Animation HW1 – Stop Motion

Story Behind

It is a great experience working with Name. She came up with the idea that described a story in a bin very quickly, and I loved it. After that, we began to think about how to loop the story. I was inspired by the dual personalities in psychology that a person changed his personality and did totally different thing in different period of time, which could be the looping hint for our story. So our story was that, a bin-man with dual personality always looped between the status where he loved clean and tidy bin and status where he was in favor of mess and party.

We draw a very detailed storyboard and planned the shot-type and time in advance.

We created a lovely bin-man (thanks to Name’s excellent fabrication) and I drew some emotions on its face.

We shot as planned. Sadly, we discovered that the half of our footage were watermarked because of the free trial of DragonFrame. We had no other way but changed the ER laptop to continue shooting.

I was not satisfied with the annoying watermark in the picture. Therefore, I searched the internet and experimented ways to remove it automatically. Finally I figured it out and removed all pictures with watermark in 1 hour and re-created the footages.

Name edited all the footages and the effect was amazing! I simply changed the titles and made color calibration and it was perfect!

Reflection

• Animation was indeed a very very time consuming artwork.
• It was indeed very important to set the lighting that had constant illuminance. Otherwise it was easily to be seen in the footage.
• Detailed plan of the movie and proper shooting sequence were really crucial for us to save time before and during shooting.
• p.s. DragonFrame sucks!

Review of Understanding Comics

Due to the heavy workload this week, I only finished the first 8 chapters of this book. It is a comic book that tells readers about the basics of comic vividly. There are lots of psychological principles used in comics that are explained by the author clearly, like the perception consistency, the Gestalt principle, which I am very familiar with but never realized they are in the comics.

The two biggest gains from this book are: Concrete expression lets people see others, abstract expression lets people see themselves, which is the secret why comics make people think about themselves as the part of the character.

Another thing I learned a lot about is the path of creation of comics (idea → form→idiom→structure→craft→ surface) and how these parts determine the level of creation. You can create a comic as long as you have idea, form and surface. To reach a mature level, you need idiom, structure and craft. But to achieve masterpiece, an artist must reflect his/her idea and form and recreate the rest of them to have impact. This also applies for all kinds of art forms.

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