During week 11, I worked on producing my short story animation for Performance and character. I decided to use 2D animation for my work. The story of this animation was a comedy themed piece of a man playing putt putt golf but can't seem to get a hole in one on the second to last hole.
Story:
Story:
Short Story animation:
Synopsis:
A nice day at the beach and one young man decides to have a game of mini golf. However one hole gets the better of him. He tries to hit the ball into the hole about three times but fails. He gets angry and has a tantrum hits the ground with his club and storms off in a huff. In the end the ball goes into the hole of its own accord with a gust of wind.
Theme: Comedy.
Animation: Stopmotion/2D
Character biography.
Name: James Cutter
Age: 15
Hobbies:
Base ball, Computer games, Watches Top Gear.
Story:
Being a young man in high school James has been eager to try anything he hasn’t tried before, he finds a love in base ball and is on the school team. He plays computer games and finds a liking to driving games and sports games. Sometimes it's like he learns a sport from the games themselves. However one fault in his character is he gets to cocky in what he tries. He thinks on the first try he’s an expert after doing a good job. Though others tell him he’s not and when he’s pressured he gets anxious and bad tempered that he can’t answer the question put to him.
The story was inspired by many things such as funny golf videos and a classic Goofy Disney shorts of him learning golf. I got my reference footage from found golf footage on Youtube but also myself performing key movements such as the short putt. The key inspiration though was by an actual event that happened to me. When I went on holiday in Cornwall I played a little putt putt golf but there was one hole a small hump which I couldn't get a shot in. This animation would communicate what feelings I had about that very hole.
Reference and Inspiration:
I was feeling confident in my choice of story I was using inspiration from animator John Lasseter as when he produced the first Disney Cars film it was inspired by a road trip he took with his family after the success of Toy Story 2. I felt comedy was a good choice as well since I'd always wanted to do a comedy based animation. However I felt I couldn't do a looney tunes like animation.
But I decided to use different angles around the character and the hole and so I created backgrounds of the course and a close up of the hole.
When doing the animation I felt the most difficult part was mapping out the swinging movements from an angled standing pose. Thats when I used the Barsheets and storyboards to help in planning those movements, and learning from last year I looked back at the reference footage.
I was feeling a little anxious about the length of my short story as I was trying to keep it short and sweet as Johny our tutor recommended. I estimated it would take at least 20 seconds. I felt rather unsure about some of the swings of the club in the first few frames as they looked like they skipped between in-betweens and key frames.
Once the animation was finished I improved some of the scenes of my animation. I wanted to include some facial expressions. However I remembered that Joe said it was mainly about the performance in the character and could add expressions if I had the time.
Looking back on my animation I would think I did a very good job on my story and animation. I did like how I communicated some of my feelings about the golf hole in the animation (even if one idea I had involved a steam roller). However I feel I could've improved upon some areas.
One of which would be the positioning of the character. Originally the character wasn't lined up with the golf ball and I had the character step back. Another would be the angry walk which I took inspiration and reference from the survival kit maybe I needed to slow the walk animation down a little so I could see the frames better.
I was beginning to be reminded how important the barsheets and reference footage was for this kind of animation.
Overall I am rather pleased with the animation and hope that the feedback I receive from my fellow students may help to improve or refine it. In future I shall take the time to consider taking more time to look at the frames and the lining up of the characters to certain objects.
Comments
Post a Comment