Team Project Animation Research
Short Animation Research
(11/10/18) Watching numerous short animations on YouTube I have noted some similarities and differences between what I have watched.
Firstly, staging stays consistent and presentable throughout the animation - always working with the characters (art direction) to ensure nothing looks out of place.
With each animation I viewed being between 5 - 10 minutes long, the story was strong and to the point, not dragging on for too long to ensure the viewer remained invested in the story. Considering the length of these animations, most build an strong view of the world they are set in. Though most of the world building is left to the interpretation of the viewer.
Art Direction
Styles differ drastically between animations - some animations may offer voice acting, while others are silent; relying music and more expressive movements to portray emotion. The short (right) is primarily silent, only offering gasps and sighs from the characters.
Character movement can also be based on the art direction of the animation; more stylized animations may opt for a snappier movement to their characters. Though this isn't always the case, the animation (below) was largely stylized with hand-drawn environments and cell-shaded like characters; featuring fluid motion.
While the animation to the right does feature a great art direction, I feel the whole animation drags on too much. It's easy to watch for the first 2 - 3 minutes, after this however, the animation begins to drag. It's trying to do too much at once and would have been fine finishing a few minutes in.
What I take away from this is that: in our team project, we shouldn't have a scene drag on too much. As we're going for a quick scene-to-scene type of animation, this shouldn't be a problem. We need to be careful that the wind-up to the punch line doesn't take too long, the animations that we will create need to be quick and to the point.
Example of fast, snappy movement in a short animation.
While brainstorming ideas for our animation, we came to the idea of creating animations that contradict famous movie quotes. This would include the animation taking the quote out of context to deliver a punch line. We each began looking for animations that also used this idea, each of us all came across this video and channel:
While this is a 2D animation, it still portrays the type of animation that was in my head. A short, to the point type of animation that delivers the joke out of context, then moves quickly to the next scene. All of the team was in agreement that this was the type of animation we wanted to go for.
From this series of videos, after seeing animals being used in some of the shorts, I got the idea to use animals in one of my storyboards. This storyboard's featured quote is "What we've got here is, failure to communicate." and features a group of animals in a psychiatrist's office.
Watching these videos helped me to generate new ideas and expand my thought process when it comes to story-boarding for this project.