 32
An 8 bit graphic can produce 256 values
RGB Channel is actually a grey channel their just being assigned a colour
8 bits = JPEG
16 bits = TIFF
Animation industries try to avoid anything below 12 Bit
Colour Banding is due to being an 8 Bit image – not enough it within the image to show all the variants of colour
Any editing in photoshop will be 12 Bit and upwards
WEEK 5
BIG SMALL STORIES
20/10/22 Summary:
This seminar was about telling stories and what we wish to convey to the viewer; throughout the session we looked at numerous different artists, artwork and animations. One standing out to me being Grayson Perry’s work who created his own manifesto for himself as an artist.
A quote that stood out to me from the seminar was “Remember your practice lies not just in your hands and the manipulation of materials but it is also present in your questioning, perception and empathetic approach”.
Jane allowed us to think about why as human beings we create stories, what we are trying to convey to the viewer, who are we trying to emulate, why we create characters and make us empathize/love/hate/fear them.
We were also asked to think about ‘divergent thinking’, meaning to think openly, expand our ideas and think with a tactful and meaningful manner. Jane went to further to say that stories are meant to make you FEEL something, another quote that stood out to me being “If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree.”
Further in the seminar we were shown these pieces of writing:
“Once there was a redheaded man without eyes and without ears.
He had no hair either, so that he was a redhead was just something they said.
He could not speak, for he had no mouth. He had no nose either.
He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach either, and he had no back, and he had no spine, and no intestines of any kind.
He didn’t have anything at all. So it is hard to understand whom we are really talking about.
So it is probably best not to talk about him anymore.”
— Blue Notebook No.2.
LYDIA DAVIS
Odd behaviour
“You see how circumstances are to blame. I am not really an odd person if I put more and more small pieces of shredded Kleenex in my ears and tie a scarf around my head: when I lived alone, I had all the silence I needed.”
You know, quiet.
“The room he was given had seven wardrobes. Seven. At night the wardrobes oppressed him. Dark brooding figures shuffling closer to his bed, faces glowering out from the whorls of polished grain. The landlord wouldn’t let him get rid of them. They were classic. Solid. So he had to think of a way to use them. The TV fitted into one, Hi Fi in another, cooking equipment in a third, and various bits and bobs in the rest. But he couldn’t think of anything to do with the last one. Then one night he dragged his duvet into it and had the best night’s sleep ever.
He decided to stay in the wardrobe. He would move in a radio and would eat there too. Eventually he would get six more people to live in the other wardrobes. Because he was the last person to keep himself to himself.”
DAVID GAFFNEY
After being shown these pieces of writing Jane then gave us prompts to quickly write a short piece of writing on one of the 5 themes:
- Grief
- Love
- The kindness of a stranger
- Sickness
- Peeling an orange
For my own I chose grief and wrote:
Grief:
The woman had a small hole in her chest,
The hole was gaping, gory, filled with blood and infection,
It spilled out wherever she walked, onto the streets, into shops and people,
Attempts of sowing it always seamed to break the needle in half,
Lets just hope it scarrs over.
After this we then talked about negative space and how this can be used within our work, alongside how this can make someone feel something.
DIGITAL ARCHITECTURE
24/10/22 — Digital Architecture Seminar
Part 02 — Notes from Seminar part 2
Colour Channels & Alpha Channels
- RGB+
- Alpha + (transparency)
RGB are the primary colours for video – made up of three values: red, green and blue.
These colours originated from rods and cons in our eyes – the rods and cons in our eyes can only really see red, green and blue. These are however not primary colours, but they are the colour wavelength that humans can perceive and see – we can see way less colour than brightness, can see brightness much more easily than variation in colour.
The + in RGB+ means you get a fourth channel, meaning the transparent alpha channel (grey) – your phone uses this to cut things out to composite things (e.g., overlaying text, rubbing something out in Photoshop).
Luminance + RED
Luminance + GREEN
Luminance + BLUE
Luminance + ALPHA
Every channel is essentially just a gradience and luminance – every channel is luminance; it’s just been assigned a colour.
Green screens use ALPHA channels – used to be blue screens and not green screens – however they used green screens as its brighter and is easier to key out.
The RGB Channels exist in the 10 Bit systems – an 8 Bit graphic has 256 possibilities – 10 Bit or 14 Bit are going to be refined enough for films.
The ALPHA channel needs to have the ability to change opaqueness – if you lower the values of all the channels the pixels will all go black (e.g., decrease colour green down it would go black)
Additive Colour Space
255 green Channel
255 blue Channel
255 red Channel
If you mix all these colours directly it will turn white and that is the additive
Combined Values (8Bit)
If you block all three values (red, green, blue) – how much of all of these colours are in an image. For example, if you zoom in on an image and colour picked a pixel that pixel will have a different number variation of red, greens, blues. What we really are looking at is brightness’s, per say if you have zero percent red, blue, green the image would be completely black – more to do with brightness than actual colour. However, in a 1-Bit graphic you would have thousands of different values.
Colour Subsampling
4:2:0
4:1:1
4:2:2
4:4:4
Chroma Subsampling
Y = Luminance (green)
Cr = Chrominance (red)
Cb = Chrominance (blue)
Codex are the packaging of what the video comes in – how you can minimise data to fit into a format.
Chroma subsampling is looking at every single scan line – starts at the top left of the image, this will be called scan line 1 and goes across and down the image to make 1080 scan lines.
4:4:4 Chroma Subsampling codex is the best you can get as it is the highest quality and can also allow you to add an alpha channel, whereas 4:2:0 cannot allow you to have an alpha channel (remember, if you get 4:4:4:4 you have the ALPHA channel)
4:2:0 Chroma Subsampling is the worst one as it is skipping information – really bad for compositing
Chroma subsampling is all to do with quality – the software will look at the textile of the image (e.g., if you shoot a video on your phone and out it in aftereffects it’s not going to be the best result whereas using a professional industry standard camera).
Seeing these numbers is to do with QUALITY.
Once you have compressed you cannot undo
WEEK 6
10/11/22
This morning we had an online lecture to which both Jane and Stuart instructed us more about the 30 second project. They outlined the rules of which we should be doing this project within a pair and the animation should only be 30 seconds long and only uses original sound. This was mainly a question and hour type seminar and helped me understand more about the necessities of the project.
WEEK 7
17/11/22
This morning I had an online seminar with Jane and Stuart who again outlined more of the rules of the 30 second project; specifying that we should be working in pairs, the length of the film should only be 30 seconds and we use original sound. We watched others animatics and listened to their ideas for the project. This was mainly a question-and-answer type of seminar, therefore, whilst I listened to the seminar, I worked within the software Blender to create the first scene of the short film. This was a 3D scene of a bedroom that the character would be in, this only took me about 4 hours to create, light, render and colour. Within my group my main task is to create the backgrounds using the 3D software Blender, already I feel I am improving on my 3D building skills.