Making My Characters..

I am going to try and make a robot out of card to see how straightforward it would be to make all of my characters and tweens from card too..

my robot

 This is the card I am going to use.. SHINNNYYYYY <3 hahahaa

So I drew the robot onto the back of the card, in reverse of course; which involved tracing the robot with pencil and then rubbing it onto the page, in order to get the design exactly the same as previously/in the future..

Then I cut it out with a craft knife, which took AGESSS..

The cut out robot..

I decided that the robot needed some definition and that I should use a black fineliner or sharpie pen to outline and draw on the features with, so I did a test, writing the word 'Robot' on a piece of the silver card in each pen, to see if after 5 seconds the pens smudged..

The Sharpie stayed exactly the same, whereas the fineliner smudged completely off, as you can see above!

So I outlined with the sharpie..

 

Finished robot, with the tracing paper original..

..and again, with jaunty angle :)

I think that the robot looks good, but it was A LOT of effort, and the card is particularly tough, so it really hurt my hand cutting out the robot, as well as trying to be as accurate as possible; and as much as I like this project, I dont think it's worth injuring myself over (not after all the hand cramp the Skills module gave me) ha!

So I shant be making my robots out of cardboard.


laine.x

Plasticine Animation

I am going to explore using plasticine to make elements of an animation; in the way of creating some basic characters out of the very substance and using stop motion animation to make them moooove.

My main character:

My character on blue/green card background:

My main character with the secondary character:

After I had taken all of my photos, I uploaded them into iMovie and made each frame 0.2 seconds long (the shortest allowed in iMovie), making the frame rate 5 frames per second, but as this is just development it doesnt matter very much in my opinion :)

I then added the beginning of the track 'Your Only Doll' by Laura Marling, et voila!

This is the final mini animation I have created to show how I could use plasticine in my actual animation:



I'm happy with it as a rough animation, but obviously I would be more accurate with making sure the characters aren't jitter, and giving it a faster frame rate (making it in After Effects probably) etc.

laine.x

Character Design

So next I need to know exactly what my robots are going to look like; originally I was going to have them looking slightly different but I think the end product wont be affected if they look the same.. maybe they are both 'programmed' to win, provoking the whole confusion of the winner; resulting in them both blowing up haha :)

I really like everything about the last robot head on the second page, so I think I will use this one as the character's head; of course using the other traits of the other robot heads to show emotion (the steam coming from the ears when angry and static between the antennae when frustrated etc).

Next, the body!

I thought that I had a pretty solid idea about what body I'd like (the above sort of one) but then I got drawing for an alternative design and the following was produced:

 

So there we go, my robot is designed!

laine.x

New Storyboard

This is my new storyboard for my animation:

Here is the storyboard broken down a bit:

laine.x

Proper idea generation (init).

So I decided to come up with some other ideas, as well as explaining the original idea a bit more..

This first alternative idea I came up with after I had done my brainstorm and I had looked at different things that are also round, (other than just the ping pong ball/the sun) I'd come up with oranges (the fruit); and when I looked at different characters I could possibly have included in the animation.

To be honest I could probably have drawn the children which would be featured in this animation idea, but then again it's only a rough idea, not a full blown storyboard :).

Secondly, I have explained my original idea a bit better, using small illustrations of how it would pan out.

Looking at these ideas, I think they are good, but I dont think they quite involve all three of my words which are definitely now going to be:

• REPETITIVE
• ROBOTIC
• PING PONG

As a result of this, I thought that I would probably need to feature some form of robotics in my animation, when the idea of actually using robots to play the game of ping pong came to me!!

*squabble

 

So here we have two robot friends who are playing a game of ping pong, when at the end of the game, each of them think that they have won the match! They then start to argue over who has actually won and in the end it gets too much for their harddrives to handle and their heads both blow up!

It sounds a bit sinister but I aim to make it quite comedic, including common robot phrases like 'DOES NOT COMPUTE!!' etc.

Hahah actually I just thought, I could feature the 'blue screen of death' at the end :')

I like this idea the most, definitely!! Now for storyboard me thinks!

laine.x

Right, so let's backtrack.

After my 10% assessment today, I think I jumped into my idea a bit quickly and didnt really think of any alternative ideas..

I therefore decided to also analyse my 3 chosen words a bit more, and produced mood boards for each of the words..

This is my mood board for my word 'Metallic':

Even though I am considering dropping this word for 'Ping Pong' I still wanted to make a mood page for it, using bits and pieces I found around the house, combined with drawings:

This is my mood board for my word 'Robotic':

Here I've drawn the popular bending robot named Bender, as an example of a robot (famous from the hit tv series 'Futurama'); aswell as an 'Astable 555 Timer Circuit' (taking me back to my GCSE Electronics days! hahha)

This is my mood board for my word 'Repetitive':

I decided to collect repetitions and put them on this page, such as the geometric patterns that are repeated, the brickwork, the fingerprints and the stars (the fingerprints are my favourite!).

Then I decided to explain the idea behind 'Ping Pong' a bit more:

and finally create a brainstorm page for (you guessed it!) 'ping pong':

Lots of stuff to use there! :)

laine.x

My Storyboard

This is my storyboard, firstly in whole, then broken down:

 

 

So yeah, that's my storyboard.. I went for a simple(ish) storyline so that I dont make the same mistake as I did whilst making my cell animation (putting in too much detail that is missed by the eye due to frame rates)..

I'd like to keep the paddle & hand (be it mine or someone elses) 'human' whereas I'd like to make the ball and 'sun' and clouds/rain/puddle out of plasticine :)

I dont think my ball will have a particular character, because it already morphs into something else from its original form and I dont want to overcomplicate things..

I'm really looking forward to creating my animation now!! :D

laine.x