My Film Animation

Last semester I took a subject called Film Animation, it was a core subject and our lecturer/tutor was a professional animator and also a very laid back guy.
So laid back that in the end we just worked on the one assessment, when there was supposed to be two or something. We learnt how to use old school cameras, hand held ones that shouldn't be hand held because they're quite heavy and holding them for long periods of time would cause you to do a very slow pan down to the ground and the other type of camera was used for 2D animation, called an Oxberry camera.
The oxberry camera was cool, and was basically a top down camera, you put a piece of paper onto a platform, take a picture, change the paper to the next one, take a picture and so forth until you finish your animation. Thats a pretty bad explanation of what the camera is but if you want more information, google is your friend, I'm just your mate.

So our assignment was to work in groups and make an animation of anything, done in any style we want. A group did pixellation (Example Here), another did cut out animation, another did claymation (like Nightmare before Christmas or Coraline) another did 2D animation and our group did 2D animation.

There was four people in our group and we had to work together to make one piece of animation. Knowing that I sucked at drawing compared to the other people if we did one piece of animation using one style of art when it came to my scenes they would look horrible compared to the other scenes. One idea was to have people focus on certain parts of the animation, for example one person just does the main character, I just do backgrounds and so forth but this meant lots of meeting up and stuff to get things done, and who wants to meet up with their group?

I then took the Simpsons route and pitched the idea of a main character travelling through different worlds, and each worlds is taken care of by each animator, meaning four worlds all up. The character would travel to each world via a remote control, where it came from, nobody cares...
This idea was well received and we went ahead with the idea. The character would remain similar looking throughout the whole animation and each person's part would take 30 or so seconds each. Some people had high expectations for themselves, thinking they could do Disney-esque type animation, I took an easier path and did cut outs of my character and world. I decided to go with lots of colours and a bright world for my part, as the other worlds were different. So I went with the brightest and most colourful world I knew, the Mario world!

Now, the problem with Oxberry cameras is that you cannot go back, once you take a picture, thats it, so lots of people planned their scenes before hand. Timing everything out so that the animation would look good. I had cut outs however, and didn't find the time to time everything out properly. So I did a rough timing out of my animation and come filming day what I did was the first time I animated my part, which was quite interesting. Fortunately, I could edit it in post and did so to drag some frames out or to cut some frames out to make the animation flow better.
Overall I was pleased with my part, but compared to the other parts (particularly the first and last part), I pale in comparison. 2D animation is not my thing however, 3D is where I'm at. I'll have to compile some of the stuff I did this semester to show you guys, but that'll be another blog.

The subject was pretty fun because it was so laid back, we had no worries about failing because the lecturer was so care-free, he seemed like one of those stoner guys. A whole semester and one assignment, which produced a good result, I ain't complaining!