Tuesday 15 June 2010

Cartoon Network

____Onto Cartoon Network! My favourite project so far. The task was to create a motion campaign piece to encourage children to not only use their imagination, but to do something with it. I created a quick and simple character that I thought a child may have been able to come up with, and then visualised him in various ideas.

First, the final product:



I really enjoyed creating this animation, and it made me realise how much I love 2D hand-drawn animation. I never thought I could do it so easily but I just went with it and this is what I came up with. I shot the stop-framed hand (my own) on my own as everyone was busy and I had my own visualisation of how it should be anyway. The only issue I have with it is the camera jiggling about when I pressed the button. Easily re-done with a camera that can use an electronic release!

____At this point I also had no experience of Adobe After Effects and I was on a time limit, so with no time to learn, and just Photoshop and Windows Movie Maker at my mercy, to work I went! I took each stop-framed photograph of my hand and the pencil, and Photoshopped the character onto each frame, making it up to just over 400 frames.

The sound effects are mostly me. Especially the voices. Yes o.O


Back to the beginning! Animatics. I really enjoyed storyboarding these out and playing them together to see the results:










After the animatics, came the testing. I wasn't sure how this idea was going to even work, but, using common sense.. and Photoshop, I produced the following. The first test is a quick idea of how the animated character might interact with the stop-framed pencil, which I think went rather smoothly!




The second test below is just an idea of how "Animatic 3" could work if taken further. The 2D characters would of been Photoshopped over the playdoh blobs which keep the pencils and other tools in place as if being held up by the characters.



I'm glad I went with the idea I did. This one would of been very interesting to create, but much more difficult. Plus I really like the interaction between animator and cartoon character which my final idea had, as well as the exclusiveness of the one character, where as this one was used many of the same character idea. I'm pleased with the outcome of the concept as well as the method. I think it worked really well for the brief's target audience and gets the message across in a creative and memorable way too.

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