This is a short animation that we had to work on on flash. We were given a mesh up of different sounds and had to create an animation using different flash techniques. I tried to experiment with a different style than I'm used to, using more color as opposed to black and white then a dash of color. I'm not very pleased with this one but I'm glad I did something a little different than my normal self. 

I've been working on a side project since coming back home. It is based on something I used to imagine as a child.. I would listen to a song and watch the clouds and imagine to faint dancers merging in and out of the clouds, making their way through the sky. I thought I could attempt bringing that to life. I have been doing some timelapses from my home and when I have a large collection I will start editing and animating on top of it.
So far there have been some errors, but hey, trial and error always gets you to the end result. I have been doing tests using my iphone mainly, working out the time intervals and exposure needed, different angles. When I get a hold of a proper camera I will start using that instead for better quality.
I've always been interested in animations that involve real films as well and I absolutely love timelapses. Here are some things that inspire me and get me motivated all the time.

Here is the quick timelapse I did yesterday afternoon. The quality dropped in the transfer but I will get up a better quality when I have more stuff going.

I started with 10second intervals between each photo taken but I thought that was too quick so did some 5second ones. However, it was an incredibly windy and stormy day here so fingers crossed tomorrow will be better.

Another storyboard..  

This time we were given a short script and we had to make a storyboard for it. I felt a little pressed for time, it was a challenge but I learnt from it. Over December I will be adding more frames,adjusting colors, compositions and character designs to add fluidity and drama to the storyboard. I feel I need to add more frames in the last scene as well as more engaging compositions, something interesting. I will be making an animatic for this storyboard as soon as I return to Falmouth as I don't have the software to do it with me now.

I haven't done much uploading lately so I'm going to be doing some catching up :)

This is the storyboard I worked on showing two different characters travelling at different distances in different directions that eventually meet. Looking back at it now I can see the mistakes I made and would like to correct them, for example the first three frames, the fish is meant to travel from stage left to right but the second frame I drew the fish swimming from right to left. That mistake can cause a confusion and change the pace of the whole thing.

||Cubey Adventures||

Another set of assignments included animating a cube character using Adobe Flash CS6. We couldn't add facial expressions or details in the body, it was all about concentrating on the movement and the body language of the character. I had to animate it jumping, reacting with another cubey character which played the role of an older person (i.e older sibling, parent, guardian) and it hearing a sound out of shot and reacting to it. I'm quite pleased with the jump, I feel like I got the timings more or less right however with the reaction to the sound one I think I should have done it slower to give it more of a sense of drama. Same with the one with another Cubey, it would have been more effective if the movements were slightly slower.

Weight, Stretch and Squash and Timing assignment

We were asked to create 2 animations of a football dropping into the frame and coming to a halt considering the first 3 principles of animation. 

I think with both of my animations I should have fixed my timings a little better. For the football I would have liked to have more of a bounce, a larger arch and make it more of a fluid movement. For the bowling ball animation I think it would have looked better done a bit slower. I'm still getting the grips of flash but I would definitely love to experiment more on it and I'm most probably going to start a side project done in flash.

For my first brief in the Animation Course we were given a sketchbook project called 'Toy Story'. We had to find a toy and draw it in different locations and varied compositions. Here are some pages from my sketchbook.

His name is Sparx and he is a curious little dragon. 

-X-

Started off with some observational drawings of Sparx..

I then decided to try bring him to life.. Have him standing and give him a smile. I plan on trying different facial expressions and more expressive poses. Perhaps make him a little more stumpy to give him more of a cuteness factor.. We'll see where it goes.

As development work for my silhouette dancer animation I made a Plasticine figurine and was considering to make a stop motion by casting a light on it and making a shadow. This turned out to be too complicated to do as there were leaps in the dance and I wasn't sure how to capture that. So then I decided to experiment with the scanner and see the effect I got from it. Here are the outcomes:

Meet Ayla. 

She is a girl that has grown up living the beach bum life and has to finally start a life in the big city. It's all still a really rough idea, I just enjoyed making doodles of her. 

Sea animals done in biro.

Sketchbook pages.

I discovered a blog by Will Terell and that inspired me to loosen up my drawing, break away from keeping everything realistic so I did some studies of different facial features and hands. I found it to be very liberating to draw in this way and will post some character designs up soon. 

* Link to the Will Terell's blog: http://willterrell.com/

 The final animation.

Throughout the Foundation course I explored different aspects of art that were very new to me but the one thing that has fully grasped my attention was animation. The ability to make something move fascinated me; it was a way to bring your drawings to life. Over the course I experimented with very traditionally based animation exploring the movements of different life forms. I then decided to expand and push myself into a more ambitious project. I have always loved the fluidity of dancers and the stunning grace they portray. The perfect balance and poise they achieve fascinates and greatly inspired me. I wanted to capture the elegant flow of dancers in a similar style to Ryan Woodward’s ‘Thought of you’.

Floris Neususs’s photograms heavily influenced my work. The figures are ghost-like, haunting and they seem to convey a sense of longing, a need for a connection with another world. The figures have been positioned in beautiful feminine poses, and they appear to be in mid air flying peacefully or falling down. His work brings you closer to them and their plea, questioning the boundaries of life and death, or even the in-between. The actual method and processes of Neususs’s work is what intrigued me the most. He uses large sheets of silver bromide paper placing a model on top, this paper is coated with special chemicals which react to light thus ‘catching’ the shadow left behind by the model, the end result is a white figure on a black background and with reversal paper the figure would be black with a white background which appear to be more familiar and similar to the normal human shadow. It is a basic photographic process done without the use of an actual camera and explored professionally by numerous artists such as Susan Degres, Adam Fuss and Floris Neususs. 

Ryan Woodward's 'Thought of You'

Floriss Neususs Photogram

 Frames from the animation.

Hi, my name is Clara Anganuzzi and I am an aspiring animator. Recently I completed the Foundation in Art & Design in Falmouth and now I am moving on to the Digital Animation and Visual Effects course at Falmouth University.


For my final piece in the foundation course I created an animation of a silhouette dancer, she represents a lost soul forever looking for her substitute body but alas she never finds it and spends eternity in an infinite dance loop, stuck in limbo. Initially I wanted to produce the entire animation using silver bromide paper but that was almost impossible given the time I had and the costs involved.
I filmed a dancer called Aimee Baker in the studios at Tremough Campus. Together, we choreographed a dance that we felt suited my theme and what I was I trying to express in my animation. From that footage I took a frame to frame shot and then proceeded to edit each individual shot on Photoshop to get the photogram effect I was looking for.