See Hear - Week 4, Full Paint Animation and Stop Motion Tests

From last week, I made a full animation of my soundtrack using oil paints. Previously I thought oil paints would suit my soundtrack, so I decided to make a full animation-experiment using the Rostrums. I had never animated with paint before so this was a good challenge. Thinking ahead was vital when using the paint, so I relied on my dope sheets and I sketched little thumbnails for each frame to reference when working with the paint. This was very helpful, and should come in handy throughout the project:

This is my first full animation based on the soundtrack. I painted onto the acetate sheet, with coloured paper underneath:

 

I really liked using the oil paints, so this may be a technique to build one, possibly combining it with other mediums...


The next technique to try out was cut-outs and stop-motioney things! 
From our film show on Monday, the film I liked best was "Accumulonimbus". This was also the animation that I related to the most - thinking this sort of style would suit my soundtrack the best:


Accumulonimbus from andy kennedy on Vimeo.

While scouring Vimeo for more inspiration, I found this animation made by Aardman that I also really liked:


Gulp. The world's largest stop-motion animation shot on a Nokia N8. from Nokia HD on Vimeo.

I loved the huge-scale style of this animation and the use of the sand on the beach - it has a very lively atmosphere to it! Plus we will be looking at animating with sand in our next tutorial...

I tried a little stop motion test on the Take 5s. It's very short as I just wanted to see how the clay stop-motion would suit the soundtrack, and the blue lines/bubbly part lasts most of the soundtrack and is fairly repetitive, so instead I just animated a snippet of this part. I mainly wanted to see how the stop-motion suited the track. I used clay for this animation, rather than cut-outs, as I thought this suited my animation idea best. Here is the short animation with the soundtrack (annoyingly, I wasn't watching where the black-card was enough, as it shifts about a bit):



I also created a loop animation without the soundtrack - so the same animation but looped a few times so you can observe it a bit longer and get as idea of what this part of the animation would be like in terms of 'flow':



Overall, there are aspects I liked and disliked about this medium/technique. Stop-motion is not normally my medium of choice, so it was good to try it out, it was a bit more challenging for me than the other drawn techniques. Although, overall I feel that the oil paints suited my soundtrack better than the stop-motion (due to the interweaving, airy nature of the sound), this has been a useful experiment and there are some aspects of the stop motion that I liked. First of, the colours in this wee animation (the blue and almost-black/dark background) allow the animation to really stand out. It is more clear and striking than my oil paint animation, and although I would like a calm, moody atmosphere for this part of the soundtrack, I also think it works better if the animation is a bit more dynamic than what I have previously done. I really liked the clarity of line in the stop motion, it made the animation much more lively!