Evaluation

For this assignment, we were asked to create a stop motion TV ident based on any channel and whatever topic that channel is based on, this can include Youtube and internet channels and we were even allowed to create our own channels, as long as they were tasteful.

To start off the assignment, as research we were asked to look into the history of animation and how stop motion came into existence. After this was all done we were then asked to think about what channel we would like to create our own animation for, as I really enjoy gaming, I decided to go with the GINX channel, a channel well known for the fact that it targets the gaming audience. After this was decided, I then had to decide on what I would do for my final piece, I originally had around five ideas that I really enjoyed the idea of, however, looking further into these, I realised that a lot of them were interesting but they required a lot of work and were too time consuming so I decided to stick with my first choice. Once this was all done, I then began to work on the actual piece, I started by creating a TV frame out of paper and then cutting this into several pieces, I then slowly put the pieces back together and taking a photograph with every small movement to create the effect of movement. After I had this, I then had to create the flash content and this was to create the effect of a television turning on and the logo itself. The logo was easy to create as all it required was putting the logo onto flash and then editing it to give it its own sense of movement. After that, I then went to creating the switch on effect, this required me to look into several videos and examine the exact motion and effect that they go through in order to recreate the very same effect of a TV turning on, this made the animation rather difficult as this effect can last around half a second.

With this all done, I was then able to get into the body of the animation which would be the compilation of trailers and gameplay, this required getting high quality videos off of the internet and then placing these videos onto a program called "IMovie". With all the videos on IMovie, I then cut them into smaller clips and put them together to resemble a montage, this wasn't too hard and I really enjoyed the process. The next section would be then placing this over the stop motion, this required a little work as I was rather unsure of how to do this but after getting it all to work, I was rather happy with the final presentation, it required placing the videos onto a "screen on screen", after this was all done, I just had to export the video as an MP4, I did this by converting the video to a quicktime file, this made it far easier to export and the video could be viewed on pretty much every system.

Overall, I was rather happy with the end product, it was fun and easy to accomplish, I was new to everything used in the assignment but I still found it fairly easy to get used to, this could be the user friendly interface of IMovie, however, it was definitely far more interesting to experiment and it should be obvious through the variety of different file forms i.e. Animation, stop motion and actual video clips. I would say that despite it being rather easy to use, there were a lot of complications in the development process with some of the files going missing and even the original more improved piece of work being completely deleted, thankfully, the programs I used made several backup files allowing me to work up from whatever had been saved and this did leave me lacking in terms of any extra alterations or audio improvements. If I was given the chance to work on this project again, I would definitely go along the same route but I would maybe act a little differently about it in order to make the whole process a little easier and this would then allow to me add in the improvements I wanted to make presently. But overall, I was really happy with the final piece and I would be really enjoy the chance to try this assignment again.

Work Process

Once I had gone through the ideas, I then began creating the whole animation. To start, I had to first cut an A4 piece of paper into a box shape with the centre missing, to resemble at TV screen, once this was done, I then began to tear at the pieces so that these pieces could then be placed together in the actual animation. We then grabbed a camera and began taking photographs, we did this by starting off with taking a photo of an empty table/desk and then slowly moving a the pieces of paper into view and taking another photo after every small motion, we did this with every piece of paper, placing them together to once again resemble the TV screen, we then took several more photographs of the TV screen shape itself in order to get the effect we needed.

Once I had all the photographs I needed, I then placed them onto my computer to edit them all together through Flash, once this was done, I then needed to create the image of a television turning on as I couldn't just have the clips of gameplay footage suddenly just appear as it would feel disjointed and out of place so I found a clip of a TV switching on, I then used this footage to recreate the very look of this into Flash, it was a difficult process and required taking note of split second changes and effects as the effect of a TV switching on is roughly about a second and half long. After this was all sorted out, the last thing required within Flash, was to create the logo animation itself. I created the logo by placing the GINX logo (GINX is the gaming channel that I had decided to base my ident on) onto Photoshop, I then grabbed several images related gaming i.e. guns, cars and remotes, I then edited these to look similar to the GINX logo, I did this by changing the colours to look identical to the logo itself, I then placed them all into Flash, overlapping the different images and then animating them to give the logo a slight sense of movement.

After I had finished off creating all of the original pieces of animation, I then had to find clips to put into the ident of video games, this was easily done by collecting all of the most relevant clips and trailers that had been released around the time of the development of this animation. I then placed all of the clips I had created and collected into a film editing program called "IMovie". Being new to this program, it took a little bit of time to understand the features of this program but I eventually put together all the clips and trailers and then placed a song of my choice over the compilation. After this was all done, I then had to place this compilation over the top of my stop motion animation, this was done by dragging the compilation on top of the stop motion with "Screen on screen" enabled, this overlaps the clips and then allows you to place whatever edits you wish onto the overlapped screens. After this was all done, I then exported the file as Quicktime file, this was the easiest and most accessible file form.

Development Ideas

For our assignment, we were asked to create a short stop motion TV ident, these are small adverts that distinguish what specific channel you are on, the more recognisable idents would be the BBC ads and their circle imagery.

We were allowed to create idents for whatever channel we like, this would include Youtube channels and if we do not like any of the options then we are also allowed to create our channel and provide and ident for that. Being a huge fan of gaming, I decided to do an ident based on games. These are the options that I decided on.

1. A stop motion animation in which hands would create a television out of pieces of paper and card, video footage of games would then be provided to make it appear as though the paper TV had turned itself on and started broadcasting gaming footage.

2. A stop motion animation of different statues and toys based on characters from games, I felt that this would look rather silly and would not suit the style that I wanted.

3. I wanted a full Flash animation based on gaming involving multiple gaming characters coming together and standing in front of the logo for the channel, I originally enjoyed the thought of this but I decided against using this as it was not properly using stop motion and relied entirely on regular animation, the time used to make this would also be far too long for me to cope with.

4. A stop motion of photographs of video games interacting with one another, this means a character in one photo would stretch out his arm and shake hands with a character from another photograph. This would take a lot of time and would also cost me a lot of printing paper, also ruling out this option.

5. A very simple stop motion animation of video game cases slowly moving around the screen, using stop motion I can create the feeling that these cases were slowly moving around and acting as a border for the logo. This was far too simple and I decided to leave this option.

I decided to stick with the original idea as it felt like it would be interesting to work with both animation, stop motion and the use of actual film editing to insert the gaming footage, I felt that it could take a fair amount of time but the experimentation in the different mediums would be well worth the time.

History Bibliography

The links provided were the source of all information provided within my posts about the history of Stop Motion animation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion
http://www.stopmotioncentral.com/articles-5.html
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Stop_motion.html
http://www.lomography.com/magazine/lifestyle/2011/11/23/a-short-history-of-stop-motion-animation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film
http://ths1.ttsd.k12.or.us/cs/studentwork08/rebe_hubbweb/1800.html

Stop Motion from the 1980's to Present

Within the 1970's and 1980's, Industrial Light and Magic used stop motion animations for such films as the original Star Wars trilogy. Taun Tauns, AT-AT walkers in the Empire Strikes Back and the AT-ST Walkers from Return of the Jedi were all stop-motion animation, some of it using Go films (this was the use of programming a computer to move body parts and limbs slightly through each frame of the film). Many shots of the ghosts within Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark and the first two feature films of Robocop series use Phil Tippetts go motion version of stop motion.

In 1980, Mark Paul Chinoy was the first director to create a full feature length clay animated film, a film based on the famous Pogo comic strip. It never got a commercial release however, despite being a claymation, some of the animation did require armatures and some needed Hard based legs when going along a specific path. 

Stop motion was also used within the final scenes of Terminator and primarily used throughout the film "Batteries Not Included" in 1987, animated by David W. Allen. His other pieces of work can be seen throughout films like "The Crater Like Monster" (1977) and "Q - The Winged Serpent" (1982) and his King Kong Volkswagen advertisement is now famous among stop motion fans.

In 1985, Will Vinton and his team released an incredibly ambitious stop motion film by the name of "The Adventures of Mark Twain", based on the life and works of the famous author. Another famous set of films to take note of would be the work of czech animator Jan Svankmajer, these films would be known as "Alice", a take on the obvious "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll. Since then, many films have stood out in due to their use of stop motion i.e. "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and "The Little Mermaid" around the 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's. Since then, there have been an increasing amount of films in the stop motion industry, the main company headlining these would be the Tim Burton franchise i.e. "Corpse Bride" and "Nightmare Before Christmas" which were entirely stop motion, both were directed by Henry Selick who was also in charge of "James and the Giant Peach" and "Coraline" and another largely known animator would be Nick Park, the man responsible for the "Wallace and Gromit" series and movies. 

Stop Motion from the 1960's to 1970's

In 1965, animator Eliot Noyes Jr. released the film "Clay" which was also known as the origins of the series of films "Species", he later released a second film in 1975 by the name of "Sandman" and this was based on a music video about sand laying on a piece of glass.

In 1975, animator and film maker Will Vinton joined with sculptor Bob Gardiner to create an experimental film by the name of "Closed Mondays" and this became the worlds first film to win an oscar, Will Vinton soon decided to follow up the success of this film with several other smaller projects called "The Great Cognito", "Creation" and "Rip Van Winkle", these were each nominated for Academy awards. 

Soon after the release of his separate smaller films, he released a documentary explaining the process and development of his animations and the work that goes into them, this documentary was given the name "Claymation" and although it may be a very famous term throughout the industry, the name is actually trademarked by the company Laika Entertainment. Twenty claymation episodes featuring a clown named Mr. Bill were a feature of Saturday Night Live and the original aired on February 1976. 

Sand coated puppets were then utilised in the award winning animation "Sand Castle" in 1977, produced by a Dutch-Canadian animator Co Hoedeman. One of the many animators that were taken under the wing of the National Film Board of Canada, a film arts agency that has supported animators for decades. 

Italian stop motion films include "Quoq Quao" (1978) by Francesco Misseri, this was the first animation to utilise origami. "The Red and the Blue" and multiple animations based on clay kittens by the name of "Mio and Mao". The main European animation, however, would be the stop motion animation series of Tove Jannson's The Moomins in 1979.

Disney soon began experimenting with several stop motion techniques by hiring independent animator/director Mike Jittlov to do the first animation of Disney's Mickey Mouse toys produced for a short animation by the name of Mouse Mania to commemorate Disney's 50th birthday in 1978. Jittlov produced multiple multi-technique stop motion animation a year later as promotion for Disney's latest film "The Black Hole", Jittlovs work stood out as the best part of the special. He then later released a new film by the name of "The Wizard of Speed and Time" along with four other short multi-technique animations, these all eventually became their own full feature length films. The film was released to cinema in 1987 and then to video in 1989.

The Origins of Stop Motion

Stop motion was originally a form of film and was the very first attempt at animation. This technique is done to create the feeling of motion using a physical object i.e. a rock or a piece of paper. This is done by taking photographs of the object and then moving the object before taking yet another photograph, after you have done this multiple times and you put these photographs together in a sequence, you will eventually get the sense of motion.

The first use of stop motion was used around the same period that film was first introduced, with film very much going along the same line of animation, this is obvious through the very first film in 1879 in which Eadweard Muybridge, the inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, wanted to see the motion of a horses legs when it gallops, to do this, he created the "Zoopraxiscope", a camera that utilised his fast camera shutter , this captured a series of images that represented the sequences of motion.

However, the real use of object manipulation and stop motion began around 1897, this was a small animation by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton by the name of "Humpty Dumpty Circus" in which a toy circus of animals and acrobats suddenly come to life and perform. In 1902, a second film "Fun in a Bakery Shop" was released by Georges Melies and performed the technique "Lightning sculpting", however, he never used this process again in any of his other pieces. 

In 1907, Stuart Blackton returned with yet another animation by the name of "The Haunted Hotel", this film was a massive success and gained much popularity, so much so that a Spanish film maker by the name of Segundo de Chomon created a film along the same lines with the name "El Hotel Electrico" later that year, using the very same process. 

One of the original uses of clay animation would be a film called "modelling extraordinary" and audiences were blown away by the experience. And in 1916, Willie Hopkins introduced the first of his 54 episode series "Miracles in Mud" to the big screen. Later that year, the first female animator by the name of Helena Smith Dayton brought out her own film which was an adaption of the famous novel/play Romeo and Juliet. 

Later in the century, we were finally introduced to some of our more famous animators i.e. Willis O' Brien, an animator best known for his work on "The Lost World" and more importantly "King Kong". 

His protege and successor Ray Harryhausen, after working under O' Brien during the film "Mighty Joe Young" (1949), Harryhausen would eventually create three of the biggest films in history: "Jason and the Argonauts", "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" and "Clash of the Titans". These gave birth to one of the biggest scenes in stop motion - the skeleton fight in "Jason and the Argonauts", a scene in which actors and stop motion skeletons would interact with one another seamlessly, and audiences were dazzled by the work.