My First Year Mixed Media Animation

Name:  Daniel Newton              

Module No: ARD407 Ideas & Concepts

Assignment Title: Mixed Media

Introduction

The requirements of this assignment was to create a short piece of music track of up to about 1 minute, and then create an animated film to blend in with the track by developing and exploring the themes of Sound, Colour and Weight.

As this was an individual assignment the first thing that I did was to undertake some research on the animations created by Norman McLaren, Oskar Fischinger, John Whitney and Robert Breer. I then produced my own soundtrack that conveyed lots of different colour and weight. The next stage of developing this project was to create an animated video to blend in with the soundtrack.

 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 tapping, flicking and clicking boxes and keys on the table and I blew some whistle sounds on my recorder musical instrument. I then mixed and edited the sounds together on the computer software “Audacity” by also adding in some more music effects, such as amplifying a louder volume, reversing some sections and adding some echo effects.

 Creating the film

After producing the soundtrack I set to work to produce the animation to blend with the sound track. I started off 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 sound was recorded. By following the dope sheets I got to work on producing the animation by cutting out different shaped objects of different colours to match up with each sound. I used a Hammer shape for the Tapping sound, Musical notes for whistling, bird shapes for the flapping sounds and letters making up the actual words of Clicking and Flicking . I also used different colours for the backgrounds to match up with the different sounds and tones.

 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 soundtrack and animation were well synchronised and only slightly out of synch in some places but I think I can improve this in future when I get more experience with doping animation soundtracks. The strength of the animation is to show the different themes and tones of sound in weight and colour.

Above all I feel that I have done really well on this assignment as this is the second time I have worked individually on this type of assignment. I feel satisfied with how the final product has turned out and I feel very pleased with how the final product was received by my fellow students at the critique.