Cut Out Animation

The first group task we'd had since early October came in early 2011 when we were asked to create a cut out animation- that's an animation that is completed using bits of cut out paper. For example cutting out the hands, arms, torso and head of a character and syncing their movements and lips to an audio track. Firstly though, we had to create an audio track. This seemed hard enough but wait- we had to take the audio from live radio shows, then mash the audio together to create a smooth-(ish), funny conversation between two or more characters. Yippee!...

A few days later and we had our final audio track and i was really surprised at how good it was. It wasn't the smoothest conversation, and it didn't make much sense, but it was funny and sounded well edited, with no static or silence creeping in, George and Stuart did a good job editing it together, click on the links to view their blogs.

Next we designed the characters (finally the fun bit!). We had a radio host, Lorraine Kelly, a Frenchman, a young actress, a reporter out in the field and lastly, President Obama. There were six roles and four of us in the group which meant some people had to have more than one character. Stuart and Bas both offered to take on another character as George had a character with a lot of screen time and I was still learning how to use Flash. So in the end we had George animating the Fox News Radio host, Bas animating the Frenchman and Allistair Wankling- a transformer working as a reporter for the station, myself animating Tinnie- the rather dim but pretty actress and Stuart animating Obama and Lorraine Kelly.

After a lot of writing, here are some designs of my character, Tinnie...

Very early designs

Tinniiiieeeeeee

Long Hair

Long Hair and pig tails

After numerous pages of designs for this character, i finally found one i liked (the one on the left). It soon struck me that long hair would be hard to animate when the head was turning and so i proposed that she have pig tails instead, the rest of the group agreed and so finally Tinnie was created!

I drew out her arms, legs, lips etc and coloured them in photoshop and then imported them into flash, ready to animate.

First Plan

Neat Outline

Tinnie's Body Bits

A couple of days later and we had finished our animation! Learning Flash proved to be a slow process but i got faster everyday- the first day i produced only four frames, then i did forty and the next day i did over one hundred. I felt like i was slowing my group down, i only had one character and i needed a lot of teaching on Flash as i had never used it before but i think as the week progressed i improved greatly. Even though my group re-assured me that i had pulled my weight i disagreed and insisted on doing more on the next group task we did to make up for it. Well anyway, here is the final animation :D

It was a long process and was hard work but i'm very proud of our final product. The characters were all fairly well animated and interacted well together. The conversation sounded smooth considering it was taken from lots of different radio stations and i think it shows that the group has a good sense of humour.
Overall i think our group worked well together but i think the other three members deserve the majority of the credit. I am pleased with my contribution however because for a first time flash animation i don't think i did too badly :) I'm not sure i would have been able to do anything differently as i had no experience prior to this animation and if i had i would have tried to take on a second character. Over and out!


Here are the links to my other team member's blogs:
George
Stuart
Bas