Ronnie Leah, BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts, UCA Rochester.

 Now that I have found the ages I want to target for my animation, ages 5-7 (KS1), I now wanted to get a better understanding of the requirements to produce work at this level. I went on the official government website and took notes about the key details (published September 2013). The student must: Develop awareness of the past, common words and phrases Know where people and events fit in a chronological framework Identify similarities and differences between the past and present  Use a wide range of historical vocabulary Ask/answer questions Understand a few ways in which we uncover the past The goal is to introduce the topic to be further developed up at higher levels later on (KS2/KS3) Taught about: Major changes within living memory Significant national/global events beyond living memory, example: Great Fire Of London  Lives of significant individuals Significant historical events  I can now use this information to ensure my animation meets the standard of KS1 ...

 As my Mum is a primary school teacher, she was able to provide me with two examples, one year 1 and the other aimed at year 6, of lessons about evolution. I want to analyse how both presentations cater to the audience in order to understand educating different age ranges. I can then use the information to decide whether one of these ages will be my target audience for my animation, or whether I need to look at an audience which is younger/older.  The Year 6 (KS2) Presentation - The Life Of Charles Darwin The presentation starts by explaining who Darwin was, a bit about his early life and how he became the naturalist aboard the ship HMS Beagle. It does this through mostly chunks of text. The text is informative, with facts to back up the information. There is a single picture in the centre which breaks up the text and offers some context visually about what the text is talking about. The following slide describes the Beagles voyage. I like this slide particularly as it has eno...

 I decided to refer back to the brief after investigating evolution. On the brief it states that you should " demonstrate your ability to interpret, transcribe and represent complex ideas in engaging and dynamic ways".  In order to understand how I can effectively do this, I wanted to watch the film Fantastic Voyage which the unit is based on. Fantastic Voyage is about a submarine full of a crew, shrunken down to a microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a scientist. The goal of the film is to reach the brain in order to prevent the scientist from dying from a blood clot. The film came out in 1966, however did not seem too dated. I think this was mainly due to the use of practice props which helped give an authenticity to the film. The story follows Grant, a hired bodyguard and his experience along with the crew of scientist as they travel through the human body. As the viewers are most likely not scientist, Grant acts as a good tool to educate the audience so t...

 I now want to look back at the PowerPoint to investigate the information in more detail in order to help me to identify what sort of things I want to include in my animation. The animation I have to create is only 3 minuets and I have to take into consideration everything has to be made and animated in 3D. At the beginning of the presentation it mentions a man named Rudyard Kipling. I decided to research him in order to understand who he was and how he is linked to evolution.  Kipling was a famous Indian born British writer and poet, active around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He wrote a book called "Just So Stories" published in 1902, which gave fictional backstories to how animals gained their specific features He made up and told the stories to his daughter in order to put her to sleep at night. At the time she was 6 making his target audience children, the same audience I want to aim my animation towards. As the book is considered a classic of children's li...

 On my previous course I had to investigate the importance of audiences. I did this by looking at how video games are designed in order to appeal to their target audience. I decided to revisited and build upon the research done.  To begin, I want to firstly understand what an audience is. An audience is a collected group of individuals who consume any type of media. They are the people the product appeals to and are the ones who will purchase it. If there was no audience, companies would have no one to sell to and so there would be no profit. Companies must learn to adapt with the times, meaning they must always put the audience's needs first in order to have a successful product. An example of this is news papers. With the rise of technology, news paper companies have had to find a way to digitize their paper in order to keep up with their audiences needs. You no loner have to travel all the way to a shop and pay for a physical newspaper and can instead access it form any dev...

 After thinking About the audience, I think I want to aim my animation to educate younger people. At this point I don't know how young and so I will need to research the different methods used in order to educate different ages. This will then allow me to identify what sort of information needs to be included in the animation and also the type of story it will tell to convey that information. When referring back to the topic, I want to go with evolution. To me this is still the most interesting and I feel I can create a visually interesting animation with the information provided.  My next step is to research the importance of the audience in order to get a better understanding. 

 Today we began making a rig which could eventually be used in an animation. This was an interesting process to learn as I have never used the rigging section of Maya before. It was interesting to see how to make something which quite heavily influenced the last project (from Script To Screen previz) and I am interested to see how the rest of the rig will be made.

 Today I was introduced to the new unit, Fantastic Voyage. The goal of this unit is to create an educational, fully realised animation, aimed at a specific audience. The three topics provided were Energy, Plastic and Evolution. Each of the topic's came with a PowerPoint of information detailing what sort of things need to be covered in order to meet the criteria. You can then focus on researching and explaining a specific point found in the PowerPoint or simply use all of the information provided. After looking through all three, the topic I am most interested in is evolution, with plastics being my second choice. The reason for picking evolution is mainly due to me understanding that topic the most which will hopefully allow me to convey the information more effectively. I also really like the story of Charles Darwin and his travels on the HMS Beagle, which seems like an interesting topic to animate. I chose plastic as my second choice as there is a section in the PowerPoint talki...

  Reflective statement Overall I am very please with my work this project. I feel like I connected with this project more than the previous two as all the ideas where my own and I was not told what to do apart from include the three objects. I feel like I incorporated the three objects, Hospital, Magician, Briefcase, in a really unique way and did my best throughout to ensure I looked at every type of possibility. I spent a lot of time just researching in order to understand what it is I'm creating and always looked for a way to make my story better. I am proud that I was able to take three seemingly irrelevant objects and put them together to form a narrative which is in my opinion very strong. I love being able to look back at my old ideas and being able to see what processes I went through in order to come to the final product. It feels good to finally have the end result in the form of the previz as it represents all the hard work I put into the project. I also feel I finally m...

 Today I brought all of the elements together in order to create the previsualization for my story. Previzulizations are block out animations, detailing what is going to happen before full production of an animation begins. From completing the toolkit 1 tutorials, I have been able to practise using the camera and animating, so I felt prepared to do the previz.  Using my animatic as a reference, I attempted to recreate my drawings in 3D. The majority of my time was used to setup the characters and camera, so that the scene played out similarly to the animatic.   Once I had play blasted each of the shots, I then stitched them together using Adobe Pro Create.  Once all of the scenes were put together, I put the video in audition and applied the same sounds as my animatic. 

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  I downloaded the characters from the resources and took their textures into photoshop. This allowed me to draw my own rough textures for both my characters. While not perfect I feel it does the job quite effectively. I also modelled a cape and hat for the magician which I attached to his skeleton. 

 The hospital did not need to be very complicated as it is only seen for one shot from one angle.

 I used the images below as inspiration for my theatre.  To begin making the theatre, I started by making the curtains for the stage. To do this I made a plane, rotated it 90 degrees and selected create nCloth in the FX tab. This caused the plane to fall down when the timeline is played. I then created a cylinder above the plane and constrain the cloth to it. Now when the video is played you are able to move the cloth around and create unique ripple effects. I did this until I created curtains I was happy with.  I then moved on to the stage which was really simple as its only a cube. I imported the character I will be using into the scene to help me scale everything properly.  Once that was done I decided to make the chairs for the audience. I could then duplicate this chair around the scene to build up the shape of the theatre.  I then continued this for the second floor.  Finally I applied materials to the scene

 These are the final videos from the animation tutorials. Mushroom Squash And Stretch Cartoon Drifting Car Anticipation With Robot Arm Felix Jnr Walking Animation After completing all of the animation tutorials I feel I now have a better idea of how to use Maya. I initially was not sure how animations were actually made in Maya and now know multiple ways of creating different animations. I can now use this knowledge for all future projects and refer back to the videos if I get stuck.

 Ben Burtt Ben Burtt is a voice actor, screenwriter, director, film editor, but importantly, a sound designer. I thought given his range of skills and many years working within different parts of the film industry, he would be perfect to do my sound designer profile on. He has worked on many huge franchises including the Star Wars and Indian Jones franchises, as well as landmark films including ET and Wall-E. He is the man who popularized the famous Wilhelm scream, which has had a massive impact on pop culture even today. Further famous sound created for the Star Wars universe include R2D2's robotic voice, The humming for the lightsabres, The sounds the Ewoks make, Darth Vader's famous breathing and the blaster sounds for the guns. Instead of using electronic sounds found in sci-fi films at the time, Burtt wanted to provide his version with a more natural sound. This lead him to record sounds such as the blasters by hitting a guy wire on a radio tower with a hammer.   He ...

 Below are the three soundscape clips I have completed for the project and a reflective statement about the unit as a whole. With the first sound I tried to create the sound of water dripping into a void. I got a sort of endless vibe from the picture as if each of the blue lines were dripping into the unknown. I used the spinning of a microwave to create the endless cycle of the void, adding a phaser effect to make it fluctuate more rapidly. The sound then moves on to the sound of draining water, to demonstrate the water being pulled to the void. I recorded my bath draining to get this sound and made it a deeper sound in Audition. You can then hear the sound of running water, which I got from recording my tap. This sound is more quiet compared to the others and continues to represent the water being pulled. As the sound continues you then hear the dripping of water. I thought it would be a good end as it represents the water running out.  The next image reminded me of the crac...

  This sound is the sound running water which I got from recording my tap. I put it on a low pressure to ensure it sounded like the natural falling of water to match the image.  I got this sound from recording the draining of water from my bath. I recorded the dripping of the water from the tap for this one.  This is the sound of running water I captured from recording my tap running. This is the sound of my microwave I captured to represent the sound of the void for the image.  This is the sound of a Coke can being crushed. This is meant to represent the cracking of the ice I got this sound by hitting two metal spoons together and is meant to represent something hitting the ice to make it crack. This is the sound of static recorded by changing the channel to FM on the radio.  This was recorded by running my finger along a spring connected to my microphone.  For this sound I recorded my electric toothbrush. I moved the toothbrush towards and away from the m...