process and production: spirited away

Spirited away made by studio ghibli is an amazing film, the film has many moments which just makes you feel as if your in the world of the film, it feels alive because of the movement portrayed by the characters.

in this short clip showcasing studio ghibli at work, we can see the process they go through in order to complete the film. here is the clip:


as you can see in this clip they are working traditionally, everything done by hand, the process which most animated content from japan is done by this method because it seems the most effective for the way the film is made,  this method is time consuming as you can see by the stress everyone is going through as they are creating each scene. the reason for the film being amazing towards every animator is because of the details on each scene, this is why its so time consuming to get every detail to look convincing toward the audience watching.

Some of the scenes showcase the characters doing small things which look realistic, for example when the main protagonist chahiro is about to wear her shoes should be a simple scene to create, but as the director Miyazaki develops the scene, he explains that he wanted her to do what girls her age do when putting shoe's on, that simple tapping the floor to push the shoe on to her foot makes it feel realistic.

Process and production: method progress over time

We have progressed a lot from producing animations using traditional methods but there are limitations to how much traditional methods apply when making an animation, as for digital animation there is no limit to what you can create and achieve which has improved traditional methods of creating animations. For example traditional methods such as creating effects has changed with the advanced of different editing skills from programs we use today such as after effects which has evolved to become a handy tool for make animations look better by adding effects to the animation, I now have many ways to achieve the effect that i want rather then be limited by a few methods which had to be created, there were no presets available and all effects had to be created.

One example of how traditional methods are limited was when trying to blur the foreground and background of a scene, the way to achieve this before when it was at cel animation stages was to us a camera and changing the focal point which blurred the foreground and background, its a long process to get the camera at the right height and make sure the cels were in the right place so that you could achieve the effect of a blurred foreground and background. These days we can easily achieve these effects from many programs such as flash, Photoshop and after effects because we can easily set the blurriness on each layer and is more tie efficient.

here's an example:

this was how they produced this effect in the time of cel animation, they had a camera that had to be placed on this stand which blurred the background and the foreground, as you can see each bit of the landscape had to be on different cels at different heights.

with the advance of computers and programs we can easily produce this effect by using the same principal but we can control everything on scene. this can be done on after effects, we could also include effects that enhance the scene which could of not been done traditionally or would of been hard to produce.  

visual language: you spin me right round

this is the turn around for my character, I personally think i did well to keep the propotions of the body in oder and works really well. The only problem with this is the facial expressions were hard to do because of not placing messurements and this ended up making the face look weird. next time i produce a character i will make sure that the turn around is fully messuered and keep the proportions in order to make a smooth turnaround.

visual language: set series sequence, confusion in the sand

This animation i found was all done by hand and produces amazing results, it showcases soilders in a battle field and what its like in a sand storm senario. here is the video

              

the fact that they produced all of this traditionally on some paper that does not let a lot of light through when it comes to create the actual animation is amazing, i also found a short clip showcasing the story board which i screen shooted.

you can see that they are taking pictures and he explained this was just a line test just to check if there were anything they can fix before moving on to the next stage of colouring. the storyboard is clear and easy to follow, in this particular animation there are many angles aswell as panning shoots around the character as you can see above, which id like to experiment with when it comes to the story board i make for the set series sequence.

visual language: set series sequence, Mark wigan

i came across an intresting short based story boards which were advertisements for Orange, showcasing various things such as a mouse playing drums and another eating cheese which is very clear and understandable from such 3 pannels.

 

from looking at this i have thought about the way they make things very easy to understand in 4 short pannels, also the fact they dont change angles makes it easy for the audience to view. another aspect of these short sequence is the colour pallets used which are orange, black and white which represent the companys logo. I might explore looking at only doing a few colours for the final story board.

  

visual language: set series sequence. USB-tan

I was looking for some story boards from some animations ive seen and i came across USB-tan story board done by mike inel which showcases a character pulling out a usb out of a laptop slot. here are a few images of the story board.

looking at this storyboard shows a clear story of what will happen and is easy to follow, also as i looked through them i carefully observered the types of angles being used in order to potray what is happening, for example the first 4 shoots show the main character sitting at 4 different angles revealing various objects to establish where the character is, which i will take on board when it comes to producing storyboards for set series sequence.

visual language: set, series, sequence part 1

we got breifed to pick a word and produce many images from its, in my case i got the word brick which seemed dull untill i explored what i could do with the word brick. I set myself to produce a mind map of what i could come up with.

i started to create drawings based on what ive written down on this mind map and this ended me with limited drawings which were decent but were not enough to what we requiered, we were required to create 24 thumbnail sketches . here are a few examples i did for the initianal ideas stages, we could use any traditional mediume:

I started out with typical things to do with bricks such as buildings and bridgets all made out of bricks but then I thought about how i could make it more creative by giving the brick funny secnarios which are shown in the images above, for example flying brick. I made many by this method because of how much fun i could have with a brick in different scenes.

applied animation: brief 2b titles research

Ive picked the titles brief because i wanted to create an opening sequence to something i have read and enjoyed, each book is unique and different from each other; each also have a different theme which gives me ideas of what i could produce.

The first book is called virtue prevails, this book has no visuals and has a very nice story about 2 main protagonists that are totally opposites, the first female is a pure and religious girl who is getting married and the other is another female who is not religious and is already married and related to the first female. The story first takes place at the religious girls house talking to the other female about what she will be doing on her honeymoon. the whole book has a very interesting story which has a simple moral that can help with our daily lifes and i can imagine how each character would look like and how the opening could look like. but im not sure if im going to chose this.


The second book is from the assassins creed book series, called forsaken. This book has many stories about the  main character called haytham and i can see how i would go about creating the opening sequence, the game series is different from the books because the game does not showcase scenes that have happened and i think i can create a good opening title sequence which will make me try various poses and stances, also i can recreate the character because Haytham is explained differently and talks about his child hood which id like to elaborate on.





 This is a graphic novel series called Brody's Ghost from one of my favorite artist called Mark Crilley. the story takes place at a urbanized future almost a dystopia feel, and showcases a male who does not work and is trying to gain money by preforming on the streets, whilst he played a female watches him and turns out to be a ghost and so begins his adventure with this ghost. Although this is all visual and set to be easily animated because it is potentially made up of story boards which i could recreate in my style but i wouldn't like to produce something similar because the visuals just shows it all so if i were to create an opening sequence i will have to change the style so it wouldn't be a copy of the original. i dont think i will chose this as the the title i will research into.


I think i will be researching into the assassins  creed book so i will be able to prepared for pre-production and i already am thinking about the designs i can come up with with a potentials story board which will be an original concept which should showcase the back story of the main character and how hes grown up.