Life on Mars

This is the last project I worked on last semester.  It has some noticeable quality issues, mainly dealing with the focus, and with the camera moving.

Here is how I made it.  I borrowed some lego guys and pieces set them up on a table in my living room, and used my Nikon D40 DSLR camera to take pictures.  Just to get some perspective.  There are approximately 570 pictures for this 19 second animation.


It is a fun little story so I hope it makes you smile.

Website

Here is my website I did for this class.
http://fs.finearts.utah.edu/~pchristison/ChristisonpProject1/

Abbey Road - Final

As promised here is the finished product of my Abbey Road animation.  This is the part that took the longest.  I took the original paper and traced it onto cels.  Which are basically clear plastic sheets and then applied paint to them.  I was actually able to keep a pretty low number at 89 cels.  This was possible because I would shoot them walking in cycles just moving the cel over a bit each cycle, which makes it look like they are walking across the road.  When in reality I only drew them walking about 1 step.

It was both fun and frustrating to make.

A New Claymation

I have been working on a new animation. It is called The Opening. It documents the story of an old man who needs to setup an art show. Now I don't want to go into any detail at this point because it isn't quite done yet but I have some documentation for you.

As the title suggests this is going to be a claymation.  And inside the figures that get covered in clay is a skeleton called an armature.  Now this one is built out of twisted wire masking tape, and zip ties.  This makes him very strong while maintaining his flexibility.

He stands about 8 inches tall and when he has clothes and clay on him he ends up looking like this

Today I actually started the animation process.  I built him a living room to sit in (you can see the chair in this shot) out of foam and cardboard, and was able to shoot the first 5 seconds.  This animation will end up being about 2 minutes and 30 seconds long.  

Anyway that is just a quick introduction to it.  Next week I'll let you see the third part of Abbey Road.

Abbey - Road Part 2

So here is part 2 of the Abbey Road Animation where the bus get introduced. This is what is called a Pencil Test. Where elements are added to see how the animation will look. So it's not the finished product but now all of the elements are there.

To add the bus. I drew it one time, then scanned it into aftereffects. Which I used to make it smaller as it disappears into the background. I printed out each frame and traced them.

Abbey Road - The beginning of a Journey

This animation is practically titled Abbey Road. It is the first part in a three part series of animation that took me most of the semester last year. The total project has over 80 hours invested into it.

The premise is that it is the Beatles walking across abbey road only to be hit by a bus.  I came up with this concept by bouncing ideas off my father when he gave me a ride home from work one day.

Part one is what is called a line animation.  It is just black lines on a white piece of paper.  It is colored in with colored pencil but it is still far from the finished project. Not even all the elements exist yet.  So for now we have the Beatles walking across the road, and then they disappear.  In the next segment we will introduce the bus.

Mr. Fox

Just a short blurb today.

My next adventure took a step away form the traditional. This is lovingly titles Mr. Fox, it was the project I did for my 2D computer animation class. It is about a Fox who has a hard day, and all he wants to do is get home to his wife. However, he is finding the unreliable bus system difficult.

My wife drew all the images for this because she is amazing, and I put it together with After Effects, and composed the music in garage band. So here is Mr. Fox

Stanley the Weiner dog

Here was my first attempt and claymation. I ran into some trouble with this one.  First the clay I used wasn't the best so, after being under stage lights for a couple hours he began to fall apart.  I didn't really have a story to go along with this. I had little idea of what I was doing.  However, I have learned from my mistakes and am planning on doing a bigger production this semester. As for Stanley; while he was a good projector I don't see him making a reappearance in any of my future work.

To make Stanley I had to build a skeleton (called an armature) out of metal wire and cover him with clay.  He is setup on a large table  and a bunch of still shots are taken.  There isn't much complexity to this one so once again enjoy.

Skeleton Strip poker

The next animation that I did is a technique called rear-lighting.

Like a cut-out animation the basic principle is to use paper cut outs. This time though they are placed and a slightly transparent surface and lit from behind making the cut-out appear as silhouettes.

I completed this around October so I decided to go with a Halloween theme.  What I came up with is the basis of skeletons playing strip poker.  You have the one skeleton who deals out the cards, they all examine what they have. After they lay down we find that the smallest is the loser so in payment the other 2 take his head.

To make the characters I printed skeleton decorations from online, cut them out, and glued them to a harder paper.  I ran into some difficulty as the surface I had to animate on was much smaller than I had previously anticipated.  So it became a challenge to fit all 3 characters in the frame. 

It ended up being just over 10 seconds long, and I hope you enjoy it.

Ninja Phil! My First Animation

I have been in film school for the last couple of years, and this time around I decided to try my hand at animation.  

For my first project I was assigned to do produce a 10 second animation using cut-outs.  The basic theory is to use construction paper to cut out little puppets.  You then move them a little bit and take a picture, move them slightly more, and take another picture.  To produce 10 seconds I had to repeat that process 300 times, which may not seem like too many but it takes several hours worth of work.

For Ninja Phil I made two puppets out of construction paper. I have a ninja and a girl.  Now the ninja is in love with the girl and wants to take her away, so he climbs over the wall and drops down near her.  At this point she thinks that he has come to kill her but instead of producing a sword he pulls out a bouquet of flowers.  I was originally going to do something a little more complex, but didn't quite have the time.  The Background is simply two pieces of scrapbooking paper one cut to look like a hill. The wall is also made out of scrapbook paper cut to look like rocks and glued on a piece of construction paper.

Next time I will go into a little more depth on the creation process, such as pictures of the animation stand where I work.  

For now just sit back and enjoy the show.