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.