MACA – Practice based research

During UNIT 1 I did a lot of learning and practicing of animation techniques. I learned more clearly the logic of making animation and the animation laws that I need to pay attention to.

I think lip synch is my most complete animation because I tried paper cut and dubbed my own voice. First, I recorded my own dialogue based on the theme, and during the recording process I tried different emotions to express this simple sentence, but the results were very different. The change of mood made the sentence full of storytelling. Then I started sketching.

For the character design, because of the focus on expression, my character only has an upper body and no silhouette. I have also made the placement of the facial features in a disorganized but orderly manner – the eyes are at different heights and the mouth is tilted to one side. This design makes my characters more vivid! I then captured my mouth changes on video and completed the animation sketch on TVPaint against the changes.

The thing that took me the longest was the paper cut. Because the characters in the animation will move near and far, I need to cut out different sizes of paper. For example, for the hand forward motion and follow through, I cut different sizes of fingers. The shoot went a lot smoother because I made the animation sketches in advance.

Finally I imported the filmed movie into premium, minus the green screen and added my own painted background. Since the dialogue scene is on an airplane I painted an airplane window and seat. The background was light in color because I wanted to highlight the characters.

Reflection: During the process of making this animation I felt the importance of animation prep. I think what I did well is that the paper cut animation also focuses on animation principals such as FOLLOW THROUGH, which makes my stop-motion animation more smooth and natural. Where I think it fell short was that the images were not spatial enough because the paper cutouts were flat. I think the character’s head and hand can be enriched with back and forth movement so as to reflect the sense of space. In the future, I think I can enrich the material of paper and try to utilize the folds of paper to present different effects.