Animation in the 19th Century -- OUAN405, Understanding

During the mid to late 1800s a series of new inventions, predating the moving photographic image, were made which allowed the user to experience moving drawings for the fist time in history. In the past shadow puppetry and contraptions like magic lanterns and camera obscura were the nearest thing to a 2D moving image. The zoetrope and phenakistoscope came about in the 1830s, both using a similar concept to produce looping sequences of drawings, and were predominantly sold as toys for children. Previously sequential storytelling had been produced in the wall carvings of ancient Egyptian and Persian temples, on the painted pots and vases of Greece, and the magic lanterns of China and the middle east, but for the first time it was possible to play the separate images in sequence.
At the same time progress was being made in the world of photography and in particular capturing multiple photos per second. In 1872 Eadweard Muybridge took 12 frames of a racehorse in motion in order to settle a bet, and in doing so produced the first authentic film sequence using photographic rather than drawn images. Soon advances were made in movie cameras, and in 1892 Charles Reynaud produced Pauvre Pierrot (Poor Peter), 500 frames drawn directly onto a strip of transparent celluloid film. It was also the first film to be projected using perforations on the side of the film strip.

What I find interesting is the way that animation, photography, and live-action film developed symbiotically during this period. Muybridge was a photographer who made advances in the capture and display of multiple images, paving the way for animators and filmmakers alike. Later on the early movie cameras developed the use of transparent film, which Reynaud then used to animate on, in turn inventing the use of perforations along the side of the film strip, which improved the movie cameras and projection systems to come..

Other Side , storyboards and animatic -- OUAN405, Practice

This animatic was created from the storyboards I drew up in my sketchbook. The animatic looks a bit dull as there are a few quite static shots at the moment, since a lot of the movement in the final film will be based around facial expressions and subtle body language rather than big sweeping gestures.

Other Side, Character Development -- OUAN405, Practice

The two characters in the animation are facing off across a table. Because I plan to use lots of close up shots on the characters faces and hands they need to be visually distinct from one another.
I knew that I wanted the first character to have a bald head and beard, but didn't know what kind of beard I preferred. Similarly I was unsure about what hair/headgear I wantd the second character to have. I also made two different colourways for each character, and in each case have decided to use the one displayed on the left of their images.

New idea, Card Game -- OUAN405, The Other Side

I have decided to go with another one of my ideas, the card game. The idea is to have a dark and tense atmosphere, almost like an interrogation room only with two people having a really intense card game. The concept of "the Other Side" is shown when the characters attempt to anticipate what card the other one is about to play, trying to read each other's expressions and guess what is on the other side.

Further doubts about the football match -- OUAN405, The Other Side

I have decided to change the premise of the animation. During the process of planning for the football match my mind kept drifting back to another idea, the card game. Visually I think I can make it much more interesting, and the the story itself I feel is a bit more exciting. On top of this the actual animation will be quicker to produce as the animation is slightly more limited.
I will begin character designs and storyboards straight away.

Notes after the interim crit -- OUAN405, The Other Side

People gave me positive feedback on the animatic itself, but the actual story didn't seem to impress much. Now the group seems to have agreed with my own doubts about the idea it is only confirming my thoughts that it is a rubbish premise, and that I should start over with one of my other ideas.
People also made comparisons to the film Space Jam, which I now realise I have essentially ripped off, but without the payoff of the good guys winning at the end.

Photography Induction

This is the same photo with different shutter speeds. I used the exposure metre to get the "correct" medium exposure, but i actually think that it looks slightly underexposed - somewhere between the overexposure and the medium exposure probably would have looked best.

The first long exposure I took handheld, and the background and foreground are very shaky. The second one I took with the camera on a fence post, which removed some blur. In the first photo I think the people walking past look better than those in the second photo, even though they were both taken with the same camera settings.

The first exposure shows a shallow depth of field, and the second one a much wider one. In order to keep the images looking similar I raised the ISO for the second exposure, which has added a fair amount of noise in some of the darker areas. I chose to raise the ISO as I was shooting handheld and didn't want to increase the shutter speed for fear of blurring the image out.

Creating an animatic in Premier Pro -- OUAN405, Practice

To create my animatic I scanned in the initial thumbnail storyboards from my sketchbook, edited out my annotations in Photoshop, and isolated any moving elements from the backgrounds. Then I imported all the seperate files into Premier, using motion controls to animate the moving parts.
Sound effects were found on Youtube.

After Effects Induction

The Other Side Football Match, Visual Inspiration -- OUAN405, The Other Side

Some visual cues. I want to use a quite limited pallet, like in the Eleanor Rigby scene from Yellow Submarine. I also plan to use a similar repetitive look for the warmup scene in my animation. I want to use lots of squash and stretch and exaggerated figures like the football match in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and the slapstick violence as well.

South Park Storyboards -- OUAN403, Telling Stories

South Park is known for its quick turnarounds - episodes are often planned, written and animated within a week, famously allowing them to react to current affairs in a way that no other cartoon achieves. Because of the tight schedules that the animators are working to, it is important for them to know precisely what work to do and how to do it - as a result the storyboards produced by the writing team are very descriptive, using lots of annotation to describe the action.

In fact, the actual drawings are quite lively and expressive, often more so than the rigid animated style of the finished show - including levels of facial expression not always achieved in the final product.

Internet Meme Animation, starring Drake, Arsene Wenger and more -- OUAN403, Identify

There is no single animation that I am going to talk about in this post, instead I am talking about a recent trend in internet comedy - the editing of short video clips, normally adding in humourous props, or superimposing somebody's face into another situation. These videos make use of motion tracking in programs like After Effects.
Like any good viral meme, these videos normally come in swarms surrounding a particular event - most recently has been the release of Drake's ridiculous video for Hotline Bling, prompting various edits of his lame dance moves.

It is a testament to the power of the softwares used that people are now able to do fairly detailed and high quality animating quick enough to jump on the viral wave before it dies down.

Another steady source of these videos is professional football. Videos like these are released within hours of the final result of a match, often portraying the winning manager or players celebrating, or depicting some cruel analogy of the losing team being beaten. Here is my favourite, released on Vine only minutes after Arsenal won the 2015 FA Cup final:

The Other Side, Football Match Character Designs -- OUAN405, The Other Side

A few character designs for the footballers. "The Oher Side" need to be physically intimidating, with lots of grimacing. There won't be any vocals in the animation but I might include some grunting or heavy breathing to make this team seem more animalistic, and some whimpering or chattering teeth to make the weaker team look more scared and diminutive.

I am debating whether the team bus for "The Other Side" should be a plain design, which would leave more of a surprise as the dust clears and the team are revealed, or to have it heavily stylised to look aggressive or suit the character of the team. I was imagining something like the bus out of the film Doomsday.

White Stripes, Fell In Love With A Girl (Dir. Michel Gondry) -- OUAN403, Identify

The video for White Stripe's song Fell In Love With A Girl is a primary coloured, 2 minute long, punk riot, animated entirely with Lego blocks. I like how the video differs from most Lego based animations by using the blocks to create flat frames rather than animating Lego figures. The animators actually used a sort of rotoscoping technique, turning live footage of the White Stripes into Lego-ised frames. Some scenes are a bit messy, as the size of the Lego pieces limits the amount of detail possible, but others achieve a really lovely bold, pop-arty look. I would like to have a go at animating with this technique - although rebuilding the Lego for every single shot is a mammoth effort, the results are very pleasing.

The animation of Terry Gilliam -- OUAN403, Identify

Among all the jokes (including loads i wouldn't understand for years) what made a 12 year old me fall in love with Monty Python were the animated inserts. I particularly remember The Holy Grail as one of the first times I had seen animation mixed into live action - and there was also something special about the fact that it was quite clearly a film aimed at adults that contained what I had previously considered an artform meant for children. The lo-fi paper cutouts added another layer of wacky humour, helped move the story along, and I later understood that they were also a cost-saving device. The film, which is full of meta-jokes, probably most famously the final scene where a policeman breaks the fourth wall, also contains one of my favourite jokes; the animated heroes are being chased by a terrible monster, all hope is lost and the beast is about to pounce. Until the animator has a heart attack - saving their lives. This was almost certainly the first piece of animation I had seen which acknowledged itself as such, and explained, albeit in a humourous way, the relationship between animator and animation.

The Ant and the Grasshopper, Władysław Starewicz -- OUAN403, Identify

A surprisingly sophisticated stop-motion considering it was made in 1911. Starewicz' take on the classic morality fable ramps up the action, the grasshopper being depicted as not only lazy, but an alcoholic.
The sets and puppets are beautifully crafted, and the animation, whilst being quite jerky, does manage to convey some personality to its characters. When winter comes and the leaves fall, the grasshopper looks genuinely morose - despite this the cruel ant still mocks her request for help, even watching as the grasshopper curls up in the snow to die.
This sort of animation was still in its infancy, and there is a stiffness to some of the movement which can be put down to a lack of easing, as well as some of the other 12 principles which presumably hadn't been devised in 1911.

10 Second Animation -- OUAN403, Apply

My 10 second animation was achieved by a mix of traditional drawn animation and digital editing. The individual characters were hand drawn seperately from each other and animated in Photoshop, backgrounds were also created in Photoshop, and then it was all layered up in Premier, using the motion control panel to edit timings and movements. SFX were sourced from online public domain databases as well as the running sound effect from the Hanna Barbera collection.

I am mostly happy with the outcome, although I think the use of photographic backgrounds makes the 2D drawings look especially flat. I also got bored of the story halfway through animating, another symptom of my habit of rushing in and starting on the first idea that comes to my head, without much development, and I think there could be a bit more narrative instead of the quite linear action that came out. Also the process of hand drawing, scanning, cleaning up every frame in Photoshop, and then amalgamating it all in Premier seemed like a very time consuming way of producing a 10 second film. Yeah, I get that animation is a slow process, but there definitely seems like a mismatch in the time expended and final result - and I would like to explore other possible techniques for traditional animation which might streamline the process.

The Beatles' Yellow Submarine -- OUAN403, Identify

As mentioned in my post about the storyboards this is one of my favourite films, and possibly my favourite ever animated film. It is essentially a series of music videos, each with a distinct animation style, connected by a loose story preaching peace and love. Heinz Edelmann who was artistic director on the film says that the decision to make the film like this was made as a way of keeping the audiences' attention for 90 minutes, as up until then every animation studio who had attempted to produce a feature length film had gone bust in the process, the only exception being Disney.

Throughout most of the film the animation is fairly limited. There are a lot of static shots with only a small amount of movement on the one character who is currently talking, but the musical sections contain much more interesting snippets of animation. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is rotoscoped, Eleanor Rigby is a collage of loops, cutouts and old film footage, and Only A Northern Song uses one of the first instances of visualised audio waveforms outside of a recording studio. In fact, off the top of my head the film makes use of almost every form of animation available in the pre-digital age.

To top it all off it has a cracking soundtrack using songs from Revolver and Magical Mystery Tour, plus three previously unreleased tracks and snippets of many other Beatles hits, and a cinematic score composed by George Martin.

5 bloody stars!!!

Some of the different styles of animation:

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

Eleanor Rigby

Eleanor Rigby

Only A Northern Song

Only A Northern Song

Pose to Pose Pendulum -- OUAN403, Explore

I was pleased with the outcome of my pendulum swing, the cushioning worked well. It is 12 frames repeated, and I think it looks a lot smoother than some of the other students' because it swings on a narrower angle - the restrictions on the amount of frames mean that if I had used a longer arc the gaps between drawings would have to be larger and therefore the movement look a bit jerkier.

Flip books -- OUAN403, Explore

I was happy with one flip book, and not so happy with the other. Oddly the bouncing ball was the one I  don't like so much, and the jumping rabbit which seems like it would be harder came out better.

I don't like how the ball lands. The stretch whilst it is airborne is ok, but the squash when it impacts doesn't look very natural to me, I think it looks like it loses some momentum as well, since it sort of squashes backwards to where it has come from.

I like the secondary action and anticipation that I achieved with the ears as they flop around, but the rest of the rabbit's body seems a bit stiff, even though I wanted to go for a relaxed and floaty kind of movement.

Submarine Sandwich by PES -- OUAN403, Identify

The third film in PES' series of food animations. I only just realised this had come out, after I re-watched the Western Spaghetti and Fresh Guacamole films for the millionth times. PES again manages to pick all the right props for his pixilation/stop-motion short, which makes you go "oh yeah *everyday item* does look like *food item*". It is full of lovely smooth animation, and we finally get a full body look at our mysterious chef, but I thought that despite the slick production it wasn't quite as engaging as the previous two efforts. I think where the first two films (and Western Spaghetti in particular) were so great was that they showed more interesting processes. Cutting a boxing glove into slices of ham is cool, but then the next ingredient is also sliced on the same machine, and the next, and the next. Where Western Spaghetti showed slicing, boiling, frying, serving, Submarine Sandwich repeats the one action and leaves me wanting more from an animator who can do so much better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWEl8-PHhMI

Yellow Submarine Storyboards -- OUAN403, Telling Stories

Quite possibly my favourite animated film of all time, despite The Beatles not even bothering to voice-act their own characters. The film itself is fairly crudely animated for the most part (the sections in which the animation style changes temporarily are generally much nicer to watch and more interesting artistically), and the storyboards are equally rough and ready. They have an almost funny-pages quality to them, with sound effects drawn in the frames, and fairly detailed characters rendered on empty backgrounds (just like much of the film). I especially like the vague notes like "Ringo tells John what they're about"

Perhaps for the small studio that made the film these basic images were enough - Heinz Edelmann's psychedelic art direction was very clear, the character models fairly basic and the actual animation very limited, so maybe the animators only needed rough instruction. Another photo from the studio shows a wall of coloured and more detailed thumbnails, so we can also assume that these line drawings may be preliminary sketches.

Jaws Storyboards by Joe Alves -- OUAN403, Telling Stories

A firm favourite in my family, and generally accepted as a classic, Jaws shows Stephen Spielberg flexing his directorial muscles and produced some of the most famous and most parodied scenes in cinema. The storyboard artist on Jaws was Joe Alves, who had this to say about storyboarding the film:

"For JAWS, the shots needed to be meticulously planned so that everyone knew which shark was to be used and how the shot would be achieved (sled, left to right & right to left). Since it took literally a day per shot each storyboard drawing had to be precise."

Alves was actually on set for a lot of the shoot, and he describes his storyboards almost like a technical guide for the crew rather than simply a visual aid for the director or  cinematographer. It may even be that such a smart and creative director as Spielberg needed someone like Alves to act as a communication aid between the director and technical teams.

I personally think his boards are visually attractive, and at the same time very descriptive of each shot. Alves doesn't bother to describe the type of shot or camera angles etc. as the drawings are very descriptive themselves, but he does add some notes about the action taking place in the shot.

"Football Match" Storyboard -- OUAN405, The Other Side

Storyboard for the "Sports Match" idea. Decided to display some cartoon violence in this football match.

Story Ideas -- OUAN405, The Other Side

Pre-Production - Story Ideas

Sports Match:
A team warm up by the side of a football pitch. (look at footballers from Eleanor Rigby scene in Yellow Submarine). A bus pulls up and opponent team step out looking physically powerful/superior, and very scary/aggressive. Cut to the first team looking scared and quaking in their boots. Cut to the captains shaking hands and flipping a coin, then the referee blows his whistle, cut to black. Next shot first team in the pub looking very battered and bruised, crutches and casts etc. One player lips to the bare, barman says "Had a rough match?" player replies "You should see the other side."

Crossing the floor:
A man in a suit and blue tie walks down the street. He see s a homeless man wrapped in a blanket trying to sleep in a doorway. He sees a queue of people including old folks and people in wheelchairs outside the job centre. He sees a small business shutting down, next door a giant chain supermarket is being built/opening. He looks worried at each of these sights, but continues walking. We see a shot of Big Ben/Houses of Parliament, and then interior of ministers in session. The main character is sitting on a green bench as debate takes place. Suddenly he stands up and tears off his tie, walks down from the benches and crosses the floor.

Attack:
One or two characters in military fatigues with assault rifles are in a building (maybe a barn/garage/warehouse) barricading doors. They work efficiently and don't look too scared. Cut to them sitting round a small fire eating tins of beans. It is dark and they are eating in silence. Suddenly a dog begins to bark outside, and they look scared, reaching for their rifles. The dog stops barking with a death rattle. Suddenly there is a banging on the walls and a zombie moaning sound. The characters stand up looking grim and in silence cock their weapons. Cut to black.

Dark side of the moon:
A child looks out his window at the gibbous moon. Camera zooms through space and round to the other side of the moon. We see a portal open on the ground and various semi-organic spaceships and massive monsters (see Avengers) crawl/fly out and amass. A slow track into the biggest spaceship, in through a window to the control room, an alien in military looking clothes says something in alien language, subtitles read "ATTACK."

Card Game:
A bead of water dribbles down a surface. As we zoom out it reveals to be sweat on a man's forehead. He is concentrating hard and staring forward. Opposite is another man, looking more calm but still concentrating. Neither are willing to break eye contact with each other. Next shot we see four cards face up on the table between them, each man holds two cards, the first gripping them intently, the second holding them nonchalantly and carefree. A croupier picks up one last card from the deck, and lays it face up on the table. The men's expressions intensify. Quick alternating cuts between a track into the first man's worried eyes and the cards in the second man's hands. Sound effects and music build up in tension. The second man smiles an enigmatic smile and throws his cards on the table. Cut to black.

5 to 10 second animation -- OUAN403, Apply

The walk cycle of the main character is a one second loop on twos. I am happy with the movement of the legs and head - it conveys a sort of bored attitude that I was attempting, but the arms are slightly too rigid, so i might redraw the last frame of each step, or add in a 6b and 12b frame just to add a bit more cushioning to the swing.

I first drew the 1 and 7 frames, which are copies of each other, except  with a different arm and leg in the foreground. Then I drew the breakdown poses on 4 and 10, finally I drew the remaining four frames in a more straight-ahead fashion without looking at the following frames. The result is a fairly mechanical walk, but the straight-ahead frames add a nice flick to the feet which I think adds more character than I would have achieved if the whole cycle was drawn pose-to-pose proper.

A colour test. still unsure of whether to colour all the characters or keep them as simple line drawings.

5 to 10 second animation -- OUAN403, Apply

The idea for my 10 second animation is a simple side-scrolling loop. The main character of a man with a pumpkin head walks along and is confronted by various ghouls and scary creatures, who all fail to scare him. Towards the end of the loop he will be frightened by something mundane and everyday, I am thinking maybe a stray cat or a baby in a pram.

I plan to have the characters animated in a simple black and white line style, with a watercolour or possibly collage background, similar to Regular Show uses textured backgrounds alongside flat digitally animated characters. I am also playing with the idea of having a parallax effect on the background, using two layers that move at different speeds to give the illusion of distance.

Regular Show uses flat characters on painted backgrounds

Pixilation -- OUAN403, Explore

My pixilation theme is "Lost and Found", and involves someone's keys sneaking out of their pocket and escaping under the door. There is a short chase scene and then the keys are recovered.
The first shoot was successful, and the story is communicated well, but I decided to add in some more photos as the action moves too fast and the actual chase is shorter than I intended. I shot some more with Ewan a few days after the first shoot and inserted the new clip in the middle of the existing footage.

Overall I am happy with the result, but would definitely have liked it to be a little bit longer, with some more variety in the shots. If I was to make another pixilation I would have a look at the place I was going to shoot in and possibly change my storyboard, as it turned out that due to space restrictions in the corridors and the restrictions of my camera's lens it was impossible to get some of the angles and shots that I wanted.

(a) vous regardez un film. -- OUAN402, Animation Skills, Identify

My French is way too rusty to comprehend lots of the text in this short film, but its simple story of a man's morning routine is pretty self explanatory. I found this film on Vimeo, where it received a staff pick. The film uses a really nice contrast between 3D digital and 2D drawn animation between scenes, sometimes mixing the two styles within a shot. Both are very heavily stylised, with the black and white drawn animation using a semi-realistic semi-cartoon style which works nicely with the exaggerated look of the 3D. The environment is a sparse white space which focuses attention onto the main character. There is a nice motif of repeated actions, each time done slightly differently - for example; as the man turns on the radio the narrative text says "(a) he listens to the news", the scene is then repeated, with a slightly different animation, the text reading "(b) he listens to jazz". I really like this sort of slightly self-referential humour.

A Town Called Panic (Panique Au Village) -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

A Town Called Panic is a stop frame adventure set in a bonkers French rural village, and follows the adventures of three housemates; Cowboy, Indian and Horse, along with a cast of other creatures. The production company also created a series of adverts for Cravendale milk which featured a pirate, football player and cow. The animation style is jerky, and deliberately crude - I say deliberately because at first it seems like the character models are simple static figures wobbling around, but throughout the course of the film you realise that the main characters each have hundreds of different models in varying positions. Almost in the way that South Park uses high end 3D software to replicate paper-cutout animations, this film has a rough-around the edges feel that reminded me of my youth spent playing with toys on the bedroom floor with my brother and making up wacky stories and adventures. The film embraces all the surreal possibilities that animation allows, the obvious example would be animals and humans co-existing, but we also see buildings transforming, falling apart and being rebuilt at impossible speed, and various other tricks that break or bend the laws of physics in ways only animation can achieve. In fact this film seems to be proof that the more jerky and unrefined the animation, the more unrealistic or impossible scenes you can get away with. Sort of like the uncanny valley effect seen in robots or waxworks (and in realistic CGI) where, as the imitation of a human becomes more and more lifelike and realistic, the small and sometimes unnoticeable differences become more apparent and give the viewer a sense of uneasiness. Pixar have combated this effect by designing their human characters in a highly stylised way, but in A Town Called Panic they go the other way - towards a more rudimentary look, and I feel like they are able to keep things totally believable even as the incredible or impossible is happening.

The Storyboards of Saul Bass -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Telling Stories

Saul Bass is probably best known as a graphic designer and director of animated title sequences for big Hollywood blockbusters, working with big names like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. His jagged paper cutout animation style has become iconic, and widely imitated (a recent example would be the titles and branding of Tarantino's Django: Unchained), but I only found out recently that he also supplied hand drawn storyboards for some of these directors. His boards for Kubrick's Spartacus (he also directed the famous titles) are heavy water colours, which show camera angles and scenery beautifully but don't describe the action very well, and include no annotation or text. As pieces of art they are very nice, and its possible that Kubrick, being the eccentric and visionary director that he was, didn't need any extra from his boards.

In 1970 Bass created mass controversy by stating that he directed the infamous shower scene in Hitchcock's masterpiece Psycho (released in 1960, the same year as Spartacus). The proof he offered up (despite many crew members and Janet Leigh refuting his claims) were the storyboards he drew for Hitchcock. The scratchy black and white boards (which are much less pretty but much more descriptive than the Spartacus images) fit the scene almost shot-for-shot (and there are 70-odd individual shots in the 2 and a half minute scene), almost the only omissions from Bass's storyboards are the shots of the shower head, now almost as famous an image as the shadow behind the shower curtain. In fact many of the most famous images from that scene are in Bass's story boards, including the silhouette of Norman Bates with his knife raised and the close up of the bloody water swirling into the plughole. We will never know now who really directed the scene, but we can see how the role of storyboard artists and directors are entwined.

Here is a helpful video which places each shot and storyboard side by side so you can see how they are related.

My Storyboards "Mary, Mary" -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Telling Stories

I wanted to go for a slightly creepier version of Mary Mary Quite Contrary.

I will use a dull colour palette with lots of greys and murky browns and greens. The character of Mary will have a pallid skin tone and raggedy clothes.

Sound effects like howling wind and the screeching bird will help to make a creepy feeling.

I am going for the Salad Fingers vibe, quite a slow pace, with a fair amount of spacing between lines of dialogue. This gives the viewer more time to ponder what is going on and creates an even more uncomfortable atmosphere.

Emmy Winning Storyboards -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Telling Stories

I was recently surprised to find out that Emmys could be won for outstanding storyboard work. In the sea of posts from various animators and cartoonists that makes up the bulk of my tumblr feed, a post by Tom Herpich stuck out - just a single photograph of his table at the Primetime Emmys awards ceremony, with four golden statues on it (only two of them were his). One of these awards was given for his storyboard of the Adventure Time episode "Walnuts and Rain", which he also wrote. The full board can be viewed here.

I don't know why I was surprised that you could win awards for storyboards - I always knew that they were an important part of production, and more so in animation than most other moving image forms, but I suppose you don't expect kids' cartoons to be considered worthy of celebration (although obviously I disagree, but I think it's a widely held view - even some of my "arty" family members laughed when they found out I was going to art school to make cartoons).

Looking at the board I can see that it is very descriptive, shows every different action within a shot and even includes reference materials (like a photograph of a game of Freecell, which one character plays in the background). I can tell that it is a good story board from a production point of view, it contains enough information that a team of animator who know nothing of the story would not be able to mess it up too much, but in all honesty I don't know what makes it worthy of an award.

When The Wind Blows -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

Set during the cold war the story centres on an elderly couple as they attempt to survive nuclear holocaust by following the instructions of a government pamphlet.
I was very impressed by the mix of 2D animation (used for the characters) and 3D models (used for the setting of the inside of their house). This is something I have wanted to try for quite a while and I thought that the film pulled it off very well - I definitely preferred the look of this movie to that of "The Snowman" which attempted to imitate Raymond Briggs' drawing style. Other than this I mostly enjoyed the story, despite finding the two characters (and particularly Hilda) extremely irritating at times. I was glad that the film didn't have a happy ending as all the way through I was dreading a big Hollywood finale where some heroic medics burst in and save the day, maybe things would have been different if the film had been made in the US - certainly the quietly humourous script would have had a different feel to it.

Tame Impala music video -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

Tame Impala - Feels Like We Only Go Backwards

Directed by Becky and Joe (of "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" fame), the video for Tame Impala's   track is a 3 minute plasticine trip. Essentially composed of a series of lurid and dazzling loops, transitioning between each scene with the repeated use of a zooming out head motif. The visuals are deliberately psychedelic to match the band's sound - although this particular song is more of a straight pop song (and a bit of a dirge in my opinion) than many of their others. The continuous zooming out gives the video a slightly trance-like tunnel vision quality, and I wonder whether this was intentional or a happy side-effect. Each seperate loop is individual in looks and content to the others, but there is a general theme of objects moving towards or away from the camera, and very few of the scenes break from this. This is a shame in my opinion as some of my favourite parts were the dancing water droplets, and two scenes of a figure walking up stairs and running in profile.

Song of the Sea -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

Directed: Tomm Moore
Released: 2014

A joint Irish-Belgian-Danish-French-Luxembourgian production, Song of the Sea is set in modern Ireland & tells the story of Ben, a lighthouse keeper’s son and his sister Saoirse who is a Selkie - one of a race of magical women who become seals when they put on a sealskin coat. Whilst the human characters are all drawn in quite a standard cartoon style, the character designs of the magical creatures are quite heavily stylised, borrowing elements from Celtic and Pictish carvings. I particularly liked the design of the Faeries who reminded me of the decorated standing stones seen all over Ireland. The background art has the look of water colour painting, and was full of grungey texture which helped make it easier on the eyes, and gave depth to the wild Irish scenery. I thought that if the whole film had been coloured in flat tones, like the characters were, it would have looked like a cheap kids cartoon and been hard to sit through for an hour and a half.

Danger Mouse, new series review -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

Danger mouse has been rebooted, the latest in a long list of remakes, franchises and superhero movies proving that there are no longer any new ideas left in the world (or at least no producers or studios willing to risk making a loss on an unproven story). On top of this, the once warm and lovely hand drawn animation has been replaced by cold lifeless digital drawings, and all the characters slightly redesigned (Baron Greenback suffers the worst here). The original series was famous for cutting costs at every turn - reusing clips across multiple episodes, and setting whole storylines in the North Pole to save on background art - but these days money is saved by using cheap and visually offensive digital animation, and the overall product suffers.
It is a shame because the first episode did make me laugh, the impressive cast (including Stephen Fry and Alexander Armstrong) read from a smart script, with many meta and self referential jokes (Fry’s Colonel K mentions the special effects budget, and even communicates with The Narrator). The story of the first episode is a well-worn trope, but one that won’t get old - Greenback has stopped being evil, and is manufacturing robotic bodyguards for every head of state in the world, and everybody but Danger Mouse and Penfold believe in his innocence. Of course it turns out that the bodyguards are in fact kidnapping machines, poised to capture every world leader and leave Greenback in charge and DM has to swoop in at the last minute to save everyone. I understand that the target audience of CBBC viewers probably aren't particularly worried about any facet of the cartoons they watch, be that storylines, visuals or script, but it seems like a shame to me that the look of many of today's kids' cartoons has taken such a hit, even compared to what I was watching as a child only a few years ago.