Exploring Animation

Using Dragon Stop-motion & Cell Drawing;

For my first assignment of the year, I was given the task of exploring the different types of animation.

I began with cell drawing, a very commonly used animation technique in the Disney Industry, especially in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." This scene in particular was an animation breakthrough, as it was one of the first 

times that anyone had been able to make separate 

layers in 

order to allow two or more things to be animated

at once.

So I attempted to make my own cell drawn animation; I wasn't at all sure what I wanted to draw to begin with, so I ended up with a simple rabbit. Also, instead of wanting to make the rabbit move, I was more interested in making him change of morph into something else. I tried a number of different ways until I came to the result I have in this video here, I was inspired through videos of the sped up process of plants and dead animals.

I then also had a crack at creating my own stop motion animation, using cut out pieces of card and blue-tac, on a coloured card background. I believe this was also very successful because I felt a lot more in control when directing the card on where to go, rather than drawing continuous lines and hoping they turn out right.

I chose to keep the theme of a rabbit running throughout all of my animation tests, so that I could show the same animal moving through a number of different ways using a number of techniques.

I also tried out using Muybridge's Rotoscope technique with his famous "Running Horse," images. I used Photoshop to make this animation by tracing over single images of a horses' running cycle, and putting the traced frames into the timeline on photoshop, meaning that when I pressed play, the images would run together to create a short animation. I think this technique of making an animation worked very well indeed, as I knew what I was tracing over and the I was able to see that all of the images I was tracing over worked to create an almost perfect sequence.