Friday 29th Jan 2010

On Tuesday in Johns class we finished off the last project,making a few final tweaks to the animation before filling out the forms to have them sent away. In the afternoon in Angies class we started our new art project, going down to the library to do research on the internet into Andy Warhol as we will be making pop art self portraits this time. On Wednesday in Gavins class we started media analysis non fiction, and watched some documentaries to get us in the mood.

On Friday in Brians class we started thinking about our new project, which is producing a magazine for the college. We each have to write an article for the magazine,I am going to do mine on coming back to college as a mature student. We also did some research into how magazines are designed and laid out, in preperation for our own attempt. In the afternoon on Friday we had Angie again and we took photos of ourselves dressed in various interesting props which were printed out and blown up.

Project Three... Da da daaa!!!!

Todays is Friday, it's a new timetable and a new project.  This time we are producing a college magazine, aimed at potential candidates for the Access course next year.  We will be producing both a print version and a multimedia version, in the form of a podcast. We have to produce every element of the magazine, from artwork to articles, and use appropriate software to put the magazine together. 

Plasticene & Tears

Our wee animation. It's crap.

Animation - 19canteen till Today.

Animation as we know it today started in the early 1900's with many primitive devices to make drawings move, such as the zoetrope, the magic lantern which was the predecessor to today's projector and the humble flip book. These methods which seem simple and crude compared to todays standards, were, in their time cutting edge, and no doubt caused quite a stir.

Animation moved ahead quickly through the 2oth century, using more advanced hand drawn animation, and then stop motion animation, where the objects are moved a little, photographed then moved a little more. Then came the dawn of the computer and CGI animation, the first example of this was Toy Story by Pixar, which opened up a whole new world of animation.

While primitive forms of animation from the 19th century can entertain a modern audience for approximately 3 seconds, they are in no way comparable to modern forms of animation, except for the fact that with both you see moving images on some form of screen. However, the early devices used to make the images move were enough to inspire people into developing better techniques, even as early as 1937, with the release of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, which is still a watchable film today.

However, in the case of a program such as South Park, which started off as a cut out animation made by using cut out cardboard figures, moving them slightly then photographing them. Once this series became a hit and the makers had some money they then started using CGI animation to make the cartoon, and this in my opinion ruined the show as it lost some of its ooomph.

Urrrgh.. Happy New Year?

Friday 18th December...

I was off this week with a nasty throat infection,returned today to do what I could to help with the project with no voice! Today Dawn and I took lots of still photos for the animation, then we finished up for the xmas holidays, as we had the afternoon off.

Friday 8th Jan....

We had Tuesday off so we lost John and Angies class to do the project, back on Thursday for an assessment with Gavin, then on Friday in Ewans class we had to work out butts off to try and get our animation finished. Abee and I transfer ed all of the photos from the camera to the computer, in the process we had to manually shorten the lengths of the photos as imovie would not allow us to select them all and do it that way.In the afternoon in Brians class we wrote our report on our pieces we had produced in the design and make part of the project, which in my case was the plasticine man for the animation.

Friday 15th Jan...

On Tuesday in Johns class we tried to find out if we were doing something wrong when trying to select all the photos and shorten the timings on them, it turned out we were doing it right, it is the program that is misbehaving. That meant Emma and I had to spend a while working together with her clicking the mouse and me "apple v +enter" to shorten the timings on the last few hundred photos. Once this was done we used imovie to join up all the little clips into one long animation, then Ryan and Adam recorded a dialogue in the stylee of footie commentators off the telly.On Thursday in Gavins class we did remediation on our assessment last week, and on Friday, which is today, we are finishing off our blogs and animations as this is the last day of the project. Aaaaarggghhh... rush rush!! Thanks for the Smint Eta!!