Happy New Year!

Is this the most magical greeting card or what :) Happy Holidays to everyone out there, and Happy Holidays to me. It's been a productive year, with many learnings and changes, and for that I am grateful.

Hope that the new year will continue to be so, and that our endeavors take more solid shape as we advance.

Hugs,
digika

Our student film "Escape From the Hamster Wheel"

This was a group project at Billy Blue College of Design for "Digital Video Composition and Storytelling" class with Damian Blayney. 

Team members include:
+ Nitesh Asrani
+ Francois Hebert
+ Lina Hallberg
+ Alex Ball
+ Tatyana Temirbulatova
+ Danilo Toledo



We were given stock footage of the Billy Blue graduate exhibition, and the assignment was to produce a movie of 2 mins incorporating this footage.

The work involved writing the script, creating storyboards and shot lists, shooting our footage (of course!), cutting and editing. We also included a pre-movie animation, done by Alexander Ball, which introduced viewers to the story.

Calliope Animatic

This was a group project to digitally illustrate one of Neil Gaiman's Sandman stories. Our team was called "The People" and it consisted of Francois Hebert, Phil Sheather and Steve Milne...well and myself of course :)

The process for making this animatic was first to brainstorm on the style that we wanted to convey. We decided on Film Noir style, as we felt it reflected the mood of the story and we also found it visually inspiring. This was followed by storyboarding, image sourcing and production hours. The last bit was to add music, which Steve handled beautifully. Production was done using AfterEffects.

Semester 2: "Form and Object Studio" with Toby Whitehead

La Linea: so little says so much

Brilliant work of Osvaldo Cavandoli

Monk and Lili's

Two beautiful and totally different animation styles.

Sea Creature

The Brief
Choose any sea creature and create a short animation of the creature swimming around. The animation must include Action Script controls and two buttons.

Animation Outcome
I am fond of turtles, so I made a cute little turtle swimming around. It's inspired by my scuba diving experiences and colorful cartoons.

NOTE: to stop/restart the animation, please refresh the page!

Please install Flash plugin

Semester 2: Internet Technologies with Dawn Pugh

Typography with Flash

This is my research for the Typography assignment to animate text with Flash. From what we've heard, it's a complete pain setting type in Flash because of its way of interpreting vectors. It also doesn't handle kerning well. The discussion in class recommends the following to combat Flash's font problems:

1. Use monospaced fonts, if you can.
   
2. Use pixel fonts ( and make sure to turn off anti-aliasing); this font cannot be scaled.
3. If using anti-aliasing setting, use either "for animation" or "readability", just choose one and use it for the whole document to avoid Flash embedding the font twice.
   

So I've identified these properties as "safe" to manipulate in Flash:

• size
• transparency
• color
• speed of motion
• placing letters and words inside each other
• using color blocks
• diagonals
• and simple motion on a path

The theme for my animation is Victorian Era love. A Count is finally free to be with his eternal love, and he sings to her soul about his all-consuming feelings.

Some Inspirations
Although some of these were done with AfterEffects, there are still transitions and motions that can be observed and learned. Look past the 3D and watch the motion and interactions of shapes.

Animation techniques collection

This is a collection of various animated clips that employ creative and imaginative animation techniques. This post is used for reference, and to be visited often when looking for animation techniques and ideas. It's a living list that is updated as new bits are discovered.

Christopher Walken Tooth Fairy
Observe the gestures...



Fonejacker
Only the mouth is moving, and the main idea is the play on words. Using words and quick imagery to illustrate the word, while it doesn't even necessarily fit the context.





Terry Gilliams
Obscene and surreal collaging, unexpected and clever dialog aided with animation that is basic and crude, but that's the beauty of it.







Alice by Jan Svankmajer
Incredibly effective and wicked mix of mediums and techniques. Live footage, stop motion and tricky photography.







Legos
The White Stripes music video

Typography rules in motion

Take a journey into the world of all the little details of typographic rules. What's an ascender and x-height? What is the difference between leading and kerning?

The Vancouver Film School brings you this dynamic animated poster to explain just that.

Playing with type

Better way to learn your ABCs, cute and fun too!








And this one is an interesting play on negative space.

Stop motion - made with love and LOTS of patience

Stop motion is an animation technique, where animation is produced by taking series of photos and sawing them up together into a motion sequence. Even though there are many applications available to produce professional-looking sequences (like Flash and After Effects) to me stop motion still has the charm of hand-made craft.

This stop motion was done by Blu, armed with chalk and charcoal. Wow, this must have taken ages!



The Pet Shop is a clay figure animation, and I believe it's based on actual interviews of people in a pet shop. So fun!

I met the Walrus - animated dialogue

This video is a brilliant example of mixed-media animation of a dialogue. Watching it, the mind struggles to keep up with the speed of the imagery, and each new frame unfolds a new experience.

Jeff Vader and death by tray

An example of how a dialog can be animated using very basic animation techniques and Legos. It's the idea that makes it work :)

Clever stick figues

Stick figures can express so much.



It's not always the dazzling vectors of the animation that capture the audience, but the clever idea behind its execution.

Animusic Universe

Is this a new form of Art or is it just entertainment? You decide...

The guys at Animusic call themselves "content creation company focused exclusively on computer animation of music." When I saw their music clip on PBS, it made me stop and look again, my brain trying to comprehend what I was seeing. At first I thought it was a clever musical instrument, then I noticed all the arms and little hooks and finally the full picture emerged. I instantly thought of abstract Art and Picasso. See for yourself.

Resonant Chamber




Pipe Dream




Aqua Harp




Harmonic Voltage




Frets on fire



You can literally see the music. Every instrument can be tracked down to an animation, and as the ear hears a new sound enter the scene, the curious eye searches for the corresponding motion.

The creative world around us is transformed by the unlimited visualization power of the digital media. When does an animation become something significant enough to be called Art?