My First Year Cut-Out Animation

Name:  Daniel Newton 

Module No: ARD407 Ideas & Concepts

Assignment Title: Cut-Out

Animated Cut-out Characters: Based on an Apple and a Banana theme idea

Introduction

The requirements of this individual assignment was to create a short piece of music track of up to about 1 minute, and then create a synchronised  animated film to blend in with the track, to form a random character conversation.

In order to start this assignment the first thing that I did was to undertake some research on the animations created by Terry Gilliam, and Lotte Reiniger. I then produced my own soundtrack by gathering a lot of different track conversations from online radio stations. The next stage of developing this project was to create an animated video to blend in with the track.

Creating the sound track

After researching the animators that I have named I set to work to produce my soundtrack. I produced the track by gathering a lot of different conversations from various radio stations online such as Radio 1 and 4; I then mixed and edited the sounds together using the computer software “Audacity” to form a character conversation.

Creating the film

After producing the soundtrack I set to work to produce the animation to blend with the track. I started off by cutting out an apple and a banana to form the characters that I wanted to create. I cut out different eyes, eye brows and mouth shapes for each of the different letter sounds and also arms and legs for the apple and banana characters. In the end I decided not to use the arms and legs because the characters were always going to remain in the same location. By carefully listening to the track, frame by frame (25 frames per second) and by using dope sheets I marked in every frame where each letter of the character`s conversation where sounded and by following the dope sheets I got to work on producing the animation, by changing the mouth shapes in all the frames where each letter of the words where sounded.

Linking the film to the soundtrack

For the final stage I edited the soundtrack onto the animation itself. I did this at home by using the software “Windows Live Movie Maker”.

Evaluation

I think the final product has turned out really well, and turned out a lot better than I expected. The lip synchronisations of the characters appear to be well coordinated and only slightly out in a few places. This is something which could be improved in future assignments. One other minor fault is that the background moves slightly in the early stages of the animation because I forgot to tape it down, this again is something to improve in the future. The strength of the animation is the character lip synchronisation.

Taking all these points into consideration  I feel that I have done really well on this assignment as this is the first time I`ve worked individually on this type of assignment and I feel very pleased with how the final product was received by my fellow students at the critique .