Summer Work
My Ideas
With my Ideas I just wrote down whatever I found looked visually interesting and stood out. I decided to not create a storyboard for my work this time because since I would be creating a music piece with the music being my storyboard I wanted to focus on what visuals I could achieve with the audio to get a much more authentic, in the moment, creative animation.
What Song have i chosen?
I’ve decided to use the song LEX by the band Ratatat. The reason for this would be that compared to “For River” and “Monody” which are slow and have a big build up. Ratatat Jumps right into the song and keeps a steady beat and melody the other two just dont have. And as much as i like both songs they’re both very repettative.
More song animations ive looked at
The use of colours and mood of these animations i feel give off a very errie vibes within it. Especially the first shot, with the centure being the only sense of colour while the background is just plain darkness. I like this visual alot and may keep this thoughout my animation and keeping with that Errie vibe.
While the other animations ive looked into were good i feel this is more the sense i wanted, having each part of my animation hit in time with my music to give it that extra punch is what i want from my work. and this animation does it pretty much perfectly.
What will i be animating?
Due to LEX having a very robotic sounding beat to it. I decided to focus on that factor with my animation. Due to how ive focused on my drawing skills when it came to past animations, this time i will be working in stop-motion. Stop-Motion has an almost offputting style while moving which works perfectly with the robotic sounds.
To show off the sense of Roboticness within my animation i have decided to use items such as Nails, screws, nuts and bolts as well as prioritizing Tin Foil for being able to create whatever shape and size i want, while still sticking to the robotic type of theme im after.
This video i created in TV paint was made so i was able to work out the timing for my music video. I then took the timings and put them into a timing sheet and added to Dragonframe notes so i was able to know when and how long my shots would take to do.
FINAL
Final Thoughts (500 words)
I feel that this Project has helped me understand timing better. Being able to properly see what time the objects should take to properly feel like the music is the animation was a challenge but a challenge I feel I succeeded in completing. I think due to having the music involved with my timing I was more comfortable in figuring out where to move and how long I had with it compared to my other projects where I found I was ether to fast or not fast enough to make the movement believable.
Some of the challenges I came across was just how much a lack of storyboard opens up your creativity while thinking about what should go with each set of notes and sounds. If I had decided to storyboard this I feel it would have lost the spur of the moment randomness and creativity I wanted to create within my work and for me to fully commit to improving my creativeness.
While working with Tinfoil I was given the advice to add colour within my work, this was done through coloured sheets placed over the lights I was using which managed to bounce off the tinfoil and other metal object I was using to give off a really lovely shine affect within my work. My favourite combination of lights to use would have been a blue and Green combo, this gave the look more of a space or a shooting star vibe.
As much as I enjoyed having the chance to be more experimental I do feel that some parts of my animation could be changed to improve the overall flow of the movement.
At 1:04 a representation of what I could hear of strings from a guitar being played, managed to play till 1:18 which is 14 seconds long which I feel is way too long of the exact same animations being played.
I feel this would have been improved if I had shortened it and used other examples of the strings. Maybe have the strings move or morph into another object and mess around with them or just giving more life to the strings compared to what I did.
If I were to go back and improve my work in any way I feel I would have liked to experiment more with colour, this would have been done by changing the background colours to also show off colour and not just what lights I used on the Tinfoil and metal. Sheets of paper like whites, blues, oranges, Reds I think would have been a very visually pleasing thing to witness.
Another Idea I had was to use TVpaint to add some special effects to my already existing animation. Having blue particles sparkle off an exploding ball of tinfoil, adding white lines to show a rippling effect on the strings. Or even just the TVpaint could be used to tackle the other music notes the stop motion work wasn’t able to pick up.
Lastly, I feel that this project has helped me understand timing better and I cant wait to practise my newfound knowledge in future animations.
The Animation Blog 