4D project finished

A few weeks ago we started on a mini-project at college based on moving image. Each group was tasked with producing a time-based piece, weather it was a flipbook, film or even a thaumatrope. This is what my group finished with:

I'm pretty chuffed with what we produced considering the constraints forced upon us. But before I delve into critical evaluation, I'm going to take you through the process that lead to the creation of this film.

Mindmaps <3

We started with a mind map- obviously. A few ideas were thrown around for how we could make a time based sequence of images/film, including a time-lapse or hyper-lapse which is a film of something slow i.e: trees growing, the sun & moon, building construction sped up very fast until the slow movements are perceivable at a human speed. The other idea was to make a stop motion animation of the equipment around college brought to life. We chose the second idea because College didn't have the equipment required to make a time-lapse and making a film in the art department felt more personal.
I had already researched a stop-motion artist named Pes who I find quite inspiring. My mum and I saw his degree piece, 'western spaghetti' in Birmingham in 2008 which definitely helped inspire ten-year-old me to produce 'Ninja: Diabolo', an animation about a diaboloing ninja:

Anyway, back to the current project at hand. We looked at videos by Pes and a few other animators, we really liked an animated TV series, 'Ooglies' that was on CBBC. I produced this slideshow of film techniques and inspirations. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted the film to look like. It would start with a shot of a light switch, someone would walk past, turn it off and shut the door. Then, slowly objects like paintbrushes start rattling about faster and faster until they all pop into motion and all start organising themselves upon the work surface. The film would then consist of various short scenes that show things around college such as Vices, easels, paper guillotines (see drawings on mind map above) bursting into life until someone comes back into the classroom because they left something and all the objects drop to the floor. I started a storyboard for this plan:

I didn't have the opportunity to finish this because we decided to just make what we could for the film. We were all given only two mornings to make the whole thing. Minnie and I set up a camera on a tripod and decided the first thing we'd animate would be the paper cutter.
I assumed the role of the animator- I would incrementally move the cutting head, step back then ask Minnie- the camerawoman to take a photo.  We had the camera set to Manual mode and manual focus so that the settings don't change during the film. The cameras usually shoot images that are 5184 x 3456px. This is huge and very difficult for a computer to process into a film (537,477,120 pixels per second). HD film is only 1920x1080 so we changed the camera to take the photos only that size (58,680 p/s).

'shwoosh, shwoosh, shwoosh!'

We managed to produce a few animations like this one, but not as many as I would have liked to have made. I also wanted audio to accompany the film. Foley is very important for pulling a film together and can have a huge effect. Pes, mentioned earlier, has beautiful, crisp foley accompanying his films which really seals the deal. Sadly, we had to be realistic and made what we could in the time given, this meant actually producing the film and not worrying too much about extra parts & details. I then edited all the parts together using photoshop and adobe premiere pro over the Easter holidays.
Right, now, you might want to watch it again and then we'll move on to the self evaluation.

As I said at the beginning, I'm still very pleased with what Minnie and myself achieved and feel that if we were asked to make this film again but were given more time, we'd make a rather professional looking film. I already knew quite a lot about animation but I definitely learned even more during this project and that's very important.