Examples of Line Animation by Simon Streatfeild

I have been researching other animators that have used line drawn animation to see what other work is out there and how effective it is. I am also looking to see if there are any tips I can pick up for the rotoscoped images that I am currently making.

When searching through YouTube I stumbled across projects by the user titled 'nomistheanimator' whose name is Simon Streatfeild. Within his animations he used line animation for each of them but in different ways. The video underneath is of an old man catching a flower that is floating in the air and then blowing its petals away. This was only produced by Simon with the intention of trying out the animation technique. It was produced using a program called Mirage which is now TVpaint Animation. 

The emotions of this old man are conveyed in such a simple yet powerful way. The strength of the illustration and animation of the man's facial expressions help to make this animation more realistic with life like qualities. The lack of distraction from elsewhere in the scene focuses all attention on the character and his reactions to the flower.

Below is another animation called Twinconceivable 003 made by 'nomistheanimator' which has a much more digital feel to its style. This is therefore more similar in its aesthetics to When the Virtual Became Real. As you can seen it has a very simplistic feel just like the animation above but it looks more computerized than the one of the old man.

Twinconceivable 003 is a comic piece which shows two unborn babies during an ultrasound scan. The use of sound is minimalistic in that we just hear the beeping of the machine and underwater sounds. Drawing animation on the computer gives it a much more polished and neat finish, however it does lose the realism the hand drawn sketches seem capture.

Problems Encountered with HD

 Since I have changed my project to the size fit for widescreen I have come across a few problems and difficulties. I have been struggling to work with such a large stage as it is harder to be more precise with the finer details. Flash does allow me to zoom right into which ever part of the image I like but it is then tiny compared to the massive scale of the picture and I find myself constantly scrolling around to go back and forth from the bits I am editing within the stage.

Another issue which can be seen within the two images is that when I play back my project to see how it all looks and plays when it is in HD the screen is massive so I cannot see the whole project which is really frustrating. The image below shows how the project plays back now in HD and the image above shows how it used to play when at the standard size, I could view the whole stage in that playback.

I have also now found the because it is a larger screen the finer details on the drawings I have done on my project now stand out more, making the lines look not as well polished as they had when it was scaled down.

Changing to HD

This week in my workshop I was told that our projects need to be set to HD widescreen so that they will be able to be viewed at the exhibition. I wish I had known this from the beginning as I am now worried about the first scenes I have made showing Rosie sitting down at her laptop and creating a profile page on a social networking site as I cannot just change the ratio as nothing will fit. Hopefully I will not have to redo these scenes, my tutor has said we can change it in Premier, this stretches it all so that it should become HD and widescreen without any of the work needing to be redone. This is something I keep worrying about but as I plan on now cutting this bit down into quick shots of what is going on I will not convert it yet. 

The scenes where Rosie is sat in bed on her laptop are just photos that have been edited and then placed into the Flash project and resized. I have now created a new Flash project which I have altered the properties of the stage so that it is now the correct size. I have then gone through importing each of the images onto the stage and resizing them again so that they are all HD and widescreen in size. 

Below is a screenshot of the project set at the standard size which is 24 frames per second and 550 pixels by 400.

The screenshot below is the new project in HD. I have changed the settings to 25 frames per second and to 1920 pixels by 1080. As you can see the stage has become a lot bigger which means it will play better when projected onto a bigger screen. I then imported each image again and scaled it down to the size of the stage, this was not a great change from its original image size now that the stage is larger.

Martin Spinelli - Guest Lecture

Martin Spinelli
Radio

Background
- Virginia Tech BA in English and Media Studies
- had radio station on campus
- was curious about National Public Radio Stations (like the BBC in England but not as culturally recognised)
   - decentralised in its structure
   - low funding
   - loose federation of around 900 stations
   - the schedules were different at each station
   - they built in small cut aways - they will then place local segments within these
   - have a lot of flexibility built into them
   - a lot more opportunities to get your work heard
   - if one station doesn't want your show another one might
   - they now take shows from abroad too
   - a downside is that they have to look after themselves financially
   - the BBC is more ambitious in many ways

First experience in a professional station
- there are always obstacles - especially with institutions
- do not stop at the first no you receive
-  first full aired stories he covered were local political races
- the more you make yourself available, the more opportunities you get

Developing a practical strand and a theoretical strand of his career in Buffalo
- researching relevant historical media moments
   - tried to find other moments of technological change
- specialization in a certain field helps open more opportunities
- he started pitching news stories to national programmes
   - Pacifica Network News
   - Monitor Radio
- taking something you have access to and trying to apply it to a national angle

First experience developing programmes
- The Lannon Foundation Writers at Work Series
- The Linebreak - making use of the key speakers coming into the uni
   - funded by various sources at the university
   - 30 programmes with best-selling and innovative novelists screenwriters and poets
   - won case Gold Medal 1997
- he put all his money into studio time and satellite upload time

Marshal McLuhan
- impressionistic
- his examples are dated
- he was however extremely useful to Martin's work
- whenever you have a new media technology it seems to mirror the one it replaces
   e.g. a monastic manuscript and the Gutenberg Bible

Developing Radio Radio
- demonstrate the possibilities for a digital vernacular for radio speech - he wanted it to be engaging
- wanted the collection of content to be used for teaching
- critical thinking about analogue editing
- he edited out all of the non dialogue and the ambience then cut down the meaning of the interview
- he carves out direct speech

Roland Barthes
- processed and mediated speech
- writing degree zero - to describe what is unique in other forms of writing
   - reground the voice as a part of the body
   - Martin had been trained to cut out coughs and pauses, etc. He decided to play around with this notion.

Radio, Radio
- voice bumpers (controlled disruptions) used as framing devices - not the music but found speech to frame and contextualise the program
- being self concious and self evident about the characteristics of the production technology
- deploying digital jolts sparingly and cautiously

Other Anti CyberBullying Media Texts: Posters/Images

Figure 1

Figure 2

I have tried to research the depiction and use of social networks within the video and animation media fields but now I have decided to look at posters created about cyber bullying. Here are two that are very different in their approach but both educate on different aspects. 

Figure 1 represents cyber bullying in a visual way the theme within When the Virtual Becomes Real. It is symbolises the online world can actually hurt people in the real world. A lot of the bullies comments do feel like a slap in the face to the victims.The illustration makes the punch appear to be hard and spontaneous which is what the virtual world is like. Due to there being no restrictions on the content anybody chooses to upload to online communities there is always the risk of being suddenly shocked or upset by something even if it is not content directed at you personally. An element that can cause more shock and pain is the fact that most of the time you are sat in your own home using the internet, this is a safe place where no one should be able to hurt you.  However technology has now pushed past that barrier, becoming a regular part of our home life.

It is interesting how figure two also has two arms that are in a threatening manner. Therefore this poster is also representing the damaging nature the internet can have and linking it back to reality. On the other hand this poster is completely different to figure 1 as it has chosen to present us with some facts about cyber bullying to highlight the severity of the issue. It states that 32% of teenagers have been bullied online, this is a fairly high number. It does not acknowledge how many people have been the bully themselves, as when you take that into consideration it is evident that cyber bullying itself involves a large amount of teenagers.