Our Stop-Motion Animation...

Ceri making a tree

In our group there are three people, I wrote the script with the notes on the scene with input from the others in my group. Ceri designed the people and background scenery, both Ceri and I took photos and did the scenes. Cari sorted out the audio and will be putting it together with the pictures. 

The concept for the animation is about bulling and standing up for yourself and not taking it in silence! 

Background

The background will be the meadow background with green tissue paper to be the grass and we will use a yellow piece of card to carry on the path with a tree that Ceri made in the background as a prop. All characters were made out of plasticine.  

Below is is the planed story board with script:

·Opening  scene– *Little Timmy playing ball, looks up and waves at camera* (Birds Singing, hear the ball)

o Zooms Out *Orange and Blue hiding behind tree*

o *Orange and Blue walk over* *Little Timmy continues to play*(Danger music)

· Blue: “Hey Pinkie, what you got there. Speak up Titch!” (Silence)

· Little Timmy: *Silence*

· Orange: “Yeah, speak up!”

· Blue: “That’s a nice new ball you’ve got there”

· Orange: “Yeah, it’s nice”

· Blue: “Too good for a Titch like you”

· Orange: “Yeah, too good”

· Blue: “ I think we should have a ball so good”

· Orange: “Yeah Titch, we should have it”

· Blue: “Gimmie Titch! *Snatches Ball* “Bye Titch, thanks for the new ball”

· Orange: “Yeah, thanks Titch” *Both walk off and play ball in the distance*

· Little Timmy: *Tear on cheek* (Sad Music)

· Farmer Jay: *Walks over* “Hey Little Timmy, are you okay? What is wrong?”

· Little Timmy: *Looks over at Orange and Blue playing with his ball then looks down*

· Farmer Jay: *Looks over at Orange and Blue playing with his ball* “Ahhh, I see, you know Little Timmy you don’t have to take this in silence let them hear you speak” 

·Little Timmy: *Looks at Farmer Jay and then at Orange and Blue, takes a deep breath and walks over**Squeaks*”Give me my ball back!” 

·Orange and Blue: *Laugh at Little Timmy*

·Little Timmy: *Gets Bigger* “Stop picking on me, I don’t have to listen to you, you are not the boss of me” *Gets Bigger* *ROARS* “GIVE ME MY BALL BACK!!” *takes ball back and grows to medium*

·* Orange and Blue run away* (Seen in distance)

·Zoom in – Little Timmy: *playing with ball* “Speak up”

·(Happy by Pharrell)

·THE END

Characters

  Blue and Orange are the bullies and as such they are bigger than Timmy through most of the animation to show that they have power over him. Actions are shown in stared italics with Timmy being small and then growing in size to show him gaining confidence and confronting his bullies who had made him feel small and helpless. It is also to show that he is not the same person as he was before, his actions make him grow as a person which we thought would be interesting to have him grow physically. 

Farmer Jim and Little Timmy's

Farmer Jim is an adult who had saw Timmy get bullied and gives advice to help Timmy to gain confidence and feel better about himself. Farmer Jim is bigger than the rest of the characters as he is an adult and to show he is an important figure in Timmy's life, he helps Timmy discover himself. 

Timmy's conflict with the bullies is resolved when he gains the confidence to stand up for himself and confront the bullies who had taken his ball. He showed he was not weak and small like they had made him feel in control of himself and able to fight back. 

Voices and sound 

The music and sound-effects are shown in the brackets in bold. We put in bird sounds at the beginning to show that the characters were in a meadow that was away from other adults except Farmer Jim. Danger music is to show that the two walking over are not friends of little Timmy and mean to cause him emotional harm. The idea to keep Timmy silent to the end is to show that Timmy feels like he has no voice and he can not stop the bullies from taking what they want as he has no confidence in stopping them. This changes when Farmer Jim shows him that even though he is small he can still make a difference which shows in the volume of his voice. The sad music is too show that though they didn't physically hurt Timmy he is still upset. Finally we used Happy by Pharrell as the song is about being happy even when the situation seems dire and there seems to be nothing to be happy about, you should always find something to be happy about. 

Animation on screen

We will try and avoid it being too disorganized and a too complicated story line that we will not be able to successfully convey. We hope to keep the animation simple but with a 
powerful message. 

Audio and Sound... 

Michel Dougherty says:
“A truth whispered among animators is that 70% of a show's impact comes from the sound track.”

Our teacher gave us this statement and asked us to write at whether we agree or disagree. In my opinion the statement above is true especially in films such as horrors and thrillers were music is essentially to the anticipation of the events in the movie. 

Music adds to the effect and the emotion, it can show sadness, anger, happiness and impact upon the audience what the scene is trying to convey and if a soundtrack is effective individuals can listen to the soundtrack and link it to the movie. Some soundtracks are as famous as their movies. For example some of Disney animations music is recognisable even to those who have never even seen the films. 

Without sound behind the animation there is little interest. If you watched your favorite animation without any sound you would probably not enjoy it as much unless you can remember it well enough to hear the music in your head. The music behind the scenes brings characters their emotions and their actions to life! 

Later in the lesson we were put into pairs and told to create an podcast using the Audacity, we did a Christmas Special news report using the news that Russia are now employing reindeer to patrol with police in snowy areas. This used running jokes linked to films and songs for an example penguins escaping a New York zoo (Madagascar) and Rudolf being arrested for manslaughter, see song below... 

  

The Podcast will hopefully be uploaded at this moment in time... 

 Is Animation Useful in Learning? ...

A recent lesson was about creating animations by slightly changing the picture between frames to give the impression of movement. This is called Stop-motion animation. Within the lesson we got to experiment with creating our own. Mine was about a couple walking through the country side.

Animation of the center of the earth

The topic for discussion is the relationship between animation and learning. Animation as described by Ainsworth (2008) is an energetic process which differs over time with it increasing in its use since the 80s. Its convenience and complexity grows each year as the software increasingly develops (Ainsworth, 2008). 

Lowe (2003) discusses that within animations there are three different areas of change. The first is form changes (Transformations) e.g. changes in the animation properties; size, shape, colour and texture.  The second; position changes (Translation) which is the movement from one place to another and finally inclusion change (Transition); this is where the object is either presence or not and either in full or part, it is also about whether they move in or out of the borders and either appear or disappear (Lowe, 2003).  

Example of a weather map

There is a growing conviction that in using animation it increases people capacity to learn difficult concepts (Ainsworth, 2008). Lowe (2003) conducted a study that looked into animation and how it affects learning.  Lowe (2003) looked into weather maps and had participants draw predictions either using the animation or without; looking into the amount of information they removed from the experience. They found that they extracted information easier with the animation. It was also discovered that the more vibrant the change was in the animation the more information was extracted from it. Additionally if the animation appealed to the participants either more or less than the surroundings affected the amount of information extracted. More information was extracted, as well, if the form and position change was different to the context as it fascinated the participants more (Lowe, 2003).

There are problems with this study as there was a limited opportunity to show what they have learnt and that even though the participants may have gotten a lot of information there is no information on whether they remembered that information in the long-term and assimilated it into their schemas. Finally the participants had no prior knowledge to draw upon and help them in understanding the animation.

Overall, I believe that animation is useful in learning as it helps in understanding complex information.

Camera-less Animations...

Drawing a circle

Cutting out circle

The hand drawing

Graveyard drawing

There are five types of camera-less animations that we looked into. These are Thaumatrope, Phenakistoscope, Zoetrope, Praxinoscope and Flipbook. 

Within our seminar we did two of the camera-less animation, the first one I did was Thaumatrope. I drew and cut out a circle from a piece of card, I then drew on my design. I chose to do a hand coming out of a grave in reference to Halloween next week. After I drew on my design, I punched two holes in the middle at either end and put two pieces of string through. I didn't have time to colour in my animation.   

              


My main problem was matching up my pictures as first I did the hand too high and upside-down. I took me a few tries to get it right.  

The second camera-less animation was a Praxinoscope, done in a group. A praxinoscope has the images reflected on a mirror for people to view. First we cut out a strip of card and decided to use angry birds as inspiration for our design. We delegated roles with one person creating the circle mirror and another drew the picture at the beginning whilst I drew the end pictures. We tested are animation and then once correct we coloured in.

Almost finished animation

Problems we had with this animation was that the mirrors couldn't be aligned properly and so are picture looked disjointed in places but it couldn't be helped with the mirrors available to us. Another problem was lining up the scenes such as the bird and the blocks so it would look seamless in the movement. We didn't manage to finish in time as there are still bits uncoloured. Below is a video of our animation in process. 

Animation…

Animation has been around since prehistoric times. The images on caves show that they tried to show movement in their pictures and may have used light to trick the eyes into believing the images are moving (Ceurstemont, 2013). 

Cave Painting

There are different types of animation; I will be looking at Stop-Motion Animation. Stop-Motion Animation is when physical objects are moved between images (frames), this creates the optical illusion of the object actually moving. Initially toys and other inflexible physical objects were used until the idea of using Cel animation which gave way to clay and puppets being used (O’Reilly, 2007). This then led onto animations such as Wallace and Gromit, a Grand Day Out created by Nick Park and Chicken Run also created by Nick Park (BBC, 2002).

A Grand Day Out

Stop-Motion is unique and is capable in bringing creativity and life to inanimate objects. This type of animation is highly popular in social media and when the video is shared more money is being made and their message is being sent further than they themselves could (Qudos-Animations, 2014).

Unfortunately Stop-Motion becoming less common in films with by computer generated animation taking over (Emson, 2011). This is due to the amount of effort put into making a film length Stop-Motion animation with painstaking work and the film generally take years to create. It is also extremely difficult to change and adapt a scene once it has been shot (Pomerantz, 2014).

Chicken Run - Stop-Motion

Chicken Run is a stop-motion animation that uses clay models to create the story of a group of chickens trying to escape from the life chosen for them by the farmer and his wife. This film was created 3 dimensionally, to provide more quality to the movie. There were 40 animators working on the film and for 1 minute of filming was about 1,440 frames (Jeanmendoza, 2011). 

Merida defying tradition

BRAVE…

The last animations I watched was the film Brave. A story about a young woman called Merida who wants to choose her own life not the life her mother and tradition demands for her. It takes place in the Scottish highlands in the dark ages where it was almost unheard of for women to defy the traditions of the people as she did.

BRAVE was written by a woman called Brenda Chapmen and part of the film was directed by her. However, Mark Andrews took over half way through. Katherine Sarafian produced the film (Pixar Wiki, 2014). 

Mother and Daughter relationship 

Merida's hair - 111,700 hairs in total

It was originally called 'The Bear and The Bow' and its creator Chapman used her own experiences with her daughter as inspiration. This film was Pixar's first fairy tale though it differs from the usual plot with more development in the mother-daughter relationship than in a romantic relationship (Pixar Wiki, 2014).  

In creating BRAVE the animators at Pixar fashioned a brand new hair simulation software named Taz, after the Tasmanian Devil (Terdiman, 2012). This was used in creating Merida’s curly red hair which had never been seen before in animation (Alexander, 2012). Within Merida's hair there are 1500 individual strands, this means that in total Merida has 111,700 hairs (Pixar Times, 2012)

Merida - water animation

Fergus - 8 layers of clothing

The animators also changed the way cloth was animated. Merdia’s father, Fergus, has around 8 layers of clothing, for example cloth, leather, chainmail and more  (Terdiman, 2012). Another difficulty in the animation was water, clothes were to getting wet and how it would look with people in the river  (Terdiman, 2012). 

Learning Environment...

A learning environment is an atmosphere that encourages learning and is where the student is most comfortable in exploring the knowledge around them. This environment can be effected by a number of different influences. The resources an individual and the social and cultural surrounding all affect the students learning environment as well as their emotional well-being and their motivation to learner (The Glossary of Education Reforms, 2013). It is seen as a give and take situation as the learning environment can affect the learner and the learner can effect the learning environment (OECD, 2010).  
Learning can take place anywhere and at any time (The Glossary of Education Reforms, 2013), this means that there is no set place for a learning environment and that it can be anywhere and looks like whatever the learner want and needs it to be to learn effectively. There are settings where learning is encouraged more than others for example museums and libraries. The learning environment is important as it encourages the student to work harder, longer and more efficiently when they are in the right environment.