The assignment
Before beginning this project I decided to perform a number of different searches about the E4’s Idents. After I had looked into E4 and what Idents they had produced over the years I cut it down to my top 3 favourite Idents.
E4 Flood
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJgE5xaabGs&feature=related
This advert Caught my eye because the racing tsunami in the car park, gave the impression of being chased by a huge tsunami. The special effects were used in a creative way to attract the viewer.
E4 Rain (Esting Ident)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvrclmZMWTc&feature=related
This advert is simple but effective it shows hundreds of E4 symbols falling from above in slow motion. I think they could have made the advert better by adding a few special effects such as giving the scene a back ground drop.
I also prepared A questionnaire for the public, asking them general questions about what they thought of E4 and the programmes that are played. Most people in terms of genre liked Comedy, Horror and sitcoms, compared to supernatural, family dramas and fantasies. When asked the question, ‘what age range are the channels aimed at’ the most common answer was 16-24.
In our group of four, we were assigned to create an E4 stop animation ident. For our final production we made a decision to create an ident using green Toy soldiers surrounded by trees in a forest. The soldiers shoot at the wall and the E4 symbol appears from there bullets. We all were assigned different jobs to do for instants: Director, props design, Sound Expert and camera man. My job consisted of assembly the props and materials needed to create our set. The materials used were Green tissue paper, green card and Background off tress.
Major development in animation
The first forms of animation were established in the Victorian times around the 1800s. The first forms of animation that were popular around these times were;
The Thaumatrope (1825) which consisted having a piece of circular card cut out with two different images on each side, with two pieces of string attached to each side whilst slowly twisting it.
Phenakistoscope (1833) uses a series of pictures with different frames in to rotate fast, creating moving images
The Zoetrope (1877) is a cylinder with images inside that rotate and has a small slit to look through.
Praxinoscope (1889) has the same concept of the Zoetrope but has mirrors in the middle of the cylinder to reflect the animation.
Later on a modernized invention called the Flick book which involved drawing an image a number of times on different pages with different actions.
1900’s
The first major development in Stop Animation was introduced in the 1900’s. In later years a man called James Stuart Blackton produced a short stop animated film called Humorous phases of funny faces.” The animation was produced on a black boards using only chalk, in 1906. To obtain this he would draw an image then stop the film erase it and continue doing throughout.
Other Short films associated with James Stuart Blackton are films such as, “THE HAUNTED HOTEL” Produced in 1907. Which consisted of using 3-D objects for example a bottle of wine pouring into an empty glass and a table being set up without a person being present.
1913
An American cartoon artist Pat Sullivan created a cartoon series called “Felix the Cat” which was silent based. This character became one of the most popular cartoons of its time. The process of creating the character was simple, the creator figured the idea for a cat was modest, and to make him all black so he didn’t have to worry about the outlines, and give the character unique personality.
In the 1920’s Felix the cat became even more popular and was given its own comic book strip. In 1927 the cartoon decided to take a chance in adding dialog to the character however the movement from silent to sound did not bring much success to the table. This was around about the time when Disney new mouse character appeared and seemed to draw away and gain new audiences.
1920
The 1920s showed an important development stage for animation.
At only 19 years of age a young man, Walter Elias Disney stared working in animation at Kansas City Slide Company. One of his first short cartoons produced was called “Laugh-O-Grams” which he made in Kansas City with his close friend Ubbe Iwerks. Walter had a huge chance when he was offered to move to Hollywood and produce his Alice in wonderland Comedies which were printed in newspapers. Disney soon moved onto create one of its most well know characters to date Mickey mouse. The mouse caught its first appearance in the cartoon “Steam Boat Willie” black and white film. Disney skills soon developed when they were offered to use the new Technicolor in there new cartoons.
There are many other concepts of the idea previously to do with basic stop motion animation, such as using basic resources like match sticks and drawings, puppets and lots of different frames of pictures and combining them into short films.
A good example of a number stop motions developing are classic films such as King Kong, Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans and Wallace & Gromit. The 1933 film King Kong which used stop animation to animate the Kong, Dinosaur’s and other creature’s movement. The stop animation used in this is, short frames shown together at a speed that makes our vision process movement. The creation process was prepared by building an 18inch body miniature of the gorilla, whilst using sponge and rubber to create Kong’s muscular frame. Because of the different types of scenes in the films, fragments from the sculpture would were down, so double the amount of parts had to be made. Marcel Delgado one of the sculptures had to create two heads out of rubber latex, but both heads were slightly different. The two heads were used in different scenes i.e. Skull Island along with the New York scene and the T-Rex fight scene.
In the film Jason and the Argonauts they use a great amount of stop motion, in one of my personal favourite scenes, the skeleton fight. Two make it appear as if they were in the same scene as the characters they overlapped the two images to become one scene. I especially enjoyed the section were the skeletons up rooted themselves from the ground. I especially liked the effect of speeding up the action when replayed, but also the way they cranked the cameras to slow down smaller actions, in order to give the impression that the lightweight swords were in fact heavy battle weapons.
Cel-Animation
When we’re sitting down watching those cartoons we love so such, what were actually viewing are Cel-animations. These animations involve on creating 2-D motion imagery’s such as, The Simpson, Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry. To create these animations the artists, first draws the sketches by hand, soon after tracing the drawing and then processing them drawing frames. The characters are then drawn and coloured in on the back of the cells and placed on a background drawing. Background designing is slightly harder because it’s seen longer, you have to focus on the detail to colour in the background, use of lighting and shading. Lastly using the camera to photograph the drawings.
3-D Animation
3-D animation appeared, to create a fresh new aspect of 3-D images and computer generated animation. 3-D animation fist exploded into the scene with Disney’s 1982 Tron which combined film characters with computer generated sequences. Although it only featured 15 minutes worth of computer animation it was a huge accomplishment they had made. Later on 3-D computer animation soon became a common use as successful films, such as Jurassic park and The Terminator began to incorporate them into their films.
It was only in 1986 when a small production made by Pixar studios got the recognition to be established after producing a short computer animated film called “Luxo.Jr”, which soon gave Pixar the idea to create its first CGI full length animation, which I must say was an excellent first film from Pixar to get the recognition they deserve.
Computer Animation soon took off even further when releases such as, Star Wars, Final Fantasy and Lord of the rings, began to win awards for best motion characters and photorealistic CGI Humans.
