WIP Project 3 – Pixilation

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

Our pixilation is about little magic tricks. We saw a video on YouTube which is about a person playing magic tricks with video editing. We saw one of the trick is a photo of kitty, when the photo got slammed onto the table, an actual kitty popped out. We took that as an inspiration to our project.

Our early story scenes

Originally, we wanted to set this story in the classroom but it is pretty impossible because we want a turtle to involve, which is my(Janelle) pet turtle. Bringing it outside and to the school are risking so we moved our story in Janelle’s bedroom.

Our final story :
Janelle is bored so she went ahead to her desk and doodle on a piece of paper. In the same time, Tan came in to see what is Janelle doing. After seeing her drawings, Tan brought out an ipad and an apple pen. She opened Procreate software to draw a black cat. She shook the cat out of the ipad, a little cat doll. Tan was proud of her magic trick. Janelle was amazed but she calmly pushed the doll away, starting to draw on her paper too. A turtle was drawn. Tan still thought her cat doll was better. In the end, Janelle showed Tan the same magic trick but it turned out to be a real turtle. Tan was completely beaten down by Janelle’s greatness of her magic.

Our setup this time is very simple. We only need a paper, an ipad, a pen, a black cat doll and an actual turtle. The only difficulty we have is that this is an one way ticket. As you can see our paper has to be destroyed in the end for the story, this is an one take only shooting.

I forgot to take a photo of the paper before it got destroyed lol
Our STAR of the video!

Thanks for reading 😉 !
By Janelle Thang and Jiawen Tan

Project 2 – WIP 1 – Experimentation

Posted on by Sydney McPherson

For our second project, Chandi and I wanted to be a little more ambitious. Before we met up to brainstorm an idea, I started doodling a character to practice the cutout technique. I made some quick sketches of a girl in a dress and I drew out each body part separately. Then I cut out the dress, legs, arms, head, and so on. Soon I realized I might need more poses for her legs, so I drew a couple bent legs and one of her standing on her toes.

The coffee table in my dorm has a glass top, so I used my phone and an app called Stop Motion Studio to shoot a quick test animation. The character isn’t connected at the joints yet, but I was still able to learn a bit about the technique we’ll need.

I went out and bought some fasteners that we can use for the joints on our actual characters and they’re quite big, so I know we can scale up our characters and backgrounds a bit. I also bought some scissors, so I don’t have to keep borrowing my roommate’s!

Chandi and I came up with a fun idea about a girl who is performing on the street for tips. She will trip and fall into a sewer that has toxic waste in it. She’ll then emerge as a mutated monster will glowing yellow eyes. As a monster she will now force all the people watching to dance for her. We might add an ending where someone comes and gives her an antidote, but for now the plan is to just have the camera pedestal towards the sky and it fade to black.

Storyboards and Character Experimentation
Test animation

Sydney McPherson

Chandi Marsh

Cut out animation WIP 1

Posted on by victoriacourchesne

Work in Progress Post- Project 2 : Pre-Production. Posted by Victoria Courchesne,

Team: Eunhae Mary Park & Victoria Courchesne

For the cut out animation assignment, Mary and I first began by planning the shots we would need. We discussed the original concept and our goal and then started sketching out what kind of camera angles we would have. Below you can see two pictures of my sketch book where we began drafting our idea.

Shot storyboards along with identifying assets and size of assets.
It was essential that we created an asset list in order to buy supplies before hand.

We sought to have a more ambitious project than the first stop motion we did. As you can see we planned out 6 shots- some which included a mixture of camera pans and zooms. For the project’s efficiency we decided to make the film black and white, that way we could use simple backgrounds and silhouettes to create a compelling image. I then created a word document and wrote a shot list guide that described each shot, it’s camera angle, the assets included, and a short description of animation.

More images to come soon in the next post that will feature the production of the project.

Project 1 – Object Animation WIP by Janelle and Tan

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

After seeing the assignment, it immediately brought memories back from my younger self. Talking about object movement, it was my all-time favourite thing to play with. I loved playing with toys, role-playing each characters and creating stories. During class before, I used to love playing with my stationary on the classroom desk. Every movement that I did to the pens, rubber, ruler and stapler are scenes of a story in my head, it is like watching a tiny movie with myself.

Therefore, I suggested a very short story with stationary so we did it. The story we chose is simply a knight slayed a monster. Here is our “actors”.

Random stationary + random objects we have

Characters:
USB and a Lipstick : Victims
Rubber : A Knight
Pegasus Toy : Royal ride of the Knight
Scissors : A Sword of the Knight
Random Stationary and An Apple Charge Wire : The Evil Monster

We first decided to use the scissors as the head of the monster because it looks dangerous, fitting the theme of a monster but after a few discussion, we decided to use the scissors as the sword of the knight and replaced the head with a stapler because the scissors actually have a cover which is similar to a sword, as for the stapler, it is much more easier to work with.

Originally, we only decided on the knight slaying a monster as the story. We wanted to add a clear opening and ending so we added victims, a quick reason for the knight to slay the monster and the monster is dead in the end.

We had a trouble of shooting this because I forgot to bring a phone holder for the assignment so we spent a little bit of time to find a way to hold the phone. We went to an empty room to shoot this and hold the phone with the two tables.

The finale when we are done shooting

One of the frame

One of the frame

Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle
Jiawan Tan