Poem Animation: Packaging

Part of the brief was after creating your poem animation was to create a packaging as well as designs to go on them, relating to your chosen poem.

There are photos of some ideas for packaging my poem aniamtion taken from my sketchbook. The top two photos were just messing around with ideas and ideas for designs to go onto them.

The bottom two are of the type of packaging I decided to use. Rough drawings of the nets and the measurements I would need to create it.

Rough designs of what I am going to put on to my packaging and where and photos of my finished packaging.

Includes a just under A3 size poster with the full poem on, a art booklet with screenshots from the animation and some concept art, CD holder with CD, case with a belt to hold it all together.

The Take

The final exercise was the take, which is described as a classic cartoon device to exaggerate the surprise of a characters reaction to something that they have seen causing a extreme reaction.

The exercise was to create our own take, using our own characters that we creating and using the animation methods previously learned. The character must walk into the screen/frame, see something and react to it.

When told the brief oringnally I didn’t know that the character had to walk on, making serval ideas/ rough storyboards for the take. But once I was told the full brief I had to scrap must of my original ideas, including one of someone sitting in a chair watching TV, and falling off the chair after seeing something funny. So I came up with a new idea of a squirrel and an acorn. It took a while to create a storyboard that I was happy with, but when I did I created a turn around for the character. Then I made the line test.

While starting the line test I ran into a problem with the squirrel’s tail, I originally drew it curling into its self. However my tutor told me this would make it hard to animate and create secondary movement, so I changed it.

I added an outline and colour as well as a background using Animate Pro/Toon Boom. Sound used for it was taken from freesfx.com.

I created it in a way that it could be looped.

Finished poem animation

Some way through planning my animation, I realised that my prevoius animation storyboard was a bit too complex for the time I was given. So I decided to simplify it.

Instead of using mostly imagery, I would have the words of the poem appear with only a few moving images.

My final poem animation. Voice by myself, I used Adobe After Effects to create the words of the poem and to move them. Then i use Animate Pro/Toon Boom to create and animate the imagery.

I didn’t really enjoy this project, thought I adored learning how to use the programs that we were instructed to use. I believe that the reason i didn’t enjoy it as well as others in my class may be because I not a lover of poetry so I could not get in to it.

However I am please with what I produce though I do think i could improve the imagery in the last verse.

Experimenting with Illustrator

Some cute illustrations created using Adobe Illustrator.

Experimentation with different brushes and creating brushes in Adobe Illustrator.

Poem Animation: Experimental animation

While planning the storyboard we were taught to use computer programs that may be useful in the future. The first one was Adobe Flash.

This animation is a response to the word ‘greyness’ taken from the first line of the poem.

The idea I had was for the word to slowly fade it to focus with the background different shades of grey. It was suggested that I use a brush with lots of dots however this created a problem when exporting it, as the computer didn’t like animating all those small dots. So I had to export it a an image sequence that convert that in to a mov file.

While this animation is in response to actions and adjectives within the poem, without the use of words.

The words I used were ‘smooth’ and ‘telescopic’.

I tried to created a ‘smooth’ action with wavy lines the comes together to create a circle then get bigger like the screen is zooming in.

Word animations created using Adobe After Effect. In response to the suggestion that the poem animation be mostly are from words.

Poem Animation: Thought Process

As well as the line test exercises, we were also ask to choose a poem and animated it.

As I am not one for poetry I choose a poem that I remember learning and analysing during GCSE english, Vultures by Chinua Achebe. After I chose a poem I drew some imagery in response to the words and lines within the poem, and I tried not to make the images too obvious and figurative.

Later I realised that the poem I chose was too long, as the brief was that the animation could be over a minute long. So I decided to cut the first verse, as was suggested. It was still quite long however if I cut any more of the poem off it would not make sense.

The Emotional Sack

The emotional sack is the exercise of showing emotion in an inanimate object that doesn’t have features to show emotion, and demonstrated it through body movements and language. A prime example of this is the Carpet in Walt Disney’s Aladdin.

For this the sack had to come into frame and change emotion eg. from sad to happy. We were also ask to have a go at perspective, having the sack come closer or go farther away, though this was optional.

I found this fun to do and I enjoyed creating the transition, though I did make it hard for myself by making the sack turnaround (though that is how I normally am, jumping into the deep end so to speak).

Personality Walk

The walk was difficult as there was so much you and to think about. How the character walked, what moved while it was walking, does the hair bounce, the arm swings and the bobbing up and down of the body.

For this I decided to use my character from the head turn, which created a challenge as I imagined my character wearing high heels while walking. Which meant that I had to think carefully how I would make her walk.

The first try didn’t turn out very well, the arm swings were off and i didn’t have a more noticeable bounce on the walk. So I redone it. The second try came out much better and I was praise for the movement of the handbag.

Head Turn

The third exercise was the head turn. For this we had to create a character and animate their head turning form one direction to the other. Keeping the shape of the head and features in proportion as well as have them change expression.

It was a challenge for me as drowning expressions have always been somewhat a challenge to get right. My first attempt was good, though I was told to add more to the change of mood. Example, make the shoulders shake more and change the mouth to make the character look as if she is growling more.

Skeleton Arm

The second exercise was to understand how to use the overlapping action and how to portray it correctly. To do this we were ask to make a limp skeleton arm follow a path on the paper and animated it.

This took me longer than the first week as I decided to use a long and more complicated path than my classmates. My first try at it I didn’t have the flow of energy in the arm right especially in the wrist joint, as it was too floppy.
However on my second try it turned out much better.