06/03/2014

In today’s lesson we were asked to produce a short animation. We were set the task of creating an animation in a hand drawn style and using a flipbook technique for our piece. Our first task was to create a mind map for our idea generation about the characters, objects etc that our flipbook would be about. Then we produced a storyboard about the character and the story of the animation.

The title of my animation is breaking down walls to reach your goals. I decided to use a stickman as my character and the idea for my story was my character would kick a ball through a wall and it would end up in a goal, hence the title “breaking down walls to reach your goals”.

I drew out twenty-four individual frames that would make up my animation. Each frame had slight changes and would hopefully when moved would give the illusion of my character moving and also kicking the ball.

Once each frame was drawn I cut out each frame and using a scanner, scanned each one into the Mac and opened the file in Photoshop and saved it as a psd file.

Then using the marquee tool selected each individual frame and copy and pasted the frame into its own layer and saved. Then using the window option of the menu bar I selected the timeline function were I was able to select the create frame animation using the prepared layers I had done earlier. This tool allowed my hand drawn flipbook to be animated; I was also able to individually alter the speed of each individual frame. This allowed for me to speed up or slow down the animation I choose to run the video at 0.02 seconds per clip.

Now the animation had been scanned into the computer I was then able to go and alter my original hand drawn flipbook. I could add colour, alter the character or add new frames into my animation etc. I decided to stay true to the original and just add more detailed touches to it; I did this by working on each individual layer using the brush tool and the lasso tool to select the area I wanted to colour. I added grass, and colour to the ball, and colour to the wall and also outlined the lines of my character.

After we had completed the alterations to our flipbook animation, we were then allowed to create a new animation using Photoshop and the techniques we know and had used previously. I decided that using a photo of my face as the main image I would have four different images of a bull, wolf, owl and Tutankhamen flash in front of my face at different times. I wanted to create the illusion that I was morphing into my selected images.

I searched the internet and found the four images I would use then using the lasso tool began by cutting out the selected images heads and placing them over my face in there own layers. I repeated this four times for each individual image. I then altered the opacity at four different settings one at 25%, the second at 50%, the third at 75% then the fourth frame at 100%. I the changed the layer format from normal to screen. This would allow for smoother transitions between frames and would hopefully create the illusion of me morphing into the images that I wanted.

After I had created the first sequence of me morphing into the new image I need to reverse the affect, so I could morph back into myself. I create this by selecting the tweenies function; this technique is known as key framing. And it allowed a smother transition from me to the bull etc. I then choose a smoke image for my background and my new animation was complete.

Learning outcomes

Today I learnt how to produce an animated gif. I have used new tools on Photoshop like the timeline function this allows me to create animation sequence from frames I have created. I feel that I have really begun to understand the use and purpose of layers. As well as learning about new technique key framing.