Animator is a resource for budding animators, be it with a pencil, plasticine/clay, puppets or computer. Animator has two main sections; a blog with information that we hope is useful to animation enthusiasts and an archive of articles originally published in a magazine called Animator’s newsletter.
Colors! is a painting program that takes advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the Nintendo DS touch-screen to create a digital sketch-book. Animator Sheila Graber, who has been experimenting with it, told us; “It is great for ‘smudge and click’ as I used to call it in ye pastel days when I used 16mm film. It is SO much easier using this programe and you don’t get your hands dirty! I can recommend it for animators of today”.
During her long and illustrious career Sheila has produced a number of “face to face” movies where one face dissolves into another. Now she has produced one using Colors! called “Facelife”. It covers life from cradle to grave through various faces.
Facelife, by Sheila Graber.
You can find out more about the program at the Colors! website. There you will find a FAQ page that tells you all you need to know about running the program on your Nintendo DS, a gallery of drawings produced with Colors! and a page where you can download the program free.
Another animation program for the Nintendo DSi is Flipnote Studio. This has an onion skin feature so that you can see your previous drawings. You can also record sound and add sound effects to your animation. However, it does not appear to use the pressure sensitivity of the touch-screen like the Colors! program. Flipnote Studio is available as a free download from the Nintendo DSi Shop.
If you have used either of these programs let us know your thoughts about them in a comment to this post.
Since my “Computer modelled cat” post describing how I created the model using Animation:Master I have decided to do a short animation based on “The Owl And The Pussy-Cat” by Edward Lear. This is the poem that starts: “The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat”.
I have now upgraded to the current version of Animation:Master. My favourite part of the computer program is creating models. There is a line in the poem that goes: “They sailed away, for a year and a day, to the land where the Bong-tree grows”. The Bong-tree is mythical so is open to interpretation. I thought it would be fun if the Bong-tree made a bong noise whilst bouncing like a spring.
Wireframe of the Bong-tree
The first step was to build the tree. The tree trunk was done by drawing one side of the outline in the modelling window of Animation:Master and using the lathe tool create a 3D tube. For the palm leaves I drew the complete outline and then filled it in with a network of four-point patches. The leaf was then copied eight times and positioned near the top of the tree trunk. Bones were added to the trunk and leaves to aid the animation.
The tree was animated with a combination of muscle and bone movements. If you are unfamiliar with the way this works there are some excellent video tutorials on the Animation:Master website that show the process in detail.
Select an area and move it down to start the bounce.
Having got the tree to bounce the way I wanted, I decided to place it on a desert island surrounded by sea. The island is the top part of a ball shape, coloured yellow and given some roughness to look like sand. The sea is a flat patch of blue that was given some roughness and sparkle to look like water. I animated the sea patch across the set to give the sea some movement. The sky is a picture of clouds on a vertical patch.
Once my test scene was rendered I imported it into Windows Movie Maker and added a bong sound using the technique described in my “Using Windows Movie Maker to assemble your animation” article. I also added a sound effect called “forest” either side of the bong sound.
If you are considering having a go at Plasticine animation then an easy way to start is with a “my own Morph” kit from Flair Create.
The Plasticine stop-motion character Morph first appeared on a children’s TV art show called “Take Hart” in 1977. He interacted with the shows presenter Tony Hart, providing short humorous sequences. Much of the action consisted of Morph changing shape, such as rolling into a ball. Or he would disappear into the table top as if sinking into water. These kind of actions suit the medium of Plasticine as it is infinitely changeable.
Morph was created by Peter Lord of Aardman animation. The studio went on to produce the “Wallace and Gromit” movies, so from small acorns great oak trees grow.
The kit contains three blocks of Plasticine; a large terracotta block for Morph’s body, and small blocks of white and black for the eyes. There are some suitably sized plastic props including a skate board and a cricket bat. There is a leaflet with diagrams on modelling Morph and the best bit of all; a “How to model Morph” DVD. The DVD has Peter Lord modelling Morph from a block of modelling clay, or Plasticine, as we call it in England. As he models he gives tips on how to go about it. For example the legs and arms are pulled out of the ball of Plasticine rather than being added on. This gives them more strength. The DVD also includes 15 Morph episodes.
There is also a “my own Chas” kit that enables you to create your own cheeky Chas out of Plasticine. This also has an instructional DVD that includes 10 bumper length episodes plus an introduction to Chas from Peter Lord.
Exaggerated squash and stretch is a great way to add amusement and believability to your animation. I have created a demonstration using a bouncing ball made of very flexible rubber.
This demonstrates Newton’s third law of motion, more commonly called action reaction. For every action in one direction, there is an equal and opposite reaction in the opposite direction; even if the object does not move.
In this case the moving ball hits the stationary ground with such force that the top of the ball keeps going downwards when the bottom has stopped. The ball keeps the same volume so the sides move outwards. The amount of squash will depend on the material the ball is made of. The energy of the moving ball is not absorbed by the ground; instead it translates into a reverse thrust and causes the ball to fly upwards. Now the ball becomes long and thin as it stretches up. Near the top of the bounce gravity takes over and starts to pull down on the ball. Making the ball squash a little at the top of its bounce gives the illusion of opposite forces acting on the ball.
I created the ball animation in CorelDRAW, which is a vector based drawing program. I made just one drawing and then squashed and stretched the ball with the resizing tools that are part of the program. After each transformation I exported the picture to a jpg file. These picture files were imported into Windows Movie Maker and dragged onto the timeline. The sound track was made with a boing.wav that I found with an Internet search. I dragged two boing sounds onto the timeline and adjusted their position to match with the ball hitting the ground.
Here is the movie that I made. Please let me have your thoughts in a comment to this post.
Director of Photography, Tristan Oliver, demonstrated the secrets behind Aardman’s animated Wallace and Gromit movie “The Curse of the Wererabbit” to a group of 11 year olds in a video clip on the BAFTA website.
In very clear language Tristan takes the children through the process from scripting to animation using clips, real models from the films, drawings and stories. Near the end of the video clip he takes questions from the children who demonstrate a great enthusiasm for the subject.
A sequence I found particularly interesting was how they get the plasticine characters lips to move in time with the sound track. He shows a set of pre-moulded plasticine mouths that are substituted in turn to give the movements. That alone shows the great attention to detail that is needed to bring the characters to life.
Tristan Oliver has shot all of Aardman’s best loved stop frame animations, including The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, Chicken Run and The Curse of the Wererabbit.
The eleven minute video clip can be viewed at the BAFTA web site.
Having mentioned the Stop Motion Pro software in my previous post about plasticine animation I decided to test drive the free version that is available as a download from the Stop Motion Pro website. The latest Wallace and Gromit half hour special from Aardman, “A Matter of Loaf and Death” was filmed using Stop Motion Pro HD Studio. You would expect software of this calibre to be very expensive, but luckily for us home animators it comes in a range of prices to suit most pockets. The basic version is called “Stop Motion Pro Action!” and this does enough to satisfy the needs of a novice animator. It is compatible with Microsoft Vista, XP and Windows 7.
The first step was to download the software. It is a big file at 24,536 KB so took several minutes. Once downloaded it was just a matter running the file to set up the software. This went very smoothly and I was soon ready to make my first movie. When the program is loaded it pops up a box asking what you want to call your move and the name of the first scene. Having done this you are now ready to add some still frames.
There are various ways of feeding it with stills; a web cam, a digital still camera, a video camera or even a scanner. I had my digital still camera to hand so decided to use that. Some still cameras allow you to connect them to a computer, view a live image on the screen and record the still frame to the computer. Unfortunately my camera is not one of those so I had to settle for taking a series of pictures and then transferring them to the computer with the cables provided by the camera manufacturer. I set the camera to its lowest picture size of 640 by 480 pixels. This gave me room for thousands of pictures on my memory card.
For this test I rested the camera on my desk, held it down and clicked the shutter. I then moved a couple of objects and took another picture, and so on until I had a sequence of 30 frames. I transferred these to my computer ready to import into Stop Motion Pro.
You click on “Import” on the file menu and browse to the folder where you stored your pictures and select them. You then get an option to change the running order if you wish. When the pictures are loaded the first frame is displayed on the screen ready for you to run the movie. A click on the toolbar below the picture and the scene is played. No matter how long you have been doing animation it is always a thrill to see your work come to life on the screen.
Having got your pictures into Stop Motion Pro there is much more to do with them. A feature that caught my eye on the “Getting started” tutorial on the Stop Motion Pro web site was the ability to make a reverse copy of your action. You use a tool that copies the frames you select and pastes them after your first set in reverse order. The objects on my desk now moved forward and then returned to their original positions. I set the play to loop so that they went forwards and back continuously, what fun.
The basic version also enables you to paint on the frames so that you can create special effects such as explosions.
When your movie is ready you can export it to a AVI, WMV or MOV file and share it with your friends. The next version up called “Action! Plus” even has YouTube uploading built in.
The best feature of this program is the ability to preview your plasticine animation as you go along. To enable this you do need to have your webcam or digital camera set up to capture live frames on your computer. Stop Motion Pro adds you frame captures to your movie as you go along and you can play the animation created so far, at any point. This means that you can check on the speed and smoothness of your animation and adapt it if necessary. This feature makes it a great learning tool.
All in all it is a great piece of software and it is well worth trying the free trial version from the Stop Motion Pro website.
If you found this review useful please let us know in a comment to this post.
Maybe you have been inspired by the adventures of Wallace and Gromit and would like to produce your own animated plasticine films. If you are wondering where to start here is a complete beginner’s guide to plasticine animation.
First some advice from amateur animator Fred O’Neil (writing in A.N. issue 4): “Try putting a ball of plasticine in front of the camera, set the camera to single frame, and take one picture only. Taking care not to shift the ball from its original position, squeeze it very slightly, and take another picture. Continuing in this way, the ball you began with will assume various shapes, and in this way you can obtain inspiration. Work patiently and slowly for the whole effect can be spoiled large movements.”
If you are new to animation you are probably wondering where to get a camera that takes single frames. If you, or someone in your household, has a webcam or a digital still camera then you already have such a camera. It is just a matter of getting the single frames taken on the web cam or digital camera into your computer and make them into a movie. There is some software that you can download free that will capture your images and enable you to convert them into movies. It can be used with a video camera, webcam or digital still camera and is compatible with Windows from XP onwards. See the external links at the end of this post for more details.
Now that you have your camera set up you are ready to learn from the experiences of some other animators. Lewis Cooper tells us “You’ve decided to make a film one frame at-a-time. To make it you’ll need lights which get very hot but the substance you have chosen to use slowly melts under those lights. Not only that, the substance has the alarming tendency of falling over at regular intervals, thereby flattening the features you’ve carefully modelled. Even if you can achieve the impossible and prevent it falling over, the very act of manipulating the substance to get your animation slowly disintegrates your model. You’ve guessed it – this melting, squashing, disintegrating substance is plasticine. It is also an excellent medium for the animator to work in. These statements side-by-side indicate the basic requirement for all animators. They need to be a little nutty. Having established that fact, let’s talk about animating plasticine.” You can read the rest of the article in A.N. issue 3 page 14.
David Coleman recalls his first experience of plasticine animation (writing in A.N. issue 5 page 20): “All went well during-the first twenty-eight hours of shooting. I did not have to do as much re-furbishing of my huge and heavy, white horses (more than a 500g pack of plasticine in each of them!) as I had expected. One nomad did seem determined to get a new nose job every few hours, but I was in time to catch most of those suicidal characters who tried to dash their faces against the chipboard of the square. People say plasticine figures are less temperamental than real actors but don’t you believe it!”
What are you planning to do with this informaton about plasticine animation? Please share with us in a comment to this post.
MonkeyJam – a program designed to capture images from a webcam, camcorder, or scanner and assemble them as separate frames of an animation. Free to download.
Stop Motion Pro – image capture software as used by Aardman Animation Studios. Download a 30 day free-trial version.
Links to other sites from the pages of this website are for information only. Products are reviewed for the interest of the reader. No guarantees are expressed or implied.
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