Animated Christmas Card - Penguins, penguins, and more penguins

Happy Christmas one and all!

Alison MacPherson - The Skating Penguin - 2nd Yr ECA Animation from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

(Note: unfortunately I did not notice when uploading that the sound volume is very low, so you will have to turn it up a wee bit to properly hear the music!)

And for or those why might be interested, here is a little bit of my research for this animation. 

Who couldn't love penguins eh?

I also wanted to have that Edinburgh touch to the animation so there is a little homage in the title and in one scene, that you may or may not notice, to the painting The Skating Minister (or The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, if you so prefer) that is in the National Gallery. 

And if you are really keen and are still even reading this, here is my animatic for this 30 second animation. I felt timing was important in this one, so I put together this animatic very quickly before getting started on the animation (plus I like storyboarding and making animatics....)

Password: penguin

Animated Christmas Card Animatic from Ali on Vimeo.

Have a wonderful holiday everyone and thanks for visiting!

See Hear - Final Animation

For my final "See Hear" project animation I decided to return to animating with oil paint. I also wanted to include the deer as a more prominent aspect of the final animation. With some thinking and a bit of sketching, I planned out some new additions and then drew an animated pencil test of the deer. I then rotoscoped this pencil test when creating the animation in paint.




I certainly didn't want an unhappy ending with that gunshot sound effect, so I animated the stag reappearing after the gunshot. The stag is really meant to represent the general forest-like/natural surroundings, with him just forming from the flowing lines and disappearing again etc, but I don't think this idea comes across very strongly, mainly due to the shortness of the animation. With a bit more planning I could have developed and strengthen this idea further.
The concluding scene of the deer was animated as I went along, rather than creating a pencil test first. I had an idea of how I wanted the animation to be like and I wanted to just see how animating straight out with the paint would turn out. Not having a rotoscope or the sound clip gave me freedom with this end scene. It would be nice to have had some more music or sound ( I didn't really find anything really suitable that fitted), as it looses a bit of flow at the end there due to the sound suddenly ending. But I was pleased with the resulting animation. The freedom of just animating directly with the paint meant I could re-do things or change little bits as I went along, and just see where the flow of the animation would take the scene.

So here is my finished and final paint animation:


See Hear Animation from Ali on Vimeo.

Overall, this was good practice for working with paint. The final animation took a few days to finish. I found paint to be fairly time-consuming and a bit tedious, but I really like the end result. Paint animation seems to have a very lively quality to it. I think it will always be a time consuming technique, but maybe with more careful planning and organising, it could be a really good medium to use again.
Next time I will also be more careful with objects left roundabout the camera - there are some very annoying shadows popping in at the edges of the screen!! And that is entirely my fault for not noticing they were in the shot while animating...